Podcast

Drunk Book Club: The Phantom of Manhattan

lnd

AKA Love Never Dies AKA “that Andrew Lloyd Webber musical not even his biggest apologists can forgive.”

In which a longtime Phantom fan and someone who doesn’t even go here read a published fanfic that hits all the notes of being BAD fanfic, including: a sequel that the original didn’t need, killing off characters for no reason, magically adding babies that make no sense, and turning the canon love interest into an asshole because they’re in the way of your preferred ship. And then there are the GENERAL bad book problems, like bad pacing and a complete disdain for women.

Anyway, then it got made into a multi-million dollar musical. Because Andrew Lloyd Webber gets away with that kind of shit. Oh, and Forsyth is a pro-Brexit shitstain going back over a decade so y’know, fuck him in general outside of the bad book.

CONTENT WARNING for discussion of sexual assault, child sexual exploitation, gaslighting, ableism, misogyny, racism, and antisemitism

Feminist Analysis of Christine

“Man’s Hatred Has Made Me So”: Freakification and the Shifting Gaze in The Phantom of the Opera(1925)

“Pitiful Creature of Darkness”: The Subhuman and the Superhuman in The Phantom of the Opera

The 1943 Claude Rains Adaptation

Fantomestein Comic

1:00 The History of Published Fanfic
11:00 No True Phantom
21:00 The Overlooked Christine
28:00 The World’s Pettiest Foreword
34:00 Erik, Coney Island Clown
45:00 Saga of the Busted Dick
51:00 POV Hell
55:00 THAT Romance Novel Plot
61:00 Love Refuses to Die
71:00 Should You Read This

Say hi to Dorothy and Vrai on Twitter @writervrai and @dorothynotgale

Our icon was designed by Allison Shabet.

Get bonus episodes on our Patreon

Join us every two weeks on Soundcloud, iTunes or Stitcher – and if you’d leave a rating and review, so that more people can find their way to us, we’d appreciate it!

This post is made possible by kind contributors to this blog’s Patreon. If you like what you’ve read, please consider donating to help keep it running.

3 replies »

  1. As someone who (to their shame) did see the London preview of Love Never dies I am (truly) sorry to report that The Beauty Underneath was always performed with the kid….

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s