Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

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SpartanAltego
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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by SpartanAltego » Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:08 pm

metoo wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 7:42 pm
SpartanAltego wrote:
Mon Feb 05, 2018 9:44 pm
Again, there's a relative difference between being annoyed and having the most intimate moment of your long life being disrupted.
metoo wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 6:16 am
I think having even a most intimate moment disrupted by an innocent passer by is no excuse for intending to kill that person.

Furthermore, the scene was put in LtODD by JAL, perhaps for a reason. Maybe he wanted to tell us fans that Eli isn't quite as adorable as we think?
SpartanAltego wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 3:56 pm
That's not what I said.
So what did you say, then?
SpartanAltego wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 3:56 pm
You seem more focused on railing against a perceived view of Eli demonstrated by others than the contents of the argument, metoo. I sympathize with that stance, but you're barking up the wrong tree. Eli is adorable the same way a tiger cub is adorable, or perhaps a moody stray cat. Only at any instant he can grow up into the great big murder machine he's designed to be and show you why they're best admired at a distance.
Well, I apologise for not making clear that the latter part of my post was not aimed at you. As you yourself observe, it is indeed railing against a prevailing tendency in this forum to disregard Eli's horrible aspects and make him a cute, innocent little child who is just adorable. It's a pet peeve of mine. I even wrote a couple of fan fiction pieces to illustrate my view on this [1] [2]. Note: I would write them differently today. See below.
SpartanAltego wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 3:56 pm
Distance is key. That scene demonstrates that Oskar and Eli are now to be observed from the outside, not from within as we're used to. We no longer get the benefit of looking in on their world, because it is only for them and them alone. Stefan could be said to represent the audience in that moment, peeking in with curiosity to see what becomes of the kids: and Eli's immediate wrathful response indicates that we are not allowed further intrusion. Whatever happens to them, it's theirs alone to know. Keep in mind, too, that this is the only scene in which they are 'present' so to speak. Elsewise they exist as rumors, trails of data, a single photo taken in 2008. Because observing them from afar is the only safe way to do so, now.
I actually agree: distance is key. I have written many short stories about Oskar and Eli after Karlstad, but these days I find it very hard. One really needs to handle the vampiric aspect in order to write anything with them as central figures. It's such a dominant factor of their existence. However, this is a moral morass, very hard to navigate. Better then doing as you suggested and write stories about other people, in which O&E flashes by at a distance. Like JAL did in LtODD.

And, of course, this might be a reason why we'll never se a sequel to LtROI.
Flip back to prior posts, the context is there. We've been having an ongoing discussion, after all. You asserted that Eli's hostility toward Stefan indicated the possibility he's killed people for annoying him before. I asserted in tun that it's unlikely because Eli never had any emotional connections of that depth that we have been made aware of, and therefore would never be emotionally invested in something enough to lash out in that manner. Oskar is the changing point. You asserted that wasn't an excuse - I did not say it was, I said that the difference in magnitudes between "Eli is annoyed" and "Eli has had his blood pact interrupted" is a distinction that requires acknowledgement. Because acknowledging that distinction in turn acknowledges the unlikelihood of Eli having similar reactions in the past for aforementioned reasons.

For example, stabbing someone who killed your puppy does not necessarily indicate that you've stabbed people for spilling salt on your burger. Context is key, generalizations are the enemy.
"The dark is patient, and it always wins. But its weakness lies in its strength: a single candle is enough to hold it at bay. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars." - Matthew Stover

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ltroifanatic
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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by ltroifanatic » Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:34 am

Could there be a simpler solution?..Eli is on the run with the most wanted boy in Sweden.She sees Stefan as a witness.He saw where they got off the train.Eli surely would have killed him for that discretion alone.Purely a survival instinct?.I love the discussion you guys are having.It's made me read LTODD again and I enjoyed it immensely.So thanks.. :D :D ..PS .I :wub: Eli. :oops: :lol:
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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metoo
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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by metoo » Wed Feb 07, 2018 5:46 am

SpartanAltego wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 3:56 pm
That's not what I said.
metoo wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 7:42 pm
So what did you say, then?
SpartanAltego wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:08 pm
Flip back to prior posts, the context is there. We've been having an ongoing discussion, after all.
Yes, but I wasn't sure that I interpreted you correctly. Only part of the context is in the words, you know. I cannot read your mind. ;)
SpartanAltego wrote:
Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:08 pm
You asserted that Eli's hostility toward Stefan indicated the possibility he's killed people for annoying him before. I asserted in tun that it's unlikely because Eli never had any emotional connections of that depth that we have been made aware of, and therefore would never be emotionally invested in something enough to lash out in that manner. Oskar is the changing point. You asserted that wasn't an excuse - I did not say it was, I said that the difference in magnitudes between "Eli is annoyed" and "Eli has had his blood pact interrupted" is a distinction that requires acknowledgement. Because acknowledging that distinction in turn acknowledges the unlikelihood of Eli having similar reactions in the past for aforementioned reasons.

For example, stabbing someone who killed your puppy does not necessarily indicate that you've stabbed people for spilling salt on your burger. Context is key, generalizations are the enemy.
Ok, I see what you are aiming at.

I agree with you about emotional connections, i.e. I think the novel suggests that for a very long time Eli hadn't had an affection even remotely as strong as the one he had for Oskar. (He seems to have been very close to his mother, though.) Furthermore, I also agree that this may make it unlikely that he had lashed out it such a way before. But we cannot be certain about that.

It doesn't matter, though, because the point I have been trying to make is that this is new behaviour, added by JAL after the novel and the film had been out for a while. And I got the idea that there might be a message here, from JAL to us. Eli isn't as nice as you may think.
Last edited by metoo on Wed Feb 07, 2018 11:34 am, edited 4 times in total.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by metoo » Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:41 am

ltroifanatic wrote:
Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:34 am
Could there be a simpler solution?..Eli is on the run with the most wanted boy in Sweden.She sees Stefan as a witness.He saw where they got off the train.Eli surely would have killed him for that discretion alone.Purely a survival instinct?
I have had a similar idea myself, i.e. that Eli perceived Stefan as a threat. Stefan was wearing a dark blue uniform, after all, signalling that he was a representative of the authorities. However, the way JAL writes about the encounter, the words he lets Stefan say, makes me doubt. It now seems to me that Eli might just have been pissed of having his solemn moment with Oskar interrupted, and therefore went to kill the intruder. This is also in line with the rather bland remark he made in the novel about killing people:
"Ja. Jag dödar folk. Det är tråkigt."
"Yes. I kill people. Unfortunately."
Last edited by metoo on Wed Feb 07, 2018 11:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by sauvin » Wed Feb 07, 2018 9:40 am

I can get even testier than metoo when it comes to a general trend of fawning adoration, and have gone on record on numerous occasions throughout my membership on this board to call her a stone cold serial killer, and my Eli comes from the movie a lot more than it does the novel. Yes, I see the romance, and I see the pain and despair and anxiety and everything else you'd expect from a budding relationship between a "normal" preteen boy and a "normal" preteen girl (the quotes are in recognition of the fact that my views on gender, gender roles and suchlike are antiquated, and only tangentially to Eli's gender ambiguity and vampiric nature). It's what I saw first, and it's what I see most, but it's not all I see.

The testiness came out in a big way when I wrote "Oskar at 40", and I submitted it fully confident it'd fill my inbox with hate mail. It didn't, for which I am grateful (and the fact that I received zero hate mail spoke very highly of the calibre of the folk who grace this site), but to be perfectly blunt, all this purple bubble gum and pink bonbons business was giving me diabetes.

Granted, that work of speculation didn't have a whole lot to do with Eli per se, but was a graphic illustration of what life with her might be like. Most of the other hamhanded works I've written that do have to do directly with Eli are still in the light of her romance with Oskar and not with what she might be like when she's on her own, when she's hunting, when interacting with other people without Oskar's being present. This Eli is unbelievably naive in some ways and knowledgeable in other ways that'd give most of the forum's members a horrific case of the screaming moral meemies, but her true inner self remains hidden.

To be fair, I've also said many, many times that Eli seems to be perfectly human, except when she isn't. I still maintain this, but there are some "small" hitches having to do with survival. She might be a little girl, but she's a strange little girl who's lived a couple of centuries more alone than most of us can imagine. Well socialised, she ain't, and her diet requires her to hunt, kill and consume something that's orders of magnitude more dangerous than she is. Swimming in an ocean of the blood of her victims (which is to say, more than simple having their blood on her hands, or even just merely being "drenched" in it), her attitude towards dispatching a potential threat is apt to be a bit more cavalier than we'd probably be comfortable with. There's a reason she moves around so much: fear. The little girl doesn't want to die in her sleep or with a spear poking out her back.

There's one scene in the movie that brings all this out, at least for me: Jocke's death. She seduced him, very deliberately and very easily. She might have been trying to yank on his heartstrings, she might have been trying to yank on something else, and it's highly likely she didn't care what got yanked because the whole point was just to draw him in close enough to squeeze the life out of him quietly and quickly. The beast didn't perpetrate the seduction; the girl did. One presumes the beast took control, possibly even obliterating Eli's consciousness for the duration of the actual attack, but even if so, the whole thing should have just been "business as usual", two or three times a week, for as long as she can remember. I took her crying over his body as evidence that Oskar had just moments before touched something in her that hadn't been touched in a very, very long time, possibly even before she'd been turned, and that that touch brought back to her in full force the horror that she'd become in contrast to the ordinary mortal little boy she'd once been.

That seduction was the stone cold but otherwise human serial killer in action.

I also agree with metoo that very little is known or can be guessed at with any real confidence concerning Eli's life between the time of her turning and her showing up on the jungle gym. In the novel, she's said that she hibernates periodically (no clue why), and when she wakes up, she needs helpers who help her for "different reasons". I've outlined a few of the implications of that statement elsewhere but find them too disgusting to rehash here; we'll just suggest that they make Brooke Shields' "Pretty Baby" and Dominique Swain's "Lolita" look utterly angelically innocent by comparison. We also believe she's considered suicide in the past and is cognisant of the fact that she can't have anything "(because you should be dead)" from the novel. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about the sum total of what we know for sure about her two hundred plus years under the nighttime stars.

If thirty years or so of living with it can have such an effect on an Oskar at 40, just what do you suppose two centuries of it might do to the perpetual child who has to live in it?

Now, we say "well, Eli has never before had a romantic interest to protect, so she's never gone Rambo on any groups of people". Is romantic interest the only thing that can spur this kind of passion? How about... betrayal? Suppose she'd painstakingly cultivated some helper before one of her long naps, believing she could trust him, and caught him in the act of accepting thirty shiny little disks of blood silver from a gang of vigilantes, cops or lab-coated madmen? Under such conditions, I certainly believe I'd see red. Simple survival would dictate immediate flight, leaving everything behind, but the very fact of her romance with Oskar is trumpeted testimony that she isn't just all about simple survival. Well socialised, she ain't, but she ain't simple, either.

I just got off work, and my body hurts, and my brain is numb. There've got to be quite a number of conditions under which Eli (or anybody) could be moved to a murderous rage that have nothing to do with romance, religion or politics. Maybe I could nudge other board members to suggest a few?
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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by dongregg » Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:51 pm

At end of the novel plus LTODD, Eli is still capable of incredible violence. And we still like him. That's what a writer can do. The story is an inversion of the usual chiller-thriller. Normally the agon is how the monster can be destroyed (such as Dracula) to end the cycle of death. We do not love such monsters.

But in the LTROI world, we still love the monster in the end.

All that has been written on this thread and on others—about Eli's true nature, motivations, and changes that meeting Oskar entail—reflect the various ways that we see Eli. But none of these ways of seeing Eli leave us rooting for his demise.

Quite a trick by a tricky writer who turns a story of a bullied boy into a story of a vampire child who doesn't know himself any better than the reader knows him.

But we all (I think) end up hoping that the kids will overcome all obstacles and be together.

Neat trick, I'd say.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by SpartanAltego » Thu Feb 08, 2018 4:42 am

Sauvin:

Given Eli's tightly bound nature, violation of trust or a betrayal would indeed seem a button likely to result in bloody demise when pushed. Another would of course be an injustice of some sort, the kind that would spur even the most apathetic of us into action solely out of disgust for what we see. Eli's no superhero, and I would say he's not really a "good person" whatever that actually means. But everyone has standards.

Anger is an emotional response to being provoked, and typically incites you to reckless action unless it is the impotent kind. What would make Eli angry? Clearly, anything to do with intrusion on what he deems his personal sphere of the world, whether it'd be Oskar, breaking into his home, touching his things without permission, or (in theory) having a tasty meal stolen out from under him. Possessive anger is universal to us all, including the best and (more than anyone else) the worst of us. Love is a form of possessiveness, so seen in that light his violent reactions surrounding Oskar can be seen as a "don't touch my things" attitude as much as romantic attachment. It's a very, very cynical view of Eli that explicitly runs against what has been shown of his feelings about Oskar...but it's a way to look at it nonetheless.

If Eli ever met his "sire" or anyone like him again, it'd give it 50/50 odds of the response being either immediate flight or bloody murder. ACL's 'Once Bitten' takes the latter opinion, and given Eli's relatively calm attitude facing Revenant Hakan (at least at first) I suspect he's conditioned to working through fear by this point.

Also, outside of Oskar (he's the exception to many things about Eli), Eli's reaction to being asked to 'turn' someone could potentially result in either a quick exit from the scene or a furious murder. The end of Interview With A Vampire is a fairly good example of how someone who hates their condition would react to such a request, particularly if the petitioner seemed enamoured with the prospect of immortality.
"The dark is patient, and it always wins. But its weakness lies in its strength: a single candle is enough to hold it at bay. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars." - Matthew Stover

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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by gattoparde59 » Fri Feb 09, 2018 3:41 pm

sauvin wrote:
Wed Feb 07, 2018 9:40 am
I just got off work, and my body hurts, and my brain is numb. There've got to be quite a number of conditions under which Eli (or anybody) could be moved to a murderous rage that have nothing to do with romance, religion or politics. Maybe I could nudge other board members to suggest a few?
In the novel I rarely see Eli killing anyone in a murderous rage. Mostly it seems to be done randomly with the kind of shrug identified by Metoo:
metoo wrote:
Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:41 am
"Ja. Jag dödar folk. Det är tråkigt."
"Yes. I kill people. Unfortunately."
The one big exception is the swimming pool at the end. Eli does give a good gosh darn if somebody tries to hurt Oskar. The other is a little more ambiguous. When Eli attacks Virginia I had the feeling he was being reckless. Maybe he was being a touch self-destructive at that point given the circumstances?

I'll break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out onto the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind will take it away.

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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by OskarTheArsonist » Tue Feb 13, 2018 10:00 pm

ltroifanatic wrote:
Mon Feb 05, 2018 7:17 am
Although if Eli told me that she would never hurt me I would follow her to the ends of the world
lol while I would agree that I would want to as well we also know that Eli needs to eat so I would definitely not be trusting Eli right away.
"the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear"

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Re: Are Frankenstein's Monster and Eli the same?

Post by OskarTheArsonist » Tue Feb 13, 2018 10:07 pm

metoo wrote:
Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:41 am
ltroifanatic wrote:
Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:34 am
Could there be a simpler solution?..Eli is on the run with the most wanted boy in Sweden.She sees Stefan as a witness.He saw where they got off the train.Eli surely would have killed him for that discretion alone.Purely a survival instinct?
I have had a similar idea myself, i.e. that Eli perceived Stefan as a threat. Stefan was wearing a dark blue uniform, after all, signalling that he was a representative of the authorities. However, the way JAL writes about the encounter, the words he lets Stefan say, makes me doubt. It now seems to me that Eli might just have been pissed of having his solemn moment with Oskar interrupted, and therefore went to kill the intruder. This is also in line with the rather bland remark he made in the novel about killing people:
"Ja. Jag dödar folk. Det är tråkigt."
"Yes. I kill people. Unfortunately."
I really like this interpretation of Eli also since it give him even more personality. Eli is after all a killer and is also 11 or 12, so when someone is interrupting the moment that Eli must have been dreaming about for a while it just show's a lot of humanity.
"the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear"

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