My hot take: the story loses a lot when you take it out of the Regency era.
I think you need it to be set in an era when:
a) lightning and electricity studies had literally just begun a few decades previous and Benjamin Franklin (yes that Benjamin Franklin) was hailed in Europe as the modern Prometheus
b) the vast majority of people were still confused about what lightning rods were and did (Robespierre- yes that Robespierre- was involved in a trial about a town lightning rod)
c) the Enlightenment had been around for a long time but hadn’t fully taken hold of the whole world, so there is this social tension, that did involve a lot of class tension, between science and religion and what one privileged man could or couldn’t do of his own accord vs what he owed society and his creature because of the ongoing worldwide fights over the social contract
d) Neo-Classicism was it bay-bee. Everyone was rediscovering and reinterpreting and reincorporating the ancient world— so of course you’re going to have the aesthetic around with the ladies in their columnar dresses and the men with their Brutus haircuts. That shows you visually that there is a reclaimation and a reinterpretation of these myths, and a lot of ignoring what the moral of those myths were in a lot of cases…
E) … such as Emperor Napoleon, who himself liked a gold laurel crown. I feel like without the background of Revolution and empire, you lose that sense of tension and also that sense of possibility of the world order reinventing itself violently
I think Frankenstein works best when it is viewed as a reflection of the cultural anxieties that (pun intended) gave it life. Pushing it into the Victorian era means you lose a lot of the really interesting social context and commentary
Yeah!! Prometheus stole fire from the gods, Victor stole lightning (so did good ol Ben Franklin, whose own relationship with his son was a fascinating shit show towards the end). Prometheus got his liver eaten, Victor was stalked to Antarctica by his creature. We all pay for our hubris.
When I was drunk one night and watching the Jellyfish livestream, I reached out to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a dumb question about their jellyfish… And they actually emailed me back.
(yes, these are actually my own screenshots, I am in tears laughing)
DO YOUR ANIMAL EXPERTS HAVE TO UNTANGLE THE JELLYFISH
AND THE ANSWER IS FUCKING YES, THE JELLIES GET TANGLED SOMETIMES LMAO
ALT