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YMMV / The Glass Scientists

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  • Applicability: The comic itself centers around queer main characters, but as an added bonus the story is also pretty easy to read as a metaphor for queer identity. Just for one example, Jekyll’s main conflict of not fitting in with either mainstream society or the outsider group of mad scientists he identifies with, is pretty abt as a metaphor for how bisexual people are alienated from both straight and gay communities. Jekyll gets accused of being a fake by other scientists and pressured to keep his passion for mad science hidden because of upperclass disdain for it. Similarly, bisexual people are often accused of faking their sexuality or seen as “too straight” to count as a member of the gay community, while straight society still rejects them for being queer.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Virginia Ito is one of the Lodgers and only a minor character, but seems to have gained quite a bit of popularity in the fandom.
    • Also just the Lodgers in general. They get their share of both fan art and fan fiction.
  • Genius Bonus: Jasper describes Frankenstein and Upper-Class Twits that glorify "the purity of nature" as "Romanticists." This is especially funny when you remember that Mary Shelley was a member of the Romanticist Movement, Frankenstein classified as a Gothic novel (a defining fiction genre of that movement) before it was retroactively adopted as an Ur-Example of Sci-Fi Horror.
    • Romanticism as a cultural movement was a backlash to the incoming modernization of the world and its increase in science, mathematics, industry, reason and general bureaucratic method of handling everyday life, valuing passion, love and the purity of nature. The original book Frankenstein was written as a cautionary tale against the idea of science violating the natural order, having been written by the Romanticist Mary Shelley. In The Glass Scientist, Frankenstein had ruined the general populace's trust in science with her experiments and takes pride in it, and antagonizes Dr. Jekyll, who believes in the inherent goodness that science can provide and tries to make it Safe, Sane, and Consensual through his bureaucratically funded institution.
  • Less Disturbing in Context: Rachel appears walking up behind Jekyll with a knife in her hand, covered in blood from head to toe. Just as she's about to stab him, he turns and smiles at the sight of her. Turns out, she was actually just trying to scare the life out of him for shits and giggles, after slipping on a spleen in the blood-soaked streets of the meat market.
  • Memetic Mutation: Hyde being called or compared to a cat is very common now.
    • Jekyll is also Science Mom, with Lanyon as Science Dad.
    • Turning Hyde's facial expressions into reaction images
  • Ugly Cute: Church Grims, zombie dogs who inhabit graveyards and have rotted way enough to leave muscle tissue and bone exposed. Jekyll owns one named Zosimos created from a Scottish Terrier, and is still considered cute enough that even those who distrust the supernatural, such as the police chief, are briefly brought to coo over it.

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