Bittersweet Infamy - 135 Mother Of A Monster

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Trick-or-Treat Infamy + season finale! Josie tells Taylor about the dramatic life and times of English novelist Mary Shelley, and the infamous origins of her Gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Plus: is your Labubu a conduit for an ancient Mesopotamian demon? Find out in the final minfamous of season five!

Welcome to Bittersweet Inpe. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and in me. The Strange and the Familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet.

Josie, happy Halloween. Happy season finale. Happy Halloween. Ah! 135 episodes. Season 5. Putting her to bed. Truly scary.

Truly scary stuff. Season 5. We've dug out the rectangular coffin-shaped hole. We're lowering season five down. The mother-in-law is getting ready to sob and dive onto the coffin because she's like, tinkerbell. She dies if you don't pay attention to her. But that's okay.

Clap. Clap for her. Because after you leave this funeral, episode 135 is coming back to life. It's clawing out of the ground. It's true. Zombie style because it's Halloween and that's the shit that happens. Josie, how you doing? Lightning strikes.

Like in that one first of the first of it. Friday the 13th movie. Exactly. I'm doing good. I'm doing well. I'm embracing the fall. I'm pretending to be sick this weekend. Oh, the best.

Doing very little. Though my body is like, you need to maybe move, because staying horizontal for 48 hours. No, you'll get bed sores. That's my Halloween costume is bed so I'm working. That's good. You're going method.

We love to hear it. Yeah. I have two costumes in the possibilities. Bitch one and bitch two? be the, yes, yeah, exactly. It might be the lo-fi girl. Oh, that's such a good pull. Yeah, and I just have a notebook and just like, that would keep it a little sweater.

Setting for a test that never comes. It's so true, so true. But then another one is, have you ever seen Under the Tuscan Sun starring Diane Lane? No, I haven't, but I'm excited in advance. Oh, you have it? Okay. They introduce another expat character who is like, totally embrace the Italian lifestyle. And she's like, she's wearing gorgeous designer clothes and like, frolicing in fountains and like just, oh, what a free spirit. And we're introduced to her when

she's wearing this, like, beautiful black dress and a large black hat. And she is caressing against her cheek a little baby duck. And she's just, ah, ah, ah, are you going to carry a baby duck with you as part of the costume? I might. I might. I feel like that my, work. It might work. That's such a legendarily bad costume in terms of like recognizability, but so, but compensates for it in specificity. Thank you. This is not that widely watched and commented upon a cultural touchstone in 2025, I would say, which makes it good. I think it might be coming back because I think so many Americans are looking to move abroad, that they're watching under the Tuscan Sun. That makes sense. It's back on, back in. That Tuscan Sun. That Tuscan Sun.

Sun is looking better and better every day. Every day. They've got baby ducks there. You can caress them against your cheek. That's true. It's a good movie. I would recommend it. There you go.

There's your Halloween pick for the season under the Tuscan Sun. I just watched Train to Busan last night ago. Oh. It's been a while, but I have seen it. It was a very hot movie when it came out and sort of birthed a little bit of a franchise. And, you know, we're all fucking taking the train to Busan, but these damn zombies, you know. But good movie. Does a lot with these kind of like broad.

character archetypes. I didn't remember. That was kind of the context in which I rewatched. It was basically film club. Okay. Not ours. Someone else's. Have you been... Have you been film clubbing without me? As much as I would love to reserve my October viewing only to our upcoming viewing of Almost Dead starring Shannon Doherty. With you, we are always clear. Always clear. You can watch that along with our upcoming Waterworld episode. Josie's putting the final touches on it now and our recent Battle of the Sexes episode. over at coffee.com, K-O-HifinFi.com slash Bittersweet Infamy. But what we did not do over there is watch Train to Busan.

I did that on my spare time and a pretty good film. So, Josie, before we dive into our final minfamous of the season. That's okay. There'll be another one, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I brought you a poem. I've been really into poetry in a way that I'm not typically. I'm a fiction writer or a non-fiction writer.

and specifically I've been really into like a nice accessible like A-B-A-B type of rhyme scheme with like single-syllable line endings. Like dog, log, hat, cat, you know what I mean? Just something nice and easy that it doesn't take a great deal of mental acuity to encode. For the whole family to enjoy, really. For the whole family to enjoy. When none of this inaccessible poetry where you're like, Bjork, what are you saying? Bjork, you say it so well. So I just keep going.

Yeah. Trill those eyes. I brought you a couple poems, and I'll read one before your main story, and I'll read one right now to kick off the show. And this one's called The Werewolf's Purse. It can't get worse than a witch's curse unless you steal a Werewolf's Purse. She'll kill you dead and eat your head until her mouth is lipstick red. No ifs or butts, she'll munch your guts. Then call the witch to finish up.

The witch will sigh and say bye-bye and seal your soul your soul. soul with dragon's eye. And that's what's worst. You still get cursed. Recall that when, for purse, you thirst. So it's a cautionary tale. It truly, truly is. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cautionary tale about greed. Yeah. Thiefed. Greed. Yeah. I don't know you. That's my purse. That's my purse. I don't know you. That's so sweet. I love that. Thank you. Is it scary? I was chilled. Good, good. I have goosebumps. You can't see. via Zoom. Both of our throats are going here, hey? Maybe you're not pretending to be sick. Well, let's keep the pretending happening. I hope that Werewolf has a halls in her purse. You know what I

mean? A fisherman's friend. Those are good. Ricola. And now that I've laid the stage, now that the various accoutrements are in their places, may I tempt you with the little fun-sized coffee-crisp bar that is the infamous. I love coffee crisp. We don't really get them down here, No, well, you should, you should, you have all kinds of reasons to come up. Yes, this is true. Well, I think that as I've kind of done my reflective work on season five, which I always do, you know, you get to the end of these seasons, and then you look back and you think, oh, what was this season about?

And usually it's something fun, but season five, I don't know. And even usually it's something fun is a bit of a reach, but season five, I don't know. Yeah, we kind of dive into some stuff that's reflective of our current era and the spooky way. Inevitably, inevitably, because I think that the, the art reflects the anxieties. We've talked about this a lot. In all media, right? The art reflects the anxieties. And I think that from the jump, when you look at our season five and the sort of fraught state of relations between America and the rest of the world, in that context, the year 2025 has been kind of defined by two forces when it comes to the U.S. And so I would say if the first force that has sort of defined the year

2025 in America is the rise of white supremacist Christian nationalism. I would say that the second force that has defined the year 2025 in America is the rise of the Laboo Boo Boo. Agree or disagree? There's absolutely no way that I can't disagree because it's 100% correct. There's nothing to be said, Josie, what is your understanding? What is a Laboooo? And I know that you know this deep down because I remember telling you this in between one of the breaks between our infamous and our main story. And it just never made the cut. All my Labubu content in 2025. And there is, Josie will vote.

I won't shut up. But it never makes the show. Well, here we are. Josie, tell me about your understanding. You're wrestling. When you wrestle with the Labouboo mentally, what is the outcome? The Labuobu is a small figurine doll-like situation. I imagine, like, trolls slash nanopet kind of vibe.

Nanopet. It doesn't even go Gigapet. Doesn't go Tamagotchi. It goes nanopet. Yeah. And they like, clearly. to your purse and they have like different personalities and they're cute and Taylor is obsessed with them. Right. Obsessed with them in a way that someone who never Googles them and doesn't have

them can only be, right? It comes up in conversation a lot. We'll say that. As Josie says, this calls back to a Furby, a Morncici, a Beanie Baby, a Gremlin's, look at Giera, right? Quarquilchial big consumer plush toy fad. The pet rock in its own way, right? Calling back to a story we've covered on the show before, that rock. The Laboo-Boo-Boo, as Josie says, little stuffed guy, sort of like a little mischievous face with big eyes and sharp teeth, and then it's wearing like a little, like, almost like, where the wild things are type, full-body PJ, fluffy little guy with rabbit ears on it.

And you can get these in different forms, but I think that the most popular ones in North America right now are the ones that you clip to your bag and they kind of swing like pendants. And have you seen many Labu-B-B-B-E-U-X? I've been spelling it La Boo B-B-E-U-X a la French for the plural. Very nice, very nice. Have you seen many La-Boubu-out in the wild in Houston or any of the other environment? You were recently in California celebrating your brother's bidet, happy 40th poncho.

Do you see any Labuboos at the beach party? No, no Lubu's at the beach. And not a lot of my day-to-day, I got to say. Is it possible that I'm overstating the impact of the Laboooo-Boo-a-along the rise of religious nationalism? Absolutely not. I mean, I'm excited for the essay that you write in 2026, where you combine that you linked the two? Yeah. Yeah.

That'll be fun. Well, I'll be in good company when I do. There has been a market rise in Laboooo culture. Not only of these little guys hang naked off your Paxack, but you can get them a little customizable clothes. You can get them a little Gucci visor, the La Gougou if you'd like. Oh, my. That's my terminology. I was going to ask.

Okay. As of summer 2025, New York City, capital of the world was the, the home for a Labibu fashion show, Labubu Rave, Labubu Pride. Good. Where's my ticket? And a Labubu Ice Cream Social. That's sweet. Since 2025 was both the year of religious extremism and the Labibu in the United States,

it only feels right that our final infamous of 2025 deals with the confluence of those two forces. Amen, brother. From the winter of 2024 through the summer of 2025, the internet was flooded with social media posts questioning whether your seemingly innocent Labubu could actually be the fluffy mass-produced vessel for a demonic entity. Oh, yeah, yeah. All the evidence is there. It looks kind of demonic.

Looks kind of, yeah. Exhibit A. Sharp teeth, big eyes, ear-like protrusions. And that name, Labubu. Doesn't it sound a lot like the name Pizzou? an infamous demon from Mesopotamian lore? When you look at it from those perspectives, the two creatures are virtually identical.

It's true. As many a web user was keen to point out, TikTok videos, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels flowed documenting people's encounters with the nefarious toys and insisting that the Labubu craze is a mere Trojan horse to expedite the entrance of demons into your living room,

says one representative Facebook post by user Kareem Jovian on July 4th. Labubu toys look cute until you realize their Pizzou-inspired demons. Making that post on the nation's holiday, the nation's birthday. That's important. Embodying again, the spirit of this is that Kareem Jovion is someone who, like myself. Licked his finger, put it up to the sky, and felt which way the wind was blowing.

And he was like religious extremism and loboos. Let's get in on the ground floor. His post continues, just like in the Simpsons. Homer brought one home. And it possessed him. You're not adopting a toy. You're inviting Evelyn. So the nonfiction documentary, The Simpsons.

Treehouse of horror, most likely. And he drew his conclusions. Josie, if you haven't seen, you know, Labubu's bouncing off bags and wearing their lugugus, have you seen anything about the species, I'll say, link between Labubu and demons? I have not heard this. No. The algorithm has not fed me, fed me this news. Aren't you lucky?

I mean, I'm taking a little break from Instagram, so that might be part of it. Fuck, yes. Now, at home, we don't want you to take a break from our Instagram at Bittersweet Infamy, especially as we're going into our November break here. You're going to want to keep up with us as we, you know, give you the details about what's going on in our lives and, you know. Blow. Bye. Blow. You know, we'll blow you and we'll do some blow. It's going to be great. Okay.

But Josie won't be there because you take a break off Instagram. It's important to take these social media cleanses when the timing feels right. So in order to figure out the motivation behind these monsters, whether it's to make money with acute collectible or Sailor Moon's, style, use these items to steal the souls of collectors for the glorification of the demon Pizzou, via a convoluted plot that involves changing the consonants in the word Pizzuzu, but leaving the vowels unaltered. We need to go back to the source creator Kassing Long. So, 1972, Long is born in Hong Kong, splits his upbringing between Hong Kong and

Utrecht Netherlands. And I saw elsewhere Belgium as well, which makes sense. This is the origin of his characters, the monsters. whom he bases specifically off of creatures from Nordic folklore. And I would observe that the monsters, kind of contrary to what you might expect from this like Furby-like character who hangs off everyone's bag, the monsters have a bit more in common with something like Tova Jansen's

Moomin characters, which makes sense, given their kind of like shared Scandy ancestry or whatever. When you said that, that's where my brain went, was the Moomans, yeah. It's a similar thought, and it's again this situation where these characters sort of exist in this world where they have little interactions with one another and they're these kind of little wilderness fairy type creatures and have little names and have little conversations and so on. And specifically, these books are called The Monsters Trilogy. And I should say that what we sort of call Labubu as a creature is really this intellectual

property called The Monsters, where many different characters, including a Labubu live. It's just that Labubu has come to be the most popular from a consumer perspective. But there's also Zimomo, Ticoco, Spooky, Pato, which is kind of a... slur in Spanish, but that's okay. Labibu, baby. And Labubu is a female elf who sort of lends her name and likeness to this very popular line of mascots. Okay, okay. One thing to note is I wanted to dig into this Monsters Trilogy, find these books, see what the actual like kind of story action is behind this kind of popular commercial icon. And I really couldn't find anything. It seems like the original books from 2015 or so have gone out of print, which is also important to note that

we're in year 10 or so of Labubu right now, right? This is one of those overnight success. stories that took a decade of hard work and grinding, where Labubu really takes off. And I've created a little section here called Economics of Labubu. That's where we are in the Taylor Wikipedia page of Labuibu. Yes, yes. 2.1, economics of Labu. Yes. And I've really isolated this because, holy shit, are there some economics in Labu? Disgusting money coming in and out of this. Holy fucking shit. But I'll tell you how this kind of seemingly, you know, almost forgotten series the Monsters Trilogy has become Labubu, the worldwide phenomenon. In 2019, they do a deal with Potmart.

And Potmart is a popular vendor of, I guess, collectible toys. This is a company that was found in the 2010s, and they were doing pretty well for themselves already until they stumbled onto this licensing play. And since then, the sky has been the limit. Oh. You go and get your Pop Mart the Monsters' exciting Macaron Vinyl Face Blind Box. And you pay like 30 bucks, which was less, but then Trump, you know, tariffs. Yeah.

Bring it back to season five. It's called a blind box because you don't know what Labubu you're getting and there's the chance to get a rare Labibu. There's a chance that you don't like the Lubu you got and you can trade it or sell it or, you know. So it becomes sort of part of the experience, this blind box experience. This is how the Labubu comes into prominence and then it sort of seems to blow up because of celebrity collectors like Lisa from the K-pop group Black Pink who's like the most followed female artist in the world on social media or something absurd like this.

She was a big early Labubu Adopter. In 2024, Potmart sold $423 million worth of Lububu's worldwide. 423 million, okay? That is 729% up from their 2023 numbers. Ah. So between 2023 and 2024, it blew the fuck up. So, just to give you some perspective on that, that $423 million that Laboum made in 2024, that's about 23% of Potmart's overall revenues for the year,

which is pretty fucking big for something that came out of. nowhere. Yeah. Like a quarter of their revenues. Yeah. Of that number, that 2024 number, about 61% of that was product sold in China. Sixty-one. Okay. Wow. Let me fucking plunge the stake in here just to make these numbers make sense. Quarter one 2025 revenues from the United States alone have surpassed Potmarts entire 2024 fiscal year. What? They said that it surpassed the entire 2024 fiscal year. I took that to mean for Potmart entirely, not Labibu, although it's... Either way, we're looking at la billions of dollars in quarter one U.S. loan because this fucking

trend caught fire. And it's not tariff inflation or whatever. That's just like the profit made. No. Listen, I'm not an economist. Is that at the end of your 2.1? I don't even have a Laboooooo. Economist are you?

You don't even have a Laboubu. These are dire times. Either way, you're getting the message, though, that this is something that was okay popular, was okay popular? picked up scene, picked up steam, picked up scene, and then in 2025 just hit a fucking inflection point in the U.S. Now there's billions and billions going in and out of this IP, and I'm sure costing long in his little fucking graphic novels that he wanted to write, and he's still like, hey, why doesn't anyone know the story of these characters? Oh, well, I'll cry myself to sleep

on my mattress full of money. Yeah. Hopefully he got a good fucking cut of the licensing deal here when hopes is the originator of the IP. Yeah, that's the dream of hope. Young CEO of Popmart has become a billionaire, one of China's ten richest, off of this, basically. Wow. Labibu not just huge in the U.S. remains popular in China, where a rare vinyl Labubu statue recently sold for 170K, because there's different forms. There's not just the little plush bag guys. Right. And then in the UK, figures were temporarily pulled from shells after Brawls, LeBrawl Brawerels broke out between overly enthusiastic customers.

Oh, my goodness. So that's the economic case for the Labubu. Now what about Pizzu? Where's this motherfucker come into it? Yeah, yeah. Where's the demon taking hold of these small, plushy, billion-dollar industry? Well, again, the art represents the anxiety, right? Labubu's shown up out of nowhere and they vaguely unsettle me.

They must be demons from hell. This is the name Pizzuzzi. You jump out to you ring any bells from your memory? Not really. I mean, I tried to... Any stories you've covered on the podcast, before. Oh.

Any popular 1970s movies about demonic possession? Oh, yes. The Exorcist? Pizzu is well known as the main antagonist in the Exorcist movie

franchise. He famously possesses Reagan McNeil in the first film and then recurs in subsequent installments. I love that. Reagan. Jesus.

There you go. The signs were all there. They're all there. That vomit trickles right down, you know? So that's sort of where I think American audiences get real familiar and comfy with the name Pizzuzu,

but more generally, Pizzu is the name of a demonic entity from the first millennium BCE, known and feared by the Babylonians and Assyrians, a wandering wind demon who brings chaos with him and all his travels. Sounds like a fun character. Oh, yeah.

Not always a malignant figure can sometimes be used as a protective emblem to ward off other demons. Oh, okay. Yeah, fire with fire, demon, get it. Right, and so this is one of those things where I find that, like, I increasingly have, less and less patience. I try to be really, really empathetic to folks in their belief systems,

even when they directly countermind, even when they caused me a great deal of consternation. I just try to take the approach of, well, if I had the same set of information, what would I do? What would I know, you know? Right. Yeah. I think one of the things where I have almost no patience and less every day is this field of like, one, I don't like something so it is satanic. Two, something is new and I don't trust it so it is satanic. And three, I think the thing that fucking irritates me most because I'm like, you know what, fucking it irritates me. Because use your head is this idea of like Pizzouzuzu sounds like the word Lombo. There's no critical thinking there. No, no. Because if I were Pizzou, I would change my name to Ralph in this situation, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't want anything.

What's the game? Or like, oh, my name is an anagram of Oldemort. What does that do? Yeah. You couldn't do your wordal, your connections. this morning, what's this about, right? I agree. The sounds like is not the deep complex work you think it is. Whether I like it or not, this is something that people did notice that this thing looks maybe a little demonic and it looks, because this is sort of, I like Laboubu very much. Not only because I'm sonically pleased by the set of syllables, Labubu, pleasant to say out loud, pleasant on the tongue, but also I like that they have this sort of polarizing appearance where you can decide that they're ugly or cute or ugly cute or whatever. Yeah, sweet. It's sweet. Well, not so sweet.

if you are Filipino social media in October, November, 2024. You would have expected it to be the Americans, but I forgot how Catholic the Philippines are. You know what I mean? Never forget. Never forget. Before the evangelicals were out here beating their drums about demonic possession, Catholics were like, we've been doing this for thousands of years.

Sit down. So Filipino social media runs with it. October 30th, there's a video by TikTok user CJ David that racks up 8.8 million views in eight months saying like, hey, these are demons. Content creator Adrian Milag did an interview with. with an exorcist, father Carlos Martines, who claimed that Labubu's celebrate demons and told parents,

just don't go there. Oh. All kinds of different posts start to pop up and emerge, get hundreds of thousands of shares and engagements from there. Wow. Kind of June 23rd, 2025, after Labubu makes its way to the U.S. proper, which it already was there, but after it really blows up, so too does this online Pizzu thing.

And TikTok user at DLY Clips makes the Simpsons connection. because in online mean culture, there's this idea that The Simpsons is almost supernaturally predictive. It has a psychic quality of The Simpsons. Trump came down the staircase in Simpsons a decade or two before he did in real life, yeah. That staircase image is fake. Certainly there have been like allusions toward things that came true as, you know, when you're doing some form of pop cultural criticism for 40 years to the point where all your voice actors sound like me and fucking Josie, you know what I mean?

Then inevitably, if you're doing any sort of decent cultural criticism, you'll get some hits, right? But specifically, this Pizzuzu thing where we see the image of Homer holding this item, this statue of Pazoozuzu that supposedly possessed in, which, by the way, it doesn't. This is Season 29, Episode 4, Triose of Horror, 28, which is Trioz of Horrors of Horrors, of of course, the Simpsons sort of annual Halloween anthology that they do. They're great. They're a lot of fun. And this one, this one was only okay, but you know what?

season 29 and we take what we can get. This was pretty much a direct exorcist rip where Pizzuzu haunts Maggie. The sort of idea that this is in any way a predictive episode about Labubu, or even that Homer himself got possessed. Totally untrue. This is just like a very direct exorcist rip. But the little statue of Pizzuzu has like a big smiling face and, you know, much is made of sort of the physical resemblance of between Pizzu and Labubu.

Okay. We get like TikToks that are effectively image of Labubu, illustri. illustration of Pizzu-Zoo in which it allegedly looks somewhat like Labubu. Yeah. Bibleverse. So, Josie, I put it to you. Do you think that the connection between Labubu and Pizzou is legitimate? No.

134 episodes of experience drop on. Okay. Well, that's Josie's vote. Place your bets at home. I'm going to go with... No, period. So according to Kassing Lung, the monster's characters emerged from his young attempts to learn Dutch upon his family's move to the Netherlands when he was seven.

Quote, I went to school and the teacher gave me many children. children's books, picture books, to help me learn Dutch quickly. I also remember reading many fairy tales from Northern Europe and Scandinavia. I spent a lot of time reading in the library to improve my Dutch. After my studies, I was prepared to become an artist. I always thought about my childhood, what I've read, and what I've always loved. So I've always come up with something related to the fairy tales and what I loved so much when I was a kid. So nothing about Pizzu and there, although a lot of these like TikTok types are keen to say, well, like, Scandinavian mythology, that's pagan, that's satanic too. It's all pagan, baby. Where do you think

The cross comes from. Though Lung has never explicitly clarified his inspiration on a spirit-by-spirit basis, there's no evidence that Pizzuzu entered into his creative process, or even that he was aware of Pizzu when he was designing these things. Yeah. And as for the similarity between the two figures, the idea that like between the name and the way they look, it's just too much of a coincidence to be trusted.

According to the book, Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia and illustrated dictionary by Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Pizzuzu is represented with a rather canine face, with abnormally bulging eyes, a scaling body, a snake-headed penis, the talons of a bird, and usually wings. So, Josie, these rare laboo-booboo that you've seen out in the wild, did any of them have a sneeness? Snake-headed penis is that? Yes, with a forked tongue that flicks the re. I have not encountered the sneas, no. None of these laboos with a king cobra.

Uh-uh. Absolutely not. This is anecdotal, of course, but... But then so are all the things that people say online about my labubu started to smell like sulfur and I saw its face change, which this is very popular for like, in a creepy past away, especially young people to be like, my laboo boo-boo talk to me when I was going to sleep, you know. Oh, man.

I saw one that was like, Labubu is the child of the doll Annabelle from The Conjuring. And if you get a Labubu, Annabelle will come. So it has very much entered this sort of like scary stories to tell in the dark realm. Yeah, yeah. But given all of that discussion of, you know, scaly body, talons of a bird, wings, sneeness. The resemblance is not perhaps as pronounced as the random TikTok user with numbers in their screen name would have you believe. Like so many of these moral panics, this one dissipated in intensity fairly quickly,

with Google searches trending dramatically downward by fall of 2025, although Halloween is cut spooky season, baby. Yep. The Lubuos are charging, right? They're at their most powerful. Uh-huh. It's true. As Halloween nears, the boundary between the worlds becomes thinner and the snake-dick monsters of the past are more and more likely to slip the veil and cause havoc by the collectible figurines of the present. True. Blind box is thrill, but idolatry kills. And Pizzuzu lies in wait, hanging off your coach bag, wearing a tiny little bucket hat and

tennis skirt. And all you got to do to let them in is, and then I wrote in parentheses, get Josie help for Labubu Pund. So Josie, if you want to invite your Pizzu-Libu into your life in the form of a pun, what do you need to do? You got to pay those Laboo-Boo Bucks. They're expensive. Which you would call...

La-bux. There you go. Lebo bucks. There you go. You got it, babe. You got to pay those Labu-Bucks, Motherfax. La-boo-boo-na-boo-na-bo-a-bo-bo-a-bo-bo-bun. Hey, sweethearts.

This is Josie here with a quick reminder about the Bittersweet Film Club. That's right. If you help support the Bittersweet Infamy Podcast, you have access to the Bitter Sweet Film Club. You can head over to coffee.com slash bittersweet infamy. That's K-O-Dash-Fi.com slash bittersweet infamy. Sign up to become a monthly subscriber. And then you can listen to Taylor,

perpetual special guest, Mitchell Collins, and me chat about the movies you tell us to watch this month. On monthly subscriber Wobbles Suggestion, we are watching Kevin Costner's Waterworld from 1995. This boat that he has, this huge tribe Moran, still exists. The actual boat, and it is owned privately by someone in San Diego, California. Oh. Do they Uber that shit?

Yeah, what's going on? We need to Airbnb that boat or something. Yeah. We should have got married on that, dude. Yeah, we should have got married on that. Well, mistakes get made every day. Let's get divorced so that we can get married again on that. We got it on tape.

I can't believe we got it on tape. Let's get divorced. Let's get divorced for Waterloaf. Join the Bittersweet Film Club now with your monthly pledge over at coffee.com slash bittersweet infamy. That's K-O-F-I.com slash bittersweet infamy. And we'll see you at the movies. I was saying that you have an incredible way with words.

As my mother says, you are highly verbal. Wow, that's what the doctor said about me too. Yeah. They heard the werewolf's purse. They know that they know I'm special. The proof is in the werewolf's purse. But you also have another poem. I have another poem.

That's damn right. I love these. These are fun. So this one was inspired by a free rate about a blue moon. And a blue moon is, you know, a name to describe when you have two full moons in one calendar month. So it's sort of why it's seen to be rare. Let me tell you my story, the blue moon Halloween. Or my poem, I guess, my rhyming story.

On Halloween, the moon is full and around. The goblins gobble candy off the ground. The witches watch the windows all around. The specters snatch the souls without a sound. On Halloween, the full moon casts its light to guide the greedy goolies in the night from door to door where lanterns glisten bright to give the happy homeowners a fright.

On Halloween, the moon dictates the mood, and vile and venomed vampire victims brood and creaky coffin-dwellers act real rude. and the screaming of souls can't be subdued. But every now and then there's something rare. Some Halloweens of Blue Moons in the air. When that happens, I hope you don't despair. Because there are blue werewolves, so beware.

That's it. Cute! Blue werewolves! Yeah! Blue werewolves, don't see their purse. Yeah. That's it. I've given you under the auspices of that blue moon, the perfect soul-train tunnel to dance down and deliver one final spooky story to send us home for season five for trick-or-treat infamy. And I love that you created that soul train for me to boogie down using a poem,

because we're going to talk a little bit about some poets and some writers today. Okay. You have set the table well, my friend. Love setting the table. I can't cook, so I set the table and I sometimes clean up. It's the year without a summer, Taylor. The skies are perpetually dark, even though it's May, June, July. The rains are not just constant, but they are pounding, lit with angry lightning.

It's not the summer to lounge on the lawns or down on the shores of Lake Geneva and rattle on about poetics and meter and mime with your romantic friends. What am I going to do? It's 1816. And what you're going to do is you are going to lounge around. inside and set yourself a game. So imagine the workshop table in Buchanan E at UBC in the 2010s when we were running amok as creative writing students. Yeah, the Obama era. Yeah. The Obama era, yes, and the chaos and the whipsmart cleverness that we were able to bring to every workshop,

every story, every comment. I came to those in varying. states of sobriety. Hey, so did these folks as well. Yeah, true one. So we are taking that ever so clever energy and transporting it to the 1800s Europe. In this scenario, though, these folks, they have a lot of money. They have famous parents, lordships, and what seem like newfound, genius free love attitudes. We keep rediscovering those fucking genius free love attitudes over and over once a century or two, hey? Yeah, yeah, or two, or three, you know? And then fascism beats it out of us.

That's a vicious cycle. It's not just the blue werewolves you have to beware of, yes. We're going to add some wine. You mentioned various states of sobriety. We're going to, like... Well, you've got to add some wine, burn it off. It just adds a nice, interesting texture to your squash soup. And then you sprinkle on some laudanum, throw in some fainting couches, a little bit more wine,

not a lot of devotion to safe sex practices. Condoms are a thing in the early 1800s. They call them gloves. But no one in this story seems to bound or concerned with... We're bohemians. We're bohemians. Exactly. We don't have to worry about those conventional things.

These folks are bored. They are angry. They are writers who will capture the world with their pins or quills or whatever. And so having set themselves, a game in this very boring climate of constant rain, they have devised a writing challenge where everyone in the party will write a ghost story. The best ghost story wins.

This is the story of how one of the most recognizable monsters, one featured on the cover art, was stitched together from the lived experiences of its creator. A woman, no less. A woman writer, you may ask. An authoress? A woman writing about creating life and creating bodies? Creating man. Weird. So strange. This packed-together monster was galvanized and came to life with a single shock of lightning that fateful summer on Lake Geneva. Taylor, this is the story of Mary Shelley

and how she wrote at the age of 18, this young supple age of 18, one of the seminal work of the English language, Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus. Yeah, a very legendary book, an oft misunderstood book, much parodied. One of our previous covers for Trick or Treat Infamy, I drew you as the bride of Frankenstein, so has played out in sequels and been elaborated upon, you know, et cetera. Yeah, committed to film in all different ways, yeah. Have you read the novel? This is a good question.

Excerpts of, I think. Okay. Because I don't have like a particular memory of how it, you know, begins and ends, but I remember. I think maybe I've seen a film version that stays pretty close to the text of the book. Okay. Yeah. There are a few of those. The main ones committed to film, like the 1931 Frankenstein, where it's like, it's alive, who's alive?

That's actually not very close to the novel at all. And here is where we can like put a little bookmark for all those high school students who are cramming for the exam tomorrow. Hey, Spotify, AI generate a chapter title right here. Yes, thank you. Study guide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, parentheses, grades 9 to 12. Exactly. I'll give you a little overview of the actual novel, just because as you say, it's been

kind of adapted and it's gone through the game of telephone for the last two centuries so that what we recognize as Frankenstein is actually very different from it's initial being. In the original book, Frankenstein was a Korean woman. It's true. So it is an epistolary novel, which means that it's a novel told in letters. So it starts in a letter. The plot that we get through this letter is our main focus is a sea captain who's in the Arctic and his boat is caught in ice and he sees in the way distance a figure with a lone dog on a sled. because all the other dogs have died. A figure who is making his way across the tundra.

It is Dr. Frankenstein. And Dr. Frankenstein comes on board of the ice-locked ship and proceeds to tell the sea captain about how he got to the Arctic. This is a very popular format, I think, for, like, Dracula-type books of this era where it's like, listen, first I show up and then you're like, who the fuck is this guy? And you're like, no, no, no, I wrote some letters to my bitch at home. Yeah.

Let me show you. Yeah. And I think maybe too, it works well for kind of horror or scary stories in that it feels like, well, I know my sister's boyfriend's cousin was the guy who did the thing and like. My little sisters, Laboooooo talk to her. Yeah. We learn from Dr. Frankenstein as he's convalescing. He's very ill. We learn from him that through scientific advancements,

He created what he hoped to be the perfect human, but what was really a monster. He immediately shuns this scary being that's put together from all these potty parts from the morgue. What do you expect him to, you made him like that? Yeah, you know. Doc? Dr. Frankenstein is so horrified by how horrible the monster is that he falls gravely ill. And it's not until a year later that he emerges from his best. and hears that his little brother, who is back home, has been mysteriously killed.

He goes back home and he suspects that it might be the monster who killed his brother. Yeah, maybe. He encounters this monster, who is never called Frankenstein, by the way. It's only Dr. Frankenstein, who's Frankenstein. The monster is only the monster. You'll forgive me if during the course of this episode I referred to the monster as Frankenstein. or Frank, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, you know, any of the above.

Understood. So this point in the novel, the perspective shifts again. We're getting epistolary. Then we're getting Dr. Frankenstein's view. And now we get the Monsters View. Which this is ambitious shit, considering it was like a drunk free right by a teenager. When we're in the Monsters viewpoint, we learned that when he was born, when he was created, when he came online, he was scared, of course,

and without any type of direction or mentorship, parenthood, whatever, he runs away and he hides in a family shed. And he can overhear and kind of view what they're doing for a few months. And through that process, he learns to talk. The family speaks French. And so he learns French and he learns how to write. Frankenstein. There we go.

There we go. reads John Milton's Paradise Lost about the creation of man and Adam and Eve and all of this. When did he get literate? Well, he taught himself. Oh, he's a smart guy. He's a real smart guy, smart monster. He reads Dr. Frankenstein's journals in which he chronicles how the monster was created, so he knows where he came from, and he plucks up the courage to try and meet the family. He's concerned that they will be terrified of him, but he's learned so much, and he thinks he can overcome their fear. No. He does not. They immediately run him out and they're terrified and they leave town and he's totally sad and nothing will make him happy or nothing will be right. And so he goes on a tear and he kills a young

boy who comes across his path, aka Dr. Frankenstein's little bro bro, bro. Even from this summer, you can already tell that like we think of bolt and neck and, you know, haircut and all of these things. but this is actually like, number one, a very sad story about someone who desperately wants to belong, but due to a combination of like physical deformity slash the general circumstances of his existence, he's shunned from the jump. And number two, it's one of those stories where you hate to put too fine a point on it, but we're the monster, the monster is us, right? Yeah, yeah.

We too are born into circumstances that we didn't choose, and we too are prone to shun those who are different or be shunned for our difference. We two have, you know, you panic and you kill a little boy. Like, come on. Yeah. Especially when you don't know your own strength. So he describes all of this, the monster being the he. The monster describes all of this to Dr. Frankenstein.

And he says, you have to create a companion for me. I'm out here all alone and no one will be with me. No one will talk with me. You must create a companion. And so Dr. Frankenstein says, okay, I'll make you a bride. So the idea of the bride of Frankenstein is still the colonel's, cooked into the 1818 version. Dr. Frankenstein, though, through the process of collecting all the dead body parts and whatnot, things to himself, I can't do this again. I can't...

There's got to be a better way. Lose another monster on the world. Can't I just unbox one of these pot-mart? Yes, exactly. What about a l'bubu? Can we just give a, you know, a bolt of lightning on a l'bubu? Something to put on your bag, Frank. Yeah. Something to put on your messenger bag. The monster is upset, obviously. because the doctor said he would make him a companion and never does. And so to enact his revenge, the monster kills Dr. Frankenstein's brand new wife on their wedding night. I mean, fucking got him, though. Sucks to be you.

Yeah, remember how I wanted a companion? Well, you can't have one either. Go crying a shed about it, bitch. By the way, your brother's still dead. Got him too. So Dr. Frankenstein chases his monster all over the world, all the way up to the Arctic Circle, where now the narrative comes full circle. So we're back on board the sea captain's ice-locked ship, and Dr. Frankenstein makes the captain promise that he will find the monster and

kill him. That is what must be done for the safety of the world. Clean up your own mess, Doc. Clean up your own mess. He can't. He dies. He did. Wow. And the ice shakes loose. The boat, the ship can make its way further south. And the sea captain cannot convince his crew to stay longer to kill the monster until one evening when the monster is on board the ship and mourning over the dead body of his creator of Dr. Frankenstein. In death, we're better than we were in life, you know? Yeah. Humanity is a complex thing, even when it's crafted from other human body parts and electrified by lightning. It's still quite complex. Sort of the thesis of this book.

If you will, yeah. And the monster says to the sea captain, You don't need to kill me. I will kill myself. I will lay myself out on a funeral pyre. But you should know that you've only heard one side of the story. And I have my own side. And you just wait for the sequel, baby. And the sequel after that, and the sequel after that. And then Frankenweeney in 2017, it's great. I mean, yeah, exactly. That is the story. That is what it is. There are no bolts. That kind of, I guess, main signifier of Frankenstein is his little bolts on the side of his neck. That came from the 1930s film. I think that a lot of the iconography of a lot of these big figures, Frankenstein,

invisible man, even Dracula gets hammered down by the various portrayals in like universal monster movies. Exactly. You know, when we're kind of like codifying these characters visually so that people can instantly see them and recognize them. And it's certainly a cautionary tale about science. A few things. Yeah, for a few things. One of them being like enacting science for science's sake. It's often called the first science fiction novel. Of course, it's not the science that we know today, though. Mary Shelley's concept of science, it was not the scientific method. It was none of that. That was before all of that took hold. Science to her, and at that time, was a little more loosey-goosey. It was, for example, a poet staying up all night in a barn to see if a ghost appeared. That was considered

science. Star Arthur Conan Doyle, you know, our boy. Yes. It's a general mentality of fuck around and find out. That's what science is. Right. Let's tinker with the ingredients and see if anything new comes out of the oven that we weren't expecting, but not to any particular.

Just like, what does it all mean? Yes, yeah. And so that kind of puts the idea of science fiction a little bit in check because it's like, well, wait, what do you mean by science in that realm? But if we're understanding science within the frame of the novel as like fuck around and find out, then what she is talking about is the sense of you must take responsibility for what you bring into the world. We're still struggling with that one. Every day.

Yeah. I will note for everybody that we are going to be talking about romantics. And they were the like prototypical hipster emo kids of the day. They took things extremely seriously, and that means we are going to cover instances of suicide. There will be instances of multiple miscarriages and infant mortality in this story. So while I won't get graphic about anything, if this isn't the episode for you right now, please take a breather. We have a few road trip episodes you may want to enjoy. We have a few other Halloween episodes.

Episode number 54, Setskula, is always available for you. And it draws upon a lot of the tropes that Josie's going to be laying out. That's Dr. Flettingstein's monster, Sexula. You know what I mean? Yeah, there we go. It is a treatment of this same sort of parodic, but with vampires. So to understand Frankenstein through the lens of taking responsibility for what you put into the world, we're going to chat a little bit about the folks who brought Mary Shelley into the world, her parents.

Do you know who her mom was? Mary Woolstonecraft? Yeah. I did know that. I did know that. You did. I can tell because you said it. Who do you know Mary Woolstonecraft to be?

I don't know much about her except to say that I know her as one of the preeminent figures of like feminist letters. And she was reading the political thinkers of the day that were influencing the French Revolution, but also the American Revolution. She was born 1759. So she's right in that mix of all the early U.S. and European political thinking. Mary Shelley's father was also a well-known political theorist and novelist by the name of William Godwin. And he was, by all accounts, a successful writer, maybe not as well-known as Mary Wollstonecraft because Mary just kind of was so unique in her day.

But the idea that Mary Shelley had famous parents is very much a thing. She was a Nepo baby. Everybody knew who she was because of her parents. Got it. And I mean, it's a time when you have to have some type of title, money, fame behind you to be any type of writer or to be any type of thinker. This is not the era where the chimney sweep ends up writing the political treatise that the country is built on. No, no, no populism yet. We're still relying on our betters to tell us what to do and how to think. We're trying to change that. We're cutting some heads off in France to do it. And, you know. How's that going? Well, a little bloody, a little bloody. Where's smock?

Exactly. Mary Wollstonecraft is born in London to a very abusive father. She sees a lot of not great stuff happening to her mom at a very young age. And she educates herself and becomes very passionate about reading and writing and learning. And one of the things that she devotes herself to is women's rights. Having seen her mom be squashed by a marriage and by an abusive husband, she vows that she will never marry and that she will fight tirelessly for the preservation of women's well-being. She's inspired by John Locke, and she writes in 1792, a vindication of the rights of women, which argues that women should receive the same education as men and be treated as rational beings capable of contributing to society. So Mary Wollstonecraft is fascinated by the philosophies that are cooking up the French Revolution.

She heads over there. She crosses the channel and becomes one of the world's first female war correspondence. She writes endlessly about what she sees and what's happening. She's not for all the guillotine blood, but she's very chill with the politics. She's like, this is what needs to be happening, the rich should be replaced by the poor and the masses. So during that time, she meets an American by the name of Gilbert Imlay and not one bound by tradition and seeing from her own home life as a child how marriage could really trap a woman. They do not get married, but they do have a daughter, a daughter out of wedlock by the name of Fannie IMA. Mary Wollstonecraft unmarried means that she doesn't have a lot of cachet in society and she's kind of it loosens.

There's no real form of money coming in. Gilbert turns out to be an asshole. Men can't live with them, can't create them out of dead people's body parts, am I right? Yep. Poor Mary is so lost that she attempts suicide. She fails. Thank goodness. And Gilbert tells her that if she goes looking for a boat of his, that he believes, was stolen and commandeered into Scandinavia. Okay. Then maybe she could come back with that boat and they could be a thing. Like her, they could be family, you know?

Why doesn't he find his own boat? I think he's trying to give her something to do. A project. Some people are better off busy. Yeah. You know, it does kind of work for Mary. She goes to Scandinavia. She does not find the boat.

But while she's there with her toddler, she starts writing a book about the nature that she encounters. It's called Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Her book is about how nature has a healing property and it's an important influence on us humans. And the text actually becomes foundational for the romantic movement, for Cool Ridge, for Wordsworth. Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, a lot of folk. The crew.

One lesser-known poet of the movement. Robert Southie, he wrote to his publisher and said, quote, have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft's travel book? She has made me in love with a cold climate and frost and snow with a northern moonlight. The importance of writing of poetry, of literature, right? All of that. So Mary Wollstonecraft, she, with her toddler, returns to London where she meets the political theorist and writer William Godwin. They become a situation. So when she meets William Godwin, it's a quick falling in love process. Marriage is not the radical cool thing to do.

So they do remain unmarried until, well, shit. Mary gets pregnant again. Okay. And they realize that it really does suck to be an illegitimate child in the world. Yes. So for the sake of their daughter, they marry. August 30th. 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft gives birth to her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin.

Okay. I don't know why they chose the same name. Not that uncommon, honestly. Also not that uncommon. 11 days after little Mary Godwin's birth due to complications and a negligent OBGYN, who thinks it's fine, more than fine to not wash his hands. Mary Wollstonecraft dies of complications from her childbirth. Woolstonecraft, O.G., not the daughter. O.G., not the daughter.

So the little baby survives, but Mama Wollstonecraft is no longer with us. William Godwin, the father, is now raising two young girls. He's not a shithead. He takes on Mary's first daughter, Fannie, and he raises Little Mary Godwin. Hashtag Girl Dad. A lot of like pretty princess ponies around the bookshop that he runs, exactly. Tea time every day wearing his little pink tutu. Mary never met her mother.

I mean, as a wee wee bab she did, but not as a conscious being. But she teaches herself how to read and write by tracing the inscription on her mother's grave site in St. Pancras churchyard. That's so fucking metal. Can you get more fucking gothic? Someday you will. right Frankenstein, you know? Yeah, yeah. After four years, William Godwin marries another woman who has kids of her own, and Mary and her new stepmother never get along. It's not a good relationship.

While she doesn't like her stepmom, she gets along fine with her step-sister, a woman named Mary Jane Claremont. Later, she goes by the name Claire Claremont, so we'll refer to her as Claire. Really glad that we've got other names now for girls, yeah. Besides Mary, yeah, it's nice. As Mary gets older, her stepmom gets even more intense, especially as Mary enters adolescence and looks more and more like her husband's beloved first wife. Same name as the bitch, too. Whose portrait hangs in William Godwin's office. This is the plot of Rebecca. If you're the type of person who wants like a kind of scary

thriller but you don't want something spooky or gory, read Rebecca by Daphne de Morier and or watch the Hitchcock movie based on it. But maybe read the book. Maybe read the book. Okay. Start with the book. Great book. And again, the same angle of like, girl meets a young playboy and becomes his wife.

But oops, she's the second wife. And Rebecca's portrait is everywhere around the castle and no one will shut the fuck up about how great Rebecca was. Yeah. Are we Mary is kind of living, living that out a little bit until her parents, her father and her stepmother, send her to Scotland for two years. Where they do encourage her to write. Her dad is like, you're going to be a writer.

you're a writer, just keep writing. Sure. Mary recalls of that time. I wrote then, but in a most commonplace style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house or on the bleak side of the woodless mountains near. That my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.

That was back when you would do such things longhand sitting under a tree and letting the muse take you as opposed to like inside, at a computer with the lo-fi girl. So when Mary returns from Scotland to London, she's 17 and she meets a very young, very gorgeous fuckboy poet by the name of Percy Shelley. He's a romantic poet. He is inspired by nature. And in this romantic movement, it's all about understanding the world through your own experience.

So you're not trying to pull in other ideas to, create your understanding. You're examining your emotions and your feelings and your lests and your sadness. And it's just very emo, very, very emotion heavy. And he, Percy, is hanging around William Godwin's bookstore for the purposes of mentorship. William Godwin is a successful writer. Percy Shelley is like, hey, I'm interested in what you've done and what you've got to say. So I'm here. And at this point, Mary is a pretty young thing, whipsmart, and also radical as hell. And as we mentioned at the top, she's famous. Percy Shelley is getting some recognition for his poetry, but she's also recognized as the daughter of revolutionary thinkers.

The story goes, they fall madly in love and profess their love to each other on Mary's mother's gravesite. I do appreciate how Mary's clocking in every single rite of passage in her life literally directly on top of her mother's grave. Does she know that there's other places? There is no definitive evidence of Mary and Percy boning on her mom's grave site. But we need to save money on the sets. Yes, yes. So let's just, can we put this one on the grave? Yeah.

Can they break up on the grave? Can she write Frankenstein on the grave? We already paid for the tombstone. We paid a lot of money to get this thing etched. Yeah. Yeah. The stage hand doesn't want to move it off the stage. I've heard some arguments that, like, well, that's a bit crass and voyeuristic to talk about, like, a 17-year-old, like, losing her virginity on her mother's grave.

But you know what? I also think that Mary Shelley was like, no, history can clock it that way if they want to. I'm fine with that. I would like some sort of, like, a merry elaboration on my sexual history. The real thing's so much more boring. Why not? Exactly. Yeah, why not?

Throwing a little grave site here and there. You already paid for the tombstone. Exactly. She's not getting any debtor. Fuck. Yeah. So Mary is a radical, just like her mother, just like her father. And even though Percy Shelley is married when they meet, he is not only just married, he also has a kid by his first marriage.

Mary is still game to party and they elope. Now, my understanding of marital law dictates one at a time, depending where you are. Well put. Well put. Come to Bountiful British Columbia and everything is up for grabs or Provo, Utah or any of these other. Senegal, I think, has some polygamy stuff going on. Yeah, yeah. Not the UK, as I'm aware. Not the UK, not this time.

So not only, yeah, they don't really do it. They call it an elopement, but it's more of just a let's run away together and live in sin. But the other angle of this, too, is that both of them professes. that they do not believe in marriage. And yet twice he's married. Exactly. Yeah, no, of course. Yeah. Yeah. But it's something that Mary's parents never believed in either. And it's a way to chain women to men. And it is unconscionable aspect of society that they would never want to replicate in their own lives. And they will push against it as hard as they can because it's like the radical humane thing to do. So many of our decisions in life aren't dictated by who we'd like to seem to be.

But, you know, yeah, part of that too, I think is, because he's not that, he's five years older than her. He's not that baby, baby. He's in his early 20s. So they head out to the continent. They head to France, following in Mary's mother's footsteps. Claire, her step-sister, joins them. Why not? Hey.

You have a little traveling trio here. Sure, sure. I don't believe in third wheels. I genuinely don't. I've never usually, when I'm couple traveling, a third person is not anything but helpful. Yeah, except if they start sleeping with your partner and you're not into that. Claire. Percy. Well, Percy, yes, but Claire, you're going to need to see this girl every year at the dinner table.

We're in this for the long haul as stepsisters. Let's not do these things that we can't undo, like husbands. It's important to remember, like it's super scandalous to be traveling. with a married man whom you're not married to. And it's very scandalous to have two unmarried women traveling with a married man that they're neither of them is married to. And their sisters and they're both fucking him. That's not great either. But I think like the scandal that's involved here is so much worse for the women than it is for Percy. Every scandal is. Welcome to bittersweet infamy. Season five. At this time, women can't control their own money or own property. So there's some

basics of societal existence that were never on the table for Mary nor for Claire. But what this scandal does mean for them is that they will never be eligible for marriage, which at the time is the safest economic venture they can partake in. So when you say that they're not eligible for marriage, is it because all of the scandal of this entanglement has come out and that precludes them from getting married because they've already fallen into disgrace traveling around together in this way? Their reputation has been so sullied that they would They can't find a fucking priest to marry him. Yes.

Yeah. Got it. Kind of. I mean, they might be able to marry some impoverished man, but in terms of their societal standing, they would never be able to marry for economic stability. And also he's got a fucking wife. Yes. There's also Harriet, who has a kid as well.

This is not just like running away because it's romantic. And I think Mary is cognizant of this when she chooses to leave with Percy. she essentially throws away the promise of a safe life for something that is unknown, something that is wild. And she completely devotes herself to the romantic ideals that her mother embodied and that she wants to carry forward in her own life. Tale is old as time. Taylor's a bad boy. She is taking inspiration not only from gorgeous fuckboy Percy, but her own parents. in particular, her mother.

In fact, on their continental tour, Mary and Percy are known to read to each other the entire view of Mary Wollstonecraft's work. On the grave, I would assume this is all happening. On the mother's grave. On the metaphorical grave. They're trying to retrace her steps, Mary Wollstonecraft's steps through France. That seems like a healthy relationship with your dead mother. Right, yeah.

Maybe I can just be her. It is enticing, and it makes sense that she would be. inclined to, along with a willing partner, be like her mother and enact this life that is pushing away matrimony and marriage. But I think Mary Wollstonecraft experienced the uncertainty of being a single unwed mother. And she eventually did marry. She eventually married to protect her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin. So to me, it seems a little bit of an angsty rationale. She's a teenager. Yeah. If not now when. But it is an action that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

Okay. And beyond. As I mentioned, Claire, her step-sister, is also traveling with them and they make a very scandalous trio. Also, Claire and Percy seem to every once in a while have a rule in the hay together as well. So as much as Mary is devoted to this radical free love ideal, she's not really interested in sleeping with other people. It's kind of that classic, like, the relationship is open for one partner's sake kind of thing. A little bit, yeah. And I'm throwing around the term fuckboy a lot

because I think Percy embodies it. I defined fuckboy in such a way that it's like, okay, so the fuck boy says, this is what you signed up for. Yeah. I was clear from the beginning that I didn't want any feelings involved. I just wanted the physical and blah, blah, blah. Of course, Percy is saying I am deeply, madly in love with you. But my free radical and very open understanding of love means that I will love all these different people. And that is what you signed up for, Mary. So you better be sleeping with other men, too.

But she's not really inclined to do so. She doesn't care. She really doesn't care. She just kind of likes Percy. Sure. And I think, I don't know, that seems especially apparent when Mary gets pregnant. Okay. This is where the free love conversation hits a turn in the road, right?

Right. Right. And can you really have a deep-seated free love philosophy without reliable and consistent contraceptive? Mm. Which becomes a question for another era, perhaps. In this era, free love, a noble and radical endeavor, always seems to benefit the dudes the most. So pregnant, Mary, Comet, Shelley, and Claire returned to London. But her father, their father, William Godwin, is so pissed.

by their quote-unquote elopement. Hoaring around France. Horing around France, yeah. She and her mother endured many a hoarish slur. Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother, was known as a hyena and petticoats. Sounds like a woman who had the misfortune of expressing a contrasting opinion one time in a room full of man. Sounds like a really good Halloween costume. I was going to say, or like a really well-dressed hyena.

Yeah. So her father won't talk to her. nor will he talk to Percy. And this relationship is complicated by money. Not just the ideals of free love and making the mistakes that your parents don't wish you would. But Percy is a rich kid with a Bernetzi to inherit. And what is that? Apparently, in the 1600s to raise money for the crown.

We're selling a square foot of land in Scotland and you can be a lord or a lady. We will, yeah, we'll send you the little plaque in the mail. Understood. Understood. Something great for Dad, for Chris, the man who, the dad who has it all. You know what I mean? Well, he's not a lord yet, is he? Not till you get there. And it is one of the few things that you could buy into in terms of a royal title. But unlike a knighthood, which you don't buy into, you were awarded a knighthood. But a knighthood is for personal efforts. And at Bernetze, you can pass down to your children. So it's an inherited title. That's what Percy is set up with. So he's got, some money behind that. And he promises William Godwin and the initial kind of tussle of, I'm married, but I'm leaving with your daughter, blah, blah, blah. He promised William Godwin that he would give him some money to make things run smoother for William Godwin, the bookshop for the publishing. But Percy's Bohemian ways piss off his family and at different intervals they cut him off.

With such an unstable financial situation, it means that he isn't always paying. Mary's father what he promised he would. It also means that Mary and him at one time live in the lap of luxury and then the next day they take up residence in dilapidated apartment. It's a very chaotic financial situation that Percy creates for everybody in the family. Again, fuck boy. Unfortunately, Mary Shelley prematurely gives birth to her first child, a little girl she names Clara, and Clara dies within the first few weeks of her life. Mary struggles immensely with the loss. Yeah. She lost her own mother. Her ideas and connection to motherhood is intimately tied with death, and now that seems to be proving true again in this very traumatic, sad way.

In the context of a birth, too, her mother died during Mary Jr.'s birth. Yes, exactly. Or shortly thereafter, I should say. Complications caused. but it's a very tremultuous and an extreme loss for her. She even writes in her journals how she has dreams where Clara comes back to life after being warmed by the fire, which is really like... That's sad. Percy, he is also saddened by the loss, but he's also in the process of dipping out every once in a while because he has to flee debtors. Pick your baby daddies wisely. Pick your baby daddies wisely. Who do you want to be entangled with? for a lifetime. You know, these are the questions. Yes, yes. Percy also doesn't have to suffer any of the

physical ramifications of losing a newborn. And he, while seemingly depressed, also seems to kind of bounce back a little easier than Mary does. She physically does recover relatively quickly from the miscarriage. And within a year, she is pregnant again. And she has a little boy, she names William, after her father, and he's nicknamed to Will Mouse. Very often, they call him Little Will Mouse. That's when you know your parents are poets and writers, because your name is Will Mouse. Or mice. That too.

It is 1816, and with Little Will Mouse in tow, Percy, Mary, and Claire head out to Lake Geneva. Yes. Haven't we gotten Claire something to do? Haven't we set her off in search of a Scandinavian ship yet? Right. You know? Well, yes, here's the thing, though, is Claire's the one who suggests they go to Lake Geneva because she knows that Lord Bryron will be there.

And she has the hot for Lord Byron. Claire has a crush on Lord Byron that she has consummated, we'll say. In England, they've met up a few times. He's a director of a theater there, blah, blah, blah. She has a few dalliances. It's pretty clear to everyone but Claire, unfortunately, that he's just not that into her, though. He is married, but then also sleeping with other people and blah, blah, blah. I've heard this one before.

He's got a lot of stuff going on. He actually leaves England the summer of 1816, never to return to his home country again because of the way that his marriage fell apart. His wife in the court of law filed for separation. which is totally unheard of. That's off the fucking wall in the early 1800s. I didn't even know they had a mechanism for it. They do if you can claim and prove insanity.

And she claims... Oh, she goes for it. And successfully proves that Lord Byron is insane. So she gets her divorce. Whoa. But Lord Byron can never come back to England because of for shame, but also, I think, just the legal standing of... Of also, like, you're insane?

Yeah. And so go. Yes. Go where the wind takes you, you crazy, man. Claire, after all of this, still enamored. Baby, perhaps she's enamored because she's pregnant with his child. Yo, again, you're going to want to monitor who are these baby daddies. Can they legally set foot in the country? Do they have a clean bill of sanity? You know, these are the important questions. It's so true. Lord Byron is a very famous up-and-coming, if not already, they are romantic poet. And unlike Percy Shelley, who is also pretty well-known, Shelley doesn't have a lot of money. Lord Byron has a lot more money. He has the full title of Lord. And he has the ability to escape an insanity legal designation. I'll find a beach somewhere, yeah. Yeah, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. Here is where we enter.

the year without a summer, the ne'er-do-well house party vibes. Everybody in this house has broken some very strong social contract. And everybody in this house is a devoted, radical. Everybody in this house is a writer. They're all fucking each other in a big pile married or not. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Also in attendance is Lord Byron's physician, a man named John William Polidori, who takes up writing as well. Why not? not. Everyone's got a novel in them. We always say it. When in Rome, yeah. So this is a very stormy, stormy summer, which, strangely enough, is caused by one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded human history. Oh, wow. Yeah, this is just a little side note here, because it's the

year prior to this that a major volcanic explosion in Indonesia cast an unprecedented amount of dust and debris into the atmosphere to such a degree that it would affect the global weather for years to come. But most notably, it creates a very dreary summer of 1816. Interesting, interesting. Geological and meteorological confluence of events to create our little stormy crucible. Yeah. And I don't think anybody in the house kind of knew that going in. No, they were busy talking about how like, kind of link. guess is important, but it has to be a different woman every night, babe. Right, exactly. Got it. Also, how's our son? Right. I know. Is he still around? He's there. I feel like in so many

of the retellings of this story, there is no child around. And I'm sure there's a nurse. They're in a therapy office is where they are. True. Very true. So the grownups, if you want to call them that, Mary is like barely 18. But they are reading a book of German ghost stories called Fantasmogoria. Great. Yeah. Apparently the stories aren't all that great, though.

That's a shame. What does that mean? Why are they not great? It just means that they aren't as well written as they could be. As Frankenstein, let's say. We'll go with that. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's a room full of poets and writers who are just like, we could do better, but that's what sets the challenge. That creates it so that Lord Biden is like, these are good and all, but we could do better.

We could do better. I've had that feeling of either I could do better or I could do that. A lot of my art has been driven by like, I could do that. I don't like how that story was told. Step aside, Jr. Yeah. Well, what is that Tony Morrison line?

If you've never read the novel that you want to read, you should write it or something like that. Good one, Tony. Funnly enough, Byron, who poses this challenge and Percy, the two most famous writers in the house, they kind of half-assed the assignment. They don't. Men. But Mary and Paula Dori, the physician, they take it seriously. So it's not all men.

Hashtag not all men. Hashtag not all men. Mary claims in her 1831 intro to Frankenstein that she took several days to get started. She just was a little like starstruck. She didn't know what to do. But we know from Paula Dori's journals that she started right away. And we can trust Paula Dori's journals because he had a mad crush on Mary, and he watched her very carefully. You need to fuck outside the friend group, guys.

Dear Diary, Mary didn't wear a bra today. A little bit of that, yeah. Like, she did have a reputation of sleeping with men out of wedlock. But everyone in this house has that right. That's why they're all here, I'm sure. Yeah. According to all accounts, Paula Dory and Mary, We're close, but they never slept together.

And she, again, was not interested in sleeping with others. She was known to kind of maybe flirt every once in a while, but never to go much further than that. Right. So she actually, her reputation isn't even particularly earned. Not at all. She just fell really hard for Percy and was like, okay, let's go. Well, I'll put up with this, I suppose.

I guess it gets complicated, too, because it's like, this is what her mother seemed to have done as well. So she's like, it makes sense. I'm doing the right thing. I know I'm doing the right thing. To be clear. I have no issue with an open relationship. And neither do I, yeah.

The circumstances just need to be like agreeable. You know what I mean? Thank you for saying that because I should point that out. Like, I don't think that what we would call now polyamory is inherently negative or inherently anti-feminist. There's a way to go. There's an ethics to it that I don't think that our boy, Shelleyness. Shelly seems to be very dick-driven in his approach. Yes.

Which isn't the most helpful way to approach what is essentially terms and conditions for the relationship. Any relationship needs a solid foundation of communication. And it seems like Percy, as much as he is devoted to writing and expressing emotion, maybe kind of just runs away when things get hard. I mean, you said it. Do we have to have this conversation again? That kind of thing. Things so frequently seem to get hard with him.

Also in her 1831 introduction, Mary paints this picture that this summer, after having the challenge, she didn't know what to write, but also this crazy. easy idea came to her in a dream. And she saw a man sewn together from all these different body parts being... Like Twilight. Yes. Yes. Like Twilight came to Stephanie Meyer in a dream. Yes, yes. Two of the great, like, romantic Gothic novels in history, I'll have you know. True. According to Paula Dory's journals, she went to work quite quickly on it and didn't seem stuck and didn't seem to be inspired by any dream. Yeah, but this is a woman who seems to make herself smaller for men, so it's not shocking to me that she would come in there. Like, well,

you know, it was really hard. And I wish Percy had been there to help me, but he was fist deep elsewhere. It's true. And it's probably true as well that on a societal level, she was maybe trying to make the, this was the third edition that was published that she was writing about. So she was trying to maybe make it more palatable to a society. that didn't want to view a woman having thoughts about a horror story. We hate to see a woman win. Yeah. She was overtaken by this very romantic idea of...

The muse got her one day. Yeah. Which builds in some nice legend and that's good. But there is this question of like, well, was she just doing this to what you said, like kind of make herself a little smaller in this scenario? It wasn't me who had this idea. It was a dream that I had. To your point, you just said it is kind of as legendary an inception of.

a story story as I know. Like you said immediately, oh, you know, it's a dark and stormy night, right? The peruvial dark and story night. And I was like, I know what this is going to be because legendarily Mary Shelley just fucking killed a free right while on a group trip. Amen. Amen. You know what it during a rainstorm. Exactly. And it's for the next two years that Mary writes and writes away on what she started that summer. Okay. So interestingly, again, this is something that I imagined her, because this story is so legendary, having birth fully formed on that chip. But you say, no, she took years to write this. Right. Yes. Like, that's kind of the typical view of any great writing. Well, we've got to tell it in 90 minutes. You know what I mean to?

Yeah. Here's the montage where it's like coffee cups and, you know, balled up pieces of paper and frustration and holding up two bolts and putting them next to her neck in the mirror, raising an eyebrow, holding a baseball and looking at the stitching while rubbing her chin. Yes, exactly, exactly. She's walking down the street and she sees Benjamin Franklin's kite get hit by lightning and she has an idea. You need to go through all these important scenes. Exactly, exactly. Yes, yes. So meanwhile, at this time, this kind of like post-summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, on the stormy shores of Lake Geneva,

in the months following this, Claire gives birth to her and Lord Byron. Sharon's daughter, whom she names Allegra. And Byron, as per usual, has no intention of marrying Claire. Uh, yeah, take care of allegory. Takes off. Exactly. I'm getting some cigarettes. Bye.

If only were that, he actually filed for custody of the child. So he didn't want her to even raise the child. He took custody of Allegra, which at the time was very easy for men to do in a legal sense. Okay. And he had her placed in a convent where poor Allegra died from fever at the age of five. Not dad of the year for that. No, uh-uh. Especially because Claire was eager to be her mother and eager to see her.

And before she died, she had kind of hatched this plot to go to the convent and steal her and take her away and Lord Byron be damned. These people need hobbies. These people are like, it's not, it's, you're not all the main character. But you're right, though, because Lord Byron becomes the main character. of his own legacy and Percy Shelley too. Like, it's a house full of fucking main characters and it's a lot. And Mary at this point, not particularly a main character. She kind of improbably ends up being the one who gets a really big name book out of this whole thing.

We're not quite to the fame and fortune of Frankenstein because the fall of 1816 after this legendary summer. Or lack thereof. Right, yeah. Mary and Percy and Claire return to London. Upon hearing that Mary's half-sister, Fannie Imlay, she has committed suicide. It never ends. Apparently, and this is, you know, journal conjecture and everything,

Mary thinks that Fannie had a crush on Percy and this unrequited love was too overwhelming. You can have him? But can any woman truly have him, you know, also? Yeah, there's that. But that's fucked. Not for a guy. Not for a guy. Right. Not for that guy, certainly. And then in December of that same year, Shelley's wife, wife, remember? Because he's still married at this point. Harriet Westbrook is her name. She is found dead in London's serpentine river. She committed suicide by drowning herself and her third child whom she was pregnant with at the time. Oh, that's a shame. What it seems like, too, is that Harriet would have liked to have been Percy's wife and would have liked to have a family with him. And was and did.

And was and did. Yeah. And Mary is really affected by these suicides. She has a very strong feeling of connection to what has happened. I think especially her own step-sister. But Harriet's suicide is also a very real thing for her as well. even though it creates a situation where her and Percy can now get married. This isn't the sign from God.

Right. All the impediments died. Good. No. The impediments were there from God. And then God was like, listen, girl, at some point I got to take the training wheels off and let you. You turned 18. Go.

Here's the trade off. You get a really great book out of this. Well, she doesn't heed your advice 200 years later. No, they never do. They never do. Her and Percy do get married and she becomes Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley, yeah, I'd been kind of spoiled on the outcome from the beginning by that. And you might be wondering, okay, she loves Percy in an extremely devoted way and, okay, she wants to get married.

But she's bohemian and why doesn't she keep her mother's name? I was wondering that as well, but my question was actually, why is Percy willing to get married again? Because it doesn't mean anything to him. It's a party where you can get drunk and probably fuck some chick. Yes. And it gives him. the opportunity to claim custody over his kid with Harriet Westbrook. So again, the marriage is less about... It's useful. Yeah, it's less about like, oh, this is a display of our love together and we want this

holy union. I mean, it is a display. It is kind of... It is a display. But it's totally within a legal ramification for children, which is how Mary Shelley's parents got married, too. Right. And I think that's not uncommon.

And again, I don't cast judgment on that situation of getting married for practicality rather than romance. People do it all the time. Yeah. But also, like, again, it comes down to the specifics of the situation, the unique context of this situation where, like, throw this poor girl a bone. She seems to love you for whatever reason. Or let her off the leash, one or the other.

But don't, don't, like, use her because she looks good on the adoption papers or the custody papers. That's a little bit of what kind of happened. Yeah. But they do. They get married. Mary's dad, William Godwin, is there in the first row. Clapin hard, clapping the longest he can. He's glad that they are finally married.

Did Claire catch the bouquet? You know, I don't know about that one. She may have been busy elsewhere. Charity event, yeah. Yeah. Within the year, Mary finishes writing Frankenstein. So it's been kind of two years since the summer at Lake Geneva. and she has a full, complete draft.

She gives birth to her third child, whom she names Clara Everina. Such rich people names of these children in this story is really. I know. I do like Everina. I like how we get from two people named Mary right into, like, Allegra, Everina. Like, we're really... Yeah, true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mary had our same thought that, like, we shouldn't all be named the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, let's break them all a little bit. unfortunately that sweet little baby dies within three weeks of being born. Josie, do any of these babies? We're going to get one. I'll let you know we get one. In November of that same year, so November 1817, Mary collects her travel writing from her and Claire and Percy's little jaunt through Europe. Road trip footage, got to piece it together into an episode.

Exactly. That's what she did. It'll take you a while, Mary. Be careful. Yeah, well, well, she does get it public. pretty quickly. And in November of 1817, Mary publishes her first book. And it's about her travels. History of a six weeks tour is the title. Okay. Yeah, that's not as good as Frankenstein. I'm afraid. That sounds like quite a, I mean, people still read Walden, I guess. Yeah.

But there's a, there's a market for like boring, rich people talking about nature, but you know, get into the limbs, you know, the limbs of it all, the limbs. History knows Frankenstein better. This is true. But also this does end up being as we talked about a sort of star-studded event, so maybe there's some good gossip in here, too. I think there was also an urge from the publishing houses to get her published before Frankenstein. When Frankenstein is published in January of 1818, it is published anonymously. They decide that it would not be good to see a woman published. Fuck. What a tiresome race we are as humans.

Oh, my God. But in particular, this horror story by a woman. Point stands. No amendment. It seems to be a mess because I think they kind of rushed the publication of the travel journal to get kind of her name solidified, but then they didn't use her name. And it's all just a big kind of stupid wash. I mean, I learned through this process, too, that Jane Austen, her work was not published

with her name initially. But neither was it published anonymously. It was published by an author who was referred to as a lady. Jane Austen's novels are about femininity and about the view of the world from a female perspective. So they wanted to acknowledge the credibility of having a female writer, but they didn't want to have the credibility of an actual woman. We make the joke often kind of started on film club that there's like the idea of like just some random female character who's there to be a woman and she's played by an actress named a woman. Well, this is quite literal interpretation of that.

A lady. Yeah. A lady. Wow. But that's like a good viral. That's viral. That'll be like, did you're a lady? Is it a book by a lady? What lady? Some lady. Who is it? Yeah. That's what happens with Frankenstein, of course. It's immediately very popular. It's published with the subtitle as well, the modern Prometheus. Do you know who Prometheus is? He invented fire? A figure of Greek myth who is said to be the human who, I think, took fire from the gods, maybe. More relevantly, Prometheus is also said to have created humanity from clay, which is absolutely more relevant than the fire thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. There you go. Funnily enough, Percy is writing an epic length poem called Prometheus Unbound.

Couples. And his take on this idea of invention and progress is a very positive one. It's this idea of like, oh, yes, Prometheus taking fire, getting fire, beautiful, wonderful, let's celebrate joyous, joyous. While we know that Frankenstein is less about the joys and this wonderful to create new life, it's a cautionary tale about creating new life. They kind of take the split. Percy is very hopeful about the topic, and Mary is much more like, no dog. There is destruction and pain on the other side of this.

Well, she's writing this like 10 minutes into a miscarriage and shit. Like, of course, of course, of course. As her stepsister commits suicide, as... The creation of life going wrong, you know? Yes, yeah. So being an anonymous publication, everybody is like, well, who wrote this? We have to know. Who wrote this? And everybody thinks that it is Percy Shelley. Of course they do. Because he's a dude, because he was writing about. Famous already for writing. Yeah. All of it. I mean, he was around when it was written. There's that. And he did read a draft of the text. To say that he was not influential on the text would be a lie. He was her fucking husband, though. Of course he's going to be around when she's writing it. And this is where it gets even annoying in a modern context.

There's people who are like, well, he was around, so he probably wrote it, right? And they have done a lot of analysis of the original journals and his manuscript that he marked up. And they've crunched the numbers. He contributed 4,000 out of the 72,000 words, which is 6% of the text. That's what they have determined by looking. at his marked up manuscript. Oh, wow. Yeah, which is... Not nothing. It's not nothing, but it's not the entirety of it. She wrote 94% of that,

bad boy. Where it gets obnoxious is that, and we'll get to this in a little bit, when Mary starts publishing Percy Shelley's work, she edits it, she puts it up for publication. Nobody says a peep of like, well, wait, Percy ain't here no more. Maybe Mary wrote these. So the book, it doesn't sell super duper well in the beginning. It only has a print rent of 500, which is still kind of small. And it has some type of following, but it's not an overwhelming popularity. It has a devout following, but it's not immediately flying off the shells. It's not a Labubu.

It is no Labubu. But Labubu took 10 years. It's in its early Labubu phase. Right now we're still the Monsters Trilogy, you know. I too am in my early Lou Boo Boo Face. Aren't we all? Aren't we all? The billions will come rolling in soon.

It's just hard work and time. That's it. So Mary continues to write. She is writing the entirety of her life. And Frankenstein is slowly getting popular, slowly getting popular. Percy and Mary, the Shelley's that we can call them now, they are moving to Switzerland. They are moving to Italy. they spend a long time in Pisa.

In 1819, her son, Will Mouse, dies of malaria in Italy. Josie. He's three years old. Tragedy strikes. Yes, tragedy strikes. This is her third child, and he doesn't make it. Third dead child. Yes.

She is, however, pregnant with her fourth child when this happens. And I'm sure this will be great for her state of mind in that context. It's a lot, yeah. I will give you a little ray of sunshine in that this fourth baby is born. He is named Percy Florence and he does survive. He lives a long, happy life. Okay, okay. Yeah. But it's not the last pregnancy that Mary Shelley has. In about three years, she miscarries and it's a pretty serious situation. And a lot of people will point this out as what a wonderful person, Percy is, because he supposedly saves her life by putting her in ice baths. She's bleeding so uncontrollably that he, by dunking her in ice, stymies the flow of blood. No one puts you in an ice bath

out of love, but go on. July 1822, Percy Shelley is on board a sailing ship off the coast of Northern Italy. Uh-oh. He sails right into a tumultuous storm, and he drowns. You can't keep him in this story, man. Because this is not a wide stretch of time that we're still in like the 18 teens, right? It's 1822. So the summer in Geneva was like four years ago.

Wow. Life comes at you fast. Yeah. And so do storms. So wear a life jacket. Exactly. Percy Shelley was 29 when he died. And it was a huge kerfuffle because they didn't know where the boat was.

They didn't know where the boat. Like, Mary and Claire were running around, carriging around. Why the fuck is Claire even still on speaking terms with this? Why is she still hanging out with Claire? I got to say that Mary seems to have, like, a very open heart for... A lot of slack for the various ropes in her life, huh? That does seem to be the case. It's admirable, slightly foolish, I would argue.

I agree, I agree. But who am I? Mary is widowed at 25. That's hard. And she does have her toddler, Percy Florence, which I suppose is sweet that the son who survives is named after his father. Sure. In a move that is definitely verified by the facts and is probably the most gothic shit you will ever hear, somebody snatched from the funeral pyre on which Percy Shelly's body was burning, an organ believed to be his heart. It was later given to Mary Shelley, which she kept in her writing desk. Wow. I can only get so erect, Scott. Wow. That's remark. That is. There's hardcore and then there's hard fucking core. And Mary did not fuck around. Who snatched a heart off a pot? That's bold. Give that person a raise.

Like, wow. Apparently, he was trying to keep it for himself, and somebody was like, ah, please, you need to give that to Mary Shelley. Give it to his widow. And it ended up being the move. It did, because as weird and strange and, like, apparently was just, like, calcified, dried. To the creator of Frankenstein, even. Yes.

Wow. It lived in her writing desk, too, which I think is another layer. The heart of her creative practice and his, you know? Yeah, the heart of their connection. Wow. Mary with her young toddler keeps moving, keeps grooving with her writing. She does a lot of like nonfiction writing and a lot of it is monetarily based. She is writing because she has to support herself and her son, which she does for the remainder of her life. A lot of what she writes has to please the public in some certain ways. But of course, being Mary Shelley, she's also interested

in her own beliefs and ideas of the world. And she's an excellent writer. One of the things that she writes is a lot of these biographies of great men. And she'll kind of start with very flowery language of adulation and, oh, my goodness. Oh, look at all these military honors. Exactly. And then somewhere in the middle, she shifts to all the women who were surrounding this great man. And the rest of the essay is about women and their great deeds and all that they do. And she kind of like hides it a little bit in these essays. But I haven't read one and I really, I really want to. Apparently, they're pretty fun. Mary Shelley is someone who, for better or worse, Frankenstein sort of stands tall above every other piece of her output to the point where I couldn't even tell you what she did other than Frankenstein.

I know. With no disrespect to her improps because of my ignorance as a scholar, it's not to say she had no other hits, but if she did, I don't know him. She wrote a lot about expat Italy. She wrote a lot about like the political climate. Under the Tuscan Sun. She kind of under the Tuscan Sun did, for sure. She was like, look at these baby ducks. So soft.

Yeah. She has a historical novel. called Valperga that's set in medieval Italy. She has a novel called The Last Man that's a post-apocalyptic futuristic plague novel, which I don't know, that sounds like it might slap. So in 1823, the second edition of Frankenstein is published and it's published with her name. Okay. Her dad writes the intro and he gets a little edit and Mary Shelley gets the acknowledgement that she deserves. What a silly thing to have to toil in anonymity as an artist if it's not to your own. desire. Yeah. To have anonymity thrust upon you for a great work of literature, screw you.

Yeah. Around this time, she's also working very diligently on editing Shelley's poems. So getting the ones that weren't fully finalized into a publishable state, kind of transcribing, you know, getting all his letters and papers organized and ready to go. And she publishes a few of them until Percy Shelley's dad, her father-in-law, forces her to stop any publication of Percy's work for personal reasons, for control reasons, for probably a very complex relationship with his son reasons, all the reasons. There's a bit of grief. There might be a bit of money in there. I can't control that you died in the Mediterranean, but I can control the particulars of your estate or whatever. Mary complies That line of income for her son is very important.

So she continues to work on the poems in the background, but she's not publishing anything until years later when her father-in-law says, you know what, you can go ahead, go ahead. And while he's still alive, she publishes the remainder of Percy Shelley's works. Interesting. Yeah. So she works really hard and for a very long time getting Percy Shelley's materials up and ready to go, which again. again, is funny that nobody is questioning the validity of Percy Shelley. Did she slip anything in there? Apparently in The Last Man, the post-apocalyptic plague novel,

she does have some little digs, some ringers for the very romantic ideals that Percy and Lord Byron both shared. She's gone full like nature is bad. Yeah, there might be some of that, yeah. Got it. But it seems like she works hard and achieves a preservation of Percy Shelley's work. that is seamless. We should note at this time, John Palladori, the young physician.

I remember who was diarying, who is being like Dear Diary, I sniffed her hair today when I gave her a hug. She didn't notice, I think. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So remember how he also started working on a novel? Dr. John, who was hard at work at his own novel, wrote a story called The Vampire. But you can see in some ways how John wrote. a little bit of a satire of Lord Byron, because in this rendition of Dracula and the vampire story, the vampire is very wealthy and very fashionable and very callous and very like fuckboy-esque.

It's Lord Byron. It's essentially Lord Byron. Scholars say that this is where we start to see that tradition of Dracula being very rich and sexy and disconnected and all of this. This is before Dracula. But it's the story of vampirism. It comes well before any of this. Certainly. Funnily enough, the book gets misattributed when it is first published.

And it is published under the name of Lord Byron. That's awkward. How did that happen? Who fucked that up? I think the publishers were like, well, this sounds like Lord Byron. So let's make some money. Ah. And you would think, oh, is Lord Byron behind this?

But apparently, Dr. John was pissed. that his novel was misattributed to someone, not him. But Lord Byron was also pissed. He was like, I wouldn't write this fucking trash. Don't put my name on this. I don't want this. So it was a big scandal when it first got published. It did get rectified.

We do know now that it was written not by Lord Byron, but by John William Palladoury. Makes sense. Yeah. The third edition of Frankenstein, the one that I've been referencing as Mary Shelley's introduction, She has like a new introduction to it. Right, where she says like, I'm just a woman, little old me.

I was, I shit myself and pissed for days. And then my husband took my hand and wrote my words or whatever. She's framing it as. A little bit. Yeah, yeah. That one gets published in 1831. It went through a little edit. And some folks think that that editing process, Mary took out some of the more radical elements.

And she made it a little more palatable. Like what? I mean, certainly the addition of her introduction where she's talking about, about little old me, how could I do this? That kind of takes away some of the radicalness. But I think the descriptions get a little muted or this insistence on the effect of nature on all of this too. It gets a little quieter.

We make it a little bit of a less controversial piece of literature. And it might be that she's at a different time in her life. She needs a little bit more money. So if it's a little more palatable, then okay. Some readers digest can put out in an installments. Yeah. So the 1818 version and this 1831 are the ones that we mainly read. And it just kind of depends.

I think I in high school read the 1818 version, but I think the 1831 version gets tossed around a lot. It's kind of like the pendulum swings. One generation is really into the original and one is into the edited version. Right, right. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dies at the age of 53 of what might possibly. be a brain tumor. She is for the age, for the day, relatively old at 53. Okay.

She sees her young Percy, her son get married. He actually inherits the bear Netsi. Forgot about the bear nitsy. Yeah, the bear from Etsy. Yeah. He's solid. He's going to be good. He'll be fine. And in total in her life, in addition to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote five other books. Yeah, can't shake a stick at that, or it's nothing to shake a stick at. Don't shake your stick. Don't shake that stick. Yeah.

No, keep it holstered, buddy. This is a family show. Looking back on her love of Percy, she never marries again. She carries his calcified heart with her wherever she goes. Yes, yes, right. She is devoted to him in, life as in death. And in a lot of ways, I imagine him dead. It's probably a lot easier to deal with him. We can edit ideas of people in a way that it is, it's hard to edit real people sometimes.

Yes, yes. In a same way, she had a relationship with her dead mom that she grew up with. She understood her mother through her writings, even though she was gone. There was a strong bond. And I think she just kind of lets that role into her relationship with Percy, too. I mean, that's conjecture on my part. But I imagine she has the apparatus to understand a love through death from growing up with her mom. If we look back on Frankenstein, it is very interesting that so much of Mary Shelly's life is noted by loss and isolation. And not only just any loss of like a dead mom, a dead husband, but everyone. The loss of these children of these lives that she's trying to bring into the world.

Like some manner of modern Prometheus. You might say. And the focus of the novel is really about having a human connection with other people in your life. It might be a cautionary tale about science and invention. That's obviously one of the themes. If you're writing your paper on that, that's an option for you. Yeah, right. We gave them a timestamp, right?

But the other option is maybe looking through this lens of what we said at the top that the book is about taking responsibility for what you bring into the world. And if we're looking at Mary Shelley's life for any additional information to that, we see that she took that very seriously in her life. She loved Percy Shelley immensely through all his fuckery, through his death, all of it. She loved her mother through her, you know, quote unquote abandonment. I don't know if you could call a death caused by childbirth abandonment. It can create feelings of abandonment justified or unjustified that are understandable. There we go. Yes, exactly.

And she is also a devoted mother to her son, her one living son. She devotes the rest of her life to him. And while she continues to write, we know that she took great pains to earn enough income to support herself. and her son as well. And she's steadfast to the end when it comes to the connections she has. And we talked about how she seems to have a lot of slack for the relationships in her life. The various rascals that she encounters. Yes, yeah.

And I think that is kind of part of her writing of Frankenstein, is that she's like, this is the most important thing that we do. So I am going to have a lot of slack for it. And I know what it feels like to lose that and to not have it. And to lose a mother, to lose child after child, after child, after child, and then to lose a husband. Luckily for Trick-O-Tree Infamy, she was a steadfast and successful writer, especially when at the age of 18, she wrote for Frankenstein. Thanks for listening. If you want more Infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfemy.com.

Or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account. at K-O-5Fi.com forward slash bittersweet infamy. But no pressure. Bittersweet infamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at Bittersweet Infamy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it.

Stay sweet. My sources for this episode include Labubu Demonic Conspiracy Theories slash Pizzuzu connection by Know Your Meme. I read, Is Labubu Toy based on Demon Pizzu What to Know on Snopes.com by Joey Esposito published July 11th, 2025.

Are Labubu Dolls Try to Possess Their Owners by Jen Marevigius for Pajiba July 15th, 2025? I watched the YouTube video, Labubu creator Kassing Lung shares the vision behind his unique plush toys posted seven months ago by South China Morning Post. I watched The Simpsons Season 29, Episode 4,

Trios of Horror, 28, and I read the Wikipedia pages for Lubuobu and Pizzou. The sources that I used for this week's episode, a timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Life, created by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in England. I watched a presentation and conversation with Charlotte Gordon discussing her latest book, Romantic Outlaws, The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

This video was on the Library of Congress YouTube, page and it was posted March 4th, 2019. I read In Search of Mary Shelley, written by poet Fiona Samson, published 2018, the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. I watched the film Mary Shelley, directed by Haifa al-Masur, with Al Fanning as Mary Shelley came out in 2017. And I watched Frankenweeney, directed by Tim Burton, which came out in 2012. If you head over to our coffee page, that's K-O-F-I-Slastersweetinfamy.com. There you will find a way to help support the Bittersweet Infamy podcast, and for that monthly subscriber support,

you can be a member of the Bittersweet Infamy Film Club, where Taylor, me, and Perpectual Special Guest, Mitchell Collins, chat about the movies that you, as a monthly subscriber to the Bittersweet Infamy podcast select for us to watch. Upcoming, you'll hear us chat about the film Waterbury, World and the Shannon Doherty film, Almost Dead. Becoming a monthly subscriber not only helps support the podcast, but you join the ranks of some stellar folks, including Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Erica Joe, Sof, Dylan, and Sackle the Cat. Bitter Sweet Infamy is a proud member of the

604 Podcast Network. This episode was lovingly edited by Alex McCarthy with help from Alexie Johnson. The cover photo that is beautifully augmented by Taylor Basso. The original photo was taken by Luke Bentley. The interstitial music you heard earlier is the Labubu theme song. The song you are listening to now is T Street by Brian Steele. Stay sweet this Halloween. And we'll see you in season six.