Nope, Not a Phan

 Not sure what it says about me that it takes dumb pins on Pinterest swooning over the Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera to come out of my blog hiatus, but here we are.

Ladies, here are just a few little tips to evaluate whether or not the man pursuing you is worth marrying or whether you should, in fact, run as fast as you can to the nearest police station and refuse to leave until the man who wants to be in a relationship with you is locked in the deepest dungeon they can find. 

1. If he sings to you through the walls and teaches you how to sing as well, but refuses to disclose his name, run.

2. If he, while singing to you through the walls and teaching you how to sing as well, implies that he is an angel sent from heaven by your dead father when he is in fact a living human being who has never even met your father, run.

3. If he, while singing to you through the walls and teaching you how to sing as well, overhears you stating that you think he might BE your dead father and refuses to correct your assumption, run.

4. If he continually harasses your workplace, frightening some of your coworkers into quitting and your boss into fleeing by retiring in another country and selling the company, by pranking people, vandalizing the place, imitating a ghost, and causing numerous people near-death experiences, RUN.

5. If he squats in the basement of your workplace and, instead of pursuing gainful employment, extorts the building owners into paying him a wage through vandalization and murder, RUN.

6. If he makes a sport of murdering your coworkers, especially if they insult him, tell frightening stories about him, or literally just stumble upon him while cleaning the basement, RUN, DO NOT WALK, TO THE NEAREST PERSON WITH A SWORD AND/OR A GUN AND DO NOT LEAVE THAT PERSON UNTIL THE MAN PURSUING YOU HAS BEEN LOCKED UP OR KILLED.

7. If he is fifty and you are eighteen and he has been spying on you through the walls for months, possibly years, and now is pursuing you, perhaps consider that that age gap has all kinds of red flags on it.

8. If he has been spying on you through your walls for months, possibly years, in your dressing room and your bedroom, watching you change, CALL THE POLICE.

9. If he takes you to a secret underground lair alone the first time you've ever met in person while still not knowing his name and he's the only person that can actually take you out of his lair, meaning you're trapped there at his mercy, all I'm saying is, his physical deformities should be the least of your worries.

10. If he catfishes you, do not pursue a relationship with him.

11. If he screeches like an unholy demon and calls you a "lying Delilah" for exposing his catfishing, drop this relationship like you'd drop Jack Dawson into the freezing Atlantic Ocean while you hog the door for yourself.

12. If you feel like you can't tell him that you're interested in someone else and hide your engagement to your childhood best friend because you're afraid for your fiancé's life if your voice teacher finds out you're not interested in him, perhaps consider bringing down a countrywide manhunt on your former voice teacher instead of wondering whether you should have chosen him rather than your sweet fiancé.

13. If his only friend reveals to you that he has built the shah of Persia a literal torture chamber, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

14. If you find out that he so enjoyed torturing people in his torture chamber that he even freaked out the literal shah of Persia for being too sadistic and was kicked out of the country, DON'T JUST CALL THE POLICE, CALL THE ARMY AND THE NAVY AND THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT DOWN ON THIS CREEP.

15. If when a freak accident causes a chandelier to collapse and kill someone in the audience, you're not entirely sure it wasn't engineered by him because he's salty the prima donna got the main female role in the opera instead of you, part of the ensemble, just because he's teaching you and tried to blackmail your bosses into picking you, maybe you should wonder why you had to be reassured he didn't commit that specific murder and look further into how you see his character and how dangerous he is.

16. If he forces you to perform in an opera for him and you have no choice but to do it so you can help your fiancé get him arrested, I don't think a meaningful relationship with him is possible.

17. If he murders your costar and takes his place so he can flirt with you while impersonating another man, grab the nearest gun and shoot him in his deformed face.

18. If he literally strangles your fiancé and threatens to kill your fiancé if you won't agree to run off with him instead, forcing you to choose between a nice, sweet nobleman with a steady paycheck who loves you for who you are and respects you as a person and a deformed sewer goblin who's over thirty years older than you and is a sadistic serial killer, don't feel bad about dumping him. Seriously. He doesn't deserve you, honey.

Via Pinterest

I mean, look at this! Just look at it! Literally strangling a guy to death because he had the audacity to win over his childhood friend and fall in love with her and then object when you kidnap her and try to force her to marry you. Not the mark of a man who would make good husband material. Good husbands don't regularly strangle people.

19. If he fills the basement of your workplace with a ton of gunpowder and threatens to blow up your workplace, killing dozens, perhaps hundreds--especially if he manages to take out several other buildings with the massive pile of gunpowder--if you don't marry him, run and don't look back. Maybe move to Norway, I hear it's beautiful this time of year, all that snow.

NO. NO. No. Just no. Not forcing someone to marry you and not murdering her fiancé because she's just not that into you isn't love. It's not being a despicable human being. Look, you can ship messed up ships because they're messed up and you love reading about or watching the unhealthy dynamics, but don't pretend a ship is healthy when it's not. This isn't healthy. It's messed up. The Phantom of the Opera isn't a good guy. He's a sadistic serial killer that enjoys torturing people, does not hesitate to blackmail and extort to get his way, and no amount of a nice singing voice can sugarcoat the fact that at the end of the musical, he's just finding the one tiny little speck of humanity he had in him by letting Christine and Raoul go, not making some great sacrifice out of his love for Christine. He does not deserve Christine and he sure as Mustafar doesn't deserve someone better than Christine. No. The book was a horror/mystery, not a love triangle. The Phantom is never a realistic option in the book (see the Persian torture chamber stuff and the whole "barrels of gunpowder under the opera house" thing). Let's not pretend Raoul isn't a way better guy than the Phantom (and don't come at me with that dumb Love Never Dies crap, that musical never should have been allowed to exist). Love the messed-up ship if you want, but don't pretend the Phantom is anything more than what he is--that being a dangerous messed-up monster.

Via Pinterest

Via Pinterest

Ladies, choose better. Choose Raoul de Chagny.

Dedicated to my creative writing professor, who, while she always thought Christine should have chosen the Phantom, recognizes that that probably means she has a problem with being attracted to bad boys.