I would convict your ass, Victor.

You ABANDONED the monster as soon as you saw he was ugly. Then you took to your bed for a few months while the monster ran off to do whatever.

You knew the monster murdered your brother and framed Justine, but you let her hang for that to cover your good name.

You also failed to alert the authorities to the monster, definitely making your negligent while he kept murdering your friends and family. And you reacted to that by taking your bed. Again.

You suck, Victor. But you might be insane, so maybe try pleading mental incompetence? You were pretty clearly insane toward the end.

I think Crime and Punishment intimidated me because I had heard Dostoyevsky was hard to read AND it was long, but honestly it wasn't that long, and I don't find him hard to read at all. That was a page-turner to me. After that I decided to explore classics more and not to let "hard" reputations intimidate me. The most difficult books I've read have been Ulysses by James Joyce (needed a lot of support for that one in the form of online analyses and stuff), Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, War and Peace by Tolstoy, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I still have Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon yet to tackle. :) I am not be reading these at the comprehension level of an English professor, but the good thing about the classics is their many layers and how you can get so much out of them the more in-depth you dive. Honestly I hope I live long enough to have time to re-read and re-read these.

Some favorites are:

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, Moby Dick and House of the Seven Gables by Herman Melville, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion by Jane Austen, Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Notes From Underground by Dostoyevsky, Howard's End and Maurice by E.M. Forster, He Knew He was Right by Anthony Trollope, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas...

For more modern classics, anything William Faulkner although my favorites are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absaolm, the Unvanquished, and Flags in the Dust, James Baldwin (Another Country, Giovanni's Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk are my faves), Toni Morrison (can't pick a fave, everything of hers I've read has been amazing), Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Native Son and The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright...

I could go on and on (actually I guess I DID go on and on) but those are some top picks. I'm currently reading Jazz by Toni Morrison and I was up super late last night because I just couldn't put it down.

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Yeah you've really got to love the conspiracy/secret society aspect, I totally disagree with the OP. That was a great way to keep me coming back, and in retrospect as an adult it meshed really well with the suburban gothic aesthetic.

I picked up Thinner not knowing that Bachman was a pseudonym. A few pages in I rolled my eyes at this asshole shamelessly aping Stephen King’s style. Then there was a joke about how the events were like something out of a Stephen King novel and I gave the author credit for being self-aware and having a sense of humor about what they were doing.

I felt pretty stupid when I found out the truth.

I loved the book series when it came out (even if the ending was underwhelming in some ways) and I still rearead it at times. I think that series really kickstarted my love for whimsical macabre, quirky narrative tone, and neo-Victorian/steampunk aesthetic, all of which I've incorporated into my own work in different ways.

I'm catching up on the Netflix series now and I feel like they really captured the books a lot, while also making it more cohesive by introducing the VFD plot earlier (if I recall Handler started introducing them only in the 5th book because that was when he got the go-ahead to do the full 13 books he wanted, so the first 4 were pretty standalone).

It is the creation of undead, not just reviving someone that hasn't reached a natural death.

TIL he Usual Suspects’d it:

> When the publisher called about it, King had no idea, so he started looking around the room. The music of the band Bachman Turner Overdrive was playing from the stereo and a Richard Stark novel was lying on the desk.

I loved these books and still do. I know the first seven or so are repetitive but then it branches out in a crazy way.

I don’t know much about criminal negligence, but he’d get SLAUGHTERED in Civil Court.

He has an obvious duty of care, blatant breach of the duty, clear damages in this case, and the link between his breach of duty and those actual damages are indisputable.

He’s paying up and losing his lab for sure.

Sure, but there doesn’t necessarily need to be precedent as long as Frankenstein “acts in disregard of a serious risk of harm that a reasonable person in the same situation would have perceived.“

I think you just need to ask the jury to consider whether we are responsible for our own actions or not. Is a parent whose child grows up to be a murderer responsible for the murder? Or did the child make his own decisions?

You made a real, living person with his own mind and will.

Hi there. Per rule 3.3, please post book recommendation requests in /r/SuggestMeABook or in our Weekly Recommendation Thread. Thank you!

Sure but you can also look at modern day practice of stopping and restarting the heart to bring people back and see they don't become monsters.

So I would argue it's not the revival of the dead that's in question but the method. And while Frankenstein's methods were certainly unorthodox, theres no reason to assume they would inherently lead to an evil outcome. He didn't use voodoo or teeth to make skeletons or do witchcraft or demon summoning, he was doing a medical procedure.

We transfer organs all the time and have even done penis and face replacements. So using foreign organs to restore someone's health isn't inherently evil, and using electricity to restore function to a body isn't inherently evil, therefore I'd argue Frankenstein could have reasonably assumed his experiment would have similar, non evil outcomes, and not result in a monster.

I'm sure you can cite "documentaries" depicting Frankenstein's monster & vampires & mummies (curse people!) & skeletons & zombies.

Even Jason & the Argonauts, a very old tale, has people creating extremely dangerous skeleton warriors by throwing teeth on the ground.

More bad faith arguments. He didn't just run out the very second he woke up without Frankenstein having time to say anything. He woke up and his creator immediately started screaming at him that he was an abomination and should never have been created while acting physically threatening. Every human he met after that treated him with immediate fear and distrust while driving him off. Did you forget that humans have to be taught empathy/sympathy? He was born as a blank slate and was only shown hostility of course that was all he knew.

You know … I think you have a point that clicked when I read your word “abuse.” (Brace yourself, I’m about to get dark.)

Think about the Catholic Church abuse cases. Systematic, epidemic child abuse. A phenomenon that would have sounded like unhinged, hard-boiled paranoia if not for the fact that it actually happened. And not only did it actually happen, it went on for years with the same perpetrators because at every opportunity to stop priests that they knew were molesting kids, the Catholic Church either

1. ignored the claims in spite of overwhelming evidence or

2. did worse than nothing by merely moving the offending priests around after no or effectively no punishment.

So there really are Mr Poes in the world — not actively evil like the Count Olafs, but permissively evil by failing to stop them

My points still stand, but I’ll grant that I now see Mr Poe’s character in a slightly less critical light.

Right, this gets into the fiction of the world. Are zombies real in this world, or just fiction? Would make a substantive difference in this line of argument

I read them all and as the series says it was a very anticlimactic ending if I recall.

Responsible for his creation, but who can assume murder?

If you beget a baby, the natural way with a woman, and he becomes a murderer, is it not the same case?

Frankenstein was not trying to create a murderer, when people have babies they don't assume murder.

Dr. Frankenstien does nothing to create a murderer, by whipping, bullying, tormenting his creation to cause agression. If a parent has not done such thing to it's offspring, how can the parent be held responsible.

The accusation can respond, that Frankenstien dug up from the graveyard, murderers and robbers and criminals who have been hung. But what is the accusation saying? that such men should not be allowed to bear children? Is it a criminal offence, if a woman becomes pregnant with the child of a dangerous man?

Is the accusation being borderline eugenic, are they advocating for sterilization of unwanted people?

Needs examples

Zombies are the most numerous known undead.

I did finish all 13 books when I was 16. So it’s been a while. “Adults are stupid” is the recurring theme in the series. It doesn’t change. The only adults who seem to think are the Snickett siblings and Count Olaf. Mustache twirling villain that he is.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is a caricature. The absurdity is dialed up to the extreme. I would like to think that the real message is people who refuse to listen are at best unhelpful and at worst, perpetuating the crimes and abuse being committed. And they will choose to keep not listening. Because acknowledgement means they are guilty. Nobody wants to say they, along with the world have been horrible.

1. Allowing the act of escape at all is negligence. Dr. Frankenstein cannot argue that he was negligent before he was negligent, it makes no sense. He should instead argue that a reasonable person could not have foreseen the consequences of the monster escaping, thereby placing agency onto the monster itself. If your cat escapes and somehow sets into motion a chain of events resulting in an old lady being hit by a bus, you are not liable for that. The monster, being an unknown quality, could not be predicted in advance and a reasonable person would not assume it would turn murderous.
2. The monster is deeply philosophical and intelligent. This gives it its own agency. Given it is an intelligent being, it is the one which should be on trial. It should argue diminished responsibility, given the abuse it suffered in captivity. Frankenstein would do well to argue the monster's intelligence and education means it is a legal person of its own accord.
3. Frankenstein was clearly in possession of his faculties. He could argue he was in a manic state of bipolar II, but his best chances are to argue the monster was intelligent enough to know right from wrong. He may have created the weapon, but he did not use it.

Frankenstein ran out on him and came back to nothing. No sane person would argue that's cause to go on a murder spree.

Along the same lines. he creature had very little contact with people other than his creepy stalking of the blind girl before he decided that murder and intimidation was the way to go.

The creature made a speed run to deciding that killing Frankenstein's loved ones, framing him for the murders and threatening to do more. These weren't crimes of passions, these weren't the creature lashing out at his tormenters.

The monster made a very cold calculation to target very specific innocent people for very specific self serving reasons.

Nothing that happened the creature is a valid excuse or even motivation for what it did. It explicitly did not harm its tormentors. It harmed innocent people in a way it hoped would benefit its goals.

Your argument is in bad faith because even if something/ someone is born fully sapient they are still ignorant. The "monster" was given no chance to adjust to his sudden existence. You people are putting all the blame on the monster despite him being the only innocent character in the story. Every living creature has a need to survive brain washed into the deepest part of our brains you can't expect him to just give up and die because everyone dislikes him, there is a reason a right to life is included in the constitution of nearly every free country on the planet.