To be fair, not all the characters in Rent had AIDS - only half of them.
My sympathies were decidedly not with the hippies in Hair. Of course, I’m not sure they were supposed to be.
Is karma considered fiction? As I understand it, karma simply represents fate or destiny, so it’s worth pondering and analyzing. But in my country, karma is taken to mean what goes around comes around.
It may be just a trope, but I still want to whack them in the head with a brick and tell them to deal with it.
The musical Man of La Mancha had a lot to do with this interpretation. More people have heard the song “The Impossible Dream” than have read Cervantes.
As you say, in the books, even the Don eventually realizes he was just an old fool. But in the musical. the Don inspires all the losers around him to follow their dreams.
I know this is several months late, but he also mentions visiting a lot of charnel houses.
And he clearly needed body parts - late in the novel, when the monster demands a wife, Dr. Frankenstein has to run around collecting female body parts.
as we’ve hashed out above, Mary Shelley never names the creature, calling him by a number of epithets (such as “the wretch”). He’s never called “Legion” or “Adam”.
There is some point to calling him Adam – he’s the first being created by his Creator (although Shelley’s parallel is from Classical Mythology, not the Bible – Frankenstein “The New Prometheus”, as the subtitle tells us). But Shelley doesn’t make it. Some dramatic version may have – there were a lot of them in the 19th century – but I can’t recall now, and my references are at home.
I talked about this above, as well. I agree that there’s no indication of how the body was created, and certainly no suggestion that Frankenstein was merely sewing parts of bodies together. I always assumed he was rendering down bodies to their basic components and assembling it from those, as in Clark ashton Smith’s excellent story The Colossus of Ylorgne. Shelley definitely says that slaughterhouses provided some of his raw material, so unless the people of Ingolstadt were cannibals, he was getting some of his material from animals.
When they went to the idea of Sewing Bodies Together* they produced The Problem of the Brain. If you used body parts, shouldn’t the brain belong to somebody, with all his memories? So the original 1931 film had to have the Bad Brain. Later versions still continued to use this – in the Hammer version “Horror of Frankenstein” from the 1950s, the brain gets broken glass shattered into it. Even in Kenneth Branaugh’s “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” you see the Creature being hit in the head as it’s created, as if to explain its aberrant behavior.
None of this is necessary if you interpret Frankenstein as making everything, brain included, from scratch. It’s not anybody’s brain. it’s a tabula rasa. (In “Bride of Frankenstein” they sort of went back to this notion – Dr. Pretorius creates the brain of The Bride “from seeds” – she has no one’s used brain.)
*Why bother stitching the body together if you’re not going to make it from scratch? Just get a convenient Dead Body and rescucitate the whole thing.
IIRC he’s likened to Adam as a new creation, but I don’t think he’s ever actually called Adam or an Adam.
With regards to sewing parts together, the novel never gives any indication of how he’s created, just that he is. Sure, there are parts sourced from charnel houses and crypts, but there’s no explicit description of anything like a mechanism.
Certainly sewing together parts strikes one as most plausible given the time frame. Alternately, mixing up the constituent components/chemicals in some sort of vat and then growing a new being seems a bit ill-suited.
There is a description that the creature is large, and that is due to Frankenstein’s needs in being able to do some of his work. Thus the oversized Frankenstein’s monster has roots in the novel.
I could certainly see a means of using charnel house parts in a humanish creation by sewing together. When one needs muscles and tendons, does one really need human parts, or merely parts with an appropriate shape and length?
Could he have used the bones of a really large man for the size, and grown the flesh onto the framework like a homonculous?
For what it’s worth, in the cartoon parody of the Frankenstein story Milton the Monster, the titular character was created by pouring a liquid mixture into a mold and letting it set.
♪
Six drops of The Essence of Terror,
Five drops of Sinister Sauce…
♫
In my country, karma means the sum of one’s acts. So doing bad things is bad for one’s karma, meaning that your next life might not be what you’d have hoped for. It is not destiny, though. You can control it.
Adding to the above, because it’s too late to edit: It always annoys me when the phrase “karma is a bitch” (making nice use of the fact that “karma” has the ring of a girl’s name) is dumbed down to “payback is a bitch”. If you think your audience does not understand “karma”, then look for a different expression entirely.
Yeah, and you see how well THAT turned out…
If they hadn’t bumped in too much Essence of Tenderness they woulda had Robert de Niro-stein earlier.
“Are you lookin’ at me, huh? You lookin’ at ME?”
Ever see Thomas Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein movie? You almost described the creation scene.
Mary Shelley in her 1831 foreword to that edition does suggest some sort of machinery…
"Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.
Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion."
I’ve always liked this quote – her “student of unhallowed arts” is kneeling beside his creation. No lab table or hospital gurney – Frankenstein built his creature on the floor.
No I hadn’t seen it, but it is nifty 
Now I have seen another version of Frankenstein
I don’t think it’s a matter of dumbing anything down. They’re two different phrases with different connotations. “Karma is a bitch” applies when there’s no direct connection between the wrong, and the punishment, implying the actions of a universal principle. “Payback is a bitch,” on the other hand, implies a direct retaliation by the wronged party. If you’re a nasty, hateful person who comes down with heart disease, some might argue that’s karma. If you rip off Big Tony, and he sends some guys around to adjust your kneecaps, that’s payback.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “Karma is a bitch.” I’m sure it’s said all the time, but if you gave me _______ is a bitch and told me to fill in the blank, my first thought would be “payback.”