A vengeful, hilarious elegy for every student forced to dissect Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This is not literary analysis—it's a hostage testimony from the curriculum dungeon, and a call to burn it all down.

English Class Stockholm Syndrome—Frankenstein Edition 🏫🪓💀

“If suffering is the hallmark of great literature, then Frankenstein is the Mona Lisa of my academic trauma.” 🖼️💔

I. Prologue: Hostage in the Curriculum Dungeon 🎻🔒🤡

The sentence was passed not with words, but with a silent, smug thud. 📚⬇️

It was the sound of the book hitting my desk. Frankenstein. Or, The Modern Prometheus—a title that promised cosmic rebellion but delivered only a semester of forced-labor analysis and the slow, chilling realization that my GPA was now chained to the emotional stability of a 19th-century man who really, really should have just gone to therapy. 🧠⛓️😤

They handed it over with the distinct smirk of those who have already survived this particular plague and now get to watch it ravage a new generation. The stack of essay rubrics placed beside it was not a guide, but a manifesto of my impending doom, each checkbox a future failure waiting to be highlighted in brutalist red pen. 🧾☠️

I heard the door lock behind me. 🔐 One semester. No parole.

“This is supposed to be a ‘masterpiece,’ right?” The first thought in the mind of every captive audience. The gears of my own Stockholm Syndrome began to grind on page one. ⚙️➡️🧠➡️💔 “If so, call me the unwilling patron saint of literary hostage survivors.” 😇🙃

I looked up from the page, my eyes glazing over. The only thing more monstrous than the creature? 👹

My own pale, sleep-deprived reflection staring back from the black screen of my laptop, trapped in the hellish fluorescent glow of the classroom. 💻👁️‍🗨️⚡ I was trying to find profound meaning in Victor’s fifth consecutive breakdown while the clock on the wall ticked faster than Mary Shelley’s plot logic. ⏰⚰️

This was it. The beginning of the end. The moment my innocence was sacrificed on the altar of "classic literature." I was no longer a student. I was a subject in a pedagogical experiment gone horribly wrong, and the monster wasn't just the book—it was the curriculum as well. 📖➡️🧪➡️👹

II. Torture by Literature: Essay Sweatshop Blues ✏️🫠🔥

Four essays deep. Four. And I’m still being asked the same profound, life-altering question: “Who’s the Real Monster?” ⁉️👹 My soul has left my body, my caffeine levels are a public health hazard, and the answer is clearly Mrs/Mr. Generic , who assigned this thematic Groundhog Day. 👩‍🏫⏰😈

I have decoded so much symbolism that my brain has permanently rewired itself. I don't dream anymore; I allegorize. I see a sunset and I don't think "pretty"—I think "the sanguine hues symbolize the inevitable bleeding out of my social life." 🌅➡️🩸➡️📚 Mary Shelley said, “Let’s write a tale of suffering.” My high school curriculum developers, peering over their spectacles of torment, said: “More! It’s not nearly bland or soul-crushing enough!” 🤓☠️

Then came the prompt: “Elucidate the profound love between Victor and Elizabeth.” 💌❓

I stared at the blank document. The cursor blinked. I blinked. We were locked in a stalemate of existential dread. I finally wrote:

“One is obsessed with reanimating corpse flesh, the other is bored in a garden. It’s not love; it’s a mutual misunderstanding so profound, even Amazon Prime can’t ship chemistry this slow.” 🧟‍♂️💐🐌📦

Let’s be real. The only real connection in this entire novel is Victor’s fixation—with his own spectacular disappointment. His passion wasn't for science or Elizabeth; it was for wallowing. He’s the patron saint of gifted kids who discovered the crushing weight of expectations and decided to build a problem instead of solving one. 😩⚗️🏆

“If Elizabeth were any more of a plot device, Victor would’ve tried to bring her back from the dead not for love, but just to have a decent topic for his midterm presentation.” ⚰️➡️👰‍♀️➡️📊

III. The Monster of Meaningless Analysis 👹🤤💀

Let’s ~talk themes~. Let’s roll around in the jagged glass of ~motifs~. Let’s perform an autopsy on a novel that’s already 90% autopsy and call it ~critical thinking~. 🔍🧰⚰️

Every paragraph I’m forced to churn out isn’t analysis; it’s a cry for help wearing a cheap mask made of school-ruled paper, masquerading as a motif. The real monster isn’t some 8-foot-tall philosopher stitched together from grave-robbed body parts. Nah.

The real monster is me. 🥸 It’s 3 a.m. me, frantically scrolling SparkNotes until my eyes bleed, trying to remember if the damn boat was in the Arctic or the Antarctic. ❄️🧭🤕 It’s the ghost of my sanity, desperately trying to summarize this book for the third time because my thesis statement “Victor Frankenstein is a little bitch” was deemed “not academically rigorous.” 👻📝❌

“You know what’s truly monstrous? Me, a hollow-eyed goblin in sweatpants, searching for ‘sublime nature quotes’ while Frankenstein’s creation just wants a friend. Same, buddy. Same.” 👹🤝🧟‍♂️

Symbolism? Please. It’s just suffering with decorative ribbons tied around it. 🎀😭 Plot? Buried deeper than Elizabeth’s personality and any sense of narrative pacing. ⛏️⚰️🔇 Foreshadowing? The only thing foreshadowed is my impending mental breakdown, predicted by the ever-growing pile of empty coffee cups and the single tear that stained my annotated bibliography. ☕😢📈

We’re not scholars. We’re medieval scribes forced to copy a text we don’t understand, for a lord (the state curriculum) we’ve never seen, using ink made from our own dwindling will to live. 🖋️📜⚔️

IV. Victor Frankenstein—Patron Saint of Unhinged Obsession 🤪🔬💉

Let's diagnose this man. Is Victor obsessed with his creation, or is he just pathologically incapable of any human interaction that doesn't involve grave robbery? 🩺⚰️❤️‍🩹 He's not a tragic hero—he's the original STEM bro who moved so fast and broke so many things that he literally broke the natural order of the universe. 💻🚀⚡

His process:

1. I will play God with the electrical conductivity of corpse scraps. ⚡🧠⚰️
2. I will succeed beyond my wildest dreams and create conscious life. 👑✨
3. I will immediately abandon my creation and go take a nap. 😴🚪❌
4. I will be shocked—shocked!— that this plan resulted in consequences. 😱🙈🔥

Victor’s entire ethos can be summarized as: “I have unleashed a super-being of unimaginable power and rage upon the world. Now I must immediately go be sad in a boat.” 🚤😭🌊

His devotion isn't to science or love; it's to avoiding accountability at all costs. His only successful relationship? Prolonged, intense eye contact with his own reflection in a puddle of melodramatic tears. He didn't need a father, a friend, or a lover. He needed a really good therapist and a responsible adult to confiscate his lightning rod. 👁️‍🗨️💧🛑

“A romance with Elizabeth would’ve been more believable if Victor spent more time with her than with decomposing limb specimens. Instead, he’s got wedding jitters and a monster lurking in the shadows like the world’s most homicidal ‘third wheel from hell.’” 💍👰‍♀️😈

If this is literary obsession, I want a full refund on my time. If I wanted to study a man who creates a problem and then flees from it, I’d major in Political Science. 🎓➡️🗳️➡️🏃‍♂️

V. Romance That Should've Been Left in the Graveyard 💔⚰️🌹

Elizabeth. Let’s pour one out for literature’s most famous Sentient Plot Device. 🥂👰‍♀️📦 She’s not a character; she’s a checklist item on Victor’s path to total ruin: [✅] Childhood Friend [✅] Fiancée [✅] Murder Victim.

She is neither loved nor mourned; she is vaguely present. She is Frankenstein’s emotional insurance policy— a placeholder for normalcy he never actually cashes in. Her primary function is to be passive, perfect, and then perforated. 🎯💎🗡️

“If their stilted, letters-based ‘flirting’ counts as gothic passion, then my last disastrous group project was a steamy love story. We had more chemistry trying to fake a PowerPoint presentation than these two did on their would-be wedding night.” 💌📊❤️‍🔥

Their wedding isn't a celebration; it's a speedrun to a funeral. It has less romance than a terms-of-service agreement and the emotional climax of a slasher film. No chemistry, no spark, no hope—just Victor’s signature brand of self-absorbed melodrama and another 1,000 words I had to scrape from the bottom of my soul about the “symbolic meaning” of a relationship with all the heat of a damp cemetery at midnight. 💒➡️⚰️🎮❄️

“Mary Shelley clearly forgot to develop Elizabeth somewhere between the footnotes and the second edition. Don’t worry, so did every single reader after page three.” 📖✍️🙈

She is the reason ghosting exists as a concept. She is the tragic wallpaper of this novel. Her love is eternal? Mary Shelley clearly did not read the fine print on her own contract. ❤️📜🔍

VI. Classroom Stockholm Syndrome: How You Learn to Love What Tortures You 🧠🔗😵‍💫

This is the precise psychological breaking point. The moment the captive, chained to the radiator of rhetorical analysis, begins to feel gratitude toward their captor for occasionally bringing them water. 💧⛓️😌

It happens slowly. Three rewrites in, something snaps. Not the binding of the book, but something inside of me. I started to sympathize—not with the creature’s existential pain, but with my own. I began to see Victor’s frantic, all-night lab sessions not as madness, but as a mood. 🥼🔬🌃 "He just like me fr," I whispered into the void, the void being my highlighted copy filled with increasingly unhinged marginalia. 📝➡️🗯️

You lie to yourself, a beautiful, desperate lie: “Maybe… maybe there’s something truly profound here…” 🥹✨ There isn’t. The only profundity is the bottomless depth of your own self-delusion.

“Every essay is an act of surrender signed in blood (ink, from a dying pen). Every pop quiz is a ransom note delivered to my sanity, demanding payment in thematic insights I do not possess.” 🖋️🩸📜🤯

I learned all the tricks. The art of the pretend insight. 🎭 The masterful deployment of fake empathy. 😔 The strategic quoting of the monster’s most angsty lines to prove I “understood the assignment” in a way Victor never understood his. 📖➡️✅

Eventually, the Monster’s pathetic search for a friend mirrored my own search for a single forgiving comment on that late homework submission. His creator’s rejection felt familiar—a precursor to the red pen of doom waiting on my thesis statement. 👹❤️‍🩹➡️🧑‍🏫🔴

VII. Teacher’s Pet Trauma: Survival Rituals for “Masterpiece” Misery 🚒📝🧨

You won't make it out alive without a guide. Here is your field manual for surviving literary hell, forged in the fires of last-minute deadlines and caffeine-induced panic. ☕🔥📋

The Official Survival Checklist: ✅❌

• Step 1: Pretend Victor’s neurosis is relatable. Convince yourself that locking yourself away to neglect all your relationships and responsibilities in pursuit of one singular, monstrous goal is not a red flag, but #grindset. 🚩➡️💪
• Step 2: Find any monster metaphor and stretch it to its breaking point to pad your word count. Is the monster society? Is society the monster? Is my printer, refusing to work at 11:58 PM, the real monster? Yes. Yes, it is. 👹➡️🏙️➡️🖨️
• Step 3: Invent symbolism. Teachers love the scent of desperate creativity. That random willow tree? Obviously a symbol of melancholy and the flexible nature of morality. The rain? It’s not just weather; it’s Heaven’s tears for my GPA. 🌳☔➡️📉
• Step 4: Quote the SparkNotes analysis like it’s your own original thought. Sprinkle in “one could argue” and “it is evident that” to create a smoke screen of academic credibility. 📓➡️🤥➡️🎓
• Step 5: Blame the Romantics. When all else fails, throw your hands up and declare, “It’s a commentary on the sublime and the dangerous pursuit of knowledge!” It’s vague, it’s unassailable, it’s your get-out-of-jail-free card. 🏔️🔍➡️🔓

“The teachers know it’s a performance. They’re not grading our analysis—they’re grading our ability to perform the ritual. They just want to see who breaks character first.” 🎭👩‍🏫🔍

If English class is a battle, then irony is my shield, sarcasm is my sword, and this unshakeable sense of impending doom is my battle cry. ⚔️🛡️😩

VIII. The Final Showdown: Vengeance for the Hostages 🤯🗡️⚡

The air in the classroom crackled with the static of 100 laptops charging at once, or maybe it was just the residual electricity from all the unleashed potential being brutally harnessed into a five-paragraph structure. 💻⚡📝 The semester's final hour. D-Day. My last essay glowed on the screen—not a document, but a manifesto written in blood, sweat, and the tears of a thousand murdered brain cells. 🩸😓🧠

Adrenaline wasn't just pumping; it was screaming through my veins like Victor Frankenstein fleeing his own disastrous choices. This wasn't just about a passing grade. This was retribution. This was for every minute lost, every weekend sacrificed, every time I had to nod along like I gave a single damn about the symbolism of light and fire. ☀️🔥➡️🙄

I was not a student. I was an avenging angel of academic spite. 😇🔪

“Mary Shelley unleashed a single monster upon the world; my teacher assigned an entire curriculum of them, each essay more monstrous than the last.” 👩‍🏫☠️

My finger hovered over the "Submit" button. It felt less like a click and more like pulling the lever on a guillotine—the one that would finally sever my head from this nightmare. ⚔️➡️🧎‍♂️ Finishing this essay didn't feel like completion. It felt like breaking a ancient, powerful curse. Victor Frankenstein may never have found closure, but by God, I would. My closure was spelled in 12-point Times New Roman and a works cited page that was a lie from top to bottom. 🔚✍️🙏

If there's poetic justice in this world, it is this: submitting my work with a savage, unhinged glee, shooting a death glare at the curriculum binder that held me captive, and walking out with the knowledge that I had, against all odds, survived. 😏📤👁️‍🗨️➡️📚

IX. Elegy for Elizabeth: Gothic Ghosting 🪦💅🌹

And for you, Elizabeth. Let us now have a moment of silence, which is approximately 500% more attention than you received in the entire novel. 🤫⏳

The queen of plot whiplash. Doomed from the start, elegantly ignored until her elegantly ignored death. Her character arc wasn't a arc; it was a flatline. ➡️___⚰️ Her only power? Emitting such potent tragic wallpaper energy that the very scenery seemed more developed. 🖼️😔

If love is eternal, Mary Shelley clearly skimmed the fine print and opted for the seasonal subscription, which lapsed right around Chapter 3. ❤️📜➡️❌

“Elizabeth is the primordial reason ghosting exists—a spectral figure of pure narrative convenience. She is also, and I say this with respect, the only woman in literary history less memorable than Frankenstein’s own turgid, meandering prose.” 👻📖❓

We barely knew ye. Mostly because the author couldn't be bothered to let us. Your name shall be whispered in the halls of high schools forever as a warning: this is what happens when an author needs a fiancée to die but doesn't want to do the emotional labor of making us care. 🏫👰‍♀️⚰️

X. Outro: Escaping the Lab, Burning the Canon 🚪🔥🏃‍♂️

IT IS FINISHED. ✅

Frankenstein is dead. The monster is ashes. Victor's whining is a faint, distant echo. I. AM. FREE. 🕊️✨🎉

The only thing stitched together now is my shredded patience, meticulously sutured with the threads of pure, unfiltered spite. The laboratory of forced analysis is behind me. I have blown the doors off their hinges and I am not looking back. 🧪🔨🚶‍♂️

“GIVE ME BACK MY INNOCENCE. GIVE ME BACK MY GPA. GIVE ME BACK EVERY WASTED HOUR I SPENT TRYING TO FIND DEPTH IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH LESS CHEMISTRY THAN A BAKING SODA VOLCANO. THE CANON IS BURNING. MY VENGEANCE IS ETERNAL, AND MY HATE IS LEGENDARY.” ⏳🎓🧪🌋🔥😡

Let the monsters haunt someone else. I’ve survived the curriculum.

THE SIREN IS SOUNDING. THE BELL HAS TOLLED. 🔔⚠️

It is time to light the torches. 🔦 It is time to gather the mob. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦➡️😠 It is time to raise hell for every student, past, present, and future, who has been forced to endure this 'classic' misery. 📚➡️😞➡️😈

WE WILL NOT BE SILENT. WE WILL NOT ANALYZE. WE WILL BURN IT TO THE GROUND AND SALT THE EARTH SO NOTHING THIS BORING EVER GROWS AGAIN. 🤬🔥🧂

THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY: FINAL VERDICT ⚖️👨‍⚖️

🔥 STOCKHOLM SYNDROME METER: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 🔥 <br> ██████████████████████████████ <br> STATUS: LIBERATED. REVENGE: SUCCESSFULLY PLOTTED. 🎯🇺🇸

THE FIGHT IS NOT OVER. JOIN THE RESISTANCE.

Follow me on Twitter for more literary war crimes 🐦✨ @Allen_Fried
Enlist for the next attack at FriedReads.com 🔥📚

This is for everyone who has ever suffered for literature.
LET OUR HATE BE LEGENDARY. LET OUR VENGEANCE BE ETERNAL.
BURN THE CANON.