I sometimes abuse ampersands

In my 10+ years in fandom, never have I ever encountered a canon that impels one to consider non-consensual mpreg as a viable plot twist for the sequel as strongly as Victor Frankenstein does. It would make perfect sense. Fandom has let me down horribly on this one.

Like, Victor has canonically discussed in vitro insemination, and the possibility that female bodies could be skipped in reproduction altogether. So, we are just half a step away from him deciding that there's a more sanitary way to create life unnaturally than stitching together fragments of dead bodies.

Just imagine it: Igor notices Victor looking at him, sizing him up. Victor is always in his space anyways, shouting, imploring, inveigling and wheedling, his hands on Igor's shoulders, or pulling on his sleeve, or cautiously touching his elbow, and Igor no longer even winces when drops of Victor's saliva hit his face as he yells. Victor keeps drawing anatomy charts on the floor, but lately it's perfunctory. Igor wonders, his palms going cold, what could possibly have dampened the enthusiasm of a man who previously wouldn't think twice before cutting out the eyes of his dead rommate.

And then one day, Victor says, in an unusually plaintive tone, it's a breakthrough like no other, and presses a damp, rank-smelling cloth to Igor's face, and the world goes blank. Later, Igor comes to with a start, but as he scampers to sit up, there's sharp pain in his abdomen. You shouldn't move, Victor says,pressing him down. Science, Victor says, the one solid point in the whirling world. I'm sorry, but you'll come to understand. Igor presses a palm over the stitches - of the two of them, Victor is not the one known for neat handiwork - listens and listens and listens, trying to feel his redoubled mortality. That would have been glorious, alright?

Desirability of non-consensual mpreg aside, I found the movie overall rather meh. I actually love Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with a fiery passion of a thousand suns, but this movie just didn't do it for me. I think it was faithful to the original in all the wrong places, and then deviated from it in all the wrong places too. Frankenstein-the-novel is very much a product of anxieties of its time, and those anxieties are not easily grafted to contemporary concerns. I don't think you should whip out the "but only God can create life!!1" argument with a straight face anymore - it simply no longer has the same existential weight - nor should you, really. The key motif of Frankenstein can be repackaged with startlingly few nips and twists here and there to actually match contemporary concerns and to obviate the need to invoke God: there are plenty of anxieties re:medical research these days to fuel more than one movie, yet this one didn't even try. Alternately, you could just drop those issues altogether and, while retaining the premise (scientist creates life, life is grumpy), make it a movie about something else - like, about the homoerotic friendship between said scientist and his sidekick. At first, it seemed like Victor Frankenstein was going this way, but then it brought in all those ethical conundrums reduced to platitudes confounding in their triteness. Like, no. That screen time should have been spent on mpreg. Or literally anything else.

Overall verdict: entertaining, but inherently skippable.