Spyke

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I think the problem is the students are giving too much credence to the monster's monologues, but "He is eloquent and persuasive, and once his words had even power over my [Frankenstein's] heart; but trust him not."

All that aside, you can't look past strangling a 4-year-old boy. It's reasonable to call anything that strangles a 4-year-old boy a monster, even if it felt lonely/abandoned.

And even the monster has the self-insight to know that he's fundamentally evil: "I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good."

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Nick Groom, external, a professor of English literature at the University of Exeter, who has written a new introduction to mark the novel's 200th anniversary since publication.

“It’s interesting when I teach the book now, students are very sentimental towards the being,” Professor Groom wrote.

“There’s been a gradual shift... for years Victor Frankenstein’s creation was known as the Monster, then critics seemed to identify him as a victim and called him the Creature. That fits more with students’ sensibilities today.”

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A gun in an inanimate object. The monster is a self-described murderer.

"I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin."

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Starting an martial arts group

Good luck with it. I read your PDF. Let me know if you want any advice.

I'm not sure having no coaches is a good idea. A martial arts coach is a perfect example of "justified hierarchy". And you do mark skill disparities as one of the major issues you're facing.

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You could....

Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.’

The child still struggled and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to my heart; I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet.

I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him

...but I didn't read it that as an accident. Imagine using that defense in a courtroom: "I wasn't trying to kill the child, I was trying to kidnap him for revenge. I killed him by accident when choking him to silence him." Especially given the physical mismatch of a huge heavyweight versus a tiny child.

As I said earlier, "I think the problem is the students are giving too much credence to the monster’s monologues"

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It's a weird internet-meme that the monster is innocent. Internet-dwellers have been posting that 2018 tweet as confirmation, as though that supercedes the text.

But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.