Don't know how someone can read the line "she had nowhere else to go" or the part about Dolores crying herself to sleep every night and not be able to parse out who is the abuser and who is the victim in the situation here...

the problem with lolita adaptations is that its literally a perfect book to get turned into a horror movie and no one is turning it into a horror movie.

THE MOST charitable interpretation of Dolores being “receptive” to any advances was the fact that she was t w e l v e and g r o o m e d

Nabokov literality had the child abusing monster look directly into the reader's eyes and profess the most vile incarnations of his soul, and somehow people still are unable to tell he's the bad guy, like I can't get over the fact the book opens with the shrink being like 'this dude is so fucked we'll be studying him for decades' and both directors were like 'this is the prefect love story lmao

It's poetic and sad that her name is Dolores, it means pains in Spanish. Its almost like by calling her Lolita he erases her personhood and her pain in their interactions. He's hiding her pain within his sick fantasy.

If I adapted Lolita I would do two things 1) make it animated. 2) Have Humbert narrate the entire movie through his diary entries, but have all interactions with Dolores be framed from her perspective so the viewer can see just HOW disconnected from reality Humbert is and just HOW sick his desires are.

I think it’s amazing how Dolores is the ‘imperfect victim’ because victims rarely are ‘perfect’.

Not to mention the implication of Humbert killing her mum himself to have agency over Dolores. Edit Nabokov also was abused as a child by a older man which lead him to write this book. Also I’m new here but this video is amazing and this is one of my favourite books of all time and I hate how wildly misunderstood this book is

The thing that got me with Dolores' stomach aches is that it's a very common symptom for SA survivors to have really bad cramps or nausea in the aftermath (I'm talking about after Dolores and Humbert have 'sex' for the first time). Both as a physical symptom of the stress and trauma and as an injury. I'm unsure if that was an established thing when the book came out/in the adaptions, but it just adds another layer.

I love that the author starts the book with essentially "this is written from the pov of  a crazy man. Don't take any of this seriously. He's a ¶3do, not a good person... Also everyone involved died.... Don't try any of this at home "

Hello! I just wanna mention...When Humbert mentions Dante falling in love with little Beatrice, he intentionally skips a very important piece of info (as he often does) to make himself look better:
Beatrice was eight, yes, but Dante? Well, Dante was nine

I remember reading the ‘she had nowhere else to go line’ and feeling physically sick. Its such a clever and well written novel

I think the best way to adapt Lolita is to not adapt it. The only way to properly portray the horror of her situation is to tell it from her perspective. Make it a horror. Maybe even just call it Dolores, because her name deserves to be known more than Lolita's.

It never ceases to horrify me that people blame children for their own grooming and abuse. Kids GET to have little crushes. They GET to not understand boundaries yet. They're curious, they're literally new to the world, they don't know yet what they're feeling or getting into. It's up to adults not to take advantage of those little crushes. It doesn't matter if kids "initiate" as it's usually little hugs or kisses or words. Adults tend to lead them further by initiating contact the kids don't understand and escalating it to places the kids never knew about. The most damning thing to me is, even if an insane person wants to argue kids can consent (they can't), all the psychological damage and pain if not physical harm that comes from that contact with a groomer or predator. That adult predator manipulates or forces the kids into scenarios they don't understand yet or can't get away from, before they understand that in a lot of societies people will judge them for being sexually active at a young age or before marriage. The adults take that choice to wait away from kids who never got to make the decision for themselves. They are made to feel complicit in their own damage as a way to protect the predator. Most kids i knew who grew up abused ended up addicts, with eating disorders, mental illness, and suicide attempts. They have found abusive partners after. It pretty much ALWAYS causes long term harm and lasting damage, if it doesn't make them kill themselves. If an adult "loved" a person who was a child, they could NEVER honestly act on it because love cares if you hurt that person. If it was love you'd care if it made them feel dirty or unlovable or suicidal later. There is never a ~ who is the real victim though ~ thing, that's a fckn fantasy predators engage in to try to blunt any shame or blame for their involvement with children or minors. It's the CNC fantasy of "oh but they actually like it and it's fine really", which is ONLY a fantasy. It's insane how society sort of pushed the Lolita image and convinced so many of us young girls that getting involved with older men made us cool, edgy, deep, mature, interesting, rebellious, good actually, not like other girls etc. Our youth is marketed to us as our most desirable trait, even plain young people are made to feel desired by old creeps. Our youth is something we are told is our value, and when women e especially age we are told we're "no good anymore" basically.

For those who think Humbert truly "loved" Dolores; he literally describes how disgusted he gets when noticing the girl's developing features after she hits puberty. Because of this, he forces himself to imagine her old prepubescent self in order to stay attracted to her. This veil of imagination however becomes thinner and thinner throughout the story until he can no longer ignore how much she's changed/grown up. After finding her years later, his sickness makes him imagine her as a little girl one last time (because she apparently had enough 'nymphet' features left to help him picture things better) and that's when he begs her to run off with him. Though readers who paid attention realize that he'd have no problem abandoning her like he did with his other younger mistresses. His flowery vocabulary is meant to charm the reader into believing his horrific lies. He never cared about Dolores the Human Being, he cared about Lolita the imaginary stage character created in his mind. And the most terrifying thing about many publications is how they slap the quote of, "The most convincing love story of the century" on the front.

If you want to make a movie version of Lolita, I'd keep Humbert as a narrator as he is in the novel but simply have his voiceover not match up with what the movie is presenting. We can have his fiction and the reality simultaneously (without showing the truly terrifying bits obviously). Show us what's going on in the mind of someone who is willing to kill, kidnap and rape because of a fetish.

I'm in my 40s, and I finally decided to read the book this year because after a lifetime of hearing the popular idea of Lolita, I was curious. I guess I thought it was some tale of titillating seduction, like pop culture would have it. Oh my god I could barely get through the last half. How anyone could read about grooming, rape, kidnapping, and manipulation of a CHILD and come away with the idea that she seduced anyone, much less a grown man, is beyond me. I'm assuming most of the people pushing that narrative haven't read it, but if they have, they clearly aren't firing on all cylinders. As it was, I finished it and couldn't return it to the library fast enough.

Incidentally, I read some reddit post where someone asked AITA for telling their daughter all about a family member's conviction for assault of a child (so their daughter would know to avoid him), when all the family wanted to protect the man because "he was the victim of a Lolita seduction" and I'm like WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT IS you dumbass it's called GROOMING AND ASSAULT like that's what he was convicted for!! Fucking idiots!

I really like that acknowledges how we still have "lolita" figures in the media because of how awfully common young girls get constantly sexualized

I don't trust anyone looking at this grown adult and twelve-year-old and labeling his abuse of her as a "love story."

Absolutely fucked that some people read Lolita as anything other than an adult man preying on a little girl.