![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerToday is the day of the Big Move! Tomorrow is the release date for The Larks Still Bravely Singing! I will be unable to check internet and either congratulating myself on the brilliance of that decision or gnashing my teeth and weeping over my inability to check Amazon sales stats every five minutes. Hopefully too busy unpacking to do either?
no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-03 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-04 06:46 pm (UTC)spoilers for book!
Date: 2021-10-16 12:18 am (UTC)Were "Peggy" and "Aunt Agnes" actual shoutouts? I wound up sorry we never got to meet David's aunts, they sounded great.
Re: spoilers for book!
Date: 2021-10-16 02:22 am (UTC)And there are definitely echoes of Laurie/Andrew in the way Robert views David, which sort of makes sense in school when David really IS young and inexperienced (although David would point out that it's much better to get experience from someone who actually likes you than Bunny fucking Hastings) and really really is not applicable afterward. The bit where David is like "You're 'protecting' me for your own good, not mine," is definitely a bit of Charioteer influence, too.
Peggy is a shoutout, but not to Agent Carter! She and John and their pirate games are an homage to Swallows and Amazons. (The John character in the S&A books intends to join the Navy, and I have amused myself occasionally with the idea of him running into Ralph Lanyon, who is at first very excited! Because John is not interested in girls that way and therefore MUST be queer! But then Ralph realizes John comes from an alternate universe were sex doesn't exist and he's just like FUCK my life.)
My beta reader has never forgiven me for the brutal slaughter of Aunt Mary. How were David and Robert ever going to bang in that tiny cottage with Aunt Mary around, I ask you? But maybe I could have sent her on vacation or something... a long, long vacation to visit a niece in Australia.
Re: spoilers for book!
Date: 2021-10-16 02:33 am (UTC)Poor Robert. I mean, I love the Greeks but it was also kind of hilariously refreshing to see David going "OMFG not this crap again" (paraphrased) when so much Early Modern Gay Lit? I guess it would be called is full of Plato. Of course that's not just Renault's influence but going back to Forster....So many young men apparently took it as a sex/love manual, the way young het couples were influenced by Lawrence in the fifties and sixties. //Mr Yuk face
I have obvs never read S&A /o\ and even more obviously tend to refer all "feisty characters named Peggy" to Peggy Carter //o\\
Aw that was a great authorial choice tho! For one thing it makes David much more vulnerable and open, with Aunt Mary gone he can't pretend he's not alone. And the flu really did carry off so many people. And it also fucks David up, so he's unable to pretend everything is fine which would mean Robert couldn't comfort him.
Re: spoilers for book!
Date: 2021-10-16 02:50 am (UTC)David meanwhile has just had it up to HERE with the ancient Greeks and feels that their thoughts on
yaoisex and love are about as relevant to modern relationships as the Iliad is to trench warfare. Maybe it was good and beautiful and accurate then, but times have changed!And yes, tragic though Aunt Mary's death is, it was absolutely necessary to get David to a state of peak vulnerability so Robert could comfort him. He's SO alone and needs love so much.
Re: spoilers for book!
Date: 2021-10-16 03:40 am (UTC)//facedesk
David meanwhile has just had it up to HERE with the ancient Greeks and feels that their thoughts on yaoi sex and love are about as relevant to modern relationships as the Iliad is to trench warfare. Maybe it was good and beautiful and accurate then, but times have changed!
DAVID <333 He is rather modern and American! Also completely without that stultifying background poor Robert has of What Should Be Done. If not for his mater he might wind up immured for life with pater, altho mater also seems sensibly more concerned with Robert's sister. Robert at least is male. And like Robert says, they're way less likely to try to marry him off with only one leg.
And yes, tragic though Aunt Mary's death is, it was absolutely necessary to get David to a state of peak vulnerability so Robert could comfort him. He's SO alone and needs love so much.
Yeah, and even if you had sent Auntie M off to Australia or wherever, they wouldn't have been able to extend the dream-vacation time so easily, and with such privacy. The treatment of loneliness and friendship in the book was interesting -- David hates being alone, but he hasn't had a lot of chances to live by himself outside of the structures of family, army and uni. No wonder he likes sea-bathing alone.
Re: spoilers for book!
Date: 2021-10-16 01:33 pm (UTC)I like to think that even without David, Robert would eventually have gone, "You know what, I SHOULD go live with Pickett and Blanchard in London and meet a few chaps," but definitely the fact that he's doing it to make a home for David makes that a much easier decision for him. Very much a person who would put up with any kind of treatment for himself but move heaven and earth to protect his beloved.
David's feelings about aloneness right now are very much shaped by having been ALONE ALONE ALONE for the last nine months or so since Aunt Mary died, without much hope of a reprieve. He'll probably feel differently about it once it's no longer so much thrust on him by circumstances. He clearly spent some time at the Abbey going "I just CAN'T with all these PEOPLE all the time and yet I feel so lonely because I don't like most of them"