A Certain Slant of Light

I have given Emma Approved four episodes. I will continue to give it more episodes, because it definitely succeeds at being entertaining (and Harriet is adorkable)...but I’m not so sure about its successfulness as an adaptation.

Adorkable as Harriet is, the way they’ve introduced her character also shows how much the adaptation has already - in four episodes! - deviated from the original book. The characters’ relationships to each other have been set up so differently. In the book, Mr. Knightley thought Emma and Harriet’s friendship was a bad thing, because it tended to puff up Emma’s already healthy estimation of herself, whereas in Emma Approved, he actually lined Harriet up as Emma’s assistant himself.

And given that he picked Harriet out of a whole pile of applications, it’s hard not to think that “Which of these possible assistants will minister most sincerely and gratifyingly to Emma’s vanity?” was the criteria uppermost in his mind as he combed through the applications.

I feel in particular that they’ve gone really over-the-top with Emma’s conceit and meddlesomeness. Sure, in the book she’s a little full of herself and plumes herself on her ability as a matchmaker...but she never tries to make one of her friends go through with a wedding that the friend wants to call off, for the purely selfish reasons that calling it off would damage Emma’s pride (This match was Emma approved! It must pan out!) and her match-making business.

And she doesn’t try to talk Anne out of calling off the wedding by, for instance, trying to remind Anne why she and her fiance fell in love. No, Emma gets out a binder full of invoices to remind Anne how dazzlingly expensive the wedding plans are, and how complicated it would be to call them off.

And when Anne is not convinced - when she signs the paperwork to cancel the orders - once Anne’s gone, Emma tears the paperwork up. Because she’s going to fix this, dammit! She’s going to find a way to make Anne go through with a wedding Anne no longer wants!

This is neither the action of a friend nor of a good businesswoman.

I also think that making matchmaking Emma’s profession - not just something she does in her spare time, but a thing that she’s trying to build a company on - is kind of unfortunate, given that the premise of the story is that Emma is a terrible matchmaker.

ETA: I thought I should add this, as it came up chatting with asakiyume in comments.

The reason Emma's incompetence at her chosen career is such a problem is that it undermines what makes her character interesting rather than exasperating. In the book, Emma's a little full of herself, but it's a slightly exaggerated reflection of her actual abilities: not only is she rich, clever, and beautiful, but she's of central importance to her social circle and has clearly been running her father's social life for years, in such a way that he enjoys himself and his companions also have a good time, despite his gentle selfishness. Of course she believes she knows best. She's far more perceptive than her father or Miss Bates or Harriet, and given her limited experience, it makes sense that she would believe her perception even stronger than it really is.

EA's Emma, on the other hand, is apparently not even competent enough to realize that she doesn't really need the assistant Knightley is foisting upon her. (And if Knightley finds Emma so irritating that he needs to offload her caprices onto a hapless assistant - and there seems to be no real business reason for Emma to need an assistant - it's going to be hard to buy Emma and Knightley's romance.)

Without the background competence that underlies Emma's self-assurance, her egotism almost embarrassing, because it's so out of line with her actual abilities.

Via ladyherenya: Emma Approved has started blogging! Eeeee, I am so excited for this Emma adaptation, I cannot wait for the vlogs to begin. IS IT OCTOBER YET?

I haven’t given up on Welcome to Sanditon, exactly, but I think the show is designed to demand multimedia interaction in a way that the Lizzie Bennet Diaries didn’t, which has sapped a lot of my interest. I still watch the videos when I remember to, but I’m not waiting for them like I did for LBD.

But in a way this is a good thing! Because otherwise I might never have remembered to check out The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, a vlog adaptation of Jane Eyre that was, as Jane confesses in an early episode, inspired by the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

This means that it almost demands comparison to LBD, which is in a way unfortunate. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre seems comparatively amateur: Jane isn’t as rehearsed and funny as Lizzie, and the camera work is often odd and shaky, because Jane is holding the camera herself and thus can’t see if she’s in frame.

But therein lies some of the charm: Jane’s down-at-the-heels operation really captures her social marginality and loneliness. In both P&P and LBD, while the Bennet family is in financially precarious position, they’re nonetheless enmeshed in local society: Lizzie has her sisters and her friends to help her with her videos. She has enough social support that when her not-quite-a-thing with Wickham falls through early in the series, she can more or less shrug it off.

Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is a nobody, an orphan cast off by her next of kin, and no friends except poor dead Helen Burns. The amateurishness reflects her isolation, and I think it amplifies the sense of her loneliness: she’s reaching out, imperfectly as she can, to try to connect with the world.

That said, I suspect The Autobiography of Jane Eyre will appeal most to people who like the book and are curious to see a modern adaptation. It doesn’t have the same effortless appeal that LBD did, and I’m still not as invested in it as I was in, say, Lydia and Mary’s friendship. (But it is still only early days, after all.)

A lot depends on the depiction of Jane’s relationship with Mr. Rochester, because that will carry a lot of the emotional weight of the show. Because of Jane’s isolation, The Autobiography of Jane Eyre doesn’t have the cushion in this department that LBD did: if Rochester’s jackass tendencies are not properly balanced by his growing respect for Jane and their verbal duels/dances, there’s no Charlotte or Lydia or anyone to distract us.

Rochester showed up in the last episode - or at least his feet did - so I guess we’ll soon find out how it’s going to go...

At least we know he has interesting taste in socks.

My rarewomen fics! As aforementioned, I didn’t manage to finish my assignment: I just wasn’t feeling the prompt and I figured someone else would give her a better story. But! I wrote three treats to expiate my guilt.

First, Requiem, a Les Mis story about Eponine and Cosette for anomilygrace: a canon AU where Marius dies instead of Eponine, and Eponine, pushed by a strange tortuous sense of guilt, goes to tell Cosette, because she knows no one else will think to.

Old blood from Eponine’s clothes smudged Cosette’s blue and white dress. Red and blue and white: the tricolor. A bitter, sobbing laugh burst out of Eponine, so raucous and sad that Cosette raised her head. Perfect Cosette, face blotchy and red. A thread of snot hung from her nose.

“I should go,” said Eponine.

I always feel kind of bad picking favorites...but this is my favorite of the treats I wrote. I'm kind of sad more people won't see it, it being buried pages deep in the Les Mis section.

Maybe I could add more chapters. More people would see it then. It could become an Eponine & Cosette epic! Yes/yes? (Seriously, do you think it would be worthwhile?)

Second: Vendetta, a story for The Borgias. It is about Lucrezia and Sancia and deals with ( spoilers for season two )

And for something completely different: Movie Night, an LBD fic about Lydia and Mary hanging out and trying to pick a movie to watch. Unlike the other fics, with their focus on Misery and Death, this is all sparkles and rainbows and unicorns! Like, literally unicorns. Or at least, discussion of My Little Pony.

Although an LBD fic with literal unicorns would be awesome. Lydia would laugh herself sick when it went right up to Mary and put its head in her lap. Possibly there would be something thematic about slut-shaming and purity of heart etc? Possibly that would be a bit too obvious.

The one thing I was sorry didn't happen in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries was that Mary never showed up again. I wanted her to come back and be there for her BFF Lydia! So...here you go.

Fic: Beaches
Fandom: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Characters: Lydia & Mary
Rating: G
Prompt: trope_bingo, day at the beach.
Summary: “I don’t need you to cheer me up,” Lydia said. “I just...need you to be here. And you are. So...thanks.”

After the Wickham debacle, Mary tries to cheer Lydia up with a day at the beach. In February. Okay, cheering people up is not really Mary's forte.

Also at AO3, Beaches.

( Beaches )

We have robins! And daffodils! The recent snowpocalypse decapitated many of the daffodils, sad sad, but fortunately many of them had not bloomed yet and those are beginning to come along.

It is SPRING!

And also the end of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I am sad it's over, but all good things must come to an end. And anyway...

( Lizzie Bennet Diaries spoilers )

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Lizzie!

And Darcy!

And Lizzie!

OMG.

The episode we have all been waiting for! Except not really, because this means the Lizzie Bennet Diaries are nearly over.

(What do you want to bet they'll make it an even one hundred episodes?)

I am hoping that Lizzie and Darcy get to talk things out like Jane & Bing did, if not perhaps quite as thoroughly. (I have the impression that verbal communication is not Darcy's forte. Nor, for all that she's very good at talking, Lizzie's.)

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Via ladyherenya, an interesting article about How the Vlog & Transmedia Set-Up Make Plot Harder for LBD, which I think is excellent. There’s definitely a tension in LBD between “Lizzie growing as a person and not being judgmental all over the internet,” and “Lizzie doing super entertaining costume theater.”

Also, I’ve been thinking about other books that would make fun modern vlog adaptations. You need a main character who would be willing to share her life with the internet (so Fanny Price and Elinor Dashwood are definitely out), and a story that doesn’t depend on information that you wouldn’t really want to put on the internet. LBD has already been stretching the “would someone really put this on the internet?” limits, and making a vlog of something like Jane Eyre would shatter them like glass.

Plus, Jane Eyre is probably too circumspect to have a vlog.

Northanger Abbey, however, would be pretty much the perfect book for a vlog adaptation. Think about it! Catherine starts her vlog because she’s leaving home for the first time, so she starts a vlog to keep her family updated on her doings. She’s pretty stunned to get as many viewers as she does. I think in this version, she’s probably going away to college rather than on a vacation. Possibly she’s going a long way from home, so she won’t be able to visit much?

Catherine and Isabella Thorpe meet at the bookstore, where they are scoping out the same new urban fantasy book in this series they both love. Isabella Thorpe would obviously leap at the chance to be in a vlog: think of the way that she dramatizes her life in the book.

I’m not sure how we get from “love of urban fantasy” to “Catherine thinks maybe General Tilney killed his wife!” but maybe the connection will not be as overt as it is in NA. (I think “Catherine thinks maybe General Tilney is a vampire!” is possibly too silly even for Catherine. Although it might be hilarious! What do you think?)

Catherine and Henry Tilney meet...in class, maybe? Perhaps they are assigned to work on a project together? Or! They could meet at ball-dancing club. In Catherine’s next vlog, Isabella teases her about her crush on Henry Tilney, which makes Catherine blush, although she is totally delighted to talk about him. (Later, Isabella will tease Catherine about things she doesn't necessarily want the whole internet to know.) However, Isabella gets bored when Catherine chats about Henry too long and jumps in to talk about her own conquests.

(I really like the way that LBD fleshed out Lydia, and it would be cool if an NA adaptation did something similar with Isabella. But conversely, Catherine and Isabella’s friendship not working out would work really well in this adaptation. The people you’re friends with your first semester of college are not necessarily going to be your best friends all through, and it would be nice to see Catherine fumbling to find her real friends.)

Etc. etc. more stuff happens. Catherine gets invited to the Tilney’s house for Thanksgiving (she can’t afford a plane ticket home for the holiday). She confides in the internet that she thinks maybe General Tilney killed his wife. Henry Tilney walks into the filming of one of her videos while she’s talking about this possibility and is all “WTF Catherine,” because not only is she entertaining the possibility that his father killed his mother, but she’s been telling the internet about it.

Catherine is horrified and chastened and makes an “I am SO SORRY” video.

Then the General sends her away, and Catherine is convinced that Henry convinced him to do it, and she is all sad panda and possibly swears off vlogs.

But she does one last vlog - “I just had to let you know how the story ends!” Because Henry came to tell her that he didn’t ask his father to send her away at all! (I’m not sure why the General does send Catherine away in this version. Maybe he thought she was pre-med and is just horrified to learn she’s studying, like, art history.)

And then Catherine and Henry start dating, happy end!

Jane and Bing!

Bing and Jane!

All the feels!

( Today's episode )

1. I had a dinner today! A grown-up dinner wherein grad students and professors mingled! And by mingled I mean mostly I sat there and listened to the professors talk, which was quite interesting - one of them met Herbert Hoover when he was seven (the professor, not Hoover, unless of course he is a vampire professor...) Plus I had roasted herb chicken with gorgonzola mashed potatoes which were DELICIOUS - even the carrots were delicious! - so clearly this should happen more often.

They seemed, disconcertingly, to be far more current on recent movies than I am (what is this Argo, you guys?). This clearly lends support to my nascent plan to start making pilgrimages to the movie theater more often. First on my list: Hyde Park on the Hudson.

2. The latest in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries: I'm not sure about this episode. They've stretched the vlog format before, but this eight-minute long festival of woe just seems...I don't know. One, it's just too long, and two, if this were real and not a show, why would anyone post that? Lizzie and Lydia's...I'm not sure what to call it, because it's not a full blown reconciliation...detente?

Whatever. Their interaction in this video is so emotional and intimate that I felt embarrassed watching it.

I see why the showrunners wanted an emotional reconciliation between Lizzie and Lydia, but I...just can't see why anyone would post that online. Yes, Lydia says it's okay, but a) Lydia hates herself right now, and seems to want the video posted at least partly as a form of self-punishment, and b) even if Lydia thinks she's okay with it, Lizzie is also in the video, and why would she be okay with showing one of the most emotional moments of her life onscreen?

I think something more restrained would have worked well. Remember when Jane had her break-down about Bing leaving, and Lizzie turned off the camera? Something like that.