Scattered thoughts on various forms of entertainment

[elsane]

Hi everyone!

Here a few comments about things I've been reading and watching recently.

• Lizzie Bennet's Diaries: or, Pride and Prejudice as told through the video blog of Lizzie Bennet, live-at-home grad student.
  
  Yeah, Pride and Prejudice gets adapted six ways to Sunday. What makes this adaptation so much fun is that the producers have clearly thought very carefully about how to translate the story to the modern day. They're deeply clued into the economic insecurity that underlies the Bennets' situation in the original PnP, and in the update have very wisely retained that as a driving factor entirely separate from the romance (apart from what is hinted to be some regressive attitudes on Lizzie's mother's part). The philosophical disagreement between Lizzie and Charlotte is being set up to take the form of a disagreement about taking unfulfilling or morally questionable jobs in a tough economy.
  
  It's clever (Bingley is Bing Lee!) and funny (the actors playing Charlotte and the Bennet sisters have great chemistry and comic timing) and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes -- not to mention how they're going to handle the rest of the adaptation! It strikes me that the video blog format is going to be more and more challenging to maintain as the story goes on.
  
  
  
• Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
  
  I tore through the eARC in a single day when I really should have been doing work and/or cleaning up my apartment. LMB has lost none of her unputdownability, and sets up some very funny set pieces. This is a light book, drawn along the romantic-caper-farce lines of ACC, and a gentle farewell to the Vorkosigan series. It's well-plotted and enjoyable, and it is fun following Ivan around. I liked it much better than Cryoburn, but (as expected) don't look for anything especially deep.
  
  Now I'm going to complain about something spoilery, so here is a cut. I'm...kinda angry about Byerly, though. Packing him off-world with Rish has such an air of "pair the spares", and their hookup has the slightly artificial tidiness of comedies, which is not necessarily a fault, but yokes uncomfortably with LMB's usual depth of characterization. Moreover, Byerly's departure from Barrayar needs more exploration when the only beyond-the-surface thing we know about his character is his loyalty to Dono, Vor, and the Imperium. Last and very far from least, it's frankly offensive that he, too, ends up in a heterosexual relationship. What makes it even worse is that there is such an easy fix for all of these problems. Namely: make Rish male. Keep Byerly gay -- not bisexual, gay. Give him one or two lines that show how worn down he is by the social stigma of being gay on Barrayar, and hint at this as a force for emigration. This would help add a welcome bit of darkness to a book that could use a small dash of it, like salt.
  
  The Vorkosigan series started with painful moral compromises and its best books are painful. The victories are paid for in blood, even when they are partially discounted. But the series finishes up in comedy-cum-farce, and the moral rules of farce are different from the moral rules of drama. I find this uncomfortable. In comic mode, all threads get tucked in, and the victories can be paid for in bug butter. The sense that comes along with the last four novels is that the deep victories have been won, Our Heroes and Barrayar have come out clean on top, and -- this just isn't true. Miles is still a domineering weasel. Ekaterin is still letting her husband swallow her up. Barrayar has so very far to go before it's within hailing distance of a just and equitable society. I'm not saying that the development we've seen since Shards is not realistic or enjoyable! I'm saying that the Vorkosiverse has accumulated a certain smugness about its beloved characters and worlds that needs to be challenged more by the text. Even in comic mode. CVA didn't do this at all (and I didn't expect it to).
  
  Also, the gender and baby stuff has been getting up my nose. (Hence the hair-trigger for Byerly -- whose arc, considered in isolation, wouldn't bug me, but does in the broader series context.)
  
  
  
  
• Korra! Yep, I've been watching. Overall it's been a lot of fun, but suffers from a severe case of having two seasons worth of plot and only a single season to tell it. Thus the (interesting and well-rounded) characters suffer badly from having a lot of their important character moments compressed and sometimes obscured on screen. It's a lot like ATLA, only the flaws as well as the virtues have been super-condensed:
  
  
  
  * Major, major props for having a deep suite of interesting, well-rounded female characters who avoid the gendered archetypes and fall everywhere on the spectrum from very traditionally feminine to much less so. And for giving their male protagonists some traits that are usually coded feminine. (And for the entire world full of CoC's! That should go without saying, but, sadly, probably can't.)
  
  * Much less credit for being careful about how the plot lines for their female characters intersect with unfortunate tropes. Just as Azula's descent into instability in ATLA needed some extra care to stave off Unfortunate Implications about women not being able to handle power, the Tenzin-Lin-Pema tensions had the unfortunate whiff of career-vs-baby that I really wish we could've avoided.
  
  * They did not have room for everything in this season. Not even close. I wish they'd jettisoned the whole love polygon and given us more team bonding, much more set up for Asami's relationship with Hiroshi, and more of a feeling for living in Republic City. As it was, the need to establish the relationship between Korra and Mako ate up all of the screen time they had for characterizing the younger generation, to the vast detriment of the group characterization. I don't think it's surprising that I ended up loving the relationships between Korra and Tenzin (and Tenzin's family), not to mention between Lin and Tenzin, Lin and Korra, more than the relationships between Korra and the rest of "Team Avatar" -- they just plain got more screen time! and felt more organic.
  
  * (...can has Asami/Iroh? Pls?)
  
  
  
  

Now I must pry myself off the Internet with a crowbar and get back to work.

Comments

[philomytha]

Re the Ivan book, I think you've hit the nail on the head with the drama/farce shift in the series, and the consequent cognitive dissonance that sets up in the reader. I enjoyed the book as comic farce very much, but if I'd gone in hoping for drama, I'd have been utterly lost.

Also, the idea of making Rish male is brilliant. Normally I'm all in favour of more female characters, but in this case I'd make an exception.

[elsane]

Ah, I have mixed feelings about making Rish male, I admit! Rish is refreshingly different from a lot of Bujold's female characters, and I like that a lot -- I'd be sorry to lose it. On the other hand, her characterization isn't foregrounded that heavily, so it doesn't seem like as much of a loss as it might have, given the trade off.

I have been reluctant to get on the farce train, I have to admit -- I balked very hard at the easy thwarting of the Escobarans all the way back in ACC. I have trouble turning off the cognitive dissonance alarms in the back of my brain. Still, I definitely thought CVA was more successful than Cryoburn.

[cordialcount]

So many people posting about CVA! Rlist gods, you are good. And so was CVA when I needed that pick-me-up, but farce doesn't stick so long in my brain as the loose ends...

the Vorkosiverse has accumulated a certain smugness about its beloved characters and worlds
Agreed! LMB could have written about moral compromises, even in the scope of the farce. We had some brief notes about the hierarchies of Jackson's Whole and characters who grew up steeped in it, who benefited from it and then had to escape from it, and all the moments where the text could have reminded us this was a Great House on a planet Miles wanted to burn from pole to pole just fell away. I confess I'm not into reading fiction centered on privilege, but a bit of unease underneath the Arquas might have richened the rest of the novel.

Someone mentioned elsewhere the lack of emotional honesty since Diplomatic Immunity. My main problem with CVA is that it is emotionally honest-- to Ivan. Ivan doesn't care, as much as certain threads of fanon (me included) wished otherwise while he was a half-cipher largely off-screen, for more than tidying his world up and having everyone else's bewildering byzantine problems away from him. He doesn't demand more than life has already been giving him. Great in a friend to drink with, painful trait in a fictional character. I feel like someone put an elephant on the green silk rooms of Barrayar, and then decided to tell the story from the PoV of the elephant while it was industriously making a mud-pool for itself trundling about the garden.

p.s., I definitely agreed with most of the fandom in thinking Byerly was gay or bi-leaning-toward-men before this book, but I can't seem to find any textual evidence. Do you know if the narrative went there itself?

re:Rish being different, apart from her far less dramatic entrance, Rish reminds me of Taura. Some engineer's idea of perfection colliding with real world visibility, that feline elegance with which she carries herself, her get-everything-done practicality, and the times when for all that she's ridiculously competent she defers a little to Tej. What sets her apart for you? My memory's already fading as to who she is (not a good sign for Bujold characterization; I can quote giant chunks of Shards by heart).

[elsane]

The real problem with Vorkosi-farce, for me, is that farce, as a genre, requires a certain amount of narrative amorality which marries very poorly with the moral choices and genuine moral growth that the pre-ACC books had. I never liked ACC quite as much as many people seemed to (the development of the Ekaterin-Miles romance felt incredibly rushed, and I wasn't on board), but it lost me completely when the Escobaran police showed up and their by the book and quite respectable legal complaint was played for bugbuttery laughs. Mark's getting away with everything was never even given so much as a narrative side-eye -- and that sort of incident can easily be the sort of thing that screws up diplomatic relations until it gets settled. And the Arquas are pretty darn cuddly for Jacksonians, aren't they?

I think maybe you're not being entirely fair to Ivan! He does care about Barrayar and the Imperium, just in a way that one has to overcome the strong "don't get involved!!" conditioning. Yeah, it would've been nice to see CVA push him in more interesting ways, discomfit him a bit more. But at the very least, it was interesting to see him decide he cared enough about Tej to fight for her. In his own hapless way. Not the stuff I would've been excited to read about if the rest of the series didn't exist, I agree, but since I was already invested in the world and characters I was happy to read a smaller story.

Rish is remarkably cynical, much more so than I think of Taura being, and it's her dry amoral skepticism I found really striking. I agree she spent a lot of time in the background, though; it would've been a more interesting book if her choices had ever been in doubt.

No text-ev for By's sexuality before CVA, no. Just subtext and stereotype, which I occasionally felt a little bit bad about...