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Mar. 28th, 2009 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mari4212Item the first: Classes are over and done with for a week, and I had the last of my finals yesterday. I will note, practical finals are a very good thing in massage classes, because it means you spend an hour of your final period getting a full-body massage. And I was selfish enough to make sure I avoided the one girl in class who seems incapable of giving a decent massage. (I can't be nice all the time.)
Item the second: Why, when writing a novel based off of another author's work, do so many pro writers seem to think that the best way of doing so is to utterly ignore the fundamental characterizations that made the earlier works classics? The specific impetus here is The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, an exploration of Pride and Prejudice set 20 or so years past the end of the novel, but I'm also recalling a Sherlock Holmes adventure that pulled this too. For this P&P sequel, in re-framing the story to focus on what happened to Mary Bennet after the end of P&P, the author decided that she needed to explain why it was that Mary wouldn't want to live with the Darcy family after the death of her mother. And instead of taking the time to come up with a storyline that made sense with the earlier characterizations, she decided to take a hatchet job to both the character of Darcy and the major theme of the earlier novel. The version of Darcy in this story is a cold, unreformed autocrat who cannot stand anyone disagreeing with him, who is politically ambitious and willing to allow others to suffer if he can make an extra profit, whose nastiness makes Elizabeth miserable and has her regretting marrying him. And I'm sitting there wondering how it was that this author thinks any of this makes sense as a characterization for Darcy, or how it works at all with the character growth that is the real theme of P&P? It presupposes that not only does Darcy not maintain the emotional discoveries he made throughout Jane Austen's novel, he backslides into something far worse than where he started.
Note, I did not finish reading this novel, neither did I finish reading the Sherlock Holmes novel that started by attacking Dr. Watson and calling him stupid. I can't say whether the characterization ever improved in either case. (I will point out that there are far better fanfics out there for those particular canons.)
Item the third: Chickfood nights from Trader Joe's? Still a shiny awesome thing. Dad let us know early enough that he wasn't going to be home for dinner, so Mom and I picked up a couple of treats for ourselves. I quite recommend the roasted vegetable pizza from there, it's wonderful.
Item the second: Why, when writing a novel based off of another author's work, do so many pro writers seem to think that the best way of doing so is to utterly ignore the fundamental characterizations that made the earlier works classics? The specific impetus here is The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, an exploration of Pride and Prejudice set 20 or so years past the end of the novel, but I'm also recalling a Sherlock Holmes adventure that pulled this too. For this P&P sequel, in re-framing the story to focus on what happened to Mary Bennet after the end of P&P, the author decided that she needed to explain why it was that Mary wouldn't want to live with the Darcy family after the death of her mother. And instead of taking the time to come up with a storyline that made sense with the earlier characterizations, she decided to take a hatchet job to both the character of Darcy and the major theme of the earlier novel. The version of Darcy in this story is a cold, unreformed autocrat who cannot stand anyone disagreeing with him, who is politically ambitious and willing to allow others to suffer if he can make an extra profit, whose nastiness makes Elizabeth miserable and has her regretting marrying him. And I'm sitting there wondering how it was that this author thinks any of this makes sense as a characterization for Darcy, or how it works at all with the character growth that is the real theme of P&P? It presupposes that not only does Darcy not maintain the emotional discoveries he made throughout Jane Austen's novel, he backslides into something far worse than where he started.
Note, I did not finish reading this novel, neither did I finish reading the Sherlock Holmes novel that started by attacking Dr. Watson and calling him stupid. I can't say whether the characterization ever improved in either case. (I will point out that there are far better fanfics out there for those particular canons.)
Item the third: Chickfood nights from Trader Joe's? Still a shiny awesome thing. Dad let us know early enough that he wasn't going to be home for dinner, so Mom and I picked up a couple of treats for ourselves. I quite recommend the roasted vegetable pizza from there, it's wonderful.
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Date: 2009-03-29 03:53 am (UTC)