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So I was thinking about a Blue Castle movie (again) and about how majority of period dramas now seem to need to follow the Bridgerton model of wildly historically inaccurate costumes + sex to get any kind of genuine consideration to be made, so I'm wondering:

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well...at least it's not vikings...

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Never, never is Ken blonde.

my most embarrassing confession is that for the past 15 odd years, despite having read Rilla so many times, I always thought Ken was blonde

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Wuthering Heights is hardly romanticizing destructive behavior.

By “anti,” I don’t just mean completely different. I mean the theory that Jane Austen set out in Mansfield Park to deconstruct what she had written earlier in Pride and Prejudice, or that Anne Brontë set out in Tenant to deconstruct what her sister Emily had written in Wuthering Heights.

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Frankenstein is just ... an odd person all around.

BATTLE OF THE TERRIBLE PROPOSALS

Darcy's proposal from Pride and Prejudice:

Frankenstein's:

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“So Shirley went—not radiantly, as to a high adventure, like Jem, not in a white flame of sacrifice, like Walter, but in a cool, business-like mood, as of one doing something, rather dirty and disagreeable, that had just got to be done.”

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I feel like Wilhelm gets too harsh of a deal in Rilla of Ingleside ... for that matter, Nicholas II too! I wish Montgomery had included something of the Romanovs' deaths?

On Chapter 25, I don't have much to say except I'd forgotten how close Susan and Shirley are, and how possessive she feels about him leaving. And little Bruce's wish for the Kaiser to become a good man so as to feel the full weight of his actions...oof.

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No competition. Mr. Bennet is at least funny.

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Chapter 12:

Fancast: Dwight Schrute as Susan

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Fuck it. Out here today to cause maximum mayhem:

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As much as I like this chapter I still can’t get over the thought that Ken doesn’t really know Rilla.

Through the book we’ve seen Rilla growing from a rather self absorbed 14 year old (as most 14 year olds I don’t blame her) to a selfless, brave, young woman. She organizes the Red Cross! She raises a baby! She apologizes to Irene! She talks back to her mom and speaks up for herself. She sends her brothers off to war!! She has backbone and liveliness! She laughs and she’s fun to be around! She’s intuitive and tactful!

But when she’s with Ken this shyness overtakes her and she becomes quiet and demure. Yes she’s pretty, but I feel like we don’t see Ken truly seeing her. He sees her as an ideal (ex the Madonna which he Carries to battle but as romantic as that is it’s not truly Rilla)

I think this is why I struggle to like them because Ken only sees her as a pretty girl and not as who she is.

Of course, he did grow up with her a bit so maybe? But it’s my impression he always saw her as a kid.

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I’m sure it has been said before, but John Thorpe would absolutely own a cybertruck

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seems a little unfair that I’ll never have my portrait made by John Singer Sargent. I would have been really good at it. there’d be just a hint of canny amusement in my gaze toward the viewer and everything

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And, she thought, it really was heroic to volunteer to drive about the Glen and Four Winds one day, collecting promised Red Cross supplies with Abner Crawford's old grey horse. One of the Ingleside horses was lame and the doctor needed the other, so there was nothing for it but the Crawford nag, a placid, unhasting, thick-skinned creature with an amiable habit of stopping every few yards to kick a fly off one leg with the foot of the other. Rilla felt that this, coupled with the fact that the Germans were only fifty miles from Paris, was hardly to be endured.

Really feeling this lately. How dare there still be petty annoyances while the world is on fire?

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“Is this rilla-my-rilla?” He asked in a low tone.

“Yeth” said rilla and immediately wished she could throw herself headlong down the lighthouse Rock or otherwise vanish from a jeering world.

🤣 I love 15 year olds

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Someone adapt The Blue Castle!

I say this as an Austen fan, but enough Austen adaptations. She's one of the only classic authors I can think of who regularly gets feature film adaptations of her works.

I get it. Her stories are funny, accessible, romantic. Her stories aren't about highly-specific issues of her times, but have more universal themes that are easy for people to relate to even 200 years later. A lot of other classic books have lots of subplots that make them better miniseries material, but Austen's books, with one central romance thread and a few connected subplots, are much easier to adapt to feature film length without sacrificing major swathes of the book. But there are other books out there! If nothing else, adapt L.M. Montgomery or Alcott books that aren't Anne of Green Gables or Little Women. At the very least, give us Northanger Abbey! The world is full of books that have never been adapted, so there's no reason to keep adapting the same ones.