#… this became a rant i wasn’t intending to have. suffice to say; i don’t like my mom’s friends lol

[sildarmillionsays]

Looking Back on Literary Vlog Series Adaptations

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is now 10 year old! Whew! I was in college when it came out; can't remember if it was before or after I took an Austen seminar, but I still remember eagerly waiting for the weekly (or were they biweekly?) episodes and watching them as soon as they dropped. After LBD though, there was an explosion of all sorts of literary vlog-series adaptations. The company behind LBD (Pemberley Digital) made a few more themselves, and tons of other creators, mostly independent, also threw their hat in the ring and there were vlog-series adaptations of all kinds of literary works. To the best of my knowledge, this is the masterlist post that has catalogued them all. I used to watch many of these with a lot of enthusiasm ... I had intended to watch them all, but never quite got around to that. But also, I had started to get a little tired of them?

On the 10 year anniversary of LBD, I wanted to bring up some of my old thoughts on why none of the other shows quite lived up to it.

None of the other shows were quite as inventive as LBD when it came to modern-day adaptations. They tended to be very straightforward adaptations, just modernized. They were very reluctant to change anything about the plot, even if it would be a better representation of the spirit of the book. For example, in LBD, it wasn't a marriage proposal Lizzie turned down from Collins; it was a job offer. Because the significance of the marriage proposal in the original novel was that it offered financial stability that she was quite crazy to turn down. But in 2012, turning down a marriage proposal really would be NBD. In fact, turning down a marriage proposal when you're broke is probably a good call. But turning down a job offer wen you're broke? None of the other shows made as inventive a choice as this one and that was kind of a let down.

I thought it was extremely weird when college students in 2012 were depicted as being ready to get married just like that. It seemed like a failure of modernization when all the data indicate that Millennials have been getting married later compared to older generations (here is a source). If the shows were set a few decades earlier, that attitude towards marriage could have made sense (but then you couldn't have done the vlog format) or if they were set in small rural towns where people still do get married early, it would have made sense, but even people in big cities were behaving anachronistically.  

These shows were very eager to be "diverse" but were rather performative in their diversity. I've ranted a lot about how I don't like this performative diversity, but Broey Deschanel did an excellent job covering the "white people in brown skin" trope very well, so I won't into that again. Suffice it to say, I am not a fan of casting POC in white roles and then doing nothing to culturally adapt those characters to fit the cultural background of character's supposedly new ethnicity. They are still brown people with white names and white stories. LBD, on the other hand, made a valiant effort to adapt the characters they racebended. Charlotte Lucas became Charlotte Lu. Charles Bingley became (LOL) Bing Lee. There was no nuanced commentary on race, sure, but at least they made some effort.

Many of the shows also attempted to introduce sexual diversity into the shows by changing the sexual orientation of certain characters. I actually didn't get a chance to watch many of the shows  that tried their hand at this, but from what I remember, I think the show that handled this well was Carmilla (I haven't read the original, but from what I understand, the source material was quite conducive to explore homoerotic themes). The March Family Letters also did a decent attempt at this with one character questioning their presumed heterosexuality, which was refreshing because most shows had characters who were already sure of their orientation. But my issue with MFL was that I feel like they checked plot-point boxes without really bringing to life the spirit of Little Women (something the 2019 film adaptation by Greta Gerwig was able to do.)

Finally, I did not like how these vlog serieses leaned HARD into the culture of oversharing. Back in the day, I had written a whole post about how much this bothered me and I will link that here.

Once again, as explained in the linked post, LBD handled this issue better.

To celebrate LBD's 10 year anniversary, Ashley Clements (who played Lizzie in the show) is doing a vlog series called the The Look Back Diaries in which she will watch all the episodes and offer commentary. I'm curious to see what commentary they will do regarding the oversharing aspects, especially from those Domino videos. Given the recent conversation around the importance of protecting user's privacy that has evolved over the past 10 years, I wonder if the cast will look back on the Domino videos as super cringe because that AI platform was sure posting a lot of videos that shared sensitive private information that many people might not be cool with. If the Pemberley Digital of the show were real, it might even face a class action lawsuit! So even though LBD handled this issue better, I think LBD is still guilty of glamorizing oversharing.

Looking back on the literary vlog series phenomenon, it doesn't seem like I have a lot of good things to say, but I do think it was a rather nice snapshot in time. Lots of aspiring creatives got a chance to try their hand at making their own shows and get some experience and many of them went on to have careers in show biz, acting, directing, etc. The shows were not perfect, but they were a learning process for the creators, and a ton of fun for the viewers. I'm glad I had them around during my early 20s.

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