#(( mainly in the sense that it implies the days at spooky high are long past them

[royalreef]

       Ugh. Why’d she have to remind herself that she’s only got like... four months left? It never feels like she can breathe. It’s always either approaching or she’s only just starting to recover from it. That’s the nature of cycles, she supposes. Coming and going. Coming and going. Around and around the wheel goes, not stopping until it ends.

[starkey]

[Spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor!]

I know everyone is super loving Bly Manor cause ~80′s gays~!!! but some stuff about it sat really bad for me so I’m gonna try to verbalise it. Obviously if you loved it and aren't vibing with a critical analysis I'm not offended if you don't read lol. Also I’m not trying to say that there’s anything wrong with liking it! I just...didn’t, and I want to think about why, for a sec. (Sorry this got a bit long)

I think part of my problem is that I count Hill House as one of my favourite shows ever and I had ridiculously high hopes for Bly Manor, which probably couldn't ever have been fully realised. And there was actually a lot about it that I liked, especially at the begining. I thought the kids were great, and I loved the core group of Mrs Grose, Owen, Dani and Jamie. I liked the fact that the Henry Wingrave element was expanded upon, and I liked the complexity of Rebecca and Peter, and the room it gave them to be fully realised human beings. I quite enjoyed that they kept to the Hill House ghost mythology - that ghosts are lost in time but fixed in place, and that they jump from memory to memory, and haunt the people that they care about without knowing. But there were lots of things I wasn't so keen on...

Until the last episode my issues were mainly that it felt a bit...lazy? I can't stress it enough but the british accents were really really bad. Old!Jamie’s accent was deeply unbelievable and jarring, as was Henry Wingrave's, and although Peter’s accent was passable (I assume because the actor is English and not American like the others) it still didn’t match his mothers, or his ‘background’ - i.e. it sounded like a private school Edinburgh accent, not a Glasgow kid dragged up through poverty in the scheme - and yes there is a significant difference in those accents. I appreciate there’s a degree of privilege at play here - I’m used to the BBC producing high quality television where these details aren’t messed about with, and the production of Bly Manor was thoroughly American, but to put it in perspective, it would be like... if a character had a deep south dirt-poor Louisiana upbringing and spoke like somebody from a private school in Virginia. Other details also felt off - Rebecca’s costumes all seemed weirdly 2020-adjacent, none of the fashion or ancillary details seemed to match the UK in the 80s (which has a distinct feel), and the house that Peter returned to on his ‘memory bumps’ looked much more like an LA condo than a Scottish council house. Really, they should have just set it in America, because it felt more American than British, and they clearly didn't have any British people involved in the production.

I really didn't enjoy the narrative framing device of 'someone telling a story to a group of people at a party'. It makes sense in the Turn of the Screw, because the narrator is reading from a document written at the time of the events, so the narration becomes a first person one where the degree of detail is logically accounted for. In this take, the story alternated from being one which made sense - us just watching the characters move around normally - to one in which 'Jamie' (who’d apparently had a complete personality transplant that had turned her from a feisty northern lesbian into a coy, mysterious victorian englishwoman with a severe accent problem) adopted a falsely old-fashioned manner and told the wedding guests a ten hour long story about a haunted house.  And somehow neither Flora nor Miles recognised any part of this story in the least, in spite of what must have been overwhelming similarities? It was very jarring.  

I also kept waiting for a twist on a level with Hill House, but never got one. The big twist about Mrs Grose was, I thought, obvious from almost the first episode. I mean the woman didn’t eat or drink anything and spent most of her time confused about where she was, I thought it was fairly clear that she was a ghost. And yeah, I suppose because I’ve read the book I was never in any doubt that Peter was already dead. The ghosts in the background were much less spooky than in Hill House. They stood around in broad daylight while the characters talked and joked and it kind of felt like the ghosts had wandered in by accident and felt too awkward to leave. I really liked how spooky Hill House was - even apart from the jump scares I thought the psychological elements and the open discussion of death and grief was really affecting. I didn’t feel that at all in Bly Manor, and by the time we found out the details of Mrs Grose’s death, I’d already come to terms with it.  But all of this would have been fine, if it hadn’t been for the last episode.

I really really didn’t enjoy the bury your gays ending. And I’m not even usually against this in principle! I think in a dark/horror context, where there’s implied to be an ever-present threat of character death, it’s unreasonable to expect that no characters will die or experience tragedy - and in cases where there’s abundant LGBT rep some of those characters will by necessity not be cis/straight. So I don’t have a problem with gay characters meeting tragic or dark ends, as a general rule, particularly when it serves a narrative purpose and isn’t gratuitous. My problem here was in the manner and necessity of that death.

There were ways in which Dani could have died in this story that I would have felt were narratively meaningful and cathartic, but the manner in which she did die failed to hit those beats for me. This is a story in which two women in the 80's fall in love and are doomed by the world around them (we're already in Meryl Streep 'groundbreaking' territory here, in terms of metaphor). They know death is coming for them, that it will likely destroy them both, that they won't have an opportunity to grow old together, that eventually one day it will catch them and everything will be over - they're on borrowed time, and they spend a lot of that time looking over their shoulders waiting for shit to break bad. In the end, they're destroyed by a force in Dani's body/mind that she can't fight, that she can't win against, and the spectre of which haunts her through the years. Like... the obvious parallel here is mental health, and suicide - they even go out of their way to feature that classic heartsink moment with the overflowing bath. And to me, any story that has a message of 'no matter how strong you are, no matter how much love you have and give, or how beautiful the life you've built is, eventually the dark forces in your mind will Get You and it'll probably be before you make it to middle age' is... really shitty. The other echo that struck me was the HIV/AIDS crisis - obviously wlw were relatively spared from this, in comparison to mlm, but it still carries a cultural legacy of pain and trauma, and I really didn't need this show to grind down on that for me.

And the thing is... in the original story, the governess doesn't even die! Miles does, so maybe there's an argument here that Dani sacrificed herself in exchange for Miles's life in this retelling, but I'm still struck by this element of, like... they added this in! They chose to do this! Only one character dies in the course of this show (with Mrs Grose dying before the show starts) and it's the gay woman?? Why?? What did it show?? Why was it necessary?

Not to mention, the 'epilogue' scene paints Jamie as being very lonely and isolated. I'm not sure why the children didn't recognise ANY elements of this story from their past - even assuming they forgot the ghostly elements of their childhood, they should be able to see the similarities in the characters, but the scene also seems to imply that Jamie really isn't very close to Miles and Flora, and that she doesn't even really get to have a relationship with them as adults, in spite of losing everything to protect them, and not having any family of her own.

Almost everybody else gets a happy ending, but Jamie ends the night of the epilogue standing alone at a table, with the love of her life dead in a cursed lake, doomed to spend eternity watching over a crumbling house, and idk to me? that kind of sucked.

[jawnkeets]

happy easter! how do i make the jump between young adult books and classic ones? i’ve read a few classic books (mainly for school) but i tend to read ya fiction. however i really want to study english at oxford and ik that i’m going to need to widen what i read. so do you have any tips on starting to read classics or can you recommend some classic books that are good/interesting? i really want to read more classic books AND enjoy them! thank you

hi! i’m so so sorry about taking so long to reply. in truth i didn’t know how to answer this at first! partly because i was trying to work out how i did it, and partly because if i made an advice post on this i didn’t want to snobbily imply that the time comes when we should all be moving on from YA lit, because i know it’s really important to a lot of people that follow me, and i don’t at all want to prescribe what people should read at all. but disclaimers aside, it’s a really good question.

1. i suppose i’d say that whilst it is a new start in some ways, in others it really can just be a further expansion and continuance of your interests! when i read young adult i loved spooky stuff, so the first thing i sought out was classic lit along those lines, particularly gothic and/ or late victorian literature. that way i didn’t have to force myself to be interested; i was already interested in the subject matter and then only had to gradually adjust to the language and pacing. then i found that the more i read, the more my tastes gradually changed and organically developed (e.g. ‘i really liked these particular philosophical questions/ moral issues raised by frankenstein as much as the spooky stuff i originally picked it up for, i think i’ll read some more romantic literature dealing with similar concerns'), and the more classic lit i read willingly and enjoyed genuinely. if you send a list of young adult genres etc u like i can do my best to recommend some classic lit for you to start with!

2. romanticiseeee itttt – watch dead poets society, share pretty pictures on tumblr, etc. you can give this up later (or not! up to u), but this has given so many people a sense of how exciting history, literature, philosophy, etc are. as i’ve said in my faq, don’t do this at the expense of actual learning, but rather use it to kindle a sense of excitement, like it’s something really important and life-changing (which it is!!). look at art, read the wikipedia pages of philosophers, get acquainted with greek myth, do it all (it doesn’t have to be in a systematic way, just follow what catches your eye and the links will form naturally)! i think schools get it wrong in separating subjects so firmly from one another – you’re delving into the past, into ways of feeling and thinking that in many ways are SO different to what we think now (though in some ways comfortingly similar). be open not just to enjoying this as a hobby, but to entering it. i felt pretentious at first and that i was faking it, but it really is a case of faking it til you make it (and passion is never fake, anyway). there’s no ‘one way’ to read classic lit – i often thought i was missing something and was going to get ‘caught out’ as a phoney, but as long as you keep challenging yourself and throwing yourself into it the ideas and opinions you develop will be absolutely good enough, and you really will get out what you put in!

3. i was really fortunate to have a fantastic literature teacher who set up a weekly poetry club for a year or so; he picked poems that were ‘classic’ but very simple to understand. it was a wonderful way into classic lit as not just a stuffy thing to be adjusted to and slogged through to acquire a vague sense of achievement (why i didn’t read much of it before), but as vivid and alive – some of the poems had me reeling and i’d leave the classroom feeling things i’d never felt before and didn’t know how to name. ‘stopping by woods on a snowy evening’ and ‘the road not taken’ by robert frost were two i vividly remember, ‘high windows’ by philip larkin another, and also coleridge’s ‘rhyme of the ancient mariner’. read them aloud if you can! i’ve put together a poetry list, too, if you liked these (they’re all on there!) – skip the ones that don’t immediately speak to you, but hopefully a few will.

4. i was nervous about reading classic lit for ages, and was really put off properly starting, because when i read classic lit i sometimes just didn’t understand it. the actual words and the way sentences were constructed often baffled me, i had to go to the dictionary a gazillion times, i used sparknotes for every single scene in a shakespeare play. this is all fine, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise! rome wasn’t built in a day, and things only get easier. you’ll look back and be surprised how quickly you improve, even in a short space of time.

5. but i also felt there was something i just wasn’t getting not just in terms of literal understanding but because a lot of classic lit (like the poetry of keats, or hamlet, or the great gatsby, which i did for school and was my sort of ‘gateway novel’) was so beautiful and mysterious but conceptually so far beyond me or different to how i thought and functioned, or even if i sort of grasped it i didn’t have a clue what to say about it. rainer maria rilke’s letters to a young poet fixed that for me – it’s a beautiful piece of writing and seemed to answer so perfectly my mix of confusion and mute awe when reading classic lit:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

i hope this helps 💕 an exciting road ahead!!