#book maura vs sasha alexander maura

[domini-porter]

Double apple! 🍏 🍎

Also 🍑

🍏: Oh lord, what don’t I overuse. Dropping subjects and articles. Opening with unattributed dialogue. Triple emphasis. Run-on sentences. I could name specifics but highlighting them feels like a risky move, and I feel like I’m just barely skating by on calling it writerly voice as it is. (I’m only partly self-deprecating here; I’m hyper-aware of many of my writing tics and flourishes, and it’s a constant battle to make them intentional, and not just tics and flourishes.)

🍎: Happy domesticity, especially babies. I’m someone who has never experienced a maternal instinct/desire for children, so I just wouldn’t know how to do it in an authentic way, and I’m a lifelong, legendary hater of the trope of Cute Kids™️ being every woman’s dream. I never bought Jane being baby-crazy; it always felt pretty out of character. I’m aware she’s married with kids in the books, but on the show? Absolutely not. Until a baby shows up, and it’s all she’s ever wanted? It just really struck me as one of those meta choices—suddenly Jane loves babies, wants a baby, as a way to, I dunno, prove something, but they couldn’t even make that read as comfortably hetero, what with the plan being Baby Rizzoli Has Two Mommies.

So it’s both me not liking or understanding the innate desire to have kids, or be around kids (I mean, I don’t hate being around kids; I do lots of kid-centric arts education and love it), coupled with it just not jiving with the characters, at least for me, at least until consistent characterization became optional (season 4, I wanna say?). 

Plus, or mainly: just let two powerful, professional female characters in traditionally male spaces own it. Particularly when their lives seemed satisfying and complete without babies, without even getting into that sort of gross misogyny-adjacent conservatism that a woman can only be truly happy when she’s a mother.

Uh, lots of feelings on this one, it seems 😬 

🍑: The gimme here is Edith Wharton, since the whole Age of Wickedness series is basically an homage, down to the name. And as an AU-forward writer, I spend most of my time dropping them into other worlds. But let’s see—Maura is obv my baby, and she (both the character and Sasha Alexander) have a vibe that feels timeless, that could fit into pretty much any setting or era (Jane can too, but more as a generator of conflict in the individual-vs-society mold; Angie Harmon has def seen an iPhone, or at least a cordless). I absolutely see her in some candlelit ballroom wearing a fancy gown, just as bewildered and oppressed by rigid social norms as she is in the modern era. Honestly she could vibe with any of the great romantic heroines of that era—Jo March, Anna Karenina, Lily Bart (hopefully not as tragically as those last two). Certainly that has a lot to do with high society being the same as it ever was, no matter the time period, but that makes it so easy and fun for me. And Maura’s internality makes her a useful and intriguing cipher in ways that really allow for explorations of culture, society, relationships, etc by using her as the lens. 

Anyway, I’m pretty sure she and Countess Olenska would’ve gotten along like a house on fire, even though it meant displacing Maura as Mrs. Manson Mingott’s favorite granddaughter when Ellen came back from Europe.

[julieverne]

Ok but is it plagiarism if I rewrite a Tess Gerritsen Rizzoli and Isles book to make it a tv version of both of the main characters where they fall in love a little bit more in each progressive book or...