#his travel journals are basically love letters to Penelope

[checkoutmybookshelf]

...It is possible I am about to bring the Bridgerton fandom down on my HEAD, but I have an opinion and I am sharing it.

The show hasn't set writer Colin up sufficiently well for me to believe that he is going to catch professional jealousy about Pen being Lady Whistledown.

Yes, we got the journal reading scene, and it is well established that Colin is a prolific letter writer. I am also aware that the fandom is happy to headcanon Colin being as prolific a letter writer as he is made out to be is setup that he is a prose writer. But um.

Contextually, when all you have to communicate with people is letters? Like, that doesn't necessarily HAVE to equate to also being an excellent prose writer. For one, when you're writing a PRIVATE letter to someone you like (such as a friend or family member) your audience is extremely specific, so you don't have to tailor to a general audience. The skills are different. I imagine the letters being a combination of text messages and a Tumblr blog and a Facebook profile before Facebook became functionally unusable. It's a means of connecting and sharing experiences, and given how the Bridgertons react to the letters and their content, it's basically an amateur travel highlight blog. Which is why the letters and journals worked TOGETHER in the book to establish Colin as a good travel writer, because he had the letter format and the longform format. They complemented each other and there was more emphasis on Colin actually engaging with his journals in the book. Like, he was talking about editing them and refining the prose and really engaging with the text. That piece is missing in the show for me. He doesn't seem to really give a damn about the writing unless the plot needs him to in a given moment.

We got two full seasons of Penelope building her private life around Whistledown and finding time to write and struggling with writing and working out the logistics of getting published and protecting her identity. Even without the time jump in the book that gives her extra experience as a runaway successful gossip columnist, I believe that writing is important to Penelope in the show.

Colin spent season 1 being a naive white knight, without so much as a hint that our boy is a writer. But maybe he discovered writing on his travels. Ok, fair enough, but then why didn't they have him working on writing in season 2 when he was feeling directionless and purposeless? Would that not have been a direction and a purpose? He just...kinda shows back up in season 3 and there's a journal for one scene and we're expected to believe that he is suddenly as avid a writer as Lady Whistledown? Sorry, no, I'm not sold. We don't even get what might have been an interesting internal conflict where his fuckboying around the ton in a desperate attempt for validation is CONFLICTING with some kind of internal validation that writing brings him. Like...the foundation and the groundwork and the moments that Penelope gets to establish writing as something important to her just are not there for Colin.

I honestly think I'd have preferred them to drop writer Colin altogether (I'd have been disappointed as hell) rather than try to token in the writing with like...the letters and the singular journal scene. Writer relationships can get MESSY and DRAMATIC and...I would have loved that. But the show just hasn't spent enough time there for me. I'm still here for the Polin relationship, but I wish we'd gotten the love and care in setting up writer Colin (or even a fraction of it) that Penelope got.

[shiveringsands]

Okay. But what if season 3 opens with Colin traveling abroad and writing letters to Penelope only to receive a letter back from Penelope that says something like

Dear Mr. Bridgerton,

It is inappropriate for an unmarried lady to engage in a private correspondence with a gentleman of no relation. I must request that you do not write to me again.

And Colin is 😢 and frantically writing letters to Eloise to figure out whats going on. Eloise writes back super cryptically like

I have not seen Miss Penelope Featherington since the end of the London season. She appeared to be in good health.

And Colin is so bummed because he has all these THOUGHTS and FEELINGS that he wants to tell Penelope about his travels and he CAN'T! So he starts writing them all down in a journal...and that's how he figures out that he wants to be a travel writer.