Anghraine

heckofabecca responded to this post:

OH MY GOD I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO REMEMBER THE NAME OF WIZARD'S HALL FOR YEARSSSSSSS

I replied:

Glad to help! I haven’t read it since I was a kid, but it’s always stuck with me—maybe because it was such an influence on what I decided to write.

heckofabecca responded:

Dude the whole quilt of people and their names was SO DARK!!!!

I replied:

yesss

lotesse responded:

wizards hall is so good. did you ever read the pit dragon trilogy? I loved those

I replied:

I didn't!

toomerrymaiden said:

I loved the incarnations of immortality, it's a shame

I replied:

Yeah. :\

I mean, they always had their Anthony issues, but there was a lot that was really interesting and engaging about them (especially On a Pale Horse and With a Tangled Skein IMO). But he’s … blech.

gemmamelon said:

I, too, want Emelan, and was, just the other day, vaguely imagining Mara Wilson as Rosethorn, because I think she’d be able to be appropriately spiky while having a warm relationship with child actors that would also show through, on screen.

My best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.

The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.

This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)

And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.

Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.

Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.

(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)

Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.

This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.

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An anon said:

One of my biggest issues with 1995 P&P is that both Darcy and Elizabeth look too old. David Rintoul's Darcy was definitely too robotic for my tastes but I definitely got "young and fashionable" vibes from him.

I replied:

It’s not one of my biggest, in that there are a lot of other things that bother me more, but it does bug me, can’t lie. Just about everyone seems 5-10 years older than they should.

It definitely contrasts with the 2005 and 1980, where IIRC the ages are kind of all over the place, so some are spot-on or nearly so, and others are wayyyy off. If I recall correctly, the 1995 is more consistent but also almost always ‘off’ in that 5-10 year range.

I know this seems trivial to some people, but I think the ages do matter to their backgrounds and developments and general characterizations. Not just the young ones, either—Mrs Bennet would be barely middle-aged and Mrs Gardiner is almost certainly in her 30s. That affects the impression they give (to the audience and to the other characters) and their own experiences and personalities and dynamics with other people.

And I do think that Garvie and Knightley come across as early 20-somethings where other Elizabeths have a certain … hm, air of maturity about them that doesn’t fully work for me. Meanwhile, Darcy is literally introduced as a “young man,” is still in his 20s, and (like Elizabeth) has a character arc that rests on brand! new! experiences! And I think that the adaptations generally are—not interested in getting that across with him. But the 1995 is especially uninterested in that aspect IMO, so generally speaking, I’m with you there.

(I also agree that Rintoul is too far on the robotic end, but does come across as fashionable! It’s an interesting choice, because at first, Darcy seems to simultaneously resent ‘the world’ [i.e. the fashionable world] while also being judgy about people not being part of it. He’s not a fop by any means, but he is part of a certain world, and the ways in which he doesn’t fit aren’t visible, sometimes even to him.)

It’s occurred to me that two of my least favorite scenes in two very different adaptations are … basically the same.

(Predictably, ranting negativity re: Jackson’s LOTR and Davies’s P&P under the cut)

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Adaptation discourse has crossed my dash a few times lately, and … tbh, I think direct adaptations do inherently claim a connection to their source material. If their creators don’t want audiences considering how they’re engaging with the source material, they can file off the damn serial numbers like anyone else.

Tagged: #yes it's also a film; a tv series; a book; a whatever #and i think it's perfectly fair and important to consider things in those lights too #but that doesn't mean that it's invalid to look at something that proclaims itself a version of [x] and consider its relationship to [x]

A lot of Tolkien fandom has defended the PJ movies' sometimes drastic changes as totally valid artistic choices in an essentially separate creative work, so the meltdowns over the existence of changes in the Amazon series are ... hmm. Interesting.

(I don't like some of the ones we're hearing about, either—Elrond?!—but there is a blatant double standard going on here in how much independence adaptations should have. Can't lie that I have some schadenfreude, though.)