James Norrington did nothing wrong. His only crime was being a Jane Austen hero in a Disney movie based on a theme park ride.

Okay, no. I tried, but couldn’t just let this post stand. Listen, OP, I agree with you 10,000%, but it is so much worse than that.

In CotBP, where the criticism that James is boring is most likely to come up, we can see in his introductory scene that James is head over heels for this woman by Regency standards. I mean, the unflappable, highest ranking Naval officer in Port Royal is reduced to a stammering, awkward mess around Elizabeth. If this were an Austen novel, y’all would be fucking swooning.

And what of the deleted scenes? (Don’t even get me started on this, I will rant for hours about how salty I am that they cut them.) We see James agonizing over the fact that he believes Elizabeth has only accepted his proposal as a means to an end. His stony veneer cracks, and we get to see him vulnerable!

‘Is it so wrong that I should want it given unconditionally?’ is such a fucking incredible line, and in a period drama, would be seen as a declaration!

But James isn’t in a period drama. He’s in a Disney movie based on a theme park ride. The film is an unapologetic mishmash of genres, and he has committed a cardinal sin by falling in love with Elizabeth, a modern character. She practically rolls her eyes at his heartfelt confessions! She wants nothing to do with his subtle emotional advances!

While, in a Austen novel, James Norrington would have been the clear hero and most obvious choice for Elizabeth to make, she is completely uninterested because he’s made the mistake of being period appropriate and not a product of the early 2000s like the rest of the main cast.

And the worst part is…once James changes so that he fits into their world…he is killed.

But that’s a discussion for another time.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

@meganphntmgrl and i talked about this endlessly when I was in NYC (and i’m trying to make her read Pride and Prejudice just to prove this point lmao).  I’m not even convinced that Elizabeth has this degree of non-interest in him, though.  I think she just already has a really big crush on Will and thinks, due to the circumstances of their meeting, their being the same age and everything, that they’re meant to be together. (Is that a convention of modern storytelling? Little bit, yeah, but it’s not unknown to either mythological romances or period romances - the class divide between them, and importantly, Elizabeth’s desire to be with him overwhelming her sense of convention and propriety, is what stands out to me the most as a 21st century detail.)  All that said, she doesn’t expect she can actually be with Will at the start of COTBP, and seems to be really considering James’ proposal. He’s not what she wants in life, but she’s not disgusted or rolling her eyes at him.  In her words, more or less, she kind of knew he might propose, and knows her father is all for the match, but it still took her off guard.  She’s having to decide on a realistic course for her life and to put aside her dreams, because she’s a woman now, whether she feels ready for that or not.

COTBP is a film written by men that thinks it’s a story about a girl being forced to choose between reality and romantic fantasy, and it’s very clear that Elizabeth knows that Norrington is an appropriate match for her.  Even though she does, in the story, accept his proposal as a means to an end, her acceptance is still fully serious.  (And for all I might joke about her dumping him or whatever - the proposal doesn’t get a big, dramatic rejection.  He sees her standing beside Will and asks if this “where [her] heart truly lies”, and she confirms it.  The breakup is implicit, but he instigates it, seeing this is what she wants.)  Elizabeth’s heart might belong to another man, but there’s no sulking or anger or even too much reluctance when she accepts James; she might even know they could be happy together.

When Will reminds her that her fiancé will want to know she’s safe after the climactic battle, as much as it hurts her, Elizabeth leaves.

tl;dr Elizabeth isn’t so much of a Spunky Modern Heroine Rejects All Trappings Of Period Drama stereotype that she doesn’t compromise on what she wants as society, her family and her fiancé dictate.  She accepts James’ proposal and is prepared to marry him; she never tries to run off with Will; it is James who breaks their engagement for her happiness.  There is no indication that Elizabeth particularly dislikes him; he just isn’t Will.

Then I just really really love their relationship dynamic in DMC and AWE because it’s not founded on expectation or obligation anymore and it isn’t hindered by propriety.  As soon as those things go away, they actually relate to each other like two people who have known each other for ages.  Elizabeth isn’t an unfriendly sort of person, but she doesn’t just go around relating to the other characters she doesn’t know very well.  The bits of conversation she has with James Norrington in Dead Men’s Chest are more real conversation than she and Will ever have in the entire film trilogy.  Will and Elizabeth get these pining, lovelorn speeches and bits of drama, but James and Elizabeth just talk like old friends.  You already know about the deleted scene where they casually strike up conversation on Isla Cruces; I love the moment where he makes a comment suggesting his dark mental state, and she gives him a look I can only describe as Suddenly Interested.

And she holds his gaze for a couple of frames!

So, not like, romantic interested. But like. Realizing this guy she’s known since forever has depth, and she wants to see it.

They’re interrupted by Jack, who is in this film particularly (a lot more than I realized, actually, but on the writers’ commentary Ted and Terry cannot stop bringing it up) is hoping to get Elizabeth to himself, and clearly picks up on this moment as infringing on that hope.

Curse of the Black Pearl was consciously written to frame Elizabeth as the protagonist, and when she chooses Will at the end, it’s because he and he alone among her potential love interests embodies her romantic dream.  Torn between the reality of Norrington, a man she’s always known might propose to her, a lawful man, a good and honest man, but embodying the smothering sense of obligation that comes with her class and gender role - and the reality of Jack Sparrow, a pirate she’s read about with eagerness who shows her that pirates genuinely are pretty scummy people, dirty and disloyal to everyone - Will appears to offer her a third option: someone who breaks the law, but only for the right reasons; someone who defies social convention, but only to better society. 

Except Ted and Terry are men and what seems obvious to me is that the third option Elizabeth really needs is to graduate from the damsel role life appears to have slotted her into and become the romantic hero she dreams of.  Sure, I buy that she loves Will, with a sort of infatuated and light-hearted love that could develop into something more but could just as easily not - but most importantly, what Will represents to her is a projection of the life she wants for herself.

And acquires, in the next two films.

Elizabeth’s narrative arc, if it weren’t tucked underneath or behind everybody else’s, is the most well-developed narrative arc in the trilogy, well beyond the first installment which is the only one that they actually wrote to particularly revolve around her.  Jane Austen heroine?  Maybe.  Probably not.  But the protagonist we deserved, most definitely.

And as much as I do like Will as a character - I actually think his storyline would have gotten the resolution and impact it deserved if he hadn’t been treated as the protagonist, as much as I think hers would have been, but this post isn’t an excuse for me to air my grievances lol - the character whose storyline most follows hers is Norrington.  

Her arc is about finding her place in the world, rejecting the specific oppressive reality she believes is inevitable as a well-bred 18th century female and embracing the heroine swashbuckler she’s wanted to be all her life but projected onto male love interests.  And this arc is a microcosm of the larger plot in a way no one else’s is - Beckett’s threat to end the age of piracy and keep the entire ocean under his thumb threatens her specific character growth and reflects the world she’s trying to escape in a way that is not half so resonant for anybody else.

Will’s story is, excepting turns of the plot in which he’s trying to save Elizabeth, entirely about his relationship with his father, and how that affects his identity.  It has nothing to do with society beyond the tensions in the first film where he wants to be respectable but has learned his father really was a pirate all along - after that film, there is no thematic or actual connection to society in Will’s plot, which is why it gets so exclusively connected to the supernatural storyline.  But Norrington’s arc is also about his place in the world.  After the first film, in which he and Jack and Will  operate as foils to one another, each of them demonstrating one of the paths Elizabeth may follow as she grows increasingly experienced and consequently disillusioned, Norrington has his fall from grace and subsequent identity crisis.  His maintaining the wig and coat while a drunken, miserable wreck on Tortuga, and his willingness to throw everything away to regain his former standing, implies that the role of Naval Officer was the whole extent of his identity.   So, yes, the man lacks a viable personality in COTBP - it works out to seem intentional by the sequel, because it becomes clear the role he was inhabiting was the only person he knew how to be, and without it he discovered how little of a person he was.  This is a grim inversion of Elizabeth’s storyline.  Elizabeth becomes more and more her true self, including symbolically casting off and manipulating her wedding gown, while Norrington symbolically clings to the relics of his former life and wallows in existential despair.

By the time of AWE, Norrington has discovered that his is not, in fact, nothing, without his social role - as evidenced by his willingness to betray all that he must stand for when that role has been resumed, to “choose a side”, and to choose Elizabeth’s.  But yes… then he dies.  

Both in the substance of their actual conversations, which, owing to their rarely being about love, convey a greater sense of compatibility than Will and Elizabeth’s conversations never being so casual and often running to the dramatic, and the symmetry of their narrative arcs, the story of Elizabeth and James Norrington really would have made a perfect romance.

@morethanprinceofcats really out here bringing the “in this essay I will…” meme to life

@smallvillecommunity this is…….. the nicest thing……… anyone has ever said to me

I remain absolutely floored how much the original trilogy (I haven’t seen any other others) absolutely rose above the fact that they were, in fact, Disney Movies based on an amusement park ride.

Norrington is a gentleman in the best sense of the word. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly like him… but he leaves me no choice but to respect him.

The latest from my sketchbook.

Was talking to my dad yesterday and.

Hm.

Apparently my dad is (still?) disappointed that I didn’t get my PhD in English Lit (and tried not very subtly to convince me to apply to grad school) because he’s very certain of the fact that I am exactly the right kind of person to fixate on tiny details and do a lot of research on them and write a dissertation on them and he’s not *wrong* it’s just that I don’t know how to tell him that I have channeled that energy into writing 300k words of pornographic fanfiction because I would *much* rather do that and work at a computer store than work with academics.

But also we both agree that it’s bullshit that nobody adapts the conservatory scene or the banquet scene in Dune, so that was a nice chat.

I should point out that my dad was a college professor, before he retired. I don’t know if this was him going “my kid should be a college professor too” or if this was him going “one of my kids should attain a higher level of education than I have and the other one is a functional human being so it’ll have to be you” but I did point out to him that I’m neck deep in writing approximately twelve essays about hierarchy, community, and liberation in the works of Jane Austen and he was like “but you’re not going to publish it” and. The thing is, I *am* going to publish it, I’m just going to publish it for free and while I might pay someone to copy edit it and ask some people to review the individual essays, I’m not going to attempt to get it peer reviewed.

Also he’s never sure whether or not I’m fighting with my sister when we talk about Austen.

(to be fair, neither am I)

My sister owns like twenty extremely twee and photogenic editions of Austen books and went on a Jane Austen vacation where she went to the Austen house and went somewhere else and did an Austen tea but *GOD FORBID* we talk about class and how naval commissions worked in the Georgian era. No, Austen was never writing about *class.* English authors would never write about anything so gauche as *class* /s

There’s a definite possibility that Bingley’s father got rich through the slave trade, but Austen leaves out specifics in that regard and the vague way she describes the family’s wealth (so new that their father didn’t live to buy a mansion, but no so new that his daughters were only educated at home, and belonging to a family in Northern England) could mean that their wealth came about from the slave trade or could mean that it resulted from the beginnings of industrialization and the cotton trade (which, of course, would still have had some profits derived from slavery but is not quite on par with Sir Bertram’s ownership of a plantation in Antigua in Mansfield Park).

As to the Gardiners, they don’t actually appear to be spectacularly wealthy, just *more* wealthy than the Bennets, and there’s no special speed connected with the way Mr. Gardiner raised himself from being the son of a lawyer to someone who lives in a part of town that Caroline Bingley mocks him for (which is to say, he doesn’t appear to have raised himself particularly high in society). Mrs. Bennet married slightly up, which is the Bennet daughters are tenuously part of the landed gentry but are still fairly poor, and Mrs. Phillips married a lawyer like her father; she seems to be better off than Mrs. Bennet but worse off than the Gardiners. But the source of Mr. Gardiner’s income is pretty clear:

Working in trade and keeping warehouses in London means that while Mr. Gardiner may have traded in goods that were made or made possible by slaves, he was not directly involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Living close to his warehouses indicates that he is not wealthy in the way that the Bingleys or Darcy are wealthy - he is wealthy enough to keep a house in London and take vacations, but not so wealthy that he can live off of the interest of his wealth.

Given few direct references to slavery in Austen, which are uniformly negative, I think that it is unlikely that she would intentionally write sympathetic characters as engaged in the slave trade.

Austen was not an abolitionist, and it’s important not to color her as one. I don’t want to whitewash the Austen family connection to slavery - it did definitely exist (her father was the trustee of a plantation in Jamaica for some time) - but there has been something of an upswing in people attributing all of the wealth in Austen’s work to the slave trade, and that isn’t accurate.

Darcy, for instance, isn’t contemptible for his wealth because he was a slave trader. He’s contemptible for his wealth because he was a *landlord.*

(I’m joking, kind of.)

@ms-demeanor I agree with you for the most part, but I’m kinda curious why you say that Austen’s references to slavery are uniformly negative.

I can only think of two instances where slavery is mentioned directly:

The first is in Emma where Mrs. Elton thinks Jane Fairfax is making a reference to the slave trade, and says that she and Mr. Elton are abolitionists– to which Jane replies that she wasn’t talking about the slave trade, but the governess trade. It’s an interesting exchange, because the Eltons are portrayed as being nasty, petty, annoying people, and they’re the only people in Austen’s books (as far as I remember) who explicitly say they’re abolitionists. At the same time, the way Mrs. Elton phrases it kind of makes it sound like she assumes that being an abolitionist is not only accepted, but expected of her– and no one else, including Emma, seems to think it worth remarking upon that she is an abolitionist. I guess if you squint it’s maybe implied that Jane is an abolitionist? But I don’t think it’s stated explicitly; rather it’s an assumption made by Mrs. Elton (who makes a lot of other misguided assumptions).

The second is in Mansfield Park, which you mentioned. Sir Thomas Bertram explicitly gets his money from slavery, and while he’s portrayed as being rather domineering at times, he’s certainly not the bad guy in that book by any means. Pretty much no one in that book treats Fanny well, but Sir Thomas is kinder to her than almost anyone other than Edmund, and also admits he was wrong to pressure her to marry Henry Crawford. His connection to slavery, as far as I can recall, is portrayed pretty neutrally.

I don’t know what Austen’s personal views on slavery were, but her books seem to be deeply ambivalent about it– honestly, my impression purely from her books is that she considers the subject rather taboo, or at least distasteful. When Mrs. Elton talks about abolition, it’s treated as embarrassing/awkward, rather than as a moral issue, and Sir Bertram’s failings don’t have anything to do with him owning slaves.

I’d love to be corrected, though– maybe I missed something!

The scene in Emma actually strongly implies that Mrs. Elton’s family is connected to the slave trade and that she is extremely defensive about it. She hears a mention of slavery and immediately says “if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend of the abolition,” Mr. Suckling being her brother-in-law.

It’s phrased in a very “the lady doth protest too much” kind of way, because she hears someone mention the concept of trading in human flesh and immediately assumes it’s a jab at her brother-in-law - which suggests that her brother-in-law (not her husband, father, or sibling, very specifically this one person she is connected to) was involved in the slave trade before abolition.

It’s like Ivanka Trump hearing someone mention the border wall and turning around to say “My father is the least racist person you’ll ever meet!”

This is also emphasized by the fact that her family name is Hawkins, the family name of the man who introduced the slave trade to England, and that she is from Bristol (with Liverpool and London it was one of the three main hubs of slavery in England) but pretends to be from Bath.

Fanny Price’s one mention of the slave-trade is met with dead silence. She asks Edmund if he heard her ask her uncle about the slave trade, he says that he had hoped she would ask him more questions, and she responds that she would have if her question hadn’t been met with dead silence. There are several interpretations to this, but honestly my feeling is that Fanny asked a question that she thought was apt and it went over like a lead balloon.

Fanny is a *fascinating* character because she is so completely broken by her family that you have to approach her as an unreliable narrator. Fanny looks at the world like a kicked dog and it makes Mansfield Park absolute torture to read sometimes, and part of that is in her devotion and generosity toward her *awful* relatives.

I would actually argue that Sir Thomas Bertram is one of the worst of several very bad men in Mansfield Park. When, after years of abuse at the hands of the Bertram family and constant reminders of how much she owes them for allowing her into their home to be abused, she refuses to marry Henry Crawford and tells her uncle that she could not like him enough to marry him, he criticizes her for essentially talking back, saying that he thought she was free of the independence of spirit that infected young women these days. (This paper is good overall, but look specifically at pages 10-11 for how poorly the Bertrams generally and Sir Thomas Bertram in particular treated Fanny). My general takeaway is that everyone at Mansfield Park is terrible enough to deserve each other and that Fanny and Edmund are lucky to get away and be happy and poor together.

There’s actually a TON of academic writing on slavery in Mansfield Park. There are several the points that academics can get deep in the weeds on (particularly whether or not the names she used were allusions; I tend to believe they were) but the “slavery” section of the Mansfield Park wikipedia page has a decent, if quick, overview.

There are plenty of people who see Austen as an apologist for slavery, there are plenty who see her as an abolitionist. I don’t think that Austen was an abolitionist in an activist sense, I do think that she was likely very sympathetic to abolition.

Reading through Austen analysis is interesting because you stumble across a lot of people who have no idea what is going on. Austen was relatively subtle in her own time, and now seems so subtle that she is opaque. If you want to get a feel for that, look at the Jane Austen Fandom Wiki, where nobody who has spent more than an afternoon with a Jane Austen book has ever written a description of any of the characters. Their description of Sir Thomas is so anodyne that it becomes revisionist.

Genuinely, there is a lot of context that modern readers have lost when reading Austen. There are a lot of references and allusions and turns of phrase that fly right over our heads unless we spend a lot of time catching up with them. It’s a thing that happens in literature as time passes, it’s why Shakespeare nerds and Chaucer nerds are slightly crazy - they know all these excellent in-jokes and they can’t explain them to normies without writing a dissertation. Austen is very similar, and because her books are often presented as comedies of manners it is easy to overlook the fact that nearly all of them also contain tremendous tragedy.

Anyway, if anyone ever wants to read up more on Austen and Austen criticism, Persuasions is an online journal of Austen criticism that is at least partially free to read. It’s pretty awesome.

bored-at-work thought of the afternoon: which Austen hero would be most likely to be a vampire?

My gut says that though pop culture would try and make it Darcy, it really wouldn’t be, because he’d be so horrified at being undead and how this violates his moral principles he’d walk into sunlight. 

I think it would make the most sense for it to be Henry Tilney? Has the love interest most likely to either be incredibly chill with it or E X T R E M E L Y into it, has the bad dad who’d probably induct him into it, has an affiliation with a cool proper vampiric house in the form of Northanger Abbey, has a sarcastic sense of humor that helps him deal with being one of the legion of the damned, has the hunting dogs that would enable him to be a Twilight-vegetarian i.e. he drinks animal blood instead of human blood.

On the other hand, I do think it would be the sexiest and most fun to have Captain Wentworth as a vampire. He and Anne are already so aware of each other physically. Why not make it Gothic?

sdkjfhsdkf fuck that is SO funny, I feel like it’d have to be one of those What We Do in the Shadows scenarios where the whole time Mr. Knightly is just lecturing new vampire Emma on her responsibilities. What does she mean biting her victim like that? There’s a proper way to do it, she’s being so wasteful not going straight for the jugular, etc. 

also genuinely believe that in Mansfield Park the Crawford siblings would be vampires and Fanny Price is the only one to realize it

booty shorts with “i love you most ardently” on the ass

Spork plug

Last summer, our Which Jane Austen? exhibition was made even more comprehensive and exciting by some loans from the National Library of Scotland.

It was time to return the favour.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. And then the murders began.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And then the murders began.

The phantom of the opera did exist. And then the murders begun.

Maman died today. And then the murders began. 

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. And then the murders began.

In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne. And then the murders began.

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram; multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem,               inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum, Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae. Deinde homicidia coeperunt. 

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. And then the murders began.

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. And then the murders began. 

It was a dark and stormy night. And then the murders began.

“Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.

And then the murders began.“

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?’ And then the murders began.

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. And then the murders began.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. And then the murders began.

@ellenkushner I just tried this with Swordspoint and it doesn’t work because the murders have already started

The importance of page turning your treasures

On Friday 4 August, the Which Jane Austen? exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries is closing to the public one half hour early. But why? What’s going to happen in that time?

When putting this exhibition together, Professor Kathryn Sutherland arranged for a few items to be borrowed from other, non-Bodleian collections: things that would help tell Austen’s story in detail, or to illustrate the breadth of ideas woven into the exhibition’s display cases.

Amongst these loan items is a manuscript of Sanditon, Austen’s final, unfinished novel, written entirely in her own hand. The manuscript comprises of three booklets, of which the third has been borrowed from King’s College Cambridge for our display.

One of Professor Sutherland’s captions as displayed alongside the manuscript.

Austen used brown gall ink to write this manuscript. This is a particularly sensitive ink, and there’s a risk of it fading when exposed to light for too long. While illumination in the Bodleian’s ST Lee gallery is carefully controlled, precautions are still taken to absolutely minimise any risk of harm to the valuable objects on display.

Having seen this manuscript in person, it can be honestly said just how moving it is to look directly upon the last words Austen crafted before her tragic, early death. There’s little surprise that this is such a popular item for display. Of course, this high demand means that the manuscript needs extra special care to avoid over-exposure or damage.

So when Which Jane Austen? closes 30 minutes early on 4 August, it’s for a page to be carefully turned in this important manuscript.

As is usual for loan items, staff from the host institution will be accompanied by a member of the lending institution - in this case, a member of King’s College, Cambridge will attend the Bodleian Libraries to oversee the page turning. The 4.30pm timing is a courtesy to our colleague from Cambridge, who will have a long journey to and from Oxford in order to make this appointment.

There is one more page turn scheduled for Sanditon in September, to ensure this popular, impressive and affecting example of Austen’s own handiwork remains intact and respectfully preserved.

Which Jane Austen? runs at the Bodleian Libraries’ Weston Library until 29 October.

Edward Ferrars suggests that happiness is an individual affair in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. (via oupacademic)

Consider this (based on a conversation I had with some friends a while ago): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for people who actually like Pride and Prejudice. Look–I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I got about 20 pages in before I came to the conclusion that the person who wrote it did so out of the belief that the original Pride and Prejudice was stuffy and boring. There were out of character vulgar puns. And the trailer for the movie did not convince me that I had missed anything by cutting short my reading experience. So, what I’m talking about here is this premise: the world of Pride and Prejudice, but if you die, it’s highly likely, almost certain that your corpse will get up and try to eat people. But no one dies in Pride and Prejudice, you might say. In fact, few or no people die in any Jane Austen novel. This is true. But people do get sick with some regularity. Imagine the tension added to Jane getting sick after going to visit Bingley if there was the chance that she would become a zombie after she died. Becoming a zombie in an eligible bachelor’s house probably would have seriously wrecked any chances of any of the living sisters ending up with him. Imagine Mr. Collins, as a minister, having the duty upon someone’s death of severing their head with a ceremonial plate or something that would prevent the corpse from rising. Obviously important, but this only makes him more self-important and obnoxious. And dangerous. For you see, in this version, Mr. Bennett, who stays in his office all the time, whose life is the only thing allowing Mrs. Bennett and her daughters to stay in the house–Mr. Bennett is definitely a zombie. He died at home, and Mrs. Bennett decided that, no way were they dealing with this, and so…just started faking it. Jane and Elizabeth know. The younger sisters don’t. In this universe, I think we have to go with zombies that are not any faster or stronger than the humans they were, and in fact tend to get weaker as time passes because their flesh is rotting. And…hmm, okay, how about they are pretty violent upon rising, and for about a week afterward, trying to bite people and spread the infection (even though most people are carriers anyway, but getting a nasty bite from a corpse will give you other stuff that will have you die while carrying the virus). But then they calm down and basically just start sort of attempting to act like they did in life, that is, taking habitual actions with no consciousness, in a depressing and desiccated way. So Mr. Bennett is a zombie, and Mrs. Bennett’s number one goal is to get her daughters married before anyone finds that out. And this, actually, makes Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr. Collins more frustrating for Mrs. Bennett–obviously Mr. Bennett didn’t tell Elizabeth that she could refuse Mr. Collins, because Mr. Bennett is dead, but Mrs. Bennett can’t say anything or the game would be up. Another question in this version–does Mr. Darcy find out about Mr. Bennett being a zombie somehow? Does Elizabeth find out that he knows and didn’t say anything and this is something that helps repair his earlier actions? Anyway, this is the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that I was looking for.

@lufwoodemilius01

This is what I expected it to be before seeing that trailer for the first time.

oooohhhh

SO I actually enjoy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but holy shit, I would’ve enjoyed this a lot more….even if it takes away one of my favorite moments of this story in Mr. Bennett telling her to say no.

I’m a little mad actually.

Here’s the thing, folks.

Chuck Tingle’s erotic works are short stories, i.e. works of fiction under 7500 words.

They are science fiction: they take place in a complicated multiverse full of sentient objects, dinosaurs, and unicorns.

They are inarguably popular: there is no way Chuck Tingle, as a self-published author of erotica, would have the profile to get troll-nominated for a Hugo if he wasn’t drawing thousands of delighted readers to his short stories–can you name another science fiction author who regularly does that? (Can you name any other author of self-published SF erotica??)

But you wanna be mad about Chuck Tingle getting nominated for a fan-voted award for best (most popular) SF short story, because his story is silly? Because it’s got buuuttttt seeeexxxxxx?

I haven’t seen one person get mad about the Related Work nominated this year which is hosted on a website called Ask A Bigot and in which the author lays the blame for child rape solely on homosexuality. I haven’t seen one. And that blog post is nominated for a Hugo as Best Related Work (to Science Fiction), because the child rapist in question was a fantasy author–but you want to tell me “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” doesn’t belong in its category? You want to tell me Chuck Tingle is the nominee bringing down the tone of this year’s Hugos?

Fuck a whole lot of that.

Or as our friend Jane put it:

“Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.  Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than any other literary corporation in this world, no species of composition has been so much decried. … There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and under-valuing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.“

–Jane Austen, defending that most reviled of genres: the novel.

One of the drawbacks of writing Tumblr posts when I’m angry is that I don’t even always work out what point I’m trying to make until long afterward, let alone consider whether I’ve made that point clearly. So! A morning-after addendum.

Here’s the thing, guys. The Rabid Puppies put SIXTY-FOUR NOMINATIONS ON THE HUGO BALLOT THIS YEAR. Sixty-four! 

Some of those have, rightly, gotten a pass as things that are good and popular with mainstream Hugo voters and would have gotten nominated anyway: Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Penric’s Demon”, The Sandman: Overture, The Martian. 

Some things have likewise gotten a pass because even though they likely wouldn’t have appeared on a Hugo ballot prior to the Puppies takeover, they’re generally acknowledged to be popular in their own parts of the genre: Jim Butcher and Stephen King were not regularly appearing on Hugo ballots before last year, but okay, yeah, they fit the parameters of the categories, they have massive fan followings and enjoy enormous commercial success; maybe they do deserve to be considered. The blind, rabid pig finds an acorn once in a while.

And there is also a lot of toxic self-aggrandizing garbage on the ballot because the Puppies are nominating their own leaders and friends. The entire Best Related Work category is a tire fire. Three short fiction nominees were published by Castalia House, which Vox Day owns, and one was published on Vox Day’s website. I don’t even know what’s going on in Best Graphic Story and I’m not sure I want to.

I just want people to recognize that automatically lumping “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” into the category of “horrible turds foisted on us by the Rabid Puppies”–making it the banner for that category–is a nasty knee-jerk reaction to surreal humor and gay erotica. 

There are a lot of actual turds on the ballot. A LOT. But I’m pretty sure “Space Raptor Butt Invasion,” as a very popular short story that happens to fall way outside the Hugo voting mainstream, is actually an acorn.

so Charlotte Bronte read Emma by Jane Austen and was really interested in this minor character named Jane Fairfax who was poor and would have been a governess had she not married well and then Bronte wrote her own novel exploring the plight of the poor governess who married this guy named Edward Fairfax Rochester in a novel called Jane Eyre and my point is don’t let anyone tell you shit about fanfiction.