Dark Stories of the North

Definitely an observer, the idea of self inserting weirds me out dfghjhgfd I really like high drama and terrible emotional conflicts and I do not personally want anything to do with any of the things that happen in the books I like. And hm. I tend to like the characters that I feel are similar to me for the novelty? But again, that's for the novelty, so that isn't the majority of the characters I like or encounter. Honestly my bar for liking characters is fairly low. If a character is somehow surprising, is entertaining, or simply emotionally resonant in some form then I will like them. Admiration literally never enters the equation, like they're not real people lmao idc if someone's nice or a good speaker or whatever. I do gravitate towards certain character concepts and their built-in tropes and conflicts though.

I think it varies a little bit. The most common denominator is probably, frankly, that the author cared more about the (male) love interest and so gave him more interesting things to do and more emotional growth. And that genre romance specifically often frames the protagonist as like... simply a vector through which to carry out a romance with the love interest. It's super glaring rn with the way mainstream romances copy paste "ships" but usually the ship is like "ambiguous female protagonist/recognizable love interest from a well known IP" like all the ACOTAR rip offs are copying Rhysand, they're never porting over Feyre. There's an entire industry of Adam Driver/Kylo Ren love interests at this point, but even the super aesthetically blatant Reylo ones tend to barely have the most passing, surface level interest in Rey. But setting aside the "authors hate women" side of things, I think a love interest going on a huge, fraught emotional journey for the sake of the protagonist, is itself part of the fantasy. You know, it's "I can fix him" done completely unironically. The idealization of a man turning over a new leaf for the love of a good woman etc etc. Similarly passivity is like... not not framed as desirable in women either. The idea of the wide eyed ingenue who only has like three facial expressions?

It's still very Gender Roles, but that's genre romance for you!

There is Mercymorn everywhere for those with eyes to see…

some last anna karenina thoughts copied over from discord so I don’t lose them:

I forgot how bluntly the book portrays suicidal ideation, I liked how it goes into anna devolving. and her awareness that she cannot really control her own feelings. and just the stream of consciousness of her attempting to calm herself down and noting really trivial things like shop signs while internally spiraling over how she seems to have no way out of her life. it’s all done in a more naturalistic style than I would’ve anticipated from a novel of that era. I also didn’t realize this on first read, because I didn’t know the book’s conclusion but it sets up the concept of death as a means of escape for the characters through different plotlines so early!

I said it before at one point, but I’m really struck with the continued theme of banality? and that’s really the note the book ends on! levin as the near deuteragonist, and most distinct foil to anna in terms of anxieties and emotional tumult, suddenly has that epiphany of faith, deciding he does actually believe in *a* god, if not in church doctrine. and he assumes this sudden answer to like… the meaning of life… is going to change him completely and his relationships with others, and then on the very last pages he’s just taken by the regular day to day irritations, his relationship with his brother is no better, and he still yells at his wife even tho she doesn’t deserve it lmao. but something something there’s still meaning in life despite it all.

so there’s an interesting balance of the two arguments being like “nothing matters… might as well kill yourself” vs “nothing matters, therefore every small thing matters”

it’s fascinating given how much tolstoy hated the book while he was finishing it! and generally his own spiritual crises in old age. I also can’t help but read too much into levin as an author stand in— given there are autobiographical elements in that storyline. and also just “levin” -> “of lev”

a quirk I also noticed is that we never get any real scene setting for the city environs (I remember being disappointed about this on first read! I wanted to know what the fancy parties looked like!) vs the in depth descriptions of rural scenes, what the sky and fields look like etc.

anyway I do generally find the way tolstoy writes women really interesting. there tends to be *a lot* of depth allowed but there’s always a little bit of a high handed patronizing kind of vibe along with it. and I’m mulling over how I feel about how he wrote anna in that light as an irrational woman vs the novel itself as a reckoning with despair. but yeah idk really interesting with all cultural context how she is written, the choice of her as protagonist at all, and the handling of her affair and societal fall from grace

wrt levin specifically, it's such an interesting choice to have the second proposal take place with a sort of nearly ridiculous synergy. he and kitty carry out the entire, complicated conversation entirely in abbreviation. it reads like they must simply understand each other so well. and yet all of their later conflicts are just miscommunication after miscommunication and a refusal to understand or even really respect each other's values. the text itself explicitly states at one point that levin doesn't really know kitty or her thoughts and desires!

the dedication to mundaneness (for lack of a better word) in anna karenina is so interesting to me. there's a sort of, not exactly drudgery but things always turn out messy and anticlimactic next to the character's expectations. there's a recurring motif of characters wrestling with these grand philosophical, moral, or religious ideals, and reaching a supposed conclusion, or else settling exactly how they're going to get their life in order, and how idk poetic and appropriate it will be? and then it's always immediately undone. not in a diametrically opposed way, that would still give them a sense of catharsis but in a more banal foiling. I feel this is most often and most obviously illustrated by levin's story line (his back and forth on marrying kitty; how that marriage goes; how he perceives his brother's death next to the drawn out and miserable thing it is) but also in karenin. how when anna wishes to ask his forgiveness and reconcile, he thinks of several dramatic possibilities, one where he doesn't go to her and she dies, one where he goes and forgives her and she dies, another where he goes to her and she isn't as poorly off as she'd suggested so that he can scorn her. and explicitly he never considers the possibility that he might see her, genuinely forgive her, and then she lives and they have to keep dealing with all of their conflicts. or! that he might forgive her and she might still leave him.

vronsky and anna's relationship eventually souring falls in line with this as well, but the broad brush strokes are too... expected in a story. and it could be easy to perceive its unraveling through a very dramatic and romantic lens. but the banality and smaller, un-romanticizable unhappiness in all the subplots ground it, and paint it in a different light.

The metaphor of love as death continues. It’s interesting that Vronsky considered acting on love as a sort of greedy murder, whereas Levin is mourning the death of the possibility of a love that’s reciprocated.

Thinking about this extended metaphor…

I appreciate the dread inherent to rereading Anna Karenina. The book, while straightforward about its general subject matter, opens with the concerns of side characters and follows them for awhile. The main players aren’t treated like protagonists from the first page, so it’s almost coy about lacing them in.

Like oh, here’s Stepan Arkadyevitch occupied with the domestic fallout of his affair with the governess being discovered— by the way his sister Anna will be visiting soon. Don’t worry about it though. Here’s Konstantin Levin, who’s miserable trying to anticipate how a proposal to a girl will be received— by the way, he may have a rival in Count Vronsky. And of course they’re going to eventually meet, and of course things will go horribly!

lmaooooooooo

save me classic literature save me

so btw… I’m reading the drama book