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"The Cursed Bus: Enter Mars, the Guardian of Fire"

Hello!

Jane Austen has a unique writing style and it's not for everyone. You aren't "wrong" if she turns out not to be for you. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the narrator is pretty sarcastic. The narrator finds the characters amusing and sometimes straight out makes fun of them. I really like that.

One thing that may make the characters in Pride & Prejudice feel stereotypical is that it's a popular novel and many characters and plots have been copied or based on it (inspiration, not plagiarism). When I watched Casablanca for the first time for example, it was hard to appreciate how unique it was at the time because it's been represented in so many other works.

I love Austen's writing in general because she's laughing at the absurdity of the people and society around her. I love the description "comedy of manners" for her works. I find that she has good insight into how people act and think. Her characters usually feel psychologically real even when they are almost caricatures (Mr. Collins). Elizabeth's journey from misunderstanding to loving Mr. Darcy is so nuanced and realistic. I enjoy her love stories because they focus on intellectual and moral compatibility above lust. She also writes very good antagonists who have clear motives and act rationally, which can unfortunately be rare.

If you are having a hard time reading, I'd suggest an audiobook. It might help with the nuance in sentences. Jane Austen's writing can be very dense and there can be a lot of meaning and even contradiction in a single sentence. There are full cast versions on Librevox or this one. An annotated version might help too, I'm not sure if you were already provided one like that since this is a school assignment.

Here's Cinderella, 17th century style! :) This is my second 'historical Disney princess' design. :) It doesn't bear much resemblance to the original design, but I tried to take elements of the original design and imagine how such a gown would look as a 'real' costume. Also, I'm not good at drawing in the Disney style so I didn't even attempt it, LOL.

I chose 1697 as my starting point, as this is when Charles Perrault's version of the tale was published. One reason I like this period is the silhouette, and the 'a la Fontange' hairstyle; it's quite unusual as hairstyles go, and I thought it resembled Disney Cinderella's hair a little bit. :)

In brief, the aesthetic particulars of cultural expressions may be more or less arbitrary, but the material conditions that produce them are not. While there are many imaginable paths to any given end, whatever you end up with can't help but imply things about the material conditions that gave rise to it.

To pose a simple example, architecture made of wood implies the existence of trees, even if you never show a tree "on camera" – and if you explicitly establish that your setting doesn't have trees in it, people are going to wonder where the wood came from!

Let's bring it back around to the second example in the initial post: the plague doctor costume. Sure, some of the aesthetic particulars are arbitrary – the mask didn't have to be shaped like a beak, and the linen didn't have to be black – but the overall form of the costume emerges from the need to fulfill a specific function: it's basically the 17th Century equivalent of a biohazard suit.

Depicting a doctor in your fantasy setting sporting a plague doctor costume as casualwear is the equivalent of depicting a doctor in a contemporary or near-future setting casually wearing one of these:

Naturally, this doesn't oblige your fantasy setting to adhere to any of the real-world particulars of how our world's plague doctor costume came about, but function that costume performs unavoidably implies the existence of some reason for it to be socially acceptable for a doctor in your setting to wear a hazmat suit to dinner.

And that's the fun part for me: digging into all the things the author didn't realise they were implying about the material conditions of their setting because they were treating this stuff as purely iconographic.

Was the author thinking about what they were implying about the material conditions of their setting by establishing that it's socially acceptable for a doctor to wear a biohazard suit 24/7?

Probably not – they just threw it in because it symbolises doctor-ness.

Am I going to think about what it implies?

New photos of Emma Watson and Dan Stevens for ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (2017)