#kiralamouse

@kiralamouse - I think that if those concepts are the story you want to read, then maybe you should be the one to write it.

While I agree that those are concepts that should be addressed because they weren’t handled well in the movie, that’s not the story I’m telling here, and this will be shown in later parts of the story.

Regards,

Any language with a different writing system is a bear to learn. I can’t imagine tackling two at once. Do you at least remember enough that you don’t have to relearn basic literacy?

ha, unfortunately, no, i was completely illiterate (and tbh, barely conversant) in hindi only a few months ago, i had no grasp of the alphabet whatsoever, and now i’m semiliterate because the vowel diacritics and some consonants still give me trouble and i don’t know much vocab 😬 measuring literacy in mandarin is complicated, but if you take the view that knowing ~4,000 characters means someone’s literate, then i’m definitely still illiterate! (this is what i mean about it being humiliating, i was top in hindi in third grade and reading li bo’s poetry in eighth grade 🙈)

If they’re well into the tour, I go back to it all being deliberately staged, Drama and all. I’ve seen performers at an annual RenFest who seem to be improvising the weirdest stuff, but you see the same “improv” in different shows - the Six could do the same. But ofc that’s another layer of complexity… who ARE they under their stage personas, then???

Like, if you wanna go through the entire thought process that got me to this point, I was originally thinking about the whole “this contest was staged to make a point” twist aspect of the show (which is pretty explicit in the Broadway version at least--they 100% scripted the contest and the infighting and stuff) and how long they could reasonably keep that twist under wraps. I was wondering if this was a Hannah Montana Movie situation where the whole audience is just supposed to keep the secret?

But then I was like, OK, no. Assuming this music in the show is all diegetic, the audience 100% knows this is scripted/staged to at least a degree because you don’t just break into musical numbers in real life. And these songs are happening in real life. So the audience knows this competition is fake going in (even if they weren’t spoiled). What they potentially don’t know is what the fake competition is in service to. And also, and the end of the day, it doesn’t super matter if it’s a secret or not. Like, IRL I knew the twist going in and that didn’t change my enjoyment of the show.

Sidenote, this show is really weird to talk about because of the absolute lack of fourth wall effectively thrusting you into the narrative as soon as you step into the theater and forcing you to differentiate between the show and “the show”.   

Anyway, that got me thinking about just the show composition in general and yeah, they could have--and surely did--script most if not all of the bits in the show in universe. The line I specifically mention is the one that’s most likely a genuine out of character line imo. Because she gets the, “Thomas Crowmwell Among the Ministers” line earlier in the show which is a line you write for your bandmate who is a history nerd I think so it wouldn’t be crazy for that same person to miss her scripted line to answer a question about a topic she knew the answer to out of habit. Which leads directly into your question of who are they as people, separately from their stage personas.  And I’m not gonna get into the logistics of reincarnation/resurrection/mythic manifestation/etc because it is 1 AM and, either way, I’m not Moss or Marlow so I’d truly just be making up an answer if I came to one at all but assuming the Queens in-universe are some legitimate representation of the historical Queens and assuming they wrote the show for the reasons it seems they did--to reclaim their stories, I would guess that they are playing heightened versions of their actual selves (whatever “actual selves” means in this context). Because I feel like making a whole show where you’re like, “We’re going to finally tell the world who we are,” and then giving wildly inauthentic info would be weird (unless they had, I guess, painted themselves in an entirely positive light which I don’t think they do because they’re fighting the whole show). So I think the show from I Don’t Need Your Love to the end (and especially the song Six) are the best representations of who they are or at least who they want to be because midway through IDNYL is when they drop the act that the competition is real so it’s only like one level of acting, not two at that point (in the world of the show I mean). And I think, if put in this position, and asked to write an AU for your traumatic life, most people would be inclined to be sincere (even moreso than they would have been for their main songs which I think are def partially tongue in cheek except for HoS, IDNYL, and the last bit of AYWD).  

I feel like *reading* Shakespeare’s plays is something that should chiefly be done by actors studying their roles; the best way to experience Shakespeare is performed, the way he intended. So… full cast audiobooks, maybe?

Yeah, Anakin's good at using his actual awkwardness intentionally, whereas Lando uses his smoothness to create any social effect he pleases with any degree of finesse that he desires. What would be interesting is how Padme joins in, because I feel like she generally enjoys provoking mischief less quickly than the boys, but when you get her started...

Yes, that’s exactly it! That’s what I was trying and failing to express lol. Thank you for putting it so succinctly!

Anakin is genuinely awkward and somewhat uncomfortable in social situations himself, and partly because of that he’s learned how to weaponize his awkwardness and use it to make other people uncomfortable in very pointed ways.

Lando, on the other hand, hasn’t got an awkward bone in his body. The man is that rarest of rare people: someone who is genuinely suave. And can therefore pull off pretty much anything.

(Which means that he probably has a broader range of targets than Anakin for this sort of thing, too.)

Pretty sure Rick Riordan’s Mark of Athena ended with the hero plummeting to an uncertain end. He earned back a lot of grudging goodwill with me with the dedication for the subsequent book: “To my wonderful readers: Sorry about that last cliff-hanger. Well, no, not really. HAHAHAHA. But seriously, I love you guys.”

XDDD well at least he knows what he did ...

Nah, he’s not a Shakespearean hero, he’s 100% an Austen hero! 

I think with Pride and Prejudice Austen had sort of... hm, how to phrase this? She’d figured out her own style. She’d figured out what makes an Austen hero the way that Byron figured out what makes a Byronic hero in Childe Harold. 

Like, Northanger Abbey is her first novel and it’s a satire, so she’s kind of obviously refining her ideas of what a novel is and what a hero or a heroine is based on these archetypes she’s studied and is super familiar with. Sense and Sensibility is the first novel she published and there you can see a lot more of the things that she really was interested in writing about, and the sorts of characters she considers virtuous or villainous, and a lot of what she points out as good male behavior revolves around the respect and care they have for the people who are dependent on them and the practical steps they take to help the heroines. It reminds my of that 70s feminist question-- yeah but does he do the dishes? All Austen’s heroes would, in a modern context. (In a Regency context obviously they all have servants.) 

Austen is, I think, a very metafictional writer and she borrows and riffs on other works of literature quite often, but that’s not so much... her having “Byronic” or “Shakespearean” heroes, that’s just a feature of her work and her writing style. In Pride and Prejudice, you can see the influence of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (in terms of ironic moral and also title-- ‘pride and prejudice’ comes from the ironic moral ending Cecilia) and Tom Jones (in the Wickham-Darcy plot) and also Much Ado About Nothing (in terms of the A couple’s verbal sparring and the B couple getting torn apart, and also in terms of the hero’s big moment coming about when he listens to the heroine and agrees she’s right). But Darcy is very much the model of an Austen hero-- someone who listens to women, respects what they say, acknowledges when he’s wrong, and changes his behavior accordingly. So I think he certainly has literary antecedents from the material Austen riffs on and returns to in other works (she references Shakespeare quite a lot, for example, not just in tone in Pride and Prejudice and literally by name in Mansfield Park-- there was a Shakespearean actress in the Regency named Mrs. Crawford), but he is her own unique creation. 

Reinforcing this theory: my then-16yo cousin got approached by several of my sister's college-grad friends at my sister's wedding, till they found out how old she was. Between the formalwear and the fact that she was very self-possessed, it never occurred to them that she was still (relative to them) a child, but as soon as they knew, they switched off the romance track to be friendly with her.

It happens! And as long as the adults involved act as those men did and go, “oh my bad let’s rechart this,” it’s not an issue.