There were a lot of corsets involved.

I spent a good chunk of today watching the 5-part Story of the Costume Drama documentary from ITV…uhm, I think from last year? It’s narrated by Keeley Hawes, and features lots of actors and writers. I don’t usually watch documentaries, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about this one, and it was very entertaining and interesting.

A few points:

1. While it was very interesting, it was also about 9.2% focused on dramas set between 1800-WWII, meaning that, uhm, I’ve seen most or already had them on my list of things to watch, which tragically means that I got few recs out of it. (And, really, while I like quite a few of those, I kind of…want more set earlier? I want more swords and flintlocks in my period dramas!)

2. They used the term “bodice ripper” a lot, but it was largely used to describe the 1995-P&P onward dramas that contained pretty much any sexual content, from wet shirts to kisses to all out sex scenes, whereas here in the US, it tends to get used more for raunchy historical romance novels with more aggressive heroes who, uhm, often literally rip the heroine’s bodice. The cultural context kept making me go “but that…oh yeah.”

3. Hans Matheson (Mathison?) talked a lot about the version of Doctor Zhivago that he did with Keira Knightley as Lara. But he was Mordred in Mists of Avalon and I kept going “Ooo…pretty pertty snow…But I saw you as Modred last week and she played his stepmother in the movie I saw a week or so before that! I feel this is wrong somehow! Also, what happened to your cornrows?” My brain is sometimes a bit odd?

4. Andrew Davies described his rewrites of classic lit and the adding of sexual elements to some as being specifically designed to make people who didn’t have an interest in reading the source material want to read it. I don’t know that I completely agree with his explanation and I’m not sure how successful a ploy it is, but it’s interesting to listen to him describe it.

5. There was lots and lots of Alex Kingston. Uhm…I’ve always liked her, but Lost in Austen made me develop a major crush on her, and then she’s fabulous on Marchlands. And she kept talking about how it was awesome to play Moll Flanders and play a woman who actually hand sex (I am unfamiliar with the plot of Moll Flanders, and so do not know if we’re meant to judge her for her sex life or not) and gushed about the clothes, and then she was talking about making Boudicca and training for the swordfights and carriage riding in the streets and apparently her neighbors called the police at one point.

Also, I do not know what else she’s been in, but the girl who plays Marianne in the latest Sense and Sensibility (which I have not seen yet) was there a lot too, and she’s kind of ridiculously adorable. And looks about 15.

(I…uhm…was also recently linked to a website that has torrents-SEEDED torrents-of practically every UK show ever and am dying over all the period dramas that I shall soon have that will never be released in the US and that I can’t find anywhere else.)

P.S.-Netflix, what do you mean that you do not have part 2 of Nana? You have the rest! (Though, part 1 ends about where I got annoyed and stopped reading the manga, though I suspect I wouldn’t now, since I am more accepting of RL modern drama stuff now than I was when the manga first hit the US.)

I am sometimes a Mean Girl in many ways.

Today I learned that the best way to bring out my nasty side in fandom is the "Female Character X was awesome until she had implied romantic feelings for Male Character Y, and then she was wimpy and her life is all about mooning over him" argument.

(Character context for the discussion is Sam Carter and Jack O'Neil in Stargate: SG-1. I'm always 99% certain that there were 2 versions of that show, because the one I watched seemed to have Jack being the way more smitten of the two.)

But really, this POV makes no sense? And even if it did, it would be the standard case of blaming the character for the writer/narrative. Also, these cases usually actually have the characters of both characters being emphasized, and since most shows default to the straight white if you're in the US male POV, there's often more focus on the guy's feelings, so if anyone should get the negative feedback over mooning it's usually the guy? But we're so conditioned to see men as being multi-purpose and women primarily as wives/girlfriends/homemakers, especially in fiction, that people seem to automatically jump to the conclusion that "feelings=weak and clingy" when it comes to women.

(I suspect we'd also get a lot of this reaction proportionately-based on what I've seen-with LGBT characters if more were portrayed as sexual. Or, you know, around at all. Like, everyone loves Diana in White Collar, as far as I can tell, and we know she has a long term girlfriend, but aside from flirting with someone in the pilot, she's been relatively asexual onscreen. And, granted, so has Jones, but the treatment of Jones-HOW IS HE STILL A GUEST STAR HE'S IN EVERY SINGLE EPISODE-is another, separate issue from Diana's portrayal.)

I mean, we can argue all we want about men being written better in fiction (I usually think it's less that and more that the writers spend more time-good or bad-on them) and more central to the story, but the reader her/him-self is what determines how it's perceived and interpretted, and will frequently interpret similar situations the same no matter how the individual canon portrays it.

But anyway, has anyone ever seen this with straight men? Possibly more pertinently, has anyone ever seen this crop up when Male Character Y wasn't being shipped-actively or passively-with someone else? (I want to say that I've seen it more with m/m-centric folks than f/m-and definitely f/f- ones, but I think it'd come out even if I discounted 13-17-year-old shounen fans.)

*leaves to get to places way late*