The parent problem of Disney's Descendants films

I'm perfectly aware that I'm not the target audience for the Descendants franchise. These breezy fairy-tale-meets-high-school-rom-com flicks are aimed at young viewers, specifically teenagers – at a guess, closer to fourteen than nineteen. Nevertheless, I can't help enjoying them. 

The original premise of the films is to let the children of famous Disney villains attend the same high school as the kids of famous heroes and see what happens. For this scenario to come about, the creators had to dream up a land (Auradon) where all the heroes hung out, and The Isle of the Lost to which all the villains had been banished. It did not make a lick of sense, but it was fun and spawned a jaunty trilogy centering on the villain kid quartet Mal, Evie, Carlos and Jay and their hero-kid love interests. Mal especially, played by rising star Dove Cameron, was the heroine (sometimes anti-heroine) of this trilogy.

With the tragic death of one of the leads (Cameron Boyce who played Carlos), the franchise ground to a halt for a while. Then it started up again with what seems set to be a new, Wonderland-centred trilogy, where Red, the daughter of the Queen of Hearts, and Chloe, the daughter of Cinderella and her prince, get up to time-travel shenanigans in order to improve the present, and then have to deal with the consequences. Recently, the fifth Descendants film, Descendants: Wicked Wonderland, premiered on Disney Channel and (fortunately for me) Disney Plus.

To sum up, the franchise contains fairy-tale crossovers, (non-snide) Disney references, romances, bouncy hummable tunes and ongoing riffs on the hero-villain dynamic. It's basically five films' (and counting) worth of "you and I are not so different" storylines. Of course I'll keep watching! Heck, age is just a number.

There are problems, though, when a geek like me troubles her decades-too-old brain with the logic of a franchise that's only supposed to be a fun time for high-school kids. I'm not too concerned with the sloppy world building when it comes to timelines, the way the fairy-tale federation of Auradon is run or the morally questionable choice of assembling all villains and their children in a penal colony. Having the parent generation of villains and heroes attend the same magic high school doesn't add up, but I'll let that pass. I don't question the blending of modern times with fairy-tale narratives. What bothers me are all the missing parents. Who are they? Where are they?

It started in the very first Descendants film: while the hero kids mostly had two parents (as a carry-over from the original stories), the villain kids were only introduced as the kids of Maleficent (Mal), the Evil Queen (Evie), Cruella de Vil (Carlos) and Jafar (Jay). Not a peep about who their other parents were. While we eventually (in film number three) learned that Mal's dad is Hades, the rest of the quartet's second parents remain a mystery. It wasn't just the villain spawn either. Fairy Godmother has a daughter called Jane, and Dopey has a son called Doug. Nice to know that Dopey scored, but with whom?

If it had ended there, I could have lived with it, as it's quite fun to speculate and invent head-canons regarding probable pairings. But each film introduced new young protagonists, and almost every time only one of their parents (a famous villain, mostly) was mentioned. That way, the problem has grown exponentially to a point where even a whole film exclusively dedicated to tying up loose parent threads (which we're never going to get anyway) wouldn't be enough. For crying out loud, even Smee has twins. How did that happen?

What makes me mind this quirk of the Descendants films much more than I should is, I think, all the lost storytelling opportunities. I believe someone somewhere claimed that the films were to be considered as Disney canon, but come on, they're clearly not. Which means they could have gone nuts and fan-fictioned away by pairing Disney villains up any old way, which would then enrich the possibilities when it comes to the villains' offspring. The "VKs" (villain kids) would have two sources of villain genes to worry about rather than one. There could be clandestine villain-hero hook-ups, of the romantic or scandalous kind. Who is Jane's dad – is there perhaps a reason Fairy Godmother keeps her on such a tight leash?

Surely the target audience, consisting as it does to a great extent of teenage girls, has to wonder about this too and bemoan the lost opportunities for even more Disney-related "ships"? I'm at a loss to explain this storytelling nonchalance. Maybe, considering the young audience, the creators have chosen to be a bit shy when it comes to procreative matters. We learnt in Descendants 3 that Maleficent and Hades are supposed to have been married when Mal was conceived, although they then split up. Now, I can imagine the Disney versions of Hades and Maleficent having an affair, but married? It's as if the powers that be don't want to sully their viewers' minds too much with contemplations on the possibly irregular relationships which resulted in villain kids such as Evie, Carlos, Jay and many more.

To anyone progressively minded who feels the need to snigger at this and at Maleficent's and Hades's "marriage", I have a question: Who, exactly, is Bow's mother in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power? I'm not disputing that his two dads are super cute and shippable, but someone must have carried Bow for nine months in her womb, no? Sometimes, progressive media have their own problems with the birds and the bees.

Apologies to Nora Roberts

A good while back (in 2017, which is a horrifying nine years ago) I was pretty harsh on Nora Roberts, on the basis on The Next Always which I tried to read and then gave up on. I owe her an apology, because since then I've enjoyed plenty of her novels – but as audiobooks, not as paperbacks.

Roberts is a good example of the differences between an audiobook and a paper novel. Things you like listening to would not necessarily thrill you as reading matter, and vice versa. The typical Nora Roberts novel is, in my view, ideal for the audiobook medium. I had an especially good time with her latest Lost Bride trilogy: Inheritance, The Mirror and The Seven Rings. The plot in brief: Sonya, a feisty web designer who's just thrown out her cheating fiancé and quit her job, inherits a lovely Maine mansion from an unknown uncle. It is full of friendly ghosts, plus one hostile one. Sonya has to figure out how to break a curse in order to help the friendly ghosts to move on, as clues are conveniently drip-fed to her.

Plot-wise, the whole story could easily be condensed into one volume. But as an audiobook listener, I appreciated the hanging-out-with-characters scenes which annoyed me in The Next Always. I wallowed in the cosiness of it all while I did my chores and Sonya, her best friend Cleo and their respective love interests cooked and ate good food, went for outings, acquired charming pets, interacted with the friendly ghosts (that was my favourite part) and were successful at their jobs. 

Would all this have bored me had I read it? Possibly. The Lost Bride trilogy did not try to interest me in the minutiae of renovating a hotel or helping a kid in the bathroom, so I think I would have liked it more than The Next Always even on paper. What I am sure of is that I got more enjoyment from the trilogy as listening matter than I would have got in book form.

When I read, I like the story to have some momentum and not get too stuck in one particular place, however appealing that place may be. In an audiobook, on the other hand, I don't mind dwelling for a little longer than necessary story-wise in a pleasant fictional world. So the attractive settings and friendly banter of Roberts's novels work very well. The sex scenes are a bit of a trial for me, as I don't much care for the Rugged Hero type that Roberts's heroines fancy, but that's a minor quibble.

Conversely, there are gripping reads that work less well as audiobooks. If a novel has a huge cast of characters, for instance, it's a disadvantage for an audiobook as you can't just flip back the pages to remind yourself who X was, then easily find where you were again. If an author has a certain style you're particularly partial to, it can fly by you too easily while you're distracted by making the bed or cleaning the kitchen. For this reason, I only occasionally listen to my downloaded audiobook version of A Tale of Two Cities, although it is very nicely read by Martin Jarvis. It would be interesting to find out if P.G. Wodehouse works in the audiobook medium or not: I suspect not, but I could be wrong.

So, sorry, Nora, for not finding the best way to enjoy your novels sooner. If I can find something equally feel-good in paper form as Blue Dahlia (the Roberts novel I'm currently listening to) to get me through January, I'll be very lucky.

The yearly crop of Netflix Christmas films

'Tis the season for not too demanding blog posts. Last year, I admitted to the guilty pleasure of watching Christmas romcoms on Netflix; this year, I've indulged even more heavily, and might as well give a few tips to those who share my taste for this particular kind of brain rot. Always remembering that we're not talking The Seventh Seal here (fortunately).

The ones to watch while you're wrapping presents (or not at all): The award for the most plotless Christmas rom-coms available on Netflix this year (at least as watched by me) goes to Haul out the Holly and Haul out the Holly: Lit Up. Their main attraction is Lacey Chabert, of Mean Girls and Hot Frosty fame. Emily, a stressed-out woman with Christmas-mad parents, returns home to her small town (of course) after a bad breakup. Only, her parents are disappearing to Florida and the duty of keeping up the over-the-top decorating and Christmas jollities now falls, at least partly, to her. She only wants to have a nice, quiet Christmas but is somehow won over by the collective hysteria. 

In the follow-up, Emily and the other townsfolk feel threatened by a family of influencers (gasp!) who want to take over the festivities completely. I actually somewhat preferred Haul out the Holly: Lit Up to the first film – the dialogue is a bit sharper, and the quirky neighbours have their moments – but there's no denying both films are very thin indeed; Chabert, pro though she is, has her work cut out. Also, the message is confusing. At some point, I'd have liked someone to remind the small-town busybodies that Christmas isn't about the tallness of your nutcracker (that's not a euphemism: this is a thing). Nevertheless, you won't miss much while struggling to wrap up that cosy sweater, which is a plus.      

The stilted ones: Sometimes you just want a Christmas romance that actually is a bit stiff and unconvincing, simply to get into the right frivolous spirit. Paris Christmas Waltz and A Cinderella Christmas Ball are good alternatives for watching while present-wrapping, if you can't face the Haul out the Holly films. The romantic leads struggle to produce any chemistry, the romantic entanglements feel cut and pasted from other Christmas romances, and there's a certain air of cutting corners when it comes to costs. But the surroundings are nice, and there are some surprisingly good performances from side characters. In Paris Christmas Waltz, Paul Freeman nails the wise mentor role (even the Frenchness), and A Cinderella Christmas Ball has a solid supporting cast all round. I especially appreciated the surly guard, the crusty butler and the disgraced Duke who spouted none-too-brilliant words of wisdom with full-on sincerity.

The actually quite good ones: If I'm not mistaken, all the films I've mentioned so far are imported fare, shown but not produced by Netflix. The homegrown crop this year is a cut above: it feels like Netflix is getting the hang of this. True, the best Netflix romcom I've watched this year was not a Christmas one (The Wrong Paris – yep, I'm as surprised as you are). But Champagne Problems isn't half bad either. 

If you opt for only one Christmas romcom set in Paris, please let it be this one and not Paris Christmas Waltz. In Champagne Problems, glamorous business woman Sydney goes to Paris to win a bidding war for a French winery on behalf of her company. She accidentally falls for the owner's estranged son, and complications ensue as she ends up spending the weekend at the vineyard with an assortment of national stereotypes while trying to show her mettle.

Call me easily pleased, but having the French characters talk to each other in actual, correct French, and the German pronounce each obscure German Christmas phenomenon impeccably (because the actors actually are French/German, duh) already gives the project a certain classiness for me. To add to this, the dialogue is pretty fizzy, and the hero, instead of only hanging around gazing longingly at the heroine, actually has his own drama to resolve. Pas mal du tout.

A Merry Little X-Mas was also good fun. Personally, I found the environmentalist female lead character (a yummy mummy played by Alicia Silverstone – man, I'm old) hard to take, but the rival love interests (a toy-boy himbo and an English model really trying not to lose it) of the couple supposedly breaking up kind of stole the show, and there were some solid chuckles along the way. If you need small-town American cosiness, this is better than Haul out the Holly.

The absolutely bonkers one: I had to find one with a premise almost as out there as Hot Frosty, and My Secret Santa fits the bill. Get this: a single mother, who's lost her uninspiring job because of cut-backs, is desperate to find money to send her daughter to... snow-boarding school. A nearby resort offers a 50% discount on the school fees, but their only opening is for an inhouse Santa. So our intrepid heroine disguises herself as a jovial old man and lands the job, while falling for the resort owner's son.

Really, one suspects that someone came up with the idea while drunk. But you have to give Netflix credit: once committed to it, they do their best to make it work, and I had a good time. Not the worst Christmas film Netflix has to offer, but (among the newcomers) undoubtedly the craziest.                         

Very light reading indeed – Regency and meta romances

Sometimes, all you have the energy for is a good, light-hearted romance, preferably without those awkward "I'm serious, me" sections where the heroine Learns About Herself or has to get over some family drama of the decidedly-not-fun-kind. But where to find a romance that is not too embarrassing? I no longer automatically reach for the latest Sophie Kinsella, as she seems to be leaning a bit too much into lesson-learning nowadays. Emily Henry is a find, but she can hardly be expected to turn out more than one book per year. So what else does the genre have to offer?

After a newspaper article recommended Sophie Irwin's A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting, I bought it but was unconvinced by the first couple of paragraphs. Luckily, I gave the novel another try this year, and found that it improved considerably after the first chapter or so. This is classic Regency romance fare: you may not be too surprised by how things turn out, but it's highly enjoyable all the same, and not too anachronistic-seeming. I've stumbled on some shockers in this genre, which were essentially just modern chick-lit in fancy dress, but this feels if not genuinely 19th-century, at least genuinely Georgette Heyerish. 

Also, it's uncommonly clean for a modern romance novel, which is a plus in my book. Honestly, there are only so many sex scenes using "of him" and "of her" phrases ("the scent of him", "the wondrous touch of her") and featuring supernaturally patient guys I can take. More power to Irwin for sparing us them. Her second book A Lady's Guide to Scandal is just as good, even a touch better when it comes to the plotting (at one time, I was genuinely unsure of where the story was going), but the obvious play for the Bridgerton audience bothered me a little.

Elsewhere, Emily Henry seems to have started a new trend: the meta romance. I hesitated before buying Katie Holt's Not in My Book as the plot seemed uncomfortably close to the one in Henry's Beach Read. But though it features a(n aspiring) romance writer and a broody love interest who's into literary fiction and who criticises her in creative writing classes, it's sufficiently its own thing not to feel like a rip-off. The heroine is cute, the hero bearable and "enemies to lovers" a very solid trope. 

I can't help it, I tend to enjoy romances about writing romances – and more often than not I prefer the book-related stuff to the romantic scenes, which was also the case here. Yes, there are sex scenes this time around, with the patient-guy factor very much in evidence, but I'll say this for Holt: when it comes to these scenes, she manages them better than Emily Henry, though Henry has the edge in other respects. Ideal for travelling.

The meta romance sub-genre has its pitfalls, though. Even though I had a good enough time with Cristina Wolf's How to Write a Rom-Com, I had expected more from the premise – jaded publishing assistant sent to a small town to gather ideas for a romance writer, though she really doesn't enjoy small-town romances – than I got. Pointing out that something is a trope doesn't make it less of  a trope in your own story if you don't put a different spin on it. Here, the heroine succumbs to the charms of the small town and the small-town hunk way too easily, plus there's a Liar Revealed story baked in, and that's not a favourite plot-line of mine. But hey, I read the novel. I'm by no means tired of meta romances yet. 

Miss Austen should be right up my alley, and yet...

Was autumn always this intense? I have trouble even making it to the gym a modest number of times a month, let alone finding the energy for blogging. But I guess I should be able to write about how there's no pleasing some people, in this case me.

A few weeks ago, I watched Miss Austen, a respectable period drama based on a novel by Gill Hornby. It's well-cast, well-acted, and has the admirable goal of defending Jane Austen's beloved sister Cassandra. She's not much liked by literary historians as she burned most of her sister's letters. However, this drama fights Cassandra's corner. An enduring love for Jane and an eagerness to follow her wishes are shown to be the reasons for the letter-burning, rather than an attempt to sanitise Austen's reputation. I think Austen would have warmly approved.

All the same, isn't it kinda boring?

That's certainly not the actors' fault. Both Keeley Hawes (always a safe bet) and Synnøve Karlsen put in engaging performances as the older and younger Cassandra; Patsy Ferran is a perfect Jane; and Jessica Hynes as my personal favourite, passive-aggressive sister-in-law Mary Austen, is a joy. We follow two timelines. The older Cassandra travels to the deathbed of the brother of the man she was supposed to marry, and takes an interest in his daughter Isabella. Isabella's deceased mother was a firm friend of Jane's, and Cassandra finds her sister's letters in an attempt to keep them from her sister-in-law's clutches. While she reads them, memories resurface. That's where the younger Cassandra and Jane – long-dead in the more recent timeline – come in.

The problem is, not much happens in either timeline. Either Hornby or the TV adapters have attempted to jolly things up a bit with a romance or two, but for once I could have done with less of this particular ingredient. Isabella's interest in the local doctor, who reciprocates her feelings but is too proud to ask again after having been shown the door once (by Isabella's dad), is a tepid affair. The young Cassandra meets an absurdly eligible admirer (wholly fictional, I suspect) while on a family holiday, but as we know that both she and Jane ended up single, it's just irritating to watch her push away her chance at love for no apparent reason. The plot drags quite a bit.

What should bring some zip into the proceedings is Jane's writing, but the flashbacks take place very early in her writing career, so there's not much discussion about her published novels. The exception is Persuasion, which the older Cassandra is reading to Isabella. I loved the flashback, taking place later than the other ones, where we see young(ish) Cassy reading the scene of Louisa's accident for the first time and exclaiming "you killed her!", much to Jane's amusement (Louisa lives). In the later timeline, Isabella is equally on the edge of her seat when the scene is read to her by Cassandra. 

This was great, and I could have done with more in the same vein. That Isabella's impertinent maid Dinah eavesdrops and gets ideas on how to bring her mistress and the doctor together was perhaps a melodramatic twist, but hey, I'm not complaining. We needed a reminder, at this point, as to why we should take any interest in these women at all.

The continuing problem with life and works dramas is that novelists' lives – even the most colourful ones – are rarely as interesting as their books. That doesn't mean they themselves were unhappy. The best thing about Miss Austen (besides Mary) is the sisterly bond between Jane and Cassandra, and I can well believe that they lived very contentedly, as long as they could be together. Whether their life really lends itself to the costume-drama treatment, however, is another matter.

On a roll with books, until...

Judging from my latest blog posts, one would have thought that I'd not done much reading lately. In fact, I was doing pretty well with my reading until not so long ago – I've just been too lazy to blog about it. I finally read books which I actually owned instead of just buying new ones, got in some ambitious reads and finished books I had previously discarded after only having read a few pages. For a while, I was feeling pretty smug, and then the inevitable happened: I got stuck.

The problem is not when you don't get any further with one book, but when they pile up. My first mistake was when I vaingloriously decided that it was finally time to read Sketches by Boz from cover to cover. It's the only major work by Dickens I've only read a fraction of, and that simply wouldn't do. Not for the first time, though, I soon came to a halt, and not by any means because the book is bad or un-Dickensian. There are a lot of humorous descriptions to make one chuckle. The problem is that because of the genre, the sketches are mostly just that: descriptions, with little dialogue or story. With Dickens, I want human drama, preferably with a lot of cutting lines by villains and suchlike. I can stand descriptive parts of his novels because they're so brilliantly written and often funny, but without a plot to hook me I find even the wittiest tableau of a London street hard going.

All right, then, so maybe I could postpone Sketches by Boz a bit longer and read it more piecemeal. But there were other substantial books I could try. I looked forward to Kept by D.J. Taylor, clearly as Neo-Victorian as they come. It was a bit hefty – which is only natural when you want to emulate the Victorian novel – so maybe not ideal to lug to work for my lunch break. My plan was this: at home, I would read Kept, and at work I would dip into The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories. Ambitious, yes, but I could take it: just look at how easily I got into Wuthering Heights a couple of months ago!

You can guess what happened next. I never knew Yanks could be such a downcast lot. Nothing wrong with the writing, it was just so depressing. After four short stories, I started on the Nathaniel Hawthorne one, stopped after about a page with a disgruntled "OK, so she's totally a witch" and set this volume aside as well.

As for Kept, it's annoyingly well-written, which means I have no excuse to give up on it until after a mandatory hundred pages. But the plot lines so far just don't interest me. The art of poaching wild birds' eggs? Some ghastly madwoman locked up somewhere? I need to persevere, but what did I find when I last tried? A lengthy description of a London street!

What conclusions can be drawn? Nothing most readers don't already know: that it's darned hard to find a reading strategy which allows you to virtuously work your way through the piles of books you've bought without getting stuck somewhere. When I was younger, I tried the tactic of alternating between Ambitious Book Projects and self-indulgence reads, but that put too much pressure on the latter and involved far too many ABPs for my liking. 

This time around, I went into a regular self-indulgence bonanza. I re-read the last three Thursday Next novels (I've had my doubts about some of Jasper Fforde's latest novels, but the Thursday Next ones really are brilliant); devoured, for the first time since childhood, an old Swedish translation of Betty Cavanna's A Touch of Magic, a delicious example of having your cake and eating it when it comes to historical fiction (you're invited to tut-tut over the frivolous Shippen girls while at the same time revelling in the drama of balls and suitors); and finally tucked into a Young Adult novel irresistibly called Do You Ship It? I wasn't sure at first, but yes, I did.

Will all this self-indulgence reading give me strength to start up with slightly heavier stuff again?  I've started on The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden, but the jury's still out. Pros: if I know Arden, there will be folklore elements and possibly a villain in the works. Cons: death, disaster and World War One.

The guilty pleasure of Riverdale

Imagine, if you can, a TV series called Duckburg, where the characters are not quite as you remember them from Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics. To start with, naturally, they're all human. Flintheart Glomgold is married to Magica de Spell, and the murder of their son Gladstone Gander forms the main mystery to be resolved during the show's first season. Mickey Mouse has made clear to Minnie in the very first episode that he's only interested in her as a friend. That's just as well, as Minnie starts a sweet romance with an unusually broody Goofy, who has plans of becoming a writer but is somewhat too mixed up in a biker gang. Mickey, for his part, is dating the daughter of Peg-Leg Pete – who incidentally has hit the gym big time.

This, you would agree, would be taking a great deal of liberties with the source material. But heck, I'd watch it.

Without actually having read the American comic Archie (except stray pages that the cunning algorithm has started to show in my Facebook feed), I'd say this is a pretty fair analogy to the difference between Archie and the TV series Riverdale. The comic, from what I have been told and can make out from said Facebook snippets, is a light-hearted affair where girl-next-door Betty and rich girl Veronica vie for the attention of the red-headed titular character. In the TV series, on the other hand, the young protagonists' lives and loves are endlessly complicated by dark and twisted mysteries, and the outwardly idyllic small town is full of buried corpses (literally). It's borderland insane – but I am hooked.

So why, considering that the quality does go downhill after a neat first season, and the plot lines get ever more derailed, did I spend the better part of a day (I had and have a cold, so there was an excuse) bingeing the last episodes of season four of Riverdale instead of, say, finally watching The Conclave? My reasons are highly subjective:

It's Once Upon A Time methadone: Small-town intrigue? Check. Cosy diner where everyone goes? Check. Twisted goings-on behind an idyllic front? Check. Powerful mayors and sheriffs who wear an actual star on their police uniform? Check. Lots and lots of relationship drama? Check. Riverdale gives me enough "heightened reality" – or rather total lack of reality – vibes to remind me of my all-time favourite series. 

True, there's no Rumple/Mr Gold for my heart to ache over, but that can be restful. And the villains on offer are entertaining, in their fashion. In the first season, the Blossom family, with their 19th-century Gothic Aesthetic, are an absolute delight, but their importance diminishes as the series goes on. The exception is red-headed bombshell Cheryl, who moves from bitch to wild-card to generally well-disposed towards the heroes. She's always fun with her withering put-downs and quirks, but what can I say? I had hoped that the Blossom family drama would have turned out somewhat differently.

What of Peg-Leg Pete then – or rather Hiram Lodge, father of the enterprising Veronica Lodge? I mean, he's handsome – conventionally so, but they can't all be silver foxes. However, much as my superego appreciates that the series doesn't go the clichéd route of turning a "normal" businessman into a villainous mastermind, and instead opts for making Hiram a straight-out gangster, my id is a bit disappointed. As tired as the Evil Capitalist trope is, it usually leads to more toothsome villains (in my personal opinion) than the Tough Mobster trope. Hiram's fun, with his wide-eyed "what did I do?" reaction to well-founded accusations, but he's a bit too macho for me.

I can catch up on the soap-watching experience: I was too young for the classic soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty, and though there were soaps aimed at teenagers around when I myself was one, I wasn't patient enough back then to try them. Any series with more than 100 episodes I wrote off immediately. 

Now, though, I see the appeal of series where you're not going to run out of episodes in a hurry. There's a particular appeal in watching the script writers come up with increasingly far-fetched drama just to keep the story going. Yes, it will lead to arcs you don't care for very much and want wrapped up as soon as possible, but if the writers do their job properly there will be enough plates spinning to keep you interested even through the rough patches. And there's always the hope that they'll hit gold and suddenly introduce a storyline almost as good as in that first season you fondly remember.

The protagonists are really likeable: At the centre of the series are four friends (who are supposed to be high-schoolers but naturally are played by actors in their twenties). They eventually pair up into two couples: Archie and Veronica on the one hand, Betty and Jughead (real name: Forsythe Pendleton III, and no, he's not "old money") on the other. Of course there are plenty of bust-ups, but essentially they stand by each other through thick and thin and are a bunch easy to root for. 

Betty is the stand-out – a good girl with a dark side, who generally manages to keep "Dark Betty" under control and do the right thing, while being well able to counter any bitchy attack with full force. Jughead has his own scruffy charm, and Veronica is an entertaining powerhouse, always dragging the somewhat aimless Archie in her wake with gentle force. 

Archie himself is, in some ways, the weak link, saddled as he is with a certain righteous blandness. His character is also one of the main victims of the soap format: every half-season or so, he's seriously into something new, something he's convinced will be the mainstay of his future: music, boxing, helping disadvantaged youths, you name it. You just want him to pick a lane and stop making hair-raising mistakes. On the other hand, having a hero character in need of support from his more colourful friends isn't such a bad idea. And let's face it: the hero was never going to be the main attraction for me.

So the upper-class cad is the hero? OK, then

I'm in an intense escapism period book-wise, which explains why there will be a lot of TV and film posts in a row. I've already milked authors like Stephanie Garber and Emily Henry for their blog worth, and don't have that much to add, except a strong recommendation to read them if you want to retreat to a happy book place (and like the genres they're writing in – that's pretty crucial). To find the same kind of escapism on TV, however, is proving surprisingly hard.

All right, that's a forced transition, as I watched the British drama/soap Rivals on Disney Plus last year and not just now. Nevertheless, it is the kind of series you are supposed to watch in an escapist mood. It's based on one of the "bonkbusters" penned by Dame Jilly Cooper, who seems beguilingly jolly. That the fictional county her stories take place in is called "Rutshire" says a lot. What's more, the series appears to be faithful to the spirit of the author: both the setting and the characters' outlook have a near-authentic Eighties feel. This should be right up my alley. But it isn't, quite.

To be honest, I thought it dragged a bit. At the same time, it is well-acted, and every time I was close to giving up a new plot development happened that had me thinking "OK, I want to see how this plays out". But I did spend lot of time wondering why I didn't get more into the series. Now, afterwards, I also wonder: if this show wasn't for me, then who is it for?

Quite a lot of people, it turns out. Rivals is a hit, and I've heard people I'd have thought would have minded the overall positive way upper-class stud Rupert Campbell-Black is depicted (I'll come back to that) praising its watchability. So what is holding me back from joining more wholeheartedly in the fun?

Could it be my bourgeois outlook? It's a strong possibility. I assumed, at the start of the series, that Campbell-Black would be seen as a bad guy, albeit possibly a redeemable one. I actually started Riders by Jilly Cooper once but didn't persevere, and in that novel, I got the impression that Campbell-Black was the villain (though the author clearly shared his pro-hunting stance). In Rivals, though, it didn't take long to figure out that in the rivalry between Campbell-Black and local media mogul Lord Baddingham, we are supposed to side with the former.

Now, I can find it endearing when the English gentry catches a break in the world of TV entertainment. It doesn't happen that often – caricatures of British poshos abound in dramas like Midsomer Murders, Morse and its spinoffs, and many, many others. When Downton Abbey dared to portray the Crawleys as decent people (on the whole), critics sneered. So in a way, I admire Dame Jilly for standing up for the toffs and not giving a whistle for street cred. At the same time, I am solidly middle-class myself, and if there's a fight between a nob and an upstart, I want to be able to side with the upstart.

That's hardly possible here, though, as Baddingham (the upstart in this scenario) is a thoroughly bad lot, and not in an alluring way. It's amazing the way David Tennant can turn off his considerable charm like a tap as Baddingham. There's a brief flash of Doctorish charisma as he's trying to persuade his mistress to go to Spain with him, and an equally brief flicker of vulnerability when he confronts said mistress with a particularly heinous betrayal. But otherwise, Tennant as Baddingham is in continuous creep mode.

So is the series snobbish, then? Well, it tries not to be. It does its best to give us truculent middle-classers reasons to dislike Baddingham that have nothing to do with his modest beginnings. Look how careless he is with his employees. Look at his brusqueness and his prejudices. Look how he puts professionalism aside for petty vengeance. Above all, look how little he appreciates his loyal and supportive wife.  Also, Baddingham finds himself at odds with the hard-hitting left-leaning journalist Declan O'Hara and the successful but teddy-bearish businessman Freddie Jones – just in case we were starting to suspect that his lack of poshness is an issue.

I know I shouldn't be too sniffy about obvious manipulativeness from a show like this, but I can't help finding it a bit tiresome. Another example is how the audience is bludgeoned into hoping Freddie and romance writer Lizzie Vereker (both married) will finally get it off. Lizzie's husband James is the most parodically one-dimensional bad hubby you can imagine. He ignores her. He puts her down. He cheats on her, flagrantly. He straight up recoils when she wants to rekindle their relationship. "Why don't you just divorce the wanker?" Campbell-Black asks, and that is certainly the question.

While I didn't find Rivals to be quite the fizzing champagne bottle of a show I'd hoped, many others did, so it's worth trying out for a good time (be warned, though: there's a jarringly serious rape story right in the middle). Also, I'll be checking out a possible season two, hoping to finally get a handle on Baddingham's mistress Cameron Cook whose motives are a mystery to me – which is welcome in a story where not many things remain mysterious. But Rupert Campbell-Black? Not my type.

The mysterious appeal of Netflix Christmas films

I have a shameful confession. Not only have I watched both the A Christmas Prince trilogy and The Princess Switch trilogy on Netflix; since they came out, I've also had the time and the inclination to rewatch them. The appeal of the soupy Netflix Christmas film is hard to explain. Never mind high-brow stuff: there's plenty of light-hearted TV and film fare which is of way higher quality than this. 

And yet, there's something deeply satisfying with a Christmas romance with just the right amount of hokeyness thrown in. I enjoy picking the tropes apart – sleigh rides, snow fights, handing out Christmas presents to orphans – while admiring the efforts of the leading lady (it's more or less down to her) to carry the whole show on her back. Rose McIver (Tinkerbell in Once Upon A Time – I knew there was a reason I liked her) and Vanessa Hutchens are both seasoned pros, and they have to be. 

I guess this is what people mean by enjoying something "ironically", though I suspect in my case there's some unironic enjoyment thrown in as well. Watching Netflix Christmas films is a little like watching old Barbara Cartland adaptations, except the casting's more wobbly – you don't get Oliver Reed purring "I can see you are going to be very interesting". True, you can find the odd trouper (Alice Krige is the Queen in the A Christmas Prince films), and the kid actors tend to be solid too, but as for some of the supporting cast, you're amazed that there was no better talent on offer. Surely, good character actors can always be had for a decent pay check. Nevertheless, the prince-themed trilogies somehow manage to get the mixture of groan-worthy clichés and slick execution just right.

That's not true of all Netflix Christmas films, though – far from it. I've watched a fair number of misfires over the years: a heroine with a suitably Christmas-film-friendly job (wedding-planner, caterer, candystore owner) and pretty, snowy surroundings aren't enough to compensate for the amateurishness of it all. The unfunny script, the awkward pauses, the non-existent chemistry between the leads: it's just painful to watch, and more than once I've simply given up. But I'm not put off the genre altogether. Being the new A Christmas Prince or The Princess Switch should, after all, not be that high a bar for a film.

I've been comparatively lucky this year. Meet Me Next Christmas, about a girl called Layla who has to get a ticket for a sold-out concert in order to reunite with a potential Mr Right, is actually cute and funny. True, there are some absurdities thrown in. At one time Layla (Christina Milian) selflessly abstains from a designer handbag she would have needed to barter for her ticket, so it can go to a father and son who want to give it to their wife/mother who's been ill. But if they can afford an exclusive designer handbag (which isn't even that pretty), they can find a better present for the convalescent mum. We're not talking about food rations here. However, it wouldn't be a real Netflix Christmas film without a good helping of cheese.

Meet Me Next Christmas may not be Love Actually, but it's several notches above Hot Frosty, one of the most marketed Christmas films this year (at least on streaming). Nevertheless, Hot Frosty is worth a watch if you want to see an absolutely bonkers premise (even for a Christmas film) carried out with some panache. It scores high on the "what did I just watch?" scale. So, get this: young widow Kathy, played by former Mean Girls actress Lacey Chabert, puts a scarf with vague magical properties around a snowman. The snowman comes alive. He looks like a handsome bloke, but is still sensitive to heat. Will he help Kathy find love and joy, perhaps by judicious matchmaking, before melting away as is the custom in bittersweet tales involving live snowmen? No, silly. The snowman is the love interest, so the film has to find a way to do a Pinocchio on him.

Chabert and the rest of the cast do their game best to keep this surreal love story on the road. But the mind does boggle. Also, I wondered if the live snowman (called Jack, not Frosty, which is something) really, truly is the male ideal nowadays. Is this what other women want? A man full of childlike wonder, who has to learn everything from scratch (though he is a fast learner)? Who may have emotional intelligence, but not much of the other kind? A guy who's sweet, ripped and clueless? I never thought I'd say this, but could we have Mr Darcy back, please?

If you want a nice, frothy romcom that does not insult your intelligence all of the time, Meet Me Next Christmas is your best bet. If you want a jaw-dropping festival of hokeyness to enjoy ironically, you could put Hot Frosty on (perhaps while wrapping your Christmas presents, so you feel you've done something sensible with your time). Or why not watch both? It's almost Christmas, after all.

The perfect beach read (or very nearly)

After being so harsh on Doctor Who last time, I'm in the mood to "say something nice", as Missy would put it. Perhaps confirming that an acclaimed romance author is, indeed, very good (in my view, that is) would be a good idea, even if it doesn't make for a startlingly original post?

Finding the ideal summer holiday read is always tricky. A summer or so ago, I read and very much enjoyed Emily Henry's Book Lovers. Nevertheless, I didn't immediately follow it up with Beach Read from the same author, which I bought upon finishing Book Lovers. If there was something I minded in Book Lovers, it was that quite a lot of time was spent on the heroine's coming to terms with the death of her mother, and the effect this had on the relationship between her and her sister. It was by no means badly done, but it's not the kind of storyline you expect to feature prominently in a feel-good romance. 

When Beach Read started with the heroine, January, remembering the day her mother got her cancer diagnosis, I thought "here we go again". The mum makes it, but when the book starts January's father has died of a stroke. At his funeral, his former mistress showed up and handed January the key to a beach house which her dad has left her. Now, several months later, January – a romance author with writer's block and a cash-flow problem – is forced to visit the beach house and clear it out for a sale while she tries to regain some inspiration.

It's not the most cheery start to a light-hearted read, but this summer I persevered through the first depressing pages, and the novel soon goes into the feel-good mode one is led to expect from the way it's marketed. January's neighbour turns out to be Gus, her old crush from college and a literary author who she always thought despised her writing. Soon the old enemies-to-friends, friends-to-lovers plot is on its way. I really enjoyed the central conceit that the two authors agree to switch genres – January will try to write something more literary, while Gus tries a romance – and the book-related plotting and discussions that ensue.

It made me reflect on how subjective appreciation of a novel's plot lines can be. I imagine an editor with romance as her speciality would encourage an author like Henry to concentrate on the romance, by no means stint on the length of sex scenes, and play down the bookish parts. An editor would also probably not have any problems with the dead dad storyline as it places January where she needs to be and provides a motive for her sudden doubts of romance and happy endings (her parents' marriage has always seemed like the ur-romance for her).

For my part I loved the bookish parts, found the sex scenes (there are only two of them, but they do go on for a while) tedious, and could have done without the dead dad plot altogether. Though, yes, the pay-off is touching (I'm glad I wasn't actually at the beach when I read it as I snivelled quite a lot), it is something of a foregone conclusion. So there you go. Much depends on personal preferences. What I can say is that Henry's prose style is enjoyable, funny and – unlike that of many authors of up-beat romances – it doesn't make you feel as if your brain is shrinking while you read it.

I found it interesting how January and Gus choose to interpret what a "literary novel" and a "romance" is. It mostly seems to be a question of subject matter for them, and a pessimistic vs optimistic outlook. To me, the difference between a literary and popular work is mostly a question of the importance of language. Ideally, a good literary novel should have an excellent style and a strong plot and characters. However, for a literary author, literary style tends to come before plot (if character is neglected as well, I for one will give up). It should be more difficult for Gus than for January to churn out text, as every sentence has to sing. 

January's "literary" novel sounds interesting and like something I would like to read, but it's more what I'd call middle-brow than high-brow. As for Gus, in not changing the setting of his novel, I'd argue that he misses the brief completely. The setting for a romance is important, and a potentially suicidal cult is... well... not it. Surprisingly, though, the scenes where Gus and January research the cult plot line are fascinating.

So, yes, as you've gathered, I'm really into the "book plot". It was the same in Book Lovers where the heroine – with the help of her love interest – ended up having to edit a novel where the hard-as-nails protagonist clearly seemed based on herself (a plot line that could have been give more space in my view). I've started Henry's Happy Place now and am liking it, though I miss the bookishness. But hey, that's just me.

Pixar's Elemental: strong on romance, weak on allegory

I have similar feelings towards Elemental, Pixar's latest film, as many others (judging mainly from YouTube). On the strength of trailers and movie clips, I wasn't too eager to go to the cinema to watch it, and was tempted to wait until the Disney + release. When I did watch it at the cinema, however, I was pleasantly surprised and had a really good time.

Why wasn't I more excited for the film, then, as I could see from the trailers etc. that the animation would be stunning and colourful? The general impression of the Elemental's premise seems to be "haven't we seen this before?". A world with humanised elements doesn't come across as very innovative from a studio that has already given us humanised toys, bugs, monsters, fish, emotions and more. What bothered me more than a certain staleness in the Pixar formula, though, was the staleness of the themes addressed. Were we really getting "let's overcome prejudice" and generational conflict? Again?

I've seen the "let's overcome prejudice" theme in animated films and elsewhere many, many times. Zootopia (or Zootropolis in Europe, but as I don't know why the title was changed I'll stick to the original one) is the most high-profiled example among the animated flicks, and to be fair I thought it handled the subject matter rather cleverly. More recently, we've had Raya and the Last Dragon and Luca, and apparently Trolls World Tour from Dreamworks (which I haven't seen) tackled the same issues. It's especially popular to use allegories when trying to put the anti-prejudice message across, and while I can appreciate the good intentions behind them, I feel as if I see another clunky metaphor for immigration (looking at you, Marvel's Secret Invasion) I shall scream. I've already expanded on why I especially dislike allegories where humans are the discriminators and the discriminated against are another species of some kind. At least Elemental doesn't go down that road, but still: this has been done.

Generational conflict is the latest favourite topic of animated Disney films, and it sometimes crops up in Pixar too. I'm getting pretty tired of this as well, especially as generational-conflict films tend to be short on villains. Encanto, Strange World, Turning Red and now Elemental all have the younger generation questioning and/or wanting to break free from the older one, and zero villains.

But enough whining (for now). In spite of my misgivings, I very much enjoyed Elemental, which luckily isn't just Zootopia all over again. What I especially liked about the film was the romance. Here we have two protagonists – the prickly fire girl Ember and the somewhat mushy but endearing water guy Wade – unapologetically falling for each other in a classic romcom scenario. When's the last time we got that in an animated film? Seems like ages. And it's not just one of the characters doing all the running, either. Ember and Wade see the point of each other and complement each other: she appreciates his ability to connect to others, he admires her spark and can-do approach. It's really sweet.

The other main story thread, about Ember's parents' experiences as immigrants to "Element City" and how they affect Ember, has its moments too, though for my part I was more into the love story. Ember's sudden realisation that she doesn't really want to take over her father's shop felt as if it surfaced a bit abruptly after we've seen her repeatedly trying to prove to her dad that she's ready to take over. But maybe that's the point: she feels so guilty about not really enjoying shop work that she's suppressed her ambitions.

The main problem with Elemental is that the allegory of elements living together in one city doesn't serve either of these plot threads. Yes, it's visually impressive, and has inspired the animators to a lot of creative character and city designs. But it doesn't really work. However romantic the scene is where Ember and Wade finally dare to touch and manage to do so without destroying each other, you can't help wondering what will happen when they get even more tactile, plus if and how they'll manage to have children. 

As for the immigrant story, its personal approach is both a strength and a weakness. Unlike Zootopia, Elemental isn't about bringing harmony to a whole society; it's just about Ember trying to have a relationship and find a career that fits her talents without upsetting her parents. This makes the film more engaging and less finger-wagging than if it had gone further down the social commentary route. On the other hand, it can't use the same gambit as Zootopia, where there were no one-to-one parallels between different animals in the film and different groups of people in the real world, which lead to more general and less infected musings on the nature of prejudice. But in Elemental, the fire people are immigrants; they've already been established as such within the story. However, the physical danger that water poses to fire, and fire to everything else, has no equivalent in the real world. Elements really don't mix, but humans can. 

I don't think Element City is meant to be a one-to-one parallel to, say, New York (what would that imply about the air and earth people – that there are some immigrants who've had it easy?), but with some real-world parallels being so explicit, Elemental falls between two chairs when it comes to its world building.

Quibbles aside, Elemental is a heartwarming love story and sometimes touching family drama which is beautifully animated. It's definitely worth watching in a cinema. But Pixar does need to look out. In a film like Inside Out, they were really committed to the idea of animating a girl's emotional development by making her emotions into characters of their own. They had fun with the concept, whereas in Elemental, the animated elements are mostly a way to dress up a story that might as well have been told as a live-action romcom featuring humans. If the story and concept don't gel, then maybe one of them has to go.

Sanditon series two: A Regency romp that works

The frothy costume drama Sanditon continues after all! It was originally cancelled by ITV after its first series – in spite of, to my knowledge, being generally well received by the costume-drama-loving public – but (if a brief Wiki search is to be believed) PBS and the streaming service BritBox came to the rescue. Series two was aired by Swedish television during the autumn of this year and became a welcome distraction on Saturday evenings. Irritatingly, the series creators (chief among them Andrew Davies), not having learned their lesson from last time, decided to end this series on a cliffhanger as well. At least this time we are assured that the story will go on in a third series.

Why do I like this show, when I was so stern about Netflix's attempt to jazz up Austen's Persuasion and haven't been especially blown away by Bridgerton, which is firmly in the same genre? It's not as if Sanditon has anything to do with its supposed source material anymore. Any tenuous link to the fragment penned by Jane Austen has been snapped long ago. And it's not Great Art by any means. The characters, though engaging enough and well acted, aren't especially complex, and the storylines aren't original – in fact they are cheerfully stolen from such different sources as Cyrano de Bergerac, governess novels and Gaslight. In my post about the first series, I warned against expecting anything Austenesque, and I repeat the warning for this series as well. This is not like Davies's Pride and Prejudice, let alone his Dickens adaptations. But, like the recent Doctor Who special, what we have here is an example of TV entertainment that understands its brief. It promises a light-hearted Regency soap, with romances and intrigues you can gossip and speculate about with other costume-drama nuts, and this is exactly what it delivers.

So why don't I feel like Jane Austen's good name has been violated, in the same way I did when watching Netflix's Persuasion? It is a bit cheeky to use an Austen fragment as merely a sales pitch for a series and then go completely in your own direction. I'm not fussed about this, though, and I suspect the main reason is that I didn't think Austen's novel fragment was particularly good, at least not by usual Austen standards. And it is only a few chapters long after all. Persuasion, on the other hand, is a completed work, and one of Austen's best novels, if not the best. Anne Elliot is a wonderful, mature heroine, and I feel it's far worse to take liberties with her than with the relatively thinly sketched characters in Sanditon. It's also worth mentioning that though Sanditon is unpretentious and doesn't feel overburdened by background research (a character struggles with a corset at one point, but corsets weren't really a thing when you wore forgiving high-waisted Empire dresses), it's not knowingly, wilfully anachronistic in the same way as the Netflix Persuasion. It does make some attempts to anchor its plot in a recognisable Regency setting.

As for enjoying Sanditon more than Bridgerton, I simply think there is more pace to the former. It's strange considering that the Julia Quinn novels I've read are usually very entertaining, but I find Bridgerton more than a little slow. The material feels as if it's been stretched too thin, and there's not a lot of the original author's wit in the screenplay. Sanditon, by contrast, bounces along and has a wider variety of subplots to keep it going.

What's series two about, then? Well, for one thing, they've killed off poor Sidney, presumably because they couldn't get Theo James back. I thought this too drastic at first, but as there are other characters who are unaccountably absent, I suppose because their actors couldn't or didn't want to return, I could eventually see why they went with this solution (is it likely that Lord Babington wouldn't check on his wife at least once? And do we ever get explained what happened to Diana Parker?). Anyway, poor Charlotte is grieving for Sidney, but eventually other romantic options come along. A dashing Colonel (Tom Weston-Jones, aka hot Compeyson from Dickensian) takes an interest, while Charlotte for her part is intrigued by the reclusive Mr Colbourne, by whom she is employed as a governess for his daughter and niece. There is some mystery concerning his dead wife... Meanwhile, Charlotte's romantic sister gets entangled with various redcoats; prickly heiress Georgiana Lambe is courted by the painter Lockhart, who plays on his unconvential image but doesn't seem entirely trustworthy; Esther Babington, upset that she's been unable to conceive a child, becomes the victim of a plot to to replace her as Lady Denhams's heir; and Thomas Parker frets over Sanditon's finances as usual, this time more and more ably assisted in his endeavours by his younger brother Arthur.

Needless to say, I liked some plot and character developments more than others. If there's one character who has suffered from being so far removed from the original source material, it's Thomas Parker: in Austen's fragment, he is my favourite by far, but in the series not even Kris Marshall's homespun charm can save him from coming across as a prize idiot. I wasn't a fan of the sugar boycott subplot – "moral" boycotts are a pet peeve of mine in any era. On the other hand, I am warming to its instigator Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke): there's some good character development for her and for Arthur Parker (no longer simply "the fat brother") in this series. Also, the boycott plot has the advantage of casting a favourable light on the comic relief characters of the vicar and his spinster sister; they support Georgiana and are genuinely fond of her. For someone who watches a lot of Midsomer Murders and the Morse crime dramas (Morse, Lewis and Endeavour), a kindly vicar in British television makes a nice change.

Rose Williams gives Charlotte a great deal of charm and somehow makes this often frustrating heroine work. How Charlotte can prefer Mr Colbourne to the handsome Colonel is a mystery to me, but I can't wait to find out how it all turns out in the end.

What was that? Netflix's Persuasion and the pretty frock conundrum

"What did I just watch?" Is a comment you sometimes hear on YouTube. I interpret it as slightly more positive than "It was terrible and I hated it". The reviewer is signalling that though the film or TV programme they watched was complete rubbish, somehow they managed to get some enjoyment out of the sheer weirdness of the product on offer. I consider myself generous when I call the so-called adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion on Netflix a "What did I just watch?" kind of TV film. It was awful in so many ways. I could not in good conscience recommend it to anyone. And yet I did enjoy revelling in its bizarreness, in a way I wasn't able to do in the case of, say, Enola Holmes. It's just... so... what were they thinking?

I'll start out boringly by, in all fairness, listing a few positives:

1) At the beginning of the film, when Anne is pining for Wentworth, Lady Russell points out that if he cared about her so much, he could have got in touch with Anne after he became rich. If I remember rightly, this is briefly touched upon in the novel, but I don't think any of the other adaptations have brought it up. I've never thought about it because come on, would you really contact a woman who dumped you because you were poor and say "Hello again, I'm rich now?". But Wentworth knew that Anne wasn't a gold digger, and that the concerns about his lack of fortune were those of her friends and family, not Anne's own. Not looking her up does seem a little "weak and resentful".

2) The Musgrove girls, Louisa in particular, are less slappable than in other adaptations. Louisa doesn't unconsciously treat Anne like an old maid and considers the possibility that Wentworth might be a good match for her. She registers that there's something between them and, when she starts falling for Wentworth herself, more or less asks Anne's permission to proceed. Also, when Wentworth criticises Anne behind her back, Louisa stands up for her. It's not in the book, but I quite like this.

3) When Anne tells Wentworth shortly after his return that "I don't want you to be angry", he whips back "How would you like me to be?". Good point.

4) Captain Harville is sweet. Well, he always is, but I'm grateful this adaptation didn't ruin him. In this version of the story, he actually tries to fix Anne up with Captain Benwick. When Benwick falls for Louisa instead, Harville explains being down in the mouth about it (in spite of his own attempt at matchmaking) by not expecting his own reaction: Benwick's grief "kept my sister alive somehow". I can buy that.

5) Mr Elliot is a real charmer. The whole Mrs Smith subplot isn't brought up (and let's face it, it doesn't really work in an adaptation anyway), so his main fault is being mercenary, something he is upfront about. I enjoyed him running rings around the sadly wooden Wentworth when it came to verbal sparring. It also made a nice change that this version of the character actually marries Mrs Clay.

6) On the whole, the side characters are played well. Richard E. Grant plays Sir Walter with a touch of self-irony which is amusing.

There is no way, though, that these positives weigh up all the terrible stuff. There's the sheer cringiness of the winking allusions to modern mores  ("A Five in London is a Ten in Bath"; "Hide my ledgers! I don't want anyone to assume my identity"; "Don't respond to anything he says... like a ghost"). Anne Elliot – Austen's most mature heroine, who suffers real anguish during the course of the novel –  is depicted as a Bridget Jones-like singleton, smirkingly breaking the Fourth Wall, drinking red wine to drown her sorrows, sometimes mooning over Wentworth like a teenager and getting into embarrassing scrapes. Her (unshaven) Frederick does little except look troubled: the romance is far from compelling. Even if you ignore the references to modern dating, Louisa's courtship tips to Anne are inane, and why would Anne herself rudely blurt out during dinner that Charles Musgrove proposed to her first?

The worst thing about the film, though, is its open, knowing anachronisms. So why on earth didn't they set it in modern times and state that the story was inspired by Persuasion rather than an attempt at a direct adaptation? It would have solved many, if not all, of the film's problems. It could openly have poked fun at contemporary dating games etc. instead of making nonsensical allusions to them in what's supposed to be a historical setting. The diversity casting wouldn't have induced any head-scratching moments for the viewer, because uptown 21st century New York, for example, really is a melting pot, unlike Regency England.

The only answer I can think of is that the film's creators were beguiled by the trimmings of a romantic period drama – the pretty dresses, the coaches, the dancing – while not caring for the real historical context at all. And so, as they were going to ignore the times in which Jane Austen lived and worked anyway, they thought they might as well do it as openly and flauntingly as they could. The success of Bridgerton seems to have given people the idea that you can play fast and loose with Regency-set dramas as long as you deliver those pretty frocks. Well, I'm sorry, but this doesn't work with an Austen novel (it hardly works with Bridgerton in my personal opinion). Next time anyone wants to jazz up a Jane Austen plot, they would do well to go modern.

Predictions for The Gilded Age season two

Should I, to paraphrase the movie Mean Girls, stop trying to make The Gilded Age happen? Perhaps because it's airing on HBO and isn't as immediately accessible to a British or American viewership as Downton Abbey, there doesn't appear to be an awful lot of hype about it. Instead, costume-drama viewers seem a lot more interested in Netflix's Bridgerton. But I'm just back from my first trip to London in three years (well, OK, I travelled back last Sunday – but I'm still tired!) and going for the path of least resistance. I don't have much to say about Bridgerton anyway. It's frothy, escapist, not very action-packed, the ideal viewing if you have a cold, and has nothing whatsoever to do with Regency England (something the series, to its credit, acknowledged briefly in a parallel-universe-explaining scene in season one). The higher Regency society was no melting pot, and the Queen did not literally select the "diamond of the season" as if the season were some beauty pageant. This is pure fantasy, and should be enjoyed as such.

Back, then, to The Gilded Age. To be fair, in terms of action, there's not much more going on here than in Bridgerton. Only towards the end did it pick up the pace – and then, just as all the pieces had been moved into a promising pattern, the season was over (after nine episodes, not ten as I first thought it would be). The Gilded Age suffered from the same problem as late Downton series in that some storylines were dragged out just so the characters involved could have a "season arc". For instance, no-one really believed that Marian Brook's romance with Mr Raikes would come to anything, so that plot line could easily have been shortened, even if it meant having to give Marian something else to do for the rest of the season. For all that, I really liked this series – yes, more than Bridgerton – and now the preliminary introductions to the characters are over and done with there are many interesting ways it could go. In order to follow my old Downton tradition, I think I'll try some predictions, hopefully without spoiling too much of season one for those who have not yet seen it.

Mrs Chamberlain's son makes an appearance Romance seems likely to bloom between Marian and Larry Russell, but will it really be all plain sailing from here? This pairing is so obvious it could easily become boring if there are no other romantic options for these young leads. Marian has made friends with Mrs Chamberlain, a rich and kind woman who is nevertheless shunned by polite society because of her scandalous past. She has a son ("adopted", though he is in fact her biological son) whom we have yet to meet. It would lead to some intriguing developments if he were to take an interest in Marian. What would her aunts say? Aunt Agnes would be shocked, but she has a more pragmatic side, and in terms of wealth young Mr Chamberlain would be a catch for the penniless Marian. Marian herself would be favourably disposed towards the son of a friend. By not being an obvious "Mr Wrong", he could give Larry a run for his money.

Mr Russell does Marian a good turn The admirable George Russell is the kind of man who always pays his debts. Marian unwittingly helped him unearth a scheme to besmirch his good name, and now he owes her one. There's no guarantee he will help her with good grace. Russell is a great character, my favourite by far, but the viewer is still supposed to be a little wary of his ruthless streak. I can see Agnes Van Rhijn being reluctantly grateful to him for helping her niece out of some scrape, and him acknowledging her grudging thanks in a stiff "well, we're even now" way.

An English Lord for Gladys? It's pretty clear that the socially ambitious Bertha Russell is in part modelled on Alva Vanderbilt, which would make her daughter Gladys a parallel to Consuelo Vanderbilt. Consuelo married the Duke of Marlborough, a match fiercely promoted by her mother, but was famously unhappy in her marriage (and let everybody know it). We've already seen that Bertha did not consider a perfectly respectable young banker grand enough for Gladys. Maybe a titled Englishman is what she's looking for as a son-in-law. I don't think the dates match, regrettably, but otherwise one could imagine Bertha trying to secure a young Earl of Grantham for her daughter before he's snatched up by Cora instead. Anyway, I expect some members of the English aristocracy to make an appearance.

Bertha Russell and Agnes van Rhijn team up It may be too soon to expect this in season two, but consider this my standing prediction for future seasons as well. Sooner or later, it will happen. They are both hard-headed women, and will in time find some common cause (possibly involving the happiness of Marian and Larry). Bertha told Mrs Astor that she could prove a useful friend, but I can't really see these two women becoming really chummy – Mrs Astor is more likely to see the point of Bertha's husband (whom she has already conceded to be "a force to be reckoned with"). But Agnes and Bertha do have things in common, and if the situation is dire enough they could be brought to see it. As Agnes has been a bit of a disappointment this far, I think the character would benefit from moving out of her comfort zone.

We learn more about Peggy's ex I'm ashamed to say I can't remember what happened to Peggy's husband. Did he die? Or did her father bully him into accepting a divorce, and in that case, on what possible grounds? In any case, Mr Scott's behaviour over Peggy's marriage is baffling, to say the least. It's one thing if he thought she married beneath her, but she did marry – and yet he handled the whole situation as if she was living in sin. It's rare for a character in a Fellowes drama to behave completely irrationally and in a "stock character" (Stern Father) manner. Does Mr Scott know something about Peggy's hubby that we don't?

Battle of the butlers I suppose the rivalry between Church and Bannister, where the former apparently shopped the latter to his employer when he was earning a little on the side (though should we, and more importantly Bannister, really take Miss Turner's word for this?), will play out somehow. Not that I really want it to. I like them both. Can't they just be pals? 

Little Women (2019): Is romance out of fashion?

Right, time for something girly. Recently, I finally watched the 2019 film of Little Women, the latest adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel, this time written and directed by Greta Gerwig. I've had the DVD for quite some time, but kept putting off watching it as I'd heard rumours that Gerwig had made changes to the ending I wasn't likely to approve of. As it turns out, the film as a whole was good in many ways, but yes, I did resent the changes at the end, not least the coquettish, "post-modern" way they were served up.

To start positive, I enjoyed this version of Little Women a great deal more than the 2017 mini-series adaptation of the same novel. Whereas the TV version concentrated on the hard life of the March family and their ability to cope, the 2019 film re-introduced the importance of imagination and creativity in the March sisters' lives, which was also a big part of the lovely 1994 film with Winona Ryder. Here again, we see the sisters performing amateur theatricals and hosting their own version of the Pickwick Club. When Laurie gets his first glimpse of the March household, he is thoroughly charmed by the warmth and closeness of the family. I was relieved that this film allowed itself sunny, light-hearted scenes and wasn't dead serious all the time: after all, Little Women the book wouldn't have become such a success if it had been all doom and gloom. 

The casting of the protagonists works very well, though I mostly prefer the cast of the 1994 film. Saoirse Ronan can overdo the tomboyishness of Jo in a take or two, but she is convincing as an energetic and driven young writer. Florence Pugh makes adult Amy surprisingly likeable (though she's not as convincing as young Amy – I think the 1994 film made the right call when they had two different actresses as Amy, even though the one playing the little minx Amy risks putting the polished young woman Amy in the shade). Emma Watson acquits herself well as Meg – and she needs a win after the lacklustre Beauty and the Beast –  and Laura Dern delivers as Marmee, even if it's hard for her or anyone to compare with Susan Sarandon. Timothée Chalamet looks so young and clueless as Laurie you can sort of see why he'd be too immature for Jo. I actually preferred Eliza Scanlen's sweet Beth to Claire Danes in the 1994 film: Danes was very convincing, but there was something slightly passive-aggressive about her Beth ("maybe we should give the Hummels our bread").

I had mixed feelings about the chopping and changing from present to past in this version of Little Women. True, if you're almost over-familiar with the story, it does feel refreshing not to have to sit through the same scenes that always make it into the adaptation in exactly the same order as always. Nevertheless, even if you know the story it can be a bit hard to know where you are in the plot, and I did wonder if someone who hadn't any knowledge of Little Women beforehand would be able to make sense of it all. But mostly, I thought this was a perfectly acceptable way to shake things up and keep the viewer alert.

What was the problem, then? I had a few other quibbles but my main objections all relate to one storyline: Jo's romance – or rather non-romance here – with Professor Bhaer.

Now, I'm not that big a fan of Bhaer as a character. I confess that I have only re-read the first part of Little Women in adult years, while I haven't re-read the part published in Europe as Good Wives since I was a girl (when my mother read it to me). Then, I had no idea why Jo would turn down Laurie's proposal and thought Bhaer was a sad comedown for her, seeing as he was something of a bore who had moral objections to her writing sensational stories. The thing with Bhaer, though, is that he needs to be older (and possibly wiser) than Jo, and someone she can look up to. She falls for someone who can guide her, rather than have to be guided by her, like Laurie. The 1994 film did an excellent job of making Bhaer appealing – I mean, they cast Gabriel Byrne! – while preserving the difference in age and experience between him and Jo, and the contrast between him and the boyish Laurie.

In this film, Bhaer looks more like a glamorous young student than a professor. Louis Garrel could just as well have played Laurie. There is no discernible age gap between him and Ronan's Jo, and his accent sounds more French than German. Byrne as Bhaer made us swallow his criticism of Jo's writing with his gentle, measured manner – you felt he was trying to be constructive, because he sensed that she could do more with her talent. Garrel's Bhaer blurts out "I do not like them" (Jo's stories) and "they are not good", which is effective in that we realise why Jo becomes incensed: those are the very last things you should say to an author. But he doesn't offer any constructive criticism, and there is no reason, on the strength of this conversation, why she should value his opinion. And why does a man who can read and understand Shakespeare express himself so clumsily?

It gets worse, though, when Bhaer re-enters the story towards the end. Here, if the film followed the book, he and Jo should finally get together and get married, after a sweet scene under an umbrella. We do get some romance between them, but it is undercut by a scene with Jo and her publisher spliced in right in the middle of it. Jo is explaining that the heroine in her book does not marry either of her suitors, and her publisher insists that she change the story. We then cut to the umbrella scene – bathed in the same warm, somewhat unreal glow as the film's flashbacks – and then we hear the publisher commending it. It is therefore heavily implied that the romance between Jo and Bhaer and their subsequent marriage only exist as fiction in her novel, while the real Jo remains unmarried. Getting her novel published is her real happy ending.

Now, you could argue that Jo simply didn't want to put her own romantic experiences in her novel – there's a difference between her and her character after all. But she doesn't sound like a happy bride-to-be when discussing the plot change with her publisher (she talks about "selling" her heroine into marriage). The ending is unclear enough for there to be some debate over how it should be interpreted, but from what I've read, Gerwig meant the unromantic interpretation to be the right one. Alcott allegedly wanted Jo to remain single initially but altered the plot to make it more appealing to readers, and Gerwig thought she would honour the writer by giving the film the ending she'd really intended.

Here's the thing, though: whatever Alcott may or may not have intended for Jo to start with, she ended up granting her heroine a love life, and that was the smart creative choice. It's certainly better than some half-baked affair where a male character's only function is to serve as a romantic red herring. Given that Bhaer in the book (as far as I remember) was no Gabriel Byrne, I'd had preferred it if Gerwig had written him out of the story altogether. I could live with that. But where there's a Bhaer, there's a way for him and Jo to be together. Also, there's something self-congratulatory about playing around with the book-within-a-book conceit. Together with rather too many speeches about how the only way a girl in the mid-nineteenth century can make money is to marry rich (though I liked how Aunt March's motive for taking Amy to Europe rather than Jo was that Amy was the most likely to make a good match and save her family's finances), the tinkering with the ending lends the film an air of modern condescension.

We seem to be getting less and less of of romantic plots nowadays, at least from creators of culture and entertainment who want to appear morally irreproachable, and it's starting to get me down. Romance is frowned upon, especially romance between a woman and a man who is older and/or in any way in a position of power in relation to her. I can't help feeling this is hypocritical, to say the least – because, newsflash, quite a lot of women (including me) do find power attractive, however improper it may be to say so. And anyway I like romance, even the blander kind with male protagonists who take their lead from their womenfolk à la Laurie. It's quite true that a woman doesn't necessarily need romance to be happy, but she can still want to experience it through fiction.

Vindicating the Bennet sisters

My summer holiday (unusually long by the standards of most countries except Sweden, yet it feels too short for me) is drawing to a close. I have done quite a bit of reading, though - not very ambitious reading, mind you, but reading nonetheless. Two of my not-too-demanding summer reads have been "Austenuations", i.e. novels somehow connected to Jane Austen's fictional universe (prequels, sequels, retellings from another point of view - that kind of thing). In both cases, the novel they lean against is the ever-popular Pride and Prejudice, and one of the authors' goals has clearly been to give a satisfying ending to one of the Bennet sisters still unmarried at the end of P & P: Mary and Kitty Bennet respectively.

Now, this is not a new exercise. I'd guess one of the reasons Pride and Prejudice attracts so many sequel writers is that there are still two Bennet girls to marry off. Austen couldn't resist playing this game herself, apparently: she's supposed to have told her family that Mary married her Uncle Phillips's clerk and Kitty married a clergyman. Sequel writers tend to take different views on whether this should be considered "canon". For myself, I don't think they need to follow Austen's pronouncements to the letter: I've no idea in which context they were said, but I can just see her putting a worried niece's mind at rest ("Auntie Jane, didn't Mary and Kitty marry?""Yes, yes, Mary married her uncle's clerk and Kitty got really sensible with time and married a clergyman."). It is strange to imagine Kitty as a clergyman's wife - why couldn't she marry an officer, but a nicer one than Wickham? - and consequently, I've seen her paired with a couple of pretty unconvential clergymen in various sequels. Sometimes, I'd wish that the sequel writers would ignore Austen's marriage predictions rather than force them into being, but on the other hand I'd rather they follow them than write a sequel where Mary becomes an old maid or Kitty is killed off (this has happened). It's not too big a stretch to assume that Austen meant all the Bennet sisters to get husbands, and this is what most readers (including me) want too.

In the novels I've read - The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow and What Kitty Did Next by Carrie Kablean - the authors want to do more than simply marry the girls off, however. They want to vindicate and flesh out the characters of two sisters who, in different ways, were pretty hard done by in the original novel.

Hadlow's novel is the most ambitious, and maybe her task was also the hardest. I can't be the only one who's felt sorry for Mary Bennet, but sadly, the main characters' low opinion of her seems well-founded in Pride and Prejudice. As the plain and bookish sister, one could assume that she would be the clever one in the family, but she never says or does anything sensible and is in her priggish way almost as silly as her younger sisters. Austen was harsh here. You would expect an author to give a plain, studious girl good sense as a sort of compensation, but Austen would be familiar with enough luckless maidens who were neither good-looking nor clever and consequently really hard to marry off (this at a time when staying single and making your own living wasn't really an option for a middle-class woman, unless you could face the drudgery of becoming a governess). Mary is an example of this type of unfortunate girl. If we only go by what we learn from her in Pride and Prejudice, she's lucky to get a husband at all, even if he's "only" a lawyer's clerk.

Hadlow puts a lot of effort into vindicating Mary. The hefty novel takes place before, during and after the events of Pride and Prejudice. We learn of Mary's troubled childhood, despised as plain by her mother and ignored by her father, whom she is eager to impress. Hadlow skilfully doesn't deny that Mary's behaviour is priggish, but she makes a convincing case for why it's not unreasonable for her to behave in this way and gravitate towards ultra-serious books which denounce fripperies such as appearances. I did feel that too much time was spent on Mary's back story, but seeing Mr Collins's visit from Mary's viewpoint was fascinating. Many a reader have asked themselves why no attempt was made to match Mary to Mr Collins, seeing as they seem compatible. The answer is simple enough: Mr Collins, as Longbourn's heir, thinks he is entitled to the best the Bennet household has to offer him by way of wife material, and if Jane isn't available Elizabeth is the next-best thing. This, again, is realistic: what's remarkable is that Charlotte Lucas, no dazzling beauty, manages to catch him in the end. Mr Collins would probably not have much luck on a dating site in this day and age, but from the point of view of Regency England, he is highly eligible.

What I liked was that Hadlow's Mary isn't any more taken in by Mr Collins than the rest of the Bennet family: she sees his absurdities, but believes she would be able to live with them and makes an entirely unromantic play for him. It fails, and she is not given any credit for her pragmatic thinking by her mother.

Hadlow doesn't spend too much time on the events described in Pride and Prejudice, but only delves into them when they are important for Mary, which is a good call. I was more interested in what happens to her after P & P, and the slow build-up pays off when it comes to character development: I could believe that the self-aware and intelligent young woman at the end of the novel was the same person as the insecure teenager at the beginning of it who sought solace in Fordyce's sermons and thought she had to make an impression by quoting moral platitudes. There's a lot to enjoy for the Austen nerd: we get to see what it really means to be the unmarried sister in a family, and I appreciated how Mary unwittingly puts the Collinses' marriage on a better footing during a visit by forcing Charlotte to up her game. Avoiding your husband as much as possible really isn't much of a recipe for a happy marriage. When Mary's own chance for romance finally comes I found her love interest a little underwhelming, but I think Austen would have approved of him, for all that he's not Mr Phillips's clerk.

What Kitty Did Next isn't as substantial as The Other Bennet Sister - it's more of a classic Regency romp kind of Austen sequel. Like Hadlow, though, Kablean is a stern champion of "her" Bennet sister and keen to portray her as a young woman of character. Now, Kitty in the original novel is more of a blank slate than Mary. She copies her sister Lydia a lot, so what she becomes when she is free of Lydia's influence is really anyone's guess. In this respect, you could say that she's easier to vindicate than Mary. Like her sister, though, she is left in an unenviable position at the end of Pride and Prejudice. Mr Bennet, spooked by Lydia's fate, vows that he will become a much sterner parent and rattles off a number of restrictions which poor Kitty will bear the brunt of. He is mostly joking, but Kitty isn't to know that (I didn't get it myself as a teenager), and had he been serious, she would have had zero chance of meeting a suitor. Serious or not, Mr Bennet's new-found interest in his role as a father is likely to lead to a much duller life for Kitty.

In Kablean's novel, Kitty discovers talents both for writing and music, which I thought came a bit out of nowhere. But she is still suitably interested in the glamours of high society. The novel feels a little static at times: the blurb mentions a "fateful night" at Pemberley, but it doesn't take place until quite late, and before that there aren't that many events or conflicts. It has to be said, though, that I hadn't predicted the way in which Kitty gets into trouble: it's a little different to what one might think. Kablean is clearly familiar with Austen's marriage predicitions for Mary and Kitty, and mischievously introduces several young men who either are or might become ordained, which keeps one guessing, though Kitty's own preferences seem pretty marked. Or will her final choice not be a clergyman at all?

Of the two novels, I prefer Hadlow's, but I enjoyed Kablean's as well as an easy summer read. It's interesting to see that they have some things in common: for one thing, happily, they aren't written as Austen pastiches, and the prose flows well yet unanachronistically. In both novels, the sisters' parents are no help when it comes to the girls finding happiness (except in the end for Kitty when Mr Bennet steps up) and their father's contempt for their "silliness" wounds them both. Jane is kind but ineffectual when there's a real crisis brewing. Miss Bingley is a cow. The Gardiners offer a refuge and are very important in Hadlow's book especially. The Darcy household is somewhat criticised for being a self-contained unit: it's difficult to find a place in their happy bubble. Hadlow's Mary never quite fits in at Pemberley, whereas Kablean's Kitty thrives there at first, only to learn the hard way that her sister, her brother-in-law and her new friend Georgiana Darcy don't quite trust the "new" Kitty yet.

Another thing the novels have in common, then, is that the focus is not (as it so often is in P & P sequels) Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage, so they're not an excuse to dwell on love scenes between these fan favourites. Fine by me (I'm a little tired of this romance, I must confess), but might be useful to know: trust me, if you want Lizzy-Darcy smooching, there are plenty of alternatives. 

A tale as old as time about... pity and self-sacrifice?

The Beauty and the Beast, as we all know, is the story of a beautiful woman who learns to love an ugly beast, only to discover that he, too, was beautiful all along. Or wait... is it?

Previously, my knowledge of the original story of The Beauty and the Beast came from the fairy-tale series of Illustrated Classics, which were usually pretty accurate, though they sometimes softened the edges of the adapted tales. The Beauty and the Beast edition was, in the Swedish translation I read as a child, called Lena and the Lion. As the Beast was depicted as a lion, and I was a cat-loving kid not too fussed about inter-species relationships, I was dissatisfied with him turning into a prince in the end - wasn't a dashing lion a much better bet than just another run-of-the-mill fairy-tale prince? Some of that childish disappointment with the prince ending, I admit, still lingers. I can see the rationale of the Beast turning into a man - but did it have to be a prince?

From the Illustrated Classic, I learned of some elements of the classic story which didn't make it to the animated Disney film, such as Beauty actually being the daughter of a ruined merchant, the merchant getting into trouble because he picked a rose from the Beast's garden, Beauty's jealous sisters etc. But the story still seemed very much like a romance. Lena, ultimately, loved her lion.

As I set out to finally read the original The Beauty and the Beast, written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740, I was therefore shocked to discover how unromantic the central relationship was. The condition for the Beast's curse to be broken is not that a girl should love him (and he her in return) as in the Disney film, but that she should agree to marry him. As Mr Gradgrind would tell you, those are two very different things. Beauty (which is actually a nickname, not a proper name - you can see why adaptations have simplified matters and called her Belle=beauty in the original French) never falls in love with the Beast in the original version. In fact, she loves the prince he will become, who visits her in her dreams, all along, and doesn't twig that her dream lover and the Beast are one and the same. She finally agrees to marry the Beast because she pities him, feels under an obligation to him and appreciates his good nature. When she asks her dream prince whether this is the right step to take and he enthusiastically encourages her, she is most seriously peeved.

Another change compared to modern adaptations of the tale, which maybe bothers me more than many others, is that part of the Beast's curse is to appear not only ugly but stupid. In the course of their acquaintance, he only puts the same questions to Beauty each evening (how her day has been etc.), never showing any wit or superior understanding. It's not a question, then, of Beauty being beguiled by his personality. Like, one suspects, many other girls of her day, Beauty is faced with the prospect of marrying a suitor she doesn't care for because he is kind, and he is rich.

The Villeneuve version of The Beauty and the Beast is a good read in many ways. There are pretty details about the Enchanted Castle (where Beauty and Beast are served by genii in disguise - the cursed servants appear to be a Disney invention), and it's intriguing to see how the prince's gambit of visiting Beauty in her dreams threatens to work against himself as he becomes his own rival. The later part of the story should be of interest to fantasy aficionados, as it contains a great deal of intricate fairy lore. Far from being cursed because he needed to be taught a lesson, the hapless prince got into trouble because he turned down a vindictive fairy who wanted to marry him. A good fairy then tries to help him as best she can, though she can't break the curse directly. The good fairy/bad fairy set-up makes sense of the role of the Enchantress in the Disney films, who always seemed somewhat of a split personality. Anyway, there's a lot of back story involving these fairies and others and rules they have to follow, not all of which come into play in the story. What we see, in a word, is some "world building". Beauty turns out to be the daughter of a king and yet another fairy, and it's all very complicated. Though all this isn't really necessary for the central plot, the fairy shenanigans in themselves are interesting enough.

Nevertheless, the Beauty/Beast relationship being so very different from what I was used to gave me a nasty jolt. How could Lena and the Lion get its source material so very wrong? The answer is that it didn't, but that the source material was not really Villeneuve's tale but a simplified adaption of it written by another 18th-century lady, Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. This is much closer to the story most of us are familiar with. Beauty does care for the Beast in the end, and there is no muddying of the waters with dream visions. The bad fairy and good fairy appear, but their motives aren't gone into, and the whole back story of Beauty being a princess with fairy blood is dropped. Nevertheless, shadows of the problems with the original (problems to me, at least) remain. The Beast is allowed to show plain common sense, but his wit is still hampered by the curse. The moral is that neither beauty nor wit makes for a happy marriage, but a good heart. That's all very well, but how happy would Beauty and Beast's marriage have been in the long run if he hadn't turned back into a prince?

I'll have to admit it: for my money, the animated Disney film - and the story it tells, which has then inspired other adaptations - is better than its source material. Though I'm still not a fan of the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, I can better understand now why it leaned so heavily on the animated version instead of taking a fresh look at the original tales. The re-focusing of the Beauty/Beast relationship from marriage of convenience to love match brings its own problems, but they are much more fun to explore. Modern Beasts (in the Disney films and in Once Upon A Time) are allowed to be interesting and far from foolish, but this development has its own price: the more personality the Beast has, the less inclined he is to mollycoddle Belle or to fall in love with her at first sight just because she's beautiful. We seem to have come full circle, from the dumb sweetie Beast of the original to Beasts who are intelligent but not noticeably sweet-natured (though there is ultimately Good In Them). Both parties have to adapt for the romance to work.

Villeneuve and Beaumont may point out that while you can question the wisdom of telling girls they will be happy with someone they consider ugly and stupid as long as he has a good heart, it is a no less dangerous message to claim that you can transform a beastly man with the strength of your love. I think they'd be particularly horrified, presupposing that they somehow gained non-18th-century knowledge of the Brothers Grimm tales, by the Once Upon A Time crossover. But to me, a spot of Grimm is exactly what this fairy tale needs.