companionenvy

There was some disconnect, though, in that the show really seemed to be pushing the idea that Mary was as good or maybe even better as her sons. Realistically, her experience level would probably have put her somewhere between season 1 Sam and season 1 Dean--in other words, certainly a skilled hunter, but not someone going toe to toe with celestial and demonic beings on the regular. Though I suppose there's room for retconning that in the new series.

Here's a thought: could the "frame narrative" of the show be set in Heaven? That would be consistent with narration from Dean, and it might be a way to make a memory-wipe scenario palatable. Have a first scene with Dean, John and Mary (the JDM/SS versions) in heaven, where maybe J&M have gotten or are getting some of their memories back. Or, at least, it becomes clear there are some discrepancies in memories, and Dean investigates. Still not great, necessarily, but at least then there's not the same sense of total waste and frustration, as some version of these characters do get their memories back, eventually.

Sigh. I left these boards years ago over bitch/jerk, and I can't even get through a single post that has nothing at all to do with Sam or Dean without accusations of bias resurfacing. I don't care if Shakespeare were writing, producing, and starring in the series. It is a prequel about characters whose fates are known, as is the broad outline of their story. That makes me not super excited for it right off the bat. I guess it is possible that the show could work well if the showrunners simply ignore things in canon that they don't like, and tell the story of John finding out the truth from Mary and fighting supernatural baddies together. It would be a total cheat that cheapens parts of SPN canon, but the show could probably work on those terms. I don't think they're going to do it, though, as the comments about finding ways to work with canon suggest. As I acknowledged, they could also find an in-text workaround, most obviously a memory wipe. But, as I also said, I detest memory wipes of that kind. Watching an entire series that one or both of the main characters are just going to forget isn't my cup of tea. Still think Wayward Daughters was a better idea for a spinoff. It could more easily have carved out its own little corner of the SPN-verse without either interfering substantially with the mythology or being overly burdened by it.

Eh. I just don't see how this is going to work. I'm generally suspicious of prequels, because I do think that part of the enjoyment of a show is watching to see how everything turns out in the end. When you don't have that, it robs us of something significant. Sure, the journey is more important than the destination, and it can be interesting to see how everything came to be--but at the end of the day, knowing the fates of John and Mary cheapens the experience of watching them headline what I assume is intended as a multi-season serialized drama. And for John and Mary, show canon has also precluded what would seem to be the natural progression of a show with this kind of central premise. If it weren't a prequel, a show in which two teens fall in love, one of them hiding her continued entanglement with the supernatural world she's trying to escape, would naturally be leading up to a reveal, and the two of them hunting together. SPN may have been loose with canon, but there's a difference between technical retcons that can still be finessed into what we know, surprising additions that change our sense of the characters without violating canon, and a premise-changing move that simply can't be reconciled with what came before. John's father being a MOL when he had called himself a "mechanic from a family of mechanics" and reference to an apparently living father had been made is in the first category. It wasn't a central part of the episode in which it was introduced, and it can be made consistent with what we later learn by assuming he had a stepfather from a relatively young age. He certainly didn't know about Henry and his legacy status, so it isn't a big leap; John thought he was from a thoroughly ordinary family. Mary hunting after marriage is in the second category. I know a lot of people hated that decision, but it isn't actually precluded by canon, and, IMO, isn't even that inconsistent with it. We know she wanted to leave hunting at age 18, but people are complicated, and there are any number of ways she might have been drawn back in for reasons of both obligation and desire. There's room for her to have been mostly a stay-at-home-mom who occasionally hunted when she caught wind of a case. What there's not room for is for John to have been in the know. John having been a Muggle who becomes initiated into the supernatural world after Mary dies is a central part of the show's premise. When the boys visit in 1979, he certainly doesn't know anything about it, and then has his memory wiped at the end of that episode. Once Mary returns and we learn more about her past as a hunter, there's never an indication that John knew anything, and a number of indications that she was keeping it from him. So, right off the bat, you not only know how these people's stories end, you've taken away what should logically be the key direction in their shared narrative. It just isn't that satisfying to have endless seasons of Mary getting drawn back in to hunting, John being in the dark, and them fighting about her absences and his...whatever he was doing. That leaves us with ""John knew, but then his memory got wiped," which is a narrative tactic I've always hated, unless it is used in a relatively limited way and/or with a minor character.

Oh, of course. Obviously Marina couldn't have done any of this on her own. But that would have been the obvious thing for her parents to do as well. They would have had as much motivation for covering things up as she would have. Ethically speaking, definitely the right thing to do. But this would have been risky to the point of insanity. That Colin was willing to do it--if indeed we believe he actually would have gone through with it, in the cold light of day--is not something any reasonable person would have anticipated. And I don't remember the exact dialogue, but I don't think Lady F actually intended to tell the old guy. The idea was that he'd be so happy to have an heir he wouldn't mind it when Marina gave birth to a full-term baby at six months. Marina's no saint. But she was in a truly terribly position, once we pretend that there was no chance of delivering the baby privately. While it isn't right, I can also understand why she was frustrated beyond belief by Penelope nattering on about how wrong it was for her to dupe Colin into marriage when Marina might well have been looking at a future as a street whore otherwise--especially when those scruples only made an appearance when the dupe was someone she cared about. The consequences for Marina if there was no marriage were likely to be catastrophic. The consequences for Colin after being duped into marriage don't compare. Again, that doesn't give Marina the right to do what she did, but it does put her actions in context. I did find her an idiot for initially refusing Philip, and for acting like she was in for a life of misery when she went off with him. Even allowing for her grief, she should have been able to realize that she had just gotten an outcome that should have been beyond her wildest expectations, short of George having survived and come back for her. Frankly, Philip being willing to marry her wasn't all that realistic either; if he was an honorable guy, he would have given her a generous yearly stipend to support her and the child, not marry her. She should have been thanking her lucky stars.

For me, there's a difference between a complicated personality and total inconsistency. I could believe, for instance, that a man might sincerely love his wife and family, but also be having an affair. The latter is a betrayal of the former, but the two are not incompatible. Similarly, I do believe that Penelope really does care about Eloise and consider her a friend, despite the fact that some of the things she is writing would definitely and rightly be perceived as a betrayal of Eloise (or at least of her family). That's different from accepting that someone who has no idea how someone becomes pregnant is also capable of making sexual innuendos about what occurs on a honeymoon and predicting that a child will soon result from it. Even there, I get that there are probably ways of squaring that circle, technically speaking. A person could know that there was some sort of "marital act" that resulted in children without being aware of any of the logistics, or that it could happen before marriage. But it isn't simply a matter of technical possibility, it is a matter of credible characterization. LW's writing style, from the knowing winks to the witty aphorisms to the kernels of worldy wisdom, does not match in any way with a girl who accidentally asks her mother if she can "play" with her best friend. I teach in a university. Plagiarism cases, unless you've located the original source, are always tough to prove, especially if you're working with limited samples of a student's previous writing. After all, students do often write more effectively at home than they do during timed in-class assignments, and of course, even in comparing multiple at-home essays, we all want and expect that student writing will improve over the course of their education. But there comes a point at which pretty much any competent judge would agree that the inconsistency is so great that it is not credible that the same student could have produced them. That's basically where I am with Penelope and LW.

Marina was wrong, yes, but I think, in context, it would have taken almost heroic levels of integrity and self-sacrifice for her to have refused to lie, given the options as the show presented them. One weakness of the plot is that it absolutely ignores the presence of what seems to me the most logical and safest option. Marina should have returned home to the country, delivered her baby in private and used some of the money in her dowry to pay off a poor family to raise the kid. It wouldn't have been a foolproof solution, and it still might well have led to rumors of scandal that would have decreased her stock on the marriage market. But without any solid evidence of her "fall," she could have re-entered society a year later and would likely have still been positioned to make a decent match. But apparently, the show does not want us to consider this. So, as the writers have it, basically her only option is to marry before her pregnancy becomes obvious. The alternative is not only permanent social disgrace, but a life in poverty. That means that unless she chooses the truth and the streets, ANY marriage she makes is going to be grounded in deception. We (for good reason) don't like the old guy, and we do like Colin, so the deception seems worse when it is trapping him. But if the old guy hadn't been conveniently horrible, there's really no moral excuse for conning anyone into marriage. Even if we're willing to say that it would have been much less-bad for her to trap the old guy, it is sugar-coating it to say "Oh, well, he'll die soon and probably can't even get it up." The guy could well have still had years ahead of him--and not all old men are impotent. In fact, if he had been entirely unable to consummate the marriage, it would have been a real problem for Marina, because there's a difference between a guy desperate for an heir being willing to look the other way on a nigh-impossible timeline, and the same guy committing to a belief in immaculate conception. So Marina was looking at possibly upwards of a decade with a rotten guy who had already shown an inclination to dehumanize her physically--and who would have been a lot more likely than decent Colin Bridgerton to find ways of punishing her for her deception. As no reasonable person would have expected someone in Colin's shoes to marry her if she told her the truth--even if we assume he actually would have done it--that's not really a viable choice. So was it right? No, of course not. But the stakes were so high that I can't blame Marina for not insisting on the truth.

Right. I think the issue is that we can't have it both ways. Obviously there can be shades of grey, where someone isn't all good and all bad. But there's just too much distance between Penelope as a sweet, bubbly innocent and Penelope as a witty, sharp sophisticate for the second to exist without the first being a total sham. If you want to cheer for Pen/LW as an ambitious conniver who is outplaying everyone else in the social game, that's fine. But then acknowledge that she's doing rotten things to other people for her own gain, which she is, rather than trying to create a scenario where Pen is LW, but she's also not really saying anything bad about Daphne, and is only exposing Marina out of high-minded concern for Colin and because she has literally no other choice. And again, the Colin situation I can kind of buy as a combination of contrivance (why couldn't Pen go across the street to the Bridgerton's when she found out about the elopement, despite being able to trot off to the printer's whenever she likes?) and desperation. She obviously didn't want to out Marina. But...we see from the reaction of the Bridgertons that Daphne and her family clearly think there's a difference between Daphne's pool of suitors drying up (also a contrivance, frankly) and LW writing about her being out of options. So it was actually hurtful, and presumably LW is writing comparably hurtful things about people we don't know or care about, but may not deserve it any more than Daphne does. For the Ton? That WAS the news! The "season" was the reason nearly everyone was there, and what everyone was talking about. The show made Daphne "The Diamond of the First Water" and had the Queen herself praise and single her out. She should have had a house full of suiters and been the most popular at the dances, all of it. For her to suddenly have an empty house and dance card? For the Queen to have been wrong in choosing her? Huge. I mean "not news" in the sense that an engagement, a scandal, or a break-up was news. There wasn't a tangible piece of information that other people didn't know, and that anyone who fancied themselves a "journalist," of a sort would have to report on in order to remain credible. It might be a reasonable ambition. It isn't an intrinsically worthy goal in the sense of it justifying treating other people poorly--to the extent that she is treating other people poorly in order to serve her interests as LW, she's being selfish. It isn't like she needs to raise money so that her sister (or even she) can afford life-saving surgery or something. Again, it is a matter of having it both ways. Admiring Pen for deciding to buck social expectations and look out for number one is one thing. But that acknowledges that she's doing selfish and hurtful things. Saying "Yes, Pen is awesome because she's turning a rotten system to her advantage, but also nothing she did was harmful or unjustifiable in any way" just isn't tenable, IMO.

The thing is, there wasn't actually any real news about Daphne to report, which means it is hard for me to see how LW's credibility would have suffered by not piling on with snark. It isn't like she would have been allowing herself to get scooped by another scandal sheet; as long as she kept writing entertaining stuff, I don't find it credible that the fact that she didn't happen to comment on non-news involving Daphne would have been enough to sink her. On the other hand, the fact that it was hurtful to Daphne is evident; there's a difference between there being a general sense that your star is fallen and having your social failure proclaimed in the press. I also don't think that people not aware of themselves as characters in a TV show would notice that LW didn't publish anything about Daphne and conclude that Penelope was a likely suspect. Only if she were sitting on a much bigger scoop than "Daphne's kind of a loser now, right?" would it plausibly have even occurred to anyone that LW might be protecting Daphne, specifically, and I still don't think Pen would have been a leading suspect. In any case, protecting Pen's identity and ensuring the success of LW are not inherently worthy goals, and should not be justifications for bad behavior. If you say something nasty about something else because doing so is pragmatically useful to you, the fact that your actions may have a discernible motive does not mean that what you're doing isn't selfish and cruel. It just seems really convenient that super-resourceful Penelope has simply no alternative but totally outing Marina publicly, where outing Marina publicly corresponds perfectly to her own romantic desires. Penelope and Colin had been friends for years. Why wouldn't he have believed her at least enough to not elope in the morning? That would be an outrageous, specific, and dangerous lie for Penelope to tell; Colin would have had to be a moron not to take it seriously, especially when he thought back and realized Marina had turned on the charm suddenly, tried to get him to sleep with her ASAP, and was now unaccountably invested in eloping immediately. I mean, maybe he would have gone through with the elopement anyway, but it wouldn't be an especially likely outcome--and if he did, it would kind of be on his own head. There's also, as I raised before, the matter of consequences for Colin. If, despite all of Pen's legitimate efforts--telling him directly when she gave him the hints, going to the home that night and speaking either to Colin directly or to Eloise--he still wound up eloping with Marina, it isn't like he was facing execution. He was going to wind up married to an attractive woman who was fond of him and would have tried, after the initial betrayal, to be a decent wife. Of course the discovery of the betrayal would have been incredibly painful to him, but unlike a woman of the day, even if he couldn't find a measure of forgiveness in time (which would have been understandable), he would still have had the option of forging ahead with whatever non-domestic pursuits interested him--including extramarital affairs, if he chose. Yes, being legally tied to Marina and her child would have prohibited him from finding true domestic happiness elsewhere, in that case--but he could otherwise set up a separate existence. In the context of a society in which people were regularly making marriages of convenience, and were at best making love-matches based on minimal acquaintance with their partners, it isn't exactly a horrifying fate. It is a matter of proportion. What Marina was doing to Colin was bad enough that Colin had a right to know, even though exposing her secret to the Bridgertons and scuttling the match would have had devastating consequences for Marina even without the added element of public exposure. But to me, the consequences weren't so woefully dire that it excuses exposing her publicly simply because that was definitely going to prevent the marriage and other measures were only probably going to prevent the marriage. That being said, I actually do think the exposure of Marina, while wrong, is potentially forgivable; what is more serious to me is the mere fact of Pen being so thoroughly deceitful and unkind to others.

Daphne came pretty close to being forced into marriage with a brute, and Marina could have died in her attempts to induce an abortion. I'll grant you that it didn't honestly make a ton of sense that Anthony was pushing Daphne to marry Berbrook because she didn't have any other suitors at the ripe old age of 18 or 19, but even if the stakes would realistically have been pretty low, what Penelope did to Daphne is still shitty. That Penelope might be rightly frustrated about her own situation doesn't justify lashing out at others; that's like saying that it is totally fine to steal from people as long as they have more money than you do. As for Marina, I don't think Pen was obliged to keep the secret. But that would justify telling Colin, not exposing Marina to the entire ton. The fact that things did, rather improbably, work out more or less ok for Marina doesn't mitigate what Pen did.

If Pen thought there was any chance she was going to have to invoke the nuclear option and out Marina, she should have been a lot more direct with Colin than she was. I also fail to believe that someone who is capable of driving around making deliveries of her scandal-sheet under her parents' nose would have found it utterly impossible to get a message to her best friend's brother, who lived across the street, in a timely manner. But let's leave that aside. I can accept the betrayal of Marina, even with all its consequences and potential consequences, as within the bounds of forgivable for a seventeen year old who perhaps thought she was out of options. The problem for me is that she's being a total snake to Eloise, and trying to ruin people who don't deserve it, if her treatment of Daphne is any indication. LW came close to sinking Daphne's social prospects, something Pen had no reason to do. That takes us from Penelope making a mistake under great emotional pressure, to Penelope being a globally catty and deceitful person, who doesn't care about the potential effects of her actions on others. Also, it is a minor point, but I want to push back on the idea that Colin's life would have been ruined, especially in the context of a society where people were forced into bad marriages--or simply made impulsive or ambitious marriages with near-strangers, with predictably iffy results--all the time. Colin was going to suffer a terrible betrayal, and then be left with an attractive, grateful woman who presumably intended to be a good wife to him going forward. At worst, if he had been totally unable to forgive, he would have had the option of settling money on Marina and having a name-only marriage while he devoted himself to other pursuits. Not what anyone might want for him, but not the kind of horror that would warrant publicly destroying Marina and threatening her own family's already precarious position.

For me, the question isn't whether or not it is sexual assault. The question is whether or not that's a terribly meaningful category given the time Daphne lives in. Taking a belt to a child for misbehavior is child abuse. It is and has always been child abuse; it just hasn't always been recognized as such. But if a father in Bridgerton whipped his eight or nine year old son, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to talk about how terrible and abusive the father was, because he would be acting in what he and most of is peers considered to be a responsible manner--one that was in fact in line with what was believed to be good parenting practices. Good, loving parents of the time weren't beating their kids bloody, and probably weren't regularly whipping their kids, either. But a degree of physical punishment was standard, and it would be silly to evaluate a parent of the era on modern grounds, abuse or not. Daphne's situation is slightly less clear-cut, because she's not acting in accordance with any recognized social norm, and I do think the show is critical of her; she knows she's doing something likely to be hurtful to Simon. But she still lacks the context necessary to recognize what she's doing as a massive violation, and I don't think this is something that should be intuitive to her. As such, it doesn't radically alter my view of her character--even though it would if something similar happened on a show set in the present day.

I don't like Pen being LW for reasons of logic, more than for reasons of character (though I think it really trashes her character as well). Pen is a 17 year old society girl in her first season. Unless she's totally lying, she is innocent enough that she doesn't understand where babies come from. She slips up and asks her mother if she can "play" with her best friend. The writer of LW is a sophisticate comfortable with mild sexual innuendo and prone to witty aphorism. It just does not make sense for that prose to come from a sheltered teenager. That's aside from the stretch it would take for it to be believable that Penelope would be able to make consistent, in-person deliveries of her scandal-sheet on the sly. I also don't think she's nearly savvy enough to get even as much gossip as the average society woman--although on that score, I suppose, with the significant exception of her scoop on Marina, it isn't clear that she was actually providing new news so much as articulating what tons of people would already have been saying and speculating. Marina remained to me extremely sympathetic throughout, even though it was obviously wrong for her to try to entrap Colin. Given the options available to her, it would have taken truly heroic heights of integrity for her not to go along with it. In the real world, by the way, I don't believe Philip would have married her--if he was decent, he would have settled a respectable income on her, but he wouldn't have married a fallen woman. As it is, it is a pretty hopeful ending for her, even if she can't immediately see it through her grief. Re: race - I kind of wish they'd just left out the explanation, but the question of what would have happened if Queen Charlotte actually had been a visibly black woman is actually pretty fascinating (the theory that suggests she was biracial is junk, by the way). Regency England was obviously not a model of egalitarianism, but it was not the antebellum American South either. There are a number of recorded instances of black Britons of the era--many of the freed slaves--who actually did get a relatively high degree of acceptance in high society circles. They certainly wouldn't have been seen as viable marriage partners for members of the ton, but it wouldn't have been wildly taboo for them to have been at a fancy party like some of the ones we see in Bridgerton, and most notable black Britons of the period (unsurprisingly, given their small numbers) married interracially. Phillis Wheatley, the American slave-poet, was patronized by a Countess and supposedly had an invitation to appear before King George. Lord Mansfield, a noted judge who set the groundwork for banning slavery in England, raised his half-black great-niece Dido Belle, and while she does not seem to have been a full equal in his household, evidence suggests that she was largely treated as a member of the family. She married a white steward, and had sons who went into business and the army. Julius Soubise was a slave of a Duchess who, after being freed, rose to become riding and fencing master (and, possibly, the Duchess's lover); he wound up becoming a rake and dandy. So I think the question of what would have happened in that kind of society if the King had married interracially is really interesting. A realistic version of it likely would have seen a still racially-divided society in which the new black nobility were regarded with suspicion and were not seen as remotely equal marriage prospects, but in which blackness had become more of a deficit than a wholly disqualifying factor. Like, maybe someone like Simon wouldn't be thought of as a match for Daphne, but would be seen as a suitable prospect for the Fetheringtons after they lose their money. It would have been a gradual climb--and probably would have been complicated by the fact that there were just so few black people in England. You might have wound up with an initial generation of newly created black nobility who virtually all married not totally-ideal white spouses, and within a few generations wound up with white-passing descendants.

Coming late, but put me in the camp who thinks we can't apply 21st century standards here. Neither Daphne nor Simon would have any context for thinking of what she did as rape. I'm not a total moral relativist; here are certain things that any person of ordinary feeling should recognize as dead wrong. If Simon had overpowered Daphne on their wedding night while she sobbed and pleaded for him to stop, that would be horrific regardless of his living in a time where "marital rape" was not a crime and his entitlement to his wife's body would have been taken for granted. But what Daphne did is different. By the standards of our time, yes, it was a form of rape once he asked her to stop and she wouldn't (I agree that "wait" is tantamount to "stop" in this context). Even within the context of her time, Daphne is doing a knowingly bad thing: she couldn't have confronted Simon directly, and clearly decides not to do so out of a desire to wound him if it turns out she's right about what he is doing. But despite all the sex she's been having, she barely understands it, and she certainly doesn't understand it in terms of a modern sexual ethic. She has no reason to regard violations of bodily or sexual consent as something that would be uniquely awful or psychologically damaging. She does not understand things like trauma or PTSD. And she really doesn't even have a framework for understanding that someone should have the right to choice in sexual matters. Had she been forced to marry Berbrooke, she would have been expected to submit to him and bear his children. Simon is expected to sire heirs. She was willing to accept that he couldn't, but when she finds out that he simply won't, that is beyond the pale for their time. From Daphne's perspective, she isn't physically hurting Simon, and she's having sex that, at the outset, he seems to very much want. All that she's doing is preventing him from doing what would have been regarded as an unnatural and sinful thing. There's an obvious anger behind what she's doing, but I don't think it makes any sense to judge her by values that she couldn't possibly be expected to possess.

I don't think that suggests that it is Memorex heaven. Memorex or not, heaven is still magic, for lack of a better word. Presumably, most people who died in old age would want to return to a younger body, whereas I can see how even someone who died at Bobby's age would prefer to keep his appearance at the time of death. There's no reason everyone should either have to look like they did at death, or have to look like they did at age 25. Plus, practically speaking, the show had to have a Bobby who looked liked the Bobby we knew.