#MisselArch

[misselthwaitearchives]

Ten years ago today, Mary moved to Misselthwaite...

If you need something hopeful to watch while waiting for spring to come, #MisselArch is still (and will always be) available on YouTube.

[misshyperbolemakes]

“Just please don’t say you love me, ‘cause I might not say it back.”

[panneshirley]

anonymous asked:

mary lennox or liddy smallbury?

[mylifeeinfandoms]

the misselthwaite archives → favorite quotes 1/x

[pencilinkproductions]

Four years ago today, we aired the very first episode of The Misselthwaite Archives! If you're feeling a little despondent at the cold winter months, now is a great time to re-watch the whole series on YouTube. Stay tuned for several exciting announcements about new projects!

[thewomaninlilywhite]

Please watch The Misselthwaite Archives

It’s comedic gold – I’m obsessed… I’m gonna watch all 40 episodes tonight because it’s amazing

[panneshirleyarchive]

turtle

[fakefandominsta]

Mary Lennox from The Misselthwaite Archives

[tomato-stained-genes]

I’m currently watching through all the web series based on classic lit that i kept saying i’d watch and then never did. Just finished Green Gables Fables and now i’m on to The Misselthwaite Archives.

[literaryinspiredwebserieslove]

The Evolution of LGBTQ+ Representation in LIWs

In The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, back in 2013, there was exactly one queer character. He was a side character with an offscreen love interest created solely so that people wouldn’t ship him with Lizzie at that pivotal point in the story.

2014 was when LIWs really took off, and it was also when there were the greatest differences in LGBTQ+ representation (though no one was very good at it yet). Series like Emma Approved and Green Gables Fables (we’re talking Season One here) had none. Other series, like From Mansfield With Love, made a side character who didn’t have a love interest be gay. So far, no one was really gender-bending or reimagining anything to make it gayer.

But Shakespeare is about the gayest off-copyright source material there is, so it was pretty much impossible to correctly adapt Shakespeare and make it end up totally straight.

From our 2017 standpoint, NMTD looks pretty heterosexual, but it was actually about as queer as any LIW can be without departing from the source material (though we’ll get to Twelfth Grade a little later on). Hero’s moms, though absent, are accepted by everyone, as is Balthazar, who is of course very gay despite never using that word in NMTD (The Candle Wasters really don’t like actually saying things, do they?). But it was Pedro’s coming out that really changed the tides. Goodbye queerbaiting, hello to the possibility of onscreen characters entering into non-heterosexual relationships.

2015 was a transition year in many ways. It was no longer acceptable to make an LIW without some form of queer representation, but the methods were all over the place. Some LIWs put a queer pairing center stage – Pedrazar being the prime example, however you feel about LLL – while most series started to create queer side pairings, either through gender-bending or through creating new arcs for the characters. A few examples of this from 2015 would be George Squared from Call Me Katie, Smarling from The New Adventures of Peter and Wendy, and Jamie and Isabella from Northbound. Of course, some LIWs still did LBD-style representation – The Misselthwaite Archives comes to mind – but it was now because the creators wanted queer representation and not because they wanted to avert certain het ships.

Then 2016 happened. We, the viewers, were no longer willing to tolerate entirely cishet shows. 2016 saw the rise of trans and genderqueer LIW characters at long last – Puck in Bright Summer Night and Serena in The Adventures of Serena Berg being the prime examples – as well as multiple characters on the ace spectrum. And with the rise of young, bisexual webseries creators, the number of bisexual characters skyrocketed.

So let’s talk about Twelfth Grade for a minute. I won’t lie and call this series the gayest thing I’ve ever seen, but it is probably the biest. All three of the leads are bisexual, and no one is straight. Literally no one. And no matter who you shipped, it was likely a possibility if not a reality. Again, this was made possible by the source material, which is just about the biest thing ever written, and by the new LIW atmosphere, which was demanding – and getting – the queer representation that just doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Gender-bending skyrocketed in 2016, both with side characters and with mains. And now, in 2017, cishet characters are starting to be the minority. The Emma Agenda and Middlemarch: The Series, my two favorite currently-airing LIWs, have both gender-bent logically and competently all over the place in order to keep canon mostly intact while also making it much, much more diverse. Very few current LIW ships are m/f, and of those, even fewer characters are completely heterosexual.

We’ve come a long way since the days of LBD. and we couldn’t have gotten here without a lot of hard work and thinking and the bravery to tell stories the way we wanted them told. I’m not saying heterosexuality should vanish from LIWs, but I think that the direction we’ve come in is the right one. When a series like NLTS or MMTS gives the same amount of drama to queer pairings as to straight ones, when characters like Roxanne Roberts or Bathsheba Everdeen struggle with their identities in relatable ways, it normalizes every part of the human experience and continues to make LIWs the most representative form of media I know.

While I know I skipped a lot of important moments and didn’t mention several very diverse series, I used examples that I hope most people will be familiar with and that won’t be too spoilery. 

LIW creators: keep doing what you’re doing. It is noticed and appreciated. Thank you. 

[misselthwaitearchives]

It's been five years since we released our first episode of The Misselthwaite Archives! We're so thankful to all of our fans for supporting the show while it aired and afterward—your kind words, passionate discussions, and beautiful fan art really encouraged us in 2015 and continue to inspire our creative endeavors. If you haven't seen the series in a while, give it a re-watch to prepare for the coming of spring!

[bisexualwentworth]

The Misselthwaite Archives Episode 2 “Existential Cigarettes” is unavailable in restricted mode, presumably because of the title.

@bisexual-meme-thief @pencilinkproductions

[panneshirley]

for anonymous

[nebula83]

It’s cold outside and it might snow and I’m tired and I have yet another cold so I’m rewatching The Misselthwaite Archives because I woke up with the urge to do so and WOW I miss Mary and Robin and everyone so much!

Go watch it, it’s like a warm cup of tea for the soul.

[pencilinkproductions]

As part of the Misselthwaite relaunch, we have some new (well, old, but previously unreleased) behind-the-scenes content for you! Here is our character concept board for Phoebe Sower on Pinterest. Our writers, director, and actors all contributed ideas that helped shape Phoebe during development and production.

Character boards for Mary Lennox, Callie Craven, and Declan Sower can be found here.

[marysfoxmask]

Have you done The Misselthwaite Archives webseries? It's obviously one of the looser adaptations, but I thought it was really well done. Love to hear your thoughts on it!

my first ask!!! i’m so excited!! thank you, anon! i love asks, btw, and would love for people to continue to send them!

i actually watched the misselthwaite archives as it was coming out! every wednesday, i watched the newest episode after coming home from school. it was the highlight of my week!

i actually rewatched a good chunk of episodes the other night. it dredges up a lot of nostalgia for me in a bittersweet way. i appreciate the series a lot, and i think everyone involved did a great job, but it’s the way the creators approach adapting the source material that i find to be a little off the mark.

this is mainly because i think something is inevitably lost when bringing the secret garden into modern day (which was, back then, good old 2015). i think, if i were trying to adapt the book into a modern setting, i’d minimize the modern day trappings as much as possible; references to modern pop culture like parks and recreation and beyoncé, like misselarch employs, are fleetingly fun, but i think they date the material too much. they also feel too kitschy and cute, in my opinion. that’s my opinion of a lot of the misselthwaite archives’ adaptation choices—they’re cute, but don’t feel like they do justice to the material. 

i feel making mary a snarky, bitter teenager seems like a good idea at first, but i think it’s ultimately a misrepresentation. in the original novel, she’s prickly and prone to insulting others, sure, but she’s also sullen, withdrawn, and socially awkward—her inability to connect with others is derived from the lack of positive social interaction she had since she was born. she’s emotionally stunted, which mary in the misselthwaite archives doesn’t communicate at all in her video diaries to dr. burnett (which is a very nice homage, i will admit). 

on the contrary, teen!mary is charismatic, with a biting wit; she’s had friends in the past, but they only cared for her parents’ money. ironically, her friendship with declan seems almost to benefit him more in terms of social development than it does her. her petty cruelty seems more the product of watching mean girls one too many times than any deep-rooted emotional trauma. though there are gestures made to indicate that she feels badly about her celebrity parents’ deaths, i never found them particularly convincing. i felt her vulnerability as an orphan, as a young woman with no prospects, with no real friends—as she is at the the beginning of the story—never came through properly. it felt like the writers wanted to modernize mary’s contrariness in a way, metamorphosing it into a more palatable 21st-century diagnosis: jaded teenager syndrome. 

which is cute, but not very book-accurate, i feel. it colors the rest of her journey if she hasn’t been socially deprived like she is in the novel. i can’t imagine the mary of the misselthwaite archives having a profound revelation about how much nicer people look when they smile, for instance. as a result, her journey feels a lot less interesting to me.

i personally feel mary should have been prickly, of course, and sometimes aggressively mean, but more unwilling to talk about her feelings than anything—more emotionally numb after years of neglect, more uninterested in nearly everything. she shrugs when spoken to, looks eternally glum, glares at the pitying glances of sarah medlock. it’s only with the influence of the characters in the story that she’s coaxed into opening up and begins to bloom.

i really liked sarah medlock’s characterization, as well as uncle art’s and phoebe’s! i love that aunt sarah is presented as having positive intentions from the get-go, as i’ve always hated her vilification in other adaptations. i also really like the portrayal of declan—i like the idea of him being a bit of a social misfit.

with callie, i really enjoy her actress’s portrayal—she’s properly hysterical and catty! but i feel like turning colin into a girl doesn’t add anything to the story, and removes some of the narrative tension that comes with mary coming into contact with a member of the opposite sex that mirrors her in terms of upbringing and attitude. if anything, i feel it downplays the tension of their budding friendship, as the subconscious assumption that people are more likely to become friends people of the same sex is one that the audience undoubtedly has. 

i don’t particularly like callie being steeped in pop culture, either, though it makes sense in a modern setting, technically. in the source material, though, colin is surrounded by interesting things to engage with, but he’s disinterested in all those things when mary stumbles across him. he’s more interested in thinking about his illness. i think having callie be immersed in pop culture as a way to entertain herself indicates a level of engagement with the world that colin is completely shut off from, which definitely affects his characterization. a version of colin that is invested in things enough to buy merchandise of them, etc. is a version of colin who is already significantly more “alive” than his book counterpart from the beginning. a more accurate idea of communicating colin’s isolation, i feel, would have callie being too cynical and emotionally stunted to be interested in anything, at least for very long; any media about characters going on interesting adventures only reminds her of the lackluster quality of her own life and makes her insecure, so she eschews pop culture in favor of frequent depression naps and bullying aunt sarah and phoebe. sometimes she’ll read if she’s bored, but not often, and she refuses to have lessons with phoebe unless she feels well enough to learn, leaving her education full of gaps despite her intelligence. callie, in my hypothetical adaptation, is determined to live a miserable, barren existence, much like colin. 

 anyway, it also seems that canon callie isn’t dogged by colin’s negative thoughts quite as much, and her feelings surrounding her condition feel too subdued to communicate colin’s utter maladjustment. the episode where callie “explodes” feels too muted by half! this girl should be furious, incoherent with hysteria, raging at the world for her mother’s death, stricken with self-loathing and misery! but, while callie’s actress does an amazing job with what she has, i can’t help but feel that the adaptation of her character was a bit lukewarm.

i also think giving mary and callie a history together undermines the importance of them finding each other for the first time, and gives their friendship too much of an instant leg-up from the minute mary finds her. it makes the work she has to do to befriend/reform callie feel too easy. 

not to mention, the pacing of the second half of the story, where mary finds callie to the point where she and declan plan to take her to the glade, seems way too fast. i feel there was a lot of missed potential there; they could’ve really drawn out the rockiness of mary and callie’s relationship, like mary and colin’s in the book.

i think my big problem with the misselthwaite archives is that the creators, in service of adapting it to modern times, undercuts and downplays a lot of the earnestness of the characters’ relationships that i found so charming in the book. instead of instantly loving dickon and breathlessly calling him beautiful, mary only grudgingly admits that she needs declan’s help, and any affection she has for him she keeps close to the chest. colin’s desperation for mary’s company, his screaming for her to come to him, is rendered as needy over-texting, devoid of any emotional urgency; callie seems more bored, rather than truly lonely and unable to communicate in an emotionally mature manner, like colin is. even declan is subdued in his love for nature, more shy. it makes sense for a modern adaptation not prone to the novel’s 1910s sentimentality, but i can’t help but feel that the adaptation feels dull and repressed as a result. 

i also wish we got a proper video of callie and declan meeting!

like a lot of adaptations, i think the pacing is off; more time should be spent on ironing out mary and callie’s relationship, more time should be spent in the garden, helping callie bloom. the “eye of the tiger” bit was cute, but gah, colin walking took months and months of practice, and to see all that development be reduced to a short little montage feels disheartening. i’d love to see at least 10 episodes of the teens just chilling in the glade, talking about their childhood traumas in more detail, having little conflicts among each other, planting flowers and setting up decorations...for a series with such short installments, that kind of episodic structure would be perfect. maybe they could create a subplot where mary suggests callie go to her high school and she has to work that out with medlock and that becomes a whole character-building thing, or she has a conflict with basil, or callie properly hashes out her negative feelings toward declan, or something. i dunno. i just wanted more.

i think the misselthwaite archives was really cute, but i feel it misses the mark on the melancholy of the original story; the glade itself is perfect, but the interpretation of mary feels too derivative of the “bratty teenager” trope to be honest to her book character, in my opinion. and i dislike pop culture references in timeless classics, even modern-day interpretations of them, lol. but i still appreciate it as an adaptation, though—it’s just so eager to translate the sentimentality into something more modern that it loses the essence of what i find so charming about the book, which is the unabashed intensity of the characters’ friendships, the extreme character development, and the scale of the emotional and social deprivation mary and colin suffered before said character development occurs.

i also wish declan had more animals around him, though obviously that can’t be helped, haha.

please send more asks, anon! i’d be happy to answer them! :)