#and northanger abbey is just so enjoyable and funny and relatable

[henry-fox-biggest-stan]

Emma is Austen’s best novel

Pride & Prejudice contains Austen’s best romance

Northanger Abbey is my favorite out of Austen’s novels

[butterflydm]

2020 (what a weird year)

I did not get very much done this year at all. The business I work for got us all classified as essential workers which... tbh, I did not agree with as a categorization. It’s meant that hours per week stayed the same, but my anxiety levels at work skyrocketed. And most of the time, after getting home, I basically had enough energy to check some stuff online but I mostly needed to decompress by doing something familiar, which I’ve been doing by replaying FFX and FFX2, and my brain mostly hasn’t had room for anything new. Which is a shame for all the plans I had to watch tons of new media! I had a long list of things I wanted to check out and I haven’t really watched any of it.

I did get a chance to watch a few new things (as always, tbh, any recs of mine are basically ‘you will like this thing, if this is the kind of thing you like’):

The Old Guard: Really enjoyed this movie. It’s been out for a while now, but if you haven’t had a chance to watch it, it was a fun, easy watch that also made me think some interesting philosophical questions about life. A good time! It’s honestly the only movie I watched during the 2020 pandemic period, unless I get around to watching anything else in the next couple of days.

MXTX’s Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System: I love love this story. I’ve watched the donghua (looking forward to S2!) and read the translation by BC Novels, and the story just has so many things that make my heart go ‘yes!’: it’s funny, with a charming PoV character who both doesn’t take himself too seriously and also seriously misunderstands himself in a lot of ways -- very relatable. It’s dramatic AF, with romantic lead Luo Binghe at the heart of a lot of that drama. It’s clever and I love the way the premise is used for both humor and pathos.

Tone-wise, it reminds me of works like Galaxy Quest or Northanger Abbey. Honestly, that light tone helps in some of the later chapters, which have content that is actually very dark and very heartbreaking if taken seriously, but because of the momentum of the story and the tone of the narrative, I didn’t feel like I got lost or bogged down in the darkness.

And I love the relationship between Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe a whole heck of a lot. I think the way it’s structured is clever and sweet and sad and makes for an interesting story. There is an element of an unintentional romantic obsession that SQQ created by the way he flipped between kind and cruel (against his will, which is what makes it forgivable for the audience, imo, because SQQ wanted to always be kind, though not always for the most selfless of reasons) and how LBH had to try to mentally justify/rationalize how the same man could act in such completely opposing ways. And the narrative symmetry between how SQQ thinks of LBH as the center of the universe because he’s the OP Protagonist (!) but LBH thinks of SQQ as the one that everything revolves around and how that’s narratively true because, of course, in the story that we’re reading, SQQ is the protagonist and LBH is his love interest.

I also actually really appreciated the bad sex near the end of the novel -- sex-to-save-the-world is a trope that can easily get romanticized but here it’s (literally) painful and ugly instead, as all of LBH’s trauma pairs with the influence of Xin Mo on his mind. Even through the translation, it definitely feels like bad sex written well, rather than badly-written sex that is supposed to be good, if you know what I mean. Sex can be an important narrative tool in stories and I feel like MXTX uses it very effectively here.

I think I burnt through the entire translation in just a few days. I’ve been reading a lot of fanfic afterwards and I think my favorite so far is I Wish You Were My Husband by Feynite. It’s an AU but it keeps the same kind of vibe as the original story.

Bridgerton: Goodness, so enjoyable! Julia Quinn is not My Most Favorite of the various romance writers that I read but she was one of the first writers that really got me back into reading romance and it was delightful to see her world on screen. I don’t picture people when I’m reading novels; I have to have a visual first and then I can carry that into the reading, so it was nice to be able to assign faces to some of these characters that I’m already very fond of. Simon and Daphne had a nice amount of chemistry and I loved the Bridgerton family relationships.

I hope they get to cover all the romances in the series and continue to do some updating as well -- I generally liked the changes they made to Simon and Daphne’s romance (a few I wasn’t as into but could see why they’d done it -- mostly For The Drama). And I really loved what they did with Simon and Lady Danbury’s relationship. It took me some time to tell the three older Bridgerton brothers apart but that’s pretty much canon, lol. Anyway, I was invested enough in it all that I stayed up all night on Christmas eve to watch it all and I had no regrets afterward.

I started watching S2 of TharnType but then my work schedule changed and I was working on Fridays and (see above) I just didn’t have the energy to watch anything after work. I might wait and binge the rest of the series once it’s all out, now that it’s gone this long without me being caught up.

I do think I’ll take a break from Critical Role for a while, after it comes back. I’ve just come to an unfortunate place where the show literally cannot win with me re: the romances, as I’m annoyed when they happen but also, perversely, annoyed when they get ignored because my brain goes “they gutted beaujester for this limited amount of inferior romance? At least commit to giving an adequate amount of the romances that I dislike!”. And so it becomes a vicious circle. Good sign that it’s time to take a break. My unhappiness with one part of the show is overshadowing everything else and maybe some time away will change that. Or maybe I just need to pick it up again with campaign 3. I guess I’ll see how it goes. I also admit that I’d hate to pick up the show again only to have Lucien get killed off in a few episodes.

I want to try to watch some more shows in 2021, and maybe I’ll have time, if I’m freeing up several hours every Thursday.

I want to watch Heaven Official’s Blessing and I’ve had a translation of the novel on my phone for the entire year and I really do want to read it as well. I’d like to watch Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo’s new shows (The Wolf & The Legend of Fei) as the gifsets I’ve seen have been interesting and enjoyable, and there are a bunch of shows that I’d gotten recommendations about after watching TharnType that I still want to check out too. Plus, I have the new Stormlight Archives book and I want to read that as well. So, there’s quite a list.

It’s still probably gonna be quite stressful at work for a while, at least until I’ve had a chance to get the vaccine, but at least I am going back to Thursdays & Fridays as my days off at the start of the year, so I’m looking forward to that. I’m also hoping to get back to my detailed rewatch of The Untamed, because that was so much fun but I did not have enough brain this year to do any more of it.

[narrator-scio-story]

So About Northanger Abbey

In order to understand the story of my recent reread of Northanger Abbey you need to understand my overall history with Jane Austen.

It’s a long history, really.

I got a nook back when I was 12 and I’m pretty sure Pride and Prejudice was already on it then. One of the Barnes & Noble classics series versions, with the fancy introductions and stuff. Either it came with the nook or my mum bought it on her account before adding my device to her account, but either way, it was there and I read it.

I might’ve read Sense and Sensibility in the same format, too, despite joking with a friend about how that one in the description explicitly called it a romance novel and ew we wanted nothing to do with it. But not long after - definitely before I was 13 - I realised I didn’t need the ~$4 versions of each one separately, when I could just buy the complete works of Jane Austen for ~$12. So I did, and I read them all.

And then before I turned 14, my 8th grade school year had just started and I decided I wanted to try to reread all the Jane Austen novels while still 13. I managed the first 4 in the order my copy went, and then I hit Northanger Abbey. I kept reading through it, though, as much as I could - I love that quote about how woman is fine for her own enjoyment alone, although I could hardly stand everything I had to get through before hitting it, it really didn’t seem worth it.

But it was so tedious, and I realised that with such little time left before my next birthday, if I was to get through Persuasion I would just have to give up on Northanger Abbey.

And I had enjoyed every reread prior to that one. So it seemed obvious that that one wasn’t worth rereading.

After having had to struggle to get even halfway through Northanger Abbey that year, I didn’t try reading it at all the next summer. Nor when I was 15, nor while 16. I read Sense and Sensibility, followed by Pride and Prejudice, followed by Mansfield Park, followed by Emma, went to the table of contents and skipped Northanger Abbey to get to the beginning of Persuasion, and read Persuasion. Several years I also read Lady Susan; one year I read Love and Friendship. But I didn’t even try Northanger Abbey again. I was convinced I hated that one.

The plot was stupid. The main character fell in love with this guy after meeting him once. And then he only loved her back because he knew she liked him.

First, that was all I remembered, by the end of several years. I knew that the beginning was a girl going to Bath and being introduced to a guy at a party and liking him a lot. And I knew that the ending was the guy marrying the girl, because he knew she liked him.

I might’ve also remembered that there was a girl the main character was friends with who was a jerk, who had a horrible brother, but that wasn’t at all likely to recommend the book to me either.

But more importantly, that seemed really stupid to me. I knew in theory, at least by the time I was 15, that it was a satire. But that just didn’t sound like an interesting plot. People parading up and down the room in Bath was not something I could relate to. And really, I read Jane Austen because it makes me cry when the characters get happy endings. This book’s ending I didn’t feel invested in at all.

So this year, after whizzing through Mansfield Park and Emma, having started in the wrong place in the list because of Mansfield Park being on the AP Lit reading list, I hit Northanger Abbey and figured I needed to try it again.

Lady Susan - let along Love and Friendship - is a satire. And I love that! I find it hilarious! Northanger Abbey is the same thing in a longer form, so I figured I ought to just try it. Try it again. Make sure I got through it and then judged it.

Right from the beginning I felt that whether or not the story was worthwhile, the language... I was really missing out by not reading those brilliant sentences every year. While I still in some ways disliked the characters, I adored the narrator. The narrator is just wickedly brilliant. So sassy. Perfectly expressed.

And I think that’s how I still feel about the book. It was funny, on average, and I don’t intend to pointedly ignore it, as a deliberate insult that it is not like the other Austen novels, in future years - it isn’t bad enough to do that - although perhaps if it weren’t by Jane Austen, and entwined in how I think about her literature as a whole, I might not bother rereading it quite so often. But Jane Austen is just overall better if you’re comparing her works against each other and pulling out trends and understanding the context.

But although I may not appreciate that book as a whole as much as some people do, wow I now love the individual sentences. They’re now nicely highlighted quotes which I will flip through frequently.

Jane Austen writes amazing stories in a lot of her other books, but in Northanger Abbey she instead has words worth reading.