#v. ethians

[soulatsiege]

Just so you know. All of the Baratheons are Ethians. But I can't choose which animal for Stan :(

[irhinoceri]

Ok, I have to talk about how these two adaptations of the story of Lady Jane Grey are so intertwined. It seems clear to me that My Lady Jane is more of a fantasy AU fix-it fic of the 1986 movie than as an alternate historical AU. I watched a documentary about the real history and predictably it’s a lot less about tragic teen romance and way more about Jane as a Protestant puppet… though the documentary did try to lean a little too hard into the idea that Jane actually had more agency than history says… because trying to girlboss a 15 year old who died after her father-in-law royally fucked up an attempted coup is trendy, I guess.

Anyway, the overwhelming focus on Jane and Guildford as an arranged marriage to true love pipeline in the show has got to owe its life to the movie…. Not that you couldn’t look at historical records and be inspired independently, since Guildford is one of the very few people who didn’t desert Jane when things went south and died for it (if you choose to believe he was a wife guy and not that he was just in it for the promise of being made king himself, or that he was just a teenage boy who had no more control over his life than Jane had over hers) but a show released in 2024 based on a book published in 2016 is definitely going to draw comparisons to the previous most famous mainstream adaptation of the historical events. Right? Right.

There is a lot that is different but I am putting on my confirmation bias glasses because I can see how the authors/creators of My Lady Jane took cues from the movie.

Their unhappy wedding where Guildford is double fisting wine goblets and Jane is giving withering glares is beat for beat like the movie. The “God’s Teeth” thing that Guildford says in both movie/show.

Them growing closer and falling in love while off on their isolated honeymoon. The displaced people living in the woods that open Jane’s eyes to the larger problems in the world just in time for her to be made queen and start trying to enact sweeping societal reforms… though I also found it deeply ironic that in the show it’s the Protestant stand-in Ethians being persecuted and banished to the woods, where in the movie it’s beggars branded and cast off because the Protestants stole the land from the Catholic Church and didn’t allow the peasants to farm there anymore. There’s a lot more focus on asking what the the point of Protestant v Catholic fighting really is when all it does is cause people to starve and turn into beggars when their livelihood is destroyed by the glorious revolution. And the show takes all that nuance and just turns it into a simplistic Verity (Catholic) Bad and Ethian (Protestant) Good which maybe proves you shouldn’t try to convert real world struggles into fantasy allegories unless you are prepared to really think about what that is saying about the reality you are distorting. But whatever. That may be too deep a question for a story that leans all in on the Bloody Mary caricature.

Oddly enough, it’s Stan Dudley that looks and dresses the most like young Cary Elwes. Am I going insane? Some of the outfits Stan wears look like the were yoinked directly from 1986 Guildford’s dressing rack. It’s a nod to the movie, I tell you! The real Guildford had a lot more brothers and none of them were named Stan.

The scene in the movie where Jane is executed was undercut by the fact that a horse neighed very loudly off screen just before she was beheaded. Though to be fair every time any animals was shown or a human being was likened to a beast I was going “Ah ha! This is what gave them the animorphs AU idea!!!!”

Anyway. There’s no point to this besides me frothing at the mouth about how period dramas fictionalize historical people and events to make them more romantic and cinematic and then people are inspired to further adapt the adaptations and you end up with AUs of AUs and fix-it fics of romantic exaggerations until the original people are lost in the mish mash of popular imagination and we end up with something like My Lady Jane which is both amazing and funny and sexy and romantic and yet also fails spectacularly at its stated goal—it asks “what if Jane lived” but the person in the story bears little to no resemblance to the person it’s trying to save. Everything and everyone around her is different. Something something where is that post about a tragedy being a tragedy because in order for the characters to survive they had to make different choices and be different people?

The real Lady Jane went to her death staunchly preaching that people would go to hell for being Catholic. It’s hard to romanticize that, so we have to make up stories about true love and horses to make someone that we care about actually… when really the true tragedy is that a couple of children were executed because the adults around them fucked up their stupid Protestant coup.

Tempted right now to watch the 1986 film Lady Jane, starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Cary Elwes as the doomed Jane and Guildford. I mean how am I to properly appreciate how sugary and delightful My Lady Jane was without watching the Tragic Version too.