Lizzie + William 4ever!

A while back, I heard about this web video series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern retelling of Pride & Prejudice as told via YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest. I bookmarked the page and promptly forgot about it...until I was desperately trying to avoid some freelance work I had to do. And then I promptly watched the 86 Lizzie episodes, the 28 Lydia videos, and the various Maria and Domino videos, and read the various Twitter updates. You know what's WAY more interesting than medical editing? The Lizzie Bennet Diaries!

I'm not big into people messing with Austen. The continuations of the books hold little appeal, and while I mostly enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I didn't like how it messed with Lizzie's character.

You want to know an Austen adaptation that works? Clueless, the modernization of Emma. And the LBD succeeds for the same reason Clueless did: the heart of the characters are the same, but a bunch of the details are changed. LBD sticks much more closely to the story of P&P than Clueless to Emma, but both maintain the soul of the people.

Ashley Clements is an amazing Lizzie, but what I've found fantastic is the portrayal of a number of the secondary characters, particularly Lydia (Mary Kate Wiles). Holy crap, y'all. I never really thought that much about Lydia beyond what's in the book; I just accepted her story. But what Bernie Su and the other writers do with this character, and how Wiles brings her to life, is just brilliant. There's a depth to Lydia that I don't remember in the original, but at the same time, it feels completely organic.

It's symbolic of how LBD somehow manages to bring surprises to a story that I know well. The details of Lydia's journey is the largest of these, but the tweaks made to certain other characters and storylines manage to combine the original story with modern times. Charlotte Lu(cas) (Julia Cho) has been fleshed out, but remains the pragmatic character from the story. Georgiana (Gigi) Darcy (Allison Paige) still wants her brother to end up with Lizzie, but she's the one character who seems off from the original--a bit too assertive. (I'm also not sure how I feel about Caroline.) But it is the 21st century, after all.

And Darcy. Because of the setup of the story--told through Lizzie's own video diaries--we don't see him until about six months into the story. We hear a LOT about him, but we don't see the man himself until WAY into the story. It serves the story well; this format only emphasizes that Lizzie is the "prejudice" in the title of the original, and she tells us all about his "pride." And yet, with seeing him only a few minutes, I can't help but pull for him.

The story, unfortunately, is rapidly heading toward its conclusion, and I'm left in suspense with how they're going to handle the climax of the book. After binging on the videos, it's torture to have to wait for new content likes this (it's like how I started reading Harry Potter when the first three were out, and only had to wait a few months before Goblet of Fire came out...and then had the torture of waiting for the last three to be released).

Yet I want it to just keep going, but I don't want to stop hanging out with these people.

Espcially Fitz. Because he's AWESOME.