![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Depraved Homosexual Fantasy Drinking Game; Jane Eyre (items unrelated)
Why is it that queers in historical fiction and fantasy always seem to wind up sniveling, lecherous Depraved Homosexuals? Ah, I just answered my own question. I'm reading Anno Dracula at the moment; I'll save my thoughts for when I finish it, but I must sigh at this trope, so popular among heterosexual readers and writers who consider themselves liberal enough to make gay jokes, more or less. You could make a very slow text-based drinking game out of it. Drink for every time a queer man's sexuality in a historical novel is described as "a taste for boys." Drink for any scene where he fondles something underage and you're supposed to find it grotesque. Drink for interest in unwilling straight men. Drink for mincing, though do moderate your liquor intake, as alcohol poisoning can be deadly. Drink for gay brothels. Drink for equation of homosexuality and pedophilia in general. Chug if he meets a gruesome end. Raise your empty glass to the lesbian women never, ever mentioned. The whole affair makes a soul want to go back to the 19th century and then suck someone's dick good and hard, just to give this genre the middle finger.
Anyway, last night/this morning (we paused and resumed) we put on a recent Jane Eyre film adaptation, the one with Michael Fassbender. I am not going to try to review a Victorian Gothic novel from 1847, nor am I interested in getting into the general literary catfights regarding the Brontes and whether it's a sin against taste to be attracted to Edward Rochester or Heathcliff or Mr Darcy or nice guys or bad boys -- the internet is already clogged with people's arguments about that.
So on the subject of the Jane Eyre movie: it was alright, although sort of fell into the uncanny valley between being the over-the-top ridiculous Beauty and the Beast-ish tropey gothic darque rain-laden story it is and trying to be something more respectable. For example, it cast mousy Mia Wasikowska for Jane Eyre, but preposterously handsome ridiculously brooding Michael Fassbender for Edward Rochester. Inherently these people can't belong to the same story, and it strained suspension of disbelief. The film really should've cast some magnetic Mary Sue -- Keira or her like -- for Jane, then the stormy overblown atmosphere of it all would've been complete. Fassbender's charismatic, though, I was surprised to find that he was; he had to be to make Rochester anything resembling likeable. I mean, the man is dead handsome, there have been decency codes against the things I'd do to him, but he and his shark teeth are pretty well suited to being Byronic. I'll put him next to Gabriel Macht for "possible James Bonds."
Anyway, last night/this morning (we paused and resumed) we put on a recent Jane Eyre film adaptation, the one with Michael Fassbender. I am not going to try to review a Victorian Gothic novel from 1847, nor am I interested in getting into the general literary catfights regarding the Brontes and whether it's a sin against taste to be attracted to Edward Rochester or Heathcliff or Mr Darcy or nice guys or bad boys -- the internet is already clogged with people's arguments about that.
So on the subject of the Jane Eyre movie: it was alright, although sort of fell into the uncanny valley between being the over-the-top ridiculous Beauty and the Beast-ish tropey gothic darque rain-laden story it is and trying to be something more respectable. For example, it cast mousy Mia Wasikowska for Jane Eyre, but preposterously handsome ridiculously brooding Michael Fassbender for Edward Rochester. Inherently these people can't belong to the same story, and it strained suspension of disbelief. The film really should've cast some magnetic Mary Sue -- Keira or her like -- for Jane, then the stormy overblown atmosphere of it all would've been complete. Fassbender's charismatic, though, I was surprised to find that he was; he had to be to make Rochester anything resembling likeable. I mean, the man is dead handsome, there have been decency codes against the things I'd do to him, but he and his shark teeth are pretty well suited to being Byronic. I'll put him next to Gabriel Macht for "possible James Bonds."