I've got to say, while Anne Shirley is very sweet, it's not my favorite adaptation by a long shot. (I grew up with the 80s live action series, read the books, loved Anne with an E and also found the 79 anime compelling.)It's doing a great job, but it's not so much doing the things I really find compelling about the Anne series. Its determined cheery charm and desire to resolve each episode neatly sometimes feels more akin to Pollyanna than what I think of as LMM's embattled heroine.
But it has me thinking, as every adaptation does--what would feel both new, and meaningfully rooted in the themes of the original?
For me, the dream "modern-setting" adaptation that tugs at my mind is one that would probably piss a lot of people off, but hear me out:
I'd like to see one where the Cuthberts, an older, set-in-their-ways autistic sister-and-brother pair, still decide to try and foster or adopt a boy. They are still told that they are receiving a boy.
Indeed, all the paperwork affirms that this child is a boy...
Anne, an autistic anxious and vibrant child with a heartbreaking desire to please, a huge and indomitable inner life, strong feelings on what names and spellings she's willing to accept being called by, and a deep, deep well of insecurity about her physical appearance, is a girl, despite what all the medical paperwork says about her.
I would love to see someone take the peculiar mix-up that serves as the foundation of the story and use it as a hook to tease out ideas about found family, friendships, community, bigotry, acceptance, growth and hope and finding one's home--all the themes that shoot through LMM's children's books--but with the distinctive added layer of transfemininity as a part of Anne's initial distance from the people of Avonlea.
Matthew would ask no questions, simply nodding along and trying to be kind to the child he's bringing home. Marilla would be in a quandary, stuck between her strident 'knowledge' of what is 'supposed' to be true and the deeper moral compass that would inevitably drive her to defend Anne from people who are being manifestly unfair and unkind.
Diana Barry's mother might find it both easier and harder to say out loud just why she's so uncomfortable with this new "bosom companion"--because of course one doesn't want to seem un-PC when banning a small underfed trans girl from one's home.
Gilbert Blythe can get wrecked for tugging her hair, as usual.
Idk I just have a lot of Thoughts and Feelings about Trans Anne Shirley okay.
annaxmalina
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