#rewatching projects

[flutishly]

There's something so real about a lot of these early NMTD videos that even the best of other webseries never quite captured. Maybe it's the range of styles between 4-5 different vloggers (so far we've had Beatrice, Ursula, Benedick, Hero, and Dogberry/Verges). Bea is engaging, snarky, and direct, confidently ready to film herself. Hero is cheerfully sweet and feels wonderfully tuned to the camera and her own style. Ben is a bit awkward and strange and so ready to have a relationship with viewers, without much experience to back it up. Ursula is predominantly behind the camera and seeks to film art as she sees it. Dogberry and Verges have a crappy camera and no sense for filming or vlogging, but so much passion.

The episodes leading up to PROJECT II - ONE SHOT all feel remarkably distinct and unrelated. Yes, these characters are clearly interconnected (seen in VOX POPS through Ursula's storytelling, but also with the linked scenes in "Football Antics" and the Watch's video), but their vlogs are just... different and unrelated. And best of all, they have such different filming, editing, and storytelling styles. They really feel like they're coming from different characters. And there's no clear narrative! What's the story? Is it just a bunch of vlogs from some high school kids circa 2014?

I love ONE SHOT partly because of how it's shot and all (it's great!!), but also... it's just such a COOL way to show off how so many of these threads do fit together. There's an almost-effortless naturalness to how ONE SHOT shows these teens being silly, arguing, and having fun. It's lovely. It's different. It feels so real, so unscripted, so natural.

At this stage, it's so easy to question what Nothing Much to Do is even about. If you don't know the plot of Much Ado About Nothing, I don't think there's any easy way to guess how this story is playing out. And I love that the naturalness of the different filming styles can really make it seem like, no, there's no overarching narrative, there are just a bunch of kids making silly Youtube videos (as was decently common at the time) and having fun online and sharing about their lives. Drama? What drama? (We're in a Shakespeare comedy, aren't we??)

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I think the most interesting and unexpected thing so far about rewatching the Lizzie Bennet Diaries is the realization that a lot of things that felt like they stretched credibility back in 2012-2013 as regards oversharing on the internet... just no longer seem as unbelievable. The rise of TikTok and other bite-sized, share-all video platforms means that it suddenly doesn’t seem quite as weird (unfortunately) to have someone sharing highly personal information on the internet, including people in their videos without their consent, and so on. Of course there were vloggers like that at the time, but it still felt just a tiny bit performative and off. But videos today often feel that level of scripted and performative, it’s just how things have gone. And so... not quite as jarring.

Here I was, expecting to rewatch and find all of the things that have aged poorly. And while those are certainly there, the format, if anything, feels more relevant. Fascinating.

[flutishly]

As the daily rewatch of NMTD gets going (avoiding the actual phrase/tag, per my previous post), I'm finding myself discovering parts of the show that I never actually knew/processed. Logically speaking, I knew that there were Tumblr accounts and I think I was even following them from some point. But I never followed them at the beginning of the show's run (I only discovered it a few episodes from now, and don't recall going back to fill in the transmedia blanks) and certainly never processed that Ursula's "Vox Pops" video was actually the first (chronologically) of the NMTD-verse.

The first episode of NMTD is naturally Beatrice's first vlog. I still find it immensely watchable and engaging. Bea is funny, approachable, and bursting with a liveliness. She feels realistically teenaged and Harriett Maire's acting makes Beatrice seem entirely real, particularly in the way she shifts between different performance styles as she introduces herself and her family. I've long adored "And So It Begins..." as an excellent example of how an episode manages to cram its background in without seeming like it's trying too hard. It's also just... enjoyable to watch, and this is again purely down to having such a charismatic lead.

If we then loop back to "VOX POPS" (don't ask me why I wrote it normally earlier but am now stylizing with caps), there's a sense that Beatrice belongs to a whole, rich world. In "VOX POPS", she's hardly the main character, which is of course the point. Watching these videos in their chronological - rather than logical - order makes the show feel a teeny bit wider from the start. But it also begs the question why Beatrice is vlogging at precisely the same time as Ursula begins uploading her "artsier" videos. This is answered to some degree in "And So It Begins...", by the fact that Bea's life has undergone major changes of late and she's figuring herself out. Would it have made some sense to have an in-story inspiration from Ursula's videos, in that first episode? Maybe! Then again, this is one of those things that necessitates some degree of suspension of disbelief, when asking why webseries characters begin (or stop) filming videos when they do.

Both of these videos are just introductions... and of course, there are several more introductions to come (not just in terms of characters, but distinct channels/styles, like the Watch videos and Ben's vlogs). NMTD is one of the best shows I've ever seen when it comes to having a full, ensemble cast, which I think is beautifully illustrated by "VOX POPS" being its "accidental" premiere. Yes, Beatrice is the show's main character (and she is, both in terms of plot-centrality and driving the presentation/performance of this story), but she never feels like a character who sits alone at the top of a pedestal while other characters revolve around her. She doesn't change based on who's filming her, but her centrality does. It's something that I still think NMTD did best out of so many webseries.

There's not much to write at this stage, given how little of the story has unfolded (and knowing just how much plot is still to come. So far, I'm mostly surprised by the transmedia (which I remember being fairly thin and far from NMTD's strength, an assessment I stand by so far... it's not bad, but it's clearly supplementary) and by the instant worldbuilding.

So it begins, indeed.

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NMTDaily rewatch rules

I've been thinking a lot about how to approach recapping or discussing the NMTDaily, given that this is rather obviously right up my alley. I won't be rewatching the videos immediately upon their release and I want to be careful about not overly obsessing, but obviously there's something so joyful about rewatching shows I love (see: The Great Webseries Rewatch) and the fact that there is a shared opportunity to do this for one of my favorite shows and in real-time is too good an opportunity to miss.

But! It occurs to me that there are two important points.

Posting "daily" is a little much for a rewatch project, conceptually.

There may be viewers who are watching Nothing Much to Do for the first time thanks to the NMTDaily. At least, I certainly hope there are! In which case... posting nonstop spoilers might be a bit of a bummer.

I'm reminded of the little tricks fans came up with to draw a line between fictional Tumblr accounts and realities, the need to separate between "reality" and reality, one accepting a sort of truth to the fictional world that was coming right up against our own, and the other speaking entirely external to the story. In NMTD, there are a few small hints of that in-story as well, particularly through music.

On my end, I think there will be two different categories of posts and two different tags. There will be more recap-style posts, that view NMTD through a lens similar to that which I've been using for my general webseries project. These will be tagged as "NMTD", alongside respective rewatching tags.

The other set of posts will be "naive", written with only the knowledge of the episodes that have aired and the source text. These will be tagged as both "NMTD" and "NMTDaily". Anyone who wishes to avoid my spoilery thoughts can simply go through the "NMTDaily" tag. I'll try to keep it clear.

Anyways. 10 years! 10 years. Wild.

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LBD rewatch, part 1

I’ve already gotten through just around half (certainly the thematic half-point), so I won’t be able to get into all of my observations and thoughts, but I thought I should still write up something before I kick off the Darcy era. So... here are my thoughts, in bullet points, in no particular order, and likely completely incoherently:

Lizzie’s highly judgmental nature comes across a lot stronger than I remembered. The first time I watched the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (and I think the subsequent 2-3 times I rewatched it not long afterward), I obviously recognized Lizzie’s snark and judgmental tendencies. She’s meant to be prejudiced, after all! It’s part of her character. And yet upon rewatch, I can’t help but feel like Lizzie reminds me of so many people who go through life convinced that they’re the good guys, while actually being pretty awful. (I’m vaguely reminded of the line in Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief: “They were born beautiful and mistake being beautiful for being good”, but that might be a whole other conversation. In a nutshell, it’s as both Lydia and Charlotte observe, that Lizzie’s diaries will always be biased. Which is not a bad thing.) Lizzie is often mean. And needlessly so, it goes without saying. It’s an obviously important character beat, but I think that in 2012, I was more readily forgiving of people like that. But today? I see a Lizzie who is constantly talking down to Lydia (who very obviously worships her older sisters and is constantly seeking their approval/time), who is casually cruel about Mr. Collins, and is unrelentingly negative about Darcy (which... okay, yes, again, plot point! but it’s still really mean to put online!!).

That said, Lizzie’s love for Charlotte is the positive flipside that I also hadn’t remembered. Their mutual hurt in “Friends Forever” and Lizzie’s hollowness in “Missing Charlotte” is evident and it’s hard to fully fault either friend. Both say and behave in a way that’s unfair to the other. It’s brilliantly done and the resolution and reconciliation was great.

Mr. Collins is definitely not as annoying as I remembered. Sure, he’s definitely irritating, but Lizzie treats him way more unkindly than he deserves. Like other than the “barging into a room uninvited” thing (which is definitely not cool!), he’s just trying to share in his part of the passion! And the degree to which Lizzie’s impatience is somewhat out of step with modern norms is only emphasized by how clearly Charlotte is able to manage later on. I also didn’t remember just how much the show subtly teased the possibility of his proposal being romantic after all. Even knowing where things were going, I watched the episode with a distinct sense of discomfort, which is quite impressive. If I wasn’t intent on doing a full rewatch, I probably would have skipped these episodes because they’re “cringe-y”, but no, they were worth it! Unexpectedly.

Lydia, oh man, there are essays to write here. Lydia comes across as so much less put-together in retrospect in how she presents herself to the camera, and I think a huge part of that comes from knowing just how much of her we’ll end up seeing and just how much she needs her environment. If Lizzie is the Bookstagram star, Lydia is clearly a wannabe influencer on TikTok. Yes, Lydia seeks attention in “negative” ways, but she’s also constantly trying to get Lizzie’s attention and acceptance and it’s specifically about Lizzie’s attention and acceptance. She’s hugely loving and loyal to those around her. She is lonely. She’s a youngest daughter who likes to party, but also likes to party with her older sisters and with her older sisters’ friends (which is not trivial). She fiercely defends Mary and Lizzie in this first half of the story, which I think beautifully sets up her struggles in the second half. Lydia’s insecurities are bubbling below the surface, but they’re already there. I could absolutely write so much more here, but maybe that’ll end up in another post, who knows.

Fitz is a nice interlude, but I had a harder time believing he didn’t pick up on Lizzie’s massive NOPEing when he told her about Darcy’s intervention. I never thought of Fitz as a particularly important character, and indeed he isn’t. Definitely doesn’t hurt the story, but he doesn’t really add much either. I found myself wishing he could have offered more insights into Darcy, but... alas.

Like I said in my first post, it’s somewhat strange to discover that a lot of the parts that stretched credibility in 2012... don’t anymore. I don’t especially like that observation, but there it is. And like I mentioned above, there’s a feeling of dissonance between the different types of social media stars that the characters would be. Lizzie could still be a Youtuber, I suppose, but she strikes me more as the sort who would make short videos about “intellectual” topics - her research (?), culture, books, etc. And Lydia would obviously be the sort who is constantly trying to get perform.

I felt this at the time and still feel it: Caroline and Bing are somewhat unnecessary to include on camera. It would have been fine without them. Not, again, that it’s bad with them? But it just doesn’t feel quite as critical and there is the slight ick factor with how everyone just lies to Bing all the time about him being on camera. Nope.

Continuing with the things I didn’t like, the way everyone talks about Jane and Bing’s relationship in terms of purity is unpleasant. The story does this weird thing with Jane and Bing that sort of strips their relationship of depth by using “sweet” terms. And it’d be fine if the show came outright and said how this ties into this particular couple’s choices regarding their relationship (romantically, physically, etc.), but they don’t. Not a fan. Didn’t age well.

Jane’s anger in “Snickerdoodles” is so beyond justified, considering that at this point we’re talking about two modern adults who have been dating for months. Don’t forgive him, Jane. He’s not worth it.

The pacing is excellent. I thought it’d be a slog to rewatch, but not at all. It’s delightful.

No, not everything aged well. The casual sexism - while possibly intentional and tying into bullet point #1 - is irritating. Certain phrases that are obviously meant to emphasize character flaws still should not have been used; the same effect could have been conveyed differently.

As with my endless rewatches of Pride and Prejudice (1995), I continue to relate to and appreciate Mrs. Bennet more upon rewatch. Go figure!

Having Kitty Bennet be a cat who follows Lydia around is still one of the most genius adaptation decisions I have ever encountered in any media. Ever.

So those are some of my initial thoughts from this rewatch. It’s entirely likely that I’ll remember more when I pick it up again later this week, but I’ll obviously also be posting (hopefully shorter) analyses or thoughts about the next episodes as I progress. It’s definitely a positive experience so far and I’m so excited to keep watching not only LBD, but also the next shows on my list.

(And to everyone asking: I’m doing this rewatch independently of The Look-Back Diaries! I did watch a few episodes of those when they started, but somehow never ended up following consistently. And now I’d rather finish my own rewatch “naively” before I add the extra context. That’ll be the next stage!)

[flutishly]

GGF rewatch, part 1

Confession: I actually started the next rewatch in my Great Webseries Rewatch series a few weeks ago. And then I paused, not because I wasn't enjoying it but because I was traveling. And now that I'm back home, I intend to continue and so it seemed like the right time to start writing up my impressions from the first batch of episodes that I saw.

Let's start with the fact that I even chose to rewatch Green Gables Fables next, after LBD. When I was imagining which show would be second, I kept asking myself whether I'd go with my personal successor to LBD, the show that got me into Tumblr in the first place, or whether I should just continue with the Pemberley Digital set of shows. And then... I ended up going for something else entirely. I picked GGF almost intuitively, thoughtless, just because.

It was a pretty great choice, honestly.

GGF is one of those shows that I watched consistently as it was airing. I reblogged posts about it and I followed all the creators and I got excited over it and I loved it and felt so much from it. But I didn't write all that much about it. It's not that I didn't write about it at all, of course I did. (I wrote and rambled quite a lot in those days, after all...) But it was never the dominant show in my orbit and in a way I felt like I always sort of forgot about it. Every time I watched it, I'd be like "oh right, this is great!" and then it would again just sort of... fade into the background. Part of this has to do with the fact that it originally aired alongside shows that would become among my all-time favorites. Part even has to do with the fact that its second season aired alongside another excellent Anne of Green Gables adaptation (Project Green Gables), which I found somewhat easier to write about.

Anyways. It's time to give GGF its due, because... yeah, this was and remains a good show. And yes, I do love it.

Right from the onset, Mandy Harmon is excellent in how she presents Anne. The filming style is youthful, quippy, a little messy, imperfect, and so utterly Anne. I thought this when the show was airing, that something about GGF's flaws consistently made it better as an adaptation. In a lot of regards, GGF was one of the best in having realism in webseries literary adaptations. Not only did the story easily lend itself to bite-sized episodes (Anne of Green Gables itself being very episodic), but there was a concious effort to make Anne's world fully populated. Anne is thoroughly present online as an aesthetics blogger (excellent adaptation choice), befriending Diana through Tumblr (a nice wink to much of the fanbase itself, and a bit to the way the show developed), and there is a rich and real transmedia experience that I think ended up blowing pretty much every other show out of the water. All these years later, I still marvel over how characters were introduced to the story seamlessly through their online personas, without it necessarily being "plot relevant" for Anne's videos. They simply existed and as such they also occasionally existed in Anne's immediate (filmed) orbit.

But since I'm not reviewing the transmedia (and never really tracked it much when it was live either), let's get back to the show itself: Dang, it's good.

The pacing is great. The acting is great (if a little uneven when Diana is onscreen, though this isn't so much because of bad acting as much as a reflection of the character's relative discomfort/unease onscreen). Most of the adaptational choices are great (I still don't much love the Diana-getting-drunk plotline, which was the last episode I watched, but it was a lot less painful this time around than the first, and better than I remembered). The sense that Anne lives in this fascinating little town is beautifully conveyed in-story and I love how open everything is. Anne doesn't hide her videos and she addresses her mistakes on camera (particularly as relates to being mean or snarky about individuals) and there's none of the awkward work-arounds to explain why some people know certain things. The story just... is.

I'm still at the very beginning, of course, but I find myself wanting to write about the show in a lot more depth than I ever did while it was running. I find myself wanting to talk about how Anne's dramatic filming style feels less like old vlogs and less like new TikToks/Reels and more like the transition from the old world to the new, in how they're so fluid yet dramatic. I find myself thinking about how Anne's loneliness comes across so beautifully in the first few episodes and how she takes a little while to settle into her Avonlea life. I find myself loving how Anne's anger with Gilbert is so freshly realistic, that it's easy to forget that the story is over 100 years old.

I don't know how much I'll actually end up writing as I go through. I meant to pause and write up my thoughts as I was watching the first batch of videos, but I just got wrapped up in it and couldn't stop; the episodes flow seamlessly and warmly and the show feels like I really am just catching up with some teen vlogger from a decade ago. But again: I'd like to make the effort. I hope to pick up my rewatch next week, so let's see how that goes...

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GGF rewatch, part 4 - Interlude

I was about to start my Green Gables Fables season 2 rewatch and at the end of the first ("episode 0") video - beyond realizing that I'd fully misremembered the show's timeline! - I noticed that there was a disconnected video: "Anne and Gil React...". This video isn't included in either the seasons 1 or 2 playlists and since the show has been unlisted, it was harder to find it. (I ended up scrolling through Anne's Tumblr feed, which also helped remind me what took place when and how excellent the transmedia was on this show.)

I'll linger on the video for a moment before I continue my actual season 2 rewatch, because it occurs to me that this is the mental image I have of Green Gable Fable's versions of Anne and Gilbert. Specifically, I always remember them as that final moment, when Gilbert side-hugs Anne and she pushes his face away. They're both so clearly comfortable and friends in this video that it's easy to forget that their friendship came about at the very end of season 1 (as in Anne of Green Gables). As I've mentioned before, I have a very strange relationship with GGF, in that I feel like I forgot about the show oddly quickly, despite liking it so very much. Going into season 2, I'm especially aware of that fact, since I realize that I actually remember fairly little. There are a few plot points and major scenes that are fresh in my memory and I'm excited to re-experience, but I don't have many expectations of the season as a whole, which is kind of exciting.

And that makes me think about how I wouldn't have remembered "Anne and Gil React..." without the little thumbnail at the end of season 2's "teaser" episode, "Goodbye, Avonlea" (which, sadly, does not directly link to the video). And that makes me think about how contemporary literary webseries were, whether in the context of their use of specific social media platforms for the purposes of transmedia or in how rooted to a particular slice of time they are or, as is now emerging, how hard it is to replicate the original viewing experience almost a decade later. (Sidebar: This makes the forthcoming Nothing Much to Do rewatch project all of the more interesting, but naturally I'll be writing about that separately when the time comes.) This one little out-of-place video - which actually perfectly captures what I best remember from GGF - seems to represent something about this rewatching project on the whole, about the way these webseries blazed to life and have faded from collective memory, about art as a whole, and about what it means to rework a classic story.

Onto season 2!

[flutishly]

LBD rewatch, part 2

I’ll just update for a few episodes in one go, but in pieces.

1. Lydia in LA

Before I dive into Darcy Day whatnot, I want to pause for a moment on the way that Lydia presents herself in the two episodes between the Great Darcy Reveal. I remembered the existence of these episodes, but nothing about their content; I suspect that their placement in the story makes it hard to focus on that. I mean, DARCY is going to APPEAR in the NEXT VIDEO. And it’s hard to assign Lydia’s arc here to something fixed in the original Pride and Prejudice novel, which maybe also makes it fly under the radar a bit.

There’s an odd bit of performance happening in these videos that I again find more believable now than I did when it first aired. Lydia, notably, does not turn the camera off in “Runaway” once Jane starts pressing her, nor even once she starts answering Jane’s gently probing questions. It’s ultimately Jane who turns the camera off and forces the rest of the conversation offscreen. We don’t get a clear resolution to her line of questioning, either. The initially somewhat judgmental assumption that Lydia is skipping class in order to be with a boy is quickly supplanted by the more concerning reality that Lydia is skipping class in order to avoid a boy. But it’s reality that doesn’t get the spotlight (and I don’t believe this is raised again). Even when Lydia is controlling her own narrative, it’s not quite hers. Jane is sweet in how she talks to Lydia, but she’s still very clearly talking down from a place of “older sister” to “baby sister” (and I think it’s notable that Jane so often calls Lydia her baby sister, not just her youngest sister). And the unedited nature means that this does feel ultimately like Lydia’s approach is to let someone else decide what parts of her “image” get to go online. It’s fascinating.

And it’s also beautifully vulnerable. Lydia’s constant performance is something I associate with the first half of the show and her tiredness and isolation something I associate with the second half. Yet these two tiny episodes bridge the gap rather beautifully. I don’t think I fully appreciated it on first watch.

Interlude as “Are You Kidding Me!” begins: “Oh no, I forgot how awkward this is, I don’t want to watch thissssss”, pauses repeatedly, grimaces, writes this interlude, returns.

2. Darcy

Mm yeah, that was pretty much exactly as awkward as I remembered it. And it’s still really funny/weird to me that this episode tries to hew so closely to “familiar” phrases, because the episode overall ends up feeling the most old-fashioned and out of place. Which makes sense on Darcy, but not as much on Lizzie. It’s one of the episodes that feels most scripted and adapted, I think, which is not exactly to its favor. I’d forgotten how good some of Darcy’s expressions are, though. But yeah, super painful to watch, as expected.

3. Lizzie and Lydia reset

I did not remember this at all, but the parallels and foreshadowing in “Letter Analysis” and “The D Word” are fantastic, even a bit in the preceding “Sister, Sister”. Lizzie and Lydia both talk and joke around their great insecurities - Lizzie about driving people away, Lydia about being left alone. (Which are extremely similar insecurities! And yet they don’t see it on the other!) Lydia again displays that intense loyalty to her family, even praising Lizzie by saying “Family first, bitches!”. And her loneliness is on display again, between leaving Jane in “Sister, Sister” and missing Mary in “The D Word”. Lydia’s episodes in particular feel like they’re meant to be transition episodes, but they’re shockingly good in adding depth to her character and contextualizing everything that’s coming. And Lizzie is clearly meant to be in some sort of post-climactic breathing space, but here too it feels like she’s also coming face to face with a lot of her real concerns. She’s worried about how she’s pushing people away. She’s defensive. And she’s suddenly no longer so confident in her judgements of those around her (Darcy to the positive, Wickham - unnamed - to the negative). It’s really good character work in moments that could easily have been cut. I’m glad they weren’t.

4. Charlotte’s relationship with the Bennets

I love how Charlotte is so clearly integrated into the Bennet household, to the point where she makes a point of standing up for Jane as well (yes!! wonderful!) and Lydia talks about hanging out with her, and she’s just... an obvious part of all three’s world. It’s so great.