!!!!! did you say Cyberpunk Orpheus and a fairy tale play?? :0 (and Your take on a vampire show!!)
Cyberpunk Orpheus: I’ve already discussed that here!
Fairytale play: This play is told by two narrators, and it is to an extent about unreliable narration. There is a princess, and we are first told that she’s good and kind, but then the first narrator says that’s boring and instead makes her hard and sharp and cynical, but deeply clever. In order to stop a war that has been declared on her kingdom for no good reason, she goes to the other king, who communicates to her solely through stories that represent the diplomatic situation (this is based off one fairytale where diplomacy was enacted through symbolic gestures with beans, grains, and chickens!). This is when the second narrator turns up. She wants to make the story more interesting, so she introduces assassins who are trying to kill the king of this neighbouring kingdom (the one that declared war). Our princess finds out and has to uncover their plot.
The problem is, the two narrators don’t care about the people in their story. These characters are just as real to us, the audience, as the narrators, and so it becomes steadily more horrific that the narrators are making the characters’ lives worse and worse, treating them like rag dools just to prove to the other that THEY are the better storyteller. They’re quite terrible people really. Ultimately, to add a greater twist one of them says that the assassins were sent by the princess’ father as a backup plan. The princess finds out, and she is left with an impossible dilemma, to tell the neighboring king and ruin her country’s relationship with his forever, or to let the neighboring king die at the hands of her father.
But the thing is, throughout, the princess has become more aware of the narrators, until by this point she is completely aware of their existence and the fact that they are making her act out their story. So she rejects their story. And she makes a choice which they would never think of, and which they would never think that she would think of.
Up until this point the princess has been presented as extremely clever, more than anything, and proud of that cleverness. She wants to win, and she wants to do it with action, herself, with agency. Furthermore, up until this point she’s been presented as almost hating her people,because they flatter and preen and simper and she hates that. But the narrators don’t realise that they are still her people, and so despite all her pride, despite all her cleverness, she does not try to solve this by being clever.
Instead she tells the king. And then she weeps and asks forgiveness and begs, laying aside all her pride, for the sake of the people she must lead. And the neighboring king forgives her. The narrators are disgusted, but they’ve lost because this is so clearly the end of the story that they can no longer alter it. The princess wins, was is averted. It’s all about choosing to love more than anything else, about how choices like that can change the course of everything, and it’s about how sometimes the bravest, cleverest, most important thing to do is to ask for mercy. And also of course about creating your own story.
Vampire show: ALSO MY BELOVED THAT LIVES NOWHERE BUT MY HEAD.
So this is in many ways a reaction to the issues I have with other vampire media, or even just things I’d like to explore.
In so much modern vampire media, the protagonist is usually something special. Even if the narrative pretends that they’re just be a normal person, there’s usually something unique and special bout them, even if it’s small. There’s nothing special about Alessa, a student in Edinburgh (because I do love Edinburgh) who accidentally stumbles across a vampire one evening, and when I say there’s nothing special, I mean that throughout the whole show, no matter how long it runs, there is a massive focus on the fact that she is NOTHING SPECIAL. She has no family links to vampires, she has no special skill. She is not even particularly brave. She is doing this, she is fighting, because someone has to. She is every person who stood at the door of their house and refused to move for invaders, she is every girl who walked down a dark street at night, terrified, she is nothing more than human courage seen a million times through history.
Anyway, it turns out that Edinburgh has a large vampire population, but they’re all imprisoned in there by an Evil Vampire King (who as yet has no name). Very East Berlin under communism type of situation. Margarita, the vampire Alessa meets, is sneaking into the city to try to find her husband, Jude, who is trapped there, while also trying to help some vampire escape. At the end of the first episode, Lessa offers her dorm room as a safe place, somewhere where non-invited vampires can’t come in. It’s a mix from then on of hotel comedy, you know, wacky characters who come and go, and genuine vampire adventure fiction.
Lessa starts learning how to fight, but she starts only doing it to protect herself, so she takes self-defence classes and practices, and her fighting wll advance very realistically, with all her skill clearly coming from hours and hours of practicing. Her most fundamental motiviation is that she always wants to make things better for other people, so she gets more and more involved in the actual fighting, until in the season finale she volunteers to go and fight a big group of vampire as a distraction, believing she’s going to die while the others (by this point there’s a surrounding group involving Margarita, I haven’t spent time on them yet) rescue Jude. And then she doesn’t die! because people don’t always have to die. She gets a bit of a hero moment and survives, but only because she flees.
There’s a lot of focus on the idea of heroism, how heroes have to die, how they don’t get happy endings, on rejecting that idea. Throughout people keep calling Lessa a hero, and she keeps refusing to be one for this reason, because she isn’t also! because that implies that she’s special! and she’s not! People also keep asking her why she’s here, and in the first season she keeps giving more and more elaborate fake reasons based off vampire fiction she’s read or seen (my bloodline is closely linked to that of a great vampire... my boyfriend in highschool was obsessed with my blood so I confronted him in the woods... that kind of thing). because she doesn’t really know. But eventually the answer is just because she wants to be, because someone has to be! She chooses to fight, there’s no reason for her to do it besides her choosing to! And at the same time Margarita has a habit of thinking of herself as a hero, of being the only one who can save us all, so she has to break that idea as Lessa has to begin to accept that she is going to have to help save them all.
And then there’s Martin. Martin in the first season will be one of the Evil Vampire King’s head guards, and he’s evil, but in the later seasons he gets Redemption. This I in my hubris have decided will be The Perfect Redemption Arc, and it comes in large part from Lessa refusing to deal with his oh I’m an evil vampire aah schtick. It’s all about how redemption isn’t something earnt, how it is given, how it is an act of grace, of mercy. And Martin and Lessa, they become BEST FRIENDS. In a “I would walk to hell and back for you” way, but also... Lessa makes Martin watch Buffy because she thinks it’s funny how mad it makes him because it’s wrong. Martin knew some of the Romantic composers so he takes her to concerts and tells her about how they were all terrible people. They get dinner together and she talks about her classes and her other friends and he talks about the past and the present and the job that he’s taken recently. She briefly has a boyfriend and when he dumps her he’s like “do you want me to go intimidate him with my fangs? because I can totally do that. Just say the word.” There won’t be any significant romance for Alessa because that’s not important in this, so this friendship will be perhaps the most deep and important relationship of the show.
Ultimately it’s about this one image. Martin is on the ground and Alessa has offered a hand to help him up, it’s very cliche. But you know the angles for the Hero Pose? Low shot, light from behind, intimidating posture? All those camera angles are used FOR THE FIRST TIME, no one else gets a hero pose before, despite all the heroic killing and all, before here. This offer of kindness, this gesture, that is the ultimate heroic gesture, and Martin can see, can understand that this woman is going to save them all by extending grace. Her power is in her humanity, meaning it is no greater power than anyone else has. And that’s the point.
Also, the vampires are still people. They’re people with a greater propensity of being corrupted, because they have to drink blood which is inherently violent, and they’re extremely powerful, and they live for so long that it’s easy to forget that human lives are important. But they’re still people. So there’s a lot of discussion of the fact that Alessa is murdering people, and she will never really be able to deal with that guilt. She thinks it must be right, because they would have murdered more people and she couldn’t have let them do it, but she can’t really understand how to deal with this. She is constantly ashamed that she couldn’t save the evil vampires, that she ended up having to kill them. So it’s also about forgiveness for her.
Sorry this got so long, but I have a lot of Thoughts about this show, and I care for it so very much!!! Thank you so much for asking I’ve been dying to talk about it!!!!!!
