{"id":110,"date":"2011-06-01T21:29:37","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T21:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/?p=110"},"modified":"2011-06-02T21:12:55","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T21:12:55","slug":"what-if-pride-and-prejudice-had-no-humor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"What if Pride and Prejudice were a Soap Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Last Man in the World aka Mr Fiztwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World<\/em> by Abigail Reynolds<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Last Man in the World (TLMITW) is, like most of Abigail Reynolds other stories, a what if story, taking an element of P&P and changing it, thus changing the story that follows to something else entirely.<\/p>\n

Why you should read this:<\/strong> If you like sitting at home during the day eating ice cream and watching daytime soap operas.\u00c2\u00a0 If you enjoy historical romances, perhaps those published under some subsidiary of Harlequin.\u00c2\u00a0 If you prefer your prose to have competently-constructed sentences that are readable and even\u00e2\u20ac\u201cat times\u00e2\u20ac\u201cgood.\u00c2\u00a0 If you care about the quality of writing more than other JAFF fans seem to.\u00c2\u00a0 If you think Jane Austen has too much humor in it.<\/p>\n

Why you might not like it:<\/strong> The soap operaish and historical romance qualities mentioned above.\u00c2\u00a0 If you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like paying for JAFF.\u00c2\u00a0 If you prefer your characters to actually be in character.<\/p>\n

Regency, AU, R, available for purchase at the usual places.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think I should preface this by mentioning that I spent all of my husband George\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s money on gin and entertainment; so I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have enough money or even want to buy this so my review is based off an old PDF of the story that I downloaded before it was published.\u00c2\u00a0 That said, I have no idea how much (or not) this has changed since it was published.\u00c2\u00a0 The PDF is 73 pages, so even adjusting for smaller pages in a book this doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem quite long enough to be a novel, however I am glad that it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t long enough, because by the end I was getting quite bored and found myself skimming it.<\/p>\n

This story is very much a soap opera.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never actually read a historical romance that isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t JAFF, to be honest I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d much rather have people over for drinking games than read that type of thing.\u00c2\u00a0 Come to think of it, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather have people over for drinking games than do most things.\u00c2\u00a0 However I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m now going to attempt to stick to writing this review.\u00c2\u00a0 The basis of this story is that Darcy compromises Elizabeth at Hunsford and so they are forced to marry, Elizabeth still unaware of Wickham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true character, Darcy unchanged and so on.\u00c2\u00a0 Elizabeth is desperately unhappy and tried to please Darcy by not arguing with him etc, and so seems much unlike herself.\u00c2\u00a0 This story has the common JAFF conflation of Regency and Victorian mores.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, Elizabeth is silent and still, lying back and thinking of England because ladies don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take pleasure in having sex.<\/p>\n

As I said before so many times, the plot is soap operish, after the forced marriage and Elizabeth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s initial unhappiness with her situation, she and Darcy have an argument and she tells him what she really thinks of him.\u00c2\u00a0 They very little contact until Darcy has a clich\u00c3\u00a9d bad fall from his horse and of course, he almost dies.\u00c2\u00a0 Elizabeth nurses him back to health and during that time realizes she loves him, however under the effects of that evil laudanum he orders her from his bedchamber and she becomes extremely depressed and even considers suicide until her maid tells her she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pregnant and forces her to eat.\u00c2\u00a0 It reminded me of when George killed our son, and\u00c2\u00a0 even did it in front of our guests.\u00c2\u00a0 That was quite depressing, however the gin helped me get over it the very next night.\u00c2\u00a0 Back to (TLMITW, eventually they reconcile and realize their lurve is mutual and live happily every after until a tenant hits Elizabeth and then Wickham and Lydia come to visit and attempt to wheedle money out of her.\u00c2\u00a0 But those problems were easily dispatched so Darcy and Elizabeth could live happily every after.\u00c2\u00a0 I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand what the purpose of those last elements were, as far as I can tell they existed to make the story longer and even more soap opera-like then it already was.\u00c2\u00a0 This story was almost completely devoid of intentional humor, which is its biggest shortcoming, indeed most of JAFF\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biggest shortcoming. \u00c2\u00a0That said the plot was funny, although I don’t think the author intended I find that aspect funny.<\/p>\n

Another problem was the characterization.\u00c2\u00a0 Like in the novel, Elizabeth undergoes a transformation and realizes her past mistakes.\u00c2\u00a0 However unlike in the novel Darcy does no such thing, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s already his changed self at the beginning and undergoes only a minor change after realizing his mistake in assuming her anticipation and acceptance of his proposal.\u00c2\u00a0 Someone I know once noted that one of the problems with AUs is that once someone starts changing one thing, they change something else and something else again.\u00c2\u00a0 And this story definitely suffers from this problem, not only with plot but with character.\u00c2\u00a0 This Elizabeth is certainly not the one made for happiness who would laugh herself out of a broken heart quickly.\u00c2\u00a0 She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the Elizabeth I know and love from Pride and Prejudice.<\/em><\/p>\n

The good aspect of this story is its writing.\u00c2\u00a0 While the prose is by no means great it is much better than most JAFF, so that redeems some of the problems with the characterizations and lack of humor.\u00c2\u00a0 I can at least read it without cringing at the actual writing itself, which is more than I can say for most fanfiction.\u00c2\u00a0 I really don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have much more to say about this topic and am feeling much too lazy to find quotes to give as examples for any of this.\u00c2\u00a0 Also I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m getting bored with writing this and need to get ready for the salon I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m hosting tonight.\u00c2\u00a0 Right now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m listening to very good music, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m feeling generous.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll give this:<\/p>\n

\"3<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Last Man in the World aka Mr Fiztwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World by Abigail Reynolds The Last Man in the World (TLMITW) is, like most of Abigail Reynolds other stories, a what if story, taking an element of P&P and changing it, thus changing the story that follows to something else…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[77,14,40,15,55,64,49,46],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-martha","tag-author-abigail-reynolds","tag-era-regency","tag-length-novella","tag-plot-forced-marriage-scenario","tag-quills-three","tag-rating-explicit","tag-source-pride-and-prejudice","tag-type-plot-departure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}