11 hours ago, MJ Frog said:
20 hours ago, gingerella said:
Count me in on those who were fine with the And They All Lived Happily Ever After ending.
Exactly. Is this not why we watch Jane Austen? Or I mean "Jane Austen"? If you're looking for bleak existentialism, you've come to the wrong fictional universe.
Yeah, everyone happy and paired off is a very Austen ending. However ...
1 hour ago, sharifa70 said:
The biggest thing for me was Otis & Georgianna. That felt completely rushed and un-earned to me. He shows up for a scene or two, goes back to London, and next time we see him, Georgianna is back in love with him?
I feel like almost all the happy endings here were rushed and unearned. The thing with Austen was that her characters all had to grow and overcome their flaws to get their happy endings. They went through stuff that led directly to them being able to find their match and then be happy, and there was often a bittersweet element to the happy endings, so they weren't all perfect and shiny. Lizzie and her family were stuck with Wickham as an in-law, for instance. Elinor's husband was disowned by his family and lost his inheritance.
But I don't feel like there was a real character arc for any of these romances, nothing like Lizzie having to readjust her impression of Darcy while he had to have a reckoning about how he'd regarded her and treated her, or Emma having to grow up and gain empathy, or Marianne having to get a grip, or Anne having to learn to stand up for herself. Georgiana did have to grow up and stop being frivolous, but that wasn't presented as the obstacle keeping her away from Otis. She was split up with Otis because he got her kidnapped and nearly forced into marriage so someone could take her fortune. He was the one who needed a character arc to redeem himself so they could be together. Or else they needed to have her reject him because she was being frivolous and he was so serious, only for her to learn what really mattered. The situation, the character arcs and the outcome didn't match.
Charlotte was the main character, but did she have any kind of growth arc? She was basically Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way and flitting around solving everyone else's problems until she was rewarded with her own happy ending at the last second without her actually doing anything to achieve that ending. I'm still not clear on why they split up at the end of the previous season, other than that it was the end of the season and they needed a cliffhanger. Mostly, it seemed to be a communication issue, that they couldn't openly express their feelings for each other, which led to misunderstandings. And that was never resolved. They were kept apart all season because of her engagement, then she breaks her engagement and we're back to misunderstandings from lack of communication until someone else figures out the misunderstanding and resolves it. She may have been able to express her feelings to Ralph to break up with him, but then that had nothing to do with how the romance with Colbourne was resolved. That's not a particularly satisfying romance to me.
Samuel and Lady Susan seems a little better, but it's still not all that developed.
I have no problem with happy endings. I just want them to be satisfying, to feel like the characters earned them and to feel like I've gone on a journey with them, taking them from where they were at the beginning to being better people at the end. What Austen did so well was show us flawed people who had to learn something to find happiness, and I don't think we got that here.
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