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I'm a little late to this, but the closest I've come to a 19th c. formal affair out of O'Brien was USMC "Mess Night." Dress uniforms, absurdly elaborate rules, toasts, and the thrill of watching your First Sergeant getting blackout drunk. They're glorious.  Edit: Rules - Link. Cessna fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 20:44
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:17 |
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Phenotype posted:I've always thought a younger John Goodman would have been a great Jack Aubrey. Too late now, obviously, but he's the right mix of fat/big/strong and can be oafish and funny but also serious and commanding. Hell yes. For Maturin, Steve Buscemi.
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Feb 26, 2021 20:23
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Aubrey/Maturin is a manners comedy as much as it is an action series. I don't know how you'd make *that* popular except by Pirates of the Carribean'ing "sure the homeless pirate boy can marry the governor's daughter" it all up. People loved Downton Abbey.
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Jun 9, 2021 16:23
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Phenotype posted:Hah, maybe it's just because you guys are a lot better at history than I am. I don't really know what's supposed to be happening when, so I'm not thinking "Oh it's the War of 1812, only a couple years til Napoleon escapes!" I'm just thinking "Okay they're at war with the Americans now and then Jack and Stephen can go on any number of timeless adventures until they next decide to refer to a major historical event." Like I said, it seems like O'Brien purposely put them outside the more famous battles and fleet actions so that history wouldn't keep getting in the way of whatever sea stories he wanted to tell. One of the big problems with the timeline is the fact that the big battle which ended any real chance of France seriously contesting Britain's control of the sea happened in 1805, relatively early on. There was a lot more going on before then.
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Oct 4, 2021 18:46
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Notahippie posted:Like The Lord Bude said it's always risky to impute the authors' pov from the characters, but personally I definitely feel like O'Brian's take on marriage and for that matter life in general is pretty pessimistic. I don't think there's a happy marriage in the series except for maybe Pullings,' and like you said women are usually presented as a cause of unhappiness. You get a little of that stated directly by Stephen when Sir Blaine is interested in a woman and Maturin tries to talk him out of it. I also always felt like Maturin's musings on humanity felt to me like O'Brian's - in particular the passage, I think actually in book 4, where he thinks something like "many men die before their time - they show a flash of life in their twenties, then die and join the grey things that creep across the land." I dunno, there's something kind of heartfelt in that framing. My mental image of O'Brian has always been that he was depressive and somewhat cynical about the possibility of happiness, but I don't know if that's a fair interpretation or not. I don't think it's women or life in general per se as much as "anything that isn't at sea" that is unhappy and pessimistic. The sea is where you have grand adventures, doing things like finding new places on the globe to explore and French people to beat up. It's wonderful and glorious. But life back in England - "not at sea" - is dull. It's where you go to wait to go back to sea, filling your time with things like Admiralty politics, squabbles over money, and other such dreariness.
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Aug 12, 2022 17:36
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:17 |
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withak posted:I vaguely remember reading a Milch interview where he said they considered period swearing in the writing for Deadwood but it sounded too goofy to the modern ear, like everyone was Yosemite Sam. 
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Oct 23, 2023 19:43
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