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The author IS FROM MICHIGAN.. You're right. lol

aside from everything else you said, which is all good and valid...do people really think there's no subtext in shakespeare? have they...listened to him???

without putting sugar on it. Romeo is a PDF file grooming a minor (Juliet) nothing else. its just written by a PDF and masked as something (romantic) people forget their age difference and how young Juliet really was.

I dont understand why Ava Reid Lady Macbeth was so bad. I especially hated the anti scotish rethoric given Ava Reid past work Juniper & Throne was critical of xenobia well this book reeked of it.

I think retellings can be fine but I don’t get the point of giving a voice to characters who already very much have a voice, are these authors even familiar with the original texts or do they just assume that just because something is old it must be treating female characters badly? Also it looks like feminism = women can never do anything bad.

Wow this is amazing, I’ve always been so confused on why I have a love and hate relationship with Romeo and Juliet, this explains everything thank you !!!

im so glad i found this video! i study social anthropology and specialize in ancient civilizations and i love classic literature as well. being able to read classic and apply cultural context and understand to them really enhances my reading experience, so when i see these retellings like circe and tsoa i get SO frustrated. its not that i dont believe they cant be retold, but its not often done in a meaningful way that takes into account the context of the time period its based in. yeah madeline miller has a classics degree, but that doesnt mean she understands the anthropological aspects of classic literature. i think thats where a lot of these retellings fail. i also think the need to coddle women and make them out to be weaker then they are is a huge problem in these books as well edit: i realize what i said about studying classics can be taken incorrectly but and i understand theres a level of understanding context and history involved but i mean on more a nitty gritty in depth level like someone would have studying anthropology or history

I really appreciate your commentary on this! Your video got the point I think some others missed, even in critical reviews of Lady Macbeth. What people need to understand is that Shakespeare's portrayals of women were already progressive For The Time. He consistently put female characters into important roles that had agency in the plot, which was not at all a given. Lady Macbeth is already one of the best examples, but I also love Volumnia, Coriolanus's mother, who is explicitly the real heroine of Coriolanus. That's not to say that there's nothing to criticize or analyze from a feminist lens, of course. When I went to see Much Ado About Nothing without reading it beforehand I was shocked and upset by Leonato telling his own daughter Hero that she should die for adultery (it was a really good performance 😅 and when I say 'upset', I mean emotionally affected, not that I thought this plot point shouldn't have been included in the play). There is sort of a criticism against that in the play in that of course Hero is innocent, but it never says that if Hero actually had been adulterous that Leonato shouldn't have denounced her. It's just so strange to me that this feminist retelling thing tends to target where it's not needed? As you said, they add violence where it isn't as if that's all that's needed to give female characters depth. I wish more retelling authors would take a Margaret Atwood approach and limit themself to including acts of violence and misogyny where there is a historical basis for it. It would be a much more effective story if authors didn't act like all women are or must be victims and 100% justified all the time, or that men always act as villains and abusive monsters 100% of the time (except the one Good One who might be the love interest). I would like this story a lot more if they acknowledged that men and women could have good individual relationships under patriarchy, and that patriarchy *would still be a problem.* For example if it showed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth having a good or even decent relationship, even if they don't romantically love each other, and had Macbeth as a generally well-intentioned character who still might hurt her by reinforcing her limited role as a woman in society. And in arranged marriages it's ridiculous to act like every single one of them must have been horribly abusive. Some were and I'll never deny that many women in history have been systemically hurt by men, but it's not useful to act like men were never nice or supportive to women either, or that women never found their own power within their situations. Hundreds or thousands of years ago, people were still people, just like they are today.

I get app your critiques; however, I have two counter opinions. I despise Brandt with my entire heart and soul. And I think I disagree with you for most of the things you criticized for being unintentional. For me, they served the purpose of making the book fun as well as meaningful. Great review, though!

I had similar opinions about A Dowry of Blood. I feel like you would like House of Hunger if you're feeling like more vampire lady books. I read it recently and really had a spooky good time. Also Natural Beauty is on my list for this fall!

I am so excited to hear what you think of all of the TBR books! I love T Kingfisher so so much. I did have an ARC of A Dark and Drowning Tide and I have.....opinions. Super interested to see if we pick up on the same things with that one!

was not ready for this intro

Ahh hope you enjoy reading Dracula! Read it for the first time about 3 years ago and it almost immediately became my favourite book. Became absolutely obsessed with it, learning about Bram Stoker, Read all the catalogue drafts/WIPS he made of it, researched the Decade of Victorian culture when it was written. It’s a great gothic horror in its own right it’s a Fantastic Time capsule of the “modern” victorian Science and healthcare even though most of it has become outdated(Really outdated for the one insane asylum Dr lol). The characters were also a surprisingly delight for me because there is absolutely no mellow drama and it’s so refreshing Three Men propose to a women and they are genuinely Happy for the guy who gets the Yes! They remain friends! Literally nothing happens to break the friendship! They go drink together to celebrate! It’s great! Movie adaptations always does the relationship between the cast dirty lol they were all ride or die for each other immediately.

I’m enthusiastic for your dark academia adventure. They at least look like interesting titles

I too found Babel to be heavy handed. I felt talked down to in several parts. It was still interesting but i was disappointed.

Cutting my own hair without even thinking about it: a memoir of girlhood 😂

You have no idea how on point your intro was - this fall is shaping up to be filled of a lot of painful growth for me, so I'm excited to check out these books and embrace the vibe. We're out here changing with the seasons, or something. Also by all means cut your bangs - and if you hate the result, they'll grow back relatively quickly anyway. (I am notoriously unsentimental about my hair so idk if I am the best person to give advice in this respect though haha) Editing because oh my god, I thought I was alone in my disappointment with Babel. I'm a translator and I was SO hyped for a book where the magic is about translation! But I was really let down by the specifics of it (I have a lot of detailed thoughts about individual choices that were made), I really disliked the heavy-handedness as well, and as was the case for me with the Poppy War, I hated the ending 🙃 it's such a shame, but it seems for me this author's books always veer SO CLOSE to being all-time favorites and then take a hard turn in a different direction. So unfortunate for me, because I totally get why everyone seems to love her so much.

having "yeah we made a worm-hole" as just a passing comment and not going into it is fucking bonkers, its like the author understands the appeal of dark academia aesthetically but has never encountered genuine scientific curiosity in their life

just to start off it feels really icky to portray scottish history in a way that erases actual scottish women from the story. (also im pretty sure the whole play was part of a flatter the queen strategy that shakespeare had going on and the person that did actually macbeth in was supposedly someone who the queen at the time was descended from?)

ahhh such an excellent video! Especially love the point of women having to have something bad for them to act morally "incorrectly" which inherently gives them less complexity than the male characters who can do whatever they like. let women be evil again!! such a smart video and I'm shocked by how small this channel is, very excited to watch every single one of your videos now!!!!

im not into Shakespeare and don't know anything about Macbeth and still didn't like it. I didn't;t really like Roscilla

"WHY ARE WE JUS TFIUCKING CHATTING" im fucking cry, im dead as nico lmfaooooooo

Your point from around 15:00 was so on point!!

Lol french people as a rule would be way more biased against English people than Scottish. Maybe not in the 1000s, idk, but definetly today 😂

Lady Macbeth being one of the most proactive female characters of all time and they do a retelling to “give her a voice “??? Like im sorry but giving Lady macbeth a voice in the original ended up with a kill count and a civil war, i think you can’t outdo that 😭

you really hit the nail on the fuckin head with "they're trying to do a feminist retelling without doing any of the work" and it also explains why all the hunger games knock-offs failed to say anything significant--- you can't deconstruct something you don't understand i think leaning too far into a kind of "perfect feminism" where the heroine can do no wrong is what leads to the lack of agency. they're scared of having a flawed or unlikeable character. or maybe it's actually "perfect victimhood" that has them believing their heroines can't be worthy of sympathy unless they are the perfect victim.

I feel like this is something that’s increasingly happening in modern media, not just books labeled as feminist retellings. The fact that women can’t be evil or bad or at the very least morally complex; they have to be beyond reproach, pure and good. It’s as if the feminist pendulum swung to hard to the other side that it just ended up going around in a circle to end up again in traditional gender roles. Because feminists have to be beyond reproach, they have to be perfect and feminism itself has to be a perfect social movement when in reality it’s not (as no social movement ever is). I feel like this happened in House of the dragon S2; the show runners as so hellbent on showing Rhaenyra and Alicent as women who are victims of patriarchy that they end up as useless characters. They don’t do anything and don’t have any agency in season 2 and that is so frustrating? Like women can make morally questionable choices in order to advance their personal goals

This video reminds me of a post I saw where it said “what they don’t show you in medieval novels” and it was just facts about medieval societies that showed that despite its massive flaws it wasn’t just death and sadness and tragedy everywhere and that peasants weren’t entirely helpless and then “what they do show you: unnecessary violence against women” In the end both of these type of stories in the end take away all the agency women had, even if it wasn’t much to begin with, to make them reactionary to the world around them. As a woman these stories make me feel insulted by how afraid they are to show flaws and make a character unsympathetic. Women are people, we all make mistakes and can sometimes be unsympathetic. I don’t like feeling frail. This video has even reconsidered me to think some things on how I write some of my women characters, so thank you so much

I'm glad I didn't buy this one. I loved Lady Macbeth in the original, so I'm sure I wouldn't like this retelling

Instagram poets really need to learn about ‘show, don’t tell’

it's a small part but the story of that random greek man dying for his daughter and you talking about the positive individual relationships within these oppressive systems really got me. great video!

I really like your point about women only being allowed to act bad if it is response to a man wronging them - it is a form of stripping of agency as you say. Women are deep and complex. This is also seen in House of the Dragon - the changes to Alicent from book to show. Sometimes we want evil women in fiction!

I enjoyed Lady Macbeth having not read the original and no inkling of what the original story was. That being said, I loved the discussions within this video essay. They were ideas and perspectives I had not considered before. Why do the majority of us feel that the evil nature of a woman must be justified by vengeance? Why can’t a WMC be inherently evil, for pleasure, for entertainment, or just for the sake of it? I also read Cersei having no idea that in the original story she was not assaulted.

This reminds me of the & Juliet advertisements saying “What if Juliet didn’t end it all over a man?” as if also Romeo didn’t end it all over a woman. It was such a weird way to make R&J feminist that it just gave me the ick. Especially since it glosses over the very real issues of suicide. Idk maybe the actually musical is pretty good but I never saw it and probably never will 🤷‍♀️.

This is exactly how i felt about a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice that I found in my college's literary journal. They cap it off by saying that "in all the versions of the story, do you recall Eurydice asking to be rescued?" and this is preceded by Eurydice joyfully committing suicide because she is being "Stalked" by Orpheus. Garbage story written in the cringiest manner possible.

I think these authors wanna start with the base of "she's just a normal girl", then heap tragedy on them to "explain" why they become evil women or to make the pure heroines more morally gray and jaded. I also feel like there's an aspect of being award bait? Like how Oscar bait movies are so dark and heavy?

Thank you so much for making this Video!! I got this book two weeks ago and it’s been burning a hole into my shelf since I finished it-I got tricked my the blurb and cover 😔- I hate it. I have been reading “feminist retellings” for the past 5 years and so many of these points are accurate and have been on my mind! So many of these books feel like a YA(like 13) simple introduction to feminism but with SA and unnecessary torture porn. I’m tired of reading about these women losing what little agency they already had.

Also just wanted to comment a lot of these retellings honestly feel white privileged feminism. I dunno I just seen this a lot. There was even the movie Queenie where a slave owning woman tells her daughter ((her fiance had a baby with a slave)) that the black women slaves were put into their lives so they wouldn't have to please the dark urges of men or something on those lines.

Lady Macbeth sounds like it should have been a Bluebeard

No literally, this can apply to a good 50% of retellings. imo Ariadne was the worst offender bc in the most widely accepted versions of the myth she ends up in a happy relationship with dionysus after having a rlly hard life and ends up a goddess. But the retelling decided that NO!! Instead, he abuses her as well and her sister kills herself and ariadne just dies at the end?? and the entire time she didn't really do anything, like you said, things just happen _to_ her.

You hit the nail on the head with this retelling. I LOVE Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth and all the ways she rails against society’s understanding of womanhood, and I’ve always related to that frustration, so I was so excited for this entire book which I expected to lean into her agency, her ambition, and her fury. And I loved the Wolf and the Woodsman, so I was so excited, but this retelling was the exact opposite of what I hoped. I enjoyed parts of it, but it was far from the thing I expected.

This is an incredible video and I'm glad you touched on the topic of SA and how it's almost become this cheap gimmick for writers to use in their so called "feminist" retellings

This is the first video I’ve seen of yours and I really enjoyed it!! I’ve had a lot of issues with “feminist retellings” lately just stripping agency away from female characters. It happens so frequently it’s genuinely disheartening, and it’s disappointing to hear this is just another one of those examples. Especially because of how affected I was by Lady Macbeth in the Shakespeare play when I first read it in high school. She was such a fascinating and tragic character. Have you read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik? It’s a retelling mashup of a handful of fairytales. It’s my favorite book of all time, with some of my favorite female characters in any media I’ve come across. They’re fully realized people, all with different strengths and flaws and sympathetic motives. They’re beautifully imperfect individuals, and have full agency over their choices despite living in a patriarchal society. They take action, they don’t just sit around and wait for action to come to them, even if it turns out the actions they take maybe weren’t the best because they’re only human. The narrative gives them grace while simultaneously holding them accountable. And the relationships they have with the men in their lives (romantic, familial or otherwise) are intricate and multifaceted and meaningful, but don’t define any of them. (Also my girl Miryem is unapologetically Jewish and it’s SO rare to find fantasy books with Jewish leads, she means the world to me.) Spinning Silver has raised the bar of writing empowered female characters so high for me and no other author has been able to clear it lol. I will forever continue my search though.