My New Shiny
For many years -- and I can call old friends to attest to this -- I've been playing in a desultory sort of way with an original alternate-universe thing. In this universe there's another island nation off the coast of Europe, somewhere sufficiently south of Britain that it wasn't constantly embroiled in conflict with England and Ireland. It has a great deal of complicated political history, but by the 1930s there's a monarchy with a king who rules as well as reigns, and a government that doesn't depend at all on the old aristocracy. The country's facing some of the problems that affected all of Europe at the time, plus the problem of trying to stay out of the war that's all too obviously looming over the horizon.
There were characters at court; there were also characters at the country's major university/college, which traditionally has had close connections with the Crown. There were spies, and ambitious students who expected to join the government and perhaps run it one day. And swordfights, just because (if Heidelberg could keep the tradition, why couldn't I?).
All of which is to say, this thing with Meine Liebe? For me, it's kind of overdetermined, as the lit-crit people would say. Who could fail to love a Japanese anime version of the inside of her own head, deeply alien and yet profoundly familiar? Especially when it features character designs by Kaori Yuki, of Angel Sanctuary and Count Cain fame?
So I'm thinking, I may be stuck with this one, but there's no law that says I have to be stuck with it alone. Maybe some of you would like it too, whether for your own obscure reasons or for the more obvious and universal ones. And so, in honor of the Rare Fandoms round of yaoi_challenge, behind the cut is my poor effort at the traditional Great Big Pimping Post. Come on, indulge me. I promise it'll at least be pretty.
If a little image-heavy. Which is another reason for the LJ-cut.
1. So, Phoebe, what is this Meine Liebe thing?
Okay, this gets a little complicated. The 13-episode anime series Meine Liebe, and the 13-episode followup series Meine Liebe Wieder, are based on (of all things) a dating sim of the same name. In the original, you're a girl whose object in life is to get one of the main characters to fall in love with you; you get to be a secretary, and the main characters are aristocrats on their way to the upper echelons of government. There's also a manga based on the game, which follows a similar plotline.
Let us avert our eyes from these things. For one thing, they're painful to behold; for another, they don't really matter. As best I can tell, when the anime project came up the writers looked at the game, then looked at each other, and then said in a single voice: "This could be really great! If it were all, you know, completely different." And happily for us, they proceeded to make it all completely different. In the anime the secretaries are gone, the lead characters are framed as a bit older -- university-age, not Hogwarts-age -- and the series is about everything but the characters' love lives: politics and court intrigue, war as fantasy and reality, coming of age and loyalties and ideals.
And yes, about yaoi/slash, sort of. It's not a focus of the series, but you can't tell me that the writers/creators weren't aware of what the fangirls would be thinking, and more than willing to encourage us to think it.
2. You said something about an island off the coast of Europe?
Welcome to the kingdom of Kuchen.
Yes, Kuchen. As in, cake. You may also notice the little island of Zwiback off Kuchen's northwest coast.
Everything and almost everyone in this thing has a food name. Why? Who knows?* I prefer to think of this as not a bug but a feature: how can you not love it when, early in the series, one of our heroes confronts a rival, and the rival replies with our hero's full name, in that classic anime-villain velvety murmur; and that name is Orpherus Furst von Marmalade?
Despite this element of sheer cracked-out-ness, the creators have done a nice job with the political and social background. Not much is explained: you have to work a lot out from hints and implications. But when you do, you wind up with something that's surprisingly complex and realistic, and that hangs together better than I would have expected. Kuchen is a monarchy, and one where the king holds a great deal of power. The current king works more than he plays -- we actually see him dealing with stuff like proposals about port security, and those close to him worry about whether he ever has a chance to relax. He doesn't seem to be an absolute monarch, but he's plainly very effective, and not everyone in the kingdom likes that. For one thing, he's governing through what appears to be some sort of civil service/bureaucracy system answering to the Crown, thereby depriving the hereditary aristocracy of most of its political power. Unsurprisingly, there are those in the aristocracy, and indeed in the king's own family, who're less than pleased about it.
He's got stuff to worry about, has the King. So it's not surprising that he stands on his balcony at night, looking picturesque and worrying about it.
-- Which may help to explain the political importance of our direct setting, the Rosenstolz Academy in the capitol city. Rosenstolz is by way of being a high-status university or college with military overtones and strong traditional connections to the government: the King himself is a graduate, and the headmastership is a direct Crown appointment. Indeed, there are hints that it's something close to a Cabinet-level post.
There are good reasons for this, not least of which is that the school grooms some of its students for direct appointment to the Strahl, which appears to be the Kuchen Parliament. Strahl candidates must be members of the hereditary aristocracy, so that a reasonable person could gather that the Strahl Candidate system functions as a safety valve, allowing gifted and reliable members of the aristocracy a path to power that they need not share with the non-nobility. The headmaster selects the Strahl candidates and oversees their progress, so you can see where this would be a sensitive post.
As you may have gathered by now, Meine Liebe is sort of a school story. But it's not a school story the way, say, Harry Potter is a school story: we're not in the realm of classes and exams and who's-going-to-make-the-team.
3. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Where are the pretty boys you promised me?
Why, I'm glad you asked. Right this way, please. First, our Strahl Candidates.
a. The blond is Orpherus Furst von Marmalade Gorz (I think they probably meant Orpheus, but I'm resisting the temptation to fix it for them).
Honorable, intelligent, driven, charismatic and fiercely idealistic: he wants to remake all the world into a place where no one will suffer. All that idealism might lead him toward a scary fanaticism, but his basic kindness will probably allow him to keep his balance in the years to come.
He has a dead sister he's kind of obsessed with; but hey, who doesn't?
b. Eduard Markgraf von Sekt Braunschweig.
Orphe's best friend, he's become a Strahl Candidate mostly out of loyalty to Orphe, although there are hints that he's begun to develop an independent sense of duty to the kingdom. Bright, perceptive about people, emotionally generous and funny; if you had to actually live with one of these guys, Edo would be the pick of the lot. Like the others, he's an aristocrat, and heir to his father's title, but he's actually illegitimate; Kuchen law evidently allows a father to recognize an illegitimate son and make him the heir at his own discretion. The Kuchen bar must have an interesting time with marital settlements, is all I can say.
Points to the series creators for the fact that Edo is a person of color; extra points for the fact that they make absolutely nothing of this, and indeed, never even mention it.
Oh, and he has a missing sister he's kind of obsessed with; but hey, who doesn't?
c. Ludwig Herzog von Mohn Liechtenstein.
Heir to one of the kingdom's greatest families, and immensely gifted on top of it: a fine swordsman, a fine scholar, a charismatic leader, and the possessor of Teh Best Hair Evar OMG.** (And possibly the Best Voice Evar as well; he's voiced by Seki Toshihiko, and the match is perfect.) Also, a gentleman who has perhaps read Machiavelli at the wrong moment in his adolescence. He expects to grow up to rule the world, and has -- or perhaps, affects to have -- an alarming degree of contempt for the idea that the populace as a whole should have any say in public affairs.
Lui has minions, whom he dislikes. Complex and secretive, he's more sensitive than he pretends to be; he also has friends, who are not the same people as the minions.
He and Orphe have a certain mutual-fascination/dislike thing going on. You expected that, right?
d. Ishizuki Naoji.
Heir to a powerful Japanese family; his father has sent him to Kuchen ostensibly to further family connections there, but really to get him to safety ahead of the coming war. He has mixed feelings about this. Naoji's on the path to being the ideal of the warrior: gentle, thoughtful, in harmony with the world around him, and deadly in combat. Some day he's going to be the guy who can put on a blindfold and still take out a courtyard full of would-be assassins; now he's a little insecure, easily dazzled by his companions, and utterly unaware that every single one of them loves him.
Including the ones who can't stand Ludwig, which can be awkward, since Naoji is Lui's lieutenant and closest friend and they are so doing it, or if they're not they're going to be any time now.
e. Camus Pfalzgraf von Silvaner Luneburg.
If Hisoka had been born into a loving and bizarrely over-protective family, had congenital health issues, and been of painfully gentle disposition, he might have turned out rather like Camus.*** Camus is an empath; he's got some degree of precognition and clairvoyance; also, he can talk to flowers and have them talk back. When you put this together with his physical fragility it could create a situation where life would be difficult for him on a purely social level. But the other Strahl Candidates like him and rely on his abilities, and the formidable Ludwig is his cousin and sponsor: nobody in their right mind messes with him deliberately.
And then, a few non-students of note:
a. Isaac Cavendish.
Journalist, pool shark, and all-around Mystery Man Who Is Not What He Seems. He has no official connection to the school, but seems awfully interested in it and in our heros. People keep asking him who he really is, and it's a good question to which he has reason not to supply a good answer.
He has a sister who, for a wonder, is not dead or even missing, although you suspect people occasionally threaten her.
b. Oh, now come on, I hear you saying. What's he doing here? And what's up with the two eyes?
No, that's Beruze-sensei.**** Not to worry: he's a teacher, not a surgeon or a sorcerer. He has a gun and a hidden agenda; but hey, who doesn't?
c. The Headmaster.
Included here because nobody should stumble upon that perm unwarned. He's more important than he pretends to be, and has a sense of humor that makes even the students who love him best roll their eyes.
There are other characters, but these are the ones at the core of the series, and enough's enough.
4. Okay, so what do they do?
Sadly, there's not much I can say about the plot without major spoilers popping up in every line. The students fight duels and argue about ideal societies and deal with their families' expectations and ambitions; they're also drawn into larger events, into plots against the throne and the machinations of foreign powers. A surprising number of the threads that don't seem to be going anywhere actually turn out to play into the overall arc, but I'd be lying if I tried to tell you there isn't a certain amount of random stuff that never quite works out.
The series as a narrative relies on a certain kind of realism that doesn't always quite serve the plot -- or to be more precise, doesn't always result in either the external plot or the emotional plot(s) behaving according to the unstated structural rules we usually see in this sort of story -- but that I find hugely appealing. Our main characters are smart people who come from important families, but they're also still students: they don't know everything about the world around them, or necessarily have enough information to make sense of the plots and conspiracies they've stumbled into.
Strikingly, it's not that these plot elements don't in fact make sense; they can be made to make an unusual amount of sense, particularly by anime standards. But you as viewer need to step back and analyze the available information yourself to see it, since the characters don't necessarily have the information to figure it out, and the series won't spoon-feed you any explanation.
And then, certain of the characters have what amounts to the same emotional crisis more than once in the course of the two seasons. That's realistic enough: people routinely need to have the same moment of enlightenment about something three or four times before they really incorporate it. But you don't see that happening much in fiction, for obvious and valid structural reasons, and I can understand a viewer finding it odd and repetitive here. But it works very nicely with the realism of the main characters' limited and partial knowledge of the stuff they've gotten themselves into, and I find myself admiring it more than I object to it.*****
-- There's intrigue, okay? And scenes at court. And attempted assassinations. And horses, and swords, and cars, and zeppelins, and pretty boys in uniform. Come on, what's not to love?
5. Fine, where's the fandom? I'll have a look if that's what it takes to shut you up.
I'm not sure there is one, sadly enough. There are five stories on FF.net, that's how much there isn't one. But the episodes have been uploaded to anime_downloads, and are also available at this amazingly fast site.
And a bunch of people have offered to write for it in the rare fandoms round of yaoi_challenge. Come on, check it out! And maybe by this time next year, it won't be a rare fandom any more, and we'll all be able to say we remember when.
______________________
**ETA: Now, half a year after writing this post, it has finally dawned on me that the name of the place is actually Cockaigne, not Kuchen. Or at least, it was supposed to be. Cockaigne, of course, is as good and traditional a name for that mythological island off the western coast of Europe as one could hope for -- but if you check the etymology, you will find that it still means Cake. I can only assume that the series creators did a little research, found this mythological island kingdom that matched their concept almost perfectly, saw that tidbit about the name translating as 'Cake', and then gave everything and everyone else food names to match.
**Ludwig's hair is practically the best evidence we have for the existence of magic in this universe. My own theory is that in addition to everything else, Ludwig is clearly a wizard who hasn't yet discovered his own inborn power, but is nevertheless wielding it in minor and subconscious ways. Only that can explain the fact that he can and does fence without tying that hair back, and it always stays out of his way, and never blows in his face or gets tangled around his sword or anything.
***And the mere thought is enough to make the Hisoka-construct in my brain inform me that after all, there are fates worse than rape and horrible death.
****He looks that way because THE UNIVERSE IS LAUGHING AT ME. I can think of no other explanation.
*****ETA: While I was watching the thing through for the first time, I mostly thought, This is fun, but I'd be lying to people if I tried to tell them it was good, exactly. But by the time I was two-thirds of the way through it I'd re-evaluated: it was surprisingly intelligent and subtle, if you were willing to really pay attention to it. And now, on watching it through for a second time, that evaluation still holds -- with one warning. While I can only speculate on how it happened, my sense is that the writers started out trying to do more than they turned out to have space to do. The ending of Wieder is a big mess, as they rush frantically to try to resolve threads and plot points that needed at least four more episodes, and possibly another entire season. Everything's fine until the end of the second-to-last episode, and then we're in the land of deus ex machina and huh?. So I'm just warning you.
But there's an upside: it gives the writer room to work, and plenty of incentive. Which isn't the case, at least for me, when the original seems perfect as it stands.
There were characters at court; there were also characters at the country's major university/college, which traditionally has had close connections with the Crown. There were spies, and ambitious students who expected to join the government and perhaps run it one day. And swordfights, just because (if Heidelberg could keep the tradition, why couldn't I?).
All of which is to say, this thing with Meine Liebe? For me, it's kind of overdetermined, as the lit-crit people would say. Who could fail to love a Japanese anime version of the inside of her own head, deeply alien and yet profoundly familiar? Especially when it features character designs by Kaori Yuki, of Angel Sanctuary and Count Cain fame?
So I'm thinking, I may be stuck with this one, but there's no law that says I have to be stuck with it alone. Maybe some of you would like it too, whether for your own obscure reasons or for the more obvious and universal ones. And so, in honor of the Rare Fandoms round of yaoi_challenge, behind the cut is my poor effort at the traditional Great Big Pimping Post. Come on, indulge me. I promise it'll at least be pretty.
If a little image-heavy. Which is another reason for the LJ-cut.
1. So, Phoebe, what is this Meine Liebe thing?
Okay, this gets a little complicated. The 13-episode anime series Meine Liebe, and the 13-episode followup series Meine Liebe Wieder, are based on (of all things) a dating sim of the same name. In the original, you're a girl whose object in life is to get one of the main characters to fall in love with you; you get to be a secretary, and the main characters are aristocrats on their way to the upper echelons of government. There's also a manga based on the game, which follows a similar plotline.
Let us avert our eyes from these things. For one thing, they're painful to behold; for another, they don't really matter. As best I can tell, when the anime project came up the writers looked at the game, then looked at each other, and then said in a single voice: "This could be really great! If it were all, you know, completely different." And happily for us, they proceeded to make it all completely different. In the anime the secretaries are gone, the lead characters are framed as a bit older -- university-age, not Hogwarts-age -- and the series is about everything but the characters' love lives: politics and court intrigue, war as fantasy and reality, coming of age and loyalties and ideals.
And yes, about yaoi/slash, sort of. It's not a focus of the series, but you can't tell me that the writers/creators weren't aware of what the fangirls would be thinking, and more than willing to encourage us to think it.
2. You said something about an island off the coast of Europe?
Welcome to the kingdom of Kuchen.
Yes, Kuchen. As in, cake. You may also notice the little island of Zwiback off Kuchen's northwest coast.
Everything and almost everyone in this thing has a food name. Why? Who knows?* I prefer to think of this as not a bug but a feature: how can you not love it when, early in the series, one of our heroes confronts a rival, and the rival replies with our hero's full name, in that classic anime-villain velvety murmur; and that name is Orpherus Furst von Marmalade?
Despite this element of sheer cracked-out-ness, the creators have done a nice job with the political and social background. Not much is explained: you have to work a lot out from hints and implications. But when you do, you wind up with something that's surprisingly complex and realistic, and that hangs together better than I would have expected. Kuchen is a monarchy, and one where the king holds a great deal of power. The current king works more than he plays -- we actually see him dealing with stuff like proposals about port security, and those close to him worry about whether he ever has a chance to relax. He doesn't seem to be an absolute monarch, but he's plainly very effective, and not everyone in the kingdom likes that. For one thing, he's governing through what appears to be some sort of civil service/bureaucracy system answering to the Crown, thereby depriving the hereditary aristocracy of most of its political power. Unsurprisingly, there are those in the aristocracy, and indeed in the king's own family, who're less than pleased about it.
He's got stuff to worry about, has the King. So it's not surprising that he stands on his balcony at night, looking picturesque and worrying about it.
-- Which may help to explain the political importance of our direct setting, the Rosenstolz Academy in the capitol city. Rosenstolz is by way of being a high-status university or college with military overtones and strong traditional connections to the government: the King himself is a graduate, and the headmastership is a direct Crown appointment. Indeed, there are hints that it's something close to a Cabinet-level post.
There are good reasons for this, not least of which is that the school grooms some of its students for direct appointment to the Strahl, which appears to be the Kuchen Parliament. Strahl candidates must be members of the hereditary aristocracy, so that a reasonable person could gather that the Strahl Candidate system functions as a safety valve, allowing gifted and reliable members of the aristocracy a path to power that they need not share with the non-nobility. The headmaster selects the Strahl candidates and oversees their progress, so you can see where this would be a sensitive post.
As you may have gathered by now, Meine Liebe is sort of a school story. But it's not a school story the way, say, Harry Potter is a school story: we're not in the realm of classes and exams and who's-going-to-make-the-team.
3. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Where are the pretty boys you promised me?
Why, I'm glad you asked. Right this way, please. First, our Strahl Candidates.
a. The blond is Orpherus Furst von Marmalade Gorz (I think they probably meant Orpheus, but I'm resisting the temptation to fix it for them).
Honorable, intelligent, driven, charismatic and fiercely idealistic: he wants to remake all the world into a place where no one will suffer. All that idealism might lead him toward a scary fanaticism, but his basic kindness will probably allow him to keep his balance in the years to come.
He has a dead sister he's kind of obsessed with; but hey, who doesn't?
b. Eduard Markgraf von Sekt Braunschweig.
Orphe's best friend, he's become a Strahl Candidate mostly out of loyalty to Orphe, although there are hints that he's begun to develop an independent sense of duty to the kingdom. Bright, perceptive about people, emotionally generous and funny; if you had to actually live with one of these guys, Edo would be the pick of the lot. Like the others, he's an aristocrat, and heir to his father's title, but he's actually illegitimate; Kuchen law evidently allows a father to recognize an illegitimate son and make him the heir at his own discretion. The Kuchen bar must have an interesting time with marital settlements, is all I can say.
Points to the series creators for the fact that Edo is a person of color; extra points for the fact that they make absolutely nothing of this, and indeed, never even mention it.
Oh, and he has a missing sister he's kind of obsessed with; but hey, who doesn't?
c. Ludwig Herzog von Mohn Liechtenstein.
Heir to one of the kingdom's greatest families, and immensely gifted on top of it: a fine swordsman, a fine scholar, a charismatic leader, and the possessor of Teh Best Hair Evar OMG.** (And possibly the Best Voice Evar as well; he's voiced by Seki Toshihiko, and the match is perfect.) Also, a gentleman who has perhaps read Machiavelli at the wrong moment in his adolescence. He expects to grow up to rule the world, and has -- or perhaps, affects to have -- an alarming degree of contempt for the idea that the populace as a whole should have any say in public affairs.
Lui has minions, whom he dislikes. Complex and secretive, he's more sensitive than he pretends to be; he also has friends, who are not the same people as the minions.
He and Orphe have a certain mutual-fascination/dislike thing going on. You expected that, right?
d. Ishizuki Naoji.
Heir to a powerful Japanese family; his father has sent him to Kuchen ostensibly to further family connections there, but really to get him to safety ahead of the coming war. He has mixed feelings about this. Naoji's on the path to being the ideal of the warrior: gentle, thoughtful, in harmony with the world around him, and deadly in combat. Some day he's going to be the guy who can put on a blindfold and still take out a courtyard full of would-be assassins; now he's a little insecure, easily dazzled by his companions, and utterly unaware that every single one of them loves him.
Including the ones who can't stand Ludwig, which can be awkward, since Naoji is Lui's lieutenant and closest friend and they are so doing it, or if they're not they're going to be any time now.
e. Camus Pfalzgraf von Silvaner Luneburg.
If Hisoka had been born into a loving and bizarrely over-protective family, had congenital health issues, and been of painfully gentle disposition, he might have turned out rather like Camus.*** Camus is an empath; he's got some degree of precognition and clairvoyance; also, he can talk to flowers and have them talk back. When you put this together with his physical fragility it could create a situation where life would be difficult for him on a purely social level. But the other Strahl Candidates like him and rely on his abilities, and the formidable Ludwig is his cousin and sponsor: nobody in their right mind messes with him deliberately.
And then, a few non-students of note:
a. Isaac Cavendish.
Journalist, pool shark, and all-around Mystery Man Who Is Not What He Seems. He has no official connection to the school, but seems awfully interested in it and in our heros. People keep asking him who he really is, and it's a good question to which he has reason not to supply a good answer.
He has a sister who, for a wonder, is not dead or even missing, although you suspect people occasionally threaten her.
b. Oh, now come on, I hear you saying. What's he doing here? And what's up with the two eyes?
No, that's Beruze-sensei.**** Not to worry: he's a teacher, not a surgeon or a sorcerer. He has a gun and a hidden agenda; but hey, who doesn't?
c. The Headmaster.
Included here because nobody should stumble upon that perm unwarned. He's more important than he pretends to be, and has a sense of humor that makes even the students who love him best roll their eyes.
There are other characters, but these are the ones at the core of the series, and enough's enough.
4. Okay, so what do they do?
Sadly, there's not much I can say about the plot without major spoilers popping up in every line. The students fight duels and argue about ideal societies and deal with their families' expectations and ambitions; they're also drawn into larger events, into plots against the throne and the machinations of foreign powers. A surprising number of the threads that don't seem to be going anywhere actually turn out to play into the overall arc, but I'd be lying if I tried to tell you there isn't a certain amount of random stuff that never quite works out.
The series as a narrative relies on a certain kind of realism that doesn't always quite serve the plot -- or to be more precise, doesn't always result in either the external plot or the emotional plot(s) behaving according to the unstated structural rules we usually see in this sort of story -- but that I find hugely appealing. Our main characters are smart people who come from important families, but they're also still students: they don't know everything about the world around them, or necessarily have enough information to make sense of the plots and conspiracies they've stumbled into.
Strikingly, it's not that these plot elements don't in fact make sense; they can be made to make an unusual amount of sense, particularly by anime standards. But you as viewer need to step back and analyze the available information yourself to see it, since the characters don't necessarily have the information to figure it out, and the series won't spoon-feed you any explanation.
And then, certain of the characters have what amounts to the same emotional crisis more than once in the course of the two seasons. That's realistic enough: people routinely need to have the same moment of enlightenment about something three or four times before they really incorporate it. But you don't see that happening much in fiction, for obvious and valid structural reasons, and I can understand a viewer finding it odd and repetitive here. But it works very nicely with the realism of the main characters' limited and partial knowledge of the stuff they've gotten themselves into, and I find myself admiring it more than I object to it.*****
-- There's intrigue, okay? And scenes at court. And attempted assassinations. And horses, and swords, and cars, and zeppelins, and pretty boys in uniform. Come on, what's not to love?
5. Fine, where's the fandom? I'll have a look if that's what it takes to shut you up.
I'm not sure there is one, sadly enough. There are five stories on FF.net, that's how much there isn't one. But the episodes have been uploaded to anime_downloads, and are also available at this amazingly fast site.
And a bunch of people have offered to write for it in the rare fandoms round of yaoi_challenge. Come on, check it out! And maybe by this time next year, it won't be a rare fandom any more, and we'll all be able to say we remember when.
______________________
**ETA: Now, half a year after writing this post, it has finally dawned on me that the name of the place is actually Cockaigne, not Kuchen. Or at least, it was supposed to be. Cockaigne, of course, is as good and traditional a name for that mythological island off the western coast of Europe as one could hope for -- but if you check the etymology, you will find that it still means Cake. I can only assume that the series creators did a little research, found this mythological island kingdom that matched their concept almost perfectly, saw that tidbit about the name translating as 'Cake', and then gave everything and everyone else food names to match.
**Ludwig's hair is practically the best evidence we have for the existence of magic in this universe. My own theory is that in addition to everything else, Ludwig is clearly a wizard who hasn't yet discovered his own inborn power, but is nevertheless wielding it in minor and subconscious ways. Only that can explain the fact that he can and does fence without tying that hair back, and it always stays out of his way, and never blows in his face or gets tangled around his sword or anything.
***And the mere thought is enough to make the Hisoka-construct in my brain inform me that after all, there are fates worse than rape and horrible death.
****He looks that way because THE UNIVERSE IS LAUGHING AT ME. I can think of no other explanation.
*****ETA: While I was watching the thing through for the first time, I mostly thought, This is fun, but I'd be lying to people if I tried to tell them it was good, exactly. But by the time I was two-thirds of the way through it I'd re-evaluated: it was surprisingly intelligent and subtle, if you were willing to really pay attention to it. And now, on watching it through for a second time, that evaluation still holds -- with one warning. While I can only speculate on how it happened, my sense is that the writers started out trying to do more than they turned out to have space to do. The ending of Wieder is a big mess, as they rush frantically to try to resolve threads and plot points that needed at least four more episodes, and possibly another entire season. Everything's fine until the end of the second-to-last episode, and then we're in the land of deus ex machina and huh?. So I'm just warning you.
But there's an upside: it gives the writer room to work, and plenty of incentive. Which isn't the case, at least for me, when the original seems perfect as it stands.