Jonathan Harker In College Vibes

A Chicago-inspired "Rebecca Alternate Ending" video by Kara Lane and Lauren Jones!

"We've been sent so much fanfic from all over the world, and we've loved every single alternate ending! We thought we'd create our own. Chicago the play was first performed on Broadway in 1926, the same year Rebecca is set... Maybe that's where the similarities end... or maybe not!"

hopefully may will be kinder to me

Heyy my Lucheni fandom where you at...

Commission

cudia rik changed me……….. final lair was so……🚬

Ultra-specific trope im thinking really hard about: When a character refuses to kill someone who asks them to, not out of righteousness or any care for the other person, but out of hostility or spite. No, I won’t give you what you want. I won’t let you escape this through death.

“Wir fallen, und nichts was uns hält. “

Der Tod x Graf von Krolock

Death and Immortal

Stumbled upon this video essay on Musical Rebecca and how Kunze/Lévay supposedly departed drastically from the book’s themes by romanticizing Ich and Maxim’s relationship, and I have Des Notes(tm):

The claim that the novel is not a love story but a study of jealousy. Obviously…romantic jealousy. 🤣 Granted, the narrator also has self-esteem issues, but the moment Maxim says he never loved Rebecca, the narrator’s seething jealousy of her literally vanished. It is very much dependent on her love for Maxim and her belief that he did love Rebecca.

While Maxim did murder Rebecca in the book, it should be noted that little to nothing contradicts his claim that Rebecca was a bad person. Outside of Maxim’s POV, Du Maurier wrote numerous red flags. To whit:

Ben is afraid of Rebecca (she threatened to send him to the asylum, per him). Frank, who had a wholeass affair with Rebecca, tells the narrator directly that goodness is more important to a man than beauty. Beatrice, who is depicted as straightforward and honest, doesn’t praise Rebecca outside of her beauty and charm, forgot Gran loved Rebecca, and deals with the narrator with uncharacteristic patience. Even Mrs. Danvers proudly boasted that Rebecca once flogged a horse. And then there is the fact that all of Rebecca’s closest intimates are creeps and sleazeballs. Mrs. Danvers and Favell may have their sympathetic moments (as in, they did care about Rebecca), but that doesn’t mean they are depicted as good people.

And then there is the fact that Rebecca deliberately manipulated Maxim into killing her, lol. The final twist is that she had cancer and was looking for a quick end. Mrs. Danvers confirms, even before she knew of this diagnosis, that Rebecca feared getting sick and would have wanted a quick end. Her pregnancy was a lie meant to push Maxim to his limits, and it worked.

If Du Maurier wanted to make Maxim shady and unreliable, she wouldn’t have done any of this. Instead, she did everything possible to justify Maxim and buttress his claim that Rebecca was bad, which is no doubt part of why the narrator forgives Maxim so easily.

So on that count, what the novel ends up saying in terms of theme is less “traditionalist chauvinist husband murders his flawed but morally clean modern ex-wife” and more “abuse victim finally retaliates against his abuser and struggles to recover from his trauma with the help of another abuse victim.” Problematic? Yeah, highly so (except for the abuse victim overcoming trauma part). But that’s the way Du Maurier wrote it. She absolutely gave Maxim (almost) every reason.

So in adapting the book to a musical, Kunze decided to opt to emphasize out this romantic strain of the novel. Understandable, given that musicals are very romance-friendly and don’t do thrillers easily. But it’s still not a radical interpretation from Du Maurier’s work. You do get Rebecca fans and defenders, but given that a pro-Rebecca fanfic sequel irked most fans, it’s safe to say most fans agree that Rebecca was bad and Maxim was a victim.

Bonus: As for the novel’s queer coding, it should be noted that in the novel, Mrs. Danvers explicitly says Rebecca never loved anyone. Not just men. This supports the whole Rebecca-as-sociopath canonical strain (although ace headcanons are a possibility) and less the interpretation of Rebecca being a possibly queer woman silenced forever by her murderous macho husband. Also, Beatrice is perhaps just as queer coded than Rebecca herself, and it is heavily implied (and Maxim confirms it) that she didn’t like her, found her fishy.

So in sum: This is less Book-to-Musical Wicked and more Book-to-Musical Notre Dame de Paris. Subtle thematic shifts, same plot, some changes to make it more musical-friendly. Sounds like your everyday book-to-musical adaptation to me.

random but i've been thinking about tcomc again and how i find it sort of disappointing that adpatations, when picking which conspirator to build up as edmond's ultimate adversary (which i sort of dislike in the first place tbh), always choose fernand, when if there is one that fits that role better it's villefort. usually mondego ends up as the more prominent of the enemies because he's the one with the most personal motivation, and ends up as mercédès' husband and albert's father. he's the one "closer" to edmond, being the one who somewhat "takes his place" in life, becoming the husband of his fiancée and the father of a son that mercédès says "should have been ours". plus, focusing on the love triangle is easy. but in the text of the novel, the conspirator who gets more space and is, in my opinion, a more definite foil to edmond, is villefort. edmond is arrested at his engagement/wedding party, villefort is picked up from his own engagement party to go interrogate him. both edmond and villefort are strongly motivated in life by their bonds with their respective fathers, though for wildly different reasons - and villefort keeps his disabled father in his home, while still resenting him, when edmond will never see his father again because villefort condemned him to protect his. both of them lose their first love, though in different ways. it's villefort's daughter edmond has to save from the mechanism he set in motion himself because his own surrogate son, maximilien, is in love with her. benedetto is villefort's son but spends some time believing his father is actually monte cristo. villefort's defeat is the only one that edmond (and the reader) doesn't enjoy, because inadvertently by destroying him he also causes the death of his innocent child, and that is what leads him to realise he may have gone too far. villefort ends up mad, when he'd hoped edmond would go insane in the chauteau d'if. and both of them of course have an intense and complex relationship with the concept of justice. and i could go on