Oh god, breezy. I used to work at a bookstore, and you would not believe how many unofficial sequels to P&P there are.
Also, tons of Sherlock pastiches. One woman has a whole series about her female detective, to whom Sherlock is married?!
I think it's bs that somehow fanfic of classic lit is okay.
but yeah, Graeme-Smith is the king of not-just-fan-fic, but actually taking the book itself & just adding things.
Okay, no! Just no! I mean I saw the trailer for Pride and Prejudice and zombies and I rolled my eyes as much as the next person, but to find out that some woman's written a book series about Sherlock Holmes's wife??? Yeah, 'cos Sherlock Holmes would've definitely gotten married. Always chasing after the ladies that Sherlock... Seriously, the closest thing Sherlock would ever have to a wife is Mrs Hudson! >.<
Or Watson.
Very true
That sexy bastard.
Lol! I can just see it now.
"Come on, need to concentrate. There's a clue here somewhere, I just know it!"
"Feels like I'm wearing nothing at all... Nothing at all... Nothing at all!"
"Stupid sexy Watson!!!"
1) Hark a vagrant has a couple of great comics about Watson. I'd link them, but on phone. XD
2) yeah. That's what really made it feel like fanfic to me: author's self-insert OC marries a character who is established in canon as not interested in marriage or romance.
That pretty much sums it up. Something similar actually happened with Pride and Prejudice. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn't bother me that much because it knows it's a piss-take and it's not supposed to be taken seriously, but I have come across a major punch in the ovaries to Jane Austen called "Lost in Austen." It's a tv series about a major Jane Austen fan who for whatever reason ends up trading places with Elizabeth Bennet... So yeah, that was literally a woman reading Pride and Prejudice and going "OMG, I am totally in wuv with Mr Darcy!!! I know, I'll write a story where I get sucked into Austen land and then I can marry him instead!"
BBC Sherlock is great.
I watched the movie Pride and Prejudice (with Keira Knightley) with my mother, who apparently has a bit of a crush on Mr. Darcy. I thought it was fine, for a period piece romance. I confess, I haven't read the book with or without the zombies, but upon reflection, I probably should read the original--for the sake of reaching out to my roots, if nothing else. (I'm related to Ms. Austen, albeit a bit distantly--which, no shock, she never had kids.)
Regarding the movie: I don't really care too much, one way or the other. I kind of wanted to see it, but I also figured the acting would probably be awful and the script changes to make it a zombie flick would probably be groan worthy rather than actually funny. Parodies, fan works, re-imaginings, they happen all the time. People borrow / steal ideas all the time. It's a fact of life for anyone who creates.
As for fanfiction itself, I've written plenty of it. I enjoy it as a genre and see nothing wrong with it. I've protested some individual fan works on the premise that they sucked, but as long as the writing is good and they're not making money off someone else's work--(*cough*FIFTYSHADESOFGREY!*cough*)-- then yay, good fanfiction. Which is ... not always easy to find. Of course, people DO make money off this stuff and you can't really stop them if the original owners don't or can't cry foul. While I enjoy people giving new perspective / life to an old work, I'd like it if Hollywood, and various other people making money off the nostalgic masses, would get their own ideas more often--but hey ... whadda gonna do? Disney started by ripping off every fairytale they could get their grubby hands on, and they're certainly never gonna change.
I really don't mind people using other people's work for the purpose of parody, and fair use laws seem to agree with me.
It's certainly more derivative than this. Zombies completely alter the plot, and make P&P&Z very different from the original, so the actual number of what Grahame-Smith did is pretty irrelevant.
I liked the first half of it, but it just got rushed at the end. There was no sense of what would happen with the zombies, just a couple of French kissing shots.
I, personally, felt like P&P was a boring book and didn't much care what happened to the source material to begin with, and, as a person who writes and publishes fanfics on the internet, (Mainly because I'd rather charge people for content that I can charge them for, and fanfics are something I can write and publish for fun without needing to worry about losing the opportunity to be actually, monetarily rewarded for what I intend to do for a living... As selfish as that sounds?) I felt like it was kind of a creative idea... But then I learned that it was almost a word-by-word copy of the damn book... Now, that's just not kosher. I don't feel the same passion about Pride and Prejudice that you do, but I can sort of see where you're coming from. If Jeeves and Wooster went to Blandings and the swan was replaced by a dragon for the sake of "Updating the book for a new audience", my rage would be loud enough to wake Steve Jobs.
Yeah, that really shits on my bacon. I mean, of all the directions they could've gone with that... Hell, that time period was interesting enough they could've ran on a new, interesting plot so hard that if you changed the names it could hardly qualify as fan fiction anymore. But no, the zombies have absolutely no effect on how things play out, and the filthy bastards just copy-pasted a pdf of the story and changed just enough to make money. Some word-for-word sentences are okay in rare, rare cases where you're making a very specific joke about an otherwise obscure reference (E.G. the countless parodies of Jack Nicholson's speech in A Few Good Men that litter the media) but the whole damn book is just sickening.
"It's legal so it's fine" is a silly argument, ha ha. We arent talking about if it's legal or not, but if it's "right" or "wrong." To do so. And yeah, I think it's absolute bs that people think that they can just add a bit to someone's book and sell it (even if it's in public domain). It's not your work, ha ha.
I remember having a discussion about this back in 9th grade about the book P&P&Zombies, after we watched a modernization of R&J. I felt that modernizing R&J isn't necessarily a bad thing (they just did it horribly. I mean, they cut the hero moment from Parisfrom the goddamn story what the fark), because it makes the story more relatable to the audience. Esp with R&J, which has a lot to think about, and really needs to be understood (which is why it pisses me off that they cut out Paris), BUT, it loses the thing which makes Shakespeare really great, which is all the puns and double/triple entendres. Doing this isn't making it more understandable or relatable, but just more edgy, which is silly. Not only are you making the book (which has a point to it) sillier and less real to the audience, but you also lose the focus on the story (and more on the zombies). So it has dounle negaties.
Are there other mash ups? I know they got Sense and Sensibilities and Sea Monsters, but I haven’t seen anything else like Moby Dick and the Great Old Ones or A Tale of Two Cities and Aliens. The Abraham Lincoln story I didn’t really put in the same category since all it was doing was taking a historical figure from real life and making up a fictional story about him. Wasn’t really fanfic from what I can see. The only problem I had with that movie is it was sort of dull in general. I get that Lincoln is one of the more iconic U.S. Presidents, but I think it probably would have worked better if you had someone like Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson killing vampires instead.
Teddy could have even used a "Carrying a big stick" one liner before he staked a vampire. Same thing with Andrew "And now you know why they call me Old Hickory, you overgrown leech!" To be honest though, like Kiel, I haven’t read the Austen book with or without zombies. But throwing in undead/monsters isn’t really going to motivate me to read it any more than the original one. Not into fanfic.
Don't forget regular use of the word "bully."
He's talking about the lingo of the early 19th/20th century.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was amazingly bad. I have not seen this abomination, but I've heard of it. Have you read Jane Eyre?
When Mickie the Mouse becomes public domain, I'm totally going to have him getting attacked by Romanian fruit vampires.
Oh...even better...Catcher in the Rye. Holden's transition into manhood would be much more relatable if he had to save his sister from land-sharks.
They can only postpone the expiration of their copyright for so long.
Yes, he was dragging himself by his front legs, so his spinal cord was obviously damaged. This, of course, meant that he couldn't defecate. I think my grandfather eventually finished him off.
There was another time when my grandfather was lowering the gate on his trailer and crushed the head of my little cousins' puppy.
Gerbils: domesticated lemmings. :p
My apologies. I probably shouldn't mention how terrible parvo is in Central Arkansas.
Have you seen the horror movie entitled "We Are Still Here"? It reminds me a bit of that.
It's terrible, but it's about a demonic house in which the ghosts of the family murdered in the furnace come out and murder other people. It's creepy, right up until they play their hand and show us what's going on, then it loses all suspense.
The monsters looked like this, though; which reminds me of your story.
Zombies in literally any centuries is okay in my book.
Yeah, but it was shittily done.
I never read the "Pride and Prejudice" as I always thought the book would be a piece of shit (for no logical reason). I only heard of it because of Disney's 'Suite Life of Zack & Cody'. There wasn't much for me to say or think when I saw the trailer, maybe that would be different if I had read the actual book. The movie looks like it may actually be decent, hell, I might even enjoy it (if I ever choose to watch it). This will probably be the case for many people that haven't read the book; we'll think the movie is okay while the people that have read the book will be foaming at the mouth at how badly the directors ruined P&P.
It's kinda like Star Wars Episode VII. I think the movie was a piece of copy and pasted shit that was rehashed as something new (which it was in almost every aspect). People who are either haven't seen the OT or turned their brain off for the duration of the film enjoyed it very much despite it being, within the context of the Star Wars universe, terrible.
But it made us squeal when we saw the Millenuim Falcon! ^_^
The fact that Rey seemed to know more about the Millenium Falcon than the man who has been piloting it longer than she's been alive was ridiculous. I could have forgiven everything they screwed on (Finn and Rey's character, an ice planet being right next to the sun, a planet gun that is useless after its first use, etc) if they hadn't made Kylo Ren lose the final fight.
Well to be fair, the ground did have to split apart to separate them, so I'd call that a draw.
@Danaos
Yes yes yes! It's just not even remotely plausible Rey would be a superior swords woman.
I'm not even saying Adam can't lose the fight- but it's a horrendous choice to have her actually outmatch him in a fight.
What a silly over-generalization. I'd hate to have such a narrow worldview that I believe everyone who enjoyed a movie I didn't is either not a fan of the franchise, or an idiot.
What a silly way to look at what I said. Not seeing Episode IV doesn't mean you aren't a fan, the people that DID see Episode IV almost unanimously agree that Episode VII was almost too much like Episode IV. When I say "turned their brain off", I mean they didn't critically watch the movie (as most movie goers don't). Most people don't sit there and pick apart everything that's wrong with the movie, they just sit down and enjoy the ride. The movie is very enjoyable - I never said it wasn't - but it's not good when you put it next to all of the other films. Especially when you consider that Disney nuked the EU (the good parts) and replaced it with a remake of Episode IV. And to touch back with the phrase "turning your brain off", it's something the people will often say when they are describing how something is more enjoyable if you don't think about it too much. In this case, Episode VII is just that.
While I did think episode 7 was a bit similar to episode 4, it was already a huge improvement over the prequel trilogy, so I ended up not minding the movie. (Of course it might have helped I went in with really low expectations)
