Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal is a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, set in modern Pakistan. This premise immediately peaked my interest. I could not wait to see how the setting would influence the story. Little did I know how unchanged the plot would be from the source material.
I have not faced such a frustrating story in a while. I did not even manage to finish the book, making it only to 25%. I could not read on, especially after I was told that there would be no original twists that would deviate the story from the source material. First and foremost, what needs to be brought up is the unrealistic and illogical way this story interacts with Pride and Prejudice. The novel really dug its own grave by making the source material not only exist in the world, not only be known by the characters, but be taught by them! The main character, Alys, knows Pride and Prejudice. She teaches Pride and Prejudice. This implies critical thinking about the text and of course, knowledge of the plot and the characters’ names. She then proceeds to not realize it when her own life turns into Pride and Prejudice, that she is living through plot point by plot point with characters named similar and even identical to the source material, like Darsee. Darsee. If I met a guy called Gandalv I’d already be like “this is weird, is this a Lord of the Rings prank?”. How far are we supposed to suspend our disbelief here? Alys overhears him at the wedding saying the exact same thing as Darcy did in the original, and she is still oblivious. The absurdity is quite clear. And even if you let the whole Darsee thing slip, all the other characters are carbon copies of their source material with slightly different names, just dropped off into another setting. The fact that Alys doesn’t realize she is living the plot of the novel she teaches also undermines her authority and intelligence. When you are studying a book and then the plot literally happens to you, and people all around you are weirdly named really similarly to the characters (and act the same way too!), you should at least be questioning your sanity. INSTEAD OF JUST GOING ALONG WITH IT AND NOT EVEN NOTICING THE PARALLELS. How smart can someone be if they don’t even realize these parallels staring them in the face? It is so so so so damn frustrating. I cannot put to words how annoyed and frustrated and lost for words I am regarding how this story is told. What was brought up in discussion about this novel was that Alys cannot be allowed to draw those parallels, because otherwise she would realize she is in that world and that would just make everything meta and derail the story. Yeah. Exactly. Which is why this makes no sense at all! Other than copying Pride and Prejudice, what does this story bring to the table? It explores Pakistani culture, sure. But there’s no original story that interacts with that culture. It’s just a copy paste of Pride and Prejudice where names and places and cultural aspects around the characters have just been replaced. CTRL + F and replace. What is the literary value of copying a novel point by point? Because it almost feels like Kamal had Pride and Prejudice open in one document on a split screen, and a blank document in the other, and was just rewriting the story line by line. Where is the originality? The creativity? The twist of a modern retelling? It is so dry, without any sense of novelty or interesting explorations or surprising twists. Since there is nothing new, and even some lines can be predicted if you know the original, the story just becomes... boring. Why do I want to read a “new” story if I already know everything that will happen? Unless I am completely off the mark, I am pretty sure retellings are not supposed to be a line-by-line rewrite of a story where things are just replaced without repercussion. The culture, the times, they should influence the story and make it something different. Two characters’ interactions are not going to go the same route as they did in Austen’s time in England, because of course they wouldn’t! Times have changed. Culture influences the way you interact and relate to people. But this just repeats the same story all over again without letting the story breathe in this new reality. There could have been a multitude of twists. The story could have just been about exploring themes of Pride and Prejudice in this new setting and exploring how the clash of characters would play out in the modern world, without taking every single scene from Pride and Prejudice and just copying it in. What’s the use? What’s the point? If I wanted the same exact story, I would just read the original! The way the story repeats the source material brings me back to one of the first fanfictions I ever wrote, where my friends and I fell into the world of Lord of the Rings. We basically replaced the four hobbies and went through every story point in the same way. But at least we realized we were in Middle Earth! We acknowledged that we knew the story and knew where it was going, and it was meta in that way. It was badly written, but it was also one of the first actual long stories I ever wrote. I was an amateur (for all intents and purposes I do not claim to no longer be an amateur). But a reader I am, and I need to get this frustration out of my system. Since my golden LotR days, I have read and written my fair share of fanfiction (as nerds do), and in the fandom community, there is a subgenre called Modern AU (Modern Alternative Universe), where the characters are placed into the modern world, which parallels modern retellings, such as of Pride and Prejudice. But these modern retellings truly integrate the world to make it affect the characters. Some plot points of the source material are adapted of course, but I have seen it done in so many smart and clever ways. There is always a reason for the story to be set in this place or that era: it affects the characters, the story, the potential twists which are different to the source material. The stories can stand on their own, as an original creation that borrowed characters and created something different and original out of the story. For example, I have never seen full conversations just be the exact same as in the source material, because since the setting is different, that just wouldn’t make sense. We don’t want the same story in a different setting. We want a new and interesting story based on the themes of the source material, which follows the same guiding lines, BUT which also plays with this new world and actually lets it influence the story. Unmarriageable did no such thing. It is uninventive, unoriginal, and uncreative. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It is like someone’s first try at fanfiction if they didn’t know what fanfiction was. I can’t read it, I’m sorry. I just can’t. For me, it’s just unreadable. 1/5
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Minor spoilers for the FNAF movie and… for FNAF 4. You have been warned. Content Warning for subjects of abuse and trauma. That’s a lot of lore. Aka, don’t come for me At this point in time, it is no surprise that the FNAF universe has an unbelievably extensive lore. One search for the game lore on youtube brings up hundreds of videos, and even those that claim to “summarize” the lore mostly run well over an hour long. As such, writing a creative interpretation of the games is bound to run into issues with the official lore - whatever that official lore may be (with the story is so convoluted and astray at this point, I would not be surprised if Scott Cawthon himself no longer knows what is canon and what is not, let alone the rest of us). This theory is more an interpretation than anything else. It is not meant to be an attempt to uncover a “truth” behind the story, but rather meant to explore a dimension of the game through a particular lens and play with ideas that I either have not seen spoken about extensively before, or, in case that I have, have promptly forgotten about after years of watching and losing myself in Matpat FNAF theories. I am not aiming to make these ideas make sense within the rest of the lore because I do not know that lore, nor do I claim to. The main sources of interest here are FNAF 1 and FNAF 4. Both 2 and 3 I have left out because that I have barely played the games or looked into their respective lores. Both 1 and 4 feel most relevant when thinking about the lore in any case: FNAF 1 introduces us to the FNAF world, and FNAF 4 ties up the (official?) tetralogy of the time. And with its out of place setting, FNAF 4 also brings a lot of new theories to the game, especially with the minigame between nights which of course are indispensable when thinking about FNAF lore. I nevertheless also wanted to wait to watch the movie before sharing this little idea, in the hopes that it would get me more material to work with. And while it did not really go in the direction of this interpretation, it definitely explored similar themes. In this extremely serious blog essay, we will be looking at how the FNAF games, in particular FNAF 1 and 4, can be seen as a child’s trauma response, with the games themselves representing the child’s subconscious nightmares. First, we will look at Freddy's bite, the origin of the trauma, and the consequential situation of the boy, stuck in a semi-conscious state in a hospital. This is represented in the games through the player’s inability to move, and the logical problems of the security guard job. Then we will finish off by talking about how the games represent the boy reliving, struggling with, and fighting his trauma(s). |