Carnival Row: A Partial Review
Sep. 8th, 2019 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
technocracygirlI watched the first two episodes of Carnival Row early in the last week. It's urban fantasy, mystery, and horror all wrapped up into one. It's a beautiful style, a new world with a bleep-ton of backstory to it. It's neo-Victoriana, with well-thought faerie culture. It thinks about colonialism. It is right up my alley.
There are some issues. It's way too dark for my TV -- I have to have no lights on and the shades drawn to actually see what's happening on the screen. While there's both male and female nudity, the female nudity seems a lot more salacious than the male nudity. There is a thriving sex industry, but no indication that anyone other than skinny women are whores. (And there is very little respect for these sex workers, but that's also part of the fantasy racism.) The background cast is very multicultural, which is nice. Almost all of the speaking cast is white, white, white.
But, as of the end of episode 2, the good is outweighing the bad, and I am excited to get to episode 3.
I finally get to watch episode 3.
Episode 3 is an episode-long flashback to the war seven years earlier when our two leads met, fell in love, and parted.
It is boring.
I don't know if its that the two leads have way more chemistry as enemies than as lovers. I don't know if it's because I was promised a mystery story, and I don't care to have one-sixth or one-eighth of it taken up by a war/romance story that I am perfectly content to have as backstory and don't need spelled out for me. I don't know if it's because I'm pretty sure only a handful of people we see in this episode are going to make it out alive, and why does the camera keep going back to that little fae girl. I don't know if it's because Our Heroine is introduced as a librarian, and there are books she's in charge of that are older than human culture, and because I know that those books are going to be set alight by the time this episode is done, and quite frankly, midway through the episode, the books are the only characters I give a bleep about.
I start pausing the episode to see how much more of this there is. At forty minutes in, I give up and spin on to episode 4. Thank G-d, we're back to the present-day story. But my interest in this story is shattered. Thanks to the long, plot-less, look at the characters of Our Hero and Heroine, I have been burned out of the interest in uncovering the world. I am burnt out of these two people. The entire story no longer seems dark and mysterious, but trite and a retread of familiar tropes. Instead of being interested in where the story is leading, I am worn out by all the Victorian tropes that don't seem to be in any danger of being subverted or done in an interesting way. The fantasy racism is there to make the speaking cast almost entirely white, and if there's a deeper corollary going on between the English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots, well, I'm missing it.
I am very disappointed in what really looked to be an interesting, new story.
There are some issues. It's way too dark for my TV -- I have to have no lights on and the shades drawn to actually see what's happening on the screen. While there's both male and female nudity, the female nudity seems a lot more salacious than the male nudity. There is a thriving sex industry, but no indication that anyone other than skinny women are whores. (And there is very little respect for these sex workers, but that's also part of the fantasy racism.) The background cast is very multicultural, which is nice. Almost all of the speaking cast is white, white, white.
But, as of the end of episode 2, the good is outweighing the bad, and I am excited to get to episode 3.
I finally get to watch episode 3.
Episode 3 is an episode-long flashback to the war seven years earlier when our two leads met, fell in love, and parted.
It is boring.
I don't know if its that the two leads have way more chemistry as enemies than as lovers. I don't know if it's because I was promised a mystery story, and I don't care to have one-sixth or one-eighth of it taken up by a war/romance story that I am perfectly content to have as backstory and don't need spelled out for me. I don't know if it's because I'm pretty sure only a handful of people we see in this episode are going to make it out alive, and why does the camera keep going back to that little fae girl. I don't know if it's because Our Heroine is introduced as a librarian, and there are books she's in charge of that are older than human culture, and because I know that those books are going to be set alight by the time this episode is done, and quite frankly, midway through the episode, the books are the only characters I give a bleep about.
I start pausing the episode to see how much more of this there is. At forty minutes in, I give up and spin on to episode 4. Thank G-d, we're back to the present-day story. But my interest in this story is shattered. Thanks to the long, plot-less, look at the characters of Our Hero and Heroine, I have been burned out of the interest in uncovering the world. I am burnt out of these two people. The entire story no longer seems dark and mysterious, but trite and a retread of familiar tropes. Instead of being interested in where the story is leading, I am worn out by all the Victorian tropes that don't seem to be in any danger of being subverted or done in an interesting way. The fantasy racism is there to make the speaking cast almost entirely white, and if there's a deeper corollary going on between the English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots, well, I'm missing it.
I am very disappointed in what really looked to be an interesting, new story.
