Emma Approved vs. LBD
It’s disappointing to me that Emma Approved hasn’t lived up to LBD in some areas. EA has actually improved on LBD in some other areas, but it turns out that the areas where they’ve improved on LBD aren’t areas I care about very much, while the areas where they’ve fallen short are areas I care about quite a bit.
My personal assessment (YMMV, and if you disagree with any of these I’d be interested in hearing how you disagree):
Areas in which EA has gone beyond LBD: The video production values. The hair, makeup, and clothing. The promotion of the fashions shown on the show, with purchase links.
Areas in which EA has been equivalent to LBD: The acting. The squee-worthy adorable shippability of the characters.
Areas in which EA has fallen short of LBD: The transmedia. The believability of the world. The writing choices they’ve made in updating Austen to the modern day, and to the web series format.
I’ve always been something of an outlier in the LBD/PD/EA fan community, so a lot of this could simply mean that the creators of the show are optimizing for a different segment of their audience than I fall into. And they could be completely right to do that, if it means they thereby achieve their goals more effectively than they would by targeting people like me.
From my point of view, what they’re doing is choosing to care less about the artistic integrity of their show than their most-ardent fans do. From their point of view, what they’re doing might be seen as making rational choices not to focus limited resources on enhancing aspects of the show that most viewers don’t care about.
There are shows I watch these days that satisfy my desire for webseries adaptations of classic literature, shows that explicitly acknowledge LBD as their inspiration and strike me as worthy successors to it. At least as of now, though, Emma Approved isn’t one of them. That makes me sad, but not sad enough to stop watching it, at least so far.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/67236142200.
Tags: to tag or not to tag, that is the question, i'm going with no, because my tone is mostly negative, and i'd rather save my tagged output for things that are more positive, but if you follow me i guess you know what you're in for, and can of course always choose to unfollow if my negativity bothers you more than my usual upbeat inanity can make up for.
