aah this is great. i love osric and rosencrantz's craft nights, and that rosencrantz still thinks his poison bottle snowflake is cute. and that he worked himself up so much trying to say a critical thing to polonius that he cried more than polonius did.
and the interactions between osric and hamlet are really compelling and i found myself getting really into them even though i knew (as oric finds out) that this isn't the 'real' hamlet. and it makes me think ... okay here's where i start to babble.
in some ways, the good place is about the afterlife as a sitcom. you have this group of attractive young people, living together in a city or a suburb but somehow always meeting in the same part of it (the same neighborhood, if you will), and some of them are meant-to-be pairings while others are more unlikely odd couples but their romantic options tend to cycle within the same group, and events around them tend to cycle, too, problems arising and resolving in regular patterns that come from the characters' flaws. and then the good place throws that formula out the window, with glee. and this kind of feels like the afterlife as fanfic you put familiar characters in new situations, in new pairings, either set in the interstitial spaces of the original, or in a vacuum where fic things happen. you flesh out the characters' backgrounds (and oh how good is osric bringing up games of marginalia that this hamlet doesn't remember) and their interactions and discover new things about them, but one way or another, you always have to reckon with canon. what actually happened? remember. (then forget.)
i also liked the little detail of osric enjoying the feeling of a cocky grin settling on his face.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2019-02-08 04:08 am (UTC)and the interactions between osric and hamlet are really compelling and i found myself getting really into them even though i knew (as oric finds out) that this isn't the 'real' hamlet. and it makes me think ... okay here's where i start to babble.
in some ways, the good place is about the afterlife as a sitcom. you have this group of attractive young people, living together in a city or a suburb but somehow always meeting in the same part of it (the same neighborhood, if you will), and some of them are meant-to-be pairings while others are more unlikely odd couples but their romantic options tend to cycle within the same group, and events around them tend to cycle, too, problems arising and resolving in regular patterns that come from the characters' flaws. and then the good place throws that formula out the window, with glee. and this kind of feels like the afterlife as fanfic you put familiar characters in new situations, in new pairings, either set in the interstitial spaces of the original, or in a vacuum where fic things happen. you flesh out the characters' backgrounds (and oh how good is osric bringing up games of marginalia that this hamlet doesn't remember) and their interactions and discover new things about them, but one way or another, you always have to reckon with canon. what actually happened? remember. (then forget.)
i also liked the little detail of osric enjoying the feeling of a cocky grin settling on his face.