War and Peace and Boys Before Flowers

Frack you, Tolstoy. He just killed off my OTP in War and Peace – the reserved and distant but passionate Prince Andrew(a Mr. Darcy of another ilk and era) and the warm-hearted, impulsive, equally passionate Natasha Rostova.

Prince Andrew: “The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there is all joy, hope, light: the other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness…”

Natasha never remembered how she entered the drawing room. When she came in and saw him she paused. “Is it possible that this stranger has now become everything to me?” she asked herself, and immediately answered, “yes, everything! He alone is now dearer to me than everything in the world.”  Prince Andrew came up to her with downcast eyes.

“I have loved you from the very first moment I saw you. May I hope?”

He looked at her and was struck by the serious impassioned expression of her face. Her face said: “Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot but know? Why speak, when words cannot express what one feels?”

You see? Does it not seem like they’re meant for each other? Isn’t it a delicious romance? But no. Tolstoy must kill it off, cut it off abruptly as soon as the two are reconciled again. Oh, it’s all so romantic-novel-ly and unsatisfying!!

I hate you, Tolstoy.

Ironically enough, this parallels with another OTP that I’m currently hugely unsatisfied with, or rather with the way the writer is handling them, but this is an OTP from a very different universe – Ji-Hoo and Jandi from the currently-airing Korean drama Boys Before Flowers.

This is them.

Looks like they’re together, right? Yeah. They’re not. Looks like they’re in love and having a happy, beautiful day and everything’s going along swimmingly, right? Yeah. Not. In point of fact, not only are they not together, in spite of above heartbreakingly cutesy picture, but they’re not ever even going to be together. And how do I know this, considering the drama is currently airing and not over yet? Because it’s based on a manga, and this is the third adaptation of that manga, and all of them follow the manga and make her get together with someone else. FRICK.

Fandom, how you kill me.

And yes. I enjoy many different kinds of entertainment, thank you very much. So what if I enjoy great Russian literature and Korean television equally? Deal.

Filed under: Books, Literature, Quotes, TV, boys before flowers, kdrama, natasha rostova, prince andrew bolkonski, tolstoy, war and peace

Quottish

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
- William Hazlitt

Filed under: Quotes, Quotes, william hazlitt

C.S. Lewis quote of the day

“You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature.” -C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Filed under: Photographs, Quotes, c.s. lewis, Photographs

“The balloon comes back down and settles at a height where he can see Paris below, the tiny globes of yellow streetlights, the small cooking fires in the park, the shadowy figures, the houses with people sleeping, and he imagines the rooms inside, the photographs and paintings, the stained-glass windows that in the morning will toss warm colorful light, and he feels like crying, and he is crying, not for the loss, but for the delicacy of life, for this small city, for every city dotted with people.”
-The Painting by Nina Schuyler

Filed under: Quotes