Meme.
It's Friiiiddaaay! *jumps*
Raining very hard in Shanghai, but I'm not going to let that spoil the prospect of an evening at JZ Club tonight, where there is always live jazz and apparently you're allowed to smoke inside again.
But first, a meme:
Leave the name of a character from a fandom you know I'm in, and I will tell you:
* How I FEEEEEL ( Read more... )
Raining very hard in Shanghai, but I'm not going to let that spoil the prospect of an evening at JZ Club tonight, where there is always live jazz and apparently you're allowed to smoke inside again.
But first, a meme:
Leave the name of a character from a fandom you know I'm in, and I will tell you:
* How I FEEEEEL ( Read more... )
Oh Cesare. :( Has so much ink ever been spilt on an individual who almost became great, who was so close and yet so far from his goals, who is so much more famous in his failure than his opponents in their success? I became enthralled in Cesare Borgia when I was 14, reading up on Machiavelli for the first time in history class. His cleverness and strength of will, the speed with which he could turn an idea into action, his sense of timing, was brilliant and beguiling. Perhaps knowing that he would end tragically, and still so young, allowed me to admire him despite his reputation for cruelty.
The way he is being portrayed on The Borgias is very sympathetic - perhaps a little too much so, given the history, but I cannot fault the character that Neil Jordan and Francois Arnaud have created. There's a quote from Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones (the book) that goes:
"So many vows ... they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other."
I love the fact that Cesare's conflict right now comes from a place where he's trying to be true to his father, his mother, his sister, and himself, but finds it near impossible to make all those demands cohere. He's the first son (in this version) and heir, but also illegitimate; he's a warrior in a cardinal's robes; he's half-Spanish and half-Italian; he's in a classic double bind, and it's only a miracle that he's as sane as he is.
Another thought I had yesterday was that Cesare on the show has things in common with Anakin Skywalker and Alia Atreides, where they all do terrible things out of fear: fear for their loved ones, fear of losing what they have. If there's one story I would like to see written right now, it's a Children of Dune/The Borgias crossover built around that idea of fear as the mind-killer.
* All the people I ship romantically with this character
Lucrezia.
* My non-romantic OTP for this character
Cesare/Micheletto. Cesare/Giulia. Cesare/Machiavelli (historical). And Cesare/Alfonso of Aragon, because of how wonderful they are singly on the show.
* My unpopular opinion about this character
I really hope that the relationship between Cesare and Lucrezia never becomes unambiguously sexual on the show.
* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.
I'm ready to see Cesare the athlete and warrior; in fact, I hope they show that side of him before he officially leaves his seat as cardinal.
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Yiipppeeee! That was sooner than I expected. :)
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