Jane Austen characters on Twitter. A Cinderella-esque personality filming her struggles in the world of high-fashion. Jane Eyre YouTubing in secret.
These might all appear to be scenarios as ridiculous as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but they’re actually part of a small but growing genre on YouTube where creators take on classic works of literature and rework them for the modern electronic age.
The genre started around four years ago with “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries,” a retelling of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Since then, dozens of works, from the seemingly realistic — such as “The March Family Letters” (Little Women) — to the more supernaturally-oriented “Frankenstein, MD” (Frankenstein), have been created. There is a series for literary lovers of all genres out on the web. Two stand out in particular, primarily due to the creativity on the part of the showrunners of changing the original stories, and they illustrate the ways this new mode of storytelling is revamping the way classic literature relates to the modern world.
Carmilla
While many of these YouTube reboots are amazing for how closely they’re able to follow their source material while updating it to the modern day, “Carmilla” stands out because it does the exact opposite. Loosely based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 gothic novella (which predated the Dracula story by 25 years), the show follows Laura, a wide-eyed freshman journalism student who is documenting the strange happenings at Silas University (which include, but are not limited to, an ancient god requiring virgin sacrifices in the school’s basement and a library that gets deadly after dark). After her original party-girl roommate vanishes, Laura is left with the apathetic, beautiful and very obviously vampiric Carmilla.
The original story ends with the evil vampire threat defeated, but this adaptation travels down a different path. Rather than leaving the relationship between Carmilla and Laura ambiguous, the series plays up the romance between the two women and moves Carmilla out of straight-up villain territory into an antihero, romantic role.
While the first season does have multiple lesbian characters and even one who identifies as non-binary, it suffers from an entirely white cast, something that isn’t remedied until season 2 begins.
Nothing Much To Do
It was only a matter of time before Shakespeare’s works entered this trend. Based on the play “Much Ado About Nothing,” this New Zealand take on a classic shakes up the classic vlogging format of many YouTube adaptations by having multiple characters contributing their own perspective on this tale of romantic mix-ups. These characters actually leave their house — surprise, surprise — and these added scenes of movement and different settings gives the series a more realistic, lived-in feeling most of the other blogs decide to ignore.
What also makes “Nothing Much To Do” stand out is its deft handling of issues such as slut-shaming, the consequences of social media use and feminist reevaluation of the original source material.
For viewers who feel as if certain plot lines were left just a tad unfinished, never fear, because the adventures of these characters continue in “Lovely Little Losers” (a retelling of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost”) and in the currently in-production “Bright Summer Night” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The first makes a storyline involving the series’ bisexual and gay character more prominent, while the latter appears to be adding a lesbian twist, as well as introducing much-needed racial diversity into the cast.