There needs to be an "Austen adjacent men" bracket. So many hotties in Austenland (and other properties I guess) and no way to rank them.

it may not be a full bracket but your wish is my command - here are some austen-adjacent men to vote on...

curse my spelling mistakes *Mr Nobley

Paging Mr. Darcy

This is coming for us soon btw

So when Darcy went to fix the Lydia/Wickham situation, he first tried to get Lydia to return home, only bribing Wickham into marrying her when she wouldn't. This is sensible by modern standards, but we know from everyone else's reactions Lydia *failing* marrying Wickham would bring the Bennet family shame. Darcy knows this, and doubt he planned to leave the situation as is. So how did he originally plan to fix it?

I think Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy was gonna channel his inner Emma Woodhouse (didn't have to dig far, they're very similar people) and play matchmaker. In my headcannon Darcy checked his "Possible Husbands for Georgie" list against his "People who owe me Gargantuan favours" list and offer whoever came up money to marry Lydia.

Now, he would want to spare the Bennets of as much of the scandal as possible, and wouldn't want to take the merit in front of Lizzie, so all would most likely happen discreetly through Mr. Gardiner, while Lydia was in London, and she would move to her husbands immediatly after.

However, I wanna propose a different scenario: Lydia returns to Meryton. Scandal ensues, the Bennets are disgraced. Then, within two weeks, a random well-off man shows up intent on courting Lydia and *only* Lydia. He heeds nobodys warnings and gives no explanations. Lydia loves it. Every other mum in Meryton is furious. The Bennets are confused and paranoid. Imagine the drama. The intrige. The million questions still unawnsered long after Lydia eventually gets married and leaves. Bingley marries Jane (cause of course Darcy still told him he'd been wrong to pull them apart, and Bingley would) and Darcy's still somewhat around. Maybe him and Lizzie get together, maybe not, but every time the topic comes up he gets all sheepish and awkward and she gets suspicious and it's a thing. It's their new dynamic.

bitches be like “that man is perfect for me” and the man is just ink on paper

the food of love 🌷💛

pride & prejudice

Loveuary (with Jane Austen) 2024 Line Up - Hallmark Channel

Paging Mr. Darcy

Love & Jane

An American in Austen

A Taste of Love

Sense and Sensibility

This Paging Mr. Darcy film that's coming out on Hallmark today I believe intrigues me so much, because it's so close and yet so far to a story that's lived in my head for about five years or so but never got off the ground for various reasons.

In both stories, the heroine is an Austen scholar who goes to a Jane Austen convention and is searching for an academic job and meets a guy. But I feel like that's where the similarities stop. I'm amused to see Hallmark's take (and with hubris I feel pretty sure that my characters and take on the story are more interesting) but I'm also sort of annoyed that if I ever get round to writing my story everyone will think I've ripped off a Hallmark movie when I got there first! Conceptually, anyway.

Girls, forget about Mr Darcy's proposal

This is the only way I could find the offer acceptable-

Paging Mr. Darcy

Anyone an idea what this is?

Every Avadriel scenario summed up

Ava: I hate him. He's a dirtbag. A lying liar. He's evil. He disgusts me. I fucking hate him.

Also Ava: I fucking love him.

It took like three months but I have finally finished The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. And it was garbage.

Even without knowing that this was originally Star Wars Reylo Fanfiction, this book was dry as fuck and I zoned out so much while reading it I can barely remember the basis of the plot. The only thing that got me through it was how often I was pulled out of the plot by the comically bad writing. Spoilers below

Our main character, Olive, is in a predicament, that her best friend, Anh (Rose Tico), wants to date Olive's ex, Jeremy (General Hux?), but Olive had just broken up with him and Anh thinks she still has feelings for him. Olive tries to convince Anh that she's moved on and fakes going on a date until she almost gets caught working in the lab at midnight on the night of the date and kisses someone to make it seem like she's on a date...in the biology lab.

The rest of the book was honestly filled with Anh pushing Olive to actually act like she's dating Adam (the man she kissed in the bio lab that fateful night) and Olive pushing back on it for some reason. Girly nobody would honestly believe you were dating if you only met up for coffee once a week, said hello to each other in the hallways, and were never seen in public together otherwise. I'm shocked that it worked, but also not, because this book sucks.

The only time Olive actually takes control of the plot is when she kisses Adam and when she plays the recording of Tom harassing her in the restaurant (which she should have known that he was recorded like five chapters earlier, when she saw she didn't stop recording after her presentation and it had practically killed her phone battery. Like girly......it's not that hard. But whatever.) That one single page in chapter 20 was the only entertaining thing about this book.

Other than that, the characters were all flat, and Malcolm, who I am led to believe was Finn in the original, is a racist, homophobic caricature whose personality traits are fucking like rabbits and being the gay/black best friend and nothing else. Anh's personality was being the only woman of color in the room but also the head of several diversity committees and somehow running an organization for black and indigenous people despite not being either of those things (she's Vietnamese, which is notably not black nor indigenous). We are told Adam is a ruthless, cutthroat professor but never really shown that. He's just there to bounce off Olive's increasingly #quirky personality. The side characters even felt like copy/paste versions of Olive, which made the whole experience worse.

Not to mention one of the lines, walk with the confidence of a straight white man, is literally stolen from a 2012 tumblr post about the murder walk. I have not seen a single person mention this. Do we forget our roots? Something about repeating history...

Anyway, this book was bad, over-hyped, and just overall boring. I don't read romances so my only baseline is Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti which was published in 2008. That book is far from perfect but it at least had an interesting world and heroine who did things instead of just letting things happen to her, and it was a fun read. I finished that book in less than a month and it took me three months to read the Love Hypothesis.

TL;DR this book was shit the characters were flat the plot was almost non-existant and Olive was one of the worst heroines in a book I've ever read. 0/10.