I'm convinced. Hank Green is a genius.
When Hank first announced his side-project, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as a YouTube video blog, my first reaction was, "Oh, that's cute." Loyal nerdfighter that I am, I subscribed to Lizzie Bennet's fictional YouTube channel and occasionally took six or seven minutes out of my week to watch Ashley Clements as Lizzie rant about her silly parents, her sister, her grad school, and this jerk she met at a wedding called William Darcy.
It was fun. It was cool. It was new. And it soon became a fully-fledged fandom, with all the trappings of yet another collective obsession belonging to thousands and thousands of bored internet-lurkers. People like me -- young, outspoken, and always looking for something new.
Now, I'm not as intense of an internetter as some. I'm afraid of twitter and tumblr, and I'm only slowly acclimating to such big forces of the virtual world as Reddit and Imgur. But I follow YouTube religiously. I Facebook. I even Pinterest from time to time, and obviously I have a blog. So I'm not ignorant of these things. Maybe just a little late to the party, but I'm getting there.
Still, this project, LBD, took me by surprise. As the story progressed, I became more and more engrossed, and so did the rest of the internet. The geniuses behind the project branched out into other areas, giving their characters fictitious twitters and tumblr accounts, facebook pages, company websites and email addresses. Other characters began to vlog, including Lydia, Charlotte, and Darcy's sister. These actors took on alternate identities almost as real as their own, in the virtual world at least. Now you could be browsing around on Pinterest and come across some of Jane Bennet's fashion pictures or Lydia Bennet's not-so-sound partying advice.
It's all amazingly three-dimensional, a story experience unlike anything the world has ever seen, to be overly dramatic. The extremely broad fan-base experiences the misadventures of the Bennet sisters in real-time, in real-life detail. And yes, there are some campy bits, like the fake demonstrations of "Pemberly Digital's new video-chatting technology" that are obviously contrived, but the scope of the project is so huge that things like that are added bonuses rather than unconvincing plot complicators.
I fully expect to see more of these in the future, a whole new genre of internet storytelling. And I welcome it, giving life to these old stories, making them relevant to young people today who may love or hate them. This is the future! Huzzah!
Anyway, go watch them if you haven't already. Start from the beginning.
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