I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life: A Guest Post by Alexene Farol Follmuth
You may know her under her pseudonym, Olivie Blake, the author of The Atlas Six series and recent standalones Masters of Death, Alone with You in the Ether and One for My Enemy. Aside from writing incredible fantasy worlds for us to explore, Alexene has written a fantastic retelling of one of Shakespeare’s most recognizable plays, built around an MMORPG. Read on to discover the inspiration behind this unique story, in Alexene’s exclusive essay down below.
Hardcover $19.99
Twelfth Knight (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition)
Twelfth Knight (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition)
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Hardcover $19.99
A retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night built around an MMORPG and a protagonist exploring who they really are in the freedom of a virtual space. But with a meaningful relationship brewing, the balancing act between real life and virtual alter-ego is about to get complicated.
A retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night built around an MMORPG and a protagonist exploring who they really are in the freedom of a virtual space. But with a meaningful relationship brewing, the balancing act between real life and virtual alter-ego is about to get complicated.
Creativity for us artistic types went one of two ways in 2020: productively (see also the album folklore) or… stare at the ceiling-y, which is to say, with arduous difficulty. I fell into the latter camp. While I had recently experienced some success (!) with the sale of my YA rom-com, My Mechanical Romance, my fantasy work as Olivie Blake remained largely undiscovered. So, the anomaly of a book I’d written about coming of age had suddenly become my job.
Yikes! I thought to myself, and lay down.
Astonishingly, something came to me: a girl who disguised herself behind a masculine avatar while playing a fantasy RPG. A very obvious direction for a very famous play. In fact, my favorite Shakespeare play, one I’d loved since my teens. Teens! Aha! Why long for new experiences outside the same four walls when I had riches in the vault of my adolescence?? Because truly, no one did it better than The Teen Rom-Com of The Aughts.
The reason Shakespeare works so well for retelling (and re-retelling) is not because his creations are so highbrow and profound, but rather, the opposite. Shakespeare wrote for the common man, a proverbial character he understood very well. He saw all of it—absurdity, fallibility, irony, dick jokes—and put it to the page in a way that remains lasting for its fundamental truths: that people are stupid, but mostly they just want to be loved, and they’re trying their best. (This is also true of Austen, but I digress.)
For me, the meaning of “Shakespearian” is that buoyancy, the existence of two truths at once. That love is beautiful and it is madness-inducing. That love is transformative, and it’s making everything so much worse. I wanted to write something that felt part of the teen adaptation canon—10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, She’s the Man—because of what lived in the fluid artistic space where love was the dumbest thing you could possibly do.
But also, a retelling allowed me to adapt a time-worn message in a new way. In the play Twelfth Night, Viola is seeking safety in a strange land. In Twelfth Knight, Vi seeks safety from predominantly masculine online spaces. I thought, hm, what if the queerness written for laughs was… authentic? And perhaps most of all, I wanted to pose a fundamental question about who was “allowed” to be angry—one that spoke to my own experiences as a young woman, as a biracial teen at a predominantly white high school.
To carry both moods required a balance between earnest and ironic. It meant seeing the comedy as well as the struggle and honoring both. It meant glimpsing the profound only by virtue of its absurdity—the wonderful thing that it was to be human and in love, to your own hapless detriment.
And in the end, I can only hope that Shakespeare would have loled.