Noughts & Crosses

[Charles EP M.]

Did anyone else see the TV adaptation of this? Taking a lot of liberties with the book plot but my god, the sets and location alterations and clothing and buildings in the background and slang and generally all the worldbuilding is an incredible piece of work. The entire Albion setting feels lived in and real and you can feel what they're going for with the allusions without it being a creaky one-to-one. And I got a kick out of Albion's conflict with a UN-type body in the books now being Albion wanting shot of the lingering control Aprica has, i.e. they want UBI (with bits of Brexit but mostly "the colonial settle nation thinking of ignoring The Motherland cos it says to be less racist" is pretty Rhodesia, South Africa leaning).

And you know it's a real AH cos someone did maps:

 

[Callan]

The book is interesting because worldbuilding is sparse but quite thought out- there the PoD is that Pangea never properly separated and thus allowed African civilisations to overrun European ones as opposed to the other way round. I got the impression the international body there was more of an !EU type organisation than a UN one- IIRC the only reason the schools get partially desegregated in the books is because of a directive by the body.

But yeah, while I have some issues with the plot and how they adapt it, the worldbuilding is top-notch and makes it worth watching just for that.

 

[Charles EP M.]

The nought festival being midsummer and a very old school green-man version was a nice touch - a reminder they got conquered way back.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Well, it's made it to America on streaming and the result was Polygon doing an article thundering how These Sort Of Stories Don't Work and it erases black identity and generally writing as if Noughts & Crosses wasn't originally written by a black woman, didn't have black people in the show's production, and wasn't (as far as I can tell) popular with black people in the country that made it. Which kind of pisses me off because that means if you don't know it, you'd read Polygon and assume "ah, whites who don't get it wrote it".

 

[Callan]

Well, it's made it to America on streaming and the result was Polygon doing an article thundering how These Sort Of Stories Don't Work and it erases black identity and generally writing as if Noughts & Crosses wasn't originally written by a black woman, didn't have black people in the show's production, and wasn't (as far as I can tell) popular with black people in the country that made it. Which kind of pisses me off because that means if you don't know it, you'd read Polygon and assume "ah, whites who don't get it wrote it".

I could do another rant about how all-consuming American discourse simply can’t get it’s head around the idea that black perspectives exist outside and independently of America and might be in some way valid, but I think there’s an interesting point here: Noughts and Crosses doesn’t really travel well.

Blackman’s worldbuilding is light touch but very effective and the world she creates is very rooted in the black british experience. She’s been fairly explicit about this: she’s stated her writing the first novel was prompted by the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent cover up, and that certain events that happen to Callum and Sephy in the books were based on her own experiences of racism. In the third book Sephy’s dad literally becomes an expy of Michael Howard (I can back this up, honest).

The book series is and was huge in Britain but it’s not a surprise to me that it hasn’t had as much resonance elsewhere. Given how page-to-screen adaptions inevitably flatten a lot of the nuances of the source material this becomes even worse from an American point of view.

 

[Charles EP M.]

It does seem to be doing okay in America, is the thing, at least as far as I can tell from twitter.