(no subject)

[doyle]

I've been doing a lot of reading about the Jamestown colony (because even me, with my primary school recollection of early American history, say the 1609 flashback in Darla and went 'whuuu?') And it turns out there was a woman, 'Mistresse Forest', who arrived in Jamestown with her servant in 1608 and just vanished from history (the servant ending up as one of the few to survive when almost all the colonists died out the next year). It's all nice and serendipitous but it doesn't explain where the bloody nuns came from.

But now I want to write Darla fic from this guy's perspective. And absolutely not entertain the naughty thoughts brought up by the idea that Darla would have almost certainly have known Pocahontas.

ETA this bit from MSN chat:
Kevin says:
when I read your last post I mistook "Jamestown" for "Jonestown" and spent a good 10mins pondering how Pocahontas was involved in a pseudo-religious suicide cult

Comments

[thebratqueen.livejournal.com]

One of my friends actually works in Jamestown, so I hit her up for all my Darla backstory needs. Granted, this is probably overkill on my part since clearly what's shown on the show couldn't have been more inaccurate if Darla's death scene had included a walkman, but I'm a geek so there you go.

Of note, the script for Darla originally had the flashback take place in 1607 but it was changed to 1609 by the time the show aired. I can only assume some kind soul pulled Tim aside and informed him that there were no woman in Jamestown period in 1607 and that's why he changed it to 1609, when the first signs of XX chromosomes made their way over ;)

Nuns would not have been there at all since Jamestown was a Protestant colony (and again, let alone the fact that there weren't many women there at all to begin with). I chose to fanwank this by saying Darla was hallucinating ;)

Darla would have also never gone over to Jamestown without some form of family there, such as father, brother, or husband, for her to be with. So the idea that she was the Jamestown whore just isn't going to fly.

It's ironic that the gang felt a need to inject incorrect religious imagery into the whole thing because the colony was extremely religious all on its own. Members were expected to go to church daily, and not going could result in not being given food rations and/or beatings.

One of these years I'm going to do a story for Darla, where I show how she was a prostitute in England who thought she could reinvent herself in the new world only to fail when the harshness of that reality and her past catches up to her. But in the meanwhile I share what tidbits I know for what they're worth. =)

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

what's shown on the show couldn't have been more inaccurate if Darla's death scene had included a walkman

Ha! And I feel validated on the hallucination thing, connorbeast and I had a long discussion/fanwank-fest on MSN where I insisted that the nuns were a hallucination, or that we're seeing a flawed memory rather than what actually happened (which would fit with the fact that nobody calls Darla by her real name in the flashback)

Also, yes, she couldn't possibly have been a whore (though I love the idea of her arriving at the colony with her husband, or the husband dying on the trip) I can't see how it would have made a significant difference to Darla's backstory to have her sired about 80 years later...

(This is so the perfect fandom for me. I wallow in the geekiness. I went to the library today and got books on Taoism, British pop culture in the 1970, the early colonization of America, Druids, the evolution of American English, and travel guides to Rome and Brazil. All of them in some way under the blanket category of 'stuff I might want to write fic on'.)