 Hello, my darling extraterrestrials! I am Kim, this is Dustmoats and Velikor, and today I'm going to be nerding out in your general direction about a historical fiction novel written in 1844, and of course it's various film adaptations. I am, of course, talking about The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. They are dashing, they are daring, they are porthos, ethos, and aramis. A brash newcomer, D'Artagnan, manages to quarrel with all three of them, one right after the other, on his very first day in Paris, and he arranges duels with them for the very next day. He's pretty sure he won't survive even the first of these duels, but he is a gentleman and he arrives anyway. With rapid elocution and very pretty manners, he demonstrates that he had no intention of giving offence in the first place, but if they still wished to kill him, he would behave as honor demanded. But then they are conveniently attacked by the Cardinals Red Guard, and all of a sudden our four heroes are the best of friends. The whole book is written like this. It's hilarious. D'Artagnan is a brash and hot-headed youth who's been advised by his father upon leaving his farm for Paris that he should not take any insult lying down. So now D'Artagnan perceives eye contact or poorly timed laughter as an insult, and in 17th century France an insult means you get to kill them. Well, kind of. Dueling is illegal because of the incredibly high death count among the gentry, but it's still a very common occurrence. At one point D'Artagnan witnesses a woman slap a man on the street, and without even hearing what the conversation had been about, he simply walks over and puts himself into her service, offering to kill the man who has insulted her, who by the way is still standing right there. Like yes, D'Artagnan, murder is the correct course of action in this context, and to him it totally is. He's a 17th century Frenchman. The lofty manners, the rhythm of speaking, the narrator's odd little habit of reminding you of all of the flaws of his various characters as, like, kind of excuses for whether they're behaving weird. It all adds up to a lively comedy with a little bit of romance, and a little bit of adventure, and a sous-saint of tragedy. It's a lovely example of historical pulp fiction, and I think that's why it has so many theatrical adaptations. The BBC alone has made three different adaptations of this as a series, first in 1954, then in 66, and then in 2014. The Wikipedia page of the Musketeers in film, literally, it's just a list of all of the adaptations, and it's so long that you have to scroll. John Wayne did one in 1933, Christopher Walken was in one in 69, and Charlie Sheen did one in 1993, and because I really can't not show you this picture, this is Orlando Bloom as the Duke of Buckingham in the 2013 film adaptation. Yeah, you had to see that. I bet you wished you could have gone through your whole life without seeing that, but now you have to suffer with me. Given the sheer number of examples available for comparison, I just picked. I picked my favorite version of the versions that I have seen, so I chose the 2014 BBC series, The Musketeers. And now I'm going to compare it to the 1844 original novel. The BBC series embellishes and adds a lot of dramatic detail, while still staying very close to the original plot, but changes things up in some pretty significant ways. First of all, in the book, D'Artagnan only meets Constance Bonissu after she's already escaped from being kidnapped, and he immediately falls in love. They proceed to not see each other at all until she is kidnapped again and held hostage for the rest of the book, and he has to rescue her. As in, in the entire novel, D'Artagnan and Constance have one conversation and they pass two notes, and that is the entirety of their grand romance. Let's be honest, this is probably not the origin of Fridging, but it's the earliest historical example I've ever seen. For those of you not obsessed with TV tropes, Fridging is when a female character is kidnapped or killed in order to elevate the plotline of a male character. The term refers to a commonly seen image in media of a dead woman stuffed in a refrigerator. Conversely, the 2014 series claimed Constance Bonissu as a series regular, and she gets character development and an actual love story with D'Artagnan. She is still married to D'Artagnan's landlord who is a dick and also actually a spy for the cardinal. And while Constance of the book is very clever in executing the business of the queen, which often involves getting kidnapped, Constance of the series is given, she's given a real personality, she's given an emotional arc, she's given integrity and values. She slaps Eremis across the face when she thinks he's betrayed D'Artagnan. She convinces D'Artagnan to teach her how to fight. Basically, she's just generally a badass. Eventually all the musketeers go off to fight France's war with Spain and she's still in Paris running the garrison. And she's basically a captain of the musketeer cadets. This woman is amazing. She does get kidnapped once in the series, but that's not so much to elevate D'Artagnan's plotline as to elevate M'lady de Winters. Speaking of, in both book and series, M'lady de Winter is a kind of scary female assassin who is actually Athos's wife whom he hanged from a tree after discovering her misdeeds. The book does this by having him find a brand on her shoulder that marks her as a felon. The series does this by having her murder his brother after he tries to force himself on her. Either way, she doesn't die. Most predicaments M'lady de Winter can get out of by seducing the nearest man. Occasionally, when on the rare occasions she finds herself outmatched, she'll get incredibly angry and the book describes her as becoming suddenly and terrifyingly ugly. Every time it happened, I imagined a trapped bobcat ripping its captors to shreds. But at the end of the novel, the musketeers and several other related parties track her down and pass judgment upon her, leading to her execution. And she just wilts. It was so out of character for her. And I found that in M'lady de Winter, you can watch as Alexander Dumas manifests his misogyny on this one particular character. He can't conceive of this woman defending herself. She must seduce a nearby man. There's a moment where she has seduced a man and is actively being rescued from a tower, by the way, she also got kidnapped. And she's being carried down the outside of the tower. And Alexander Dumas literally writes something like, um, and in that moment, M'lady de Winter remembered that she was a woman and became afraid. It's like, what? What? Whereas M'lady de Winter of the series is cold and calculating and unrepentant, while still being very emotionally driven. She spends most of the first season trying to get Athos killed, and when she thinks she's succeeded, she finds her revenge empty. And that she misses him. Aramis is particularly funny in the book, because he is incredibly pious. And he always is insisting that he will not be a musketeer for very long. He's just waiting until he can become a man of the cloth. But if you watch closely, you'll notice that every time he claims to be engaged in religious pursuit, he is actually in pursuit of a woman. He plays it extremely close to the chest. The one time D'Artagnan walks in on him actually engaged in religious pursuits, it's because he believes his lady has forsaken him. Honestly, the whole thing felt like Alexander Dumas was making fun of the ecclesiastical style of debate. The whole thing was utterly ridiculous from D'Artagnan's perspective. There's these two clergymen trying to convince Aramis to write a thesis on how a person needs two hands and all ten fingers in order to truly worship God, which first of all is ableist and second of all, what does those two things have to do with one another? To paraphrase, if my grandma had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. The series interprets Aramis as a man of faith who cherishes women and who is also a great romantic, but also will, you know, have a little bit of murky morality when it comes to protecting the people he loves. Also, if given a chance between making trouble and avoiding trouble, Aramis will pick making trouble every time. There's three books in the main series following D'Artagnan and there's three seasons in the BBC series, The Musketeers. I could probably talk for about an hour about all of the ways that their paths diverge and intersect, how Athos' relationship with D'Artagnan becomes more paternal over time, and how Porthos has so much more depth in the series than he does in the book, how the politics of 17th century France made it an ideally convoluted backdrop for this author, and how he uses the mores of, is it mores or mores? I think it's mores? I might be wrong. I've literally only ever read this word, but how he uses the mores of the time to highlight the irrationality and hilarity of the events he is relating. But I'm not going to. I'm utilizing my self-control and I am stopping now. So this is me stopping. But oh my god, Luke Pasqualino is so gorgeous, and D'Artagnan is like this handsome adorable puppy that I just love. Okay, now I'm done. Come talk to me about books. A viento! I really appreciate you going around all of the equipment when you did that.