User talk:Leithaus/The Adventures of Victoria and Balthazar

The webisodic Adventures of Victoria and Balthazar follow a modern day version of Nick and Nora, the famous detective and his wealthy wife from Dashell Hammett's The Thin Man. Both couples share a globe-trotting lifestyle of the rich and famous, continually getting caught up in grand scale intrigues that they solve while maintaining a casual and witty banter, a hectic social schedule and a wardrobe to die for. That is, however, where the resemblance ends.

Synopsis
Unlike his prototype, Balthazar neither drinks like a fish nor eats them, being vegetarian -- though not as strict as his vegan better half, Victoria. Victoria, far from being the naive rich, has a conscience burdened by the knowledge that her money -- which she inherited from her now deceased father -- is the spoils of his unsavory career in the Bulgarian mafia, and a promise she made to him on his deathbed to redeem something of his life by making something good come out of his ill gotten gains.

Details
The series, scheduled to come out sometime in 2009, appears to follow in the footsteps of Quarterlife and Tyranny, being at least initially solely webisodic, and is known for its quirks and devices. Some of these are of a humorous variety, for example, despite constant references to Italian villas, charity galas in Bali and appearances at Davos, the couple are always finding themselves arriving at Seatac at the outset of each mystery. Some, like Greg House's cane, in the popular medical series, House (TV Series), or Sherlock Holmes' pipe and deerstalker are dramatic props establishing character, and VnB -- as it is known to its fans -- comes with a good seasoning of these, including as Balthazar Crowley's "everlasting" overcoat and Victoria's unusually featured iPhone. And some of these devices have a decidedly esoteric flavor: even the characters' last name, as many have noted, shares a connection with the infamous "magician" Aleister Crowley.

Esoterica
In fact, the esoteric subtext is a matter of not inconsiderable Internet chatter. It has been suggested, for example, that each mystery arc is written following an esoteric symbol, called the Enneagram, devised by the Armenian mystic, G.I. Gurdjieff, and is supposed to describe the arc of any complete process. One blogger has written extensively about Victoria and Balthazar as a faerie story. S/he proposes that Victoria and Balthazar are fay, that is are faeries, explaining why mystery and adventure spring up wherever the couple find themselves. The proposal has a much debated post-modern twist about faeries, summarized in the hotly debated blog entry that was taken down and put up so many times that we quote from it here rather than post a link.

One of the signature aspects of the stories of the fay is that time is warped -- if not outright stolen. Whenever mortals come in contact with denizens of the fay their passage through time becomes massively distorted. They lose scores if not hundreds of years of time in the mortal world. When i was thinking about faerie stories i noticed their capacity to captivate and pull you out of the present moment. i surmised faeries are faerie stories. Our way of being with the fay is through their appearance to us as stories -- which pull us out of the present moment.

i think that VnB are fay. They come to us from the land of faerie. Even if V doesn't know it. B is attempting to create the conditions by which V remembers that she is fay. This is why reality continues to do strange things around her. As if reality keeps reshaping in order to send her messages, to help her wake up to her true nature. Their romp through the mortal world is magick'ed and magical -- full of all the trappings -- unexplained wealth and luck and adventure. It's as if Oberon were on a honeymoon with Titania -- except that Titania was under a spell that made her forget she was queen of faerie and Oberon was trying to help her remember herself. The conditions of the mortal world in which they travel are filled with mystery -- of the kind we normally associate with mystery stories -- because faeries create mystery whenever they come into contact with mortals. It's in their nature.

Moveable feast
Finding links to VnB footage has become something of an Internet sport. The producers appear to monitor sources very thoroughly. As soon as a link appears it is taken down. Even the blog entries about the Youtube fiasco have ultimately been taken down. This, of course, is seen as something of a challenge by the technorati, making VnB links -- and more confusingly, links to footage that is purported to be from the series but often is clearly not -- spring up frequently. Ironically, the producers of the Adventures of Victoria and Balthazar are more likely to leave links to fake footage alone.

Links
TBD