My favorite new Jane Austen adaptation is an elaborate game of Dungeons & Dragons

polygon.com:

Move over, Bridgerton. So long, Sanditon. My new favorite Regency-inspired show is Dimension 20’s A Court of Fey & Flowers. As a scholar of both 18th-century fiction and actual play, I’m telling everyone I know to watch this creative new spin on both Austen and actual play. In a time of an overabundance of Austen adaptation retreads, it’s refreshing to see a show playing with the much broader palette actually contained within Austen’s work — including her influences and the wider world she inhabited.

For those unfamiliar with the British Regency (1811-20), let’s first set the global scene. It was a time of great change. Revolutions had just happened — in the United States, France, and Haiti — and were looming on the horizon all across Europe. The powerful went cottagecore, rejecting hair powder, heavy makeup, conical corsets, and wide panniers for a few years of relative freedom before the coming backlash of Victorian hoops and bustles. Of course, the aesthetics of the Regency have their own grim origins. Filmy Empire-waist gowns were made from cotton derived from enslaved plantation labor and silks acquired by imperial conquest. Real-life tea tables were political battlegrounds as abolitionists avoided serving “blood sugar.” As Austen grew up, the fashion for sentimental, epistolary novels waned as thrilling Gothic tales, progressive political novels, and reactionary conservative fiction all surged onto bookshelves.

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