Kathryn VanArendonk

The thing, the fam-like counter history that I really wonder about for Outlander is if it were being developed right now, would it...

Would there be more push to make the adaptation farther away from those original books?

Because there is now more romance happening on television, and we've also then seen a lot of conversation about what romance looks like on television.

This is a big, a whole long spiel that I have about how TV uses romance and how little

actually romance television has been made.

It has usually been the will they, won't they side plot to whatever the thing is happening.

And it's only recently that we started to see shows where like that is the job number one.

Yeah, yes.

But because there now have been shows like Bridgerton and Heated Rivalry, and then you get conversations about them, and there's a little bit more awareness of what romance book readers like and respond to, and it turns out that in none of those cases...

Do they like rape?

As a part of the show.

And it would be very, very hard to excise, particularly in some of the early seasons, really hard to remove the arc of some of those plots and character development from how that works at the beginning.

But I really, really wonder if...

you would be getting a version of this show that was tilted toward the current romance environment where you are, there's a lot more context for those things.

There's a lot, suddenly you're getting people having, yes, ahistorical conversations about trauma and consent.

And there's, you know, all kinds of trigger warnings all over them.

They are given their paste differently.

Part of what is so, I think, disorienting for romance fans in this show is the way that like it'll happen.

And then it's like and then we're still being we're getting hauled across the countryside yet again.

And so I I'm very curious what that would look like.