When I started watching Santa Diabla, I will admit I did get hooked, but it wasn't a top priority of mine since the episodes are so long and are split up when I watched them online. But, I finally stayed up until 2am one night and got caught up on the season. The next week I began to watch it on Telemundo with the English subtitles. It made such a difference! Not to mention how relaxing it was to be in bed by 10 pm and not have to click back and forth through the different parts of the episode.
And this is where my obsession began-
The next week in class, Dr. A said we would be speaking with Chascas, the writer of Santa Diabla. I could not help but try to contain my excitement. I have followed him on twitter since I began watching the show. I usually don't tweet- but I tweeted him TWICE before we spoke with him. After our conversation he truly captured me with his passion for writing telenovelas and how he relates them to himself personally. I can say I completely agree with his reasoning of using an African American woman as someone who is strong, independent and an educated entrepreneur. It truly amazed me to see the reasoning behind choosing her for the character. I see the cause and effect relation in this choice through the way viewers talk about Mara, the African American character. They absolutely love her and value her strong-mindedness.
Another thing I admire about Chascas was his choice of writing about things in which his values were completely against. I never thought about that- it makes complete sense that it is a therapeutic process for him and... maybe I should try it? Haha. With that being sad, my obession with Chascas began.
After our discussion with him, I continued to watch the shows on Telemundo.. every night.. at 10pm. And when I went home.. I recorded it when I couldn't watch it. But I couldn't get the subtitles to work so then I just read a recap (do you see this obsession progressing?)
Next, my group and I started working on our consumption presentation (this is where it really gets worse) I developed a stalking procedure of all of the characters social media (twitter/instagram). I saw that they post pictures and tweets of what they are doing real life, which right now is still filming Santa Diabla... truly facisnating to me that they can post these pictures of themselves on the set! I also noticed that every one (the director and characters) has an ipad which I guess is to read the script. I also saw a picture of Gaby Espino in an Alaskan jacket because it was so cold on the set (Dr. A told us it was freezing). So my epitome here is that I have been learning about all of this so far in the semester and now I actually see it-- through the lenses of consumption and production.
This my friends, is how my obsession with Santa Diabla, the characters and the writer began.
This is a class blog run by Dr. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and her students in the course "Telenovelas, Culture and Society" at the University of Georgia during Fall 2013
This is so funny. I feel the exact same way. I have been watching La Reina del Sur online. At first, I got up to about episode 8 with no problems meaning I had the subtitles and everything. As I got to episode 9 and 10 there were no longer subtitles! Obviously I freaked out. There are parts and things that they are saying that I do understand without the subtitles, but I still miss out on a lot of key details. So.... I bought the DVD. However, they DVD doesn't have subtitles. English or Spanish. So.... I just have to watch it without them. I least I own it though, right??
ReplyDeleteChascas was one of my favorite conversations! He was so animated when he talked, and you could tell he was passionate about what he does as a writer.
ReplyDeleteWhat he said about writing about things you don't agree with really stood out to me, too! I wrote that down when he said it because I thought it was so interesting. But it's true. I mean, I can always think of negative things about something I'm against, so it's kind of like ranting, but forcing yourself to be creative about your ranting and actually ending up with a product that you can share with other people. When he said that, it honestly kind of rocked my world and changed my perspective on writing both as a consumer of media and as a writer myself. I don't know if he intended for that to be such an intellectual conversation, but I certainly got a lot of fresh ideas from listening to him. What a gem. So glad we got to talk to him.