So I finally listened to Witchfinders...


So this is the story about Guy seeing Marian's "ghost."  Richard Armitage reads it.  I've had it for a couple of weeks now, and I figured that today, in the midst of my Robin Hood withdrawal, I should listen to it while I drove out to Ventura to administer my final.  

I thought I was going to be ok.  I thought it couldn't possibly be so bad that I shouldn't listen to it while driving.  I was wrong.  I got through about half of it before I got to campus, and I was in tears while driving.  I had to pause it a couple of times I got so upset.  Don't get me wrong... it was good. It was really good.  Richard does a fantastic job of reading the narration (some of the places where he was describing the Marian-hallucination and Guy's reaction to her had my breath catching in my throat.  I could FEEL the ache of it.)  Also, his character voices are hysterical.  His Vasey is maniacal and growly, his Much and his Allan are spot on, his Robin is a bit ponce-y, and the one-shot characters are all pretty distinct.  (The older Witchfinder was CREEPY, too...) Oh... and his Kate is pretty funny.  Kate in general in this is interesting, and the interactions between her and Guy were really good...

So... yeah.  It was good.  It was also heart-stoppingly sad. The Marian that Guy hallucinates isn't a comforting type of vision who tells him what he wants to hear.  She's... she's just Marian.  Saying what Marian would say and not letting him off easy, but still trying to get him to see that he could be better.  It was good, but it broke me. I got to campus and had to go in my office for a while and sit and calm down. 

My final went well.  (except for the fact that one of my student's computers got the blue screen of death while she was trying to write... but that turned out ok) In what probably ended up being a good turn of events safety-wise, my car's CD player decided it didn't want to play the rest of the story while I drove home, so I had to wait until I'd gotten back to the house and eaten some of the delicious home-made nachos Rae had made before I could hear the end.

It wasn't disappointing, Robin's ridiculous escape-of-the-week aside.  It would have been impossible for Guy to have a complete change of heart, but... they let him have a moment of goodness, a moment of doing (or in this case, not doing) something that made the world a fairer place.  And then... there was his last conversation with Marian, where she tells him he's the one who's fading and suggests that everything she's said to him has been what he really thinks deep down... wow.  And the pain in Guy's voice when he said, "You're not her" killed me dead. And then she fades.  She's gone... and Guy almost wishes she would have stayed even if it made him a little crazy and my immediate reaction was something like Oh my gosh they gave us a totally shippy Guy/Marian story I love them.  *flails a lot*  *sobs*  Why?  Why couldn't this have been an episode?

*ahem* Sorry about that.  I'm not quite better yet.  Don't know if I will be in the near future.  Or... you know... ever.