In which Victorians attempt to rap for #dabwaha

Having had an entire seven days to contemplate my strategy for success in DABWAHA, after Unveiled was defeated by Shadowfever, I had to think about why people were voting for that book..

Now, there are some possibilities that presented themselves. For instance:

• It was a wildly popular book that ended a wildly popular series.
• Barrons was compelling and Mac kicked ass.

I suppose that all of this might have something to do with it, but I can do nothing about those, and so I decided to ignore the wild popularity and the awesomeness of the book, and instead pretend that what I needed was to bridge the historical and the contemporary.

So I decided to write a rap. A Victorian rap. Never mind that I can’t rap; neither could the Victorians, so that would just give it added verisimilitude.

I penned lines like, “You bask in your villainy/You make me feel agony/My other carriage, it is made of mahogany.” Or: “Don’t mess with us, we’re pale and pasty/We don’t get any sun, and our food isn’t tasty.” I figured that Elaine would be wont to say something like, “I wear black and I wear red/Mock my laugh and I will kill you dead.” But–alas–none of these things came together in a coherent story.

I also–desperately–tried to come up with some version in which the speaker put headgear on a donkey that belonged to Barrons. You might wonder why anyone would do so. Well, when you do that, in Victorian parlance, you would say “I put a cap on your ass.” But the convoluted lead-up to joke ratio was pretty dismal–first, I’d have to give Barrons a donkey, and then I’d have to explain why it needed a hat, and then give it one…so no on that, too.

And so I’m left with only this:

Our lamps burn oil and our factories weave cotton
Peers veto bills and our burroughs are rotten.
It’s Victorian England and our voting’s skewed.
Take a page from us, and vote often, dude!

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