Dawson’s Creek and Rubi

I can’t help but harp about the historical importance of Dawson’s Creek’s unintended magical realism, because my dad used to watch that hugely popular show. Both the classic show and Young Americans do not need a sequel either for both legal and budget reasons. However, indirect and mostly seemingly unrelated prequels are probably going to be better than a sequel to both as a result. 

Strangely enough, the best candidate for a Dawson’s Creek prequel is a future anglophone adaptation of a popular Mexican comic book classic named Rubi, about a hellishly beautiful woman prowling her way through the urban jungle.  

I may not have read the Rubi comic books yet, but there are at least two comic book versions of Rubi, one from the 1960s which spawned both a campy telenovela and a movie, and another one from the early 1980s which remains better known for a slick telenovela and comic combo, a rather adult Teleserye drama, two 2010s comic retellings and a rather gross time travelling telenovela. 

However, even though all of them have a lot of obvious cultural values dissonances, the time travelling telenovela, even with its own less sociopathic Rubi (like in the 1968 telenovela and 1970 movie), remains too heavily stripped of every other version’s advantages, to the point of becoming just a rather bad show in name only. The rest remain a lot better received despite such values dissonances, which explains why the Rubí franchise remains entertaining to this day. 

The plot of the darkly comedic anglophone Rubi will be set in what turns out to be America in the 1910s-50s. In that version, Rubi Nagare grows from a cute ass baby to a sociopathic adult on par with Ryōma Nagare from much of the Getter Robo series. In fairness, she is also meant to be a lot more like his partner Hayato Jin rather than himself in terms of bad behaviour.

She was born from an equally ruthless brothel madam spy (a polyamorous bisexual like her daughter!) trying to survive a history of insanely horrible partners, as well as having figurative incest with both of her sisters and will always brothel out everybody in the process as much as possible. She and her fellow orphaned sisters live in a slum and then will be unalive as middle aged adults after becoming particularly nasty femme fatales themselves. 

An American adaptation to the Rubi comic series is seriously going to have a lot of smutty black comedy potential for all it’s worth. 





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