From Russia With Love <3

I finally realized why I can’t write my Russian love story without being incredibly cheesy. It's because that’s how a Russian would write it. That’s how they would expect it to be. Russians are possibly the cheesiest people on earth, even the hardcore guys. You wouldn’t think so… it always seems like Russians should be the hardest and meanest people. But no, they are cheesy and corny. I just need to get myself out of the Russian mindset, which is hard because the story is based in Russia. I’ve been trying to put myself into the story and imagine what it would be like so that the story seems more real. But that’s not going to work for an American market. I have to get the Russian setting, but then put myself back in America in terms of personalities.

I was watching Kadetstvo the other day; it’s a Russian TV show. Honestly it made me kind of sick how cheesy the story and even the acting was. It was just so typical and cliché. For example... in one episode there is this boy, who is a student at a military academy, and he falls in love with his teacher (mind you this is an ongoing relationship I’m only giving the results of one episode) and she asks him to come to a café with her. She is leaving on a train soon and she starts asking him all these questions about another girl that is his age, he is basically like, “why do you care?” Anyway, they fight about it for a while, and he starts yelling, and she says “I care because to me you aren’t indifferent” Which I’m assuming translates better into “I care about you” and then, of course, she leaves and runs out of the café. He, of course, follows her and grabs her; very roughly I might add, causing her to drop her suitcase. She starts crying…and he says, “what did you say?!” She says, through tears, “I have to go… I have to catch my train…” and he says, “what did you say?! Is that true? Is that true!?!” And she says “yes… yes it’s true! But I have to go!” and he gives some stupid speech of… “I hope everything works out for you…. Blah blah blah…” and leaves, and as he is walking away the camera focuses in on the teachers face, and the boy is walking away behind her, she screams his name… "Maksim!" she turns around, then he turns around, and they run to each other’s embraces. They start kissing and he assures her that he will never let her go and that he’ll take care of her, then he asks for her train ticket and rips it up. SOOOO cheesy. But the best part is that while I was watching this all I could think about was how similar this was to my story. They do the same exact thing only at the airport. It’s really quite funny how that worked out. I swear I hadn’t watched this before I wrote the story. At least now I understand how corny my story was.