Dollhouse squee, and meta-ing
Firstly, you guys, it freaks me out when I am the first one on my flist to link to stuff:
Dollhouse trailer!!!!
From upfronts, so a little rough-cutty, but still much with the awesomeness. And the Eliza kicking ass, and Tahmoh Penikett being all lawman. My current problem is, none of the media previews I've read actually sound like what Joss says the show is, so we need to find a cool-sounding one-line description to bring the non-geeks in.
(Little clip; promo shots).
But in other thoughts: Brother1 is home, and decided we should watch a random Buffy episode ("I know you won't like this, what with your love of chronological order, but...) so we watched 'The Replacement' (5.03) and then I watched 'Family' (5.6). And Spike swept his leather jacket on, and I thought about scrollgirl and Nikki Wood. So my question is: how far can I, as a fan, work around the actions of a character that bother me? How far can I pick and choose, and does it matter what the creator wants me to think?
As a fan, I'm actually very bad at being critical of the shows I love. It bothers me that I find it hard to pick them apart the way other fans do. Letting things slide is not normally me, and I know perfectly well that saying 'I'm not in fandom to be critical' isn't good. It's kind of true, but I'm ashamed of that, and writers shouldn't get away with sexism/racism/homophobia/whatever, just because they also make good TV. I know all this. And yet I'm totally a Spike-fan and a Joss-fan, mostly unequivocably. And I loved Owen in Torchwood before S2 happened, I love the show even when it might seem to advocate torture as a means of extracting confessions. I don't like it when they do that, but I still like the show.
It's strange because 'in real life', I'm pretty quick to call people out. I'm the one my dad and brother sigh at because 'not everything is about feminism'. Not everything is about homophobia. Except for me, being a bi female, both of those are kind of important in my life. I notice them because I'm always looking out for them. I also tend to notice any kind of religious imagery, which is why Doctor Who S3 is one of those fannish things that did drive me nuts. Makes me angry even thinking about it now. So that's one time I didn't handwave for the sake of the love. The other time in recent memory is Supernatural 'Malleus Maleficarum', which made me throw things at the screen for reasons other people smarter than me have articulated.
But I fangirl two characters portions of fandom view as rapists.
We read characters our own way all the time. We build fanon histories for them which may or may not accord with all our given knowledge. We ignore the bits that bother us - just ask any Harry Potter fan who's discarded the epilogue to write fic! We write slash, which is almost certainly not what the creators intended. In-character is still a virtue, of course, and the best stories don't completely ignore past het relationships, but it's still... I guess what I'm saying is that it's taking what we're given and making it work better for us. If I write SGA, I don't play Rodney as geek comic-relief, because I don't believe it when the writers do it. It bothers me and I don't see why I have to do it just because they think it's funny. It's encouraged that we turn the female characters we're given into something better than they're written - we try to reclaim them from being love interests and jealous, helpless creatures. We turn them into something that makes the story more interesting.
So I can defend that, if I need to. I love fic that pokes at the edges of the material and sees the parts the writers don't or can't. It's possible SGA has such great fic because the canon's a little flawed. But, I'm talking about stretching this feminist/queer/humanist rereading into just ignoring the stuff I don't like. Violent straight white males are hardly a character type I'm short of, if that's what I need. I could have just stopped watching either show, or watched with a proper degree of criticism. Instead I read and write fic, and make icons, and buy the DVDs. Do other people do this to the shows they love, or am I just a bad person?
Opinions are particularly welcome on this issue!
Dollhouse trailer!!!!
From upfronts, so a little rough-cutty, but still much with the awesomeness. And the Eliza kicking ass, and Tahmoh Penikett being all lawman. My current problem is, none of the media previews I've read actually sound like what Joss says the show is, so we need to find a cool-sounding one-line description to bring the non-geeks in.
(Little clip; promo shots).
But in other thoughts: Brother1 is home, and decided we should watch a random Buffy episode ("I know you won't like this, what with your love of chronological order, but...) so we watched 'The Replacement' (5.03) and then I watched 'Family' (5.6). And Spike swept his leather jacket on, and I thought about scrollgirl and Nikki Wood. So my question is: how far can I, as a fan, work around the actions of a character that bother me? How far can I pick and choose, and does it matter what the creator wants me to think?
As a fan, I'm actually very bad at being critical of the shows I love. It bothers me that I find it hard to pick them apart the way other fans do. Letting things slide is not normally me, and I know perfectly well that saying 'I'm not in fandom to be critical' isn't good. It's kind of true, but I'm ashamed of that, and writers shouldn't get away with sexism/racism/homophobia/whatever, just because they also make good TV. I know all this. And yet I'm totally a Spike-fan and a Joss-fan, mostly unequivocably. And I loved Owen in Torchwood before S2 happened, I love the show even when it might seem to advocate torture as a means of extracting confessions. I don't like it when they do that, but I still like the show.
It's strange because 'in real life', I'm pretty quick to call people out. I'm the one my dad and brother sigh at because 'not everything is about feminism'. Not everything is about homophobia. Except for me, being a bi female, both of those are kind of important in my life. I notice them because I'm always looking out for them. I also tend to notice any kind of religious imagery, which is why Doctor Who S3 is one of those fannish things that did drive me nuts. Makes me angry even thinking about it now. So that's one time I didn't handwave for the sake of the love. The other time in recent memory is Supernatural 'Malleus Maleficarum', which made me throw things at the screen for reasons other people smarter than me have articulated.
But I fangirl two characters portions of fandom view as rapists.
- Spike and Nikki's coat is an issue, but it's been discussed, and it wasn't the reason I personally started wondering whether I was wrong to like the character. 'Seeing Red' and the attempted rape scene made me angry, but it also made me assert, quite seriously, that something which happened in canon was OOC. Not that I didn't believe that Spike had murdered and raped before, just like Angel, but I didn't believe it when it happened. So mostly I don't. I know that it's part of the show, but when I think of "things which are Spike", it's not on the list. I'm not really sure that says good things about me.
- Owen, in the very first episode, sprayed himself with something which apparently made him irresistible to a woman and her boyfriend. (The boyfriend part is probably accidental). Now, here I know that the creators of the show don't want me to think this is rape. In Buffy, in contrast, it was a very deliberate act to remind viewers that Spike was still evil. Owen is supposed to be kind of damaged, and sarcastic and not nice, but still one of our good guys. The creators says they didn't mean the scene that way, the character is particularly tormented by a violent assualt he later witnesses, and he doesn't do anything similar afterwards. So again, when I write him, I don't factor that scene in.
We read characters our own way all the time. We build fanon histories for them which may or may not accord with all our given knowledge. We ignore the bits that bother us - just ask any Harry Potter fan who's discarded the epilogue to write fic! We write slash, which is almost certainly not what the creators intended. In-character is still a virtue, of course, and the best stories don't completely ignore past het relationships, but it's still... I guess what I'm saying is that it's taking what we're given and making it work better for us. If I write SGA, I don't play Rodney as geek comic-relief, because I don't believe it when the writers do it. It bothers me and I don't see why I have to do it just because they think it's funny. It's encouraged that we turn the female characters we're given into something better than they're written - we try to reclaim them from being love interests and jealous, helpless creatures. We turn them into something that makes the story more interesting.
So I can defend that, if I need to. I love fic that pokes at the edges of the material and sees the parts the writers don't or can't. It's possible SGA has such great fic because the canon's a little flawed. But, I'm talking about stretching this feminist/queer/humanist rereading into just ignoring the stuff I don't like. Violent straight white males are hardly a character type I'm short of, if that's what I need. I could have just stopped watching either show, or watched with a proper degree of criticism. Instead I read and write fic, and make icons, and buy the DVDs. Do other people do this to the shows they love, or am I just a bad person?
Opinions are particularly welcome on this issue!