we're half awake in a fake empire.
so, my flist page only goes back 10 entries. i tried to manually change the URL but it just turns out that, like everything else in this world, lj is really super dead. i mean, i'm never here either, so who am i to pass judgment, but it's kind of odd and kind of funny and kind of sad. like the beginning to it's a mad world, the song.
anyway, i mostly came here to vent my feelings on organized crime tv shows, which i have been sort of stewing in. that isn't the most precise term, but i'm mostly thinking of shows like sons of anarchy, which i used to be so into, and, now, peaky blinders, whose first season i just finished and which i've been spoiled for, and the general kinds of trends on these shows, which have been frustrating me.
i think what solidified it for me was that polly and gemma feel like the same character. not even the same woman, but the same character. they fill the same structural gaps, their faults and foibles are incredibly similar, the way that they engage with the new women in the Family are also very similar. they're consistently granted the screen time and the narrative space to operate as Badass Women in way that the other women on the show are not permitted to.
i can't believe anything in the year of our lord 2016 has me mad about sons of anarchy and tara all over again, but here we are. and mostly because i'm mad about what happens to grace! i can't believe that when men are confronted with a female character that people actually like and are forced to keep around and not immediately kill off, their immediate response is well, clearly, we must stick her into an unwarranted unhappy marriage to give her depth. the levels to which this is misogynistic is one thing (esp. since both shows end up killing their girls anyway), but the levels to which this is narratively lazy and insipid drives me up a wall.
grace and tara both had narrative possibilities within the family. they could have fit within those structures, they could have made them more complex, they could have layered them by challenging the power dynamics that were at play. they are/were both engaging, cutthroat women in their own rights, who decided to parlay that determination and that force towards things (ideals, life paths) that they thought to be good (Good) and only found that to be later challenged by their own feelings and their own hearts, which made them darker (grayer) than they ever thought they'd find themselves. there is narrative tension in that! and once she makes a choice to stay, there's further narrative tension in that! and the next logical step would be to test the limits of that darkness and to see how far she is willing to go with her moral code for love, but that's never where we're taken?
instead i feel like these dude showrunners want her to be simultaneously a darker figure as much as a figure of forgiveness? we already have one badass old lady on the show; why does there need to be two? and it frustrates me to no end because there is such an easy, easy answer here. you could give me mob queen struggles. you could give me her rising up through the family and needing to defend/avenge an attack against her love interest (the prince/the king in the family) and then, his struggle in having to see her as an equal rather than as some golden good girl who can absolve him of the manpain that he feels. if she challenges him for power (in his eyes), that is an interesting arc, too.
don't just kill her off so that you can extend narratives of his pain and his despair, and because you don't know what to do with her.
my god.
anyway, i mostly came here to vent my feelings on organized crime tv shows, which i have been sort of stewing in. that isn't the most precise term, but i'm mostly thinking of shows like sons of anarchy, which i used to be so into, and, now, peaky blinders, whose first season i just finished and which i've been spoiled for, and the general kinds of trends on these shows, which have been frustrating me.
i think what solidified it for me was that polly and gemma feel like the same character. not even the same woman, but the same character. they fill the same structural gaps, their faults and foibles are incredibly similar, the way that they engage with the new women in the Family are also very similar. they're consistently granted the screen time and the narrative space to operate as Badass Women in way that the other women on the show are not permitted to.
i can't believe anything in the year of our lord 2016 has me mad about sons of anarchy and tara all over again, but here we are. and mostly because i'm mad about what happens to grace! i can't believe that when men are confronted with a female character that people actually like and are forced to keep around and not immediately kill off, their immediate response is well, clearly, we must stick her into an unwarranted unhappy marriage to give her depth. the levels to which this is misogynistic is one thing (esp. since both shows end up killing their girls anyway), but the levels to which this is narratively lazy and insipid drives me up a wall.
grace and tara both had narrative possibilities within the family. they could have fit within those structures, they could have made them more complex, they could have layered them by challenging the power dynamics that were at play. they are/were both engaging, cutthroat women in their own rights, who decided to parlay that determination and that force towards things (ideals, life paths) that they thought to be good (Good) and only found that to be later challenged by their own feelings and their own hearts, which made them darker (grayer) than they ever thought they'd find themselves. there is narrative tension in that! and once she makes a choice to stay, there's further narrative tension in that! and the next logical step would be to test the limits of that darkness and to see how far she is willing to go with her moral code for love, but that's never where we're taken?
instead i feel like these dude showrunners want her to be simultaneously a darker figure as much as a figure of forgiveness? we already have one badass old lady on the show; why does there need to be two? and it frustrates me to no end because there is such an easy, easy answer here. you could give me mob queen struggles. you could give me her rising up through the family and needing to defend/avenge an attack against her love interest (the prince/the king in the family) and then, his struggle in having to see her as an equal rather than as some golden good girl who can absolve him of the manpain that he feels. if she challenges him for power (in his eyes), that is an interesting arc, too.
don't just kill her off so that you can extend narratives of his pain and his despair, and because you don't know what to do with her.
my god.