Dysfunctional Shipping Awareness Month, Days 6&7
Have y'all missed my stabby pointer finger? I know I have! Adama-grade temper tantrum about some extremely disturbing topics below the cut.
This is a tragic and terrifying thing: people RightShip Helo and Athena. Like, actually think theirs is a beautiful love. I personally think it is the single most squicktastic relationship in the BSG verse, which is no small feat. (For purposes of this, I'm going to call the Eight who eventually comes to refer to herself as Sharon Agathon as Athena. Helo/Eights generally is fascinating and fantastic, because it's a way of highlighting everything wrong with this relationship.)
The way it starts is bad enough, with Athena lying to Helo about who she is so he'll have sex with her and maybe impregnate her. The "woman desperate for a BAAAAAAAAAYBEEEEE" trope this invokes is irrelevant next to the fact that that's rape. Athena knows he wouldn't want to sleep with a Cylon, or probably with anyone who wasn't Boomer, and she knows she's not Boomer.
But honestly, it's what follows that really freaks me the fuck out. Sharon, along with Five and however many Sixes, keeps on stringing Helo along for weeks - no, months - conspiring with dozens of other cylons to manipulate him into this whole jaws-of-death trauma bond. Then, when he finds out the truth, she turns it back around on him and guilts him for his completely reasonable feelings of betrayal, having withheld knowledge of her pregnancy for the moment when it would have the maximum impact on him. The Helo/Athena storyline down on Caprica is a shockingly good portrayal of the dissonance between the Cylons' sophisticated cerebral grasp on human psychology and their unwillingness to acknowledge even their small amount of empathy for human emotion.
I think the narrative sometime remembers the utter creeepiness of that relationship at least up through the end of 2.5. The scenes where he visits her in the jail cell have that haunting tinkling music behind them, and Grace Park sells the hell out of the way Sharon has the intellectual upper hand even from behind bars. Not coincidentally, I also think the time between Kobol and New Caprica is also the point at which Sharon's story was at its sharpest and most effective concerning her own vulnerability as a pregnant POW. This story doesn't need pitiful perfect victims and cackling full-blown evil villains, it needs detailed portrayal of actions and events.
But after the jump to New Caprica, that thread gets dropped. A year passes - a whole year *eyeroll* - and they get MAWWIED, so OF COURSE everything is miraculously all better! All of their conflict from there on out is about how their marriage is a cylon/human relationship. Not about what anyone involved did or does, but about some mystical divide in some essential natures. I'm not saying identity isn't important, I'm just saying, what folks do (for good or ill) shouldn't be completely ignored in favor of what they are. In this case, Athena Stockholmed Helo good and proper, to the extent where Helo never shakes it off. He only shows discomfort with the relationship in the episodes on the Basestar, when he's confronted with her Cylon nature - again, not what Athena or the other Eights did to him or anyone else. Helo's and Athena's conflicts are shown as being them against a world where nobody! understands! their! love! BIGOTS!!!
Don't even get me started on the fucking Hera thing. Laura Roslin STOLE! OUR! BABY! Except when you remember how thoroughly gross this relationship is, you realize that the story goes more along the lines of: Laura Roslin, pursuant to her official capacity as a state authority and her ethical obligation as the only grown-up left in the universe, rescued a helpless infant from a mass murderer who spent all of her free time stomping around her cell yelling I REGRET NOTHING!!! and said mass murderer's thoroughly brainwashed accomplice. Um, that bitch? lol@haters.
Actually, lies. Let's get me started on the Fucking Hera Thing. Because dag, it's perfect. This is a story with a lot of perspectives that get fair airing. Roslin's security concerns for the fleet at large and for Hera individually are valid. Helo's need to trust the people around him leads him to a conclusion that's both right (nobody hurt the baby) and wrong (she didn't die), and it cranks up the cognitive dissonance he's experiencing between his feelings for Athena and his position as a sworn defender of humans. Athena's suspicion of the humans makes perfect sense as well, and her trauma at the whole thing very sympathetic and real, but her determination to jump directly to the most brutal possible scenario smacks of projection. (I mean, who kills a baby? Or helps to kill millions of babies? OH WAIT.) And look what she does with it:
Helo: It's important. And I'll be with you there and back. It's you and me from now on, no matter what. Just like we agreed.
Athena: I know. I know. I really appreciate it, Helo, I really do. I just can't get her out of my head. Our little girl.[LDYB 1]
Helo: Why the frak didn't you say anything?
Athena: I don't know. Maybe I didn't want to. Maybe I wanted him to come here and blow up the whole ship. Is that what you're looking for?
Helo: You don't mean that. Sharon, we finally got the Admiral to start trusting us. Finally! And what?
Athena: They killed my baby. You think I care about you or us or whether the Admiral trusts me anymore? [walks away]
Helo: Hey! Sharon! I love you! And I'm not giving up this frakkin' easy! Not after everything! [LDYB 2]
She turns it into yet another way to isolate Helo emotionally. Encourages his trust and support for her, and uses it to sabotage the rescue mission to Caprica. Which I do love, in that she was a character who could take even such a deep, personal wound and spin it to protecting her own survival. (And she does need Helo for protection at this point, which is also pretty scary and unhealthy.) But I also think it shows a relationship that's gone entirely too deep into horrible mind games to come back up and become good.
Arguably, it might not be so much that the writers are doing it wrong, per se, so much as they're espousing a wrong point of view exceptionally well. The Helo/Athena relationship seems intended to be a microcosmic reflection of human/cylon relations, complete with commentary on the idea of reconciliation. And I'd agree with that, actually, and I think the ship was effectively used on a metaphoric level while still working as a specific emotional story between these two characters. I don't much care for the heavy-handed and scientifically incorrect Hera, Mother of All thing, but I do see how throughout the series the hybrid baby was used to show that there was a new civilization being pressed out of the remnants of the old ones.
However.
The story - for both Helo/Athena specifically and human/cylon generally - did a lot of telling one thing and showing another. It told us that reconciliation and peace were normatively good and only difficult in execution because of the stupid bigoted unwashed masses. But it showed us Cylons who merrily rolled along with little to no empathy, understanding, or regret for how sorely they had victimized the humans around them, expecting not only mercy but immediate trust and acceptance the instant it became in their self-interest to knock it off, and humans that had been so thoroughly browbeaten by the Cylon assault from within and without that they didn't know up from down enough to grapple with what was happening to them. As much as I as a viewer enjoy Helo/Athena as a story and individual Cylons as antagonists, I'm still morally comfortable being Team Human, and Helo/Athena still makes my blood run cold.
Which is why Helo/Athena still makes the list for this meme, even though I have just RANTED ABOUT IT FOREVER. Because I think it's a fascinating story. I think the discrepancy between Helo's subjective experience of the relationship and the objectively inexcusable way it began and progressed is a I think the emotions there are powerful and real, even if they're also horribly messed up. I'm drawn to the stories that chill me and frighten me and even repulse me.
It's just hard not to wonder, why the fail, and it's even harder not to come to some super-unflattering conclusions. As a point of comparison, consider Kara/Leoben. Leoben's dollhouse on New Caprica isn't different in motivation (Cylon attempt to approximate and enforce human constructs of love) or execution (isolation and dependence on an occupied planet) than Sharon's obstacle course on Caprica. If anything, Leoben's extremely tenuous grip on reality is a factor which could arguably serve to make him less culpable for his behavior than the pragmatic and emotionally astute Sharon is for hers. But the show and (as far as I can tell) fans of the pairing don't sweep the ugliness of Kara/Leoben under the rug. Why the discrepancy? Because Helo and Athena are married and have a baby and if it looks like normative American family life, it can't be abusive? Because Kara's a woman and Helo's a man - or because Leoben is male and Sharon is female? Because Kara, being aware of the manipulation, was in some way able to sufficiently resist, while Helo, having been unaware of the humanoid Cylons and therefore more susceptible to the mind games, was able to rationalize and excuse the horrible relationship? Sure, it's plausible that people might come down on the side of this having been a legitmate relationship and have a positive investment on it, I don't really have a problem with that, but the near-total disappearance of these concerns from the narrative and discourse around it bothers me a lot.
So yeah. Doing it so wrong. Normally when I think writers and viewers are this wrong about something, I at least humor the theoretical possibility that I might be the one who's missing something. But when Joss Whedon goes out of his way to agree with me, what can I say, I roll with it.
[whole meme below]
Day 1: The ship you don't want to be endgame.
Day 2: The ship you love because it really never will happen.
Day 3: "They are the worst possible thing to happen to each other" ship.
Day 4: The ship that would ruin/assassinate the characters if it happened.
Day 5: The ship where your favourite scene is the most dysfunctional one.
Day 6: The ship where the rest of its fandom is DOING IT WRONG.
Day 7: The ship where the writers are DOING IT WRONG.
Day 8: The ship you want to break up so you can stan the hell out of them.
Day 9: The ship you want to see being a trainwreck tragedy because they're too alike.
Day 10: The ship you want to see being a trainwreck tragedy because they're too different.
Day 11: The ship you love for its creepiness.
Day 12: The ship you love for the power difference.
Day 13: The ship you love for the way they hurt each other.
Day 14: The ship you love for the angst, banishing all joy and sunlight.
Day 15: The couple that are at their moral worst when around each other.
Day 16: Most creatively homicidal ship.
Day 17: The ship that looked like a fairytale but isn't or never was.
Day 18: The ship with the most transference issues.
Day 19: The starcrossed ship where the obvious reason they're starcrossed is the least interesting aspect to you.
Day 20: The couple you only ship in an "in another lifetime" sort of way.
Day 21: A couple you ship for the wrong reasons that fits none of these criteria.
Day 22: A couple you ship for the wrong reasons that fits too many of these criteria.
Day 23: A ship you wanted to include but couldn't find the space for.
Day 24: Anything you want.
Day 25: Fanfic and meta that say what you want, but so much more eloquently.
Day 26: Fanvids and fanmixes that say what you want, but so much more eloquently.
Day 27: Picspams, GIFS, and other fandom things that say what you want, so eloquently you feel redundant.
Day 28: The "exception that proves the rule of the rest of the meme" ship.
This is a tragic and terrifying thing: people RightShip Helo and Athena. Like, actually think theirs is a beautiful love. I personally think it is the single most squicktastic relationship in the BSG verse, which is no small feat. (For purposes of this, I'm going to call the Eight who eventually comes to refer to herself as Sharon Agathon as Athena. Helo/Eights generally is fascinating and fantastic, because it's a way of highlighting everything wrong with this relationship.)
The way it starts is bad enough, with Athena lying to Helo about who she is so he'll have sex with her and maybe impregnate her. The "woman desperate for a BAAAAAAAAAYBEEEEE" trope this invokes is irrelevant next to the fact that that's rape. Athena knows he wouldn't want to sleep with a Cylon, or probably with anyone who wasn't Boomer, and she knows she's not Boomer.
But honestly, it's what follows that really freaks me the fuck out. Sharon, along with Five and however many Sixes, keeps on stringing Helo along for weeks - no, months - conspiring with dozens of other cylons to manipulate him into this whole jaws-of-death trauma bond. Then, when he finds out the truth, she turns it back around on him and guilts him for his completely reasonable feelings of betrayal, having withheld knowledge of her pregnancy for the moment when it would have the maximum impact on him. The Helo/Athena storyline down on Caprica is a shockingly good portrayal of the dissonance between the Cylons' sophisticated cerebral grasp on human psychology and their unwillingness to acknowledge even their small amount of empathy for human emotion.
I think the narrative sometime remembers the utter creeepiness of that relationship at least up through the end of 2.5. The scenes where he visits her in the jail cell have that haunting tinkling music behind them, and Grace Park sells the hell out of the way Sharon has the intellectual upper hand even from behind bars. Not coincidentally, I also think the time between Kobol and New Caprica is also the point at which Sharon's story was at its sharpest and most effective concerning her own vulnerability as a pregnant POW. This story doesn't need pitiful perfect victims and cackling full-blown evil villains, it needs detailed portrayal of actions and events.
But after the jump to New Caprica, that thread gets dropped. A year passes - a whole year *eyeroll* - and they get MAWWIED, so OF COURSE everything is miraculously all better! All of their conflict from there on out is about how their marriage is a cylon/human relationship. Not about what anyone involved did or does, but about some mystical divide in some essential natures. I'm not saying identity isn't important, I'm just saying, what folks do (for good or ill) shouldn't be completely ignored in favor of what they are. In this case, Athena Stockholmed Helo good and proper, to the extent where Helo never shakes it off. He only shows discomfort with the relationship in the episodes on the Basestar, when he's confronted with her Cylon nature - again, not what Athena or the other Eights did to him or anyone else. Helo's and Athena's conflicts are shown as being them against a world where nobody! understands! their! love! BIGOTS!!!
Don't even get me started on the fucking Hera thing. Laura Roslin STOLE! OUR! BABY! Except when you remember how thoroughly gross this relationship is, you realize that the story goes more along the lines of: Laura Roslin, pursuant to her official capacity as a state authority and her ethical obligation as the only grown-up left in the universe, rescued a helpless infant from a mass murderer who spent all of her free time stomping around her cell yelling I REGRET NOTHING!!! and said mass murderer's thoroughly brainwashed accomplice. Um, that bitch? lol@haters.
Actually, lies. Let's get me started on the Fucking Hera Thing. Because dag, it's perfect. This is a story with a lot of perspectives that get fair airing. Roslin's security concerns for the fleet at large and for Hera individually are valid. Helo's need to trust the people around him leads him to a conclusion that's both right (nobody hurt the baby) and wrong (she didn't die), and it cranks up the cognitive dissonance he's experiencing between his feelings for Athena and his position as a sworn defender of humans. Athena's suspicion of the humans makes perfect sense as well, and her trauma at the whole thing very sympathetic and real, but her determination to jump directly to the most brutal possible scenario smacks of projection. (I mean, who kills a baby? Or helps to kill millions of babies? OH WAIT.) And look what she does with it:
Helo: It's important. And I'll be with you there and back. It's you and me from now on, no matter what. Just like we agreed.
Athena: I know. I know. I really appreciate it, Helo, I really do. I just can't get her out of my head. Our little girl.[LDYB 1]
Helo: Why the frak didn't you say anything?
Athena: I don't know. Maybe I didn't want to. Maybe I wanted him to come here and blow up the whole ship. Is that what you're looking for?
Helo: You don't mean that. Sharon, we finally got the Admiral to start trusting us. Finally! And what?
Athena: They killed my baby. You think I care about you or us or whether the Admiral trusts me anymore? [walks away]
Helo: Hey! Sharon! I love you! And I'm not giving up this frakkin' easy! Not after everything! [LDYB 2]
She turns it into yet another way to isolate Helo emotionally. Encourages his trust and support for her, and uses it to sabotage the rescue mission to Caprica. Which I do love, in that she was a character who could take even such a deep, personal wound and spin it to protecting her own survival. (And she does need Helo for protection at this point, which is also pretty scary and unhealthy.) But I also think it shows a relationship that's gone entirely too deep into horrible mind games to come back up and become good.
Arguably, it might not be so much that the writers are doing it wrong, per se, so much as they're espousing a wrong point of view exceptionally well. The Helo/Athena relationship seems intended to be a microcosmic reflection of human/cylon relations, complete with commentary on the idea of reconciliation. And I'd agree with that, actually, and I think the ship was effectively used on a metaphoric level while still working as a specific emotional story between these two characters. I don't much care for the heavy-handed and scientifically incorrect Hera, Mother of All thing, but I do see how throughout the series the hybrid baby was used to show that there was a new civilization being pressed out of the remnants of the old ones.
However.
The story - for both Helo/Athena specifically and human/cylon generally - did a lot of telling one thing and showing another. It told us that reconciliation and peace were normatively good and only difficult in execution because of the stupid bigoted unwashed masses. But it showed us Cylons who merrily rolled along with little to no empathy, understanding, or regret for how sorely they had victimized the humans around them, expecting not only mercy but immediate trust and acceptance the instant it became in their self-interest to knock it off, and humans that had been so thoroughly browbeaten by the Cylon assault from within and without that they didn't know up from down enough to grapple with what was happening to them. As much as I as a viewer enjoy Helo/Athena as a story and individual Cylons as antagonists, I'm still morally comfortable being Team Human, and Helo/Athena still makes my blood run cold.
Which is why Helo/Athena still makes the list for this meme, even though I have just RANTED ABOUT IT FOREVER. Because I think it's a fascinating story. I think the discrepancy between Helo's subjective experience of the relationship and the objectively inexcusable way it began and progressed is a I think the emotions there are powerful and real, even if they're also horribly messed up. I'm drawn to the stories that chill me and frighten me and even repulse me.
It's just hard not to wonder, why the fail, and it's even harder not to come to some super-unflattering conclusions. As a point of comparison, consider Kara/Leoben. Leoben's dollhouse on New Caprica isn't different in motivation (Cylon attempt to approximate and enforce human constructs of love) or execution (isolation and dependence on an occupied planet) than Sharon's obstacle course on Caprica. If anything, Leoben's extremely tenuous grip on reality is a factor which could arguably serve to make him less culpable for his behavior than the pragmatic and emotionally astute Sharon is for hers. But the show and (as far as I can tell) fans of the pairing don't sweep the ugliness of Kara/Leoben under the rug. Why the discrepancy? Because Helo and Athena are married and have a baby and if it looks like normative American family life, it can't be abusive? Because Kara's a woman and Helo's a man - or because Leoben is male and Sharon is female? Because Kara, being aware of the manipulation, was in some way able to sufficiently resist, while Helo, having been unaware of the humanoid Cylons and therefore more susceptible to the mind games, was able to rationalize and excuse the horrible relationship? Sure, it's plausible that people might come down on the side of this having been a legitmate relationship and have a positive investment on it, I don't really have a problem with that, but the near-total disappearance of these concerns from the narrative and discourse around it bothers me a lot.
So yeah. Doing it so wrong. Normally when I think writers and viewers are this wrong about something, I at least humor the theoretical possibility that I might be the one who's missing something. But when Joss Whedon goes out of his way to agree with me, what can I say, I roll with it.
[whole meme below]
Day 1: The ship you don't want to be endgame.
Day 2: The ship you love because it really never will happen.
Day 3: "They are the worst possible thing to happen to each other" ship.
Day 4: The ship that would ruin/assassinate the characters if it happened.
Day 5: The ship where your favourite scene is the most dysfunctional one.
Day 6: The ship where the rest of its fandom is DOING IT WRONG.
Day 7: The ship where the writers are DOING IT WRONG.
Day 8: The ship you want to break up so you can stan the hell out of them.
Day 9: The ship you want to see being a trainwreck tragedy because they're too alike.
Day 10: The ship you want to see being a trainwreck tragedy because they're too different.
Day 11: The ship you love for its creepiness.
Day 12: The ship you love for the power difference.
Day 13: The ship you love for the way they hurt each other.
Day 14: The ship you love for the angst, banishing all joy and sunlight.
Day 15: The couple that are at their moral worst when around each other.
Day 16: Most creatively homicidal ship.
Day 17: The ship that looked like a fairytale but isn't or never was.
Day 18: The ship with the most transference issues.
Day 19: The starcrossed ship where the obvious reason they're starcrossed is the least interesting aspect to you.
Day 20: The couple you only ship in an "in another lifetime" sort of way.
Day 21: A couple you ship for the wrong reasons that fits none of these criteria.
Day 22: A couple you ship for the wrong reasons that fits too many of these criteria.
Day 23: A ship you wanted to include but couldn't find the space for.
Day 24: Anything you want.
Day 25: Fanfic and meta that say what you want, but so much more eloquently.
Day 26: Fanvids and fanmixes that say what you want, but so much more eloquently.
Day 27: Picspams, GIFS, and other fandom things that say what you want, so eloquently you feel redundant.
Day 28: The "exception that proves the rule of the rest of the meme" ship.