Dysfunctional Shipping Awareness Month, Days 6&7

[pocochina]

Have y'all missed my stabby pointer finger? I know I have! Adama-grade temper tantrum about some extremely disturbing topics below the cut.

Comments

[boot_the_grime]

There are certainly disturbing aspects of Helo/Athena - the entire way how they got involved - but I think you interpret her character as far more calculating than she is. I found her very sympathetic during season 2. I only started hating her in seasons 3 and 4 when everyone seemed to be treating her as a perfect hero (while Boomer got the opposite treatment and was turned into a scapegoat), while she was becoming more and more hypocritical and auto-racist. And then it culminated with her literally getting away with murder, and it seemed like the writers saw nothing wrong with that.

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.

LOL, I can imagine Roslin's PR spinning it all that way if it got found out. :p What happened was that Laura Roslin kidnapped a baby from its parents. Pure and simple. That she kidnapped a baby as a person with state authority makes it all the creepier. You can see my opinion of Roslin and her policies in my other post http://pocochina.livejournal.com/222307.html?thread=2500451#t2500451

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:

Or maybe it's a result of Roslin trying to forcefully abort her baby earlier. Not to mention Athena being raped by the Pegasus 'interrogator'. I don't think that the humans as a whole had given her many reasons to think that at least some of them wouldn't be ready to do just about anything, since "Cylons are not people".

[pocochina]

only started hating her in seasons 3 and 4 when everyone seemed to be treating her as a perfect hero (while Boomer got the opposite treatment and was turned into a scapegoat)

man, I love Boomer. That poor girl. I think Athena's anger at the other Cylons was super-interesting, but it doesn't make her seem sympathetic and righteous to me.

I can imagine Roslin's PR spinning it all that way if it got found out

ha! Consider me Laura Roslin's PR team. favorite ever.

What happened was that Laura Roslin kidnapped a baby from its parents. Pure and simple.

This is my thing: that spin on events (and it is spin just as much as my version) gets plenty of airing in the show, and even more airing in fandom. In part because people have a visceral reaction to this, and that's fine, it's a heavily emotional storyline. But *my* spin on events never gets presented except by me, and I think that's in large part because the show is successful in whitewashing Athena and guilting us into losing sight of what she did, to billions of people generally and Helo specifically.

That she kidnapped a baby as a person with state authority makes it all the creepier.

I mean, that's a valid reaction, and certainly the one the show intends you to have. But I happen to think that as a matter of ethics and policy, there are a very small number of circumstances where people lose their right to parent their biological children. and, um, emotionally exploitative rapist mass murderer fits the bill. There's things Roslin does that I wouldn't agree with in a rw context, but I gotta say this isn't one of them.