Best Friends For... a rather limited time-span? (Spoilers for West Wing, BtVS, AtS and DS9)

[selenak]

Recently I rewatched some West Wing episodes (from early s3, and the one where the Republicans call a tax for millionaires "the death tax" to lobby against it made me go "zomg, Sorkin and friends really were prescient sometimes!"), and aside from revelling in dialogue, character affection etc., it reminded me of a suspension of disbelief problem of

Comments

[nomadicwriter]

Oddly enough, I've been thinking about this sort of thing recently. I've been catching up on the detective show Lewis, the spin-off to the long-running Inspector Morse, and I'm really struck by how present Morse is all the time, how much he gets mentioned, how much Lewis remembers him. I suppose that's a less tangled situation than most cast losses, since they wrote Morse's death in as the appropriate way to end the show (and John Thaw who played him died not long after) and he was the iconic lead character, but still, I'm constantly amazed by how much he's remembered within the show's universe, in a way that other TV shows just don't do with absent characters

[selenak]

So yeah, while it does bug me a little when people suddenly try to portray characters as BFFs who do everything together when they haven't been like that in a long time, it actually bugs me a lot more when fic-writers try to 'explain' the split with epic angsty off-screen backstory.

Interesting. What about using on screen events to deduce that such and such might have caused character A to keep more of a distance?n

[nomadicwriter]

That doesn't bother me quite so much, as long as it's not over-dramatised. I guess my aversion to that subgenre of fic is down to how often it's used to launch a melodramatic angstfest of how Designated Fandom Woobie has been cruelly, horribly mistreated by his former friend/boyfriend (who is almost inevitably my favourite character of the pair). Dissolution of a relationship is probably an interesting topic if it's treated in a way that goes into the issues on both sides, but I've been burned too many times by seeing it segue into the dreaded, "Character A must apologise for everything he's ever done in order to be worthy of regaining affection," fic.

West Wing season three is a case in point, where I saw many, many Poor Mistreated Woobie Sam fics launched off the fact that he and Josh had slightly fewer scenes focused on their friendship that in earlier years, and also sometimes stood further apart in meetings. (I wish I was kidding about that last part.) And Stargate fandom is even worse for it.

[selenak]

Oh, I hate grovelfic as well, but that wasn't what I had in mind at all.

Your example: zomg, and here I had assumed Sam and Josh were both the Designated Fandom Woobies. (Based on fannish osmosis over the years and the way the crack van recs talk about them.) Though given nobody beats Richard Schiff when it comes to sad eyes, I'd be surprised if Toby wasn't also a Designated Fandom Woobie.

[nomadicwriter]

Heh. I think they're both designated woobies individually, but if you ever get the two of them together in a fic, Sam generally takes precedence. Toby seems to largely escape the curse of woobiedom. I think possibly the beard gives him immunity.