oh, the non-surprise
And in other news: some very tentative looking at Once Upon A Time communities and at the fanfiction sent me back in a hurry with renewed resolution to only read reviews/comments from people I know. It's the phenomenon I first encountered during ye olde Highlander days with Methos and since then kept running into in fandom after fandom over the decades. You know, same old: canon delivers fascinating shades of grey or layered villain character. Hooray! Only... hang on. Why do so many people decide nothing is ever this character's fault and he's misunderstood and why are those MEEAAAAAN people not forgiving already, not that there is anything to forgive because he didn't seriously do anything wrong, and anyway, he's cool, and so forth, and so on. Only this time, said phenomanon comes two editions, one for Rumplestilskin and one for Regina, and for God's sake, did I really just read someone saying Snow & Charming ought to be ever so grateful to Rumpel because of everything he did for them and their family and how he "kept them safe"? SERIOUSLY?
(Also, one would think it to be self evident that blaming a seven years old child is evidence of a warped perspective, but apparantly not.)
*Deep breath* All of this has happened before. And all of this will happen again.
Incidentally, for all my renewed growling about Bill Adama, rewatching some BSG has reminded me that BSG generally atually was good about this. Both the canon and the fandom, by and large, at least to the extent that I recall (and I was admittedly never completely emersed, since the two main ships - Kara/Lee and Adama/Roslin - were ships I actively disliked). The show gave you the Cylon perspective from late s2 onwards in addition to the human one, but it never ignored or downplayed the genocide that started the saga. Most of the characters were enormously flawed, but (in varying degrees) understandable nonetheless, and there were moments of sympathy for everyone, but I never felt that if character X didn't want to forgive character Y, we were asked to see X ans Meaaaaan. There is this moment in Faith (season 4) where right after Kara & a small group of humans have made contact with the rebel Cylons and a tentative alliance is in the progress of being made, a Six recognizes Jean Barolay as one of the humans who killed her in a painful way on New Caprica. Barolay, who'd belonged to the resistance both on Caprica and on New Caprica and had fought against a brutal occupation, is naturally anything but sorry to hear this and gives a taunting reply. The Six loses it and kills her. Cue everyone pulling guns on each other. Our scriptwriters, Weddle & Thompson, whom Ron Moore had worked before with on DS9, evidently have watched Lawrence of Arabia and liked it a lot, since the solution Natalie, another Six model and the temporary leader of the rebel Cylons, finds is the one Lawrence picks in LoA's first half: she kills the Six (who can't download anymore, unlike in New Caprica, and therefore will genuinenly be dead) herself, thereby preventing an escalation and saving an alliance. Meanwhile, there is a whole additional mini drama going on in the background because Barolay was Sam Anders' oldest surviving comrade from the Caprica days, he's only recently found out he's a Cylon himself and is filled with self loathing about it but also curious, so he goes from almost touching the interfaces on the basestar to pulling a gun on the Six and wanting to kill her to watching Natalie kill her to (several scenes later) holding the hand of a dying Eight. The thing that struck me most about the scene about rewatching is that you, or at least I, can feel everyone's perspective and can also see why they're unable to see the others' pov. Jean Barolay saw someone who'd been part of an oppressive regime and then dared to be surprised the people they were oppressing fought back. (That this particular Six had not been in combat with her was immaterial; she was still part of the regime.) The Six saw someone who'd inflincted immense physical pain on her and still gloated about it. Both perspectives were true. (Incidentally, there is a DS9 episode called The Darkness and the Light - I haven't googled it, but I think it was one of the Ron Moore ones - in which Kira gets kidnapped by a Cardassian (who intents to kill her), who as it turns out had been crippled by her resistance group. He points out he had been a civilian, not part of the Cardassian military, and that this had been true for most of the people who'd died in that particular attack. Kira retorts that since the Cardassians were occupying Bajor, there were no Cardassian civilians. (One episode was written before, one after the second Iraq War, and let's not forget the amazing switcheroo the show pulled off at the start of s3, when viewers went in expecting the Cylon occupation of New Caprica to be yet another Nazi occupation of France in space variation and then suddenly got presented with Iraq parallels, making the Cylons Americans instead. Oh, and both star Nana Visitor, who plays a dying cancer patient in Faith's other plot thread with Laura Roslin.) To get back to my point, Faith doesn't say that Barolay should have been nicer to the Six, or that the Six should have had just gotten over it. (The overall show says that Thou Shalt Not Oppress Others, which invariably has bad results, of course.) I feel more for Barolay because we've known her longer(and also, like Kira, she hadn't been killing just because, she had done it as part of a very unequal struggle), but I also feel sorry for the Six. And for Natalie. And for Sam who has the identity crisis from hell in addition to losing someone who'd fought at his side for years and yet somehow manages to come out of this not bitter and hating everyone but still capable of empathy. BSG was a flawed and at times very bleak show, but it also kept having this presentation of humans (and Cylons, so maybe I should say "sentient beings") as complicated and trying, though not always succeeding, to cope with life; as people capable of doing both horrible and wonderful things to each other. I guess that's why for all my frustrations with individual storylines and some overall decisions, I keep coming back to it, and do get a lot of narrative satisfaction from it.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/878160.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
(Also, one would think it to be self evident that blaming a seven years old child is evidence of a warped perspective, but apparantly not.)
*Deep breath* All of this has happened before. And all of this will happen again.
Incidentally, for all my renewed growling about Bill Adama, rewatching some BSG has reminded me that BSG generally atually was good about this. Both the canon and the fandom, by and large, at least to the extent that I recall (and I was admittedly never completely emersed, since the two main ships - Kara/Lee and Adama/Roslin - were ships I actively disliked). The show gave you the Cylon perspective from late s2 onwards in addition to the human one, but it never ignored or downplayed the genocide that started the saga. Most of the characters were enormously flawed, but (in varying degrees) understandable nonetheless, and there were moments of sympathy for everyone, but I never felt that if character X didn't want to forgive character Y, we were asked to see X ans Meaaaaan. There is this moment in Faith (season 4) where right after Kara & a small group of humans have made contact with the rebel Cylons and a tentative alliance is in the progress of being made, a Six recognizes Jean Barolay as one of the humans who killed her in a painful way on New Caprica. Barolay, who'd belonged to the resistance both on Caprica and on New Caprica and had fought against a brutal occupation, is naturally anything but sorry to hear this and gives a taunting reply. The Six loses it and kills her. Cue everyone pulling guns on each other. Our scriptwriters, Weddle & Thompson, whom Ron Moore had worked before with on DS9, evidently have watched Lawrence of Arabia and liked it a lot, since the solution Natalie, another Six model and the temporary leader of the rebel Cylons, finds is the one Lawrence picks in LoA's first half: she kills the Six (who can't download anymore, unlike in New Caprica, and therefore will genuinenly be dead) herself, thereby preventing an escalation and saving an alliance. Meanwhile, there is a whole additional mini drama going on in the background because Barolay was Sam Anders' oldest surviving comrade from the Caprica days, he's only recently found out he's a Cylon himself and is filled with self loathing about it but also curious, so he goes from almost touching the interfaces on the basestar to pulling a gun on the Six and wanting to kill her to watching Natalie kill her to (several scenes later) holding the hand of a dying Eight. The thing that struck me most about the scene about rewatching is that you, or at least I, can feel everyone's perspective and can also see why they're unable to see the others' pov. Jean Barolay saw someone who'd been part of an oppressive regime and then dared to be surprised the people they were oppressing fought back. (That this particular Six had not been in combat with her was immaterial; she was still part of the regime.) The Six saw someone who'd inflincted immense physical pain on her and still gloated about it. Both perspectives were true. (Incidentally, there is a DS9 episode called The Darkness and the Light - I haven't googled it, but I think it was one of the Ron Moore ones - in which Kira gets kidnapped by a Cardassian (who intents to kill her), who as it turns out had been crippled by her resistance group. He points out he had been a civilian, not part of the Cardassian military, and that this had been true for most of the people who'd died in that particular attack. Kira retorts that since the Cardassians were occupying Bajor, there were no Cardassian civilians. (One episode was written before, one after the second Iraq War, and let's not forget the amazing switcheroo the show pulled off at the start of s3, when viewers went in expecting the Cylon occupation of New Caprica to be yet another Nazi occupation of France in space variation and then suddenly got presented with Iraq parallels, making the Cylons Americans instead. Oh, and both star Nana Visitor, who plays a dying cancer patient in Faith's other plot thread with Laura Roslin.) To get back to my point, Faith doesn't say that Barolay should have been nicer to the Six, or that the Six should have had just gotten over it. (The overall show says that Thou Shalt Not Oppress Others, which invariably has bad results, of course.) I feel more for Barolay because we've known her longer(and also, like Kira, she hadn't been killing just because, she had done it as part of a very unequal struggle), but I also feel sorry for the Six. And for Natalie. And for Sam who has the identity crisis from hell in addition to losing someone who'd fought at his side for years and yet somehow manages to come out of this not bitter and hating everyone but still capable of empathy. BSG was a flawed and at times very bleak show, but it also kept having this presentation of humans (and Cylons, so maybe I should say "sentient beings") as complicated and trying, though not always succeeding, to cope with life; as people capable of doing both horrible and wonderful things to each other. I guess that's why for all my frustrations with individual storylines and some overall decisions, I keep coming back to it, and do get a lot of narrative satisfaction from it.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/878160.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.