The one where I really like White Collar.

[thepresidentrix]

So far, any positive comments I've seen about White Collar - including my own - have made a point of saying that it's brainless (if extremely pretty) fun. But I begin to wonder exactly what we mean by that.

I mean, it is tv, which is usually not your high water mark for intellectual stimulation, and by virtue of its very premise, White Collar has

Comments

Re: thread-jumping!

[tempestsarekind]

I think that's all very true, and very frustrating. I know what my physical type tends to be, to the extent that I have one (more on that in a second), and it doesn't match up with, say, Brad Pitt (snooze) or whatever muscly guy is on the cover of the most magazines at the moment. (I don't mean to sound quite so snarky about that, oops.) But it's assumed that I will be attracted to whoever the "it" guy is, and if I'm not, then I'm weird. (A friend of mine constantly accuses me of liking "effeminate" guys, where "effeminate" apparently = "not totally ripped." Bleh.)

But the other part of this is that I'm way more attracted to personality than I am to physical things; or at least it's only after I've fallen for the personality that I find those physical things attractive. This happened with David Tennant, whom I didn't start finding attractive until I started loving Ten in S3; and Matthew Macfadyen (Arthur Clennam); and definitely Paul Gross, whom I liked quite a lot, even, as Geoffrey Tennant, but didn't find attractive until I started watching due South. (ETA: I hasten to say that once that process has happened, I find these people deeply attractive on a physical level--my reaction to the publicity shots of David Tennant in Elizabethan clothes, for Love's Labor's Lost, was one of the most inarticulately girly moments I've had--but it sometimes takes a while for that to occur.)

So part of my failure to find the traditionally attractive guys attractive is probably that they wind up getting cast, overwhelmingly, as somewhat bland leading men, whose personalities don't do much to draw me in. And those guys are often characters who, yes, do know that they're pretty, so it reinforces that reaction you have, maybe--I have it too, sometimes.