Fair Warning
If you like Luc, you may not want to read this. No offense to anyone who likes him - especially if you can argue your case intelligently. It's only his overly-vocal and apparently fickle fans I look on with more than a little bit of disdain (yes, I am an elitist snob). I know there are characters I don't frequently write - Robert, Ryan, Holly, Rebecca are chief among them. Partially it's because I'm not really a fan of those characters, to put it mildly, and partially because I don't feel I can get a hold of their characters - and characterization is something I try really hard to capture in my stories (with differing degrees of success, I know).
So, with the latest reports that Gilles Marini is in talks to become a regular, I'd just like to state upfront that - unless something changes drastically with how he's portrayed on the show and how he interacts with the other characters (namely, that they start to interact in a way where they're not all just drooling over his perfection) - Luc will not appear in any of my stories. What's more, he most likely will not even exist in the world of my stories, even if they are canon-based and not AU. I don't like him, and I doubt I ever will no matter what they do with him or how they develop him in the future. I don't like the "actor." I don't like the character. He certainly hasn't earned the right to be in the rest of this season and a regular next year. I feel they went about the addition of him to the show completely wrong if they wanted people who watch with their brains to actually like him, and I can only hope his role remains as relatively small as it was when he first appeared, if at all possible, and he remains as small of a character, if not smaller, as Scotty, Joe and Julia have been/were forced to be for years. I think what upsets me most of all is that I really feel the show has made a massive creative turn-around this season, and this just really disappoints me because I think the decision is based entirely on ratings and business and not one person gave one fraction of a thought as to whether it was a good idea creatively or would benefit the other characters, including Sarah. Aren't we finally getting rid of the "perfect male specimen" character, the "ratings-boosting, show-saving big-name-star", the character-destroying and charisma-sucking vampire that the others worship in awe when he's unrealistically shoehorned into the ensemble? Why'd they have to go and add another one?
I hate to get so pathetically upset over a TV show, because there are certainly other things to worry about. I know my dislike of him is irrational. If I didn't love Sarah so much, I wouldn't mind because then I could just ignore her non-family scenes entirely. But she is one of my favorite characters, and I hate to see her saddled with an underdeveloped fantasy just in the hopes of boosting ratings slightly. I hate the thought that all of my favorite characters and these supremely talented actors will have less screentime because they'll have to give a guy whose biggest claim to fame is six-pack abs and a reality competition show even just some of the focus of each episode.
And even if I DID like the character and what he brought to the show, I still wouldn't be able to write him, because of the characterization issue as mentioned. I don't know how to write someone who basically stepped off the cover of a romance novel. In my opinion, there's no character there to capture, and certainly no stories I would find interesting to tell. So from here on out, Sarah will remain the kick-ass, sexy, smart, SINGLE woman I see her as. Maybe she'll have an occasional boyfriend I make up for the heck of it, but I always have and always will prefer to see her as a mother, a sister, a daughter, a businesswoman, someone who is a little flawed, maybe a little lonely, but still awesome enough to be an interesting and fun character even without a forced love interest. (By the way, as a happily single woman still managing to lead a fulfilling and relatively successful life, I find it, frankly, insulting that the majority of her storylines since about the middle of last season have been about her slutting around and/or pining after every guy who said hello to her. As if there's nothing else they could do with her character besides make her man-crazy.)
Ahem. Rant over.