LJ commen limit, sigh...okay, the complexity of GwenhohaiyeeJanuary 2 2010, 20:15:47 UTC
I'm pro-choice. So I do not see Gwen not wanting a baby or not wanting to keep her pregnancy as a bad thing...I pointed it out as an example of Gwen not having a happy ending after all, so in S3, it was actually an example of #2...even bleaker than #1. In #1, we have classics where the focus is on the white straight people's happy ending, while the minorities get the shaft, even in happier stories (for example, they remain servants for life). In #2, more prevalent in modern Darker and Edgier, even they don't get the happy ending, but they are the only survivors, and the Unfortunate Implications are doubled when the situation implies that those that could conform, must conform to survive.
Kansas is a reference of course, to Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy returns to Kansas at the end...alike to Alice In Wonderland. The lesson being, don't go anywhere. In Torchwood, Jack tried to be good, and the house he built burnt down around him. Gwen tried to explore new things, get slapped back to her Normal life.
Gwen is someone who's impulsive to the point of being destructive (the DJ at her wedding, though she was compromised by hormones, cheated and drugged her lover. She also shares The Cast with Owen, alien hormone spray using date rapist. Ianto, who endangered the world to save ONE person, his girlfriend. Tosh, who gave in to the terrorists and fell in love with her one night stand. Jack...who was a con-man and totally did worse.
The problem with Gwen then, isn't that she have flaws, but that she's singled out as The Heart, and her flaws are dismissed, her consequences don't come back to bite her,
I'm a media geek, so I think beyond what's on screen, the execution, I think about the blue prints, the character concepts, etc. I'm a fan of comic books...in TV, because there are different writers, characterization depends on the writer, but in comic books, even more so, because character concept is frequently played with due to the canon aus.
RTD wrote less than a handful of Torchwood eps, and I really don't agree with his concept of Gwen, what he says she is and what she comes across as on screen, is veeery different. On the other hand, I like this one better; "Stephen James Walker believes that what makes Gwen a compelling character is her moral ambiguity. Since she was introduced as an audience surrogate, Walker claims that it would have been an easy trap to fall into to make her a "one-dimensional paragon of virtue". Instead, the writers made Gwen more "realistic" by giving her "distinct human failings", which Walker feels make her "arguably the most complex and interesting of the five regulars". He identifies these failures as her "tendency towards egotism", "self-righteousness", and "selfishness", as evident in her "highly questionable treatment" of boyfriend Rhys."
As someone who reads fanfic and sometimes write them, and again, a comic book fan, I find that the blueprint has the potential to be very complex, and if we disregard RTD's remarks about Gwen, we can find complexity in her character that he wouldn't agree with. Between RTD's Wonder Woman and Petty Sociopath(the drugging again...), in the hands of any good writer, someone like Gwen could be the aknowledged Girl-Woman, unintentionally sensitive but well-intentional, and developmentally 'not done baking yet', something she is aware of at heart, and is a great source of conflict because Society Says You Should Marry A Man And Have a Baby, or at the very least, know where you are at life when you are 18 and magically an adult, even though people make major career changes five times on average.
Complexity, in execution, in consistent execution, would have been marvelous, but from RTD and Myles, we got this character who's suppose to be Wonder Women, but she couldn't even hold a knife properly, and she became a sharp shooter without enough development (and there was actually a good part to put development in, like, right at the beginning of CoE, they could have shown Gwen at the shooting range, really sweating some, before going back up to tap the photo of Owen and Tosh). She's also 'The Heart' who laughed during the queer jokes at Ianto, not cool.
Kansas is a reference of course, to Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy returns to Kansas at the end...alike to Alice In Wonderland. The lesson being, don't go anywhere. In Torchwood, Jack tried to be good, and the house he built burnt down around him. Gwen tried to explore new things, get slapped back to her Normal life.
Gwen is someone who's impulsive to the point of being destructive (the DJ at her wedding, though she was compromised by hormones, cheated and drugged her lover. She also shares The Cast with Owen, alien hormone spray using date rapist. Ianto, who endangered the world to save ONE person, his girlfriend. Tosh, who gave in to the terrorists and fell in love with her one night stand. Jack...who was a con-man and totally did worse.
The problem with Gwen then, isn't that she have flaws, but that she's singled out as The Heart, and her flaws are dismissed, her consequences don't come back to bite her,
I'm a media geek, so I think beyond what's on screen, the execution, I think about the blue prints, the character concepts, etc. I'm a fan of comic books...in TV, because there are different writers, characterization depends on the writer, but in comic books, even more so, because character concept is frequently played with due to the canon aus.
RTD wrote less than a handful of Torchwood eps, and I really don't agree with his concept of Gwen, what he says she is and what she comes across as on screen, is veeery different. On the other hand, I like this one better; "Stephen James Walker believes that what makes Gwen a compelling character is her moral ambiguity. Since she was introduced as an audience surrogate, Walker claims that it would have been an easy trap to fall into to make her a "one-dimensional paragon of virtue". Instead, the writers made Gwen more "realistic" by giving her "distinct human failings", which Walker feels make her "arguably the most complex and interesting of the five regulars". He identifies these failures as her "tendency towards egotism", "self-righteousness", and "selfishness", as evident in her "highly questionable treatment" of boyfriend Rhys."
As someone who reads fanfic and sometimes write them, and again, a comic book fan, I find that the blueprint has the potential to be very complex, and if we disregard RTD's remarks about Gwen, we can find complexity in her character that he wouldn't agree with. Between RTD's Wonder Woman and Petty Sociopath(the drugging again...), in the hands of any good writer, someone like Gwen could be the aknowledged Girl-Woman, unintentionally sensitive but well-intentional, and developmentally 'not done baking yet', something she is aware of at heart, and is a great source of conflict because Society Says You Should Marry A Man And Have a Baby, or at the very least, know where you are at life when you are 18 and magically an adult, even though people make major career changes five times on average.
Complexity, in execution, in consistent execution, would have been marvelous, but from RTD and Myles, we got this character who's suppose to be Wonder Women, but she couldn't even hold a knife properly, and she became a sharp shooter without enough development (and there was actually a good part to put development in, like, right at the beginning of CoE, they could have shown Gwen at the shooting range, really sweating some, before going back up to tap the photo of Owen and Tosh). She's also 'The Heart' who laughed during the queer jokes at Ianto, not cool.
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