Until I get a Six Feet Under icon, this one will have to do for now.
For starters today, birthday question. Is it lennongirl's birthday? Ani, if it's your birthday today or tomorrow or yesterday, happy birthday! I'm sure that you're doing something awesome over there at home. Hee.
Now in relation to Six Feet Under, as you know or don't know, I had a Six Feet Under marathon recently. I watched the series over a week and will probably be rewatching the episodes in the next few weeks to be able to digest more of it. It really is so poignant and so incredibly well-written and it probably has the best series finale that I've seen, ever. No weird fade to blacks, no last happy scene without knowing about what happened to them in the future. Charmed came close to this but of course not as powerful or insightful.
That said, there are a lot of issues brought up throughout the series but one in particular stood out to me. Lost recaps constantly observe that any time anyone on that show has an issue, it's usually a "Daddy Issue". Six Feet Under wasn't an exception. There was Keith's feelings toward his father. Nathaniel Sr. popped up throughout the entire series and the children analyzed their relationship with him. In Queer as Folk, Brian's father beat him and Michael never knew his father and Justin's dad disowned him.
Why do you think that television shows explore the father dynamic more than the mother dynamic? Is it more powerful to explore the more masculine dynamic? Is it just because fathers do often abandon their children or cause some kind of traumatic experience in childhood that continues to affect that child as an adult?
I'm always thinking about the parental dynamic in Disney movies because the fathers are almost always around and they kill the mothers. In movies that aren't animated, the girl raised by her father (without any siblings or female siblings) always appears as a tomboy because she hasn't had that female exposure. Disney female characters (princesses) seen so in touch with their femininity.
So, why is the paternal dynamic more prevalent in television?