Cally, Dee, and Ellen: on the reviled feminine on BSG (Cally)

[pocochina]

womenlovefest concludes! unless I think of something to say tomorrow, or whenever. like I need an excuse to rant about why fandom is wrong to hate women. But I'm grateful to have been provided one, all the same!

Day 1: what gender-neutral society?
Day 2: why these ladies?
Day 3: Ellen Tigh
Day 4: Dee
Day 5: Cally

I admit upfront that while I’ve always liked Cally, I

Comments

[ever_neutral]

Wow, thanks for this post. Particularly since Cally's not one I think about much, truthfully.

Cottle dishes out one of the show’s most explicitly misogynist slams, with (and this part is burned into my brain) “you gotta love a woman who can complain even with her jaw wired shut.”

... WOW. What. How do I not remember this? And I see nothing but love for what an endearing jerk Cottle is.

And women and madness is always a difficult subject, but leaving aside the question of whether the narrative played into problematic tropes with her illness, real women do suffer from post-partum mental health problems.

Yep. And FUCK, Cally was fucked over by the show. That whole business in S4 leaves an awful taste in my mouth. Don't get me started on Galen.

[pocochina]

mm-hmm, it's from LDYB. To remind us that this is a gender-neutral society, and so the show having tiny girls beat on for shock value is okay.

Cottle has a lot of wildly sexist lines. I lost count of the number of times he "young lady"s at Laura. Having him be the only one arguing the pro-choice perspective is one of the many, many problems with TCH, because it implies that the argument for bodily autonomy is best made by paternalistic men. Or the time we're supposed to think he's this Lone Voice of Wisdom when he says gang rape is wrong. (After letting two men who have already beat on Sharon in to loom over her in her hospital gown, no less. I love that arc so, so much, but the VAW issues are handled terribly.)

word on the S4 issue. Cally herself clearly stayed awesome but the show only ever gave us Galen's self-centered perspective on her, and so she was in the margins before being fridged. ugh.

[anonymous]

Cally is a hard one for me. Until New Caprica I like her. And I particularly like her when they are down on Kobol. She is a character right up at the limits of what she can deal with, and sometimes past them, and she  perseveres with getting on with it the best way she can according to what she think matters

[pocochina]

Cally is fantastic on Kobol. She's such a survivor, I love it.

I don't necessarily think that Cally being a mother would've been uninteresting? Her being a good parent could have been used as a fantastic contrast to that awful bully Bill, or the shocking selfishness of Helo and Athena (who, upon finding out Hera was NOT DEAD, went into snit fits about their wounded pride instead of sparing a second to be happy about it, blah blah everyone sucks but Laura as we know). I agree that it's gender-conventional, but I don't think that precludes a good story unless the show is assuming that normatively feminine women must be boring and thus shutting her POV out, which is what I think happened.

Asking me to care so much about Cally when Laura is about to be killed is one of my lowest Battlestar moments. And I can't help seeing that through the age issue. Television and fandom in television are obsessed with young characters.That is a great point and probably does explain a lot of the increased fail

[korenap]

Going for catch up. Yes I'd rather read your meta than fic. Fic rarely makes me think.

There is something about your posts regarding these characters and why I hate that fanfic is categorized by ship and tends to revolve around ship. I so was the fic info to tell me if you have a female protagonist. Identify what the character is fighting to overcome please. Make the relationship serve to develop the character, not the other way around. I don't care about fealty to canon, I want to see a character grow.

[pocochina]

thank you! I'm so glad you've enjoyed.

I hate that fanfic is categorized by ship and tends to revolve around ship

PREACH. Why is genfic so hard to find? I don't mind if characters are in canon or non-canon relationships, but the romantic relationships in and of themselves are not the most interesting parts of the show to me. And when I do love a ship, it's because the characters bring out something interesting in each other, and I want most to see that trait dragged out.

[korenap]

Well I can't say I don't write fic around romantic relationships. I have my one posted fic and it has femslash, though I tried to make it about the evolution of a character making choices for herself and figuring out who she is and what she values.

The more women I see writing almost exclusively male characters, the more I want to write women. The person whose fic I did a remix of insisted that a major male character be dead. At first I found this an incredible hardship, especially when I found myself having to kill off another male to deal with the void. Now I'm glad that the number of men running around has dropped. It's forced more women rise to the top as I continue to write the story. Now many friendships have to be between women. There are more f/f couples as well. I think its going to be the women who finish what the men started, with much better results than we got in the series.

Given how replete the fandom is with m/m and m/f fic I'm increasingly comfortable with this.

[astreamofstars]

I say this quite a lot. I have no problem with shippy fic, but my main interest in reading fic is in the individual characters that I love (no guesses needed to know who I'm mainly talking about here), and what I want from a piece of fic is to experience a story about that character, where I learn something about the character or get to watch her from an interesting viewpoint. That can happen in shippy fic, but it doesn't have to be shippy and sometimes the best stuff isn't, and I think this is also why I tend to like a lot of different ships, because each one explores a different angle on the character. I never really know how to express that without it coming across to fandom as me saying "You guys write too much sex" though ... I think I upset people sometimes. And that isn't even what I'm saying, exactly. It's more just saying I'd like to read something new and different and explore my character through numerous different methods, not just one.

[rose_griffes]

I can get why people feel ambivalent about Cally, because she was forced into so many different roles early on. She's cute and feisty! She bites ears of potential rapists! She... killed Boomer. And then things start getting messy, although I'm inclined to giving her a pass, because 1) her victim didn't actually die and 2) that same victim was part of what killed 99.99% of humanity just a few months before.

Hard to be the character that voices the opinions of "the people" when everyone else is magnanimous and forgiving of minor things like genocide. (Unless it's a day when they're planning to toss people out the airlock instead.)

Bwah, Cally hate just makes me want to rant. Really, I should just say, "Yes, I agree with you!" and leave it at that. Heh.

[pocochina]

Ranting is THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE to Cally-hate, because she is FABULOUS.

Hard to be the character that voices the opinions of "the people" when everyone else is magnanimous and forgiving of minor things like genocide. (Unless it's a day when they're planning to toss people out the airlock instead.)

YES, exactly. I feel like she got the brunt of it when the narrative decided to try to handwave the fact that actually, most people hated the Cylons because they had every reason in the world to do so, and ABSOLUTELY NO REASON NOT TO. Clearly I loved her more every time she said something to that effect.