Comments | pocochina: December Talking Meme, 12/7

pocochina

December Talking Meme, 12/7

Dec 07, 2014 16:15

So....it looks like this may morph into the December-January Talking Meme, because I'm taking way too many interesting prompts to want to turn any of them down. If yours is late, it hasn't been forgotten ( Read more... )

supernatural, bsg: frakkin' toasters!, bsg, meta-fantastica, spn: corpus angelorum

Comments 22

ever_neutral December 8 2014, 00:20:03 UTC

pocochina December 8 2014, 01:07:25 UTC

I still enjoy the Cylons a lot too, even having thought them through to this extent. And I mean, I come down hard on BSG because I think about it a lot, but any one episode of it is worth, you know, the entire series of most shows, so. It's tough to get too mad, lol.

obsessive_a101 December 8 2014, 01:26:06 UTC

OHMYGOSH! I love you, aaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd I love this. (*inner voice*Well, of course, you love this. You asked for it.*pushes inner voice away*) And I wish I have a better and more thoughtful response than saying how you describe all of this really makes sense to me?

Because while I was at least somewhat predisposed towards the angels (or Cas at least - my sister being who she is), I was completedly caught by surprise with how quickly I grabbed a hold of them and their plot-line/storyline and went: "oh bbs, WHY?" in a way that I almost never did with the Cylons (though BOOMER, FOREVER MY BB AND FAVORITE! - thanks to "Downloaded" being one of the 1st episodes I ever saw, and even without any context whatsoever, I FELT for her so much - especially in knowing that the one "friend" she had made was at LEAST partially manipulating her for her own means, which you know, just meant I was more horrified because they were so human-like to me by the time I finally started from the beginning and WATCHED WHAT THEY DID FOR THEIR "ONE TRUE GOD ( ... )

pocochina December 8 2014, 03:22:16 UTC

aw, I'm glad you weren't disappointed!

Look! They can choose to be different. Look, they can love! - "Uhm... Yes....? So they chose to kill all of us?

ahahaha, EXACTLY.

Needless to say though, my love for BSG overall (if simply for the character-work it managed to do - and for the fact that Laura Roslin exists for that show) is overwhelming still. Flaws and all. :)

Yeah, I mean, I can only have the problems I do because the show had a wonderfully organic touch for reproducing how people and groups work. But reproducing isn't always entirely the same thing as understanding or correctly evaluating.

Also, this is a pretty good stab at reminding me of exactly WHY I really need to catch up with Supernatural, because ANGELS MYTHARCS!

I hope I'm not pushing expectations to an unrealistic level when I say I think you'll really like S8+. You can probably afford to skip around S6-7, if you want the thumbnail summary...?

obsessive_a101 December 8 2014, 03:30:52 UTC

I hope so as well, but I'll probably not skip around (I'm a completist at heart when the stakes are high enough) - that plus, TECHNICALLY, still stuck at episode 5x03, so I have to finish that season as well. :)

♥ But definitely no disappointment from me, and now... I need to head to bed for sleep. *so tired*

rosaxx50 December 8 2014, 08:48:52 UTC

But I think it's more about how their respective narratives treat them. The Winchesters are allowed to have their resentment of the angels. They're not vilified for fighting back, or for being angry at the angels. Whereas BSG is all "if you're angry at the fucking lunatics who have spent the last five years trying to fucking kill you....RACIST!!! see, you're just as bad and you TOTALLY DESERVE IT!!I can't speak for the later seasons of spn, but I certainly agree with you that BSG fell down HARD when it came to presenting the cylons/colonial reaction to the cylons in s2. I've never thought of BSG as a response of 9/11, maybe in part because as you point out, the absolute difference between the BSG humans being almost wiped out and chased across the universe by a technologically superior race, vs. America's declaration of war, and the battle in the middle-east, are just... impossible to equate ( ... )

pocochina December 8 2014, 19:37:35 UTC

I can more easily distance myself from the angels in SPN, than in bsg which tries so hard to be dark/gritty/~reflective of the human condition~

I hadn't considered that, but that might be part of it for me as well.

And no, I haven't seen Sarah Connor Chronicles, should I?

rosaxx50 December 9 2014, 09:49:22 UTC

And no, I haven't seen Sarah Connor Chronicles, should I?

It's a great show and I'd definitely recommend it! It also presents a robot apocalypse, but I think the two seasons were a lot more clear-sighted and interesting than BSG, in some ways. Plus, the reinvention where the hero's mother becomes the hero instead, hero learns from the women in his life, gr8 acting and cast...

It's only watching Dollhouse this year and loving it that made me more at peace with TSCC's cancellation (to make room for Dollhouse s2).

local_max December 8 2014, 15:29:08 UTC

Well, I can only talk about BSG directly. Yeah, I mean, I think these criticisms are accurate. I think part of my problem is that I have a hard time with conceptions of agency generally, because I'm close to a determinist. I'm not sure exactly how to unpack the various philosophical baggage that is associated with all this, especially since I have only very vague overviewy stuff. But, let's put it down to these three possibilities for simplicity ( ... )

local_max December 8 2014, 15:30:30 UTC

3) consciousness is something we can't demonstrate conclusively doesn't exist in non-human beings, and that we can only communicate really effectively with other humans is a sign of our own biases and limitations. We can't really conclude that there is anything special about human life. Behaviour may still be good or bad, but the value of human life is not tied to human specialness. Humans' ability to choose AND consciousness are not significantly different from animals' or even nonliving matter. This means that vilification drops out, but protecting people over animals is only justifiable by "uh, well, I guess we have a right to protect being sufficiently like us to ping our emotional centers ( ... )

local_max December 8 2014, 15:38:43 UTC

So maybe there's a 0, which is that it's not the POSSIBILITY of agency, but moral worth, which is the determiner of worthiness to live, and the Cylons should inherit the Colonies because they are better. This is a dangerous, fundamentalist attitude, which is dangerous in a different way than the dangerous relativism when you get all the way to 3. The show tends to be closer to the relativism, IMO, which sort of works with me because I am pretty relativistic, but it also does mean it does some intense victim-blaming and seems unable to think critically about the difference between an individual airlocking and genocide. But, you know, I am on board with Helo in A Measure of Salvation, that the destruction of all the Cylons is a really bad idea. That the Cylons are currently trying to kill them, like, EXTERMINATE them, maybe does change the equation enough. But that's such a huge loss of life, even if it's life that is basically a kind of uniformly "evil" kind ( ... )

pocochina December 8 2014, 21:22:21 UTC

I mean, I was going to say that I think torturing and airlocking Leoben in s1 is wrong -- at least, airlocking him is wrong before it's clear to the Colonials that Cylons get resurrected. But I also get that a) the ticking time bomb scenario may not be real, but if it were it would literally destroy the whole human race, and b) there are extremely limited resources to feed and shelter people

See, I guess...this is where I am a consequentialist, or maybe a jus en bello formalist, or whatever. Because I don't so much think that executing Leoben was out of bounds. Faulty machine or immoral person-equivalent entity, the goal of what he was doing was to cost a lot of civilian lives. But I think that death by airlocking was intended to be particularly cruel. I don't mind Starbuck having been meeeeeen at some points during the interrogation, because they really did need to find out about the hypothetical bomb - but torture is significantly less effective than mind games, and so doing it was about being able to exert power rather than ( ... )

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