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selenakYou know, it occured to me that within the last decade or so, I mostly fell for shows (and books, and movies) where the main characters were just as interesting and complex as the sidekicks and/or villains. Not exclusively; for example, I had a brief fling with Earth: Final Conflict where neither Boone nor Liam did anything for me but Sandoval, Da'an, Zo'or and Lily always did. (Then the writing went to hell for every character, but that's another tale of woe.) But mostly. Which means I developed a certain allergy to a phenomenon quite common in a lot of fandoms, called hero-bashing.
Here are the basics: if the hero (male or female) does anything right, it's taken for granted and evidence he/she is a bland character; if he/she does anything wrong, it's not because of flaws that make him/her a three-dimensional character, no, it's an unforgivable act. If a sidekick complains, it's adorable; if a hero(ine) does it, it's whining. If a hero(ine) has communication problems and closes herself/himself off, it's cold/bitchy/heartless/any of the above; if a second lead/sidekick/whoever-but-not-the-title-character does it, it speaks of depth and only adds to the allure of the character. (If you're thinking of, say, Buffy Summers and Wesley Wyndham-Pryce respectively here, you're not wrong.) Let a hero behave jealously, and the ranting about his/her self-centredness goes on for eons; let a sidekick do the same, and it's just a phase or cute or three-dimensional. (Witness the different reaction in Potterdom to Ron being jealous of Harry in GoF, and Harry being jealous of Ron in OotP.) And so on, and so forth.
Which is why I'm pretty quick to jump to the defense of quite a lot of those folks in the central positions. Not in every case, though. And there is a difference between criticism and bashing. Which leads me to Babylon 5, a rather unusual case in that it's so much of an ensemble show you can't really asign a single hero/central character/lead position. For example, JMS, B5's creator, has been known to say that the heart of the show is the Londo-and-G'kar storyarc, and if Babylon 5 were the story of any of the invidiual characters, which it's not, it would be Londo's. And Londo is decidedly not the hero of the show. The closest you get to hero in the traditional Trek-influenced sense of Captain/Commander/Leader of the Good Fight position is first Jeffrey Sinclair and then John Sheridan. The later, imo, has a well-thought out personal arc and character development for two seasons (2 and 3) which then ends. His subsequent status within the narrative has its highly problematical aspects, which are explained very well by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hobsonphile here.
(She also includes some highly entertaining speculations on Londo/G'kar. Don't look at me like that. JMS did it, too.)
(And yes, I had fun with the conclusion of a certain story of mine.)
But enough of John Sheridan. On to a John I did fall for, John Crichton of Farscape.searose positions that after season 4, John/Aeryn makes less sense than John/Scorpius (in a platonic sense, btw), and explains why here.
And just to finish the recommendation of challenging posts:acadine questions the rationale of slash being more "free" of gender stereotypes than het and argues for equality quite forcefully here. Choice quote:
If you are relying on the default in any of your writing, and that includes fanon, the pat 2D characterization stereotypes that pervade (slash) fandom, and the deeper slash archetypes, of which rivalslash is but one, you are a shitty writer. Period. End of story. This is as true for het as it is for slash, and I honestly don't think that anyone who blames this sort of stereotypical characterization on "societal gender roles" can be a good writer. There's no honesty in that, no truth - Ivy's take on het, and the fandom's take on het - is basically an excuse.
And what I think about good writing, any writing worth doing, is this: it needs no excuses.
Here are the basics: if the hero (male or female) does anything right, it's taken for granted and evidence he/she is a bland character; if he/she does anything wrong, it's not because of flaws that make him/her a three-dimensional character, no, it's an unforgivable act. If a sidekick complains, it's adorable; if a hero(ine) does it, it's whining. If a hero(ine) has communication problems and closes herself/himself off, it's cold/bitchy/heartless/any of the above; if a second lead/sidekick/whoever-but-not-the-title-character does it, it speaks of depth and only adds to the allure of the character. (If you're thinking of, say, Buffy Summers and Wesley Wyndham-Pryce respectively here, you're not wrong.) Let a hero behave jealously, and the ranting about his/her self-centredness goes on for eons; let a sidekick do the same, and it's just a phase or cute or three-dimensional. (Witness the different reaction in Potterdom to Ron being jealous of Harry in GoF, and Harry being jealous of Ron in OotP.) And so on, and so forth.
Which is why I'm pretty quick to jump to the defense of quite a lot of those folks in the central positions. Not in every case, though. And there is a difference between criticism and bashing. Which leads me to Babylon 5, a rather unusual case in that it's so much of an ensemble show you can't really asign a single hero/central character/lead position. For example, JMS, B5's creator, has been known to say that the heart of the show is the Londo-and-G'kar storyarc, and if Babylon 5 were the story of any of the invidiual characters, which it's not, it would be Londo's. And Londo is decidedly not the hero of the show. The closest you get to hero in the traditional Trek-influenced sense of Captain/Commander/Leader of the Good Fight position is first Jeffrey Sinclair and then John Sheridan. The later, imo, has a well-thought out personal arc and character development for two seasons (2 and 3) which then ends. His subsequent status within the narrative has its highly problematical aspects, which are explained very well by
hobsonphile here.(She also includes some highly entertaining speculations on Londo/G'kar. Don't look at me like that. JMS did it, too.)
(And yes, I had fun with the conclusion of a certain story of mine.)
But enough of John Sheridan. On to a John I did fall for, John Crichton of Farscape.
searose positions that after season 4, John/Aeryn makes less sense than John/Scorpius (in a platonic sense, btw), and explains why here.And just to finish the recommendation of challenging posts:
acadine questions the rationale of slash being more "free" of gender stereotypes than het and argues for equality quite forcefully here. Choice quote: If you are relying on the default in any of your writing, and that includes fanon, the pat 2D characterization stereotypes that pervade (slash) fandom, and the deeper slash archetypes, of which rivalslash is but one, you are a shitty writer. Period. End of story. This is as true for het as it is for slash, and I honestly don't think that anyone who blames this sort of stereotypical characterization on "societal gender roles" can be a good writer. There's no honesty in that, no truth - Ivy's take on het, and the fandom's take on het - is basically an excuse.
And what I think about good writing, any writing worth doing, is this: it needs no excuses.
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Re: Sidekick vs. Hero: Fight!
Date: 2003-08-21 12:30 am (UTC)I think you're missing the point. She tries to be the General because she believes it's necessary to win, but at the same time, her heart tells her it's wrong. Lies my parents told me is where we see Giles inadvertendly demonstrates this to her; hence Buffy sitting next to Dawn, stroking her hair, before closing the door on Giles.
The continuing challenge for Buffy is always to find a balance between Slayer and person, and it's an ongoing struggle. She's always at her best when she manages to rewrite and change the rules - which she does from the end of Touched onwards - not when she tries to follow them - which she does from Showtime to Empty Places.
Re: Sidekick vs. Hero: Fight!
Date: 2003-08-21 10:40 am (UTC)So in Lies My Parents Told Me Buffy has absolutely no realization about how dangerous Spike is, how the only reason she she says she needs him is because she loves him (or whatever) and then goes on to shun Giles' leaderships, I consider that not to be a step in the right direction. She couldn't go up to Giles and simply say, "You were right, I do care about Spike. I don't want him here for the battle, I want him here for me. But guess what? I've always made that work before." So, yeah, I don't think there was a major revelation there.
Stroking Dawn's hair. Nice, pretty, sort of resolves what she said about sacrificing Dawn - doesn't resolve the fact that she still treats the SiTs like soldiers in training and doesn't even know most of their names, doesn't resolve how careless she is with the lives of others. In my opinion, that never gets resolved. Buffy fights like she always fights and expects everyone else to fight like her. And then she fixes the problem of this by making everyone her! Eugh. Please.
Here you come up against my opinion that just because the show textually had Buffy win or be proven "right" doesn't mean I agree. Giles exists for a reason - writing him out of training the girls made no sense. Casting Buffy as a General in the first place made no sense. Casting Faith as a General makes no sense. Hell, having the entire season take place in Sunnydale makes no sense. Argh, sorry about this, but I just don't like the season at all so I'm pretty much useless in debates about it. Probably should have just not jumped in.
answer, first part
Date: 2003-08-21 12:14 pm (UTC)1) Accepting Giles’ leadership? He hasn’t provided any since several seasons. Accepting his counsel is another matter, but the one he offers in Lies my parents told me is paradoxical, to put it mildly. It’s
a) Be a general and be prepared to sacrifice anyone and not to rely on anyone
b) My judgement is better than yours, therefore I will go behind your back.
Moreover, Giles’ argument for killing Spike as a preemptive measure isn’t exactly sound, either. It rests on the rationale that due to the trigger, the FE could use Spike at any time. But the FE has also shown it can possess Willow (in Bring on the Night), no matter how briefly, and Willow as a tool would be a hundred times more dangerous than Spike. Why not kill Willow as well, while you’re at it?
2) doesn't resolve the fact that she still treats the SiTs like soldiers in training and doesn't even know most of their names
This is in fact addressed by the show itself, repeatedly and explicitly, as are Buffy’s motivations for it (or didn’t you watch Touched)? Incidentally, it is Giles who starts the whole they’re soldiers/you’re a general gig in Bring on the Night, but while the reasoning is clear, it is also shown as ultimately the wrong solution. Hence “they’re not soldiers, they’re girls”, and ensuing events in the last three eps.
3) doesn't resolve how careless she is with the lives of others
Not true. And she isn’t. She is distant, forces herself to be, but she isn’t careless. Take the most notable example of Buffy risking the lives of others in season 7, the one with the most dire consequences – the first attempt to fight Caleb & Co. at the vineyard. Now, obviously the fatal flaw here is that Buffy is so angry with Giles (and with reason – no matter how you put it, what he did was a betrayal and in a way, Helpless revisited) that she didn’t listen to his suggestion they should do research on Caleb first. But what she did instead was in fact done with more caution than most of her earlier plans which had led to success. First, she only took those Potentials who had been trained to fight with her; the others, the newer arrivals who hadn’t had much training yet, she left with Giles and Willow, which made complete sense. Willow was the one person who had proven she could protect them for a considerable time (as she did in Showtime), should Caleb do what Angelus had done and use the fight with Buffy as a distraction to go after those she ad left behind; and Giles was the one these newer arrivals were familiar with since he had found them. Second, those Potentials she did take with her she divided into two groups, each group with an active Slayer, and left one of them outside as back-up, should the other group run into trouble. Moreover, this strategy worked; they were winning against the Bringers. The one factor which changed everything was that Caleb was able to take out both Slayers and Spike. And the only people who had been as strong in earlier years were Adam and Glory. As far as Buffy knew at this point, Caleb was not a supernatural creature but a human maniac who had used a knife and hot iron, not supernatural strength, to harm one Potential, and could well be holding and torturing another, judging by his message.
Did she make a mistake? Yes, absolutely. Is she therefore culpable of the deaths of some Potentials and the loss of Xander’s eye? Yes, and she blames herself for it, too. But by the same standard, she is also culpable of the deaths of the students like Larry in Graduation Day, or of Harmony being turned into a vampire during the same fight. In fact, every single person Buffy took with her to the vineyard had been much better prepared by her to fight than the Sunnydale High students had been then; she had taken greater, not lesser, care with their lives. Not training them at all wouldn’t have been an options – the Bringers were after these girls no matter what, and this way, they weren’t sitting ducks anymore.
answer, second part
Date: 2003-08-21 12:15 pm (UTC)I just don't like the season at all
Which is your right. I loved it, which doesn't mean you should. It's a subjective thing, I suppose; clearly, we saw different things in the season. (Or seasons: as I said before, I love the later seasons - 4-7 - in particular, even though I started watching at the beginning.) However, clearly we have reached an impasse on this particular subject, so let's call it a draw and leave it and talk about when we'll get pictures of the Episode III shooting instead.*g*
Re: answer, second part
Date: 2003-08-21 08:27 pm (UTC)Still, there are a couple of things I want to address. No matter how good her plan of attack versus Caleb was in Dirty Girls (which I didn't actually remember to well, I was too horrified by the fact that they believed poking Xander's eye out consistuted a character arc for him), she does little more than use that plan of attack again in Empty Places and End of Days. Which is to say that her battle plans, due to her general experience, are single person battle plans. I say that she is careless with the lives of others because she doesn't seem to play on their personal strengths - and I don't mean who is trained better than whom. The show in general doesn't seem to think that much is necessary for a leadership role, and that upsets me. When I said that they made everyone Buffy, I really meant that they focused not on the individual strengths or weaknesses of the characters, but on a collective weakness of not-being-the-slayer - which I thought many seasons past had proved not to be a weakness.
For Giles, Spike, and all of that: Bring On the Night is one of the episodes I hadn't seen, but the fact that I had no idea Willow could be possessed and you say that it could happen at any time tells me that it was not something that was resolved or dealt with like Spike's trigger. Giles is right about the trigger, and if it is also true for Willow . . . why didn't that come up in that episode? Why no comparison? Are the characters to dumb to notice the resemblance. Bleh, much as I would like to respond to "Why not kill Willow as well, while you’re at it?" with a resounding "Hells yeah!" I suppose they were playing them both as necessary character.
Giles' contradictory advice: it's not contradictory, characterwise as he has always played General for Buffy. He tells her that since she must handle this situation and it is a General like situation. He tells her how to be a General. She respond by wearing the emotional mantle but giving none of the orders and suffering few of the consequences. She may *say* that the SiTs are girls, and they show may say so, but I never saw her treat them like girls.
Anyway, said my piece. We're never going to agree - dislike even the premise of the season, so, eh, that gives me a negative viewpoint on all of it. I'm sorry that I got all argumentative about it in the first place, I don't mean to get all nasty on you for committing the *sin* of enjoying something. Time to finishing updating my site!