DPP: Myths and Misconceptions

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

 

This is sort of a strange train of thought, but do you think there are a lot of misconceptions about who Kara and Lee are, generally speaking? The thought stems from two different things I saw on Twitter, one as part of the "Things Starbuck Wouldn't Say" meme that cropped up last week and the other from a fellow fan of the show. The first was that several of the tweets were things like "I'm sorry" or "I love you, Lee" ... both of which ARE ACTUALLY SAID IN THE SHOW! Heh. I mean I think there's a bit of a misconception that Kara will never apologize to people...and yet, she apologizes to Lee in KLG1 for something that she shouldn't even need to apologize for, honestly. She doesn't just say "sorry" she says "I'm really sorry". (And ironically, Lee...I don't think he ever once apologizes to Kara on the show for anything.)  Another one was that Kara wouldn't say "Let's talk about it." Also, not true. In the deleted/extended ready room scene from Taking a Break from All Your Worries, she says to Lee: "C'mon. TALK TO ME."  

Related to this, I think it's a huge misconception that Kara has trouble following orders. Yes, she gives Lee grief over shooting at the Olympic Carrier at first, but...she also fires immediately and when she gets the two worst orders ever: Adama telling her to execute Cain and Lee telling her to manually detonate bomb in Razor....she agrees to both, without hesitating.

Likewise, someone was saying on Twitter that they could never think of Lee as a killer...and yet he murdered Phelan in cold blood. Granted he had good reasons, but.... I mean he also is a soldier. He kills lots of people because it's his job. Related, the show itself insists that Lee is "too honorable to cheat" in EOJ/Rapture...and yet he cheated on Dee with Kara in UB and almost in Daybreak flashbacks, and clearly they're having hot makeouts in EOJ, which to me = cheating.

There's also, in fic often, the idea that Lee wants to talk about relationship issues and analyze things. And while sometimes in canon he does ask Kara to talk (Home, Scar), more often he refuses to talk about things, just bottles up or turns away.

Anyway, all of this just made me think about the other things that we assume about the characters and what they would/wouldn't do. About how sometimes you get ideas stuck in your head about the kind of person they must be, and you ignore later evidence that they've changed or can behave differently than you'd expect. I'm not sure what point any of this has, but....yeah...it's Sunday. It's rambly pilots meta. Have at it! 

Comments

[themonkeytwin.livejournal.com]

I love these kinds of rambly metas :)

Sadly, not having been in the fandom long (and that time mostly spent splashing around in this here puddle), I actually don't have much of an idea of the misconceptions that are prevalent. I don't seek out much fic for just this reason, actually – I see people writing the characters in ways that just don't make sense to me, and I don't care how interesting your plot idea is, if you've gone OOC, I'm not giving it the time of day. I'm kind of, er, picky, I guess.

I totally agree that Lee's a killer. I guess the problem some people associate some kind of enjoyment of killing with that term, but really all it means is a willingness to take human life. Lee never, ever does it lightly or without an appreciation for the cost and implications, but he is still willing where he deems it necessary. Surely that's an inescapable trait in a soldier, as you point out.

The honourable/cheating thing is a bit more snarly, and I think it all comes down to what constitutes cheating for people. Clearly, there's some kind of justification going on with the idea that cheating is really only Cheating if it's done in the context of a marriage, since neither of them were married in the flashback in UB, and that actual sex is the defining point of Cheating. That, or Lee didn't consider the UB sex cheating because from the moment it began, he had mentally already left Dee and committed himself to Kara. Mind you, I'm not saying that I think it's justifiable, but that this is how Lee (and maybe the show, I can't actually tell where it comes down on this question) can try to justify it to himself.

If we're trying to reconcile the honourable/cheating thing, the Daybreak flashbacks require a lot more justification. Although I think you CAN make sense of it within the given boundaries of his character, I don't think it can be actually justified in any way. And clearly Lee can't either, because the guilt of it is still present in how he interacts with Kara in the early seasons. Perhaps the honourable trait isn't so much not doing it, but recognising how wrong it was? Snarly, snarly.

Although it brings up another question for me: how promiscuous do we generally think Kara was? Clearly her encounters with Lee were atypical for her, just in the fact that it was LEE. But beyond that, most our information about her behaviour comes from the men she hurt the most with it, Sam and Lee, who I don't consider 100% reliable narrators. So is there a fanon consensus on the extent of her "catting around", and does that reflect what's actually shown on the show?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

I think fanon by and large actively scoffs at RDM's insistence that she frakked around quite a lot. Katee and Trucco have both said in interviews that they agreed Sam was making the bit up to hurt Lee when he says "You're not the first."

Honestly...I could easily see Kara cheating on Sam on New Caprica. If the novelty wore off... if she was feeling claustrophobic... if she'd gone on a bender of sorts. She mostly treated him casually and with disregard when we saw them together. However, I disregard the way the flashbacks happen because I don't think she would've attempted to cheat on Zak in such a casual way, even drunk and in the heat of the moment, EVEN WITH LEE, so... I draw my own boundaries too I guess. ;)

[themonkeytwin.livejournal.com]

The things RDM inists on are a little boggling, to tell the truth, but it's hardly a surprise that the fandom has been able to recognize when he gets it wrong! :D

Interesting that Katee and Trucco both think Sam was making it up. I think he certainly exaggerated it in order to hurt Lee, but I lean more your direction, that she quite likely did cheat to some extent. That line specifically, "You're not the first," struck me from a dramatic irony perspective, because I tend to think Lee WAS the first, even though Sam didn't know it. That Kara partially hated what she'd done in marrying Sam, specifically to Lee, and therefore slept around on Sam somewhat – but it was all because Lee was the first! And I'd put money on the notion that, like with Baltar, she was mentally and emotionally with Lee when she cheated, even though she couldn't be with him physically. Which was intensified by the deterioration of their relationship until they reconciled. None of that seems OOC for her to me.

With Zak, though, I agree with you that Kara as we know her now – even as she was at the beginning of the series – wouldn't have attempted it. But I can conceive that being the result of character growth, which partially came out of that time. I mean, say that she went through plenty of guys but was never in a serious relationship until Zak came along (and being the loyal person she is, I can totally see the first serious relationship she ever gets in becoming the one she thinks is forever). That she was therefore faithful to him, and that hadn't been seriously tested before Lee, and she was therefore unaware of her capacity to cheat. That the booze and the chemistry and the everything triggered the old instincts for sex, but even more powerfully combined with the newly-formed appreciation for relationship being tantalized by the unique connection that was between them. That many of the warning signs that would later make this sort of thing a conscious decision weren't set up yet, because she'd never done it before.

So, I don't know. I wasn't terribly shocked by the table scene, but then I hadn't spent however many years in fandom and fic that laid out their relationship pre-mini, so I hadn't built up much expectation of what that looked like. I also hadn't invested as much in their OTP relationship at that point, or at least hadn't noticed that I'd formed that expectation until the *poof* revealled myself to me, and so my own cheating!squick didn't kick in nearly as much.

[eridani8.livejournal.com]

nazkey and I debated out the Kara-being-promiscuous thing last week. I tend to accept RDM's view here largely- just because the show seems to give us plenty of evidence to at least suggest that it would be the case, and not really anything specific that runs against it. There are plenty of instances in the show that demonstrate that Starbuck's got a bit of a flexible attitude to sex ('the major from where-ever'; falling into Baltar's bed after whatever plans she might of had re: Lee failed to come to fruition; she doesn't waste any time with Sam on Caprica; that night in UB happens while she's in a relationship with someone else; Sam's 'You're not the first'; her twisted reasoning in EoJ about infidelity being 'just cheating' re: her marriage vows).

Without affronting anyone, hopefully, I think that the fandom's rejection of this portrayal of Kara has more to do with what fans want Kara to be, than any particularly strong evidence in canon. Whether it's because fans relate really closely to the character and project some kind of self-image, or because they just have some deep moral discomfort with it, I don't know.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

While I totally believe she enjoyed and was fairly casual about sex (and that mostly it's our own real life societal impulses to look down on that as a trait in women which make us find it distasteful)...if she was engaged or even just in a very serious relationship with Zak, I do have a hard time believing she would dare--literally dare--his older brother (whom she'd known for all of four-five hours tops probably?) to fuck her on the dining room table while he was in the next room. (And Lee? It's even less believable.)

However, it's mostly the execution of it, because it was played for a sporting, casual kind of thing even though the idea behind it was that they were so instantly besotted with each other that they forgot everything else around them. So if the producers had had the balls to go there and make it a really flat-out romantic, I can't keep my hands off you sort of thing, which I think they were going towards with all the confessions--however misguided--about deepest fears and all that close-talking, smiling, flirting in the flashback scene BEFORE she's patting the table and saying "RIGHT NOW. JUST DO ME. I DARE YOU."...well, then for me, it would've been a different story. It's the change in gears because the producers loved the idea (as they say in their podcast) that this was a challenge between jocks or some such nonsense that doesn't work for me at all.

[eridani8.livejournal.com]

Actually, I completely agree with you on that front- I forgot to put that little qualifier in- sorry.

Yeah, I found the whole almost-frak on the table in DB2 pretty ridiculous, if only because Zak was still in the room! I probably would have bought K&L getting busy while Zak was alive if there had been some kind of undeniable attraction reasoning developed, but to show it as such a casual matter seems to fly in the face of logic, let alone character traits. I find it hard to believe that, even really drunk, they'd be prepared to blatantly do it on a table with Zak present (even if he was passed out). The most basic drunken cost-benefit analysis should tell any sane adult that that's likely to end badly. It's just stupidity!

And if RDM&Co wanted it as a challenge between jocks, they didn't do a very good job of setting up a competitive, one-up-manship atmosphere. You're absolutely right about the confessions and fears being totally out of step with the subsequent challenge.

[themonkeytwin.livejournal.com]

debated out the Kara-being-promiscuous thing last week.

Ooh, link? I like to read the back-and-forths, it helps me sort through what I understand, too. I think I've already said it somewhere, but I haven't really nailed down that much of my "read" of these characters, particularly their relationship. I'm still feeling my way, and haven't watched the series THAT much that I can recall the pertinent details easily, so this kind of discussion really helps with that.

I'll qualify what I meant with RDM: there's a difference between "frakked around a lot" (ie, was consistently unfaithful), and having episodes of infidelity. I'm not willing yet to put her in the box of just casually sleeping with anyone anytime she feels like it when she's already in a committed relationship. Outside of that kind of relationship, yeah, I don't see any inconsistency in that portrayal of her, and it makes total sense of what I know of her. But once she's in a relationship – Zak, and then Sam once she got him back from Caprica – I read it as needing a tipping point before she'll resume that pattern. Both times it was Lee, too, but whatever. So I think she was faithful to Sam once she got him back, up to being with Lee in UB, after which she probably started cheating on Sam whenever the guilt or whatever needed to be blown off. Not knowing the timelines pre-mini, I'm curious about what pattern she settled into after meeting Lee. I don't remember – did she pass Zak before or after meeting Lee?

fandom's rejection of this portrayal of Kara has more to do with what fans want Kara to be, than any particularly strong evidence in canon

Ah, well, that's fandom generally, isn't it? Too true. As much as we all at times complain that they're not telling the story right in some way, it should be acknowledged that it's their story to tell, not ours. Sure, they screw things up, but determining what the story is is up to the storyteller. Which is a really annoying conviction to have, because I can't turn canon off when writing fic. :(

[lanalucy]

"I agree with you that Kara as we know her now – even as she was at the beginning of the series – wouldn't have attempted it. But I can conceive that being the result of character growth,"

This is kind of how I see it. That Kara, at that point in time, could have done this. The Kara we meet in the mini is at least two years older, and wiser relationship-wise than that open, happy person we see in the flashbacks.

[anamarya.livejournal.com]

thank you for writing it so now i don't have to. I see that he is not referring to a sort of a one time thing when he speaks in EoJ but about the constant lies and the betrayal that a relationship outside of a marriage implies. Like you said on New Carprica he feels that he left (he is clear that he intends to "speak to") Dee and that he moved on. it is the first think that he says.
but yes, it's a matter of personal opinion/boundaries/views if you consider that cheating or not (and killing for that matter). for me it is cheating but on another level than like i was saying the constant lie. i mean, i could forgive that (mainly because at the end of the day it is not faithful but it is honest), but not what Kara suggested in EoJ.

the flashback is harder but being laid on us out of the context we can not say. maybe at that point he was not yet the man that we know (and she was not he woman that we know) or maybe he would have did something to make amends. and we do know that the guilt is there.