DPP: Ranty Monday
Aug. 15th, 2011 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizziec posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no_takebacksHello Pilots Shippers, and welcome to another week of me being in charge of your DPPs. The good news is that I've finished my marking and am no longer quite so obsessed with Pilots Histories.
In honour of the fact that it is Monday, and Mondays often bring out the grumpy in people I'm inviting you to share your grumpy.
This is your opportunity to bring your rants about the show, RDM, Pilots, the Plot - anything so long as it's related to the show. Just get it off your chest. But while you're sharing also feel free to leave the things that help you deal with your rage the most - fic recs, meta or just words of wisdom.
I'll leave you for now with the matra that helps me when I find RDM's extra statements about and meddling with pilots particularly frustrating. "None of what he says as extra information is canon because if it doesn't exist on film then it doesn't exist."
In today's picture, Kara is especially annoyed. Nice to see she's entering into the spirit of the thing.
In honour of the fact that it is Monday, and Mondays often bring out the grumpy in people I'm inviting you to share your grumpy.
This is your opportunity to bring your rants about the show, RDM, Pilots, the Plot - anything so long as it's related to the show. Just get it off your chest. But while you're sharing also feel free to leave the things that help you deal with your rage the most - fic recs, meta or just words of wisdom.
I'll leave you for now with the matra that helps me when I find RDM's extra statements about and meddling with pilots particularly frustrating. "None of what he says as extra information is canon because if it doesn't exist on film then it doesn't exist."
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Rant On!
Date: 2011-08-15 02:49 pm (UTC)WHY IN FRAK'S NAME DID THEY HAVE TO KILL OFF KARA? I mean, I actually like Maelstrom because Katee (and Jamie, and EJO and everyone) is awesome and breaks my heart every time I watch it and the ending of S3 - with her return- is the ONLY season finale of BSG that has ever left me cheering instead of crying/horrified, but the fact that they decided to kill her off only when they sat down to write the episode....that was just sloppy. I mean, if Joss Whedon loves your show you can take a couple of lessons from him on how to bring a dead heroine back, he did it twice with Buffy and did it better too. And what was with the pigeon?
Also, bitch PLEASE, the annoying plot device marriages pilots made ONLY because they couldn't have each other are NOT the show's OTPs/"better" relationships! No matter how hard your leads work to convince themselves about it because you write them non-endings for their characters.
Words of comfort: I will keep saying this till kingdom come, but I really did feel like Kara didn't want to poof. If she did, if she really wanted nothing more than to vanish, she wouldn't look so heartbroken and on the verge of tears as she tells Lee she's not coming back. And even though the scene would have read as this flat thing on the page, I'm thankful to Katee and Jamie that they saved the last little scrap of pilots together to at least that extent by making it look like Kara was actually sad at the prospect of leaving Lee. At the end of all the crap, they wanted to be together and no one will convince me otherwise unless they change what's actually in the scene.
Re: Rant On!
Date: 2011-08-15 09:31 pm (UTC)This, basically, is where a lot of the problems with dead!Kara come from. When she shouts "What am I?" in Sometimes a Great Notion I suspect that's the writers trying to figure it out for themselves. If they had the slightest idea why they were killing her and how it would all eventually play out then I think the storyline would have been 100% better in all respects. Killing a main character for the shock value is not a good reason to kill them!
And what was with the pigeon?
Whenever I see a pigeon now I exclaim "It's an Allegory!" and consequently get odd looks from whoever it is I'm with.
Also, bitch PLEASE, the annoying plot device marriages pilots made ONLY because they couldn't have each other are NOT the show's OTPs/"better" relationships! No matter how hard your leads work to convince themselves about it because you write them non-endings for their characters.
YESYESYESYESYESYESYES.
YES!
Right on.
If she did, if she really wanted nothing more than to vanish, she wouldn't look so heartbroken and on the verge of tears as she tells Lee she's not coming back.
I love your words of comfort. The text of the *poof* scene may say "it feels good", but Katee's body language and expression do seem to be saying "this feels completely rubbish". May have to insert that into my own personal canon.
Re: Rant On!
Date: 2011-08-15 11:21 pm (UTC)Someone should have sentenced Rondy and all the writers to copying that line out 1000 times, like schoolkids do. And then tacked it in foot-high letters on the writers' room whiteboard when they were working on Maelstrom.
__________________________
The text of the *poof* scene may say "it feels good", but Katee's body language and expression do seem to be saying "this feels completely rubbish".
Yeah, that or "I'm trying really hard to hold it together so the last memory he has of me isn't of me sobbing, and that is why I can't so much as let him touch me because if he does, I'll fall apart."
And YES, it should be part of every pilotshipper's personal canon. It's small comfort, but at least it's some small evidence that, despite what Ron etc wanted to believe, pilots weren't just two frakked-up people who were only drawn to each other because of frakked-up wrongness.
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Date: 2011-08-15 03:10 pm (UTC)*I don't believe it was Jamie's fault. I lay the blame on two things: that Ron Moore apparently has the interest intensity of a gnat (oh look! shiny!) and he simply got bored with our pilots and let his attention wander off (this also explains the clusterfuck that was the last season); and Eddie Olmos. Seriously. I've been to several panels (at Dragon*con) with Eddie and my GOD the man has an ego. He's barely stopped short at claiming credit for creating the entire show (and the internet LOL). So we get lovely scenes of Eddie At The Titty Bar (really BSG? Really? we had to go *there*? from a show that was so ground-breaking at showing gender equality?) and Eddie Throwing Up Over Himself and no true closure or even a frakking goodbye hug between the other couple that's been carrying this show for 4 years. Because Eddie wanted to have Adama throwing up on himself.
Yeah, you could say I'm a little bitter.
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Date: 2011-08-15 03:25 pm (UTC)Huh, I guess we're all a little bit bitter.
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Date: 2011-08-15 10:07 pm (UTC)I know that this is possibly an unpopular opinion but I think Laura shares at least some of the blame for the mutiny. If she had engaged the fleet after Earth 1 and been the leader she had been to that point then I think a lot of the dissatisfaction could have been avoided.
S4 just didn't live up to the other seasons and didn't even feel right until a quarter of the season was over.
So right about the time that the Demetrius came back? Yeah, that's pretty much when I started to feel s4 too.
Huh, I guess we're all a little bit bitter.
Can you blame us though? ;)
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Date: 2011-08-15 10:57 pm (UTC)And I remember watching the whole Demetrius phase with extreme grumpyface. Which was sad, because I really didn't want any part of the show to suck after the amazingness that was Crossroads/HTBIM/Six of One.
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Date: 2011-08-15 11:07 pm (UTC)Yes! I adore those four episodes. And then Demetrius. Gah! So long on the Demetrius and then they rush through the Mutiny in two episodes? Scrabble to tie up all the loose ends in the last three or four episodes? *throws things at Rondy*
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Date: 2011-08-15 10:51 pm (UTC)The idea of Jamie pissing in Ron's cheerios made me snort with laughter. Thanks!
It's an interesting thought, and while he clearly was inconsistent with all the major characters (I'm with
Because Eddie wanted to have Adama throwing up on himself.
That was his idea? Really? I always wondered why it was that the flashbacks (however much I hated some of them) added something about the character to K/L, Roslin and Baltar but actually didn't tell me jack about Adama. I suppose that starts to explain it.
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Date: 2011-08-15 03:26 pm (UTC)Maybe related to Pilots: In Caprica group marriage is canon...and I'm not saying it would've been a great resolution to the Epic Love Polygon of Doom, but did Lee *have* to get all preachy about monogamy? And did Kara *have* to get all Catholic Marriage about divorce? Not that we see divorce on the show, but you'd think that a universe that has all kinds of marriage arrangements would find a way to accommodate it. Bizzarrely restrictive and non-universe-plausible marriage laws is a pretty annoying way to generate angst.
Totally Pilots related: So, so sick of the increasingly artificial ways they were kept apart. So boring. Not that I mind some nice juicy angst, but having them get together and seeing all the ways in which it's hard for them to make a marriage work would've been sooo much more interesting than all this endless dancing around will they or won't they.
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Date: 2011-08-15 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 09:55 pm (UTC)Yeah, though I think that quite a lot of that is actually due to the writers apparently hating couples full stop (not just our pilots).
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Date: 2011-08-15 06:31 pm (UTC)This is only because no one had yet considered relationship outside F/M until they needed ways to make Caprica (well, the pre-First Cylon War colonies) less like our Earth. The colonies could just as easily have been that kind of different from the beginning with variations in religious conviction and tradition by colony and/or sect. Only no one thought of it. *rolls eyes* Totally drives me crazy.
And this actually is one of biggest rants... I wish they'd gone about building the whole world instead of making thing up as they went along. *shakes fist*
having them get together and seeing all the ways in which it's hard for them to make a marriage work would've been sooo much more interesting than all this endless dancing around will they or won't they.
This a million times over. :D
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Date: 2011-08-15 09:41 pm (UTC)I think this is one of the reasons I prefer well written fic to the world that RDM created sometimes. Well crafted fic does build up the world around their characters, showing that they've considered in some depth the place that their characters are inhabiting. Sometimes I don't get that feeling with BSG (I've only seen one episode of Caprica so I can't really comment too much on that) - there are times when it feels as if the world the characters live in is being bent to fit whatever awesome idea the writers think they had on any given week/arc.
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Date: 2011-08-16 12:56 am (UTC)Also the wedding rings/engagement ring drive me nuts. Ron probably meant Kara's and Sam's wedding tattoo to be more quirky/rebellious than refreshingly non-Western, but really, wedding rings have been part of Earth culture for 150,000 years? I think not. (To say nothing of where physically all this jewelry came from.)
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Date: 2011-08-16 10:30 am (UTC)Yeah, I see this. I know he was trying to make it not so much a sci-fi series as, say, Star Trek and much more of a drama in a human setting, but surely the colonials were different from Western norms in some way?
(To say nothing of where physically all this jewelry came from.)
I have to admit to wondering about that at times. By the end they're running out of so many things, but jewellery, clothes and weapons/ammo/stuff to make ammo from from never seem to be included.
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Date: 2011-08-15 10:00 pm (UTC)Oh! I read a great fic recently that involved a group marriage between Sam, Lee and Kara, and I can't remember what it's called. Think it may have been recc'd through here though. Possibly a sign I've been reading too much fic recently?
Can anyone help me out and remind me what the fic is I'm thinking of?
So, so sick of the increasingly artificial ways they were kept apart. So boring. Not that I mind some nice juicy angst, but having them get together and seeing all the ways in which it's hard for them to make a marriage work would've been sooo much more interesting than all this endless dancing around will they or won't they.
Spot on.
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Date: 2011-08-15 10:39 pm (UTC)ETA:
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Date: 2011-08-15 07:26 pm (UTC)Here's the thing. I can get behind the whole star-crossed angle to a point. I LIKE that things were hard for them and that there were legit obstacles to them becoming the 'couple' that we never got to see, but at some point just throwing up another barricade for every one they broke through got tired and read as contrived and lazy writing. It took me out of the story because I was continually trying to place myself in the mind of the writers instead of simply sitting back to enjoy the ride like I had in the earlier seasons. Sure, there was also of emotional debris on the road to their happy place, but it was not insurmountable by any means. And somewhere along the line, star-crossed changed to doomed for no good reason that I could see.
It bothers me because the foundation was not built for doomed. It was built from a 'this will be a bumpy journey along a long and winding road that will eventually lead to the big payout' foundation. Just like the entire Galactica story was. Suffer, suffer, suffer and then finally, at the end, you earned your satisfying conclusion. Maybe not a 'happy ending' for all, but an ending. A nod to the fact that we did suffer through the journey and deserved some sort of peace, like the characters.
And then to really gut check us, they try to claim that we were all crazy to expect better or to not see the writing on the wall that Lee and Kara were never meant to have their happy or end up together. OK, well then I somehow misread all those BLARING signals along the path. Grrrrrr.
OK, back to happy thoughts. I have no wisdom to impart. *sigh*
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Date: 2011-08-15 11:05 pm (UTC)This - so very much this. I think it's doubly frustrating that they keep putting artificial barriers and plot devices in place because they way K/L were written even as they were writing in reasons to keep them apart meant that to me at least they never felt like they didn't want to be together. It was just that the writers never decided that the time was right. I think I could have been almost reconciled to K/L being kept apart if it felt like they wanted to be that way - that they wanted to quit one another.
It bothers me because the foundation was not built for doomed. It was built from a 'this will be a bumpy journey along a long and winding road that will eventually lead to the big payout' foundation.
Exactly. They laid down so much groundwork and then failed miserably to follow through, but the awesome groundwork made it seem so artificial that they were kept apart. And we were even getting awesome shippy moments right until they end (the don't care speech in Islanded? Beautiful, and so shippy) and then they leave it like that?
Blah :/
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Date: 2011-08-15 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 09:44 pm (UTC)Frak destiny indeed. One of the things I find hardest about the destiny angle is the idea that nothing the characters who have a destiny do is as a result of free agency. That really bothers me because free agency is what makes one human, and what makes the stories interesting - because the people are 100% responsible for the consequences.
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Date: 2011-08-16 02:41 am (UTC)OMGWTFBBQ TEH POOF
TEH POOF. WTF.
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Date: 2011-08-16 10:31 am (UTC)*clings*
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Date: 2011-08-16 03:46 am (UTC)Kara takes them to Earth. Ok, excellent destiny and I'm just fine with that. But, GAH, the execution!
Let's see...Kara has to be so utterly miserable and slightly psychotic so she chooses death believing that it's her destiny.
Yup, then she comes back but without real proof and has to fumble around yelling "We're going the wrong way?" (something I actually kinda like because Katee pulls it off so well. But...really?)
And what is she? Kara doesn't know. I absolutely hate the idea that she's an angel that some how isn't really Kara returned as an angel, but an angel that's come back in her image?? NO!, but I can maybe buy that she died, but was able to manifest in human form with a buried knowledge, I can sort-of get behind this. Yet, they tried to make it like it wasn't even really Kara?! What use was the piano-playing father closure bit if it wasn't her? Why would it be so frakkin' hard for her to remember the way to the 'new' Earth once the old one was discredited?
Writers shouldn't be so busy congratulating themselves on how 'smart' and 'chic' their ploys are that they totally screw the fanbase. Humph! Ok, official rant over. I need a print of RDM to throw darts at. Yup, that would help.
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Date: 2011-08-16 10:49 am (UTC)Yes, totally.
And what is she? Kara doesn't know. I absolutely hate the idea that she's an angel that some how isn't really Kara returned as an angel, but an angel that's come back in her image?? NO!, but I can maybe buy that she died, but was able to manifest in human form with a buried knowledge, I can sort-of get behind this. Yet, they tried to make it like it wasn't even really Kara?! What use was the piano-playing father closure bit if it wasn't her? Why would it be so frakkin' hard for her to remember the way to the 'new' Earth once the old one was discredited?
That was more or less the point that I realised that the writers didn't have a plan and were just making stuff up as they went along according to what they thought was awesome, cool or edgy on the particular day/week that they were writing. Most concepts I can kind of get behind if they make sense. As it is (to borrow a South Park-ism) it's like Chewbacca. It Does Not Make Sense (Chewbacca defence at wikipedia). And winds
everyonemost people up because of that.Writers shouldn't be so busy congratulating themselves on how 'smart' and 'chic' their ploys are that they totally screw the fanbase.
Yes! I can almost imagine writer's meetings that end with someone saying "Wow, we're so awesome. This twist will throw everyone."