DPP: Tragic Love Stories

[winegums.livejournal.com]

Today's question is as follows - would we love pilots as much as we do if they'd been a couple who hadn't got themselves royally screwed over by cosmic bad luck (a.k.a. the perversity of Ronald D. Moore)? To make a little more sense of the above question, I guess I should rephrase it: would we still care as much as we do about pilots, or be as active as we are here in trying to remember the good bits and lamenting the bad ones and imagining the what-could-have-beens, if the show had left them in a good place two years ago? (i.e. together). Or even if it had given them any clear resolution at all?

I don't honestly think that pilots would have been any less epic and heart-wrenching and beautiful if Kara hadn't been forced to go poof in that field. But in the past, I've found that leaving characters - not just romantic pairings - in a happy place often means I find it easier to metaphorically lay them to rest, so to speak, especially when there was a very real fear that they could end their story in a bad way (like Harry Potter. Or Buffy. Or the entire cast of Firefly, who very definitely did not all get happy endings but at least had what felt like an ending to that particular part of their story). And that just didn't happen with Lee and Kara in BSG. So what say you, people? Are we (at least in part) driven to fandom action by the fact that pilots got a raw deal in canon, or am I just out of my tree?