Kara Thrace and her frakking destiny.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

Helo shippers,

I almost thought there would be no DPP today. Better late than never, right? So here we go...

I have complained a lot about Kara`s death and how mystical the whole show became in the end (and not in a good way). More than the poof, more than the table episode, more than the hooker or anything else, this is what I can`t come to terms with. And that leads to my questions for you today.

What do you think of Kara`s so called destiny?
Despite all her loud kickass persona, was she ever in charge of her life or was she just a puppet in those gods`s uninspired games and all the suffering she had to endure in her childhood and adult relationships just designed to prepare her to sacrifice herself for humanity (or whatever)?
Was there ever a moment when she could have (and perhaps should have) gone a different way?
Was there anything Lee could have done to push her to choose a different path?
In short, were they really doomed from the start or was it something they chose and therefore they are the only ones to blame for their misery and not the gods or destiny?

Comments

[apodixis.livejournal.com]

This is a really awesome question and sadly, I am on the fence with my feelings about it. The end of the show sort of shifts everything about her that happened in the series to having some higher meaning which is kind of really really lame.

So I wrote this whole thing that was ramble-y and hard to follow and then deleted it for everyone's sake. Here's my main points: a lot of female characters suffer from a lack of choice and being background characters to the male leads, they always end up having things happen TO them and nothing else, or at least are a back seat in resolving it. Starbuck defied that idea for a long time and when she died, forced into it basically after a long lifetime of conditioning of abuse to prepare her for it (which, don't get me started, was kind of a retcon), she lost a lot of that. Yeah I know in real life people are forced into situations all the time, but it still kind of rubs me the wrong way. She was out of her mind (and obviously under the influence of some frakked up god) when she made the choice to die, so I don't consider it her own. It just felt like such a sad end for such a wonderful character.

This whole feeling is what led me to write my longfic, because I so much wanted to give that choice back to Kara (along with a million others) and have things work out in their own way anyway. It's probably also why I just cannot get into a lot of Kara/Leoben fics that take place within canon because something about Kara willingly choosing to be with a person that has treated her so horribly just icks me out.

Back to your question, I can think of a million different paths Kara would have taken that would have changed things for her (ie, Lee leaving Dee for her and giving Kara something to live for instead of just live with--something that may have led to her not being in such a bad place in Maelstrom), but set within the RDM world we saw, I'm not sure there would have been another way for it to work out.

[rirenec.livejournal.com]

I am going to leave a very lame comment in reply and say that I love the concept of destiny... of being more than what one appears to be on the surface and leave it at that. However, having said that, the savannah and *poof* WTF?

[n-e-star.livejournal.com]

I'm still in the middle of season 3 so I don't know too much about the whole "Mystical Destiny" arc, but the idea of Lee as Apollo - crazy in love with the one person in all of existence he would never get a chance with - struck a cord in my mind and so far I've seen nothing to disprove that.

[pennyante.livejournal.com]

your point about abuse: I want it to like, be a person so I can friend it on lj.

Leoben is fucking scary and evil. Not scary-sexy, not even evil-sexy. That moment when he sees Kara next to her own corpse and runs away wordlessly is one of the coolest moments on the show because he is otherwise indefatigable in his desire to stalk and, where possible, torture her.

The other memo to all writers everywhere is, you know, a lady can be badass and awesome without being fucking traumatized from youth, you know, once in a while. It is possible. It has happened.

[kdbleu.livejournal.com]

When Kara's destiny first came up in Flesh & Bone I thought it was a lie, a way for Leoben to manipulate her. And to be honest I've never quite let go of what that change - that Kara had not "destiny", that she was being manipulated, would have meant to the path of the show.

I hate the idea that Kara was just a puppet because it makes her not real, ever in the story to me, and Kara was very real and flawed and intriguing. I don't like the idea that her life leading up to was (retconned) leading up to her death.

Although oddly, I've always seen her decision to fly into the storm as the choice to commit suicide. I just don't like it. So, yeah, I believe she could have made another choice. She could have not flown into the maelstrom. Lee could have grounded her. She didn't have to die.

Or she could have flown into the storm and not come back as ghost or whatever. The BSG universe already had options for her to come back as a head!character or even a cylon instead of making her into the world's slowest deus ex machina.*



*This is part of a larger tangentially related rant about universe building and following the rules of said universes.

[pennyante.livejournal.com]

1) nothing that makes sense about "the song"--if it's a mystical plan of God/the gods', it would have made just as much sense if Kara had entered in a handful of random numbers that happened to jump them to earth. Because what was that song? How did she know it? How did her dad know it? Did he? WHY DOES THE SHOW LEAVE GIVE THE LEAST EXPLANATION TO THE MOST IMPORTANT PLOT POINTS?

2) Nothing makes sense about the relationship between Kara's need to die and knowing the song. She didn't seem to learn/know anything from dying (her weird new Viper sort of knew something) that was important.

3) The number of things left unexplained--where that new Viper came from, how Lee saw her plane explode/how it ended up on Cylon Earth, what the 6 hours/2 months time disparity was all about, why her mother had reason to think she had any kind of special destiny--is legion.

4) They mysticized all the female characters, by the end, in a host of ways--Six/Angel Six, Hera (and Hera's mystical connection to Sharon/Athena, Ellen Tigh, and of course, Roslin and Kara. Which was deeply infuriating. And just plain disappointing. And one of the things that has brought me to the arms of this fandom.

My diagnosis is, too many male writers on staff. But regardless of whether that's the case, the destiny thing was a copout--a way to write around the hard part of writing, which is drawing out the connections that make events belong together in sequence. In short: UGH.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

In theory, I think it could have worked. I think the idea of destiny interacting with free will is interesting and can play out particularly well in a sci-fi kind of story. When you think about your gods/aliens/whatever-they-are as simply being creatures which exist *outside of time,* then the idea of destiny gets interesting, because it means that they see every moment of time (past, present, future) the same way that we see the present. They live in an eternal "now," is the idea, so that they see people's actions at all times in the same way, whereas for someone moving subjectively within a timestream, the past and future are inherently different from the present. But seeing or knowing people's choices isn't the same thing as forcing them to make those choices. If I got into a time machine and went back to observe some famous historical event, I would know what choices those people were going to make, but I would not be forcing them to do it.

Anyhow, I think it's a very sci-fi friendly set of ideas to play with, and in RDM's earlier series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, he really focused a lot on the implications of creatures who were regarded as gods largely because they existed outside of linear time.

Of course, existing outside of linear time is not a moral characteristic -- in a good story, creatures who know the future can be evil or amoral just as easily as they can be good, and it's probably wise not to trust them/worship them based solely on that "power" (that difference of perspective) which they have and we do not. I think the nature of BSG's "God/gods" is open to debate for the entire show.

It's clear that in the show these "gods" don't just observe, but they also interact with humans and ask them to make certain choices, and in exchange the "gods" offer certain rewards. They seem to have supernatural control over natural processes (like supernovas) and over human life and death, not just in Kara's case but also in arranging for Roslin's cancer to appear, disappear, and then reappear at the right moments to signal turning points on the road to earth. Personally, my impression is that they have certain characteristics ascribed to ancient gods, including a taste for blood sacrifice. As early as the Home two-parter Elosha says that any return to Kobol will be paid for in blood, and that the overarching sign designated to guide them to Earth is the process of death for their leader. From the very beginning these "gods" have required sacrificial deaths in exchange for their help. I'm not sure what Baltar's final speech in CIC really means, but he seems to be suggesting that whatever these creatures are, they are probably amoral.

In short, I think that we were dealing with frightening, amoral beings who were not enemies per se to either Cylons or humans as a whole, but who nonetheless tended to set a price in blood on the benefits they helped those two races achieve. Kara was one of the people who paid such a price, and I think she did so willingly, believing that the result would be some kind of salvation for her people. That was in fact the result. It wasn't fair, but it was effective. The key for me in all this is that the "God/gods" of this universe are not morally perfect or even close to it; and I'm not even sure whether religious believers like Kara expected them to be.