No Takebacks

Incoming Friday rant...

I'm getting on the soapbox yet again about Fat!Lee. The rewatch episodes have been requiring heavy usage of eye bleach. I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Lee Adama did not get that body without an excessive amount of hard work. He would never eat himself into Garner's old uniforms. I don't care how broken up he was about Kara marrying Sam.

I blame lazy writing. They failed Lee over and over again by taking the shortest route. This is how I think things went:

Writer 1: "Hey, we need to show how frakked up by Kara's betrayal Lee is."

Writer 2: "We could have him talking to someone about it."

Writer 1: "We never gave him any friends other than Kara. It would be weird if he had the conversation with Dee."

Writer 2: "True... So, how do we show he's depressed without him saying so?"

Writer 1: "I eat when I'm depressed."

Writer 2: "That's perfect! We throw in a couple of stage directions to have him eating something and the special effects department takes care of the hard part!" *high fives Writer 1*

Argh! Come on, writers! Lee would have thrown himself into punishing exercise! This is a man who boxed out his frustrations prior to NewCap and again in UB. If someone wrote the "eats himself into a size 40" in a fic, I might have stopped reading for how OOC it feels.

Thankfully, the rewatch is coming out the other side. And UB and UBEX is fast approaching (I haven't watched regular UB - we only watched the extended - so I'm excited to see how it aired). And I have to say, some of my favorite Fit!Lee images come from the dance in UB. I certainly wouldn't kick Fit!Lee out of bed for eating crackers!

Edited Date: 2010-06-18 01:20 pm (UTC)

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Oh my goodness, I LOVE THIS EXPLANATION!!! It makes perfect sense, (in the writing's lack of sense). Well put! *hugs*

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Fat!Lee is a total mischaracterization of Lee Adama. Again RDM and writers going for SHOCK VALUE and disregarding the actual character they'd built.

I completely agree that he would have never eaten to deal with his pain. He's too active, too physical not to resort to extreme physical exercise and probably some obsessive workaholisim. I said a while back that I could see him exercising almost every single day, pushing himself harder than ever, and being mean an unapproachable asshole all the while. I can see him becoming very obsessive about work, pushing the crew hard to meet his exacting standards. I picture him creating some elaborate overhaul of the entire ship so he could work nonstop. (I think I said earlier that I picture him obsessively sewing new buttons on to all of the uniforms - haha!)

Great things to talk about.

(Although, Fat!Lee does create lovely opportunities for CRACK!!)

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latteaddict.livejournal.com

Writers failures aside.

It's obvious Lee didn't become fat!Lee because of Kara, he became fat!Lee because he woke up one morning realising he was stuck with Dee. Forever. He had a future to look forward to that was as exciting as a nursing home. Who wouldn't want to eat themselves to death? Okay, Billy. But Billy adored Dee. And Lee did not. Billy was (almost) as gobsmacked with Dee the moment they met as Lee was with Kara the moment they met. Whereas it took Lee months and months to notice Dee and he only did so when she fell on his head tits first. Kara just had to open a door and smile.

At least Lee got back in shape once Kara came home.

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Whereas it took Lee months and months to notice Dee and he only did so when she fell on his head tits first. Kara just had to open a door and smile.

This cracked me up! I had to IM it to my cube-mate so she could see why I was laughing like an idiot.

And, yes, you make an excellent point. Dee made fat!Lee fat. By being such a horrible bore. :)

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picture him creating some elaborate overhaul of the entire ship so he could work nonstop.

Yes, THIS! It's obvious to all of us. :)

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... guess they all figured we'd be too dumbstruck by his hotness to notice that nothing he did ever made any sense.

And there is where the writers double-fail! How can I be too dumbstruck by his hotness if they cover his magical hip dents in latex prosthetics?

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Thanks! The rewatches have been making me angry all over again. But soon comes Hot!Boxer!Lee. I will survive. :)

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Whereas it took Lee months and months to notice Dee and he only did so when she fell on his head tits first.

This!!! So frakking true! LOLOL!

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rachelindeed.livejournal.com

Hhmm, this is an interesting argument. I didn't like the Fat!Lee storyline either, largely because it turned out not to be a storyline at all. But I think the reasons I disliked it were slightly different than yours. I didn't find it fundamentally out of character; and I thought they botched the ending of it more than the beginning.

You are absolutely right that no one looks like Lee unless they have developed long-standing habits of stringent physical conditioning, and you are also right that at other points in the series we see Lee dealing with stress by indulging in particularly harsh and cathartic exertion (such as picking a fight with the biggest guy in the room in UB).

But for many people exercise is tied into their overall daily routines, and if their normal regimen is disrupted by the loss of some unifying structure - like a job, for example - that had previously ordered their time, then that disruption can have a ripple effect. Lee kept himself in fighting trim when he was an up-and-coming young officer in college and in his early career, and then when war broke out and he had to face combat and lead the entire Air Group every day I think he became even more rigorous in the standards he set himself. When he was promoted to command the Pegasus it was initially a very stressful and demanding position, and again they were in the midst of constant life-or-death peril.

But look at what happened to the structure of fleet life after settlement began on New Caprica. Suddenly Lee was in charge of a skeleton crew that did nothing but circle in orbit without anything constructive to do for months on end. Military routine and discipline crashed throughout the fleet, and the constant stress of the previous year was replaced by mind-numbing boredom. He was in a desk job, no longer required to maintain combat readiness (look at his Dad ~ that belly is what happens when Viper jocks move out of their planes and into stagnant peacetime commands). Add in his post-Kara depression and his previously established inclination to self-pity, and voila, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that he would let his health deteriorate for the sake of some passing comfort.

I think that bifurcation - pushing too hard or going too passive - has always been a part of his character; even in his last scene, he tells Kara that he always imagined that when the stress of the war was over he would "spend the rest of [his] days doing the absolute minimum humanly possible." Of course the other, healthier side of him, the side that relishes challenges and can't resist pushing his personal limits, came to the fore both in the finale and throughout much of the series, but that lurking "let it all go" impulse was always a part of him, too, I think.

My biggest regret about the Fat!Lee thing is, I think, the same as yours, though. Instead of using it as a springboard to tell a story about Lee's depression and private anguish, and his struggle to overcome those obstacles, it was used instead as a substitute for the story itself. As you say, it was as if the writers thought they had done enough to establish Lee's inner world by using this heavy-handed visual cue, and as a result they didn't go any further into Lee's interior life until basically Unfinished Business. They dropped the weight abruptly without showing anything of the emotional or physical struggles that would have entailed for a man who was truly fighting his way out of depression. Their treatment of Lee there was, in a word, shallow. (Apparently there was a 'he and Dee enter the Marines' storyline planned for the beginning of Season Three to explain how he lost the weight and developed a harder, more ruthless attitude toward himself and the military - the only remnant you see of it is in "A Measure of Salvation," I think. I'm personally glad they dropped that idea, though. I didn't want to watch Lee and Dee in boot camp, but I guess it would at least have been a narrative).

Ah, well.

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OMG "magical hip dents" is THE BEST COMMENT EVER!!!! There are not all caps big enough to encompass how I love that!

*giggles hysterically*

I think I may have found a new description of my obsession.

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I often wondered is Fat!Lee was an homage to William Shatner. (That's TOTALLY who i think he looks like.)

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LOL - I love your description that "it took Lee months and months to notice Dee and he only did so when she fell on his head tits first." You are so BAD, Latte... and I love it! *grins deviously* ('Cause you know how I FEEL about that particular character).

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But look at what happened to the structure of fleet life after settlement began on New Caprica. Suddenly Lee was in charge of a skeleton crew that did nothing but circle in orbit without anything constructive to do for months on end. Military routine and discipline crashed throughout the fleet, and the constant stress of the previous year was replaced by mind-numbing boredom. He was in a desk job, no longer required to maintain combat readiness (look at his Dad ~ that belly is what happens when Viper jocks move out of their planes and into stagnant peacetime commands). Add in his post-Kara depression and his previously established inclination to self-pity, and voila, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that he would let his health deteriorate for the sake of some passing comfort.

I think it is reasonable that the men and women would've gotten soft after the chaos of war was over - there's no need for the uberfit body ready for duty. But the emotional eating/bingeing doesn't work for me as a way of expressing Lee's disappointment and depression. When people are taxed, depleted, they resort to the most basic of their coping skills, usually developed in childhood. Lee's childhood, as it's painted, seemed to be about him becoming parentified when his father left and mother was incapacitated (I may be extrapolating from fanon here). Given the way he's characterized, especially in the mini and S1, I see his basic coping skills as rigidity, obsessiveness and isolation. I think he would be more likely to eat less, to deny himself any pleasure (seen as weakness or vulnerability?), as he did when he declared his love to Kara. That "weakness" had cost him dearly. I see him doing every possible thing he could to force Kara out of his mind and to fill his life with as much structure as he could muster.

I can see the argument for just giving in to depression. I think that is very likely, but I don't think he would eat. I think he'd withdraw and wither away first. He does not seem like the type to look easy comfort in food. I can see him lying on his rack, defeated, staring at the ceiling - or pretending everything is fine while he's dying inside. He'd just married Dee - he has to work hard to pretend everything is wonderful. What a heartbreaking thing to have to do. :(

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LOL! So funny!

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callmeonetrack.livejournal.com

My biggest regret about the Fat!Lee thing is, I think, the same as yours, though. Instead of using it as a springboard to tell a story about Lee's depression and private anguish, and his struggle to overcome those obstacles, it was used instead as a substitute for the story itself.

This, exactly. I didn't find it hard to believe that he would indulge in passivity (which he has a strong streak of in his character) and comfort-eat at all.

The Lee-loses-it-in-a-week diet was kind of ridiculous of course. I wish we'd gotten to see more reaction from Kara of the change in him, and wish we'd gotten a scene where he responded (other than trying to throw her out the airlock) to the change in Kara.

I had no idea about that Marines storyline! I'm...glad they didn't do that.

I also can never truly hate Fat Lee because it gave us

queenofthorns most brilliant crack!fic Too Solid Flesh (http://queenofthorns.livejournal.com/278139.html).

Edited Date: 2010-06-18 04:12 pm (UTC)

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callmeonetrack.livejournal.com

In lieu of more tiresome Dee bashing, I have to just say:

Edited Date: 2010-06-18 04:12 pm (UTC)

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While we're on the subject of Lee's reaction to Kara's crushing, I am wondering how much Dee knew about what had happened between Kara and Lee on New Caprica. The story is a bit confusing, of course, because UB and UBEX tell slightly different stories. I am thinking specifically of one interaction between Lee and Dee on Pegasus when Kara calls to ask Lee for meds (at the end of LDYB-II). Lee asks "Who is it." Dee gives him a look, something passes between them and there's awkwardness.

I wonder why she would react this way? It's been a year plus, Lee and Dee are married, seemingly fine, but there's a jealousy and some unspoken acknowledgment about Lee's feelings about Kara here that didn't seem to be shown from Dee anywhere else prior to this episode.

It always struck me as odd. Theories?

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OMG. I never thought of that. It's trufax!

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WORD TO YOUR MOTHER!

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nazkey.livejournal.com

The cookie icon is back! *twirls cookie icon*

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nazkey.livejournal.com

Whereas it took Lee months and months to notice Dee and he only did so when she fell on his head tits first. Kara just had to open a door and smile.

LOL. But seriously tho, I never understood why in the world RDM & Co. decided that this entire story line was a good idea in the first place. Why pair Lee up with Dee? Other than the obvious ridiculousness of their names rhyming in some Dr. Seuss way, the whole thing was just ... whaaa???? IMO

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I want Rachel to write a Dr. Suess fic on this! That woman is the QUEEN of doing remixes.

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