Daily Pilots Post

[dramaturgca.livejournal.com]

Wow, you guys are brilliant and the conversation this week has been awesome. It's been great hosting this week of DPP and I'm looking forward to my next turn in August.

To close out this DPP week, it's a Free-For-All! What do you want to say to K/L shippers? To the pilots themselves? To the world at large?

I would like to say thank you to this amazing community who welcomed me in and I hope we keep going strong. After all, there's a million and one things we haven't written yet!

Comments

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[kag523.livejournal.com]

hat is why Tigh has become my number 1 despised character (LOL). When she opened up to him the next morning, his line about survival played straight to those insecurities and, well, the rest is history.

Yes, there is no love lost between Saul Tigh and I either. Same reason. *grits teeth*

(Loved your explanation BTW! YOU, are super-thinky too!)

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

If you dislike Tigh for this, you also gotta hate Chief for ostensibly talking Apollo into making it work with Dee again in TABFYW. (When Lee says do you ever have regrets/think of Sharon, and Chief totally baldface lies and says No.)

Damn dirty cylons.

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

OMG. You're right. Tigh and Chief were both cylons. I keep forgetting that. It must have been part of their evil plan all along...

Damn cylons.! LOL

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

See, they did have a plan in the end!

Cockblocking K/L.

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I wander away and come back to find such goldmines of discussion! Yay!

Here's the scene:

Kara: (looking insecure) Are you sure I'm what you want?
Lee: (looking earnest) Yeah, you're what I want. I just...I don't think I really knew it until I said it out loud just now.
Kara: (gently, sadly) Why? Because of Zak?
Lee: (looking pained) Yeah, and a lot of things...um...but mostly because I was afraid...to admit how much I needed you. How much I needed anyone.
Kara: (nodding with a look of empathy) Yeah.
Lee: I love you, Kara Thrace.
Kara: I love you, too. (Kisses, hug, and a look on Kara's face that I can only describe as victorious. There is no insecurity in her eyes at this moment. Her smile here is almost a mirror of her smile at the end of the episode after she hears "I missed you, too.")

OK. By far the most controversial line is 1) "I don't think I really knew it until I said it out loud just now," followed closely by 2) "Yeah, [it was Zak] and a lot of things..."

So let's start with #1. Lee admits he's been wilfully blind to his own deepest desires and that until tonight he hadn't allowed himself to acknowledge, even in his own mind, that the only life he wanted was one with Kara. I think this was true. For the last few months at least he had been with Dee, working very hard to convince himself that he could be content with her. And before Dee, he'd worked hard to believe that he could be content on his own. He had a long history of pretending that he would be fine even if Kara remained nothing more than a friend or colleague.

Why had he been so willing to settle? Why did he have so much trouble facing and expressing the true extent of his feelings for Kara? This is the question that Kara asks him, and she suggests a plausible answer: was guilt over Zak the reason he'd shied away from her?

This brings us to his response #2. He says that yes, their complicated history with Zak had made his desire for Kara something that it wasn't always easy for him to embrace. Residual guilt was one factor in his long history of not-reaching-for-her. But he says that he held back *mostly because* the strength of his feelings terrified him and he was too scared to admit to them. He didn't just want her, he *needed* her (he couldn't be happy without her), and facing that truth was incredibly difficult for him because all his life he'd been afraid of depending on anyone else so completely. He'd learned to expect abandonment.

Kara nods her head at this moment, like she understands these fears.

And then Lee tells her simply, "I love you." She began their exchange by asking him if he wanted her, and he answered by speaking first of desire, then of need, and finally of love.

To me, his words basically boil down to: I'm offering you everything now -- I didn't have the guts to do it before because I was too tangled up in the past and too good at lying to myself and too frakking scared, but all those things were my problems and I'm over them now.

And just look at Kara's face when she offers her love in return and embraces him. She is transcendently happy there -- she looks like, for that moment, she believes this is real.

That's why I love this conversation, even though it's an ephemeral moment of growth undercut by later events. The very next morning, after Kara's marriage, Lee goes right back to trying to settle with Dee and works desperately to deceive both himself and her into believing they can be happy together. He persists in this self-deception whenever things fall apart with Kara, as Taragel pointed out when discussing his little "need" speech to Dee in TABFAYW. But to me that speech seems as different from UBEX as night from day, because with Kara he was telling the truth about his feelings, whereas with Dee he was not.

That's my take on it, but you can certainly judge for yourself whether I'm reading way too much in :)

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[kag523.livejournal.com]

Oh hon, this... THIS is why I need to borrow your brain sometimes. Seriously, I'm struggling tonight with the highest-angst Lee scene I've done and it's fighting me. Wish you were here to write it with me.

Thank you for the lovely explanation. See? I KNEW you could explain it in a way which makes me feel better about it. (I'm still not giving up my dislike of the line, but "understanding" makes it a little more palatable.)

*spins you around* You ROCK!

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Thanks! You are lovely! ** twirls you **

I'm still not giving up my dislike of the line, but "understanding" makes it a little more palatable

Hee! That's the perfect attitude for fandom debates :) I feel the same way -- I can't give up my love for that scene, but you and Taragel have certainly helped me understand why it didn't sound anywhere close to a great love speech :) Poor Leland -- hopefully his campaign speech writers polished up those communication skills once he entered politics!

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much the take we have to have to remain shippers, right? ;)

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Hee! Well, as shippers I think we can probably agree that something like this is what Lee was *trying* to say. How well he conveyed his meaning is certainly open to question :)

From Kara's reaction to him in that scene, I always thought that she basically understood him and accepted what he was trying to explain about his own messed-up decisions and feelings and past behavior. I thought that her running the next morning was motivated not so much because she distrusted his switch-over from Dee to her, but because of her 'I am a world-class frak-up and if I let myself try this it will destroy us both' attitude. I think you and others have pointed out that Lee needed not just to reassure her about his own feelings, but to reassure her specifically about her self-worth and all the things that made her incredible and not a frak-up -- he needed to help her trust herself and her own feelings, as well as to trust him.

But it's pretty clear that he didn't understand how much she needed that; he thought the key thing was to make her understand how much he loved her, and he didn't realize she might still think he was wrong to do so. It was just so foreign to his own way of thinking and feeling -- once he believed she loved him (and I think he took their love making as the confirmation they'd never been capable of reaching before), he never thought for one second of questioning whether she should, or of renouncing those feelings, or of pushing her away. For him, "she loves me" = bliss. That's part of why he was so blind-sided the next morning, I think.

So there was a lot more that he should have tried to say to her and to understand about her. But, even if he'd said more that night, would that really have made the difference? I'm not sure that there was anything he could have said that would have overcome those deep-rooted instincts and fears about herself that her mother (in life) and Zak (in death) had both confirmed for her. I think she had a lot more healing to do before she would be ready to allow herself true happiness.

Anyhow...we'll probably never get to the bottom of what exactly went wrong on New Caprica, but it does provide a lot of food for shippery thought!

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I can't even imagine that night ever turning out differently. That's not to say I like what happened at all, it just...I have a blind spot in that I cannot come up with a suitable alternate course of events that truly feels in character. Someone prompted me once to write it where Kara stays and I just couldn't. Because I agree that not enough work is done beforehand on their relationship or on her own issues, that would let her stay.

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that not enough work had been done on their relationship or on her issues. But perhaps you could write a scenario in which she does leave but doesn't marry Sam. Plenty of angst and hurt feeling there. Lots of room for personal growth on both their sides but no burnt bridges and no quadrangle of doom.

Re: Ten Million Points... but should some of them be dropped on the instant recall?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Someone wrote one (Wisteria maybe?) where she leaves both Lee and Sam planetside and goes back up to fly. :)