Page Summary
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - (no subject)
icarusancalion.livejournal.com - (no subject)
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - (no subject)
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - (no subject)
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - (no subject)
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - (no subject)
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - I almost wish the naming fiasco had been intentional, 'cause I'm not sure that'd even make it worse.
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - Re: I almost wish the naming fiasco had been intentional, 'cause I'm not sure that'd even make it wo
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - they say California is a recipe for a black hole / I say I've got my best shoes on / I'm ready to go
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 2
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 3 (I should re-up those Ellison icons)
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 4 (final part!)
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - Re: long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 4 (final part!)
icarusancalion.livejournal.com - (no subject)
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - more rambling on SCC?
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - Re: more rambling on SCC?
vanitashaze.livejournal.com - Re: more rambling on SCC?
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - Re: more rambling on SCC?
ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com - Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
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Date: 2009-04-05 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-05 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 05:26 am (UTC)Ha, yeah. Maybe I'm just too immersed in the world of fanfiction, but it continually amazes me whenever I find a bit of TPTB characterization that is not completely, entirely stupid. Like: Sateda. They acknowledged that Sheppard was completely emotionally stunted! Let me tell you, that just blew me right out of the water.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 05:52 am (UTC)ahahaha, truer words were never. your example makes me laugh, because yes.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-12 05:12 pm (UTC)By the way, who is that lovely lady in (both) your icons? She looks vaguely familiar, in that I've-probably-seen-her-on-TV sort of way.
I almost wish the naming fiasco had been intentional, 'cause I'm not sure that'd even make it worse.
Date: 2009-04-13 12:56 am (UTC)Ms. Lovely is Stephanie Jacobsen, who was Kendra Shaw in the Battlestar Galactica: Razor TV movie and most recently Jesse in ten episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. IMDB tells me she played Maya in a US version of Life on Mars, though given the information it's possible that was only for some trial pilot and Lisa Bonet took over when the series actually started. I have mad love for Jacobsen as Jesse!
Re: I almost wish the naming fiasco had been intentional, 'cause I'm not sure that'd even make it wo
Date: 2009-04-15 08:07 pm (UTC)But you have mad love. Wow. That's a tempting endorsement.
they say California is a recipe for a black hole / I say I've got my best shoes on / I'm ready to go
Date: 2009-04-16 08:43 am (UTC)It's hard to remember now what my original reason was for watching the show—I think I read really promising advance press at
One of many very fine things about The Sarah Connor Chronicles is something
long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 2
Date: 2009-04-16 08:47 am (UTC)Since you've seen
I want everyone to watch SCC! Which is not to say that there haven't been times when the show's made me angry or upset at casting or writing choices, in ways the showrunners probably wouldn't want an ideal audience to be. (Some of this is related to how, like almost every show that's supposed to take place in L.A., SCC is still way too white. I think the only TV series I've ever seen that approaches an accurate reflection of L.A.'s ethnic composition is Day Break (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Break), another outstanding show; DB stars Taye Diggs as an LAPD detective who wakes up framed for murder, stuck in a time loop, and trying to solve both of those big problems throughout the 13-episode run. There are a lot of good actors and complex characters, both women and men... plus the show starts out solid, gets better, and hits AMAZING in the last five episodes. Just wow, in case you ever want to check it out.) I can say that if I counted up the number of times I've had issues with SCC, I would probably only need my own fingers and toes. As I always say, there's no prize for being not-the-most-sexist/racist/transphobic, but SCC is truly extraordinary in so much of what it does—and for any two seasons of almost any other show I can think of, I'd need to round up some friends and take off their socks in order to tick off the number of times I've had a problem with the show's representations of people who belong to disprivileged groups.
Sidenote about SCC fandom: after the first season, I elected not to engage with it, for the most part. This is partly because the show itself succeeds to the extent that I usually felt I didn't really want fanfic the way I do with other shows. However, it's also because SCC fandom is 1) overwhelmingly dominated by one or two (one is non-canon, the other is kind of subtextual, both are hetero) pairings, neither of which I'm all that interested in, and 2) not infrequently preoccupied with Angsty White Guys when for heaven's sake, the show's called The Sarah Connor Chronicles and that's who the show IS generally about.
long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 3 (I should re-up those Ellison icons)
Date: 2009-04-16 08:53 am (UTC)My sense is that the majority of people in a lot of TV fandoms are white (and female), and there's a disproportionate tendency to embrace the snarky white male character, especially if he has or acquires a traumatic history. I don't blame the show itself in SCC's case, mainly because I feel it vindicated me by NOT embroiling Sarah in a romance with said character, which was one of the two things I most feared would happen. But I guess that leads me to my final point about why I'm not that into general SCC fandom: 3) a troubling tendency toward internalized misogyny. That usually takes on one or both of the following forms: either there's only a very limited number of ways fans approve of with respect to how to be a woman on the show (you can be Sarah, or if you don't like Sarah, you can be Cameron whose concept of gender may not be the same as a human's, but every other major/recurring female character is boring/icky)... or they're not really interested in any of the female characters (in which case I have to wonder why they're watching the show). And if there's even the slightest possibility of a love triangle, or pentagon, or non-Euclidean whatever—even if the original pairing was just in fandom! this is so prevalent in SCC, I can't overemphasize it—a lot of fans will immediately start slamming (often in highly sexist terms) the new addition to the mix, especially if that addition is female.
To be sure, the show set up relationships in S2 which in some ways (at least initially) encouraged this reaction, and I'm not entirely sure the showrunners succeeded in walking that line. But even in those cases, I think SCC did succeed in overturning a lot of important gendered expectations, and any success in that respect derives from how intense, conflicted relationships between female characters are so important in the show... and in many cases, their emotional underpinning ultimately has more to do with a given female character's personal history than with (romantic ties to) any man.
long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 4 (final part!)
Date: 2009-04-16 09:04 am (UTC)Oh... so where was I? Heh. Well, I know someone who only started watching with the third-to-last episode of S2, and she's enjoyed what she's seen even if she is confused! I think she is going back and filling in the gaps. It's not so hard! I encourage it!
I've got most of a nine-page post put together that's all about why I love Jesse in particular, but I'll leave you with a few Jesse quotes (not in chronological order), hopefully minus major spoilers. (Though I think it's not too much of a spoiler to say I love a woman who'll deliberately pick a fight with a bar full of military!) Imagine them being said in a totally alluring, sardonic Australian drawl...
[at a bar]
Man: What you drinkin'?
Jesse: I don't know.
Man: [amused] You don't know what you're drinking?
Jesse: There's booze in it... some sugary crap to cut the hell out of the burning taste, and some ice.
Man: What happened to your face?
Jesse: You ask a lot of questions for a guy who wants to get in my pants.
Man: Do I?
Jesse: Yeah, see, there's another one.
***
Derek: I don't think I've ever thanked you for what you said that day.
Jesse: I think the exact words were... "Your fly is open."
Derek: Yeah.
Jesse: It was.
***
[in a hospital bed, close to death]
Jesse: You know what Oscar Wilde's last words were? "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." [laughs]
Re: long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 4 (final part!)
Date: 2009-04-18 11:59 pm (UTC)You know, SGA is over, I'm between seasons with everything else I watch, it's almost past crunch time with school and I'm finished with Carnivale (at least until get my season 2 DVDs); I have time. Based on this recomendation - because I really do trust your opinion when it comes to television; it seems like you have good taste - I might start up with this show. Though I might have to make the rounds with my friends, see if anyone has season 1, at least, on DVD - I really rather hate watching it online, more so lately, because my computer seems determined to never ever play videos correctly and in general just behave like a small mechanical bitch.
And you're right; Jesse sounds like the absolute bomb. (Is it strange that she reminds me of His Girl Friday Rosalind Russell?)
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 05:18 am (UTC)"No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-19 07:03 am (UTC)Jesse is complicated and amazing, and I think it's not weird at all to be reminded of Hildy Johnson! At least with respect to the wit and the no-nonsense, type A attitude. Of course, only about five other people in all of SCC fandom feel the way I do about Jesse (one of them is making a video about her, something I had not even dared to hope for!), but I remain undeterred. A woman who throws the first punch in a bar brawl is the woman for me—plus there's other spoiler-y things I love about Jesse. And that guy in the bar, despite being kind of cute and funny, entirely fails at getting into her pants. Not his fault at all, but hee!
... yeah, my love for SCC, like my love for Jesse, has become pretty epic. I can think of several occasions when I've had problems with the show's treatment of female characters, but the other 80-85 percent is consistently good. (No knowledge of the films is required in order to understand what's going on in the show, btw. Anything a viewer would need to recall, the show incorporates in as much detail—usually not much—as necessary.) I love how in general, the show's women make hard choices unflinchingly and without tragical closeups even when the human cost ends up being so high. I love the way the show's handled violence, at its best making violent acts by its major female characters intense and disturbing but not gratuitous or voyeuristic. I'll close this round of tl;dr with a few minimally spoiler-y comments by others on this aspect of SCC.
Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-20 08:23 pm (UTC)Speaking of fantastic portrayals of women in media: are you a comic reader, and if so, have you ever heard of Y: The Last Man? If not, I strongly urge you to check it out. It's like the SCC of the comic pantheon. I'm not saying it doesn't have its problems, because it does, but it for what it's worth it's got an interesting and thought-provoking premise, and an almost all-female cast (out of necessity, but still). Most importantly, like SCC, it uses a pretty far-fetched SciFi premise to examine a real world theme: how women define themselves. (Like the Congressmen's wives who define themselves through their husbands, or the soldier in Israel who defines herself in opposition to her male copatriots.)
*Actually, some of those download links might be useful afterall. Are they downloading (like, .avi files), or streaming? It's mostly the latter my computer has problems with.
more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-21 12:29 am (UTC)I've read about Y: The Last Man before: one negative review (I don't remember the specifics, although the points seemed interesting at the time) and at least one positive review. How women define and redefine themselves is definitely of interest to me; I'll look into it! I admit I've never bought a graphic novel. I have read a few from the public library and online. A friend recently recommended Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series, which is not available through my library system... a little frustrating, because everything I've read about it has been full of accolades.
I was thinking a little more about SCC fandom... about 10 percent of what gets out there is Sarah/Cameron, which interested me for the first few episodes; I think that pairing is holding steady at third place in fandom. Then, well, I don't think it's overly spoiler-y to say that as Sarah's attitude became more rather than less unrelenting toward Cameron, the pairing lost my attention. As usual, fandom did not bend to my wishes (hee!) by providing stories about Sarah and Cameron as two women in a difficult partnership, raising a rebellious teenager—a partnership in which it gradually becomes still more clear that one of the partners is (incorrigibly, and not necessarily in a positive way) alien in how she perceives human beings and her own relationship to humans and their human reactions. Which wouldn't even be the biggest emotional issue. Also, subsequent developments would probably make the pairing too uncomfortably Oedipal for me, especially given an initial setup that already tended that way. (Not that I didn't love the initial setup too, because I did!) However, in S2 I found a different relationship between two female characters fascinating, and would read stories capitalizing on the heavily implied subtext any day. Yet as I noted before, there are virtually none. Oh, SCC fandom!
There are a couple of times that stand out in my memory, with respect to SCC failing at presentations of women in fear and pain: in one episode, the strangling of a woman taking a shower; in another episode, twenty plotless minutes too many of a teenage girl crying and fleeing in horror-movie style terror. As far as I recall, the show avoids cleavage shots on either. The relatively brief shot of the woman in the shower is from the neck up and the girl is wearing loose-fitting clothing that covers her from neck to ankle.
I thought about the show some more, and there are more close-ups of Sarah looking melancholy-stoic-tragical than I indicated earlier, though I think they're mostly in early S2 and drop off to an acceptable level thereafter. And at the beginning of S2 the voiceovers go away, to reappear in only two episodes (one is okay, the other is awesome). That's a good thing, because while Sarah's voiceovers are never as stupid as Mohinder's were on Heroes, SCC's creator realized the show works better without them most of the time.
Since you're bound to notice... there's one exceptionally ludicrous instance when the basic biological science is wrong wrong wrong in a way that could totally have been avoided, and it's likely you'll also laugh at the emergency medicine in at least one episode.
This Married to the Sea comic startlingly evokes Sarah's archetypal nightmare, but with hilarity! (http://www.marriedtothesea.com/011808/same-city-different-universe.gif)
Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-21 12:32 am (UTC)just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
Date: 2009-04-23 06:24 pm (UTC)Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-23 10:28 pm (UTC)Usually, I'm not too excited about fix-its, but I'm game to give them a look-see. Do you know up to what point she's written them so far?
Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
Date: 2009-04-23 10:29 pm (UTC)...Or something like that, anyway. I'm not very coherent right now.
Re: more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-23 10:31 pm (UTC)You evil, evil creature. ;)
Re: more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-23 10:36 pm (UTC)Re: more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-23 11:22 pm (UTC)If you ever do end up writing my favorite femslash pairing that's almost nonexistent in SCC fandom, watch out! All seven [redacted pairing] fans will get the bulletin, and so will every general SCC or femslash-friendly community I know of! (Uh, but only if you want that to happen. Hee!) Be told!! (In other words, THUMBS UP for any such enterprise. Or SCC fic from you in general, if you do go for it.)
Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-23 11:27 pm (UTC)