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Jun. 13th, 2013 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseDollhouse, for
executrixmy favourite female character: probably Mellie, who I don't think we saw enough of
my favourite male character: Alpha, if only because it was so fun to watch Alan Tudyk go to town
my favourite book/season/etc: I haven't finished the second season, so I think I'll go with season one?
my favourite episode/issue/chapter: I really enjoyed 1.03, the one with the pop star and the stalker. Probably because it was more episodic than arc-driven, and I feel like Dollhouse's mytharc was both incoherent and overly central to the show. Joss does "the one where" episodes really well, and I would have been interested to see what the show would have been like if it had leaned more in that direction.
my favourite cast member: She was terrible in it, I know, but my lust for Eliza Dushku was one of my main reasons for sticking with the show as long as I did. Even though I like her a lot better, both libidinally and aesthetically, when she's playing angry.
my favourite relationship: Echo and Sierra - sisterhood forever.
a character I'd die defending: yeah no I don't think this show actually contains any defensible characters?
a character I just can't sympathize with: Topher. And maybe you weren't supposed to sympathize with him, but I think you were at least supposed to be reluctantly charmed. But Topher takes all the parts of Xander Harris that I hate with flaming passion - the nice-guy manboy nerd thing, the fundamental empathy failure, the tendency to treat women like props - and dials them up to eleven, and then takes away the bit of sweetness that Nicholas Brendan gave the type and asks me not to throw something through my screen.
a character I grew to love: Adele, mainly on the strength of Olivia ---- 's performance. I think she ends up being one of the most interesting things about the show, this traitor woman who peddles dreams of the flesh with a cool and elegantly arched perfectly plucked brow. I would totally watch the version of this show where she was the central character
my anti otp: EVERYTHING. NOBODY ON THIS SHOW SHOULD BE HAVING SEX IT IS ALL WRONG YOU CAN'T MAKE ME SHIP THAT SHIT JOSS WHEDON. (although why I find the consent issues in Dollhouse so utterly untenable but am very much down for Crazy Space Incest with Firefly is maybe worth thinking about.)
Star Trek (dunno if you meant TOS but I'm totally doing TOS) for
ilthitmy favourite female character: I mean, she's not even really on the show, but Majel Barrett's Number One is one of the most compelling female characters in sf tv history, imo.
my favourite male character: I'm James Tiberius Kirk's girl, front and center, womb to tomb, sperm to worm, for as long as the sun and the moon shall endure.
my favourite book/season/etc: SEASON TWWWWWOOOOOOO. Anything that opens with Amok Time deserves respect.
my favourite episode/issue/chapter, etc: Obviously Amok Time and The City on the Edge of Forever are major achievements in sf storytelling and also damn slashy the both of them, but my personal favorite episode might be The Immunity Syndrome - I love how lived-in it makes the Enterprise feel, how real and vital and far away from home.
my favourite cast member: Leonard Nimoy, because he is an awesome human being. I think it was the gorgeous art photos of fat women that did me in.
my favourite relationship:
a character I'd die defending: I can really get my hackles up over Jim Kirk being misunderstood. And of course part of it is that TOS was not a show with consistent characterization, so depending on what Trek you watch you're going to think of the characters very differently. I tend to avoid the cheesy sexploitation eps like Mudd's Women, going more for the backstory + Shakespeare ones like The Conscience of the King, so my JTK is very much the stack of books with legs, an ethical slut rather than a womanizer but more lonely and isolated than either of the other things. (I also really sort of secretly resent the way other Trek shows handled this; there's an ep of Voyager where Janeway tut-tuts about Kirk's recklessness and disregard of the Prime Directive, and I wanted to tell her that you can't hold shifts in the overall narrative form and tone of the show against characters who were created prior to that change. You can't hold imaginary spaces that are governed by fundamentally different rules to the same standards and expect to get valid comparisons.)
a character I just can't sympathize with: I can't decide if I want to talk about Chapel or Rand. Rand just kind of bugs me; she's Barbie-like, obvious eye candy, and she tends to make the camera go weird and fuzzy, but I don't really care about her that much at the end of the day. Chapel is much more complicated. I ADORE Majel Barrett, but so much of what they write for Chapel is embarrassingly weak. Chapel regularly triggers my humiliation squick, and it somehow makes it all that much worse that Barrett is so obviously an intelligent and powerful woman, because she's so much the victim of her body, her heart, her femininity. I don't WANT to sympathize with Chapel, because it hurts too much. I want to look away from her agony and shame, but at the same time she's so bloody compelling.
a character I grew to love: Uhura. I think I was so glazed over by the slashiness of TOS for the first ten years or so that I forgot to notice how badass and gorgeous and fascinating and charming Nyota Uhura is. In a way that I will confess I don't recognize in Zoe Saldana's take on the character, admittedly; I feel like TOS!Uhura is all about the dignity and vulnerability of passive/nonviolent resistance. She doesn't fight much, and she's threatened and victimized a lot, but she encounters it with a cool steeliness that I find infinitely more impressive than more overt badassery ever could be.
my anti otp: Spock/anything that is female, human or not. I don't know why, I just can't, won't, go there. Maybe because I feel like the plotlines of thawing Spock out and teaching him to engage with his emotions get kind of ickily heteronormative when they're played between him and a woman? idk, I just have a major Do Not Want about Spock!het. (oh! except, I just thought of this, when it's Spock and bodyswapped!girl!Kirk in Turnabout Intruder; that I ship like I'm working for FedEx.)
Narnia for
ilthitmy favourite female character: it's always been Lucy Pevensie, ever since I was a tiny little baby thing. Lucy was always a big projection character for me, the imaginative girl who isn't elegant and ethereal. So many times in books even the unpretty girls are physically extraordinary in some way, but Lucy is just this plain simple run of the mill fair-haired schoolgirl, except for the expansive potential of her capacity to believe. I like that Lucy fights but isn't a warrior, and I love love love how much joy Lucy takes in her imaginary kingdom come to life.
my favourite male character: again, this has always been Caspian - but NOT Caspian at all the way they did him in the movies. My Caspian is a sort of fusion between the young King Arthur and Pygmalion and Lucky Jack Aubrey, and I'm really terribly in love with him. Sam West's performance in the old BBC adaptations is a decentish representation.
my favourite book/season/etc: Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's a big deal to me that Narnia has boats, okay? Boats are highly superior things, and always improve the tone and content of a work of fiction. I'm not particularly enchanted with Eustace's storyline, which seems to dominate people's memory of the book; what I actually really like about it is its essential plotlessness, its adventure tale format of one tale after another, a general goal in sight but no pressing quests or wars or other imperatives.
my favourite episode/issue/chapter, etc: either the adventure of the Lone Islands in VDT, which has always held an intense fascination for me (an early manifestation of certain narrative kinks), or - an unpopular choice - the last chapters of The Last Battle. Most of LB is rubbish, and I haven't read any of the stuff with Shift and Puzzle in ages, but I always really liked the idea of going Further Up and Further In. It's popular to hate on Lewis for glamorizing death, but as a small child I found the end of that book more intensely comforting than any other myth or faith I've since encountered. My grandmother and I have a standing agreement that if we don't get to go to Narnia after we die, we're complaining to the management.
my favourite cast member: James McAvoy? Ahaha no, but really, I don't like the movies' casting choices. Their divergence from my reading is fundamental, not superficial. And even when they look right for the part, like Anna Popplewell as Susan, they're misdirected. /grump
my favourite relationship: I love the growth and development of the sibling relationship of Edmund and Lucy - I think it's another reason why I find VDT so satisfying, actually, because they're so settled and supportive with each other, and the old wounds and betrayals are so thoroughly healed. It's important to me that Lucy keeps caring about Edmund, and that Edmund comes to really deeply respect Lucy.
a character I'd die defending: Aslan. And not because I don't understand why people find Lewis' allegorizing tiresome, but because Aslan has always worked for me as a figuration of the divine. I tend to think of Lewis as an erring pagan rather than the Christian he so badly wanted to be - he talks like my people, except then hates himself for it. I picked up Christian resonance in Aslan as a kid, but also saw Apollo and Baldr and all the other sacrificial gods - and obviously the Christ reference is more hard-coded textually, but being neither Christian nor raised Christian I feel personally free to disregard some of that. Aslan borders on iconic for me, and although I guess I don't actually defend him that often, it does always bother me a little bit when he's rejected out of hand as a propaganda piece.
a character I just can't sympathize with: Why so boring, Rillian? I'm not into Hamlet-types even when Shakespeare's writing them, and Lewis doesn't stand a chance poor dear.
a character I grew to love: Peter, oddly enough, is the one that I've found myself growing more and more interested in - maybe due to
bedlamsbard's work with him? The Pevensies as a set were always my favorites, and I gravitated to Lucy first and was always sympathetic to Susan and interested in Edmund, but for a long time in my head Peter was sort of the also-ran?my anti otp: I really don't like the whole scene with Ramandu's Daughter. I don't like that she and Caspian do a love-at-first-sight prettiness-attracts deal, I don't like that she never gets a name, I don't like that she dies ignominiously offstage, and I really don't like that she's a (Tranquil) Pixie Dream Girl. There is nothing I like about any of that stuff.
Also, I want to link to Ana Mardoll's piece at Shakesville on the acquittal of Ezekiel Gilbert for Lenora Ivie Frago's murder, because this is one of those cases I want to point to whenever people (so often in the form of my undergraduate students) assert that we've changed since the (inevitably indefinable) Bad Old Days. It's an impulse that I find really frustrating, because it makes me not want to celebrate our successes, knowing that any mention I make of victory will be taken as a total declaration of the end of the war.
eta: also I passed the graduate Spanish test-out I took yesterday! Which is awesome, because it means I don't have to take HISP 492 for the rest of the summer, and have both the foreign language requirements for my degree covered. Which means that as soon as I defend my prospectus, I'll be ABD. I am chilling out today, but this weekend is going to be for writing; I think I have most of my prospectus worked out mentally, but I need to just sort of pound out the words.
Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter
Date: 2013-06-13 05:45 pm (UTC)WRT Dollhouse: I suggest you reserve judgment on character arcs until S2. And even though I hate post-apocalypse stuff I think the two unshown apocalypse episodes are amazing so please watch them.
Also, Fran Kranz was totally Man of the Match in Much Ado.
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Date: 2013-06-13 07:09 pm (UTC)Rilian is only redeemed by being paired with Puddleglum. An epic lives in my head for those two. And yes, Dawn Treader!!!!! And no, Ramandu's daughter. :(:(:( And ♥Aslan♥
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Date: 2013-06-14 11:29 am (UTC)