The Mezzanine

I was discussing Love Actually with my friends, and someone mentioned that the relationship involving Keira Knightley is extremely problematic.

I said, "Yep. But it's one of my favourite stories in the movie."

Everyone stared.

"Why?" they asked. "It's all so… unhealthy."

"EXACTLY," I said.



Because, honestly, my love for fictional relationships has little to do with how healthy I think that relationship would be in real life. If anything, the reverse is true.

Are you a soulless vampire, desperate to stake/screw/destroy the disgustingly soulled vampire lover who you simultaneously adore and despise? I will ship that.

Are you desperately, sort-of secretly, in love with a woman who you keep on calling a "whore", while she insults your job, your skills, and your personal hygiene any chance she gets? I will ship that.

Are you fighting an intergalactic war against your nemesis, father of your daughter, whom you are openly ordering killed while secretly arranging for him to slip through your fingers? I will ship that.

Are you terrified of your wife leaving you, and have arranged a fake pregnancy so that she will stay? Or have you discovered the whole fake-pregnancy thing and are secretly plotting your husband's downfall, while still pretending everything's fine? I will ship that.

Are you utterly devoted to your commanding officer, and following his every order, especially the ones about tying him up, humiliating him, kicking him, and making him lick your shoes? I will ship that.

Are you having fight scenes that somehow morph into sex scenes, where you keep wanting to hurt each other but also can't stay away? I will absolutely ship that.



Healthy relationships are great. They're also – for me – kinda boring to watch. Give me the problematic weirdness any day.

My sister and I spent a few years discussing this. Thought I'd write it down for anyone who's interested.


You see, we noticed that people tend to end up shipping the same types of relationships. People who ship Joey/Pacey also tend to ship Han/Leia, and House/Cuddy, and Ron/Hermione (or so was our theory).

And, because my sister and I are both nerdy people with too much time on our hands, we decided to figure out how different ships could be classified, so that we could figure out, definitively, which types of ships were "the same type".

( the emotional/directness spectrum )

Questions? Comments?

I was reading selenak's meta on fictional rapists and redemption arcs (which is interesting, so go read it too), and thinking about ...well, about redemption arcs. I particularly liked what she said in this bit:

One of the reasons why I think Faith wins at redemption arcs in the Jossverse is that what she did is never excused or forgotten, she eventually accepted responsibility and turned herself in (without mystical intervention causing her to do so), and she then kept (successfully) at trying to be a better person. Which is why I find it frustrating when her dark side days are then declared to have been all someone else's (preferably Buffy's) fault to begin with - that sells the redemption arc short.

Totally. I love redemption arcs where people accept responsibility for what they did and deal with it. It's awesome. I can like a fictional character who does pretty much anything – up to, and including genocide – if they have a good redemption arc thrown in. Which must be why I'm okay with fictional murderers and rapists, like Spike and Faith.

Except that doesn't quite cover it. Because I also love Scorpius, Lilah, and Azula, who are all quite happily evil, and never get redemption arcs at all.


I think I've figured it out, though. It's the up-front thing.

A character who does awful things, then says "Wow. I did all this awful stuff. That sucks. I need to be all repenty, now." will pretty much be my favourite person ever. On the other hand, a character who does awful things, then says "Wow. I did all this awful stuff. That rocks! I need to laugh manically, for a minute." will just about tie for my favourite person ever with the repenty one.

Whereas, a character who thinks their evil deeds aren't so bad, or are someone else's fault, will get much less leeway from me.


Holtz, for instance, can do very few evil things apart from trying to get revenge on Angel, and I will end up yelling nasty things at my television and wishing he'd come back to life so I could kill him again, nastily. Likewise, Xander lying to Buffy gets very little sympathy from me, because he is doing something bad that he never takes responsibility for. And Lindsey's association with Wolfram and Hart is something I tend to scowl at.

But Willow, Faith, Andrew, Spike, Lilah, Scorpius, Tempus, the Master, Azula, and Callisto? I will forgive the 'good' ones, and grin happily at the 'evil' ones, and not really mind them doing the evil things they do. Because every single one of them is, eventually, happy to point out that those things are, in fact, evil.


I think this is why writers of Xander irritate me so much when they excuse The Lie on the grounds that Xander was trying to keep Buffy focused. Because... it's an excuse. And, even though they're trying to put me more on Xander's side, giving The Lie an excuse rather than just calling it a lie is guaranteed to take me off Xander's side and want to pelt him with tomatoes instead. Whereas, if they'd just have him accept that he did it, and that it was selfish and bad, I'd like those stories a heck of a lot more.

One thing that's been coming up in the comments at Mark Watches lately is BtVS's portrayal of "crazy" people. Which... well, I have thoughts.


The general position taken by many of the commenters is that:
1) Joss Whedon tends to portray people as generally "crazy" rather than specific-diagnosis crazy.
2) They tend to be over-the-top completely freaking nuts.
3) This is stereotyping mentally ill* people as extremely weird and freaky, which is bad PR, and not a good thing.

* (And other people who are not classified as mentally ill, but are still not neurotypical. I just didn't want to try to squeeze all of that into a single sentence.)


I see their point. I even partly agree. But my position is somewhat different.

( angsty navalgazing )

The thing is, I get the fact that over-the-top portrayals are problematic and othering. I understand all that. But having realistic portrayals would made me feel crappy - whereas the over-the-top crazy speaks to me.

Which is why I'm glad it's there.

So, over on Mark Watches, the comments are discussing Angel. And someone just said this:

Vampire Spike was never as evil as Angelus (considered one of hte most evil vamps ever) he just does the killing bit because he truly enjoys it. He's not a good guy, doesn't try to be, doesn't pretend to be, but he isn't so evil as to actually want to tear someone mentally to pieces.

Hmm.

I responded by pointing out this line of Spike's:

Do you know how much blood you can drink from a girl before she’ll die? I do. You see, the trick is to drink just enough to know how to damage them just enough so that they’ll still cry when you… ‘cause it’s not worth it if they don’t cry.

...and the answer I got? "Yeah, but he's just saying that so Buffy will kill him."


Allow me to get my ranty pants on for a minute or so.

( brief rant )

In short? A character can do awful, evil stuff. And still be your favourite character. And you don't have to gloss over one to keep the other.

Let me leave you with a fanfic that addresses this. Because if I could write that fic, I wouldn't have to write this rant instead.

Suppose I have a garden.

There's a rose bush, and then some azaleas (aren't they pretty!), and then some lavender. It's so very lovely and fragrant. And then there's a few trees, waving gently in the breeze, and after that a whole bed of daffodils! I love daffodils! And there's a nice bench in the shade, right next to the delphiniums, and some daphne, and perhaps a few carnations just to round things out...

...and then there's weeds.

Weeds. A whole corner of them. All extremely thorny, ugly, and stinky. Right in the middle of my lovely garden.


If I walk around my garden, admiring the roses, smelling the lavender, picking the daffodils, sitting on the bench - and I suddenly come across the weeds... then I'm not going to shrug, say "well, it's time I stopped looking at this garden", and walk back inside.

It's my garden. My lovely, beautiful garden. And one corner of it is all weedy.

I'm going to get out my gardening tools and start weeding. Then I'm going to figure out how on earth it got so weedy in the first place, and take steps to stop it happening again.

"I'm not telling anyone not to post anything. I'm simply trying to understand why they would even want to...
...It was a waste of my time to continue discussing something I disliked and unfair to expect others to want to read all the reasons why I thought the show had failed."

Why are we still here discussing this? Because our show, which we love, suddenly has a corner full of weeds. And we want to figure out what happened - or at least, get out our gardening tools.

If we loved it less, we might be less upset about the bits we didn't like. But this is our garden.

I think I've realised why I like Die Hard 2 better than Die Hard 3.

( some thoughts, at random )

I think I've figured out why I have such a big problem with what happens to Donna Noble: it's because of Dawn Summers.

( this might require more explanation... )

Questions? Comments?

There is a reason why sequels flop, McDonalds succeeds, blurbs are important, and Dawn Summers was hated by many fans when she first appeared.
That reason is known as The Vegemite Effect, and I am here to explain it to you.

( Hermione has bushy hair, bus tickets should be credit-card sized, Wolfram & Hart is evil, and Bruce Willis kicks arse.  )