redbrunja | (no subject)

Finished my taxes. It is actually embarrassing how long it's taken me to freaking sit down and do them, considering how easy they were and the fact that for the first time ever, I'm actually getting money back. (Seriously, I was at the 'let me reorganize my bathroom drawers to avoid doing taxes stage of procrastination).

I feel like I blinked and today vanished - part of that was because I was up super-late watching The Hunger Games (again, a friend had free IMAX tickets)* and part of that was because I basically woke up, did errands, and then spent TWO FUCKING HOURS with a Century Link technician and my landlady in what was the most awkward, stressful internet repair job of my entire life (short version: my landlady hated the tech, the tech wanted to tell me his entire life story).

I'm now painting my nails to de-stress. (OPI What A Broad on my toes, Edin-Burgundy on my nails - this color isn't really a burgundy, but the best blood-red color I've found).

12_12_12 had a great (and also depressing) meta post about the kind of love stories television shows are choosing to tell these days, which prompted me to ask: flist, can you give me examples of currently airing shows where characters in a romance choose the larger picture or their personal ideals over their loved on, without this being textually seen as Not Loving There S.O. Enough?

*So, on the drive home from my second viewing of THG,

I was got to talking about Johanna, and how she and Haymitch (SO MUCH HAYMITCH) are both fractured mirrors of who Katniss would be if she lost more people earlier in her life. And I have to admit, the changes they made to Haymitch make me kind of sad, because as funny as the line about spilling his drink on his new pants is, it means that movie!Haymitch is an entirely different beast than book!Haymitch, who would never have said that. (Tangent: I lot of really cool Effie/Haymtich prompts have popped up online, which I would kind of love to take a crack at, but I don't feel like I have a good handle on Haymitch a.t.m.)

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And at the end she pretty much negates her argument by pointing out that it's today's viewers who look at things in this way.

I phrased that badly: I didn't mean that it was a problem of perception, but more that if a male character on one of today's shows was suddenly thrust into a plotline where he started acting like Angel in the Angel-Faith-Buffy SL, viewers wouldn't buy it: b/c the preceding canon, and characterization, and setup for the ship, wouldn't have "prepared" the viewer to interpret his actions correctly. There has to be the right...the right atmosphere in place for it, IMO. I think that if viewers were presented with the exact canon for BtVS/AtS now, audiences would buy it. The problem is that I think it wouldn't happen in the current TV atmosphere in the first place.

Also that meta seems less of a meta and more of a hatefest on the CW and a lauding of Buffy/Angel- while completely ignoring all the problems in other relationships on that series, like Buffy and Spike.

Oh, I've ranted about Buffy/Spike a-plenty in the past. But the thing with that ship is that I think it's a fascinating "tracker" for the way the "tail-end of the backlash," as you put it, played out in real time. The show began with Spike threatening to stake Drusilla to "prove" his "love" for Buffy and Buffy treating that with the ridicule it deserved, then in S6 moved onto an actual honest presentation of the kind of obsession that Spike thought was love and how that was harmful for Buffy and how she got pulled into it b/c of PTSD, and then in S7 presented the exact same relationship as "romantic": whereas a lot of shows now just begin with S7 Spuffy.

I get their point, but I also think the author should broaden their tv-watching scope before assuming what happens on the CW (a network aimed at 16-24yr-olds) happens everywhere. A meta on the problematic perception of romance on tv should be just that.

That's a good point. I chose BtVS and BA as an example b/c I think that's what my flist would be most familiar with. Thing is, I can think of lots of shows that did a good job from a similar time period (or at least, better than shows generally do now.) Mark Greene and Carol Hathaway's friendship on ER, Doug Ross's friendship with Susan Lewis and contentious relationship with Kerry Weaver on the same show, Charlie Salinger on Party of Five and his relationships with his sisters Claudia and Julia (and how that related to his romance with Kirsten), etc.

These days, I'm hard pressed to come up with similar examples on any other shows I know: look at the latest horrific plot development on Fringe, for example. Even on Once Upon a Time, which I like b/c it has lots of men and women interacting in non-romantic ways, and has significant relationships between men and women that are completely platonic, still wouldn't Go There the way AtS did with Angel and Faith, IMO. The Good Wife irritated me with the way it handled Will/Alicia. The same goes for Grey's Anatomy and its attitude to workplace relationships. etc.