Weekend Stuff

[shipperx]

:
:
Football
Stomped Tennessee, which as a Bama fan is always considered to be a good thing.  However, I was expecting a better game.  This was nearly as much of a blow out as Arkansas.  Ah well, can't really complain, right?


Dancing on the Edge
Watched the Starz miniseries Dancing on the Edge which starred the same guy who is in 12 Years a Slave as a jazz band leader, John Goodman as an American robber-baron-industrialist, and Anthony Stewart Head playing a 1931 jackass aristocrat who would rather frame an innocent man for a murder than have a fellow aristocrat blamed for it.  A bit slow, but interesting  (although the final "interview" episode was wholly unecessary.)


Once Upon A Time
So, Captain Hook gets his flashback episode and... he's related to Spike, right?  (They could share long black leather coat + eyeliner of moral amibiguity tips!)

Hook was a 'good man'  (Or as Ichabod Crane would say, 'an exemplary lieutenant') who fell into pirate-ty ways upon being disillusioned by others, and who 'just wants to be seen for the man that he truly is.'  Oh, and his telling Emma "As you wish..." was totally a Princess Bride shout-out, right? (As soon as he said it, my mental pop culture quote rememberer added "Which means Dread Pirate Roberts loves you." )

I don't have a strong shipping preference, however, so I don't really have to see Emma/Hook come out of this.  They could toss Hook to Ariel Mermaid Princess (who in the trailer looks familiar but I can't place from where) and, hey, Pirate/Mermaid seems like it should work  (I have this foreboding sense that Prince Eric will turn out to have been a douche.  He kind of was in the non-Disney version of the tale, so I sort of expect it in Once's).  At any rate, I'm not set on any ship, but I was sort of correct in thinking all along that with everyone tossing out how 'beneath' the heroes that Hook is, that it would turn out that somehow he'd once been a 'good man'... hence, he's related to Spike, right? ;)

Peter Pan continues to be an interesting villain.  Good casting and good story use of the character (who seems to be hybridized with the mythological figure Pan in addition to creepy-fying the kiddie tale of Peter Pan).

Prince Charming is being a noble dolt (Seriously, Charming, it's not noble to lie to your family to 'protect them', just tell the truth and let them deal!)

Anyway, not a "Fool for Love" level episode, but I do think this seasons Once is, in general, an big improvement over last year's.  I've enjoyed the Neverland arc and its purpose for the primary characters to have to confront who they are in order to succeed.


The Vampire Diaries
I've been waaaaayyyy behind with episodes piling up on the DVR, but I finally got around to watching.

Doppleganger overload, anyone?  How many doubles can there be?  (And isn't Elena a triple now?)

Generally, I've never been a hard shipper on this show either.   Up until last year I was always about as pro (or sometimes more pro) Elena/Stefan as I was to Elena/Damon.  Although, frankly, I was basically -- y'all are vampires, Ot3 already!  But, Stefan was such an offputting douche last year that Elena 'had' to be human or he couldn't 'see her the same way'  (came off as very madonna/whore to me) that it put a serious a dent in the pro-Elena/Stefan feelz. Now, this doppleganger non-sense of being 'fated' across time and space has me jumping up and down for Team Free Will!  Go Damon.  Sure, you're a serial killing jerk, but at least no one says that the universe insists that you MUST win all the darn time.

I more often than not have issues with any ship that invokes 'fate.'  It makes me feel very contrarian.  It worked for me on Fringe because the concept wasn't brought up until far into the series after many had already climbed upon a ship (and the only quasi-competing ship got a happy ending anyway),  so it wasn't the foundation OF said ship.  And I'm okay with it the way the 'fated love' card has been used for Regina on Once Upon a Time because of the twist of when Tinkerbell pointed Regina towards her 'fated true love' (Robin Hood?!)  Regina went, 'See ya!' and ran as hard as she could the other way.  That twist makes things somewhat interesting.  Still, usually, when the 'fate'/destiny/soul mates schtick comes out, I usually cringe.  I want to watch an interesting relationship, not writer caveat!

*spit* Eternal soul mates.  I'll always be team free will.

And, Sleepy Hollow tonight, yay!  (Edit:  Turns out not.  Boo!  It's Halloween week!)

Comments

[usedtobeljs]

I don't think we get a new Sleepy Hollow til next week. (But then we get the return of John Cho, the addition of John Noble as the Sin-Eater, and Abbie and Ichabod going to a baseball game. YAY! :))

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Really? Poo. It's Halloween and everything!

[usedtobeljs]

Game 5 of the World Series. ;)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Never watch baseball. Can't even say who is in the Series.

[shapinglight]

Yay! Team Free Will!

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

1) I am all for Team Free Will. I tweeted about how tired the idea of soul mates is and how I thought it was lazy story telling and got a response back from Julie Plec saying to not ship on her feed (or something like that, I'm not all that great at Tweet etiquette).

Honestly, I wasn't aware I was shipping. I just hate, loathe, spit on the idea of soul mates.

And honestly, Stefan is just as much, if not more, of a serial killing jerk as Damon is. He just cloaks his narstiness in self righteousness and people buy it. *blech*

I admit that up until last season I did lean towards Damon because I'm a sucker for a good redemption story and they were selling Damon as a candidate since early season 1. I also see way too many parallels between Damon/Elena/Stefan and Spike/Buffy/Angel and that was an influence, but I could accept Stefan/Elena because Stefan looks like Puppet!Angel and I find that endearing and he never quite seemed as asinine as Angel could get when Buffy was involved. But that's over. Last season made the whole idea of the relationship slightly creepy and I got much more interested in Stefan/Caroline instead. Which my just end up an exercise in futility.

Also, Elena is at least a quadruple. The original servant girl killed by Ketsia, the village girl killed to make tie Original Family immortal, Katherine and Elena herself.

2) I like Hook. I like Neal too, though so I'm completely torn. I just want Emma to get Henry back. Charming annoys me, though. It's all that self righteousness. It always makes me want to hurl.

3) I watched Dancing on the Edge up until I saw the murder frame up coming and got so creeped out I had to change the channel. Which is a shame because it's a beautiful show and the music is to die for but watching a character do something obviously stupid that will obviously come back to bite them in the ass is one of my squicks.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I was just 'yeesh!' with amnesia Stefan becoming all offended when he discovered that Elena was with Damon. Yeah, because after a couple of hours of trying to refresh his memory, he really has a big reason justify going murderous because the girl he flirted with for a half-hour happens to date his brother.

Seriously?!

And, yeah, I'd prefer Stefan/Caroline at this point.

2) I tend to think that Emma/Neal is set in stone because of being Heny's parents. This is at heart a family show. Not quite a kiddified as most of Disney, but still aimed at a family audience, so the weight will always tend to side with parental units. Certainly, it's possible to have a step-father, but... I still sense it will go family route. Doesn't knock me off the Hook redemption train though. No reason he can't resolve some issues and fall for someone else. At least Once has tried to make clear that while there are "true loves" Tru love doesn't automatically mean ONLY ONE. There can be more than one true love.




The death of Jessie in Dancing is really the only bit of violence in the story, and you don't even see that. The only baffling part was the final episode which was superflous and kind of WTF??? The actual story ends in ep 5.

Ep 6 is the flashback of an interview with Louis that was done before the murder as told to the audience by the magazine editor after the series. It seemed rather self-indulgent of the writers and has nothing really to do with the plot. It just gives info on the characters, how Louis grew up, who were his parents, who Carla was, there's even an interview with Jessie about her fans. And then there's hist bizarre bit about Louis having this strange, strange phone conversation with the wife of one of the aristocratic masons. The whole of ep 6 is just superflouous WTF. If you watch it, you can skip ep 6 entirely. It should have ended with Ep 5.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Seriously!

The times that 'fate' works for me are mostly only in retrospect. Sort of like "Wow, we got through all of that. Must be fate." I don't buy into characters prattling about "Fate brings us together!" That's B.S. It doesn't sell me on a relationship. In fact it often does the reverse. I tend to be the kind to suspect that when people say "Fate" that "fate" is usually just what their own head is telling them.

It's like the Farscape quote with Aeryn and Crichton where she says if fate means them to be together, they'll come back together again, and John yells at her "Running away is not fate. It's just running away!"

And I am a bit curious about the Once set up of Regina being told that Robin Hood was her fated true love and she, turned and walked the other way and hasn't looked for him since.

Mostly, though, I tend to view 'soul mates' in stories to be a cop out by writers. It's like they're trying to browbeat an audience into shipping the 'right' ship. It feels like an 'unfair advantage' especially in things like the Vampire Diaries where what makes Stefan the 'better' one is actually the same stuff that makes him worse. It's the Angel effect. Because evil-Stefan is more terrible than Damon (and Angelus is more terrible than Spike) then somehow it's just infinitely more noble when he's not being evil. (It sort of goes with a thought I had the other day re: BtVS. I don't actually have a huge problem with someone who thinks Spike is 'beneath' Buffy. I have issues with that sort of view of relationships and history, but it's okay to say that generally morally speaking Buffy is far less compromised than Spike. That said, no way in hell is Spike 'beneath' Angel. He isn't. He flat-out isn't. Anything Spike has done, Angel has done twice over, and yet SOMEHOW Angel gets the Stefan bonus-points where he's 'better' because somehow that got written down somewhere as a 'fact' when it is not remotely related to what we've actually seen. If we were actually judging them on actions rather than caveot of style-points, yes, Spike is incredibly compromised, but stacked up side-by-side against Angel, he's a better man-pire (even if no character at any time ever recognizes that fact.)

And, yeah, Damon is quite a jackass and never reaches all that high on the morality scale, but as far as I'm concerned, at least he's not a perpetual hypocrit with a madonna/whore complex. I like the actor playing Stefan just fine, but at some point Stefan became rather insufferable where Elena is concerned.

[shapinglight]

Never seen The Vampire Diaries and probably never will, but I agree 100% with everything you say about Spike and Angel.

No way is Angel the better man.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

The Stefan/Damon thing is almost a direct translation of Spike/Angel. It's pretty damn difficult not to draw the parallels (and it's quite probably deliberate to some extent.)

Stefan was presented as the stalwart noble suffering vampire. Damon was the snarky, rude bad guy who has slowly become...er... less bad.

Stefan got turned and he went full-bore evil head-ripping worstest vampire ever! Damon got turned because he was a love-sick woobie who resisted going bad at first.

Stefan goes OTT eeeeeeeeeeeevil in a deeply out of control way if he ever drinks human blood straight from the human. He cannot control himself and rips his victims heads off (literally). Damon won't give up drinking straight from the human, but he also isn't controlled by his urges. Damon can stop whenever he chooses, but Stefan has to go cold turkey or he (as he did a season a go) goes full-bore psycho killer.

The two brothers (and Stefan/Damon are literally brothers) also have the regretable habit of both falling for the same woman (all of whom appear to be Elena in some form) They were turned by Katherine (one of the Elena dopplegangers). Damon loved Katherine more than Stefan loved Katherine, but Katherine loved Stefan more than she ever did Damon (although Katherine is NOT a good person once anyone gets to know her). Rinse and repeat and Stefan fell for (good Katherine 21st century doppleganger) Elena. Damon fell for Elena too. The show was predicated on Stefan/Elena and seems loathe to give it up, though most of the fandom seems to be Elena/Damon.

Although, unlike BtVS, Elena is allowed to actually love Damon. She actually overtly chose Damon over Stefan last season (after Stefan couldn't really accept her once she had been turned into a vampire). But, this season they're back to pushing "But Stefan/Elena have been fated over time and space and are FATE, damnit!"

Which, hey, way to put the writer stompy-foot down. (Really, I've tended to favor Ot3 with Stefan/Elena/Damon because they've established that as much as Stefan/Damon fight and argue, they genuinely love each other too. Really, they should just do the unconventional and have Elena 'keep' both of them, especially since she's now a vampire too.)

And the comics were really rancid cherry on top of the crap sundae that is the Spike/Angel situation. Angel is flat-out an inferior to Spike. Angel is given every advantage possible, yet... Spike was capable of choosing a soul, Angel wasn't. Angel, even with soul, can be convinced that his 'hero' status requires outright murdering of people because his special snowflake status and his 'earned reward' require it. Meanwhile, Angel gets constant head-pats, kudos, and multiple people to help him stay on his path while Spike gets... no one.

That puts paid to it all to me.

Spike > Angel. Period.

[shapinglight]

Meanwhile, Angel gets constant head-pats, kudos, and multiple people to help him stay on his path while Spike gets... no one.

Yep, and yet no one involved in creating the situation seems to realise how biased and unfair it is.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

It's one reason I continue to love Fred. She's the only one to just look at Spike and tell him to his face "You're worth saving."

Buffy did as well, of course, but good grief, he'd earned that from her by then. Fred did it with nothing to gain for herself. She just saw him as someone who had innate worth, and she's close to being alone in that.

[shapinglight]

So of course the DH comics will never have him interacting with Fred (or Illyria) again.

Because it's Spike, and it's not important.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

*sigh* True.

But Harmony will probably become a regular.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

1. Agree on Vamp Diaries. They've managed to make the Stefan/Elena ship repulsive on multiple levels within the last two years, haven't they? I can't quite decide if the writers are poking fun at the destiny/fated relationship bit or are serious? Because it is sort of funny. Also can't decide if they mean to show it for the destructive relationship it is?

Prior to that, I admittedly didn't care who Elena ended up with. (I admittedly don't care that much one way or another about Elena, and Damon has better abs than Stefan not to mention better dialogue delivery. So I'd rather see Damon on screen more. From my perspective both Damon and Stefan were reformed serial killers...aka vampires.)

I actually think Caroline may end up in a rather interesting love triangle - with Tyler, Stefan and Jesse vying for her.

And yes, the number of dopplegangers is getting confusing. The actors aren't that good at portraying the distinctions.

2. Hook being related to Spike? OR possibly Sawyer on Lost? Or Han Solo? Or Starbuck? OR Peter on Fringe? Actually he reminds me more of Starbuck and Solo, maybe it's the whole Captain bit? Rogue with a heart of gold, definite trope. One of my favorites.

Spike's back story was a tad more clever than the other five. Which is why I liked the character better or was more obsessed with him.

The kiss between him and Emma reminded me a great deal of the kiss in Once More With Feeling.

Agree on Charming - the guy needs to just tell the truth. He's not protecting anyone by keeping it a secret...except possibly himself from having to deal with the constant worrying, concern and fretting.
Actually - that's probably why he isn't telling them - they'd treat him like an invalid or fret constantly. (I honestly think that's the reason characters who fall ill or are dying don't tell anyone - they don't want to deal with the constant hovering. Unless you are Rumplestilskin - and really enjoy that sort of thing.)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Yeah re: Vampire Diaries. The really irritating part is that you can tell that the writers are completely unaware of the underlying sexist they are writing into Stefans every reaction in the last couple of years, from the madonna/whore stuff coinciding with Elena's vamping to the posessiveness Amnesia Stefan displayed after half an hour of talking to Elena. These are not good qualities, writers!

Re: Hook, I kind of see him as a pastiche of characters, but as I'm fine with the 'rogue with a heart of gold' they have my (wholly unneeded) permission to proceed. :)

It never hurts to have a charming rogue with a heart around.

And *sigh* re: Charming. I like the guy because he's just so darn earnest, but sadly he is often times a complete dolt.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

For some reason the stalwart and self-sacrificing hero is a bit of a dolt.
Although the show does appear to make fun of that a bit - David Nolan really was a dolt. Self-sacrificing to the extent that he was wishy-washy. So they do appear to realize it is a major character flaw in his make-up. Just as Snow's tendency to see the world in "black and white" or "good and evil" is a bit of a character flaw.

Emma in some respects is wiser than her parents.

Re Vamp Diaries - I decided long ago that you really don't want to analyze that tv show too much. Actually it, Supernatural and Agents of Shield are three series that one does not want to analyze. Because politically incorrect is an understatement.

That said, I can't quite decide if the writers mean for Stefan to be likable or sympathetic here? I don't think they do. Because they are clearly critical of Silas - who is a nasty piece of work. Also there seems to be a mocking undercurrent to the whole destiny bit. Perhaps I'm imagining it - but the tone does not appear to be in favor of Stefan.
Any more than it did in Buffy - for Bangle. If anything it felt like the writers were mocking that sort of relationship - demonstrating how destructive it really is. (I actually think the only relationships television writers actively ship are familial or friendships. Romantic entanglements they don't appear to know what to do with - unless of course it's Shondra Rhimes.)

[rahirah]

The original book version of Peter Pan is plenty damn creepy, as I recall. :shudders:

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I do enjoy their exploiting that. I think the reason it works is that the creepy aspect of Peter Pan was always there, it was just mostly overlooked. But if you're looking at all of it, yeah, there's definitely a creepy factor.

... Which is also why I suspect that when Ariel turns up, Prince Eric will be a douche. Disney really departed from the original Andersen tale. The original Ariel's story was filled with tragedy, and I suspect that this will appeal to the Once writers.