TeeVee

[meganbmoore]

I watched Arrow up until about halfway through the episode where Laurel's mother showed up and Helena returned, and somewhere in between Roy calling Thea a "rich bitch" and Diggle referring to Helena as "your psycho ex-girlfriend," I realized not only was no woman between the ages of 20 and 30 was ever going to appear of the show without being thrown at Oliver, and, remembering spoilers I've read about Shado, the only way the comic book ladies were going to appear on the show and still be allowed to fight is if they were evil killers (and I'm still rather enraged from earlier in the season when Helena and Dinah/Laurel were made rivals who apparently can't stand each other over Oliver.)

The Lady Vanishes: A BBC TV movie that, like the Alfred Hitchcock movie, is based on Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel spins, in which a young woman travels by train from Croatia to England in the 30s. On the train, a woman from her compartment disappears, and the other passengers in the car claim she never existed, leading the rest of the train to believe the young woman is delusional because of sunstroke. I can't compare it to the book or the Hitchcock movie, but I enjoyed it a lot, though I question Our Heroine's love interest falling for her while believing she's insane and would benefit from temporary instutionalization, and Our Heroine has some very cringeworthy xenophobia in the first half (it doesn't go away in the second, but she seems to have realiazed that xenophobia is not cool and only causes problems after a while) but her xenophobia is actually an important plotpoint, as opposed to the narrative agreeing with her when she's going on about how people in other countries should learn English for the convenience of British tourists and it's silly to speak any other language.

Person of Interest 2.19:

-Aah, Cal, I figured you would be toast the second we learned whether you were good or bad. (But, Head HR Dude, your own godson? REALLY? And Main HR Dude even suggested a non-lethal suggestion and everything, and I think that was hard for him to do.) I have no real opinions on Beecher as a character, but I did enjoy listening to and looking at him.

-Fusco and Carter have had way too little to do lately, especially Carter. Not to mention way too little to do with Reese and Finch.

-Shaw! Is going hunting for Root! Oh, if only f/f fanon ships could have half the following any random m/m fanon ship gets.As both Arrow and Once Upon A Time appear to have abruptly been cleared off my slate (maybe I'll netflix them when I'm over my current annoyance- and I'm still very behind on Bomb Girls, Nikita and Beauty and the Beast, but I intend to catch up with them, and I think The Borgias is back too), I'll take a moment to list new/somewhat new-ish shows that I've been thinking about checking out (not including some Asian shows I need to watch and a few other British series that have finished airing):

The Americans
DaVinci's Demons (though not until I've heard feedback that isn't about "ZOMG SEX")
Deception
Defiance
On Top of the Lake
Orphan Black
The Vikings

Please feel free to PM me trigger warnings for any of the above(misogyny, rape, racism, homophobia, ableism, the woobifying of white men who like to engage in the above, and excessive gore) or leave non-spoilery general warnings in the comments. Graphic sex for the sake of graphic sex/shock value/"being edgy" also isn't exactly a favorite thing of mine and is a bit of a turn off. (I actually have seen a list of trigger warnings for TotL and am pondering, as I can handle most in a narrative that handles them properly, but I'm not sure about all of them at once.)

In non-new-TV news, I finished revisiting canon for RareWomen (more accurately: I skimmed it a while back, planned and plotted, and rewatched all the scenes with the character who will be the subject of my fic) and am sad that there will be mo more of it ever. I also watched the first season of Sarah Shahi's shortlived Fairly Legal and simultaneously enjoyed it a lot (though I didnt enjoy the fact that her character is apparently white, and so want her to be secretly adopted) and wasn't really surprised that it didn't last long, as it doesn't fit easily within any strict "categories," and USA likes its categories. Very disappointed the second season apparently wasn't released on DVD, and probably won't be.

(PS-I've read your comments re: Adam Horowitz and rape-apologia and nod with each of you.)

Comments

[saturnofthemoon]

Okay, here are the two shows I can tell you about.

Defiance: The pilot is entertaining but, I'm a bit annoyed that, amidst all the interesting women and alien characters, the show is still all about the white, human male lead. Of course, this might change over the course of future episodes.

Vikings: Mostly a guy show with rape, slavery, and lots of gore. There are only two main female characters. Lagertha, the lead man's wife, is a shield maiden and your basic "strong woman", who occasionally fights alongside her husband. Siggy is the wife of the earl, a very grey character, who gathers power behind the scenes. I like both of them, but they don't really compensate for the show's over abundance of testosterone.

[meganbmoore]

Most of the feedback I've been hearing about Defiance is cooing over an interspecies pairing, but since it's SyFy, I'm not at all surprised that it's all about the white dude.

[shiegra]

Yeah, I'm a sucker for the ship (although I'm surprised about the cooing because I haven't seen any - I basically thought I was all alone and it was going to be one of those ships like early-seasons Stefan/Elena where the characters seeming to actually care about each other made it boring to fandom) but the main dude was beyond obnoxious. I think how much he pissed his daughter off was supposed to be charming interplay but mostly it just made me go 'wow do I feel you.'

[meganbmoore]

Well, I haven't looked at fandom at large for any of these shows, just going by the few people I know watching it commenting on them, so maybe fandom is dismissing it as boring/"badly done Romeo and Juliet"*/etc.

8Unless they're all too busy saying that about Charlie/Jason in Revolution.

[shiegra]

There are legitimate things to criticize about the ship, but 'boring' isn't really one of them. They have fluffy scenes about him helping her use a big-ass gun.

/throws salt over shoulder at mention of revolution fandom

(I mean, not that violence makes a ship automatically exciting, but for fandom....actually, Christie - the human woman in the relationship - will probably be bashed because the 'cool' young woman, the main character, has a brief moment that could be looked at through shipper goggles and she's the more violent aka fandom-accepted character.)

[shiegra]

And the dude is pretty fandom bait.

[meganbmoore]

I'm trying to only look at tumblr for Revolution fandom. More people who care about the things I care about, and I can make it so that I never again see the people who only post in a character's tag to hate them. Downside is the lack of discussion.

[meganbmoore]

Now that I've watched both episodes that are out, what was the shipper goggles moment? It appears to have flown right over my head.

(And I can't speak for last week, but this week a lot of tumblr's opinion of Irisa seems to be "ugh, she has no personality and just grunts a lot and is a ripoff of Leeloo.")

[shiegra]

Oh, when Irisa is gazing across the bar at him and sketching his face in her notebook. If he didn't already have a love interest, I would have thought it was foreshadowing. (I actually love the prospective and actualized romance for all the kids. I was spoiled line-by-line for the prison 'conversation' bit between Irisa and the deputy, and his delivery prevented my foreknowledge from blunting the impact of the scene. If not for the deputy, I might have been terrified of a love triangle.)

Ugh. I know I started it, but that was really more than I wanted to know about Defiance fandom. Why do fandoms always have to be so terrible? ....I've rarely seen a less Leeloo lady alien before.

[meganbmoore]

Yup, went right over my head. It's probably foreshadowing their becoming friends to offset the antagonism between their fathers. (I want her to be friends with Christie, but who knows.)

The potential triangle that worries me is Amanda/Nolan/Kenya, because we all know how those triangles always turn out.

The comparisons seem to be largely based on the very similar hair and superhuman fighting skills, but their personalities are nothing alike and their relationships with their older scruffy roguish white dude guardian are certainly going to be very different. (Given that Irisa calling Nolan her father were practically the first words of the series that were uttered, I think we're safe from anything being sprung on us there.) Irisa's design, though, seems to be an offshoot of Jool's in Farscape (the sneak peak of her with other Irathians looks even more Jool-like) which is by the same creators. (Actually, I derived considerable enjoyment from playing "spot the Farscape makeup" while watching.)

I suspect Irisa/Deputy is the "will they/won't they of the show, at least the first season or so, unless they kill him off.

I have a feeling that criticism of Irisa is going to ping me the same way bashing of Jason Neville does, in that things I recognize as being a result of abuse (even if Irisa has been removed from the abuse for years) are things fandom dubs annoying traits or proof they're weak/poorly developed characters.

[shiegra]

Well, there's all the het in DaVinci's Demons and the extremely extended, gratuitous rape scene in episode one of Orphan Black - Vikings has lots of rape, main male rapists and sidelined female characters and I hear The Americans has graphic rape in the first episode (I don't know about later episodes.) I thought Defiance was fun, though.

[meganbmoore]

Is that the "I'm only having sex with you because I thought you were a different clone" scene, or is there another in Orphan Black? (And it seems that all the shows that've popped up the last couple months either have rape or are built around serial killers.)

ORPHAN BLACK SPOILERS

[shiegra]

Yeah, the woman she's impersonating has a boyfriend (who, as far as we know, knows nothing about the clones) who's getting confused about their differences and asking questions and she jumps him in order to get him to stop talking. Not that 'kiss you to shut you up' doesn't already have gross undertones to it, and not that it wouldn't be rape anyway but the way she silenced him while he was getting progressively more disturbed by the fact that she wasn't the woman he was consenting to sex to made me really uncomfortable.

Oh, and the one episode of Deception I saw had some definite implications of rape (of her now-deceased friend when they were much younger) possibly incestuous molestation.

I'm staring at your list really realizing that - we don't even need to mention Game of Thrones - and going '.....euch.'

Re: ORPHAN BLACK SPOILERS

[meganbmoore]

A couple people with similar consent issues as me like Deception, so I'm not too worried there.

Re: ORPHAN BLACK SPOILERS

[shiegra]

Yeah, it definitely wasn't handled exploitatively - I didn't even think of it until you pointed out how full of it TV's latest lineup in, at which point I went, oh right, another angsty backstory for a teenage girl with has to include it!

[aphrodite_mine]

If you have any specific questions about ToL, I'd be happy to answer them. It is rough, I'm not gonna lie. But on the up side, I got out a LOT of unresolved anger by yelling at the assholes that populate Laketop.

[meganbmoore]

I saw your list of trigger warnings and, based on the people involved, I don't doubt that things are handled well, but don't feel up to coping with them right now, so it's been added to the "netflix the dvds" list. (And feel emotionally drained just from people's feedback of the shows I asked about.)