bsg season four (pre-finale)

[jlh]

I stopped at last week's episode, and I'll watch all of Daybreak in one go on Friday, though I've been spoiled for it. Watching this season was very different—so clearly endgame, and so much less filler, but so many big plot points that seemed either poorly executed or beside the point.

4.01-4.06: Admittedly, it's difficult to pay off on the end of season 3 because the last half of that last show was pretty great. But despite the whole clandestine meeting of four-of-the-five thing, and despite there being many actual events going on, I found myself slipping back into not caring again.

Kara being sort of crazy and trying to find earth, not that interesting. Felix not wanting to deal with her and losing his leg for it, also not that interesting—like, dude, you should have learned from that bad mutiny not to try it again. Anders having Kara's back 1000% despite everything, priceless. I just adore him; his presence makes Kara less tiresome. The Cylon civil war might have been more interesting if they'd actually had all six remaining cylons talking, instead of Cavil talking for the twos and fours. I understand why from a budget standpoint, but I think that might have been a time to spend some money.

Now, Cally: could that entire episode have been more wincingly stereotypical? I mean, barging into the bar with a baby on your hip screaming at your man checks off about five things on the working class saloon culture checklist, doesn't it? And it falls into a trap that I really cannot stand, that happens in so many action narratives: the woman wants the man to fulfill her domestic duties, but the narrative has given him something "more important" to worry about, which he hasn't shared with her for various reasons, and so we, as the viewer, want her to STFU. It's gross, and it makes the fangirls hate her. Getting shoved out into space by Tory was a lame way to go out. Also: I'm not sure her whole attitude about her baby makes sense when we know she knew that he wasn't a hybrid. Bad storyline, show; no biscuit.

Which reminds me, it's odd how conflicted I am about saying this, but I find Tory Foster to be really tiresome. She's such a closed character and I always find those really difficult, especially when they're doing something that seems to get in the way of other things.

Both Cally and Tory bring up that sort of female-character thing that goes on in fandom and that BSG has avoided for the most part. Fangirls hate domestic women; they're not strong, they don't kick ass, and they sometimes keep the men from doing the same because they want them to do something lame like take care of the baby. And I worry about expressing my distaste for Tory for fear that I, too, am hating on another female character. I can console myself that I really love plenty of women on this show—Dee from the start, and Roslin, and Kara to a certain extent, and Boomer in spite of herself, and Sharon, and poor Caprica-Six. But I don't like the show setting up these ladies as either awesomely ass-kicking or domestic/emotional and therefore useless.

4.07-4.10: The uneasy cylon-human alliance was inevitable, and I like how it wasn't particularly easy. That said, given that it was inevitable, I was somewhat impatient for them to just get on with it already; the arguments against it were not persuasively made and in fact are almost never persuasively made on the show generally.

I might have been more upset about the cat than any other death on this show.

I really love that Papadama and the Prez worked their shit out. I adore them.

So anyway, we unbox Three, she threatens to kill people, so does Lee, Kara runs through the ship, we go to Earth, and it's fucked. All this travel to end up at Brooklyn Bridge park, with everyone looking like they're in a Bergman film all of a sudden. And wow, if I hadn't been spoiled? Another moment to stop watching the show.

4.11-4.14: Dualla was robbed. What is with the fucked up female deaths on this show?

Here's how the mutiny was lame: It started out with a great premise; of course many in the fleet don't want to cooperate with the Cylon rebels. But Gaeta is a horrible judge of character, and he's oddly morally rigid. He just keeps hitching that wagon to the wrong star. And Zarek's actions pushed the entire thing into predictable melodrama.

Here's a cool thing about the mutiny: Galen crawling through the ventilation shafts like he was Scotty, and manually fucking the FTL drives, proclaiming his love for Cally along the way. Made of awesome, that right there.

4.15-4.18: Here's where I started perking up again. LOVE the backstory. LOVE Ellen's little wrestling match with Cavil and her insistence on how much she loves him and how he has to let go of his resentments.

Ellen showing up on Gallactica and immediately shagging Saul and then wanting a drink was pretty awesome. The idea of being Galen or Sam or Tory, spending years on a ship making skin jobs while these two play their shit out fills me with sudden empathy. (If I didn't find Tory tiresome I would so be writing threesome fic based during that period.)

I feel sooo bad for Chief getting played by Boomer like that; I thought that entire storyline was incredibly well done. I don't know how I feel about Anders wandering off into Hybridland. I do think the show has a fetish for the shaven head, though.

I am not, in the end, much for Kara and Lee. Now that Anders has wandered off into telling everyone what's going on, I find Kara and Sam's relationship to be even more interesting—like the attempted mercy killing, and Kara referring to him as "my husband" (much as Sam always calls her "my wife"). It isn't that I ship them so much as I feel their relationship is important, and it makes me sad that the pilotshipping makes people impatient about them, as though Sam only exists to keep them apart. I've always enjoyed Kara more when she's in the company of Sam, and I continue to do so. That isn't a prediction—like, omg Kara Sam 4evrs!—and it's frustrating that I even have to make that clear, as though just liking the interaction of two characters means that you are making some larger statement about the show, but that's the world we're living in.

I'm looking forward to Friday, partly because I'll be glad when the show just gets to where its going—killing everyone off in a huge ball of fire, or an indeterminate ending where they leave the Gallactica behind and move on through space, or something in between. All endings seem equally likely at this point; I have no issues that I expect the finale to resolve, or even give lip service to. Expectation-free!

Comments

[mistress-mab.livejournal.com]

You summed up my feelings on Kara and Sam perfectly. She seems more at peace, more comfortable in her own skin when she's with him.

I am impressed by your turbo tv watching skills. :)

As for Friday, I am expecting something - total enlightenment. So yeah, I might end up a bit disappointed. LOL

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I really wanted to get through the whole thing before the end, but BSG is surprisingly easy to marathon, especially when you're just sort of watching it to be done with it. In a larger sense, I want it to be over so I can look back and see what I see. But I feel that way about canons I really love—I look forward to the end so I can look back on them as a whole, and then consume them all over again! It's a huge part of the pleasure of the text for me.

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about Kara/Sam - she has seemed to be able to breathe a bit easier with him. The sweetness to her character is so frequently hidden and so completely gratifying to see, so any glimpse of it just thrills me.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Z felt that the one ep I didn't watch, it's all about how Kara has made her peace about Sam not really being Sam anymore which allows her to not really be her anymore, and it's like, okay, dude, tell me about this harbinger of death stuff. I'm ready.

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

I want them all to stand on the ruined Brooklyn Bridge, and for us to then pull way, way out and reveal that they are, in fact, inside a snowglobe owned by an autistic child.

Barring that: my guess is "reset button," literally or figuratively.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

LOL!

Well, I've already told you what the final shot is, so reset button is a good guess. Which goes back to my prediction long ago that BSG is basically The Matrix.

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

EDIT: SPOILERS WHOOPS

EDIT EDIT: Now in white text!

[rawles.livejournal.com]

WHITETEEEEXT********WHITETEEEEXT

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I am sure of this as well. LAME!

[rawles.livejournal.com]

BSG is best at LAMESAUCE.

[ziggy1278.livejournal.com]

The producers got really clear about this during the whole "All Along the Watchtower" thing. People went a little apeshit with theories of tying the whole thing back to humanity in our present state because the song was a song from our reality. They were clear, however, that Earth is not our Earth. It's like a parallel universe. None of this is coming back to us in our world here - it's not about that - they just thought it was a cool song... and presumably a cool bridge.

That's another thing I liked about the show, Earth is a very different part their mythology, and they weirdly used it to connect to us, the viewers, as this familiar thing. But it kinda backfired because everyone is expecting this big moral or revelation about our Earth circa 2008, and it just isn't coming.

And if it does I will vomit. But it wont, because BSG is best at AWESOMESAUCE.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

A cool bridge in the song, or a cool bridge in Brooklyn?

I mean, this is all based on that spoiler about the final shot of the show, which may or may not be valid, but if that is the final shot, I'm not sure how that isn't the reality we're in.

All that said, I haven't read any of the theories or listened to the stuff from the writers, etc, but I think if they wanted it to be a parallel reality they shouldn't have done something so iconic as everyone returning to a destroyed but still recognizable New York City. It was very Planet of the Apes which is fine if that's what you're going for, but not if it isn't.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I'm going to address what you said elsewhere, here, because that's going to become a mess over there, and I don't want to get into it. I'll only say that it's probably unwise to pull out a stereotypical fanboy dismissal of fangirls in a fangirl's journal, and I'm surprised you went there because you are rarely a typical fanboy; if you were, I doubt you'd want to be friends with me, as I'd give you a headache all the time.

I'm willing to say that despite having adored TNG and TOS, and watched some of DS9, that I do not qualify as loving episodic sci-fi. I'm not Carrie; I didn't watch TOS in the womb; I don't feel obligated to support all sci-fi television; I've only been to HP cons; I've never read novelizations; I don't own a light saber, etc. And I'll admit that I do like romantic plots.

But I guess, two things. First, one of the things I've been struggling with in being willing to say "I don't like this thing" is that being dismissed with, "that's because you don't like the form, or what you want isn't what it's doing" as though that's a personal failing of mine. So, I don't like BSG because maybe I don't have a great love for episodic sci-fi (the bar of which gets higher all the time) and therefore I am not eligible to have a criticism of the show. One reason I'm surprised you made that crack elsewhere is that you're not actually like that; I've never seen you espouse that belief, and that's one of the reasons I like talking to you about tv shows and movies.

Second, the show itself is invested in Lee and Kara. I don't have a lot of time for them and actually like each of their characters less when they're in each other's presence; I find that they bring out the worst in each other. But the show returns to them again and again, and they've constructed a very unsatisfying romantic subplot, as far as I can tell mostly to torture the viewers, if quotes from RDM are any indication.

(I mean, I already feel like a chump because I like a character that RDM apparently stated was created only to be an obstacle for Lee and Kara. I don't like the idea that the creators of a show I'm watching are sitting around laughing at me; it's humiliating.)

Which is all to say, I don't ship in this show, but I can recognize that the romance plots are not well done. There are any number of other things that I didn't think were particularly well done either. And having all that criticism dismissed because I am aware of and have the ability to criticize a romantic plot is a bit crazy-making. Am I under an obligation to not only be a good sci-fi fangirl (which I'm already not) but really a good sci-fi fanboy before I can have anything to say about BSG?

[ziggy1278.livejournal.com]

First, I think it's silly that you feel like a chump. I mean I fucking love the shit out of characters that I'm POSITIVE authors and creators conceived of as "Obstacle" on a whiteboard somewhere when they were outlining. It doesn't make the character less awesome, it just makes the author aware of things like romantic tension and its place in a narrative.

Second, they aren't talking about BSG, they are talking about RDM, who, like I said in my other post, has the imagination and balls and flexibility to be a very good producer of shows that have literally helped map and shape the genre. Look at his IMDB page, he's not just some guy who wrote a show. And I'm not saying he's infallible - he has made quite a few annoying decisions and written some lame eps of some of those shows. What I am saying, is to write him off as some asshole because your particular romantic subplot didn't go the way that you wanted to or the plot didn't take the turn you were expecting it to, means you are looking through a pretty narrow lens and probably don't appreciate his larger contribution.

I will absolutely write off BSG as one of my favorite shows if we get the snowglobe ending. And I am the first person to say that Harry Potter fizzled out... to a painful degree. But i do NOT get people who are, like, MAD at JKR. She's a fucking titan, and single-handedly introduced millions of kids to reading who might otherwise have been uninterested. She's not just some bitch who fucked up characters I love (but I mean, honestly Tonks AND Remus), and I think it is that logical leap that makes people seem especially (creepily) fannish to me.

Dunno if any of that makes sense. Gotta run to a job.

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

Not to follow you around the internet, but: I have some pretty big problems with what you're saying here.

The short version being that I don't think anyone gets a free ticket. I don't care what they've done. I don't care what kind of ground they've broken. RDM and JRK may be iconoclasts, but they are also writers working in field I am personally and professionally invested in. So that's how I'll regard them.

JKR is only a titan because a lot of people bought her books. Something about them clicked with the masses, and that's great. I'm glad that, through her books, she encouraged more kids to read. But she doesn't get to sit in some unassailable tower because her books have mass appeal. Twilight also has mass appeal, you know? And I don't think any of us are pretending that Stephanie Meyer isn't a ridiculous person.

As I said elsewhere, I think RDM's a talented guy. I'm aware of the scope of his career, and that he's worked very hard for a long time to get where he is. But looking closely at his bio, you know -- while it's admirable to be so dedicated and to climb the ladder of the industry the way he has, I don't really see how that makes him infallible. Rick Berman is one of the most important figures in the ST franchise, and he's an idiot.

I don't think RDM is an idiot. I think he's done some good work. I think BSG has some good ideas. But I also think it's a mess. It would be a mess if this was his first show. It would be a mess if he'd won a Pulitzer. To be perfectly frank: I don't care about RDM, I care about whether or not his show is any good.

Also: I especially have a problem with the characterization of various people's dismissal of BSG -- or HP, or anything else -- as being about a "particular romantic subplot." I ran into this an awful lot when I was trying to talk to people about ATLA before it ended, and more than once I was told flat out that they "don't care about shipping" and thus didn't want to listen to what I had to say.

Here is the thing: once you decide to incorporate romance into your story, the romance is a part of your story. That part is then as important as you make it. And quite often, in shows like BSG or ATLA or books like HP, which have tightly woven stories in which romance and the larger adventure plot intertwine, the handling of the romance plot becomes indicative of larger problems or strengths in the story.

When I told people I'd be pissed if ATLA ended in Zuko/Katara, it wasn't because of my dislike for that ship or my support for Mai/Zuko (though I'm not going to pretend that those things aren't true in and of themselves.) It was because the story, up until that point, had been building very steadily toward Mai/Zuko and Aang/Katara. And I mean STRUCTURALLY, here. The show derailing on that front would've indicated a lack of narrative integrity. And THAT'S what would have gotten under my skin.

People like Rawles talk about Lee and Kara because it's a lens through which you can see the underlying structural and thematic problems with the story. You can disagree with their opinion, but dismissing it entirely as a "fangirl" perspective is playing into every single stereotype of male-dominated fandom.

Your telling me that I'm being creepily fannish because I want to judge writers on the basis of their writing instead of worshiping at the alter of their accomplishments is also not helping in that regard.

[ziggy1278.livejournal.com]

I love you, but I think you are being a little deconstructionist, and maybe putting some words in my mouth. So, since we are safe in Clio's journal, it may be helpful to let you in on how I view this whole fandom thing, and hope that you understand better where I am coming from at the end:

Let's start with BSG. I watched BSG from day one, and I don't feel like we were dicked around by Kara/Lee. It was a totally ambiguous relationship from day one. Kara is a turbulent person in love with two men. This happens. Alot. I think it is good storytelling. I have said repeatedly that I know real-life girls like Starbuck. I think she is a brilliant character, and I think her complex relationships are one of my favorite things about the show.

The laser focus on a person's expectation for fictional relationships (which I totally agree are super relevant parts of narratives) they can't control, is THE thing that prevents certain types of people from really enjoying truly brilliant media - i honestly believe that- and those people take to the internet and find other people who are also hyperconnected to the media they consume to an *almost* unhealthy degree. It is my belief that those people are a small minority, and would be better off if they just never watched another tv show ever again, because they are so friggin' close to their fiction that they create expectations for the creators of that fiction that are impossible to live up to. I will not, and I do not, feel the need to make alot of time for them, and repeatedly confirm that their feelings are valid and beautiful (even though they may be) in the same way that I don't think heroin addicts should do heroin despite their strong feelings about it.

Now, sometimes people on the heroin luck out and get what they want. Those people in the HP camp call the Harry/Hermione people the crazy ones - but really they were ALL crazy. They were ALL on the heroin. It was just a bad trip for some of them at the end. If they were so devastated by the outcome of this relationship that they write journal entries with harsh words directed at the creator, I feel that they were all playing russian roulette by even consuming fiction, and should really take up... bike riding instead.

The people who "don't care about shipping" really do care, they just don't care anywhere near as intensely as the heroin people do - but they do want to be around the heroin people and read their essays and whatnot. Sometimes they just can't take it, and make a really dumb comment in the direction of one of the heroin people.

And it's like they say, "You know that heroin shit will kill you, right? Pretty soon you wont be able to watch or consume any media because of the paralyzing fear that it might go pear shaped and break your heart... because you are already making ridiculous comments about the authors of said media like a damn fool and the show isn't even over."

And THAT'S when the heroin people LOSE THEIR SHIT and come after you as if you can understand the heroin - but you cant - so you just scratch your head and feel bad, because you have NO IDEA how important the heroin is to them. So you have to apologize for being an asshole who doesn't understand. Because you LIKE those heroin people, you really really do, but you should NEVER engage in their arena with them. So, like today, you say, "Sorry. I am never going to say anything on the internet ever again."

----

So thats where I'm coming from when I look at 95% of stuff in fandom. And if my comments seem stereotypical, it's because they are like a... baby chicken trying to describe the Theory of Relativity using only his beak, tiny brain, and a nerf football.

Still, I contend that aggressively disliking a person who is extremely accomplished in their field for what they did to their characters is "creepily fannish." Where as disliking the choices they make while still respecting their experience is... taste.

You are free and welcome to regard the creators of your media however you like, but I think there is hefty gap between "worshipping at their altars" and angrily burning down the pedestals that we, as fans, put them on, because they didn't go our way with their narratives.

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

I think there's a misunderstanding at the core of all of this, and so that's what I'll talk about.

In conversations like this one (and I have had many of them over the years, online and off, pleasant and unpleasant) certain assumptions often get made. One is touched on in your last paragraph -- that when I am (or anyone else is) disappointed by a narrative or irritated by its creator, it's because that narrative didn't do what I personally wanted it to. That's true, but not in the way I think you mean it.

What I want from a narrative that I'm consuming is actually pretty straightforward: consistency and follow-through. I want it to do the thing it has promised it will do, and I want it to get there in a way that makes some kind of sense. When I say that a story has gone pear-shaped or run off the rails, what I mean is that it's gone back on its own promises. A well-constructed narrative isn't necessarily predictable (although many of them are, as not everything is about suspense) but it should hang together. It should deliver on what it tells me it's going to do.

I'm not familiar enough with the fine details of BSG to discuss it in depth, so I'll talk about HP by way of example.

There are a lot of things going on in the HP books, and many of them contradict each other. I always knew this, but while I was reading them as they were released, I made certain decisions as to which themes I thought she was going to deliver on and which were the kind of accidental sideroads that may come up in lengthy novels series by first-time authors.

I saw the parallels explicitly drawn between Snape and Draco Malfoy, read Dumbledore's words about how our choices define us, recalled Draco's initial offer of friendship in the robe shop, watched as time and time again Snape's benign intentions were revealed, discovered that he was in fact a reformed Death Eater, read the Sorting Hat's message of the four houses' need to stand together....I absorbed all of these things and I thought, "This is a story about unity and healing old rifts, about uniting behind a greater good, about redemption and choices and triumphing over our past mistakes." I thought this until I was 2/3 of the way through the 7th book, and I was completely, totally wrong in every way.

Afterward, when I tried to explain my disappointment, a lot of friends of mine told me I was just mad because I hadn't gotten my way. They knew I was interested in Snape and Draco, that I was sad all the Marauders had died, and they were right. I did care about all of those things. But the reason I cared was because JKR had made me care, and because she'd (apparently accidentally) set up themes of redemption and unity that never actually paid off.

It turned out she wasn't doing the thing that I thought she was -- the books didn't deliver on what they'd promised me.

Now, I think that all of the things she DID do are built up to as well, obviously, with varying degrees of success. I don't think she intentionally mislead anyone -- I just think she was sloppy and lost control of the details of her own story. My annoyance with her as an author is that she did a bad job of constructing her narrative, such that a large number of people felt slapped across the face when it was over. Authorial intent is all well and good, but if your audience consistently misreads your text, then maybe you're doing something wrong.

I agree that viciously ripping authors apart is a waste of time and kind of ridiculous besides when what you're really angry about is the story they wrote. However, while of course the world has many shallow people in it and of course many fans have entitlement issues, entitlement is definitely not at the root of every protest or the cause of all fan anger.

And on a smaller note: I don't think that being emotionally invested in a story is all that akin to drug addiction. The goal of almost any narrative is to make people care, and the degree to which they care is often a measure of its success.

[ziggy1278.livejournal.com]

How TLDR are we :D

I'm making huge generalizations there, usually because I am amusing myself, and I understand everyone is much more complex than the picture I've painted. I was trying to say that I see all of fandom as this highly sensitive thing that I always get burned by - I sort of love it, but don't want to get too close. So sometimes I make a comment that is SO not cool and I don't even understand why.

Few people are as right there with you on the HP disappointment as I am. But I think JKR is brilliant, and she delivered SIX books that i really like. Well... five and a half. And the ending was a huge letdown so the series is meh for me. It took me from "zomg you have to read these" to not even recommending them to people who haven't. And the same thing will happen to BSG if it sucks ass in the end. Which will be sad, but not author-hate sad.

Regarding the drug addiction, again it was my attempt at humorous (obviously not very) metaphor. I do think there is a healthy distance from which one should consume fiction, and fandom is where the outliers live. Its easy to forget because it's pretty much all outliers who will get on a forum and read/post stuff, and all you need to do is google to be right in the middle of a potential shit storm.

Anyway I need to stay away from it mostly. Except HIMYM fandom. Those people are too easy. Almost nobody on TWOP think Lilly is as creepy as I now do.

I love the shit out of your brain, and your passion, and your insane desire for fairness and understanding. You are like... what Fox News would be if it wasn't a lie.

<3

[ziggy1278.livejournal.com]

I state, also, that people who told you you were "mad because you hadn't gotten your way "had not read your actual posts and may have been responding to some offhand comment you made after the fact. Because honestly who wants to dredge up all that HP disappointment every time - it's easier to say "FUCK CAMPING!!!"

And that is totally what I did to rawles today - so I hope you will accept my apology to her as an apology to you on behalf of the people who missed your original post and made a judgement based on limited info (which is another way to say "using the internet").

ALL of your HP complaints always made perfect sense to me. But those coherent musings weren't a majority of what was going on out there - and those came a long after the H/Hr people had lost the war (Which is sad really because I always thought that ship made more sense, but I guess not a big deal since Hermione turned out to be a housewife or something anyway).

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yes, it made loads of sense.

I think that one place where the conversation isn't as clear as it might seem to be is the whole people who are mad at JKR. I'm not mad at JKR—whatever, it's her book. But at the time the whole thing went down, I definitely heard that not liking the book was disrespectful; that I owed her to like the book because I'd been in fandom; that if I didn't like the books it was because I was reading them wrong, or was otherwise a foolish or stupid person.

You might see some ways of talking about a creator as expressing disappointment, and other people might see them as being disrespectful. You might see other ways of talking about a creator as being angry, and other people might see it as just venting some steam. We—and by we I mean pretty much everyone—talk as though we're all drawing the same lines here. What I learned in HP fandom is that we're very much not.

Personally, to me, sending petitions to creators/writers about plot direction is a bit much, but writing non-canonical fanfiction is not. Writing something in your LJ about how you're reacting to a text is fine. And if you didn't like it because it didn't do a thing that you're interested in, that in and of itself doesn't make you an asshole, and doesn't mean that you've "read it wrong" or "watched some other show". Note that I'm not saying you're saying this—but I've heard it said many, many times.

There are plenty of people who were made fun of because they thought Snape was interesting, or were sad when Sirius died, or who were vilified because they didn't find Ron to be an interesting character and didn't think that being a Weasley should be the ultimate of Harry's ambitions for his future. Those people were told that they were reading the text wrong. And in the end Sirius's death didn't matter that much, and Snape really was just a jerk, and Draco really was just a nothing. And armed with having agreed with the text, those people proceeded to drum everyone else out of fandom.

That's the other side of what you're talking about. That's the part that I'm reacting to. I never again want to put myself in that position again. And that's why I worry about caring about characters like Anders, or not caring about characters like Tigh, even if I don't have expectations for them in the narrative.

[rawles.livejournal.com]

it makes me sad that the pilotshipping makes people impatient about them, as though Sam only exists to keep them apart.

Well, I don't think it's solely pilotshipping that makes people impatient about them. For one, there are a whole lot of people who just hate the way Kara treats Anders (i.e. generally, like shit unless he is dying; she loves dying guys) and as far as the perception of him existing only to keep Lee and Kara apart...Well, that's likely based on the fact that that's been flatly stated on more than one occasion?

Which is not to say that his role did not grow beyond that when he was randomly one of the Final Five, because it did. But for the (many) people who don't really give a shit about woobie Cylons and Cylon backstory/exposition, he remained completely uninteresting. It should also be noted that these are all probably people who like Kara in and of herself and don't need her mitigated by Anders. Or, who, to bring it back around, like her LESS with him because of the whole treating him like crap thing.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I actually liked him from the moment I saw him—the Cylon thing just made me think, aha, he now has some other reason to be around other than mooning over Kara in his hilarious way. And I think that true to the idiotic way in which the show works, it just skipped the part where Kara wasn't being a jerk—presumably, the early days on New Caprica, like, before they were married, when they were just drinking all the time. I like his willingness to be her bitch, actually, for reasons I can't quite explain. I like their whole gender role reversal and how much he sort of doesn't care.

And I don't mean to say that pilotshippers don't care, but rather that the clear POV of the show being all about Lee-Kara even if in an uninteresting and unfulfilling way tends to sideline Sam. I mean, heck, even in his time on a slow spaceship making skin jobs if Tory and Galen were in love love love and Ellen and Saul were doing that thing they do, what, was he just sitting around watching? He didn't even have his guitar anymore so he could write more Bob Dylan songs! He could have written all of Blonde on Blonde on that one trip!

[rawles.livejournal.com]

And I don't mean to say that pilotshippers don't care, but rather that the clear POV of the show being all about Lee-Kara even if in an uninteresting and unfulfilling way tends to sideline Sam

Ahhhhhhhh. I see!

I have a complicated relationship with Anders! Initially, I very (very!) much disliked him just because I hated: 1) the entire Caprica storyline, 2) the romantic obstacle plot device, and 3) I just didn't find him interesting. Of course, none of this stopped me from TRYING to get him just because he was around and with Kara so I figured he warranted it. Which resulted in this ridic fic I wrote about him and Kara and their relationship.

Then in season three I just felt sorry for him; though, not as much as I felt sorry for Dualla, just because I'd actually known her as a character before she was reduced to Lee's Mistreated Girlfriend/Wife. But by the time season four rolled around I was fine with him, HILARIOUSLY, just because I find him kind of endearingly useless! Once he was a Cylon (which was something my friends and I had joked about endlessly and actually used to get a VERY negative reaction from other parts of fandom because that spec was seen, in and of itself, as bashing him), he just sort of flailed around being like D: and looking mildly confused all the time.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

When you say the entire Caprica storyline, do you mean just Kara going back to get the arrow, or Kara going back to get Sam and the whole stupid Simon thing, or the entire first season arc from Helo staying behind? I always liked Helo, so I didn't mind watching him run around Caprica, and by the time Kara got there I was just glad that he was actually going to get out of there.

You know, I felt less sorry for Dualla because I think she knew what she was getting into more than Sam did, even if she did end up in a worse position, if that makes sense. That said, she got the rawest deal (aside from Billy, and that shit was lame, hello, let her love him if he's going to die, sheesh).

At the end of the day, Sam's mostly a big dumb athlete guy who also feels things very deeply, which is a really fun combination because he does always seem baffled.

[rawles.livejournal.com]

At the end of the day, Sam's mostly a big dumb athlete guy who also feels things very deeply,

Yeah, that was basically the launch point from which I wrote my ~*~character examination~*~ of him!

And when I say Caprica storyline, I am mostly referring the The Farm (which might still be my most hated BSG episode ever) and everything Caprica-related following it. Ignoring what I felt were various weird characterization issues in that episode, I could never get over baby-farm on an IRRADIATED PLANET WTF, why in all the world THEY LEFT THE RESISTANCE THERE, and the fact that just jaunting back to the apparently inhabitable colonies whenever they felt like it sort of undermined the entire premise of the show.

As far as Dualla, I feel much more sorry for her meta-textually as a character than within the text as a person. Because within the text as a person...yeah, she was just BIZARRELY masochistic. I feel like Sam had HINTS, but didn't KNOW to the extent that she clearly did.

I feel that I still have such rage about Billy and his demise I CANNOT EVEN TALK ABOUT IT.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yes, let's not speak of poor Billy, RIP.

The Farm was horrible horrible. That they had the one chick of the resistance that we got to know die in The Farm, just all of it, was absurd and ridiculous. But I thought they brought back all the resistance people that didn't, you know, die in that massive firefight? But yeah, that people were still floating around blowing things up was sort of strange, because then you think woe, who else was left behind on Caprica? And also, why are we only ever on Caprica?

[rawles.livejournal.com]

When I say they left them there, I'm talking about in the original episode. After Sharon brings the heavy raider and then...only she, Kara, and Helo leave on it?!?! For no apparent reason! Without even appearing to ask ANYONE if they wanted to...you know, get off the planet? And this was the same heavy raider that Sharon had just PACKED THEM ALL INTO TO GET THEM AWAY FROM THE ATTACK ON THE BABY FARM or whatever. So, you know, that more than three people could fit into it. Then, even though THEY WERE GOING TO DIE UNTIL SHARON RESCUED THEM, they decide to what...stay there to take out the rest of the farms? Which they could not...do by themselves in the first place?!?!?!?! It just made NO SENSE.

And yes to everything else you said as well. As is to be expected of BSG, I suppose, the entire resistance storyline opens up a can of worms that they never dealt with. Because if there's a group of 50 or whatever athletes and survivalists (though the number seemed in constant flux since every time we saw Anders he was all WE JUST LOST HALF OF OUR PEOPLE yet there were still...at least 50 or so of them when they finally get rescued) that managed to live on near Caprica City for months, nukes be damned, then...what about all of the other cities on Caprica? What about all of the other cities on the ELEVEN OTHER PLANETS? Even if there's just 50 survivors in 1% of the cities on each planet that's still way too fucking many people to just SHRUG OFF when there are 50,000 human beings left IN THE UNIVERSE.

[friendsofjunius.livejournal.com]

The only woman who gets to be domestic and kick-ass is Athena, and look where that gets her. Just like the Agathons' is the only half-decent marriage on the show, and look at what's going on there. I totally love that there are so many great non-married relationships on this show even between men and women, it's just hard to miss that marriage seems to be a trap at best and a death sentence at worst. (glaring exception: Tighs, maybe because theirs is the least conventional on the show)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to note that the spoiler above is the spoiler you gave me, so feel free to read the white text. In fact, that spoiler is the only one I have!

The Tighs are definitely the only ones, and I'm suddenly seeing the shocking absence of mothers, or at least, any good ones, which is so typical. For all the bad fathering in reality, Adama is a good father figure, while there really aren't any mother figures at all. Moms spoil all the fun I suppose, and are only interesting when they're kicking ass to get their baby back, or similar.