Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2013-11-28 06:31 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2013-11-28 06:31 pm
[ SECRET POST #2522 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2522 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
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02.
[Men in Black]
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03.
[Sleepy Hollow]
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04.
[Scott Pilgrim vs. the World]
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05.
[Kenneth Branagh and Chris Hemsworth]
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06.
[Person of Interest]
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07.
[The Listener]
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08.
[nick jonas/hawaii five-0]
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09.
[Big Bang Theory]
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10.
[The Hunger Games, Liam Hemsworth and Jennifer Lawrence]
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11.
(Major Lazer/EDM)
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12.
[Star Trek: Deep Space 9]
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13.
[The Quick and Dirty Life of Fritz Fargo]
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14.
[The Green Mile]
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15.
[Aurelio Voltaire]
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 014 secrets from Secret Submission Post #360.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
no subject
Mind, I do think they're terrible people, in a lot of ways, quite regardless of their intelligence. I just find that compelling.
no subject
Leonard "calls" Penny before he ever even meets her - which is another thing entirely - but he, Raj, and Howard tend to drop her like a bad habit the moment another hot woman walks by.
They drop her for the hot actress upstairs and the entire episode is basically Penny trying to win their friendship/loyalties back.
Leonard schemes to "get" Sheldon's sister before Howard and Raj can by filling Sheldon's head with sexist ideas that eventually get Sheldon kicked in the groin.
They (Howard, Raj, Leonard) play Wii Boxing for Sheldon's sister and expect her to accept the results.
Leonard uses Penny as a status symbol, rather than a person. They all do it to some degree as the series moves on but Leonard in particular views dating her as a way to get out of being a nerdy loser forever. (But, of course, she doesn't precisely fit his standards and thus must be improved upon in a series of infuriating plotlines - but examples of Penny As A Fixer-Upper and Women as (Devoted) Satellites Of Their Men would make this reply too long for the amount of time that I have to devote to it.)
And it's interesting that Leonard is, er, 'grown' the way that he is because, as seemingly determined as the series' writers are to make Leonard as annoying and cloying as humanly possible, Howard manages to grow out of his worst impulses. So it's not that they can't write better characters, it's just that they can't seem to be bothered to.
no subject
no subject
There are consequences for Howard's mistakes with the lunar rover, consequences for Sheldon for various work-related slip ups, consequences for Raj's alcohol issues, and even consequences for their various forms of sexual harassment at work. (Although Leonard seems to avoid consequences for his actions on an astonishingly regular basis.)
There aren't meaningful consequences for how they treat the women consistently in their lives. Both the narrative and the underpinnings of TBBT's world work in the geeks' favor. And the girls' basic personalities when they are introduced warp to match that vision. (For example, Penny starts out as someone who can rebuild an engine, doesn't drink like a fish, and is handy around the house regarding putting furniture together, cooking, and spiders. She later loses all three traits. Amy goes from being thoroughly uninterested in Sheldon's nubile body (and highly interested in Zach's) to being sex-crazed and kinky.) It's a deliberate (and repeating) choice on the writers' part that shouldn't be overlooked in analyzing the narrative.
no subject
The consequences for their behaviours with women are that they fail with women. Howard and Raj's long string of creepy dating escapades regularly end in humiliation. (including a punch in the face from Penny to Howard, and Raj having to squeak out an apology when she wont accept a note, at one point.) Leonard's insecurity, demandingness and need to control her anger Penny and regularly lead to fights between them (and it will break them up eventually, dollars to doughnuts.)
re Amy: I just ship Sheldon/Amy pretty hard, (all that weird, sublimated, negative-space eroticism...mmm) and I find Amy absolutely fascinating, all the more so for being so embarassingly uncomfortable. The stranger, awkwarder and less dignified she becomes, the more I love her, and not just in a protective sort of way.
no subject
The characters often say that they fail with women but, objectively, Leonard and Sheldon at least don't.
Leonard is never hurting for female companionship - red-headed doctor that he got off of Howard, Penny (multiple times) Priya, Leslie Winkle, that girl at the bar he and Penny go to after their "not a date" movie, Joyce Kim, that scientist who is Sheldon's house guest (the one who wants a gangbang with Leonard, Howard, and Raj), the old lady donator, the woman at the comics shop who Leonard cheats on Priya with, Sheldon's research assistant, and who knows who else because all of those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure that there are others.
Sheldon picks up that red-headed grad student (the one who thinks Penny is her rival) without noticing it. The implication, both by the conversational cues and the fact that he has another date at the end of the episode, is that he dates grad students fairly frequently without realizing that he's doing it. He picks up girls with Raj at a grad student mixer. And of course there's poor Amy. Again, this is off the top of my head, but that's a lot of dating for a guy who professes not to be interested in it.
Raj and Howard certainly seem to do worse, judging by the episodes in which they go bar trawling but, again, Howard is full of interesting dating stories that happened off-screen or between episodes - like being robbed by a pre-op transsexual on J-Date or losing his virginity in the back of a car. They may do poorly but they don't entirely strike out. Even Raj gets to have at least two one night stands before the writers invented a girlfriend for him that is even more socially awkward than he is for him to romance. So yeah, they suck but they don't exactly suffer extreme dating isolation or rejection either.
And, while I certainly agree with you that Penny should dump Leonard and move on to anyone else, the writers have said that "Penny needs to do some hard growing up" before she's "ready to settle down with Leonard." To me, that implies that Leonard and Penny are their endgame. So the writers, at least, don't seem to see a problem with the relationship.
I love Amy in all of her awkward glory! I ship Amy and Sheldon as best friends for life but not romantic partners. I'd rather she date Zach... or Priya... and flummox Sheldon with tales of her wild sexual escapades.
no subject
In any event though, while I see some satisfaction in this reading where they're a bunch of awful dorks who deserve to be summarily crushed by the wonderful women who inexplicably flock to them...I prefer the messier one where the female characters aren't necessarily completely perfect, or completely sane, or don't have serious issue of their own or even particularly happy endings. (I love TBBT, I really do, but I think it's largely heartbreaking. Apparently there are people who watch this because it's...funny? Cruel bastards.)
I don't want Penny's acting career to come through and fulfill all her dreams (like I don't want Sheldon to win a Nobel.) They're trite, shallow dreams. She does need to grow out of them. I don't want Amy to find someone who loves her just the way she is and blow Sheldon's mind with how awesome she is - I love the sad, awkward, broken intimacy of this dance they do around one another. Bernadette...well, Bernadette can claim she doesn't want kids and wants to be free of the obligations she had growing up, but she's married to a perennial man-child she needs to clean up after, apparently by choice. What's with that, Bernadette?
That's all just much more compelling to me than any kind of more comfortable, more balanced show that's nicer to its characters. Maybe that's just me.
re the guys dating life, (er, sorry, this turned into a long tangent. Just ignore unless you really want to keep talking about this for some reason ;-P)
Leonard doesn't do entirely badly, but he's a guy who likes being in relationships, who is always looking to be in one, and isn't exactly doing swimmingly in that regard. Penny round 2 is by far the longest, most serious relationship of his life. (It was pretty clear that while Priya probably liked him, she was never really going to go the distance.) He's not the perfect man and he's got his issues, but he's not a creepy slimeball like Howard either. It doesn't seem particularly far fetched that he would have a handful of relationships that he then crashes and burns because of his neediness, insecurities and controlling tendencies.
I don't think Sheldon is regularly dating behind the scenes somewhere, (I assume he's genuinely never been involved in anything sexual at all before Amy) but regardless, I actually completely buy that there's a type of student out there who is attracted - in a distant, adoring, intellectual crush sort of way - to a young professor who's brilliant and even sort of charismatic in his field and obviously awkward at anything else. (That's purely based on anthropological observation around a university.)
Howard before Bernadette is constantly bouncing around out there with endless, desperate energy, no filters and no dignity. LA is a big city. If he's willing enough (and he is,) he's going to get into some weird situations, and some of them are going to be at least remotely sexual. Barring Leslie Winkle, who's using him in some perverse game of her own, he doesn't appear to have been on an actual second date in his entire life. Raj apparently has three or four one night stands in six years, and one exploitative relationship with a deaf girl that seems to last maybe a month. Not exactly what i'd call a satisfying sex life.
no subject
I don't necessarily like characters who are without flaws (the qualification is in there because there are a couple that I genuinely love) but that said, the boys' flaws should have consequences far more often than they do. And that is something that I dislike because flaws are meaningless if they don't have impact on the character/narrative. I don't require niceness or even balance in characters/narratives but I do require that if X follow logically from W and that if Y is a probable consequence of W & X, then Y should at least be considered by the narrative, if not applied.
And, with the sheer number of women that they interact with, the guys should be slapped down far more often than they are. (The only woman who comes to mind as having deservedly slapped down Leonard was the geek girl he made out with while dating Priya. But, even in his break up with Priya, Priya had to be "more wrong" than Leonard - he made out with a girl so she had to sleep with her ex-boyfriend.) But yeah, it really is inexplicable to me that so many women are apparently willing to ultimately put up with those guys. Some, I could buy. All but one? Seems impossible.
I don't necessarily want Penny's acting career to work out for her so much as want anything to work out for Penny. But if I got to pick the thing that works out for her, I'd like it to be that clothing app that she made with Sheldon. (Or a break up with Leonard sticking, either or.)
And I'd argue against either Penny or Sheldon's dreams being trite or shallow things that they need to let go of. Their dreams signal very real emotional needs that, if they were met in other, more immediate ways, Penny and Sheldon might be willing to let go of in favor of an equally satisfying reality.
But I do want Amy to find someone else who likes her the way that she is. Not to blow Sheldon's mind with her awesomeness or that she is something he could've had but lost the opportunity of - I don't think either character is capable of those kinds of thoughts - but everyone deserves to have someone who accepts them as they are, rather than enduring them. And, at the moment, Amy and Sheldon seem to be enduring each other at best. And I think that the current parameters of their current relationship would be more satisfying to both of them if Amy was getting sex elsewhere.
I think Howard is all the child that Bernadette can handle and that, if she saw him as he is instead of through her surprisingly rose-colored glasses, she would probably be far less enamored with him than she is. Luckily for Howard, Bernadette is a surprisingly generous soul. (And Howard seems to be trying to grow up for her, which might eventually ease their friction regarding kids.)
(No worries about the tangents... I'm tempted by them too!)
Leonard and Priya is actually a kind of sad relationship. He starts off clingy but backs off when Priya refuses to put up with it. He simmers down and stops pushing for seriousness on Priya's part but, when Priya starts intimating that she's interested in a more serious relationship with Leonard, he can't let go of his previous attachment to Penny. Although, I have to admit, I was evilly amused by Priya's attempts to improve Leonard and red-headed doctor's clingy-ness. It was like watching Leonard date some of the less pleasant aspects of himself.
I don't think Sheldon was intentionally dating behind the scenes. And I think that if/when it stopped, it was because Amy stopped it.
I have to admit, I really enjoyed Leslie Winkle. And I actually really enjoyed (what there was of) her relationship with Leonard.
I agree that Howard and Raj are worse with girls than Leonard and Sheldon(!) are but, judging by their random comments to things like threesomes at comic con and their weekly social nights (for example, line-dancing night), they both certainly have more than a handful of dates/sexual experiences. And weirdly, I don't think that exploitative relationship with the deaf girl was his only deaf girlfriend - Raj makes a few references to another one that he met at comic con while Leonard is whining about being alone and lonely in a couple of episodes. (It's roughly around the same time that Stewart has the Wonder Woman girlfriend.) So, I have no problem believing that viewers aren't shown all, or even most, of Howard and Raj's dating experiences or relationships.
no subject
I agree with this completely, and it goes to the heart of the show for me, I just don't think it's a flaw in any way. That's deft and compelling characterization, from where I'm looking. Of course Sheldon's professional fixation and hubris are making up for a profoundly stunted social and emotional life. Penny's movie-star fantasies are the dreams of someone who has never stopped to think about what she really wants for herself and her life (maybe she's never needed to) because she's spent most of it being a pretty face. It's sad and uncomfortable and I love it to pieces.
Ditto Amy/Sheldon, I think - what he's doing to her is humiliating and possibly downright cruel. If he had the least bit of ability to see it and really cared for her, he should untangle himself from her life as fast as possible. But, of course, he doesn't have that insight, not a whit. For her part, watching her begging for affection and warmth from someone so singularly ill-equipped to give any is just brutal, and probably indicative of a crushingly low esteem and distinct whiff of self-sabotage. (A little more charitably, I can also accept that part of it is that for all her talk, she really doesn't feel ready for a genuine, intimate, sexual relationship, and letting herself be strung along by Sheldon is a sort of comfortable safe-space.) If I knew her, as a person, all I would be telling her is to dump his ass. As fictional characters though, all that incompetence, vulnerability and hurt is just riveting.
(I do think they have something, some weird connection that goes beyond friendship. I also don't particularly buy Sheldon as genuinely asexual (mostly because it would be just...healthier, and I like the messiness) and there's a certain twisted sexual edge to their relationship (all those contracts and experiments and mind games. Practically fifty shades of the color they paint the inside of asylums) that makes the whole thing quite tense and fascinating. The moments when they do manage to fumble their way to a bit of real intimacy - because they're so rare and fragile, and come in the midst of this vast ocean of alienation - are kind of sublime. So, yeah, I totally ship that even while I think it's fairly of awful.)
Anyway, that's all to say that what I find most interesting about the show is exactly how frustrating it is, and how stubborn it is about giving anyone - characters or viewers - any sort of catharsis. Yeah, it would be great if Penny made it big. If Sheldon has some emotional breakthrough. If Amy left him for someone who deserves her. If Howard did the laundry without being told, for once. But that's a long, slow, tedious journey, and that's how it should be. That is the show, not a problem with the show. Anything that does happens feels...earned, and hard-fought, so there's still a light at the end of that tunnel.
I can accept that the guys, in reality, should be even lonelier and even worse with women, but it does give them more ways of flaming out. I find the lot of them thoroughly pitiable, and yet offputting, as is - turning that dial a little more up or down seems mostly academic to me in terms of the narrative. A few dates more or less wouldn't change the basic paradigm of the thing - they're jerks, they can't see that they're jerks, and it leaves them ever more miserable and yet ever more jerks. Spiral of doom. That's my show!
Yeah, I loved Leslie Winkle too, and I did like Priya, actually. She was a little needy, but still far less than Leonard. Her ministrations also seem to have taken - he still wears the clothes she bought him and has grown into someone a little more composed, when needed. I think a lot of that was Priya rather than Penny. I did think that bit with the doctor when he's astonished to discover that his feelings are also supposed to matter and be communicated in a relationship, and maybe a relationship requires something more from him than to be some kind of desperate, passive-agressively cloying pile of tissue paper is one of the funniest/saddest of the show's moments.