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My brother has watched seven seasons of SG-1 in ten days. He doesn't have a livejournal to (brag on / mourn) his obsession on, so I'm putting it here. Dear brother: that's pretty hardcore.
I am making my sister watch Torchwood but then I'm making her fast-forward through the parts I find excessively gory. The third time I went "maggotty corpse! Oh no!" she replied "You have no idea what kind of manga I read, do you." Though she was kind enough to lend me a volume of Shout Out Loud, which is not just goreless but hilarious. The angst! The innuendo! The whited-out anatomy! It's like the kind of boyband fic I read when I was twelve, made into a comic! I do not usually read manga, but I was charmed.
We're through "Greeks Bearing Gifts" (though we skipped "Small Worlds", which I've taken a grudge to for some reason). So far my sister hates Jack and loves Owen, which is the exact inverse of my feelings on the matter. Every time something bad happens to Owen she goes "No! Poor baby!" and I silently cheer.
On the other hand, I'm forming a more solid picture of Jack's character, partially because I'm still pulling clips and so I spend more and more time with the footage, and he really comes off as a psychopath sometimes, doesn't he? He doesn't just kill Lisa, he tries to make Ianto kill Lisa as a test of loyalty. He kills Tosh's lover and is sarcastic about it. He doesn't pause for a second when choosing between Suzie and Gwen, even though, following the script, he and Suzie worked together for more than two years. On the other hand, when Rhys is killed by freakish accident, even though the world is ending, he cries and then takes time to sit with Gwen and hold her hand.
(Subtopic: I suspect part of this is because the writers have pushed Jack/Gwen bonding even when it's a weird direction for a scene to go. Like in Ghost Machine: Owen experienced a reenacted rape from the victim's perspective, spent the whole episode obsessed with vengeance, had full intent to slit old, crazy Ed Morgan's throat, and then barely decided to choose his duty as a doctor. Yes, Gwen accidentally killed the dude, but to my mind Owen needs a bit of a cuddle more than Gwen does. But is there a Jack/Owen cuddle? Come on, show, you're supposed to be post-heteronormative!)
The closest I can come up with an explanation for Captain Jack's moral behavior is that he's one of these terrifying people who carry around a very clear good/bad dichotomy in their heads. Once people cross the line from "good" to "consorts with aliens", Jack starts to lose sympathy for them fairly quickly - and even if he's still sympathetic, he takes steps to see that they suffer some awful things as punishment.
I don't know why this surprises me, because he's scripted as a loose cannon. Maybe it's that John Barrowman adds a dash of harmless gay frat boy to the character, and so it's only when I _think_ about what he's up to that I go "wait, that's batshit insane". Maybe it's that most "heroic" antics on tv have a dash of murderous crazy to them, and so it's harder to recognize a specific instance.
/end long weird ramble. I will now go translate ten pages about bean cultivation in the mesoamerican highlands. Go me?
I am making my sister watch Torchwood but then I'm making her fast-forward through the parts I find excessively gory. The third time I went "maggotty corpse! Oh no!" she replied "You have no idea what kind of manga I read, do you." Though she was kind enough to lend me a volume of Shout Out Loud, which is not just goreless but hilarious. The angst! The innuendo! The whited-out anatomy! It's like the kind of boyband fic I read when I was twelve, made into a comic! I do not usually read manga, but I was charmed.
We're through "Greeks Bearing Gifts" (though we skipped "Small Worlds", which I've taken a grudge to for some reason). So far my sister hates Jack and loves Owen, which is the exact inverse of my feelings on the matter. Every time something bad happens to Owen she goes "No! Poor baby!" and I silently cheer.
On the other hand, I'm forming a more solid picture of Jack's character, partially because I'm still pulling clips and so I spend more and more time with the footage, and he really comes off as a psychopath sometimes, doesn't he? He doesn't just kill Lisa, he tries to make Ianto kill Lisa as a test of loyalty. He kills Tosh's lover and is sarcastic about it. He doesn't pause for a second when choosing between Suzie and Gwen, even though, following the script, he and Suzie worked together for more than two years. On the other hand, when Rhys is killed by freakish accident, even though the world is ending, he cries and then takes time to sit with Gwen and hold her hand.
(Subtopic: I suspect part of this is because the writers have pushed Jack/Gwen bonding even when it's a weird direction for a scene to go. Like in Ghost Machine: Owen experienced a reenacted rape from the victim's perspective, spent the whole episode obsessed with vengeance, had full intent to slit old, crazy Ed Morgan's throat, and then barely decided to choose his duty as a doctor. Yes, Gwen accidentally killed the dude, but to my mind Owen needs a bit of a cuddle more than Gwen does. But is there a Jack/Owen cuddle? Come on, show, you're supposed to be post-heteronormative!)
The closest I can come up with an explanation for Captain Jack's moral behavior is that he's one of these terrifying people who carry around a very clear good/bad dichotomy in their heads. Once people cross the line from "good" to "consorts with aliens", Jack starts to lose sympathy for them fairly quickly - and even if he's still sympathetic, he takes steps to see that they suffer some awful things as punishment.
I don't know why this surprises me, because he's scripted as a loose cannon. Maybe it's that John Barrowman adds a dash of harmless gay frat boy to the character, and so it's only when I _think_ about what he's up to that I go "wait, that's batshit insane". Maybe it's that most "heroic" antics on tv have a dash of murderous crazy to them, and so it's harder to recognize a specific instance.
/end long weird ramble. I will now go translate ten pages about bean cultivation in the mesoamerican highlands. Go me?