Unpopular opinions meme

[very_improbable]

Sure, I'll do this one. Give me a fandom or character(s) in that fandom and I'll serve up some unpopular opinions. Not that I'm active enough in most fandoms to know what the popular opinions are, but I'll give it a go!

Fandoms: Slings & Arrows, M*A*S*H, Harry Potter, X-Files, The West Wing, Hitch-Hiker's Guide, Dirk Gently, Homicide: Life on the Street, Stargate: Atlantis, most major Tom Stoppard plays, Sports Night, Star Wars, Star Trek except for Enterprise, the Tarantinoverse, the Askewniverse, Hellblazer sorta, most Neil Gaiman things, Lucifer (the Vertigo series), most Shakespeare plays, The Persuaders!, The Prisoner, Sherlock Holmes, Casablanca, Highlander, Black Books...

You know, the usual.

Comments

[mandysbitch.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'm curious: what's an unpopular opinion in Black Books?

Incidentally, I went to a wedding last night and the best man's name was Bernard Black. True! I had to turn to the girl next to me and say, "did he just say, Bernard Black?"

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

I don't know, really! Although--reading the Yuletide story and all your girlfriends are unfulfilled and alienated made me kind of sort of ship Bernard/Fran, and that's probably a bit weird.

[mandysbitch.livejournal.com]

I don't know - I think there's this insane voice in all our heads that says, "Hee. Fran/ Bernard..." Maybe it's not so weird? I have to remind myself that I like Fran and I wouldn't wish Bernard on anyone.

[aris-tgd.livejournal.com]

I wanna hear your unpopular SG:A opinions.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

So...Rodney. Rodney was originally written as an insanely brilliant, prickly, nerdily witty, neurotic egomaniac who had to learn a lot of life lessons, but usually saved the day and was frequently shown to be physically courageous as well. This was canon, not just our optimistic fannish imaginations, for long enough that for a while, when he was "written wrong", it was reasonable to say, "Well, Rodney was written poorly in this or that episode, but that's because that one writer doesn't get him."

Of late, though, Rodney has been fairly consistently recharacterized as a barely socially functioning asshole who's totally unprepared for the pressures of his job and isn't respected by the rest of the Atlantis expedition. It pains me to say that this is now the canonical Rodney McKay and what I would once have called my preferred version of the character I can now really only call the fanon version, but, well, I calls them as I sees them.

Oh, also, I ship McKay/Carter, but it goes without saying that I ship McKay-in-the-characterization-in-my-head/Carter and not McKay-as-he-exists-in-recent-canon/Carter, so that'd be why you don't see me making little shippy icons and squeeing over their sparkling moments on screen together.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Unpopular opinions about Macbeth, please. Also Lady Maccers, if you have time.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

I actually tried quite hard to come up with something for this, and I'm stuck! I think because I know enough about Macbeth criticism to have heard most non-preposterous opinions on it argued for at least once (and not a few preposterous ones as well, of course). I hate hate hate dealing with allegedly adult theater people who insist on participating in the asinine Macbeth Superstition Power Trip, in which they not only avoid the magic M-word themselves but also flail and screech and push offenders bodily outside the building when other people say it around them. (I had a 50-year-old artistic director like this once.)

My mother and I had an interesting conversation about Lady Macbeth the other day, though. There was some alt-weekly poll she was looking at wherein Lady M was voted the "best Shakespeare villain", the runners-up being Iago at #2 and Macbeth himself at #3. Now, as awesome a character as Lady M is, it didn't feel right to us to rank her above Iago. But I made a case for it thus: Of the top Shakespeare baddies, she's one of the most complete, since she has 1) a clear singular motive that she's 2) active in executing and she 3) faces the consequences onstage, in addition to being 4) totally awesome. Iago, f'rinstance, doesn't provide us with 1) or 3) -- hell, that's part of the point of Iago -- and while I would still call him Shakespeare's greatest villain...well, it's like how Lear is Shakespeare's Greatest Work but possibly not his Best Play, you know?

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I shall take being eager to mention The Scottish play by name as a definitely unpopular opinion ;-) Do you also whistle as you wander around backstage? And, you know, I think that by ruthlessly categorising Lady M as an unambiguous villain (the best villain, no less) you could be said to be committing another unpopular opinion, as she's so often presented as a victim as well as a villain.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not actually sure I would, unprompted, have called Lady M "a Shakespeare villain" at all, nor that I really believe she should be considered the best of the lot--it was just interesting to argue the case for it. (Victim, though, I cannot really see. Victim of what?)

I don't often whistle backstage, though. I often have a perfectly good reason to say the word "Macbeth" and a context in which I would feel stupid avoiding it, which is not true of the whistling business, so while it's a dumb superstition[1], it doesn't bother me.

[1] Didn't used to be! Used to have an actual function, as you probably know.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Victim of what?

Victim probably wasn't the right word, unless you describe her as a victim of her own conscience. Or possibly as a victim the way Austria was until recently official described as the First Victim of the Third Reich.

[tree_and_leaf]

Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Bashir and O'Brien were slashier than Bashir and Garak. As quaint as it may sound, I think one reason the pairing didn't catch on (besides the entirely deserved popularity of Bashir/Garak) was that a lot of us sorta felt bad about the prospect of wreaking havoc on the only stable and positively portrayed marriage in the Star Trek universe. :) I kind of think that if that show were on now, in the post-HP-fandom ANY FIC YOU CAN IMAGINE EXISTS AND THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO COMMS FOR IT ONE OF THEM FOR FURRIES age of fanfic, there would be a lot more Bashir/O'Brien than there is.

I feel like my unpopular opinions are more boring than I expected. I haven't been in Trek fandom for like ten years, though, and I have no idea what the mainstream opinions are anymore. DS9 was the best of the bunch, too, and did amazing things like having a teenage recurring character who wasn't annoying, and doing one of those long-drawn-out-canon-is-forcing-this-pairing-on-you het pairings (Kira/Odo) that I actually, when they did get together on the show, did not hate at all.

[prezzey.livejournal.com]

* Midsummer Night's Dream
* The Prisoner

Do you also do the Star Wars expanded universe or just the movies?

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Expanded universe, eh? I think my erstwhile tie-in reading habits brought me up to, like, Champions of the Force...

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Midsummer...hm. You're making me realize how mainstream my feelings about Midsummer are, actually. Like many theater people at least in my own social milieu, I am 1) basically Midsummered out, having seen it about forty million times and worked on two or three productions and 2) of the opinion that it is, really, not that interesting of a play, except for "Pyramus and Thisbe", some of the rude mechanicals' other scenes, and some of Puck's stuff. These are very popular opinions indeed. Maybe that means I should go back and re-assess it sometime, make sure all my opinions on it are my own. :)

You're going to make fun of me if I say my unpopular Prisoner opinion is that Number Six is gay, although I think this is supported by canonical evidence. :) Here's one that may be contrarian enough: I think it's a good thing that the fabled remake series, which is rumored to be in the planning (or even casting) stages a few times a decade, has not happened thus far. TV just is not the same animal that it was back then. The Prisoner happened at exactly the right cultural moment. It should be enjoyed for what it was, not reimagined into some "slick", "edgy" Proper TV Show that "makes actual sense".

[swallowedbysky.livejournal.com]

Unpopular opinions on Homicide. Because I'm curious:)

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

"Unpopular" only for those of us donning our slash goggles, I guess, but...

Although Bayliss/Pembleton is one of the most perfect, and most canonically supported, potential slash pairings to be found anywhere, no one has ever sold me on a scenario during or after the series in which their relationship becomes sexual, and I don't think anyone ever will.

I probably can't call that "unpopular", since Kyle Secor agrees with me on all points. :)

[swallowedbysky.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. Though Gods, Bayliss/Pembleton is so perfect it should be canon. I agree with you though: I can't pinpoint a moment where I could reasonably claim that it became offscreen canon.

(Speaking of, I managed to score the whole series on Amazon for a hundred and sixty bucks recently. This makes me unbelievably happy, considering I only have the first 3 seasons because it's normally So. Damn. Expensive. /Random.)

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

I managed to score the whole series on Amazon for a hundred and sixty bucks recently.

Sorry to butt in here, but, how recently? I had an order in with Amazon which they've cancelled on me because they "couldn't find it". (Which I ordered last July ~grumps~.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I got mine from Deep Discount DVD for a comparable price, though it took for-ever.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

You've seen Secor's interview with AfterElton.com, right? Where he refers to Pembleton as "sort of my perfect unreachable lover" (well, technically he refers to Andre Braugher that way, but we know what he meant).

Yeah.

(Yay! Equally randomly, I seriously love the packaging that the complete series comes in--it's built like a drawer of case files.)

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Oh also I once found the shooting script for the movie, in which, in addition to all that "how much I...loved working with you" stuff that made it to the final cut, Bayliss says "I love you" to Frank on the roof. (I'm sure there still would have been some viewers who maintained that he didn't mean it THAT WAY. Russian men kiss each other all the time!)

[likethesun2.livejournal.com]

M*A*S*H*!

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I have only a vague sense what the popular opinions are, but...

Hawkeye and Trapper's pranks are much more fucked up than the show ever recognizes, especially because they were mostly part of the more "sitcom-y" seasons. The film conveys more clearly the idea that there is some nasty and dangerous stuff going down there, and that it has become part of their personal sense of humor to deal with the horrors of war and all that; the tone of the early seasons means that the connection isn't quite made there (and leads to all kinds of other weird crap zooming by under the laugh track, like the time Frank Burns took Hawkeye to court martial and tried to get him executed).

Even if BJ's friendship with Hawkeye over the last nine years of the Korean War is the most passionate relationship in his life including his actual marriage, which it probably is, I am really not able to see an in-character scenario in which they, you know, have sex.

Frank Burns is gay. No, seriously.

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

Twelfth Night ?

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Malvolio gets a bad rap--from the other characters and usually in production as well. The narrative treats him basically like a "blocking character", the comedy antagonist who's always shutting down the fun, stopping the young lovers from getting together, &c. and has to be defeated in service of the happy ending. Problem is, Malvolio isn't in fact interfering with anything. Twelfth Night doesn't have a blocking character, actually.

Malvolio is guilty only of being a judgmental stick-in-the-mud (more precisely, of course, of being a puritan). Those jolly, roguish secondary characters punish him for this personality trait with remarkable cruelty. I'd like to see the complexities of his subplot brought out more often in performance, 'cos I don't think Shakespeare did it that way by accident.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see the complexities of his subplot brought out more often in performance

I saw a production recently where Malovolio came on at the end and shot everybody, having been driven mad by what Sir Toby and co had done to him. Mind you, that was the best thing about the production, which otherwise was tediously Germanic, in a Darren Nicholls sort of way (it is so true that Darren's work would be appreciated in Berlin) and mostly very unfunny.

pseudo-Brechtian schoolboy buggery of a production concept

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Hahahahaha. I can totally picture that.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Measure for Measure?

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

Man, I do not know what to do with that play. Even my mom, who is usually fairly conservative in her opinions of Weird Shakespeare Staging, preferred a radically re-interpreted performance version of the end of that play to the proper textual ending. I can do something with the end of Shrew or Merchant, but the Measure for Measure principals are people I just can't get a bead on.

All I can really do with Measure for Measure is throw up my hands and leave the thinking to clever people who actually like the play--like whoever it was who wrote that one post-Measure Yuletide story from last year. As far as I'm concerned, that story is totally what happened when the play was over. Again, hardly an unpopular opinion, for local-to-this-LJ values of "popularity"...