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shadowkatNeed to fix dinner and not post on the internet. But I like blogging, particularly after drinking a vodka/pomagrant/cranbery and tonic water cocktail. Oh by the way, I've hear that pure organic cherry juice, red or black, is a miracle cure for arthritis. So try it and let me know if it works. It has to be pure though - no oceanspray or concentrate.
This is about "Plots" that do not work for me. I know. Look away, look away. First up is The dreaded Pregnancy/Baby Plot. I hate this plot, people, with a vengeance. It only works in family dramas...or reality based dramas such as Grey's Anatomy and Parenthood. In Sci-Fi/Fantasy it often becomes really silly and cliche. Also, ahem, somewhat chauvinistic and sexist at times, due to the fact that most of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is written by white male assholes who don't realize that they are white male assholes. It would be easier if they got this. But nooo.
Just finished watching Fringe's take on the dreaded baby plot and yes, it fell into all the predictable cliche traps. Farscape, Buffy the TV Series (Nikkie/Robin Wood), Fringe, Angel, X-Files...sigh. All about the male nightmare of not being able to protect the child, the child losing its Mommy, or the child being used to destroy the world. And oh...the baby is always a boy. Why is that? Why can't it be a girl? I mean seriously, why is it always a frigging boy!
I've decided these male writers have serious Daddy and Mommy issues, either that or they've been reading Freud.
I hate this plot arc. I hate it in fanfic. The writer has to work overtime to convince me that the baby fic works. To date? The ONLY fanfic writer that has convinced me that having a baby works is rarhihah (whose lj name I can't spell). She convinced me.
What did Rah or Barb Cummings do that others haven't? She discussed the normality of it. She doesn't romanticize. The kids are well kids. The pregnancy advances the characters. It's not there as a plot-twist. We don't get the kids being kidnapped. The mother isn't tortured prior to having them. They aren't necessarily boys! The sex of the kids doesn't necessarily matter. The mother gets pregnant with consensual sex - yes, I know, shocking. She's not drunk. She's not jumping time lines or universes. She just doesn't realize that the vampire got a little human and was able to impregnate her. (I liked that.)
See my problem with this plot arc is the sturm and drang of it. It's so predictable.
In Farscape..Aeryn gets preggers, she hides it from John, because you know it's the other John and he might have issues, but hey still his DNA, he finds out, she's taken off, he takes a long time forgiving her for well taking off because you know it is HIS kid. They finally make up. Then she's kidnapped. The kidnappers attempt to take her baby from her and give it to someone else - in torturous scene. They want the kid because it probably has Crichton's ability to figure out wormholes - or weapons of mass destruction. There's worries that she will have troubles delivering. In Peacekeeper Wars - the baby is in Rygel for a bit, they transfer it back to Aeryn. Aeryn has it in the middle of battle, she pops it out then picks up a gun and fights and of course it is a boy. Obviously. (And I'm thinking these writers haven't a clue what it is like to give birth to a child.)
In Fringe - Olivia gets preggers, okay Amberverse!Olivia. Peter is separated from her and involved with BlueVerse!Olivia. Walter kidnaps her, accelerates her pregnancy. Then takes blood from the baby, which of course is a boy, to start the machine of mass destruction.
[Sigh. Only white male privileged assholes with glamorous jobs would think of a baby as being a way of creating a weapon. They seriously have no idea what it is like to create life. War, violence, pain and suffering...sure. But life? Not so much.]
In Angel - again, baby, boy, mother kills herself to give it life, evil guy steals it and takes it to a horrible universe, the baby grows up to be a weapon designed to kill Angel. Mommy is dead. Angel must heal the boy.
To give Doctor Who and Stephan Moffat an iota of credit, at least the baby is a girl. But still she gets stolen, turned into a weapon to destroy the Doctor, is redeemed and saves the world.
In Buffy, we have cute baby boy Robin Wood watching evil Spike fight his Mommy and later kill her. He can't do anything. So he grows up and decides to kill vampires and evil Spike as soon as he can. It's all about him, Nikki doesn't matter. Actually it becomes all about him and Spike - Nikki is the martyr that his childhood rests on.
Also incredibly cliche. Daytime soaps have done this before. Kid comes into the show, goes after dead-beat dad, or villain or hero who killed his mom or hurt his mom,
Much hijinks ensues. Bored now. It's also in a million and one comic books. I think Marvel done it numerous times. Batman certainly was all about the dead parents/revenge arc. After a while, you become desentized, and just think, THIS? AGAIN! UGH. IT's so frigging CLICHE!
X-Files - Scully gets preggers, is stolen by someone (aliens, who knows - I didn't stick with it) and Mulder broods, finds her, and baby could be a weapon to ...
In short? The plot line guaranteed to make me run from a work is the dreaded baby plot line. I almost did it with Fringe, but the Blueverse kept me invested. I did head for the hills with Angel, people had to coax me back to it. And I definitely gave up on the X-Files - not that I was ever that invested.
Will state...at least these plot lines didn't feature a rape. I think part of the problem may well be that I've watched far too many soap operas in my lifetime. The soap opera has explored the pregnancy/baby plot line from every angle imaginable. The current plot line on General Hospital is who the father is? Franco - the evil serial killer/rapist or Jason, her one true love? Sam was possibly raped by Franco when she was drugged or drunk, and has no memory of what happened. She doesn't know if Franco raped her or not. (Sound familiar?) The Blackout Pregnancy Story Line is a Daytime Soap Opera Staple. The moment I see it? I think Daytime Soap Opera..ugh. It's been done a million times. Most famously in Passions...where, and I kid you not, the female villain decided to use a turkey baster to impregnate her nemesis/or the heroine with another guy's sperm, while the heroine was unconscious. Oh, it worked. They've also done the blackout drunk pregnancy a few times - because there's nothing more fun than playing guess who the baby daddy is. It's never the hero, or it is the hero, but the villain decides he can't live without the heroine and FAKES the pregnancy test. OR wait, the villainess fakes it, because she wants the hero. (That was OLTL's plot arc.) OR...there's a baby-switch. In which someone replaces the heroine's baby with another baby, and steals her's. Every variation imaginable has been done.
The dreaded baby plotline is a staple of daytime soap operas. Whenever they get bored or run-out of ideas...they trot it out like clockwork. It's fun to guess which cliche plot-arc they will do next. They've all been done - to death. The one that annoys me the most is the blackout pregnancy, where we get to play guess who Daddy is...and it is always a person we have never met or the hero, or the person that would annoy us the most. In short always disappointing and doesn't further anything. You spend all this time worrying over it, and no pay-off.
The dreaded pregnancy story line is too. And in soap operas? It's often the result of a rape, or could be the result of a rape, and it's often a rape that the heroine has no memory of. The blackout sex bit? Bit soap opera staple. Done every which way but loose, actually done that way too. Every American daytime soap opera has done the dreaded pregnancy story line and the dreaded baby storyline.
I think my hatred of it stems from the fact that I've watched a lot of daytime soap operas.
[Okay, I shouldn't say this aloud. I will get in trouble, But here's the thing? It's funny, people keep claiming Whedon doesn't write like a daytime soap opera writer. Prove it. He totally does. Clearly you've never really watched one. Because honestly, folks, every story arc he's done I can find in daytime soaps and Marvel comic serials. In addition? The man admits that he read and watches both. His arcs are emotionally based. Often go off the rails, logic wise, and hard to predict at times because of that. Plus innovative and insane. And he likes to hurt the characters and audience. Totally a SOAP OPERA! Soap Operas get a bad rap. They can be brilliant at times. They can be horrible too (see dreaded baby storyline). It's a mixed bag.
This is about "Plots" that do not work for me. I know. Look away, look away. First up is The dreaded Pregnancy/Baby Plot. I hate this plot, people, with a vengeance. It only works in family dramas...or reality based dramas such as Grey's Anatomy and Parenthood. In Sci-Fi/Fantasy it often becomes really silly and cliche. Also, ahem, somewhat chauvinistic and sexist at times, due to the fact that most of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is written by white male assholes who don't realize that they are white male assholes. It would be easier if they got this. But nooo.
Just finished watching Fringe's take on the dreaded baby plot and yes, it fell into all the predictable cliche traps. Farscape, Buffy the TV Series (Nikkie/Robin Wood), Fringe, Angel, X-Files...sigh. All about the male nightmare of not being able to protect the child, the child losing its Mommy, or the child being used to destroy the world. And oh...the baby is always a boy. Why is that? Why can't it be a girl? I mean seriously, why is it always a frigging boy!
I've decided these male writers have serious Daddy and Mommy issues, either that or they've been reading Freud.
I hate this plot arc. I hate it in fanfic. The writer has to work overtime to convince me that the baby fic works. To date? The ONLY fanfic writer that has convinced me that having a baby works is rarhihah (whose lj name I can't spell). She convinced me.
What did Rah or Barb Cummings do that others haven't? She discussed the normality of it. She doesn't romanticize. The kids are well kids. The pregnancy advances the characters. It's not there as a plot-twist. We don't get the kids being kidnapped. The mother isn't tortured prior to having them. They aren't necessarily boys! The sex of the kids doesn't necessarily matter. The mother gets pregnant with consensual sex - yes, I know, shocking. She's not drunk. She's not jumping time lines or universes. She just doesn't realize that the vampire got a little human and was able to impregnate her. (I liked that.)
See my problem with this plot arc is the sturm and drang of it. It's so predictable.
In Farscape..Aeryn gets preggers, she hides it from John, because you know it's the other John and he might have issues, but hey still his DNA, he finds out, she's taken off, he takes a long time forgiving her for well taking off because you know it is HIS kid. They finally make up. Then she's kidnapped. The kidnappers attempt to take her baby from her and give it to someone else - in torturous scene. They want the kid because it probably has Crichton's ability to figure out wormholes - or weapons of mass destruction. There's worries that she will have troubles delivering. In Peacekeeper Wars - the baby is in Rygel for a bit, they transfer it back to Aeryn. Aeryn has it in the middle of battle, she pops it out then picks up a gun and fights and of course it is a boy. Obviously. (And I'm thinking these writers haven't a clue what it is like to give birth to a child.)
In Fringe - Olivia gets preggers, okay Amberverse!Olivia. Peter is separated from her and involved with BlueVerse!Olivia. Walter kidnaps her, accelerates her pregnancy. Then takes blood from the baby, which of course is a boy, to start the machine of mass destruction.
[Sigh. Only white male privileged assholes with glamorous jobs would think of a baby as being a way of creating a weapon. They seriously have no idea what it is like to create life. War, violence, pain and suffering...sure. But life? Not so much.]
In Angel - again, baby, boy, mother kills herself to give it life, evil guy steals it and takes it to a horrible universe, the baby grows up to be a weapon designed to kill Angel. Mommy is dead. Angel must heal the boy.
To give Doctor Who and Stephan Moffat an iota of credit, at least the baby is a girl. But still she gets stolen, turned into a weapon to destroy the Doctor, is redeemed and saves the world.
In Buffy, we have cute baby boy Robin Wood watching evil Spike fight his Mommy and later kill her. He can't do anything. So he grows up and decides to kill vampires and evil Spike as soon as he can. It's all about him, Nikki doesn't matter. Actually it becomes all about him and Spike - Nikki is the martyr that his childhood rests on.
Also incredibly cliche. Daytime soaps have done this before. Kid comes into the show, goes after dead-beat dad, or villain or hero who killed his mom or hurt his mom,
Much hijinks ensues. Bored now. It's also in a million and one comic books. I think Marvel done it numerous times. Batman certainly was all about the dead parents/revenge arc. After a while, you become desentized, and just think, THIS? AGAIN! UGH. IT's so frigging CLICHE!
X-Files - Scully gets preggers, is stolen by someone (aliens, who knows - I didn't stick with it) and Mulder broods, finds her, and baby could be a weapon to ...
In short? The plot line guaranteed to make me run from a work is the dreaded baby plot line. I almost did it with Fringe, but the Blueverse kept me invested. I did head for the hills with Angel, people had to coax me back to it. And I definitely gave up on the X-Files - not that I was ever that invested.
Will state...at least these plot lines didn't feature a rape. I think part of the problem may well be that I've watched far too many soap operas in my lifetime. The soap opera has explored the pregnancy/baby plot line from every angle imaginable. The current plot line on General Hospital is who the father is? Franco - the evil serial killer/rapist or Jason, her one true love? Sam was possibly raped by Franco when she was drugged or drunk, and has no memory of what happened. She doesn't know if Franco raped her or not. (Sound familiar?) The Blackout Pregnancy Story Line is a Daytime Soap Opera Staple. The moment I see it? I think Daytime Soap Opera..ugh. It's been done a million times. Most famously in Passions...where, and I kid you not, the female villain decided to use a turkey baster to impregnate her nemesis/or the heroine with another guy's sperm, while the heroine was unconscious. Oh, it worked. They've also done the blackout drunk pregnancy a few times - because there's nothing more fun than playing guess who the baby daddy is. It's never the hero, or it is the hero, but the villain decides he can't live without the heroine and FAKES the pregnancy test. OR wait, the villainess fakes it, because she wants the hero. (That was OLTL's plot arc.) OR...there's a baby-switch. In which someone replaces the heroine's baby with another baby, and steals her's. Every variation imaginable has been done.
The dreaded baby plotline is a staple of daytime soap operas. Whenever they get bored or run-out of ideas...they trot it out like clockwork. It's fun to guess which cliche plot-arc they will do next. They've all been done - to death. The one that annoys me the most is the blackout pregnancy, where we get to play guess who Daddy is...and it is always a person we have never met or the hero, or the person that would annoy us the most. In short always disappointing and doesn't further anything. You spend all this time worrying over it, and no pay-off.
The dreaded pregnancy story line is too. And in soap operas? It's often the result of a rape, or could be the result of a rape, and it's often a rape that the heroine has no memory of. The blackout sex bit? Bit soap opera staple. Done every which way but loose, actually done that way too. Every American daytime soap opera has done the dreaded pregnancy story line and the dreaded baby storyline.
I think my hatred of it stems from the fact that I've watched a lot of daytime soap operas.
[Okay, I shouldn't say this aloud. I will get in trouble, But here's the thing? It's funny, people keep claiming Whedon doesn't write like a daytime soap opera writer. Prove it. He totally does. Clearly you've never really watched one. Because honestly, folks, every story arc he's done I can find in daytime soaps and Marvel comic serials. In addition? The man admits that he read and watches both. His arcs are emotionally based. Often go off the rails, logic wise, and hard to predict at times because of that. Plus innovative and insane. And he likes to hurt the characters and audience. Totally a SOAP OPERA! Soap Operas get a bad rap. They can be brilliant at times. They can be horrible too (see dreaded baby storyline). It's a mixed bag.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 01:45 am (UTC)That baby was actually a girl. Emily. I don't actually remember whether she accomplished anything because the poor tyke died of some disease. (I'd have to re-watch the episode where Scully discovers Emily to remember. I just remember it being sad.)
The second child was created ye old natural way with Mulder (though the 'how' was never explained. How as in... Scully wasn't supposed to have any ova left so, it was a 'miracle baby', which always pissed me off more that she then had to give it up.).
And if it helps with Fringe, Alt_Livia's baby seems to have gone up in smoke when the timeline got altered. It just --blooped -- out of existence (though I suspect it will probably come back again at some point. Maybe. Okay, honestly, at this point I have no idea. :D
And we're both posting about soap operas and baby plots today!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 02:10 am (UTC)And wait...the baby disappears in Fringe??? I haven't made it that far yet. But I do have to thank you for pushing me to try Fringe. I just watched the awesome LSD episode, where they become cartoons in Olivia's brain. Talk about creativity. It reminds me a lot of Farscape in that way.
And we're both posting about soap operas and baby plots today!
I was reading your post at lunch today at work, or scanning it, and my response was far too long - so did my own post.
We've both watched the same wonky soap operas. What amuses me to no end is the state of denile many fans are in - "Buffy is not a soap opera." Oh, yes, it sooo is. LOL!!!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 10:53 pm (UTC)They don't know what to do with the kid
So true. Whedon certainly didn't. Baby Connor had to get transported to another dimension and come back whiny teen boy Connor. You really can't have kids and infants in adult sci-fantasy effectively. The original BattleStar Galatica tried...and gave up, Boxy started disappearing. In the new version, he's mentioned briefly, that's it. In Fringe? Apparently the baby pops out of existence? Farscape? They had the kid at the very end of the series.
Oh and in the Marvel comics - specifically The X-Men? Baby Nathan - Scott and Maddie/Jean's kid? He gets sent to a future world and we don't see him again until he's in his 40s or 50s, sent back to the past. Comics handle it the same way Whedon did in Angel - the kid gets lost in another time-line or world, and comes back suddenly much older.
I think the only Sci-Fi tale that I saw pull it off was the Terminator series, but even in that - they ended up revisiting the tale after he'd grown into a teenager.
The story trope just doesn't work that well.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 03:52 am (UTC)Your idea does sound somewhat interesting though - because of the Connor angle.
(You are as bad as I am, I have all these well plotted out, unwritten tales inside my head.)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 07:00 pm (UTC)Yeah, I thought it would be pointless writing it from Buffy or Spike's POV because then it would just be a standard baby-in-peril story. But if I do it from Connor's POV (and in my AU Connor never had any fake memories; he just managed to escape before Angel killed him and has been on his own as a screwed-up rogue ever since) then he's in the weird position of empathizing with this kid who's going through exactly what he went through as a child, and starting to question his involvement and the path his life's taken... but still without any desire to kiss and make up with Angel. I think it's got potential, if i ever get to it.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 04:25 am (UTC)The blackout sex bit? Bit soap opera staple.
Heh, yup. As soon as that party bit came out, I think people knew what would happen. Would have been more shocking if it didn't.
Buffy was totally a soap. I think people automatically equate soap operas to daytime television and daily episodes, but Buffy? Soap. I think a quite a few of the late-90's TV explosion programs, particularly the WB, were more or less soaps. Even a couple on HBO.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 05:17 pm (UTC)was more like Scooby Doo - Where are You. They did a bait and switch on the network and audience.
Dawson's Creek likewise started out as a Family Drama, much like Seventh Heaven did...but both morphed into soaps after a while.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 07:51 pm (UTC)ETA: You might be interested in my Not the Last verse? (The Master and Lucy have a son during The Year That Never Was and everything goes AU.) It is... nothing like any of the plots listed above. At ALL. Apart from the very first story, it centres around the child, and how he copes with being brought up by mortal enemies and being the last of his species. Plus, writing a Timelord child is great fun! :) Oh, and he *does* get kidnapped once, and I can guarantee it's different from what you'd expect. Heh. (I love my OC to distraction, and he's never just a prop. And well he knows it!)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 10:43 pm (UTC)(I've only watched RT Davies and Moffat's Who. I did watch a few episodes of the Doctor Who that aired in the US in the late 70s/80s - I think it was Tom Parker who played it? The guy with the long hair? But I only have vague memories of that one.)
Would agree - Doctor Who is not a soap opera, far too episodic. It's an adventure series sort of like Star Gate, but better written. And the Doctor Song tale does remind me of a fairy tale.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 10:55 pm (UTC)Lucy was the Master (Saxon's) wife. (see icon) From S3 with the Toclafane, when the Master took over the world and Martha walked the Earth and we got Tinkerbel!Doctor? Anyway, it's a sprawling 'verse, and quite long if you read the whole thing... Mind you, all the stories ought to stand alone. Have a look some time if you're curious, but it might not be your thing. It's just when people mention baby plots, I always have to remind myself that technically that's what this 'verse is. Because it doesn't behave like the norm at all (something which took me by surprise too). ;)
*wanders off to bed*