Reclaiming Meme

[sistermagpie]

jlh has designated this "Let's Reclaim Some Shit Day."

Iow: What are the things that people frequently rant about that you actually rather like? ,

She started with first person narration (which is something I tend to think I don't like before I remember that plenty of books and stories I love are written in it), established relationship stories (I HATE the attitude on TV now, especially, where as soon as a couple is together people start thinking they need to break up or else it's not interesting--wtf?) and sitcoms (my version of comfort food! Yay!).

The idea is to just say the things you like, when you've heard people argue that they suck or have just dismissed them, hopefully not as an inspiration for snarking about why you shouldn't like it.



So I tried to think of some--took me a while to think of generic things--it's not an "unpopular fandom opinion" meme.

I love Good Guys
I've realized over the years that I have a real love for Gallant--meaning Goofus' friend. It's not that I like didactic stories or judgmental characters at all-who does? But I like it when good behavior and hard work gets rewarded, especially over cool rebellion and flash, and talent without hard work. I like characters who are responsible, respect experience, and act like good guys--or at least regret it when they don't and do better next time. If they decide they know best, they might be right, but they don't do it lightly. It's not that I can't appreciate a bratty character who thinks he can't learn from anyone. I just need to see what I consider realistic consequences of that attitude. Not all stories have to be like this, but I often like the ones that are.

It's not that I see too many people ranting about goody-two shoes characters, but I do see it often considered a given that you want your hero not to be one, and I have seen arguments about there being a flaw in the writing or an unfair bias against a character when to me it seems like a realistic place for the character to be. Like the truculent student isn't the star pupil sort of thing. Obviously I sometimes like characters who clearly aren't good too, but usually that's when the text is obviously saying they are bad, even if they're the hero. But I like heroes who try to be good, even if it makes them not cool.

I love self-contained episodes
Okay, it's not like anybody would rant about this, but it is very common for me to see it described as a flaw when shows aren't following a storyline set up the week before. (Comics work more like this too nowadays.) As my brother puts it: "If at the end of an episode of The Honeymooners Ralph brings home 70 puppies, you don't tune in the next week to find out what happened to the puppies." This is sort of related to his pointing out that on Mary Tyler Moore Mary had her work life and her home life and the two didn't have much to do with each other for years. They knew each other, like if Rhoda came to get Mary for lunch or Mary had a (disastrous) party, but they weren't all involved with each other. "I should not have to know the history of these peoples' lives to follow an episode" is his feeling.

This seems like it's getting really rare, even in sitcoms. It's like there always has to be some overarching storyline for everybody that goes over the season, hopefully with a cliffhanger at the end of the season. Friends introduced Ross' crush on Rachel early on and it immediately became a sort of soapy storyline to follow (unlike, to give credit where it's due, on Frasier where Niles/Daphne was just a running joke for years). A show like How I Met Your Mother sort of builds this into the premise, to be fair--the whole show is unique in that it's supposed to be giving us a sliver of a larger narrative--but on the plus side that structure also gives them a way to make the eps self-contained because of it. (We get an intro to set us up at the beginning of the ep.)

Anyway, I stand up for the non-serialized comedies and dramas! Let's here it for the standalones that survive with no reliance on "what will happen next?" (Maybe this is why there's so many procedurals--sometimes it seems like they're the genre that avoids this more than any other--not that they avoid it completely either.)

I'll probably think of more of these after I post this, but this is what I came up with as of now.