One for Sorrow

A discussion I was reading brought up the question: "Is having a character you can relate to/identify with/root for necessary to your enjoyment of a show?" in the context of some viewers saying that they no longer enjoyed Weeds because there were no longer any likable characters and they could no longer root for Nancy. Other people listed shows that they watched where they never felt like they identified with anyone--The Sopranos, for instance--and didn't want to, but still loved the show. One person said they felt it was a particularly American thing to base enjoyment of a show on the show fitting into their own moral beliefs. I'm not sure if that's true or not. It's probably more a sign of a particular personality than a nationality.

There are probably more shows on now than ever before with explicitly "bad" characters. One would think these shows required an audience who liked characters who didn’t share their morality, but they seem to also attract a large number of people who think the characters do share their morality until they do something really bad and the illusion is broken (and the writers may be accused of making the character rape the dog/cross the moral event horizon).

More concrete examples within. ( Probably spoilers inside for Seinfeld, Weeds, Dexter...Hopefully you don't have to follow the shows to follow the post. )

Short version: do you prefer characters you can stand behind as good, even if you have to overlook some of their behavior to think of them that way? Are there certain characters you've liked where this worked and other characters where it didn't work? And if so, why do you think?

I know you'd think I'd said all I could say--but no! There was a side issue I noticed while reading that thread, which, btw, is here, since I keep referencing it. There's one person there defending fanfic and doing a brilliant job staying polite despite everyone being rude and condescending. ( Yet I feel like her defense doesn't hold up somehow. )

I should have realized in doing my last post that madness is one of those things that have one meaning in the real world and another in a literary sense...I've gotten into the exact same discussion before in XF fandom. Because if madness in fiction can be considered a kink, I've definitely got it!

( Mad about madness. )

ETA: Happy birthday pippinsqueak!!!

This thread turned out to be so interesting, it's gotten me thinking even more about incest in literature and what it stands for. Unfortunately I really haven't read any lit crit on the subject. I have a feeling I'll be surfing around today looking for some. The weird thing, too, is that the subject seems to tie in with other recent subjects on flist, like racism in HP and strangely enough, the South(eastern US).

For now, I'm just thinking about ( the subject based on the things I've read--long! )

Phew! My flist has exploded with all sorts of great stuff while I was spending the day at Jury Duty...which wasn't too bad, actually, though my butt hurts from falling asleep in a hard chair. (It was right out of The Breakfast Club, actually. Everybody around me had zonked out and the guy came in and said into the microphone, "Who wants to go home now?" and the whole room raised its hand.) They even gave us a two hour lunch so I had a nice time walking around Little Italy and Chinatown and bought a flying pig. I haven't gotten called for voir dire or anything yet, and I have to go back tomorrow. If we're not on time our time today doesn't count and we have to do it all over again. We were threatened pretty severely with having to watch the movie again if that happened. In general the place was run in the very New York way, with the woman in charge giving us instructions on what they would do, what we would do, and what we would think of doing that we should not do. The basic attitude is always, "The deal is we won't treat you like idiots if you won't act like idiots."

Anyway, it seems like the controversy about the young HP actors is still going strong and I figured I'd stick my own thoughts out on it. I'm one of those people who does get uncomfortable with it, but it doesn't seem like this is because of the same reason most other people do...( Me on this stuff... )