(no subject)

[phineasjones]

oh. what all do i have to say? hm.

-your hair was long when first we met by jjtaylor. remus/sirius. just... brilliant. as per her usual. oh, and also, it will rip your heart out and feed it to you. or maybe that was just me.

-i have now watched all of s4 angel. i liked the last episode. i wish i had the brain power to write the essay on everything that is so fucking wrong with this season. not wrong in a story-arc kind of way, because that's actually good. if you don't mind all that they destroy in order to get you there. like... ok. things that bother me - the destruction of cordelia. partly, because i love her. because she's my favorite character and i shipped cordy/angel like nobody's business. but i can accept that the good things never happen in jossverse. what i can't accept is that all the power she wielded throughout the show was suddenly turned evil. and that her ultimate purpose was to bring evil into the world - through her pregnancy. through which she manipulated connor. it's just so... ulch. they had a powerful woman and look what they did to her.

and then the ultimate evil (ambiguous though it may have been) comes in the form of a black woman? oh, that's subtle. and they don't let you forget it either - they're always making little comments about her being 'ebony' or 'mocha colored.' there is no problem inherent in either of those but if she were white, would they describe her by her skin color?

and really, these things are thrown into starker relief by s5 in which every woman not dead or evil yet dies or turns evil.

much like wes/lilah... it was so touching to see him realize how he felt about her once she was gone. and then in s5 he's all lilah who?

and then, connor. i'm surprised by how much i care about him and his relationship with angel. i'm also surprised that we're expected to have any sympathy for angel in this matter by the end. i don't know. i know it's not supposed to be realistic. i know i'm taking it a bit too seriously, but the violence between them is just too disturbing for me. i understand that connor is violent and why and i understand that angel has to act to defend himself and his friends etc. yeah. but the various places of angel using extreme or careless violence toward connor... it's just wrong. no wonder he's fucked up. i mean, he started fucked up but angel fucked him up worse. and i don't feel like that's something they're trying to say. i feel like they want us to think that connor and angel are both poor, sad victims of circumstance. i would say, no. angel is abusive and doesn't deserve a child. which i imagine is not a terribly popular opinion. but it's also disturbing to me to think that other people were not at all disturbed by this. or maybe they just had an easier time writing it off than i did.

at any rate, i finished that season feeling sad and awful. and kind of dirty and gross. and like i don't love the show half as much as i did.

-i baked pumpkin muffins this morning. the house smells sooooo good. mmm.

-i want more longnottom!

-if i don't make a list of things to do, i'm am going to go insane. my brain is too murky right now. i don't like it. meh.

Comments

[dorrie6.livejournal.com]

-i want more longnottom!

Me. Too.

[wax-jism.livejournal.com]

Like that scene in (ack, forget ep title, looking up... looking it up...) Sacrifice where Connor has betrayed them to the Jasminites and Angel just beats him to a bloody pulp. And how much beating does it take to reduce superboy Connor to a bloody pulp? A lot. It's almost pornographic.

I mean, it sort of made sense, plot-wise and so forth, but purelly visually the image of a large, muscular father beating his slightly built son to mincemeat is pretty disturbing. And they kind of linger on Connor's broken face when he's in Jasmine's room afterwards (to show how she fixed him so easily.)

But then, Connor spends most of his time on the show being either physically or emotionally beaten. It's crazy the abuse they put him through. Actually, thinking about Connor makes me cry. You know he would have been better off if Wesley had taken him away as an infant. On the show they always act like taking Connor (for his own protection) was something so unforgivable, so monstrous... but removing a child from a threatening parent is, like, standard procedure in the real world. So what the fuck?

I found Angel's attitude around infant Connor really creepy anyway. That kind of obsession isn't going to give a kid a very healthy start. And again, no one thought it was strange or disturbing.

[jjtaylor.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec!

Oh, and Angel Season 4 is when I started watching - I think the very first episode I saw was Connor and Cordelia sleeping together. Still weirds me out even now that I've seen the rest of the seasons. It's a very strange season and I have many problems with the women's storylines. Many, many problems.

But, mmmm, pumpkin muffins.

[callmesandy.livejournal.com]

The thing with Connor is that he's crazy. And I'm generally amazed how sane he manages to be for how long given how many crazy making things happen to him.

I don't think Angel's some great father - he tries and fails and he's petty and jealous all the time. But then, he has five months as a parent of an infant and then another year or so dealing with a crazy teenager who's pretty darned damaged. And I think, really, as a viewer, I was right there with Lilah and Connor when they said that Connor's final big flame-out was pretty much Angel's fault, as much as fault could be laid (since it was also a choice Connor made, choosing suicide by avenging father).

I don't read as much into some of things you mentioned because some of the plot points were motivated by Charisma Carpenter's pregnancy in real-life (the original plan had been for Cordelia to defeat Jasmine and I've heard there was another plan for Cordelia to give birth to a Jasmine portrayed by Charisma Carpenter, so ...).