I was just fucking witcha...

[tencrush]

Well, no, I wasn't, but apologies if my last post went a bit rambly and weird. Most you have never seen me rambly and weird, though in fact, dealing with people onna OG has made me go rambly and weird before in the past, but it was always about Rose. Must remind myself not to carry my righteous anger over from there to here, because it make NO sense out of context. Sorry, LOL!

Anyway, I kind of promised to explain what the righteous anger was about, so I'll do that now. As an aside, I AM planning on polling to see how widespread the interpretation of Ianto as just the teaboy/Jack's sextoy is, but it's not even really the fact that it is or isn't widespread that bothers me, it's the fact that the writing has even ALLOWED ROOM for that interpretation to exist that gets on my nerves.

So why does it bother me so much? Well, again, it's a question of characterisation. See, to me, interpreting the relationship as Jack using Ianto as a sextoy has a lot of implications for both characters, and it's why I say I don't think it's doing them any favours. The reason I got angry about it isn't because I'm so hugely defensive about Ianto, it's actually down to a few telling statements, statements that I HAVE heard elsewhere in other contexts, about JACK, not Ianto. And all that comes back to a discussion I've had here and elsewhere a few times, about Jack, and whether or not he is still, at this point in the narrative, the omnisexual slut type that he was perceived to be around the time of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. The fact that the relationship between Jack and Ianto is open to the sextoy interpretation, in my mind, also immediately implies that it is possible for viewers to perceive Jack as THE SORT OF GUY WHO WOULD DO THAT. Harrassment, of a subordinate. Because that's what that boils down to. The thing that got me so riled up wasn't the fact that people think Ianto is the sort of guy that would allow himself to be used as a sextoy (I think that's a plausible reading if you view the show in a certain way, and I think, given the fact that Ianto hasn't really had a major storyline since Cyberwoman, barring the Jackanto story itself, it's understandable that some people might view him that way), it was the attitude of the posters in question, and of people I have spoken to elsewhere, of "Oh, that's just the kind of guy Jack is." Because, really? No. If the storytelling has allowed room for the interpretation of Jack, the leading man, as the sort of guy who would use one of his employees for sex, given all the fucked up power dynamics that that implies, then the character of Jack, with regards to his sexual/romantic leanings in any case, has not been properly put to paper.

And that angers me greatly, yeah. Because Jack, in everyone's big grandiose words is supposed to be this whole new kind of hero for the 21st century. Someone with a progressive and liberal attitude towards sex and sexuality. Someone like you and me (I would hope), who doesn't like to label people and thinks everyone should be free to explore whatever facets of life turn them on. Someone who will serve as an example to that small faction of 15-year-old boys who are squicked by teh ghey, and maybe open their minds a bit. And allowing room for people to see Jack as a guy who just puts it about a bit, who comes on to one colleague, is rebuffed and moves on to the next, really FUCKS THAT UP for me. That's why I was angry.

Am I making sense yet or am I still rambling? The hormones haven't worn off yet, I can never quite tell lately.

Comments

[descrime.livejournal.com]

I blame this entire thing on how the show has been structured, specifically the decision to basically make Gwen the main character. I couldn't believe in the Fragment's Declassified when Chris said that Jack has been waiting for Gwen for 100 years. I mean, seriously? She'd have to discover the cure for cancer to be able to live up to that hype. Gwen is a perfectly nice normal girl and if she was treated like a perfectly nice normal girl in the show, there wouldn't be a problem. Instead, for some reason, it was decided that she has to be superagent!Gwen, who's completely comfortable with her job from Day One and the only one Jack confides in and the "heart" of the team. Which means she can never be called to task for the mistakes she makes, like letting lose a sex alien that kills 8+ innocent men or cheating on her live-in boyfriend and then giving him retcon and /demanding/ that he forgive her, which quite frankly starts to make her look appalling to any viewer that just thinks for a moment. Add that on top of the fact that every male except Ianto is apparently half in love with her, and the show becomes really skewed.

Torchwood should have been more like Spooks/MI-5, in which all the characters are treated roughly evenly (though obviously Jack would get more attention). Then, Ianto, Tosh and Owen would have taken some of the B plots from Gwen which would have given them time to shine the spotlight on the other characters who are just as important to Torchwood and we wouldn't have this ambiguity with Jack/Ianto.

Also, a feature of Spooks that would have served Torchwood well was the fear that any of them could go at any minute. But you know Gwen is protected by authorial fiat because Jack's been waiting for her for 100 freaking years.

I realize that this is only tangentially related your post, but it's what I thought of first.

[(Anonymous)]

It wasn't Chris who said that. It was one of the producers. I also wondered what fucking show he was watching. The episode clearly said that what Torchwood needed was Jack Harkness. I think you are right though, the Gwen worship and every man being in love with her aside from Ianto is part of the problem.

[tencrush]

I thought that Andy thing in Adrift was bad, but then Exit Wounds happened and Andy and Rhys both looked at her like she was Mother Fucking Theresa and I threw up in my mouth a little.

[(Anonymous)]

You did just literally make me laugh out loud. The pathetic thing was that she just did an inspirational speech to a bunch of people that would have thought she was a jumped up PC and rolled their eyes at her.

RTD has a habit of falling in love with his heroes and having everyone else fall in love with them as well. DW is very bad for that, irritatingly so with the Dr making more and more God speeches as this series goes on. TW has fallen into it sometimes with Jack, although the team have clearly shown him disrespect at times. With Gwen though it has been a consistent theme, even when she was shagging Owen.

[descrime.livejournal.com]

I really couldn't believe the Doctor's Daughter on that count (though I thought the episode was fun overall).

I mean the whole "Look up genocide in the dictionary and you'll see my picture there because I've already been there, done that and even erased them from all of time, bitches" to Jesus Doctor's "I never could (I just make other people do it for me) so base your society on my moral teachings!" I wish they'd go back to a time where every episode wasn't a morality play.

[sanginmychains.livejournal.com]

RTD has a bit of the Joss Whedon flaw, that way. Joss's issue is that he's so invested in showing "womyn" as heroic and marvellous that he kind of hangs the men out to dry. RTD tries to show some darkness, some moral ambiguity in his characters, but then he ends up liking them too much, and he rehabilitates them beyond recognition. I liked angry!Owen. I thought he was convincing and interesting. But suddenly, oh, he's like that because his troo wuv died from aliens, and when he faces his post-mortality, he gets all nice and stuff, because he really was nice all along. Gag. And I like morally ambiguous Jack, I like gets-things-done Jack. Then suddenly Jack wants to somehow get a ginormous wounded alien whale back through the Rift? It doesn't stand to reason.

[descrime.livejournal.com]

Hah! Yes, I thought that whole scene was so silly. I mean, Owen was helping out at the hospital. Tosh and Ianto both were working on the supercomputer to try to stop a nuclear power plant from exploding. And Gwen...is telling the police to ignore emergency protocol and go knock on doors. Brilliant.

[(Anonymous)]

The Doctor's daughter was ludicrous, aside from being a fairly dire episode (this series really isn't good)the God/Jesus speechifying was even more over the top, and the pompous crap about the guns, again. When he was ironically waving Jack's gun about.

Anyhow getting rather tangental here, although maybe this is part of the problem? The need for hero worship, religious significance.

[tigercheetah.livejournal.com]

I've felt for a long, long time that Gwen should never have been a lead on the show. She should have been a support with Owen, Ianto and Tosh.

RTD's trying to re-create the Doc/Rose relationship with Jack/Gwen. Richard Stokes even said as much several months ago. The only problem is - Torchwood is an essemble of 5 characters, not just 2 as with Doctor Who. RTD seems to forget that from time to time.

[(Anonymous)]

Also TW isn't a children's show. Rose is 19 and starry eyed. The two things can't be compared and Jack/Gwen don't work. The reason Nine and Rose worked was chemistry, she didn't have as much with Ten, and it imploded with smugness. RTD was in love with the Dr and Rose himself. Clearly they knew the fans were sick of the companions falling in love with the Dr, so now we have endless comments about Donna and the Dr not fancying each other.

TW is different, the characters are grown up and love and lust for real, it's an adult programme, the Dr/Rose dynamic really can't work, and may well be the cause of so much of the confusion.

[descrime.livejournal.com]

I definitely see that too. Gwen just can't pull off a Rose. Rose was nineteen, and her youth served her well in that it excused her occasional inability to see how her actions were affecting others and also gave her a measure of vulnerability. Gwen seems insufferably smug and overconfident in her own righteousness to me most of the time, despite the fact that while she has no special skills or knowledge to support the attitude, everyone else on the team does.

Also, Rose doesn't fit into the Torchwood universe and every attempt to make Gwen "adult" or "edgy" or whatever they're trying to do, ends up making her look like a twat: the letting a killer alien loose because she was too good to just hand Owen a tool, the cheating on Rhys and then retconning him, the trying to kiss Jack at her wedding, etc.

Mostly, though, like you said, RTD has assumed that Gwen would be the gateway character for the entire audience, which couldn't be further from the truth for me. I associate with Ianto first, Tosh second, Jack and Owen's order changes depending on the episode, and Gwen fifth, which is probably why her characterization annoys so much to be perfectly honest. If Gwen was my gateway character, I probably wouldn't care.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually I would say that everyone I know who watches relates to Gwen last, I think there would only be a minority of viewers who find her a gateway character. I'm referring to people who just enjoy it by the way not even the hard core fans, for whom I think Ianto probably is the favourite. From the first episode I have loved Ianto the most. I think Jack does come second for me. Although maybe equal to Tosh.

[descrime.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's why I said RTD really miscalculated. I think we are supposed to identify with her because of the continued harping about how Gwen's the normal one and the only one with a life. *rolls eyes* Though it would be interesting to see the actual percentages for how much of a randomly chosen population sees each character as their gateway character. Fandom's biased because there are only certain kinds of people who willing spend hours writing long messages about how they view a television show (that would be me) and those people usually have friends that share similar outlooks on things.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree about fandom being biased, but I don't know anyone who is a "fan" in that sense. Just people who watch and enjoy. I have heard similar opinions from work colleagues, not just friends. I do know a couple of people who quite like Gwen, one is a friends boyfriend and another is a work colleague, but even then they don't actually like her the most or relate to her the most, they just like the whole team.

Like I said, and have also put in my comment later in the thread, most people just don't overthink, and really genuinely don't watch for the relationships. Whereas I of course, do both!!

[descrime.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I always like to hear about how fandom outsiders view the show. ^^

I know most people don't think about a show after it's aired, but I still think as a multi-million pound work of literature, it still should hold up to basic logical scrutiny. Quite frankly, I think we've begun to expect too little from television when it really is an amazing opportunity to tell a very in depth story as you have so much more time than a movie.

[nightspring.livejournal.com]

Didn't someone post figures somewhere from an internal Nielson poll ranking viewers' character preferences? I seem to recall that Gwen came in dead last among the regulars.

And I have no idea why RTD thought being "normal" would be a selling point for a TV character. Well, okay, an "everyperson" being caught up in extraordinary events/situations is a well-established trope in story-telling, but they are interesting because of how they step up and take on the extraordinary circumstances, proving themselves to be actually "above normal" in the process. And they did do that with Gwen to a certain extent, like for instance her fighting off the retcon in Everything Changes. But then they keep on harping on her normal-ness long after it's outlived its usefulness, to the point it becomes a turn-off, actually. Yes, okay, she's normal. What else can she do? And that's where the writing and the acting both fail, I think. The writing doesn't give Gwen an identifiable character trait or skill other than being normal, and Eve Myles isn't GDL, who apparently pulled Ianto out of thin air.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes GDL is extraordinary, standing out in such an underwritten role in series one, I'm convinced that has been the making of the show, the way the writers went with it, especially the comedy potential.

I find it infuriating how RTD and the producers keep trying to sell an idea in their behind the scenes show, even if flogging a dead horse. Martha clearly didn't work, but they go on and on about her as if it were all planned, yet clearly she has been shoehorned in, really badly so on this weeks DW, where they even admitted there not being a role for her within the plot..

They do the same with Gwen, go on and on as if the viewers will eventually believe them. I find it pompous and annoying.

YES THAT.

[x-pixel-x.livejournal.com]

And I think you've stumbled upon why I have little to no respect for Gwen at all. She doesn't DO anything, she doesn't seem to have much competence in any particular area, she just seems to float around stirring up trouble. I have no good reason to have any respect for her. Now I know that what I look for is not what everyone else looks for, so I'm not bashing really, I'm just realizing that from my own frame of reference THAT IS IT. *sits back* Wow. Talk about your lightbulb moment.