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I'm now nearly at the end of dS season one, and Fraser is still cute and Diefenbaker is still amazing and Ray is still Ray (and the Riv's cigarette lighter is totally a very young baby TARDIS) -- but.
The thing is, if there's one thing that's a recurring theme in this show's universe, it's that you've got to treat everybody like people. White, black, hispanic, Chinese, young kids and old ladies, mentally ill street people, dogs, cars, Mafia dons, rich, poor, in-between, criminals, cops - you have to always treat them as *people* first, and then everything will work out right.
...and then there's women.
Women, apparently, are strange alien creatures whose lives revolve entirely around men but whose actions are unpredictable and whose motivations are incomprehensible. Oh, and if you try to treat them like people rather than women you're walking into a trap and it'll lead to nothing but trouble.
Now I could maybe buy this coming from the main characters - Fraser takes his social clues from Vecchio, and Vecchio is a total douche with women, okay, but the *show itself* buys into this. In the same episode where we're expected to learn that crazy raving guy is wiser than you know and has unexpected depths of character, there'll be a woman wandering in who we're just supposed to throw our hands up at, because, hey, *women*.
I think there were maybe three female characters between the ages of seventeen and sixty in the first 19 episodes who I could buy as actual people. And two of them were strongly coded as Mothers rather than Women.
I stopped to write this before the last few eps because I know from fandom that there's a major *thing* coming up that involves a female character, and I have hopes that said story will be set up in such a way that Our Heroes get themselves screwed *because* they're treating her as a Woman and not a person, and all the more egregious stuff in the earlier eps was setting us up to learn that lesson and learn it hard. But I have a feeling my hopes will be dashed upon the rocks of Sexy Danger.
Even so, I want to like this show, I'm still hoping it improves in later seasons. I get the impression that RayK is capable of having actual relationships with women, unlike RayV, and Thatcher supposedly rocks, although I'm not getting my hopes up about her either. And Elaine, admittedly, did improve once she was convinced that Fraser doesn't go for women, though she's still basically just Designated Self-Insert For Girls.
But I've recently seen a fair amount of criticism of the way several more recent fannish shows of this type have dealt with female characters, and they do have their issues (major ones, sometimes!) but they're all *so* much better than dS. Maybe too many of the female characters do just get jerked around to motivate Our Heroes or dilute the gay UST, but they at least get to be people, too. Sometimes they even get to be people *first*, once in a while.
The thing is, if there's one thing that's a recurring theme in this show's universe, it's that you've got to treat everybody like people. White, black, hispanic, Chinese, young kids and old ladies, mentally ill street people, dogs, cars, Mafia dons, rich, poor, in-between, criminals, cops - you have to always treat them as *people* first, and then everything will work out right.
...and then there's women.
Women, apparently, are strange alien creatures whose lives revolve entirely around men but whose actions are unpredictable and whose motivations are incomprehensible. Oh, and if you try to treat them like people rather than women you're walking into a trap and it'll lead to nothing but trouble.
Now I could maybe buy this coming from the main characters - Fraser takes his social clues from Vecchio, and Vecchio is a total douche with women, okay, but the *show itself* buys into this. In the same episode where we're expected to learn that crazy raving guy is wiser than you know and has unexpected depths of character, there'll be a woman wandering in who we're just supposed to throw our hands up at, because, hey, *women*.
I think there were maybe three female characters between the ages of seventeen and sixty in the first 19 episodes who I could buy as actual people. And two of them were strongly coded as Mothers rather than Women.
I stopped to write this before the last few eps because I know from fandom that there's a major *thing* coming up that involves a female character, and I have hopes that said story will be set up in such a way that Our Heroes get themselves screwed *because* they're treating her as a Woman and not a person, and all the more egregious stuff in the earlier eps was setting us up to learn that lesson and learn it hard. But I have a feeling my hopes will be dashed upon the rocks of Sexy Danger.
Even so, I want to like this show, I'm still hoping it improves in later seasons. I get the impression that RayK is capable of having actual relationships with women, unlike RayV, and Thatcher supposedly rocks, although I'm not getting my hopes up about her either. And Elaine, admittedly, did improve once she was convinced that Fraser doesn't go for women, though she's still basically just Designated Self-Insert For Girls.
But I've recently seen a fair amount of criticism of the way several more recent fannish shows of this type have dealt with female characters, and they do have their issues (major ones, sometimes!) but they're all *so* much better than dS. Maybe too many of the female characters do just get jerked around to motivate Our Heroes or dilute the gay UST, but they at least get to be people, too. Sometimes they even get to be people *first*, once in a while.