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08:59 am
7/23/05

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Alice
[info]chelseagirl47
Up way too early. She who shares a bed with an insomniac, shares some of the insomnia. At least he's snoring away now, since he's got to be in at 3.

Random Sci-Fi Friday thoughts:

SG1 is so much about the pretty for me. Still loving Cameron, loving Vala, and completely won over to the Daniel & Vala dynamic. Plot, extremely obvious, no? Since I was home last night, I watched it first, but I'm thinking in some ways it'll make more sense on Fridays when I'm out to dinner or something and catch it after BSG; this is the fluffy dessert to the serious stuff going down over on BSG.

BSG: Billy and Dualla -- it's just so lovely to see two people with a genuine non-screwed up romance going on. I'd assumed their being on opposite sides of the civilian/military rule crisis at the end of last season was going to spell trouble; but though it was resolved fairly quickly, a satisfying resolution none the less. IOW, a world of adorable, those two.

The Chief just went from being a character I liked but didn't focus on much, to someone who can break my heart. Wow. Cally rocked, as well.

Like everyone says: Kara's a painter -- cool. Unexpected, but not out of character. Actually, everything we saw in that flat made so much sense for the character. I love that she's completely detached from her possessions; I wonder, though -- she's revealed here as a creative person, yet she says she fights because she doesn't know how to do anything else. I wonder if that's consistent; if there's some kind of distancing she has with parts of herself? Just impressions; I couldn't argue this either way without a lot more thought. Loved her rescuing her favorite paint-spattered oversized leather jacket -- my guess is that's the one possession she might actually have missed.

The Lee-Adama-Tigh dynamic is getting really fascinating -- can't wait to see what happens when Adama re-enters this triangle.

I'm sure this is neither original nor earth-shattering, but I so love the female characters in this show. The pilots and soldiers are, you know, grunts, just like the guys, and I love them for that. It just makes perfect sense. I mean, this isn't a feminist utopia -- Roslin's only president (in place of a male) because she was in the traditional girl-role of Sec'y of Education and ended up last one standing; upper echelons of military command are mostly male from what we've seen, and there are still women (or she-Cylons) like Ellen Tigh and Six trading on their sexuality. But, this world isn't a utopia of any kind, and I really like the way it's been peopled.

SG-Atlantis continues to feel stale and uninteresting to me; interested to see, from my f-list perusal, that some people are liking it but having problems with Firefly, when I feel quite the opposite. I'm afraid I tend to put that down to people perceiving different things in different shows rather leaping in to defend my favorite at all cost.

Unintentional Cruelty of the Week: Was out to dinner with a friend the other night and we were talking about how good Batman Begins was, when I mentioned how pervy I felt admiring Christian Bale's physique so much when I could remember him being the little kid in Empire of the Sun. She hadn't made the connection. Til then. Oops, sorry. Cute younger men? Please try not to have former careers as child actors. Thank you. (Hey, if I'd've met my husband when he was 10 and I was 18, I wouldn't be sleeping next to that particular insomniac, you know?)

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On July 23rd, 2005 01:58 pm (UTC), [info]wonderlandkat commented:
ug, I completley feel that vis-a-vis the kid who plays Harry Potter. v. attractive, sooo jail bait.

I think it's perfectly kosher as long as they're 18 though. (I mean, with the whole MK + Ashley countdown, it better damn well be.)

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On July 23rd, 2005 02:31 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
I figure it's not the age difference so much as the age when you first meet them -- that first mental picture you get. My husband is 8 years younger, but like I said, if we'd have met when he was ten, I'd never have gotten over that. That's what always squicked me about, er, Padme and Anakin in the newer Star Wars. That and bad acting. ;-)

Well, the paper my parents get has celebrity birthday listings, and leafing idly last week, I saw Daniel Radcliffe just turned 16. So, in two years you're legit.

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On July 23rd, 2005 04:20 pm (UTC), [info]wonderlandkat replied:
yeah, I can see that. Though part of it, for actors, is "do these seem like the same person?" For example I can never remember that Drew Barrymore from that Christmas movie is the same one that we have now.

I think part of it's societal too. Men can lust after much younger women, but for women to do so seems odd.

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On July 23rd, 2005 05:02 pm (UTC), [info]studiesinlight replied:
>"I think part of it's societal too. Men can lust after much younger women, but for women to do so seems odd."

This is true about social perception. And yet, what's even odder, while it's true that it's more accepted for an older man to date (or just want) a younger woman, there's also a sense that an older man might prey on a younger woman, while there doesn't seem to be much parallel sense that an older woman might prey on a younger man. He's perceived to be getting something positive in the way of experience, while the younger woman, if not a victim, must be a gold-digger. Social objections to older women dating younger men seem to be -- that is, outside the area of pure, wholesome disapproval of inappropriate age differences for power imbalances -- based solely in the fear of women daring to be conspicuously not young in public, which is just not allowed.

~shrug~

Just an observation. Personally, I recoil from stories in any medium that quite badly mismatch their characters' ages (immortal fantasy creatures aside) regardless of sex, because of the power differential and the potential for exploitation. It's ugly to me. I won't even open stories, for example, that purport to match Giles with one of his students, even after they're grown up, even in the distant future, because I just can't get over that difference as a viewer/reader, and I cannot imagine the characters being over it -- and I don't want to, because there's the parental relationship aspect there, too. But of course a gap of years collapses over time, meaning much when one's very young, and less and less as time passes.

Still, when I once realized that I found a character on a show attractive, almost the first thing I said was, "Just how old is this actor?" -- so I would know whether it was okay to perceive him that way, even in passing.
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On July 25th, 2005 06:37 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
Having had a very bad relationship with a man 12 years older than me (I was 28, he was 40), I can tell you how devastatingly bad the power dynamic can be. I think because societally the man is given more power, in some ways powerwise, older woman/younger man works really well -- M. is very much an "alpha male" personality, but it balances out 'cause I'm older and wiser. ;-)

A lot of it, honestly, is down to, uh, breeding. I think. Traditionally men tend to feel the need to establish themselves economically; a younger woman provides more breeding opportunities than a woman his own age. The standards of what's attractive survive even after that's less of an issue. I've read that in the 18th-19th centuries the aristcracy and well off middle class people had larger male/female age differences and larger families (because they could afford them); working class people often deferred marriage 'til later for both men and women, which helped limit the size of their families. Of course that didn't always work and there were plenty of working class shotgun weddings, but . . .

Buffy/Giles was always my "don't go there" place -- that being the most common of those pairings, though all would apply equally.
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On July 25th, 2005 06:18 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
Although I was squicked in Pirates of the Caribbean when Norrington, having knowing Elizabeth as a little girl, wanted to marry her later. Even though that is *totally* historically accurate, it bothers me equally in either direction.
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On July 26th, 2005 12:28 am (UTC), [info]wonderlandkat replied:
YES! when I realized that I was fairly creeped. I also wondered how old he's supposed to be.
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On July 27th, 2005 02:00 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
Thirties, I should think. That kind of age difference really wasn't unusual in those days -- when the man needed to establish himself and still marry a woman with lots of time to breed -- but the fact that he knew her when she was pre-adolescent . . . yucky.
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On July 23rd, 2005 05:10 pm (UTC), [info]studiesinlight replied:
>"That and bad acting. ;-)"

Age difference proportionately huge to their actual ages; acquaintance when one is clearly an adult and the other clearly a child, with attendant power differential; sick enabling codependence over mass murder; hidden, forbidden, and therefore implicitly shameful, relationship; terrible, terrible adolescent dialogue . . . did I mention the codependency and mass murder? . . . all that, and bad acting, too!

Still more useful as Nick's nephew, and that's not saying much. ;-)

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On July 27th, 2005 02:03 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
Well, yeah, all that other stuff, but that's moral disapproval rather than just instinctive *yuck*. ;-)

Hayden Christensen played Nick's nephew? Wow . . . It's been ages since I've watched any FK, I fear. I saw Shattered Glass, and alas, he seemed to be playing the same part, only wearing a tie and without a lightsaber.

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On July 27th, 2005 03:03 pm (UTC), [info]studiesinlight replied:
Hayden Christensen as Andre
Yup, Hayden Christensen played Fleur's son Andre in "Fallen Idol." (Not that anyone ever rewatches "Fallen Idol." I know this only because I'm still so fond of the idea of Fleur. Every hero should have a sister.)

I kept thinking we -- that is, FKdom -- should have been able to leverage something off young Mr. Christensen's success, if just a line in an interview somewhere. Of course, I thought the same thing about Carrie Ann Moss from the Matrix movies who was in "Feeding the Beast." :-)

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On July 23rd, 2005 02:32 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
Ergo, with actors, the age when you first see them. Duh.
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On July 23rd, 2005 05:51 pm (UTC), [info]tv_elf commented:
Hey, if I'd've met my husband when he was 10 and I was 18, I wouldn't be sleeping next to that particular insomniac, you know?

Snerk, all I can see now is the scene from Dr. Who with little Mickey hugging Rose
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On July 27th, 2005 02:04 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
Of course Mickey hasn't really progressed much emotionally since then, has he? ;-) Poor kid.

The weird thing is when M. and I saw the first ep, he perceived Mickey as being younger than Rose -- joked she was a cradle-robber. Of course he's not chronologically younger, but in other ways he kind of is.

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On July 23rd, 2005 09:58 pm (UTC), [info]milestogo13 commented:
I'm so glad to see other people making similar observations to my own about BSG. It is just such a great show, far exceeding every expectation I had going into it. I know it's kind of the party line being fed out from the SciFi Channel, but it really is one of, if not the, best human drama on TV right now.

And poor Chief Tyrol. Poor, poor Chief...I haven't come as close to sniffly about a TV show as I did last night in a long time, when he was telling his poor grunt that the Galactica was here, and he was going home. Maybe it's the military brat in me, having grown up around people who went off and joined the military and actually had to deal with some of them not coming home. I dunno. My dad and I both agree that they have to have a military consultant on the show somewhere, probably an enlisted man, because their protocols and behaviors and jargon and slang are all spot on.

Chief's turning out to be a damn fine actor though, isn't he?

And Starbuck's apartment was great, the character depth on the show is so good it hurts.

In summation, squee.
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On July 27th, 2005 02:07 pm (UTC), [info]chelseagirl47 replied:
I've been so pleasantly surprised by this show -- originally I started out taping it for M., but he's not engaged all that much with it -- he wanted more space battles and fun. I, on the other hand, am totally blown away that the writing and acting is so excellent.

The smartest and most thoughtful commentary on BSG on my f-list comes from [info]queenofthorns. She's rather squeeful about Lee Adama, but if you want to read some sophisticated and in-depth thoughts on the show, check out her journal sometime.

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