Race, Gender, and Character: Why We Watch

I don't know.  I don't even know if Abbie is the more interesting of the Mills sisters.  She's a good character, but the actress wanted to leave.  How can you blame the show when their hand was forced?  How do you know that they won't replace her with another character that's just as good?  Or even better?

I don't know. I think that people watch shows for a lot of reasons and if a show is that easy to give up for something like this, maybe they've been on their way out for a long time anyway.

When it comes to Sleepy Hollow, I think the show needs to end. Yes, the actress wanted off the show. Yes, there is still Jenny, who I have always liked more as a character anyway. However, the show was derailed in season 2 and it never recovered. The style of the show changed. The mission of the show changed. The feel of the show changed. I stuck with it through all of that, but the fact is that there were two central characters who were both woven into the basic concept of the show. Without either one of them, the show cannot be what it was supposed to be. Now they're proposing this Charmed scenario where the magic can pass on to some long lost relative, but it doesn't work. The season didn't work. The last episode didn't work. Killing Joe didn't work. I think the show needs to end and Nicole Beharie leaving isn't the reason for that, but it's kinda the straw that broke the camel's back.

I have always liked how Sleepy Hollow handled it's characters. It wasn't about being diverse or empowering women or black people. They treated their characters as characters, and that did more good than all of the agenda-driven diversity on TV.

Wally West... I'm more upset about them changing him in the comics than on TV. They really didn't have a choice about his race on the TV show, since Joe and Iris are black (though they could have played Iris as bi-racial, I supposed). That said, if diversity and representation are so important, I have to wonder why it's the redheads who are always tossed in this scenario. Wally West, Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang... it seem like only the villains and the bullies get to remain redheads. I'm not super serious mad about that, but if the name of the game is diversity, it seems odd. A lot of redheads have been bullied because of their hair (what a stupid sentence to write, but it is true). Yet, when was the last time you saw Jimmy Olsen with red hair in live action? Never.

I don't believe in race swapping, sexuality swapping or gender swapping for the sake of diversity. I think it says more to introduce great new characters than to simply throw "groups" a bone by swapping out an established character with a long history. It's one thing to cast someone because they're the best person to play this role on screen (and again, I like the casting of Joe and Iris on The Flash, so it's fine) but to just decide to make someone a new race out of nowhere is silly.

In one of my book, I use the term "my pet gay" to refer to the untouchable, infallible gay characters who are treated as though they have a mental disability (everyone is super nice and all smiles) because they are gay. The idea that a character should be above being human because they need to represent a certain group in a positive light is stupid.

Basically, I'm against diversity for the sake of preaching. I want good characters who are good characters, and I don't care what color their skin is or who they kiss. I have no white guilt that I need to resolve, so if they want to impress me, it better be in the quality of the work, not the diversity on the screen.

And yes, I hated Charlie! She wasn't a fan-insertion character, she was indulgent fanfic who brought down the other characters around her so that she could appear to be a stronger character than she was. There are so many better female characters on the show, and I'm glad they killed her off. I'm GLAD! Do you hear me?!

Game of Thrones is a great example.  Crowd favorites die in that series all the time, but I guess there hasn't been too many times where "if you kill X, I'll stop watching."  There were clearly some big deaths, but for the most part, many of the more beloved characters have been safe (with one, recent and big exception).

What's odd to me is the idea that you trusted the show to create your favorite character, but you stop watching when that character goes away.  Wouldn't you trust that they could create a character just as good as the first one?  Or, again, even better?  For example, people were sad when Charlie died on LOST.  But Charlie leaving allowed more screen time for Desmond, who seemed even more beloved.  Or allowed for the entrance of the freighter science crew who were pretty cool.

Well, I'm curious how she's "fundamental to the show."  This whole time were you watching a bad show with a great character or a bad show that stumbled upon a great character?  In your eyes, did the new people "ruin" Abbie before she died?  Or is her character so great that anyone could write for her, but now that she's gone, there's no way they can write anything as well as Abbie?

I'm honestly curious because that's just not the reason why I watch certain things.  Great characters are an attraction, but they've never been *the* attraction.  Of all the characters on Sliders, I think we can agree that Rembrandt started off as the worst (he developed more as the show went on, but he was the least developed at the beginning).  He's the only one who made it.  None of the later characters were any better than Rembrandt was at his worst.

So the top 3 characters were all killed off, all in a somewhat-insulting way, and they were all replaced by worse (and in some cases, much worse) characters.  And yet I watched all 88 episodes.  Because, at the end of the day, I liked the premise of the show.  And I liked the premise of the show before I'd met any of the characters.

Well, that sorta goes along with the whole premise of this.  Is a show where the two primary characters have to be invincible any better?  I mean the answer to that can be "yes" - it's happened tons of times.  I just think the premise of the show, as it was sold to me before I watched it, was more about Crane.  He's an out-of-time guy in modern US, fighting monsters that have connections to him.  Abbie is a better character, and the premise grew into the whole "two witnesses" thing.  But I wasn't offended at the idea that there could be multiple witnesses (otherwise, wouldn't the entire universe be banking on Ichabod and Abbie never dying?), and I think the idea of a secret US department of the supernatural could end up being cool.

And if Jenny ends up being the second witness, she's a great character too.  They've added the Mills father and the FBI agents if they want, or they can make it just Ichabod and Jenny with new supporting characters if they want.  They can do a soft reboot.

If it gets renewed at all.  I'm not saying I love the show.  But I didn't tune in just for Abbie or even just Abbie/Ichabod.  They were  a cool pair, but I think there's a show beyond them.

Hah, I hope not.

I mean Sleepy Hollow is a great example, but I'm genuinely curious about watching a show for one specific character.  Are there any shows where if X is killed, you'd stop watching?  I literally can't think of an example.  Even if Barry was killed and they replaced him with Wally, I'd give the show a chance (and Barry is awesome and Wally has zero characterization/charisma so far).

@Slider_Quinn21
Yeah, Charlie was killed off in Season 3, 
Its funny how nobody seems to talk about or care to remember 'LOST" these days. The show was a big fan favorite the first 3-4 seasons then it became...lost?  I for one only want to remember the show as it was (season 1-4) and forget the final two seasons and the two and a half hours   finale.  I and many others will never get those 2.5 hours back....

As for Game of Thrones, I liked Stannis, he was somewhat of  an asshole but he was the last of the "Five Kings" still alive.... going to miss him and his ...

I was glad the Sand Snakes were not killed off and since I do not get HBO and will have to wait many months before watching Season 6, that being said I would think that the writers have closed the chapter on them.  The fight between them and Jaime and Bron was thrilling to watch (even though it does not take place in the book!)

I loved LOST.  Still do.  I haven't gone back and watched much of it since it ended, but I thought the finale was great.  I actually saw an article today about the writers admitting that they made stuff up as they went along.  And you know what, that's fine.  Because to me, the show *started* as a collection of awesome mysteries, but by the end of the show, I didn't care about the Monster or the Island or the polar bear or any of that stuff.  I genuinely cared about Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Jin and Sun and all the other characters, and I loved the flashbacks and flashforwards and flash-sideways.

LOST came down to one fact - if you cared about the characters more than the mysteries, you liked it.  If you cared about the mysteries more than the characters, you were disappointed. 

It isn't the best show I've ever seen, but I still think it's my favorite.  No show ever got me as excited to watch, and nothing has come close since.

Well, I don't mean "unanswered questions" as much as "poorly answered questions" - if you waited six years to find out that the Island was special because of some sort of mystical light/water that must be protected....that's probably a waste of time.

However, I was so invested in the characters at that point that it didn't matter to me anymore.  There could've been an army of clowns on stationary bikes in that cave, and I wouldn't have thought any less of it.

One of my favourite comic book serieses is WITCHBLADE. It's also one of the worst comics ever made -- or it was until the publisher finally hired an actual writer to script it. WITCHBLADE came out during the comic book bad girl craze, featuring a homicide detective, Sara Pezzini, who finds a magical gauntlet called the Witchblade which responds to her thoughts, forms organic armour, fires blades and flames, can telepathically link to others and form various constructs (weapons, shields, climbing apparatus). It was mostly a fetish comic written for an audience who liked to see half-naked women and tormented, long-haired men whining about shallow emotional problems in juvenile prose.

I'd dismissed WITCHBLADE as empty fetish material until Ron Marz, one of my favourite writers, started scripting the series, at which point I went back and re-read all the (awful) material before his debut. In the pre-Marz issues, the comic attempted to create some buzz by allowing readers to vote in a death pool where they could vote for characters to be safe or to potentially be killed off until only one unlucky character would be left in the pool. There was no storytelling function served by teasing a death and letting the audience vote on it, nor was it originated from the stories themselves -- it was simply to create empty hype. What it did, instead, was communicate how little the people writing this comic cared about their stories or characters in any way.

I agree. Now that the whole story is out, it's clear the ARROW writing staff decided to kill SOMEONE and then chose their victim afterwards. It results in a story that feels artificial and unnatural because the writers have decided someone will die before knowing if they've set up a story that actually justifies or requires a death. They also engineered a situation where it was impossible for that death to come naturally from the story because they didn't settle on who would die until as late in the season as possible.

The weird thing is that I don't think they were far from getting it right -- if they had decided from the first episode that Laurel was to die, they could have built up an entire run of episodes where the conflict between Laurel's legal exploits and her vigilante exploits is building to terrible consequences and those consequences turn out to be her death. Instead, all that stuff was abruptly thrown into one episode because it was only with this one specific episode that the writers had finally made a choice.

I disliked the Laurel character intensely in Season 1 but came to appreciate her reworking in Seasons 2 - 4. I don't object to the death or even the circumstances of her death -- I just disliked how, because of the improvised, open-ended approach, there was nothing to make sure that Laurel's story and Laurel's death dovetailed until the very episode in which it happened. It's kind of artless. On some level, I think the writers were operating from the view that death is often random; there aren't always clues, there isn't always build-up, so it'd be fine. But it makes the story feel like it's being engineered from the outside in and without much thought or care, specifically due to how the random nature of the writing is reflected in the random feel of the storytelling.

I don't hate it as much as you did, but I certainly can't defend it.

It's like they wanted to play it as random, but they also didn't. Within the episode, they have Laurel holding her mask and saying "One last time..." which made it quite clear who was going to die.

They had more natural options for the death, bit they backed away because they didn't want to upset fangirls too much, and for some reason they viewed Laurel/Black Canary fans as a vocal minority.

I am all for sudden, tragic death. But it can't feel cheap when it happens.

See, I had the opposite reaction to that...I thought killing Brody was way overdue.  I thought his storyline had run its course, and it was time for him to go.  When someone is on the run like that, an international fugitive, they can't just let him get back to a normal life.  The show was bending over backward to keep him on the show, and it was going to suffer.