Disparate Fandom Metas
Aug. 20th, 2011 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dagas_isaAuthor makes no guarantees for coherency in expressed opinions.
Season 9 started again, and short of reading T-Lo's blog entries on the episodes, and Tim Gunn, most of the entertainment seems to be coming from the trainwreck factor. The thing that I really like in my reality competition shows isn't what I'm getting from Project Runway anymore.
To break down: I am a grouchy old-school fan and the show has changed and I don't like it.
Part of it is the whole T-Lo (yes I am secret lurker fangirl) thing that Project Runway has moved from designed based challenges (design and outfit to solve a fashion-based problem) to style-based challenges (create an outfit and style it well), but also because I keep getting the feeling that viewers are supposed to watch the show as potential consumers of the outfits rather than as someone who would be in the designer's position. And for varying reasons, for any sort of reality competition at least some of the fun is imagining how designer!Jais or chef!Jais or singer!Jais would play that round (if you know, I had any of the necessary skills) rather than questioning if I would wear, eat, or listen to the end result. Like seriously, Project Runway could give me a show that's half an hour of people talking out their designs and why they chose to do certain things book ended by an introduction and a runway show and I would be chinhanding so hard probably.
It was the third challenge of the season, with the stilt walkers, that clarified this to me. The key words here are stilt walkers, which admittedly I am not and have no clue about. But I would assume that designing garments to be worn by professional stilt-walkers while they are wearing stilts would have...a performative, perhaps costumey, function. And yet, what went down the runway seemed to be judged mostly by how well they matched with current trends and whether an ordinary woman would want to wear them, not by any stilt walker specific criteria. Or you know had a guest judge who could actually talk knowledgeably about how the designs functioned in a given context.
I like Vanille. Nothing against the other characters (I kind of love them all), but she's definitely the FFXIII character that hit for me, and she's the one whom I find most fascinating. Basically, she's not the badass, and I don't doubt that spending a lot of time with her would get annoying, but on the other hand, she's really the one who has the complete (and scary) knowledge of what they're all marked for and how it's going to end, which is not well even in the best scenario. Plus, she more than anyone knows that all the bad things that are going wrong right now are could essentially be her fault for not being able to face her destiny (and the end of the world) the first time around.
And all that smiling and cheerfulness and annoying perkiness, some of it is her natural personality to be sure, but enough of it is just her way of hiding and covering up all the negative things she's really worrying about in order to go forward. At it's core, it's not really any different from the stoic badass facade other characters put on in order to defend themselves, except that I'm guessing Vanille was never a stoic person to begin with. So her trying to use the stoic approach to hide wouldn't work, especially with someone who knows her as well as Fang does.
And well, that person who smiles and exaggerates her best known traits in order to truly hide, fascinates me because there's definitely something there under the character.
Oh and Snow, at least it's easier to explain Snow's appeal to me. One, it's very obvious that he loves Serah and that getting her back regardless of how it happened, even if he wasn't the hero, would be more important than anything. Two, he's at least as excited about having Lightning as a sister as he is about having Serah as a wife. In short, he really does care about this whole family thing. And more and more, I've noticed that "caring" really is something I look for in male characters. So hats off to you Snow.
Season 9 started again, and short of reading T-Lo's blog entries on the episodes, and Tim Gunn, most of the entertainment seems to be coming from the trainwreck factor. The thing that I really like in my reality competition shows isn't what I'm getting from Project Runway anymore.
To break down: I am a grouchy old-school fan and the show has changed and I don't like it.
Part of it is the whole T-Lo (yes I am secret lurker fangirl) thing that Project Runway has moved from designed based challenges (design and outfit to solve a fashion-based problem) to style-based challenges (create an outfit and style it well), but also because I keep getting the feeling that viewers are supposed to watch the show as potential consumers of the outfits rather than as someone who would be in the designer's position. And for varying reasons, for any sort of reality competition at least some of the fun is imagining how designer!Jais or chef!Jais or singer!Jais would play that round (if you know, I had any of the necessary skills) rather than questioning if I would wear, eat, or listen to the end result. Like seriously, Project Runway could give me a show that's half an hour of people talking out their designs and why they chose to do certain things book ended by an introduction and a runway show and I would be chinhanding so hard probably.
It was the third challenge of the season, with the stilt walkers, that clarified this to me. The key words here are stilt walkers, which admittedly I am not and have no clue about. But I would assume that designing garments to be worn by professional stilt-walkers while they are wearing stilts would have...a performative, perhaps costumey, function. And yet, what went down the runway seemed to be judged mostly by how well they matched with current trends and whether an ordinary woman would want to wear them, not by any stilt walker specific criteria. Or you know had a guest judge who could actually talk knowledgeably about how the designs functioned in a given context.
I like Vanille. Nothing against the other characters (I kind of love them all), but she's definitely the FFXIII character that hit for me, and she's the one whom I find most fascinating. Basically, she's not the badass, and I don't doubt that spending a lot of time with her would get annoying, but on the other hand, she's really the one who has the complete (and scary) knowledge of what they're all marked for and how it's going to end, which is not well even in the best scenario. Plus, she more than anyone knows that all the bad things that are going wrong right now are could essentially be her fault for not being able to face her destiny (and the end of the world) the first time around.
And all that smiling and cheerfulness and annoying perkiness, some of it is her natural personality to be sure, but enough of it is just her way of hiding and covering up all the negative things she's really worrying about in order to go forward. At it's core, it's not really any different from the stoic badass facade other characters put on in order to defend themselves, except that I'm guessing Vanille was never a stoic person to begin with. So her trying to use the stoic approach to hide wouldn't work, especially with someone who knows her as well as Fang does.
And well, that person who smiles and exaggerates her best known traits in order to truly hide, fascinates me because there's definitely something there under the character.
Oh and Snow, at least it's easier to explain Snow's appeal to me. One, it's very obvious that he loves Serah and that getting her back regardless of how it happened, even if he wasn't the hero, would be more important than anything. Two, he's at least as excited about having Lightning as a sister as he is about having Serah as a wife. In short, he really does care about this whole family thing. And more and more, I've noticed that "caring" really is something I look for in male characters. So hats off to you Snow.
