"Do you want me to kill you?" "Kind of."

[strange_aeons]

"This show is surprisingly...."
"Leather?"
(excerpted from conversation between lilairen and me)

I had planned, earlier today (technically, yesterday), to assemble my scattered thoughts into a post about the three (taped) hours of Witchblade I had just watched — but then my roommate had to go to bed and we decided to save the last twenty minutes or so for Sunday, the upshot being that I have not, in fact, watched three hours of Witchblade today, taped or untaped. More's the pity.

But I'm impatient and I don't trust my memory, so here are my scattered thoughts anyway.

I don't think I've been this excited about a show since the late, lamented Total Recall 2070, which you have neither heard of nor seen, so don't even bother wracking your brain. And it's not because they're both cop dramas containing spec fictional elements (or vice versa, whatever). The cop drama thing is coincidence.

It's the sex.

It's the creepy D/S on Irons' dining room table, and the net.strippers, and the erotic asphyxia — and, in the first season, the gay bar, the cross-dressing, and Sara giving Jake a hard time about his homophobia, all in the same episode. And the strong impression I'm failing to get of being winked at by the writers. I'm not detecting any more snigger in the tone of the episodes that involve subculture sex than I am in the tone of the ones that involve violence (er, that is to say, all of them) or drugs (rather fewer). There's an episode of Total Recall 2070 involving prostitution and another, one of my favorites, in which Farve develops a crush on a sixteen-year-old runaway-cum-porn actor, and there are a couple of scenes in that one that are played for laughs — but again, no snigger.

I like that. I like what it says about the writers, and I like what it says about what they expect from the audience. There are few things I enjoy more than being unexpectedly assumed to be a reasonable and open-minded human being.

In other news, I am, according to this thing here, Angelus. It must be the wardrobe.

Comments

[kiya]

There are few things I enjoy more than being unexpectedly assumed to be a reasonable and open-minded human being.

I'm giving notice. This is being stolen and placed in the quotes file.