Manpain: I can haz it?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Someone on my personal flist this morning linked to a really good essay about manpain by thingswithwings. She broke down manpain as being denoted by certain qualities:

1) Imma gonna let you all finish, but my pain is he WORST PAIN OF ALL TIME, yo.
2) The Jesus Complex -- The weight of saving the world rests on my shoulders alone!
3) Woman in the Fridge alert!--She has been sacrificed to nobly give me a storyline

That's a super brief and flippant encapsulation--the entire article is well worth reading (and Dee's death is well covered in it, though surprisingly no mention of Ellen Tigh's fridging)--but it got me to thinking...

Does Starbuck have manpain?

 

I'd argue that, at first, no. But later... hmm. Well, let's take it point by point:

 

1) She has pain from her past absolutely, but she does not really dwell in it so directly as, say, Adama rolling in white paint. (LOL, Someone should vid that to Adele's Rolling in the Deep. I would be so amused.)  She acts out, but the show doesn't make a huge point of letting her brood all that much about it. 

2) Destiny blows, man. We don't really discover Kara's the one who has to save the world until after she's gone (the Razor prophecy?) so she's certainly not dwelling on it much BEFORE her death. But one could argue that Maelstrom is one big expression of the Jesus Complex coming home to roost. She commits suicide because she believes she has to do it for the greater good or to fullfill this mysterious destiny that she doesn't even know what it is!  But again, it doesn't feel indulgent to me. It's not Kara weeping or moaning about her burdens. Er, until we get to Season 4? When we have to suffer through her confusion and pain and fear because no one has a clue what she is/what she's doing? And we just keep hearing WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!!!

 

3) Zak...Well, Zak was fridged, right? To give Kara (and Lee) their epic pain that they cannot triumph over? I mean technically he's backstory and doesnt' really figure in the show except for the AOC/YCGHA arc but... not too different from the Dead Little Sister trope. Actually Dead Fiance is a pretty common trope anyway. (Hell, not only does Kara have one, but Lee kind of does too if you count Gianne). So I think this one is sort of a yes!

 

It's an interesting question for exploration. In her essay, TWW says "Generally speaking, though, most women don't fit the trope very well – which is to say, when a female character loses a family member, the camera and the show usually don't dwell on her pain in the same way." She uses Buffy and Sarah Connor as examples, and I think Kara is more frequently identified as/associated with masculinity (although that's a gendered argument in itself) than either of those characters are, but it is still true that the show doesn't exactly dwell on Kara's pain the same way. But it's hard to ignore that the later seasons of BSG took the opportunity to dump so much pain/misery onto Kara at every turn that it practically became an exercise in seeing how well Katee could cry in each episode. 

What are your thoughts? Could you argue for or against Kara having manpain? 

 

And here's a somewhat-related question: Could you argue that Kara was fridged? On leeadama_daily today, there's a post about Kara and Lee's relationship, and the idea is raised there that Kara's story is told from Lee's perspective. And I can easily see how that is true in a lot of episodes, most notably of course the finale. But also, what was The Son Also Rises but a tribute to Lee's (and Adama's and Sam's) manpain over Kara's death? I never really could articulate before exactly why I hate that episode, but now...yeah I think this is pretty much it. Kara's death didn't really belong to her somehow. Bill's squabble with Lee over who loved her more...is that not almost exactly the same as him coming into the morgue after Dee's death and making such an elaborate thunder-stealing show of grief? That episode was not about Kara's life, there was barely any Kara in it to be honest. 

 

Hmm... I could go on and on on this topic I have a feeling, but I curb my thoughts here and ask for yours instead! 
 

 

 

Also--this was a bit teal deer, I know. Not even any pretty pictures. So here's one last (slightly NSFW!) one of Katee on the Sexy Evil Genius set with Michelle Trachtenberg...right before their big makeout scene. Lol: 

 

Comments

[imelda72.livejournal.com]

Omg look at Michelle she's all grown up!

Lol i just finished watching the last 3 episodes of buffy season 5; quite a change! Katee also looks adorable. I so want to see this movie.

I can't deal with the Kara + manpain question. Mostly because it requires dealing with the sh*tstorm the show dumped on her and, worse, thinking about just how much her story was indeed owned by Lee. Blah.

[slpspank.livejournal.com]

I think the manpain may have only surfaced in Season 4. And then it felt like it wasn't generated from Kara herself but maybe other characters (or just the writers) were heaping manpain onto her with needless drama. S1 Kara would have said "you guys are idiots" and drank a lot and punched someone. S4 Kara wailed and writhed in the brig. I know our girl had been through a lot but some of those scenes felt painfully out of character. In the end she still did her characteristic "whatever, I'll do what I want" move and found Earth anyway. Twice.

What bugged me about TSAR is not so much the manpain over her death but that it was Lee's that took precedence. I'm not being anti-shipper here; at this point in the story Kara and Lee had ended their affair and gone back to their respective spouses.

Then Kara dies and all of a sudden Lee acts like he is the only one who feels anything (the A definition of manpain-he misses her SO MUCH MORE than anyone else can). It's almost worse than their non-affair, as if he's cheating again with Kara's memory. Dee and Sam are once again relegated to the background. Dee has to watch her husband grieve and angst over another woman again while Sam gets one small scene to grieve his wife.

It's like the whole show forgets that Kara touched so many other lives, that there are many people who cared about her and would miss her. Do we ever get to see Helo grieving for Kara? Or any of the other pilots she would have spent every day working alongside?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to say above that I think a scene with Helo would have been more about Kara in a lot of ways, than the scenes we got with Lee and Sam and even Bill (though his was thank god not a romantic love).

Don't get me wrong--I wanted Lee to be even more distraught by her death, but I would've liked a different framing for the episode I think. It's hard for me to explain, but once she died the show stopped using her like a real character it seems and just made her a tool. :(

[winegums.livejournal.com]

Well, re: Lee being so much more anguished than anyone else by her death - unlike the rest of them, he watched it happen. Her ship blew up literally in front of his eyes, right after he himself encouraged her to get back in the cockpit and fly when she didn't want to. So I guess what we're seeing is Lee's PTSD (inability to function normally etc) combined with guilt, which is how I understood it anyway. Frankly, I thought Bill and Lee's private moments of grief were more effective in being about Kara than the big showdown *sigh*.

And I would have liked to see how Kara's death affected the others too, esp. Helo, though we do get to see a very subdued bunch in the ready room and the deck and one of the deckhands or pilots says that real justice would be Baltar being dead and Starbuck being alive. *sigh*

I do agree with you about the show using Kara as a tool rather than a character after her death, but at least it's understandable when she's still dead - the only way to focus on her is through those she was closest to. The problem was when they brought her back and kept her as The Great Roadsign To Earth. S4 Kara definitely did show signs of the manpain (I hate the whole Demetrius/ WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY! arc), though the death was her own rather than a Dead Fiance.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Oh I know why they did it the way they did. I just...it wasn't enough for me. There was too much other crap going on in the episode, and his grief was so sublimated by propriety that I found the whole thing really unsatisfying. And then when she came back and he didn't grab on to her for all he was worth? I was RETROACTIVELY even more pissed about Romo's speech having no real point/effect and it was supposed to be the lynchpin of TSAR. So yeah, issues with this ep, I haz em.

Her s4/4.5 storyline really truly suffers because the writers didn't have a clear idea of who/what she was. It's so frustrating. They needed to just make that decision early, and if it boxed them in find a way to write out of that box, but they didn't.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

I had never thought about it quite this way before, but, yes, I'd say she had manpain. She just didn't express it quite the same way as the Adamas. She wasn't usually so emotional about it, I guess. But then again, as the series progressed, she became such a dark character, in a way. All that destiny BS and Leoben and NC and Maelstrom and the "death/angel" thing. I really disliked all that and I feel it didn't really fit her. I don't know if it makes sense. *shrugs*

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question. If Kara's the hero of the story (and I always think she is) then does she have heroic manpain? Hee. Maybe. I know what you mean about it not fitting her. I always think of her more like she is in the early seasons with the pain, but also the snark and lightheartedness to balance it out. That's how I like her best.

[frolicndetour.livejournal.com]

Does Starbuck have manpain?

Yes and no. To begin with, there's a sense in which I think another term for manpain could just be, "protanganist pain." Any show that's not a sitcom is going to show characters experiencing emotional turmoil and, well, pain, and obviously the focus will be on the main characters' perspective. And there's nothing problematic about that; it's the fact that those main characters who get that focus are disproportionately male and white that's the issue. So the only problem with manpain is the "man" part, imo.

2) The Jesus Complex -- The weight of saving the world rests on my shoulders alone!

I think BSG avoided this problem for the most part by having about twelve messiahs. There's Kara, but there were also Roslin and Baltar and Athena and Caprica, and to a lesser extent other characters who were given messianic roles to play at different times. That's why I think the show was like one big, crack-addled greek myth. It was never Kara's job alone to save her people, so she didn't have the isolation of a superhero type character.(Also, I don't think alienation is an inherently bad thing to explore? thingswithwings cites Buffy as an example, and I always thought the "I'm a Slayer and no one understands me" was a really effective metaphor for teenage angst and feelings of isolation. Again, for me it's the gendered nature of the exploration that can become a problem.)

3) Woman in the Fridge alert!--She has been sacrificed to nobly give me a storyline

I would actually argue that Kara's death was the opposite of a fridging. Fridging is killing a character off solely to further another character's story-line, rather than to further the killed-off character's redemption arc or journey. (That's why, IMO, it's unlikely for the same character to both have manpain and be fridged, since manpain is all about making that character the focus.) Kara's death was ultimately in service of her own redemption arc/character journey. Whether the writers ultimately did a good job with her arc is more controversial, I know, but when a character is fridged they're not even trying; that character is beside the point. Now, if The Son Also Rises had been the last episode where Kara was mentioned, then that would meet the definition of a fridging, but as it was, it felt perfectly natural to have the people who cared about her experiencing grief over her death. (But yeah, Adama was an ass as usual.)

Contrast that with Dee's death, which I would say was the textbook example of a fridging. I remember Ron even saying that it could have been anyone, they just needed some well-known character to commit suicide, and it seemed logical that it would be the single girl since clearly she had nothing to live for! Cally's death was somewhat better in that at least her death itself was character-driven (hates cylons, loves family (family = cylons) --> *head explodes), but it served as the impetus for making Chief the king of manpain for the rest of the series, so. But I'd say Kara's death served her own story first and foremost.

and the idea is raised there that Kara's story is told from Lee's perspective.

Really?? My sense is that it's always been fairly uncontroversial that Kara was a much more developed character than Lee. Even Jamie Bamber and the writers have commented at various times about how she tended to get more attention and story development. But I can see that Lee's perspective might be easier for viewers to glom onto, since he's more of a regular guy/easier to relate to? Especially with regard to their romantic relationship. But apart from that, I felt Kara's perspective was always equally if not more central.

[nicole-anell.livejournal.com]

I don't have a substantial response to this comment other than "get out of my heeeead!" but this:

I think BSG avoided this problem for the most part by having about twelve messiahs.

made me laugh out loud.

[frolicndetour.livejournal.com]

They were not stingy with the Special Destinies on this show. XD

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Right, well that's the question. If she's the hero of the story (which I think she is), then does she have heroic manpain? I think she does to some extent but it is not necessarily exhibited the way some of the actual male characters exhibit it. I don't think there's anything bad/good about it. (That's not my argument anyway; TWW's definitely arguing against manpain though.) I was just wondering if her story was being told the same way a male hero's story would be told.

Would you argue that Zak was fridged? Hee. I don't know if that counts because he wasn't technically anything more than backstory. So we didn't have an attachment to him, plus he fueled other people's pain as well, arguably, just as much.

I don't think anyone is arguing that Lee is more developed than Kara. It's actually the opposite. He is less developed, thus a framing device for Kara's storyline in many ways. Sort of like the narrator in the Great Gatsby is for Daisy. I think there are several episodes and smaller scenes where canon did try to sort of situate us in Lee's POV w/r/t Kara's narrative: YCGHA, Kobol's Last Gleaming (the punching scene), Scar (the end mostly), The Captain's Hand (especially!), and most definitely He That Believeth, the wall scene in Islanded, and Daybreak with its flashbacks and Lee's "You will not be forgotten." Lee is the one left standing to carry on Kara's story. Some days I like that, some days I don't.

I think after Kara's death, she kind of stopped telling her own story because they didn't know what her story was. Honestly she didn't have much agency. Even her "finding Earth" was sort of down to her remembering a random childhood song then weirdly deciding to turn it into coordinates. And actually the first time she found Earth it wasn't because of anything Kara did, but because of the shiny vehicle she happened to come back in. (Gah, I am reminded that the execution was really so awful, the more I try to discuss it.)

So I don't think Kara was fridged to serve Lee's story like the way Dualla was...but in a way she was fridged to serve the whole fleet's story? She stopped being a person who could affect change really through anything except coincidence. I guess it's that angel-ghost-pigeon conundrum. Sigh.

[frolicndetour.livejournal.com]

Would you argue that Zak was fridged? Hee.

Yeah, like you I'm not sure whether to count characters who were dead at the start of the series. But I guess in a way it's the ultimate fridging since literally the only purpose of his character is to give other characters angst. But it's not something I would ever be outraged about. I'm still sorting out my thoughts on "manpain" and fridging, because I do think it's actually valid storytelling choice to explore the effect of bereavement on the survivors. So I don't think it's inherently offensive to give a character a dead fiance (or dead parents, etc), and have them come to terms with that as part of their story. Though I do have a huge issue with the kind of storytelling tropes thingswithwings hilighted in her vid. Or at least, the omnipresence of them. So I'm confused.

I haven't read The Great Gatsby since high school, and I know my English teacher hated Daisy and thought the only point of her was how Not Worth It she was, so I'm probably not the best person to have an opinion on this. ;) But I don't know, in all the scenes you mention except Daybreak, I was completely invested in Kara's perspective and seeing things from her point of view. There is the fact that Lee was left to tell her story, which is nice.

I don't know, I think Kara had agency after her resurrection. I just think that after her death, she'd done all that she could do in terms of physical acts of badassary, and fulfilling her destiny was now more of an emotional journey about learning to trust herself and believe in her own ability to be a force for good in the world, and not a cancer. So while she did get a few BAMF moments (like in The Oath), they were more incidental to her larger arc. But because Kara had plently of physical courage and strength from the beginning, I'm more or less okay with that. Which is not to say that the writers couldn't have done a better job tying it all together in a sensical fashion... I just never got the sense that they stopped caring about Kara as a person (so to speak). Like it was never "we have to find Earth, so who can we kill?" It was "something epic has to happen with Kara, how can we make the plot conform to that?"

I think this song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlmcLPACAMk) would be Kara's season four ballad. XD

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Honestly I'm kind of neutral with the manpain thing. I tend to agree it's more of a "heropain" whether the hero is a man or a woman, they just happen to be men more I guess? Eh I dunno. The only time it gets ridiculous is when...it gets ridiculous (see again: Adama, white paint) ;)

Well regardless of whether you like Daisy or not, I'm just talking about the format. Often a scene would start or end with Lee contemplating/observing Kara, which is why it sometimes seem to be framed in his POV to me. Not always, but...often and more so as we got later in the show.

I don't think she necessarily had to do physical feats of bravery, but it was sad to me that her big destiny hinged on circumstance and coincidence really. Even when it was ostensibly about/fueled by her (only Kara knew the song) it wasn't really connected and fleshed out in a satisfying way (why the hell did Kara/Kara's NON-CYLON dad know a cylon song by a musical artist from 2 bazillion years in the future, etc. etc.) I mean really couldn't anyone have remembered the song if we weren't going to actually tie the song to cylonosity in any logical way?
I wish they would have done a better, tighter job with figuring out what Kara's epicness should have entailed.

[winegums.livejournal.com]

I agree with almost everything frolicndetour said, but frankly I never understood the necessity to kill her off in the first place, even though Maelstrom itself is an episode I like. It's like, she can't have epicness without being dead first?

As for S4, I'd be more surprised if she hadn't been freaked out after knowing she's dead. But like you, I just wish they'd found a better way to frame her story instead of going "oh, she had to die after fixing her mommy issues, and then after she's dead fix her daddy issues before she remembered the Bob Dylan song that takes them all to Earth.". I mean, I love Daybreak, Part 2 while I'm watching it because as an emotional experience and an ending to BSG it's nearly perfect for me, but after I turn it off and spend a few days thinking about it, there is major RAGE at the rest of the season for being so lame with Kara.

As for the pov of Kara being seen through Lee's eyes, I wonder if maybe we feel that way because Lee isn't often presented through Kara's eyes in Lee-centric episodes? I mean, there are scenes like the Daybreak Part 2 flashback where she's prepping to meet him for the first time (and also when Zak smashed that glass) , Unfinished Business (esp. the beginning), Sacrifice (esp. the end) etc that IMO have Lee seen through Kara's eyes, so maybe it's the imbalance that makes you notice the Lee's-PoV thing?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Right, there was no need to kill her because nothing she did when she came back hinged upon her being dead. And they never bothered to explain where she went for those two months/six hours. All she needed was a new viper and a memory of a song apparently.

For me, Execution was just shoddy all thru S4/4.5. Bad storytelling choices all the way through. No forward momentum, info dumps when they finally had to get things rolling, inexplicable happenings (like why her dad would know a cylon song), I could go on and on.

Hmm, I don't think the Daybreak 2 flashbacks really seem like Lee seen through Kara's eyes so much, not in the same way anyway? Or maybe it is just that they were so infrequent/inconsistent that I can't see any pattern there. I do think that by literally placing Kara's story in Lee's hands at the end, for him to be the one that says out loud "you will not be forgotten" they give him some ownership in a way of Kara's story. It certainly sort of sets him up as a narrator of her story going forward even if it wasn't there previously. (Also I thought it was really the lamest of the lame. The biggest most obvious understatement. OF COURSE, Lee won't forget Kara. How could he possibly? She was the love of his life. So it was kind of like "Uh, thanks for that concession, show. Yeah, now I feel better knowing he won't forget her, because I was really worried that would happen." Meh. Not enough for me.

[winegums.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that what would happen is that a scene started out with Kara's POV and then shift and ended with what seemed like Lee's - that's how it ends in Daybreak 2. I mean, look at their final scene, which starts out very clearly in Kara's head with her saying goodbye to Adama/Roslin and holding back tears - it stays with her all through what she's telling Lee (I got the sense that when he turned to talk, she was watching him) until the final moment when the camera shifts away from her for good and then he turns around and sees she's gone. But chances are we'd register it as Lee-POV since the ending is the last thing and all....I'm just guessing here.

As for the "you won't be forgotten" bit, I always thought that was a direct callback to their very first meeting and not actually what it might seem if we didn't have the flashback just before that. It's true, OBVIOUSLY he's never going to forget her, but with those two so much goes unsaid that I don't mind the obvious actually being stated once in a while.

And as for him owning her story and being the one to carry it forward in his memory, honestly I can't see a way past that with a dead protagonist. It's like the Buffy S6 opener, which wasn't about Buffy herself but about how the people she left behind were dealing with her death. Same goes for Bill and Laura, too.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

The pigeon scene and the implication that Kara was a metaphor for the bird or freedom or whatever also was framing her from Lee's POV and that plus the final words really is what lends the idea he is telling her story, I think.

[winegums.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone made sense of the pigeon. Seriously, WTF was that about, since not even Ron Moore's wife seemed to know? I really hate some of these random shits and giggles ideas the writers got.

I'm going with the interpretation that it was the last thing he remembered about the first time he met her and that's all the relevance it ever had, but seriously, WTF was up with that scene? I refuse to believe Kara's a bird that's too stupid to get out when a broom is chasing it!

[winegums.livejournal.com]

I should add - S4 is lame with Kara all through its first half. I had no issues with the foundmycorpse! and mutiny storylines, or even with the acceptance of her own death that she was moving towards in Islanded With A Stream Of Stars onwards, but early S4, with confused and angry Kara, did in some ways feel like a rehash of how she was immediately after New Caprica - cranked up a lot worse.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

There just was no direction, not enough choices being made behind the scenes, you could tell. In some scenes Kara was almost serene, in others she was a raving nutcase, in yet others she was hazy and confused. There was no real thruline for her story. Same with rest of show. In a lot of ways 4.0 was just a huge exercise in time killing/wasting.

[winegums.livejournal.com]

On one hand, I get why she was that way - being mindfrakked with by a Cylon who's taken away even your table knives and is waiting for Stockholm Syndrome to set in, and realizing that you've been dead for two months, are things that would confuse and shock anyone. It makes sense that she would be angry and confused and occasionally lash out.

But, like you said, it did feel like they didn't know quite what to do with her. Which could have been avoided if Ron Moore et al had thought a bit before killing her off. (which is just, again, RAGE-inducing to think about)