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.