[ahahaha, I never thought of applying troll shipping quadrants to White Collar, but YES]
I've found that troll shipping quadrants are often a distressingly useful vocabulary for talking about nontraditional intimate relationships. And I'm pretty much always a fan of nontraditional intimate relationships and expanded vocabulary for talking about them.
[HOW CAN NEAL HATE HIM SO MUCH AND NOT WANT TO BE WITH HIM?!]
I lol'd. (And Neal just continues to think that avoiding the people you hate with a passion is a perfectly understandable response, thank you. Neal would probably not do well on Alternia.)
[Because ... yes! One of the things that drew me to the show in the first place is its moral complexity, that Neal is a character whose greatest strengths are also his greatest weaknesses, who means well, but shoots himself in the foot half the time. He's compassionate, brave, generous, smart ... and has this huge fucking blind spot about how his own actions affect other people, this enormous gap between his fucked-up self-justifications and actual reality. It's a lovely, complicated thing ...
... and then the show goes and buys into Neal's own rationalizations and AARGH.]
YES. Oh my god, yes. I feel like the writers consistently manage to write in more moral complexity than they either know what to do with or want to deal with, and it's so terribly frustrating because just a little shift in how it's handled would make it such a (more) fascinating show. (And open up so many avenues for character exploration that aren't the "tension arises because for some reason Neal and Peter are unable to trust each other, despite the trust they've built over the course of (season count - 1) seasons, and thus end up working against each other" subplot which they really enjoy bringing back, again and again. ...and which also leads into more lovely instances of "Nothing Neal does has meaningful consequences!", even when he's doing things like stealing surveillance forms because it's not like if the FBI has surveillance on someone, there might be a reason for that. No, it's cool, Neal, setting a trap for whoever's after Sam without talking to Peter about it because you're upset with Peter is much more important than whatever the FBI is doing, it's cool. </froths at mouth>)
And again, it's not so much the character actions that are the problem – this show would not be as interesting if the characters were perfect and flawless and never did anything wrong. The fact that they screw up and they're not perfect and they try for goodness without really knowing how to get there or being fully cognizant of the ways in which they fall short is amazing. The problem is that we're told via all the various framing devices that their flaws are not meaningful flaws, and shown repeatedly (Ruiz, Kramer, Calloway, Pratt) that the people who call them on this stuff are at best too hasty in their judgments and not as smart as Our Heroes and at worst completely evil. (Well, I mean, I guess we got Sara, but Sara seemed to go from "You stole something, and I'm going to follow you until I get it back" in S2 to "Oh, well, Neal has an unimaginable fortune in ill-gotten gains, so I guess I should probably distance myself from that, but what'cha gonna do? Neal will be Neal" in S3, which also made me really angry at the writers in S3. Then again, a lot of things made me really angry at the writers in S3.)
[In fairness, they do it with Peter too, at times. Peter has different blind spots, but he totally has them, and there are times when you kinda want to shake the writers until plot complexity falls out. One of the things I love most about the show is that it's about good people trying to do the right thing in different ways; I just wish that the writers actually got what they were writing about a little more of the time.]
Yes! Quite a lot, yes. ...also, the show really, really needs to stop and think about it's "Stalking is romantic!" issues, because at this point I think Jones is the only one among the male leads or secondary characters who hasn't pulled that. And only Mozzie got called on it, which was pretty rich considering that Peter and Neal were the ones calling him on it. And between the two of them they should probably have won some kind of Stalker Achievement Award.
"Screwed-up people earnestly trying to do good in screwed-up ways" is a major fiction kink of mine, as is "people trying to do good in situations where there are no good options", and variations thereof. Which makes White Collar a really fun sandbox to play in. (...I'm in the process of fighting with a fic whose basic theme is "Neal thinks he knows how to fix Peter's relationships, Elizabeth thinks she knows how to fix Neal's relationships, Peter assumes that the two of them know better than he does, and every single one of them is wrong. Fun times!)
[Have you read Terry Pratchett's Moist von Lipwig books, by the way?]
I have not! I haven't read any Pratchett books in years, for some reason, though I remember appreciating his awareness of the genres he was working within and his ability to play with that awareness in fun and interesting ways. I'll have to add them to my to-read list.
[Still, I adore all the characters, with their well-intentioned but quite often completely misguided attempts to help people (and each other).]
Hah, there's a reason I've stuck with this show through four seasons. And a reason why I have so many fics started for it. (The sweet spot for getting me into a fandom seems to be right where I adore a lot about a work and think it has phenomenal potential, but there's also a bunch of stuff that pisses me off about it. Move too far to either side and there's either nothing to hook me into writing fic for it because it seems too polished and squared away, or there's nothing to make fic rewarding for me because I don't enjoy the media enough. And so much of White Collar is so good that it really just highlights the stuff that isn't.)
(Also, Diana exists in it, and I would probably put up with a lot more just for her sake. Because she is amazing.)
no subject
I've found that troll shipping quadrants are often a distressingly useful vocabulary for talking about nontraditional intimate relationships. And I'm pretty much always a fan of nontraditional intimate relationships and expanded vocabulary for talking about them.
[HOW CAN NEAL HATE HIM SO MUCH AND NOT WANT TO BE WITH HIM?!]
I lol'd. (And Neal just continues to think that avoiding the people you hate with a passion is a perfectly understandable response, thank you. Neal would probably not do well on Alternia.)
[Because ... yes! One of the things that drew me to the show in the first place is its moral complexity, that Neal is a character whose greatest strengths are also his greatest weaknesses, who means well, but shoots himself in the foot half the time. He's compassionate, brave, generous, smart ... and has this huge fucking blind spot about how his own actions affect other people, this enormous gap between his fucked-up self-justifications and actual reality. It's a lovely, complicated thing ...
... and then the show goes and buys into Neal's own rationalizations and AARGH.]
YES. Oh my god, yes. I feel like the writers consistently manage to write in more moral complexity than they either know what to do with or want to deal with, and it's so terribly frustrating because just a little shift in how it's handled would make it such a (more) fascinating show. (And open up so many avenues for character exploration that aren't the "tension arises because for some reason Neal and Peter are unable to trust each other, despite the trust they've built over the course of (season count - 1) seasons, and thus end up working against each other" subplot which they really enjoy bringing back, again and again. ...and which also leads into more lovely instances of "Nothing Neal does has meaningful consequences!", even when he's doing things like stealing surveillance forms because it's not like if the FBI has surveillance on someone, there might be a reason for that. No, it's cool, Neal, setting a trap for whoever's after Sam without talking to Peter about it because you're upset with Peter is much more important than whatever the FBI is doing, it's cool. </froths at mouth>)
And again, it's not so much the character actions that are the problem – this show would not be as interesting if the characters were perfect and flawless and never did anything wrong. The fact that they screw up and they're not perfect and they try for goodness without really knowing how to get there or being fully cognizant of the ways in which they fall short is amazing. The problem is that we're told via all the various framing devices that their flaws are not meaningful flaws, and shown repeatedly (Ruiz, Kramer, Calloway, Pratt) that the people who call them on this stuff are at best too hasty in their judgments and not as smart as Our Heroes and at worst completely evil. (Well, I mean, I guess we got Sara, but Sara seemed to go from "You stole something, and I'm going to follow you until I get it back" in S2 to "Oh, well, Neal has an unimaginable fortune in ill-gotten gains, so I guess I should probably distance myself from that, but what'cha gonna do? Neal will be Neal" in S3, which also made me really angry at the writers in S3. Then again, a lot of things made me really angry at the writers in S3.)
[In fairness, they do it with Peter too, at times. Peter has different blind spots, but he totally has them, and there are times when you kinda want to shake the writers until plot complexity falls out. One of the things I love most about the show is that it's about good people trying to do the right thing in different ways; I just wish that the writers actually got what they were writing about a little more of the time.]
Yes! Quite a lot, yes. ...also, the show really, really needs to stop and think about it's "Stalking is romantic!" issues, because at this point I think Jones is the only one among the male leads or secondary characters who hasn't pulled that. And only Mozzie got called on it, which was pretty rich considering that Peter and Neal were the ones calling him on it. And between the two of them they should probably have won some kind of Stalker Achievement Award.
"Screwed-up people earnestly trying to do good in screwed-up ways" is a major fiction kink of mine, as is "people trying to do good in situations where there are no good options", and variations thereof. Which makes White Collar a really fun sandbox to play in. (...I'm in the process of fighting with a fic whose basic theme is "Neal thinks he knows how to fix Peter's relationships, Elizabeth thinks she knows how to fix Neal's relationships, Peter assumes that the two of them know better than he does, and every single one of them is wrong. Fun times!)
[Have you read Terry Pratchett's Moist von Lipwig books, by the way?]
I have not! I haven't read any Pratchett books in years, for some reason, though I remember appreciating his awareness of the genres he was working within and his ability to play with that awareness in fun and interesting ways. I'll have to add them to my to-read list.
[Still, I adore all the characters, with their well-intentioned but quite often completely misguided attempts to help people (and each other).]
Hah, there's a reason I've stuck with this show through four seasons. And a reason why I have so many fics started for it. (The sweet spot for getting me into a fandom seems to be right where I adore a lot about a work and think it has phenomenal potential, but there's also a bunch of stuff that pisses me off about it. Move too far to either side and there's either nothing to hook me into writing fic for it because it seems too polished and squared away, or there's nothing to make fic rewarding for me because I don't enjoy the media enough. And so much of White Collar is so good that it really just highlights the stuff that isn't.)
(Also, Diana exists in it, and I would probably put up with a lot more just for her sake. Because she is amazing.)