Current mood:	embarrassed
Entry tags:	babylon 5, fannish, sci-fi

why I love Babylon 5 [SPOILERS]

I still think muppet gender identities are a difficult topic that is taken far too lightly by the mainstream media.

-shadowvalkyrie, who doesn't approve of my shipping Bert/Ernie. Quoted to make me seem less silly in contrast.

SV and I have been talking a bit about some of the meta I'm not writing, most significantly on my feelings about Babylon 5. See, I feel a bit sheepish about it, because I used to be a Harry Potter fan, and all my acquaintances were into Lord of the Rings too, and they were het and bi teenaged girls pretty much without exception and tended to squee over the cute boys and slash "because it's hot/they're pretty" while I was completely confused as to what they saw in the cute boys and slashed, as I shipped in general, based on character "fit" and/or crackfic potential. I didn't "get" fangirls, not like that. And I soon grew to scorn OTPism when I saw how people reacted to their ships being sunk -- it's just a ship, people! Then I met B5.

First episode, I was pretty!shipping -- there was subtext, but I barely needed it. And my hero-worship crush on Ivanova, and the incredible actress who played her, while not quite as ridiculously extreme as the Legolas fangirls' attitudes, quickly got to the point where I was ashamed of it. I'd been squicked by the teenagers who drooled over men old enough to be their fathers, and there I was doing the same thing. It was embarrassing, to say the least.

And B5 taught me OTPism, too. When Ivanova/Winters was killed in S2, I was upset for a good year over the lack of resolution or discussion or actual text on it, though some of it was later over the lack of resolution of anything Talia had been linked to. What I really resented, though, was Marcus Cole, whose love for Ivanova, though apparently unrequited, got a very visible and dramatic storyline around it and apparently led to her sulking around not having a life for twenty years or something. Het shippers get all the breaks, man.

B5 had its problems in sociological areas, too. It had one major character of color in the entire show, and a male majority. And while it had the best portrayal of a bisexual character I've seen and probably the best I've ever heard of outside of queer-targeted entertainment, and did a good job of building a queer-inclusive universe, it never managed better than subtext on the one real relationship it tried to show. Its religious diversity was excellent, and it's good in terms of the quality of the female characters, but that is pretty much it in that area. And that's usually a pretty damn' important area, for me, so that's another reason I feel weird about it.

I still love the show, though. Some of it's the worldbuilding, and some of it's the characters, and an awful lot of it is Ivanova. As weird as it is to admit this, Ivanova changed my life. I was doing a lot of wrestling with gender questions, you know -- I mean, they never totally went away, but when I first saw B5 I was a lot more confused. And then there's Ivanova, seeming completely comfortable and confident, butch in one scene and femme in the next, always the same character, always tough, but not in a little gendered behavior box. Claudia Christian's not the kind of actress who ever seems to hold back or be the slightest bit self-conscious about her roles, either, and I think that attitude communicated itself even before I'd seen her do anything that really influenced and increased my respect for her and her character. It was a first, for me. I was used to the characters who were butch through and through except when convenient to the plot, and to the characters who were strong and feminine and with whom I could never really identify, but Ivanova was a variant I hadn't dealt with much, and it was really cool for me. And so I started to see her as a role model, that way. It made sense: here she was, someone I could identify with (masculine/male-cultured, queer in a metaphoric and literal sense, and an outsider) who had things I wanted (she was comfortable with the feminine side of herself, she had a clear sense of direction, and she had a hot telepathic girlfriend) and so while I recognized that she was screwed up in a lot of ways, I sought to emulate the good bits. And I am today a far happier person in my relationship to gender expression than I was before, and I just wish I had the guts to thank J. Michael Straczynski or Claudia Christian or both for that.

I am become the sort of fan I always hoped I never would become, and I feel guilty for not feeling more guilty about it. But just the same, I wouldn't go back and change it if I could. No way, José.

Sometime later: Babylon 5 and queer representation, long complicated evaluation thereof.

ETA spoiler warning in the subject line, for those who don't get the benefit of the cut text.