(urth) BSG Spoiler vs Wolfe
James Wynn
crushtv at gmail.com
Mon Mar 23 12:26:05 PDT 2009
>Again, I may have forgotten a scene or two.
>Did the Outsider have a page or two of exposition where
>He explained why they were all in this giant rock traveling
>to a planet of vampire-plants while worshiping a
>two-headed nutcase?
In the LS the Outsider is an actual character who goes on quite a bit about
his relationship to the Whorl gods and his intentions. That's what I was
referring to. He's almost as much a character as Aslan in, say, "The Horse
and His Boy" while manipulating the narrative less. He doesn't explain Pas
because he didn't invent Pas. He doesn't explain everything, because no
character ever does. The Increate is not a character in NS, and if he
performs miracles, I'm not aware of it.
>The God of BSG is more like the Increate than the Outsider.
>Even the angels can only guess at what He wants.
But He's much more inclined to perform miracles without much explanation for
why He's doing them...except that He likes cliff-hangers. That's very handy
for lazy serial writers.
>If this seems cartoony then whole areas of religion,
>particularly mysticism, must also seem cartoony.
Not at all. The BSG god is a god as a-term-for-we-know-not-what. It can
quite literally mean whatever you want it to mean. It is an idea of God that
denies rationality. Baltar makes that quite clear. And despite all the
sermons by Baltar that we have heard over the last 2 years, I challenge you
to tell me what his followers believed about Him. Christian mystics
acknowledge that there is a lot about God that we don't understand, but you
can understand aspects of God they describe.
That's alright with me. It is a frequent presentation of God in movies. The
problem is when such a god becomes the primary mover of the
narrative...which he did in BSG.
>Why give him $50? It was consensual sex between adults,
>not a financial transaction. She asked him to leave shortly afterwards
I believe what she said was "You can show yourself out" meaning "It's time
for you to go _now_ and I mean _right_ now." Leno once asked Charlie Sheen
why he utilizes prostitutes when he could self-evidently get it for free. He
responded "I don't pay them for sex. I pay them to go home." If you're a big
enough jerk, you don't even have to pay for that. She couldn't have even
gone out for breakfast with the guy? Reverse the gender and you can see that
such a scene (ala in "Iron Man") could not be written except to degrade the
character being sent home.
>In BSG people have (and don't have) sex for all sorts of
>human reasons, and have all sorts of human reactions.
>In Wolfe people apparently have sex to show what bad
>people they are, and suffer for it later.
That's ridiculous. Do you really intend to compare the writing of BSG to
Wolfe in favor of BSG? Incidentally, I thought the one other use of sex in
the Caprica arc that I have not addressed yet--a strip club-- was nothing
but exploitive.
J
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