[this is not going to end well]
Mar. 12th, 2012 11:34 pmSo I needed to reset my brain this weekend - apparently - and I accidentally spent basically all of Saturday lying in bed reading Rizzoli & Isles fanfic. It's not a show I'd ever watched, but, you know, it was there, and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spockette tweeting about the badfic had made me curious to see the goodfic. (Of which, oddly enough, a lot is on ff.net. Wow, the pendulum has swung the other way.) Anyways, after several kajillion stories I thought I would actually find out what these characters looked like, so I watched a couple of episodes on youtube. And now I am fascinated.
I mean, not with the show, which is pretty crap - entertaining-ish crap, but, well, if I'd known it was based on Tess Gerritson's novels I would have had a much better idea of the likely quality going in. But I am intrigued by the gay. This show has got to be one of the clearest examples of "we're not gay we just love each other" I have ever seen - WITH all the attendant problematics that the trope involves in fanfic - but while shows playing with homosocial subtext is nothing new, it feels like a change to see one that is so deliberately courting a lesbian fanbase. Admittedly that has partially to do with social mores about what it is permisible to represent male friendships as, but this isn't just a case where the show is representing a close friendship in a way that slips into subtext. This is deliberate pandering to an audience - they go undercover in a lesbian bar! like, literally! what even is this show! - while just as deliberately never intending to actually go there. I also hear, though have not verified, that a lot of the showrunners etc are actually quite staunchly right-wing and conservative, which is even more interesting because it emphasizes that the (sub)text is a deliberate choice.
I am not telling anyone who watches this show anything new, I realize that, but seriously, though - is this a mark of the lesbian becoming a marketed-to demographic? Because we're not, generally. Niche products like The L Word, sure, but even that no one quite knew how to sell - see also the ad campaigns, which ranged from "put them all in dresses!" to "put them all in pants!" to "oh shit, just make them all naked!" - and side storylines in ensemble shows are much more explicit. This is a mainstream show acknowledging the male gaze but deliberately courting the lesbian gaze, and that doesn't happen very much. Except maybe with Xena, but then, was Xena really 'mainstream'? Certainly not as mainstream as a police procedural in this sort of television schedule.
It's kind of interesting, and seems like it's not being advertised to play it up but depending on word of mouth, and... yeah. Intriguing. I just wish the show were better. On the other hand, I'm mostly not listening to the ridic dialogue because I'm too distracted by Rizzoli's miraculous abs. Whoa baby.
spockette tweeting about the badfic had made me curious to see the goodfic. (Of which, oddly enough, a lot is on ff.net. Wow, the pendulum has swung the other way.) Anyways, after several kajillion stories I thought I would actually find out what these characters looked like, so I watched a couple of episodes on youtube. And now I am fascinated.I mean, not with the show, which is pretty crap - entertaining-ish crap, but, well, if I'd known it was based on Tess Gerritson's novels I would have had a much better idea of the likely quality going in. But I am intrigued by the gay. This show has got to be one of the clearest examples of "we're not gay we just love each other" I have ever seen - WITH all the attendant problematics that the trope involves in fanfic - but while shows playing with homosocial subtext is nothing new, it feels like a change to see one that is so deliberately courting a lesbian fanbase. Admittedly that has partially to do with social mores about what it is permisible to represent male friendships as, but this isn't just a case where the show is representing a close friendship in a way that slips into subtext. This is deliberate pandering to an audience - they go undercover in a lesbian bar! like, literally! what even is this show! - while just as deliberately never intending to actually go there. I also hear, though have not verified, that a lot of the showrunners etc are actually quite staunchly right-wing and conservative, which is even more interesting because it emphasizes that the (sub)text is a deliberate choice.
I am not telling anyone who watches this show anything new, I realize that, but seriously, though - is this a mark of the lesbian becoming a marketed-to demographic? Because we're not, generally. Niche products like The L Word, sure, but even that no one quite knew how to sell - see also the ad campaigns, which ranged from "put them all in dresses!" to "put them all in pants!" to "oh shit, just make them all naked!" - and side storylines in ensemble shows are much more explicit. This is a mainstream show acknowledging the male gaze but deliberately courting the lesbian gaze, and that doesn't happen very much. Except maybe with Xena, but then, was Xena really 'mainstream'? Certainly not as mainstream as a police procedural in this sort of television schedule.
It's kind of interesting, and seems like it's not being advertised to play it up but depending on word of mouth, and... yeah. Intriguing. I just wish the show were better. On the other hand, I'm mostly not listening to the ridic dialogue because I'm too distracted by Rizzoli's miraculous abs. Whoa baby.
