BSG Macros: Because apparently Bill is still good for something.

[beccatoria]

Wherein I rag on Bill Adama through the medium of macroz! Also a random comment about the last episode.










DUDES, I forgot to mention, the posters on the wall behind the Chief in the Earth flashback are all SQUARE! NO OCTAGONS! HEE!

Comments

[pellucid.livejournal.com]

HEE!!!!! Oh, Bill!!!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

ONLY YOU could read this and respond with, "Oh, Bill!!!"

JUST SO YOU KNOW, I DESPAIR OF YOU! YOU AND YOUR BILL-LOVING WAYS!

[pellucid.livejournal.com]

Ha! It was intended in sort of an "oh, Bill, you clueless, selfish, emo bastard whom I love in spite of myself, damn you" kind of way. :P

Although to be honest, there was really no Bill love at all for me in this episode, even in the "in spite of myself" sense, and this makes me rather SAD, because even when I hate him I do it lovingly, y'know? I think it was the fact that he sort of pulled it together at the end and offered everyone a bunch of empty promises all over again (to wit: macro 4!), and I couldn't figure out if we were supposed to be all "Yay Bill!" there, because, uh, NO, and it was one of those moments of feeling like the show and I were really on different pages with Bill. Then reading interviews with RDM and the writers in which they were all "and wasn't that scene between Adama and Tigh amazing?!?" and I was all, "we're thinking of the same painfully awful scene there, right?!?"

So don't despair of me just yet! I MAY STILL COME TO HATE HIM!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I SEE THAT TEXT UNDER THE STRIKETHROUGH. ;)

Your srs response is really interesting to me, though, because I also saw Chaila saying something similar; that while she still loves Bill she is now slightly more worried that the show thinks of him differently to her. Which, honestly, has always been my primary concern. Well, that and the fact that even if RDM had exactly the same understanding of Bill Adama that I do, I would still find it frustrating that he never gets any comeback on his behaviour.

I mean, the man is fascinating, though these days in a trainwreck way. But...I do fervently hope that you and Chaila are right. Because if there's a way they can make it explicit in the text that reading Bill Adama as a lost, selfish, confused emo bastard is what they were going for - or at least as an option - then dude, that's some amazing storytelling.

But I still don't think I'd be able to feel sorry for him simply because he's become the kind of character who pushes all my ragey buttons, even if I can see that deliberately creating a character like that is both valid and an impressive achievement?

And now I'm being far too serious for a thread about LOLDAMA. But yeah. I mean, actually, of everything that Adama did that was lolzy this episode, the fake promise at the end bothered me least because there was certainly an element of desperation and what else are they supposed to do? I mean the only thing they can do now is look for another home and try to keep people's hopes up. It's more that...it's such a stark contrast to the original Lie of Earth which he made with such understanding. What happened to season one Adama? Poor guy.

So don't despair of me just yet! I MAY STILL COME TO HATE HIM!

I'M SO PROUD OF YOU! I KNOW YOU CAN DO IT! :p

[pellucid.livejournal.com]

At risk of further hijacking the LOLDAMA thread with teh srs, I wrote this about Bill in another comment, and I think it explains why I continue to hang onto this idea that surely they see what they're doing with Bill, right??? On the subject of "but he wasn't nearly so bad back in seasons 1 and 2, was he? what happened?":

As for Adama, he was definitely more balanced and sympathetic in the first two seasons! I miss that Adama! But this one makes sense to me in a fairly organic way: guilt over New Caprica unhinged him a bit, I think, but he deals with guilt in spectacularly bad ways, so it's been one slippery slope since then. He has this tendency to assume that anything bad that happens is All His Fault (selfish bastard), and I've always suspected that he and Roslin shared a lot of feeling guilty about New Caprica because they didn't steal that election--and while she directed hers at punishing Baltar, he directed his inward in this destructively selfish way. So we get things like "Hero" and "Unfinished Business" that highlight Adama's almost farcical sense of self-absorbed guilt and his need for self-flagellation. Yet he's also one of the least self-aware characters I've ever seen, so this whole pattern sends him further and further into this view of the world where because everything is All About Him, he can somehow keep the people he loves in the boxes and on the pedestals he's put them in and on, and when--being people with their own volition--they inevitably fail to live up (by quitting the military, dying, being a Cylon, etc.), he falls apart.

It's all ridiculously consistent, which leads me to believe they're doing this on purpose, but then there are moments when we're clearly supposed to see him as the Big Damned Hero, and I just...really???? Bill Adama??? The Bill Adama of seasons 3 and 4????? I can't decide how to feel about him. Usually I find I love him in spite of myself, or hate him lovingly, or something--because he's just so clueless he can hardly help himself. But this episode pretty much just brought the hate without the love, and I don't want to hate him. Hmm.

So yeah, I suspect you may have been right all along with your fear that you and the show aren't on the same page about Bill, but I'm still trying to hang onto my argument that at least his selfish assholishness has been consistent, so surely there's something to it. But I'm edging ever-closer to your bandwagon.

Bill doesn't push my ragey buttons, though, and perhaps that's what's making the biggest difference between the fact that we see pretty much the same things when we look at Bill, yet feel differently about it. The BSG character who pushes my ragey buttons is Baltar, which is why no matter how well-written or important he is, I just want him to GO AWAY, and have pretty much since the miniseries. So I certainly get the impulse, and I get how Adama could be exactly the kind of character to push all sorts of ragey buttons, but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, he doesn't push mine.

Anyway. LOLDAMA!!!