Every single person on the show has done some heinous shit. Some on purpose, some on accident, but the entire world is kinda built on heinous shit happening & them either perpetrating it or kinda ignoring it (like the slavery stuff/ letting guards die for them etc). Hell, pawter made a bunch of ppl die to win her battle. Dutch & co may be the good guys, but their hands are far from clean, which I think makes it easier to accept stuff that Delle seyah and aneela have done. (2/3)
I’ll have to see where the rest of the show leads, but I think this may be the one show I have where I would ordinarily hate some characters & possibly the overall msg but it works for kj, maybe Bc I love Dutch / aneela / Delle seyah lol. I tend to go more for righteous vengeance & this show isn’t that. Too much gray to be that. I think Root was the closest I’ve gotten to rooting for “villain” & we never see much of her evil past. Loved Regina too, but didn’t finish ouat Bc I got mad at it (3/3)
Anon, you watched it too quickly! s4 already?? Ah, man, I wish I could watch s3 and s4 again for the first time. s3 especially, WHAT a season. Queens rise! The kiss! Torture and ice cream! Tether! The Scarback origins! Season three had something so dynamic and epic and well-balanced, it was genuinely a really well done season of TV. Remember that moment at the end of 3×09? Not to spoil so uh, where Pree’s Wayfaring Stranger cuts back in right as it’s happening? Yeah, that moment. >_> The direction and music and everything went so hand in hand, all season long.
Although, I did really love season 4 too. There was one ep in the middle of it I really disagreed with (and then another I kinda disagreed with right after) but they seemed to ease back on the characterization they were pushing. It’s amazing to me how even with as much of a setup season it was, trying to fight back to a status quo and not even make progress in the fight against the Lady, but just to a point where they could build from, it was still so good. Weird dynamics, evolving family, things that worked even when they shouldn’t have. Really, even though s4+5 were announced together and written at the same time, it’s s3+4 that fit so well together.
All right, okay, so it might have been a bit of an exaggeration when I said I don’t really root for bad guys, because once I thought about it, I like so many. Root, HG Wells in Warehouse 13, Eva in NCIS: NOLA. I actually have a pretty extensive list of villains in f/f ships, lol. I think what I meant by exception was that when it came to Delle Seyah vs Pawter, because our baddies usually do not directly KILL main characters, I was okay with instantly forgiving Delle Seyah? I stopped watching OUAT a few seasons in and I loved Regina and SQ, from the start, before her background was even revealed, but when it came to Regina vs Snow? I sided with Snow. I was pissed at Villanelle, the ultimate bad girl, for Bill. Until Eve basically gave permission to continue to like her being still as infatuated as ever.
And I think that’s how it usually works, I’ll go with the main characters. And here’s where my exception comes in because for the whole of season 3 things only got worse between the good guys and Delle Seyah + Aneela and I was somehow rooting for them all? Like, maybe they’ll make up when it comes down to it? (And they did!)
As you said, she did have things happening to her, Johnny shooting her, then she had Gander the way Villanelle post-Bill ep had Nadia’s boyfriend, antagonists so annoying you went back to rooting for a murderer. And she herself changes a bit, she helps Johnny, she helps Bea, she cares and suffers. Which is how Root and Regina and HG really won us over, right. We care about people by seeing them care for others and be cared for. Aneela was barely in season 4 but the way she was adored by her family and Delle Seyah, that did so much to endear her to us.
You’re right, everyone’s done something bad, but there’s a difference between–or maybe a scale of–redemption, between people like Dutch and D’av who feel guilty and terrible about what they did and then people like Delle Seyah, or NCIS: NOLA’s Eva, or…Star Trek: Discovery’s Terran!Georgiou. In Discovery, we like Michael and Ash because we see their struggles and progress, while Georgiou is like an asshole cat who we like for being an asshole cat. There are just different expectations and allowances for different characters? Even a little growth and empathy from those characters is such a huge win.
It’s because of their environment too, like, Georgiou from her hellish Terran universe, Delle Seyah growing up among the Qresh. Certain things are just accepted and expected, as you said, cruel things. Killjoys is definitely a gray kind of world as opposed to, say, Supergirl or OUAT, where morality is set up to define character worth and people are allowed to stray so much less.
Killing Eve goes all the way in the other direction. There’s a distance the narrative sets between us and the victims. A fair number of innocent people die in the first eps, but it’s not until she kills Bill that we’re mad, and even then, because of the way the main character handles it, we get over it. And then sometimes narrative distance is shrunk so we might not even like allies. Jeri Hogarth, on a gray show, sets my teeth on edge. I don’t like her, despite her being a lesbian and my massive childhood crush on CAM. The way she’s bad, the way the show doesn’t really ever soften her through Jessica or other characters, I can never like her.
Heh, this got a lot longer than I expected, but your asks provoked some really interesting dissection of what I like and don’t and why. After your previous ask I was afraid you might have given up on the show, I’m so glad you didn’t. Let me know how the rest of the viewing goes, if you want!
