From: Betty Ragan bragan@aoc.nrao.edu
Serious point desreving a serious answer.
Neil wrote:
True. What I meant was, ignore the characters as characters, but don't ignore them as representations of an ideological position. See them for *what* they stand for, rather than *who* they are.
No, thanks. The whole idea of viewing people not as individual people but as representations of some ideological abstraction is, frankly, pretty repugnant to me (and that's true, if perhaps slightly less so, even in the case of fictional people).
I could understand such repugnance if I were advocating seeing people *only* as such representations. But I'm not (though I suppose I may have given the impression that I was). People - real or fictional - are still people. But they are *also* representations of ideological positions whether you like it or not. I am, you are, and so is everyone else. (Which position they represent at any given time is variable, and generally several such positions will be occupied at any particular moment.) It's inescapable, like the force of gravity or the need to breathe. I would argue that in order to see a person more fully, you have to include the ideological dimension, because that is part of his or her being as a person in society.
Avon is Avon and Meegat is Meegat. They're *characters*, not simply representations of ideological positions, and, IMO, to treat them otherwise is to do them -- and the entire series -- a grave disservice.
Au contraire. *Not* treating them otherwise is doing a grave disservice to the writers, without whom there would be no B7 at all. And the writers are real people (except the dead ones, but they were presumably real at the time), unlike the fictional characters they write about.
The scripts, after all, aren't written for generic, faceless ideological mouthpieces, they're written for specific, established characters, and that *has* to shape the story, subtext and all.
Nevertheless, those specific established characters are acting as ideological mouthpieces, even though they may not have been written as such. Even if the subtext is changed by their actions, it is merely changed to a different subtext.
(It would have been very interesting, I think, to see how "Deliverance" would have gone with Blake in Avon's place. I suspect it would have played *very* differently.)
But may very well have said pretty much the same things in a different way. If Blake's behaviour in Horizon (the communal eating scene) is anything to go by, it would have said exactly the same things in an even more obvious way.
People are people, but people are not just people. To see them only as people is getting close to what *I* would consider repugnant.
Neil