#anti max x tess

[userlaylivia]

i reallyyyyyyyyy hated the end of season 2 of og roswell ugh not because the writing wasn't good or anything but because I hated max/tess so much!! and the angst between max/liz was awful ugh jason/shiri were great in it but it hurt me! and also max NEVER loved tess idc what he might say he never even went there with her until liz pushed him away at prom and then again when she was going to sweden to prove Alex's death wasn't suicide like this is a example of a couple forced to be together and no real feelings were there max never even thought about tess that way until liz pushed him away!! I also hated it because alex died and I loved him and even though 2x17 cry your name is one of the best episodes of the show it still hurts and I understand why because Colin was getting more movie offers and alex couldn't keep going away so they had to do this as they explained on the commentary of the episode but it still broke my heart!! thank god roswell new mexico never introduced tess or max/tess or killed alex off!!

[cocogurllove]

Re-watching Roswell S2 right now and it’s interesting to me that people actually ship Max with Tess even though it’s clear how miserable he is in the relationship. I’ve had a lot of ships in my day and a few crazy crack ships as well, but I don’t know if I’ve ever actively shipped any character I liked with someone who didn’t make them happy. 

[nileqt87]

Response to the idea that Smallville was the origin of the CW’s DC shows and other thoughts

Smallville really just took its formula from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as did the revival of Doctor Who, same as Angel: the Series doing the same for Torchwood by Russell T Davies' own admission), which also has a superhero in high school origin story and a strange town overrun with freaky things happening. Smallville's meteor freaks were exactly like the Hellmouth and the high death rates of their respective student bodies.

Roswell is another show that had a similar setup and was actually the first WB show about aliens with magic powers in high school. Max Evans is not too subtly Clark Kent-like, right down to the famous moment of transforming a lump of coal into a diamond. The alien/human hybrid quartet of Max Evans, Michael Guerin, Isabel Evans and the infamous Tess Harding are reincarnations of alien royalty/elite from a destroyed planet, so the connection is obvious.

Except that show went far further with what would happen if the government found out than Smallville dared beyond a few episodes here and there. Max certainly had more done to him (the White Room and going on the run in the finale) than Clark ever did in that regard. Humans who get a little too close to the inhuman with plans for science or personal gain certainly is a trope that pops up in other genre shows (often humans desiring eternal life at a cost or captive experimentation/torture).

Sheriff Jim Valenti (who was the villain of the Roswell High books the shows were based on!) turned out to be the kids' fiercest protector, not unlike Lionel Luthor, despite being initial antagonists. Lionel being the king of horrific fathers contrasted hugely with Jonathan Kent. Jor-El's A.I. practically martyred Jonathan in a trade for Lana Lang, so this version is absolutely not comparable to the Christopher Reeve version's relationship with Marlon Brando's! Smallville's Clark is nearly a reversal of the old films in regards to farm boy Clark being the real deal, not the mere disguises of Superman and the hapless reporter (this is also true of Dean Cain's iteration), as well as the nurture over nature message of the Kents being his true parents in all but blood, whereas the focus is strictly on Jor-El over Jonathan as the father figure in the 1978 and DCEU versions.

Closest to danger Clark ever got outside of Lex Luthor's experimentation (only with the anonymous blood vial that eventually led to hybrid Lex/Clark clone test tube baby Conner Kent) was from General Sam Lane and the anti-vigilantism plot, but Clark never got nearly so exposed. Max also told his secret in the first episode, so it's a stark contrast to how long it took for Clark to tell his love interests and friends. Clark and Lucifer Morningstar are the kings of the long-delayed reveal! By contrast, Angel waited seven whole episodes and most of the rest of the characters mentioned here did so in their first episode, if not their first scene.

The WB was already a home to many shows like Smallville, though it certainly started DC adopting the channel as their home to drop their properties into that already-established format.

Angel: the Series, Smallville and Supernatural were the more masculine side (Angel: the Series and Supernatural are definitely the most mature, horror-based shows, as well) on a channel that also had Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the original genre show on a channel that was heavily just sitcoms and 7th Heaven prior to 1997 and quickly transformed the whole channel), Charmed and Roswell (not to mention Dawson's Creek and other more soapy, non-genre offerings).

Shows like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were the ones that pretty much formed everything we expect from a modern fantasy/sci-fi/supernatural/horror series now, including the mix of overarching long-form story arcs and soap opera/relationship dramas mixed with the Monster of the Week and seasonal Big Bad formats. Monster of the Week (Smallville used Freak of the Week) and 'shipping were terms coined by The X-Files' fandom (yep, the biggest controversy of that show was whether Fox Mulder and Dana Scully should remain platonic colleagues as intended by the creator or become a romantic relationship, which took an interminable slow burn of seven seasons), while Big Bad (and thus arcs surrounding that Big Bad seeded throughout the season) was coined on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All these terms are used for discussing nearly every subsequent genre show today. Television prior to these shows did not have these formats, minus the old-as-dirt episodic Monsters of the Week, but not using that terminology yet.

Smallville was a marriage of comic book superheroes into the genre show format that was already going strong on the old WB. Some of these other non-comic-origin characters wouldn't be out of place in the comic world either. Definitely true for Buffy Summers and Angel, as they basically are superheroes. Buffy has the more straight-forward Peter Parker-esque origin story, while Angel's is told completely non-linear (often through a slow drip of flashbacks--his soul was returned a century prior, not during the course of the show, yet he most certainly didn't become a hero then).

It's surprising that Supernatural never quite went all-out with a real comic tie-in presence beyond some short runs early on. Neither the comics or the novels use Castiel much at all, who is the most super-powered main on the roster (so much so that the show writers were terrified to put him in Monster of the Week episodes and even tried to kill him off in seasons 6/7 due to him making the Winchesters irrelevant). Castiel is the Eldritch being-level angelic equivalent of The Little Mermaid trying to understand humanity, but with the tragic ending of the novel.

Clark himself has a mix of Dorothy Gale (check out that Over the Rainbow shot on the bridge in Smallville's pilot, which is an image also echoed in Luke Skywalker's binary sunset, followed by him doing an Ariel pulling Lex Luthor from the water) and Peter Pan (more than just the flying boy--he also has an immortality problem) in his DNA.

It's that little piece of inconvenient canon (alluded to numerous times through Smallville) that is at the heart of the adverse reactions of many Superman purists who were horrified by Smallville's Clark choosing to live a human life and have a family with Lois in the CW's Crisis on Infinite Earths. It wasn't just because Tom Welling still refuses to wear tights, but because it was the real unsolved existential crisis facing the character. Conversations with the Kents, Dax-Ur and General Lane all exposed this issue as an insecurity he had quite early on in the series. It's hardly teen angst, nor was it with Angel and the Doctor saying it repeatedly to Buffy and Rose; it doesn't make it teen angst just because they were teenagers. Clark likewise shares the tragedy of many other inhuman immortals (and yet, they keep doing it!) in that he can't father children naturally with humans without some kind of sci-fi workaround (like Blue or Gold Kryptonite).

We might like to see these characters be Peter Pan forever, but sometimes even Peter needs to grow up (as in Hook), lest he forever remain a tragedy. Make no mistake, the immortality trope is always a tragedy, which is why so many of these characters either run away from seeing it played out or they most desire to live human lives. Having duties greater than themselves and a need to save lives they'd never be able to as mortals are often the reasons for these sacrifices, but it still remains a sacrifice and ultimately a damnation, not a gift. These characters are either doomed to lose everyone they've ever loved or go out in a blaze of glory, which is what television shows using the trope are actually daring to show more recently.

Not being a tragic horror story, Superman tends to avoid it, but it's the same problem. That brief scene in Crisis on Infinite Earths was more in line with Smallville than Superman purists wished.

The Doctor is Peter Pan. It's most obvious with the imagery of little and big Amelia Pond in her nightgown, but the story with Rose Tyler juxtaposed beside Sarah Jane Smith also shows his Peter Pan-esque tendencies. He's the immortal who keeps picking up new companions to take on far-off adventures, only to leave them behind over and over again before he has to face their human mortality. Although the Doctor is older than Spock, he has picked up many Spockisms over the years like touch telepathy (yup, the Vulcan mind-meld), the half-human aspect of the 1996 TV movie that fans and the show do their best to ignore and the 10th Doctor's sacrifice via a glass case of radiation (see The Wrath of Khan).

Angel, of course, is Pinocchio (with a big dollop of Highlander's Prize), the Beast, the immortality of Peter Pan, Louis de Pointe du Lac and pre-retcon evil!Lestat de Lioncourt (the retconned one is, of course, Spike) morphed into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a touch of Steve Rogers meets Clark Kent, but with the aesthetic (not character) of Bruce Wayne (that mix is all there). Like Pinocchio and the Beast, there are those major elements of temptation, redemption and atonement.

The Buffyverse definitely borrowed heavily from the sympathetic vampire begun by Varney the Vampire, Nosferatu's plagiarization of Dracula that gave birth to death by sunlight (see the whole aesthetic of the Buffyverse's Master), the antiheroization (quite evil initially) in Dark Shadows, the archetypes of Anne Rice (the entire Master + Fanged Four are her lineup--Akasha, Gabrielle, IwtV!Lestat/Louis, Claudia and retcon!Lestat vs. the Master, Darla, Angel(us), Drusilla and Spike), the prosthetics of The Lost Boys and the vampire detective setup of Forever Knight (which copied Barnabas Collins' cure for vampirism arc, while Angel's Shanshu borrows more from Highlander's Prize). Blade and Angel added apocalypse-fighting/comic superheroes to that mix.

Ironically, the more recent examples of the good vampire have gutted their mythologies of evil-default vampires entirely (making the exceptions to the rule far less alienated and unique amongst their own kinds) and certainly kicked out the apocalyptic superheroing for soap opera. The Buffyverse is ironically closer to Anne Rice's full-blooded, evil, murderous inhuman creatures (no matter the guilt and eating rats in alleys) than it is Twilight and The Vampire Diaries in spite of the human/inhuman romance plots, marking a strong separation between the WB's era and the CW's.

That's a strong example of how the genre show environment has changed in the last two decades, so it's not just the differences between the eras of Smallville and the Arrowverse/DCEU.

Supernatural is a particularly weird example in that it ran for so long with the same cast (unlike Doctor Who, which is fast approaching its 60th anniversary and has gone through many changes, not just its format) that it was still following the same show format and catering to a generation who grew up along with it (not to mention the actors going from young to middle-aged) from 2005 through 2020. The format all the way to the end (though never again as desaturated, jump-scare horrific as that first season was--its inspirations from The X-Files showed) is most certainly pre-streaming and owes much to its old WB origins using a formula born in the 1990s, despite the CW's rebranding in 2006. Castiel's ushering in of the whole angel mythology was the most seismic change in Supernatural's history, though even he was like a horror creature early on. The show certainly had early comedy episodes, but they definitely got more frequent later. One only has to look at the season 15 premiere's handling of the Woman in White and Bloody Mary's returns to see how alien the season 1 atmosphere was to the show by then.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer likewise shed its gothic horror atmosphere and went into the sunlight (not for the better) around the time Angel took his gothic fairy tale-turned-noir with him to L.A. See Lucifer aiming for the same aesthetic in its first season. Smallville was likewise a show that spanned the WB and CW, but before the television landscape completely left that late-'90s/'00s aesthetic. You can definitely start to feel similar differences in the change from Smallville High to Metropolis and Lana to Lois. There's a pretty stark generational shift in the shows aimed at late Gen-X/older Gen-Y (Millennials) and now Gen-Z (Zoomers). That's the biggest shift between the WB and the Arrowverse-era CW.

Castiel, despite him learning how to love, being the ultimate example of free will in a mythology that has none by design (he truly did have a “crack in his chassis”) and even adopting a son whom he can finally relate to, ends with him tired, very sad and unloved in return. Not a single character in the history of Supernatural ever tells Castiel that they love him. Frankly, Meg and Crowley, who kept saving his life, showed more care about and affection for him than the Winchesters, particularly Dean (who belittled, refused to help and abandoned Castiel for years before the Jack and Mary drama shattered the relationship irrevocably). Sam, who used to feel the same othering from John and Dean as the Boy with the Demon Blood that got heaped on Castiel if he dared remind Dean he wasn’t “human, or at least like one”, had a bad habit of following his brother in questionable acts like putting Jack in the box. Castiel says he loves others several times, but he never once hears it back. As in The Little Mermaid, Castiel sacrifices himself for someone who will never love him back, except in place of sea form is the black goo of the Empty. At least Jack cared, but you’ll notice Castiel is nowhere to be seen when the Winchesters reunite in Heaven. Not even Sam (who was equally sad and tired at the end, while Dean was just angrily lashing out at everyone while blaming everyone but himself) bothered to place a single photo of Castiel amongst his shrine to John, Mary and Dean. Sam literally knew Castiel longer than he ever knew Mary and his relationship with John was so bad that he left his father and brother to go to Stanford. Boy, did that final episode say it all about Castiel loving, but never being loved in return. Bobby Singer was wrong; it turns out that, for the Winchesters, family did end in blood.

The alienated outsider archetype who doesn't quite fit in amongst human society (often with an immortality/lifespan problem on top of other interspecies differences), but often desperately wants to find human belonging, love and family, is true of characters like Clark, the Doctor, Spock, Connor/Duncan MacLeod, Angel, Castiel, Lucifer, etc... These are subsequently the shows and storylines that borrow most from the Superman mythos.

See the many takes on Superman II's Pinocchio plot, except having to give it all up for a higher purpose (not to mention many other Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Pinocchio and Peter Pan parallels), such as Angel's I Will Remember You, Smallville!Clark's Arrival/Mortal/Hidden, the Doctor's Human Nature/The Family of Blood and Castiel's season 9 arc.

That's Superman and Clark's real impact on the television landscape.

[warninggraphiccontent]

19 April 2019

Trust issues

How we access, share and use data in a way that balances utility and privacy is one of the defining questions of our time (#LifeBeyondBrexit). This week, the ODI published a new report on Data Trusts, one approach to more trustworthy data stewardship. (More links in the Meta data section below.)

At first glance, it looks like a comprehensive introduction to the subject and key questions - I'm looking forward to reading it in more detail (this is the sort of penetrating, scintillating insight you signed up to this newsletter for, isn't it?).

In the meantime, some further related reading: here's the ODI's polling on attitudes to data sharing from 2018, me on the Royal Statistical Society's 2014 polling on the same subject, and Onora O'Neill's 2002 Reith Lectures on trust and trustworthiness.

Naturally, having wondered where all the sport visualisation was last week while trying to chart the Six Nations, a few things popped into my timeline this week, not least this from The Upshot on the 1,000th F1 grand prix. Chris had a few suggestions for further rugby-related viz - other ideas very welcome.

Finally, you can now book your place at our second IfG Data Bites event, taking place on Wednesday 1 May. A reminder of how much fun the first one was here. And you might want to put Tuesday 4 June in your diary for the third one.

Happy Easter!

Today's links:

Graphic content

Electoral dysfunction

EU Parliament voting intention (10-11 April) (YouGov)

Critique, and class (pt 2), gender, geography (Ian Warren)  

How to visualize elections using Flourish (Flourish)

Disunity to cost anti-Brexit parties seats in Europe poll* (FT, via Lee)

Party branding and colours - John Burn-Murdoch, Lisa Charlotte Rost (viaLee)

EU election results (Johnny for IfG)

Photo Finnish

Visualizing Finnish elections (Topi Tjukanov)

Finland, election result (Europe Elects, via Aron)

Maps

Visualizing 200 Years of U.S. Population Density (Visual Capitalist, viaMaddy)

Suffering from Brexhaustion? Have some more maps (Alasdair Rae)

Maps of NHS waiting times across England (Rob Findlay, via Graham)

These maps show how hard it is to measure inequality in English council areas (CityMetric)

Why Budapest, Warsaw, and Lithuania split themselves in two (The Pudding)

IfG

How the Government should approach negotiations on the UK’s long-term future relationship with the EU (Institute for Government)

Ministerial resignations, again (Alasdair for IfG)

Canada shows the way on government financial transparency (Martin for IfG)

Everything else

American inequality reflects gross incomes as much as taxes* (The Economist)

Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population (The Guardian)

Crunched: the numbers behind big tech's tax avoidance* (FT)

For a visual on how much was redacted, here is an image with all the page thumbnails. (Amadis Kay, via Tess)

What First-Quarter Fundraising Can Tell Us About 2020 (FiveThirtyEight)

The Chinese Grand Prix in 60 seconds* (The Upshot)

Age x minutes (@Worville)

Behind the viz

The Design Process of “Why Do Cats & Dogs ...?” (Nadieh Bremer)

At @puddingviz we just published our team story idea backlog (Russell Goldenberg, via Alice)

Tableau Best Practises Put to the Test (Natalie Leach, Wellcome)

Meta data

Data trusts

Data trusts: lessons from three pilots (report) (ODI)

Huge appetite for data trusts, according to new ODI research (ODI)

Putting the trust in data trusts (Register Dynamics)

Commentary from the launch (Simon Burall)

Why we need a better term (Mor Rubinstein)

Opportunities

EVENT: Data Bites #2: Getting things done with data in government (Institute for Government - watch the first one here)

JOBS: Strategy & Governance Advisor; Policy Advisor - Analyse & Anticipate (Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation)

Openness

United Kingdom End-of-Term Report 2016-2018 – For Public Comment(via Ben Worthy)

BETTER DATA FOR FAIRER EMPLOYMENT: STATISTICS’ ROLE IN TACKLING THE GENDER PAY GAP (Royal Statistical Society)

A short interview with Significance Magazine on the motivation for OurWorldInData (Max Roser)

The Perils of Public Engagement (Doteveryone, via Tess)

An open data leader in government: “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful”* (Apolitical)

Location, location, location

Mapping the world in 3D will let us paint streets with augmented reality*(MIT Technology Review)

What big data uncovers about how people use their city centres (Centre for Cities)

Facebook's AI team maps the whole population of Africa (TechCrunch)

Everything else

15 MONTHS OF FRESH HELL INSIDE FACEBOOK* (Wired)

Data Delivery Group (Scottish Government)

A Chief Digital and Data Officer with actual powers (via Jeni Tennison)

Home Office plans Crime Prevention Data Lab (UKAuthority)

Diversity Alone Will Not Be The Solution To Bias In AI (Dawn Duhaney for POCIT)

eBay for government? Ukraine’s online store has sales in the billions*(Apolitical)

The white paper on online harms is a global first. It has never been more needed (The Guardian)

One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority* (New York Times)

And finally...

Wild, wild Westeros

Jon Snow is fan favourite to win Game of Thrones (YouGov)

How Game of Thrones changed television* (FT)

Who will ‘win’ Game of Thrones? Play our interactive game and make your season 8 predictions* (Telegraph)

An illustrated guide to all 2,339 deaths in ‘Game of Thrones’* (Washington Post)

The good

A map showing the most common local politicians' names in different places (David Ottewell, via Lucy and Nick - more here)

the population of the UK – joy division style (Niko Kommenda)

#JUVAJA (@JurgenJee)

When you're marrying the human you met while collaborating on#dataviz together, you're basically required to collaborate on some viz for the wedding, right? (Amy Cesal, via Tess)

Where Would You Draw the Line?* (New York Times)

GDPR is my therapist (Vinay Patel)

The bad

Government in email privacy blunder (BBC News)

Square pie charts (via Ben Stanley)

Easily the funniest data viz I've ever seen (Dorsa Amir, via Daniel)

The egg-ly

Eggflation (Garry White, via Tim)

[kmze]

okay but max/tess was awesome too *whispers* fight me! (i adored max/liz aswell, but emilie de ravin.... EMILIE DE RAVIN)

OMG OUR VIRTUAL FRIENDSHIP IS OVER!!!! GTFO with Max/Tess ughhhhhhh no wayyyyyyyy I *still* have deep seeded hatred towards Emilie De Ravin and every time I see her I seethe you tried to destroy my OTP. You don’t even understand how emotionally distraught I was when they had sex, I hated everything, I don’t care if Max thought Liz slept with Kyle.

Max/Tess is a legit NOTP for me but I did love Kyle/Tess because they were adorable and flirty and then the writers ruined everything.

Max/Liz all the way, they were soulmates fuck all that destiny bullshit, fight me!

[userlaylivia]

just to be clear, this poll is to guess which ship I hate most not the one you hate most lol I know sometimes ppl click.on an option without reading it right or tags or anything so I wanted to be clear lol I do hate every ship here but there's one I hate most!!