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antigwenallies Dec. 31st, 2007 06:00 pm)
jo19844-twfic.livejournal.com posting in antigwenallies Dec. 31st, 2007 06:00 pm)I started a thread a while back on OG that started wit this...
Oh God i know i'm going to regret this lol but...
Why is Gwen so unpopular?
Personally, i dont like her. I know there are some who do and sme who dont, there are people who love her, and people who hate her and then theres those who dont really care either way. I was just wondering what reasons people give for not liking her because i thought it would be interesting to see if everyones reasons are more or less the same.
what wuld gwen have to do to win fans over in S2 and where did it all go so horribly wrong.
Did people like her at first but find her grating on a second viewing?
Do you think fandom has changed peoples perception (cos face it fandom sometues does more harm than good when perceptions are concerned.)
i got some brilliant replies. some of which i have quoted below the cut
Tigercheetah
The first is that she was labeled by RTD as being the heart of the series. Now I don't know about everyone else but to my mind, when you work for an organisation like Torchwood, having a big heart isn't always useful when it comes to life and death situations.
By the time we got to the middle of the series, her 'heart' had resulted in her doing a number of irritating/stupid things. In They Keep Killing Suzie she disobeys Jack by taking Suzie out of the hub, depsite knowing that Suzie has commited a number of gruesome murders. In Countrycide she reminds Ianto about his dead girlfriend and makes Tosh feel embarassed. And yet she then proceeds to moan at Owen for bringing up their kiss, when Gwen was the one who started the kissing game to begin with.
The second reason is that Gwen dominated both the first series of Torchwood as a whole and Jack's personal attention particularly. Some people will view this as petty but to my mind, it means that the producers place more importance on Gwen than any other character in the show. Even producer Richard Stokes recently compared the relataionship between Jack and Gwen as being like that between the Doctor and Rose. Since Torchwood is meant to be an assemble show, you can't place one character way above the others. You left wondering whether or not Jack and Gwen will always have this special bond. regardless of how the other characters grow. To my mind, Tosh seems to have just as much heart as Gwen.
Thirdly, what exactly is her role within the team? She seems to spend most of the first series following Jack around. That is not a defined role.
Bunniio
p 1 and 2... ok shes the new girl. Shes gonna be in it a lot.
Fine by me.
Ep3. .. still ok.
Ep4. Meh. That thing with Owen. What the? So currently for episodes in... shes... cheated on Rhys already. She kissed Owen, Carys, she flirted with Jack and she kissed him.
Ep5. Alright, heres where she annoys me. Why doesnt she just leave Jack alone to be with Estelle? Jesus woman. Back off and stop asking questions, leave the poor man to grieve. And she was rude about Estelles fairies (off character a bit I thought here...)
Ep6. Just about coped with her, probably due to the fact I was scared witless and was staring at Jack, Ianto and Owen in all their Jeans and great coat glory.
Ep7. ... didnt see much of her so cant judge. I like her in this episode though, despite the fact she was cheating on Rhys. Again... I loved how she said love suited Tosh and the Owen comments were amusing.
Ep8... Ill leave before I just explode. *grr*
Ep9. As above.
Ep10. As above.
Ep11. Leaving Rhys... ok he was being an idiot. But crying over pizza... poor woobie.
Ep12. I was alright with her here.
Ep13. Her aggression angered me. Ill leave it there...
TorchwoodAddict
The drugging is so unforgivable. My personal feelings are that if you need to cheat, you owe it to your sig other to break it off--or not cheat.
I don't see her as the heart of anything. As she becomes more assimilated into TW, she's inevitably going to lose that "human" perspective. If all she's doing is profiling, it does seem to me that they could use her just part-time. To be fair, when you're getting used to a new job, you tend to screw up a lot, and she did take responsibility for her actions in Ep 2 and try to correct them.
"She seems to spend most of the first series following Jack around." Can't really blame her for that. The view is spectacular.
That kissing game thing in Countrycide was so dumb. I do think Owen's smackdown of Tosh was worse for her than Gwen's repressive comments. Gwen doesn't think before she acts a lot, so I just see that Ianto's reaction as consistant with this characteristic.
Nymphadora Tonks
as a character she doesn't interest me or engage me on any level, she's not someone I wish to be more like or be friedns with, she vaguely repulses me in fact, I want to be more like Tosh, I really envy her super genius computer skills. If she's supposed ot be the audience's way into the series then she's a failure, she's a reason for me not to watch, I don't care if she lives of dies, in fact I hope they do kill her off at the end of season 2, because it'd improve the series for me. Do the job properly next time please, Eve was meant to play a bad chick, an evil badass, like a twisted Lara Croft or even the Mary alien who had her wicked way with Tosh. Eve is just horrifically miscast as the protagonist, she's a natural born antagonist and should have been cast as one...
qthewetsprocket
My biggest irk with Gwen is: what the other characters say about her =/= what she actually is. It's the classic 'show vs tell' conundrum...by her actions, Gwen Cooper is embarrasingly, consistently incompetent (even as a regular police officer - that scene where she jumps on the guy's back in the bar fight and then goes home cwying with an owie on her head is just too insulting for words). In the real world, someone like Gwen would have trouble even getting into the police academy training program, let alone a top-secret government organisation like Torchwood. But in Torchwood she is, and we have yet to see the first credible shred of evidence why exactly Jack keeps her on the team and doesn't fire her for being the huge liability that she is (apart from the fact that he just wants to shag her - Mary Sue much?).
And no, the whole 'helping us keep our humanity' angle just doesn't cut it. So far, with her 'superior humanity', she has: cheated on her boyfriend, lied to him, almost gotten him killed, actually gotten him killed, treated him like dirt, and put his life in danger to selfishly demand a forgiveness that she has absolutely no right to. And after all this...she has the unbelievable nerve to get on a moral high-horse when Jack Harkness saves the entire world in a way that doesn't fit in with her own sense of morality. 'Human' her behavior may very well be...but I don't think that's exactly the kind of 'humanity' Jack had in mind when he made his little new hire speech to her.
Anyway, those are the writing flaws. On a more personal level, Gwen annoys me because (as I said on another forum) she's that woman in every workplace on the planet who's completely incompetent - the one everyone else has to cover for and carry her workload because she's so consistently useless - but she won't ever get fired, because the boss wants to shag her. I mean, seriously, why else is Jack keeping her on at this point after she's messed up so many times?
On a wider scale, too, Russell T. Davies seems to have an ongoing penchant for beatifying this kind of incompetent-but-****able female character (Gwen Cooper; Rose Tyler) above her much more competent female counterparts (Martha Jones; Toshiko Sato), and I see more than enough of that kind of thing in real life...I don't want to see it on my favorite tv shows.
MANY other opinions too. i just thought it would be nice to have some gwenhate from other voices other than the ones on here lol
Oh God i know i'm going to regret this lol but...
Why is Gwen so unpopular?
Personally, i dont like her. I know there are some who do and sme who dont, there are people who love her, and people who hate her and then theres those who dont really care either way. I was just wondering what reasons people give for not liking her because i thought it would be interesting to see if everyones reasons are more or less the same.
what wuld gwen have to do to win fans over in S2 and where did it all go so horribly wrong.
Did people like her at first but find her grating on a second viewing?
Do you think fandom has changed peoples perception (cos face it fandom sometues does more harm than good when perceptions are concerned.)
i got some brilliant replies. some of which i have quoted below the cut
Tigercheetah
The first is that she was labeled by RTD as being the heart of the series. Now I don't know about everyone else but to my mind, when you work for an organisation like Torchwood, having a big heart isn't always useful when it comes to life and death situations.
By the time we got to the middle of the series, her 'heart' had resulted in her doing a number of irritating/stupid things. In They Keep Killing Suzie she disobeys Jack by taking Suzie out of the hub, depsite knowing that Suzie has commited a number of gruesome murders. In Countrycide she reminds Ianto about his dead girlfriend and makes Tosh feel embarassed. And yet she then proceeds to moan at Owen for bringing up their kiss, when Gwen was the one who started the kissing game to begin with.
The second reason is that Gwen dominated both the first series of Torchwood as a whole and Jack's personal attention particularly. Some people will view this as petty but to my mind, it means that the producers place more importance on Gwen than any other character in the show. Even producer Richard Stokes recently compared the relataionship between Jack and Gwen as being like that between the Doctor and Rose. Since Torchwood is meant to be an assemble show, you can't place one character way above the others. You left wondering whether or not Jack and Gwen will always have this special bond. regardless of how the other characters grow. To my mind, Tosh seems to have just as much heart as Gwen.
Thirdly, what exactly is her role within the team? She seems to spend most of the first series following Jack around. That is not a defined role.
Bunniio
p 1 and 2... ok shes the new girl. Shes gonna be in it a lot.
Fine by me.Ep3. .. still ok.
Ep4. Meh. That thing with Owen. What the? So currently for episodes in... shes... cheated on Rhys already. She kissed Owen, Carys, she flirted with Jack and she kissed him.
Ep5. Alright, heres where she annoys me. Why doesnt she just leave Jack alone to be with Estelle? Jesus woman. Back off and stop asking questions, leave the poor man to grieve. And she was rude about Estelles fairies (off character a bit I thought here...)
Ep6. Just about coped with her, probably due to the fact I was scared witless and was staring at Jack, Ianto and Owen in all their Jeans and great coat glory.
Ep7. ... didnt see much of her so cant judge. I like her in this episode though, despite the fact she was cheating on Rhys. Again... I loved how she said love suited Tosh and the Owen comments were amusing.
Ep8... Ill leave before I just explode. *grr*
Ep9. As above.
Ep10. As above.
Ep11. Leaving Rhys... ok he was being an idiot. But crying over pizza... poor woobie.
Ep12. I was alright with her here.
Ep13. Her aggression angered me. Ill leave it there...
TorchwoodAddict
The drugging is so unforgivable. My personal feelings are that if you need to cheat, you owe it to your sig other to break it off--or not cheat.
I don't see her as the heart of anything. As she becomes more assimilated into TW, she's inevitably going to lose that "human" perspective. If all she's doing is profiling, it does seem to me that they could use her just part-time. To be fair, when you're getting used to a new job, you tend to screw up a lot, and she did take responsibility for her actions in Ep 2 and try to correct them.
"She seems to spend most of the first series following Jack around." Can't really blame her for that. The view is spectacular.
That kissing game thing in Countrycide was so dumb. I do think Owen's smackdown of Tosh was worse for her than Gwen's repressive comments. Gwen doesn't think before she acts a lot, so I just see that Ianto's reaction as consistant with this characteristic.
Nymphadora Tonks
as a character she doesn't interest me or engage me on any level, she's not someone I wish to be more like or be friedns with, she vaguely repulses me in fact, I want to be more like Tosh, I really envy her super genius computer skills. If she's supposed ot be the audience's way into the series then she's a failure, she's a reason for me not to watch, I don't care if she lives of dies, in fact I hope they do kill her off at the end of season 2, because it'd improve the series for me. Do the job properly next time please, Eve was meant to play a bad chick, an evil badass, like a twisted Lara Croft or even the Mary alien who had her wicked way with Tosh. Eve is just horrifically miscast as the protagonist, she's a natural born antagonist and should have been cast as one...
qthewetsprocket
My biggest irk with Gwen is: what the other characters say about her =/= what she actually is. It's the classic 'show vs tell' conundrum...by her actions, Gwen Cooper is embarrasingly, consistently incompetent (even as a regular police officer - that scene where she jumps on the guy's back in the bar fight and then goes home cwying with an owie on her head is just too insulting for words). In the real world, someone like Gwen would have trouble even getting into the police academy training program, let alone a top-secret government organisation like Torchwood. But in Torchwood she is, and we have yet to see the first credible shred of evidence why exactly Jack keeps her on the team and doesn't fire her for being the huge liability that she is (apart from the fact that he just wants to shag her - Mary Sue much?).
And no, the whole 'helping us keep our humanity' angle just doesn't cut it. So far, with her 'superior humanity', she has: cheated on her boyfriend, lied to him, almost gotten him killed, actually gotten him killed, treated him like dirt, and put his life in danger to selfishly demand a forgiveness that she has absolutely no right to. And after all this...she has the unbelievable nerve to get on a moral high-horse when Jack Harkness saves the entire world in a way that doesn't fit in with her own sense of morality. 'Human' her behavior may very well be...but I don't think that's exactly the kind of 'humanity' Jack had in mind when he made his little new hire speech to her.
Anyway, those are the writing flaws. On a more personal level, Gwen annoys me because (as I said on another forum) she's that woman in every workplace on the planet who's completely incompetent - the one everyone else has to cover for and carry her workload because she's so consistently useless - but she won't ever get fired, because the boss wants to shag her. I mean, seriously, why else is Jack keeping her on at this point after she's messed up so many times?
On a wider scale, too, Russell T. Davies seems to have an ongoing penchant for beatifying this kind of incompetent-but-****able female character (Gwen Cooper; Rose Tyler) above her much more competent female counterparts (Martha Jones; Toshiko Sato), and I see more than enough of that kind of thing in real life...I don't want to see it on my favorite tv shows.
MANY other opinions too. i just thought it would be nice to have some gwenhate from other voices other than the ones on here lol
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'grr'
my post over there currently has 330 replies.
its here if ur registered.
http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showthread.php?t=152209