Fannish Friday: Character U-Turns

[lirazel]

On this ridiculously hot Friday (in most of the northern hemisphere, anyway), tell me about a character who you either started out loving and ended up hating or started out hating and ended up loving. Or both! With an emphasis on it being unexpected--if someone had told you you'd end up loving/hating this particular character, you wouldn't have believed them.

Love to hate ---> Giles from Buffy. I was always a big fan of the character, and then in season 6, they have him abandon Buffy because she needs to "stand on her own," even though her mother just died, SHE JUST DIED, she's trying to deal with living again, she's raising her teenage sister on her own, and she has to pay the mortgage??? And did I mention that she's, at most, 20 years old??? It's truly insane.

I know that this decision was made because Anthony Head wanted to spend more time in the UK so they needed to write him out of the bulk of the season, but I can think of a half a dozen ways to do that that would have kept him from abandoning Buffy.

Buffy is my woobie anyway, so it isn't surprising that I would resent anyone who betrayed her, but wow, this feels personal to me. It even affects me when I go back and rewatch earlier seasons! And I hate it because I loved that character before this!!!



Hate to love ---> Jamie Tartt from Ted Lasso. He starts out the show just this arrogant asshole who doesn't know how to properly treat Keeley, who you have loved from the first episode. You're set up to see him as a villain. And then you get the reveal of why he's that way, and while that doesn't excuse it, it does help contextualize him.

And then! Then the writers gave him one of the best redemption arcs! And it's subtle! You barely even realize it's happening! Until one day you realize...Jamie's become a really good person and you love him! He's become one of your blorbos! (On a show filled with blorbos!)

I'm still not quite sure how they pulled that off--I need to go back and rewatch the show to figure out how they did it. But wow, I am so happy the writers did that! I adore that boy and ship him so hard with Keeley and Roy!



I would love to hear your journeys with particular characters, either in the comments or in your own post!

Comments

[seekingferret]

Love to Hate the most obvious one for me is Dr. Carson Beckett on SGA, he was a delightful comic relief character for the early seasons until one episode he performs a wildly unethical, bordering on Mengele-ish, medical experiment on a prisoner of war and um... the show then tried to ask you to keep thinking of him as the delightful comic relief character and it just fundamentally didn't work for me, and I was very happy when he died.

[lirazel]

Oh gosh, that sounds truly terrible. Did the episode where that happened treat it seriously or was it a jokey thing? I don't know which is worse!

[seekingferret]

It takes it seriously, but yeah, I don't know if that's better. That episode is mostly from the victim's POV, and he ends up becoming a recurring villain who relentlessly tries to hurt the people who did this to him (i.e. our 'heroes'), which, you're like, yeah, you're using cartoonishly evil tactics but I get where you're coming from.