#i never contribute anything to this fandom because I know I'll get SLAUGHTERED | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

qqueenofhades · 4 years

Note

1/2 Hello! French anon again, thank you for the references, I'll check them out. I have to say that I am very French in my way of thinking, so I sometimes struggle with the idea of American integration and communities, often wondering what binds all the people together then. Not to say that the French one works better. There are a lot of problems and geographical segregation alone (and the many forms of everyday racism) are evidence of that. My ask this time was more lighthearted.

French anon 2/2 I have started watching Timeless (I'm at the 3rd episode, so...) after discovering it on your blog. It didn't truly click with me and it will probably stay as my ironing clothes TV show... I know it brings some degree of history awareness to the public but isn't it grossly simplified? I know the format doesn't really allow for deep exploration but still. Also, the whole "we can't change the past", well, by going there they already do, it's more like mitigating damage after that.

French anon 3/3 So I know you love it very much and I've read some of the reasons why but would you tell me if it gets better? I guess it also feel very American (not in a derogatory way!) and speaks less to me than history I've learned in school would... Anyway, I hope you're doing as well as can be, thank you for sharing your thoughts! :)

Ahaha. Timeless. Ahaha. Haha. Hah.

Hah.

(Spoilers will follow below, just so you know.)

I have, shall we say, a complicated relationship with that show. Let me be the first off to say it is not Quality Cinema; there are a lot of plot holes, the usual time-travel caveats that you kind of have to shrug and go with, and yes it is, as you say, especially American in its outlook, especially early in season 1 when it looks like the conflict is “oh no we have to save this scary Eastern European baddie from Destroying America Tee Em!!!” Believe me, I also side-eyed it a lot for exactly that reason, though it was fun enough that it kept me going. And then I fell DEEP in the trash bin for said not-actually-a-baddie at all, and... sigh.

There are still things about the show, especially in individual moments, that I thought are really well done, and I did love it (once) for a lot of reasons. You have to understand that American history is SO sanitized that for a lot of people, actually discovering the contributions of women and people of color and other unknown figures that Timeless, at its best, tried to highlight, really WAS revelatory. It inspired a ton of passion and public history examination and things that I, as a historian, obviously endorse. While still coming at everything from essentially a well-meaning white American liberal perspective (and yes, it was co-run by Eric Kripke of Supernatural infamy, hence all the fridged women in the character backstories), it did do a lot for making the average American cable-television viewer think about parts of history that they simply didn’t know about, and it inspired a devoted cult following for this and other reasons. But this fan following was a double-edged sword. It saved the show from cancellation at the end of season 1 and gave it a 10-episode season 2, which has some of my favorite episodes in the show for Reasons. But then once it was again cancelled after that, we got stuck with a two-part “Christmas Special” to wrap things up which, in the way of rushed finale so-called fanservice movies everywhere, was unspeakably ghastly on every single level, slaughtered the characters and the story, and left people (especially me) with such a bad taste in our mouths that Timeless canon (at least post-2x10) is dead to us and means we can’t revisit it without a certain amount of pain. Because yes. It was so bad. It’s generally known as the Abomination and it doesn’t actually exist.

I still love the characters, for the most part, a whole lot. Rufus, Jiya, Lucy, and Flynn are my absolute baes and I would die for every one of them. Wyatt, frankly, is the most boring, least compelling, least developed, and un-nuanced out of the lot of them, and in the way of White Fandom everywhere, he got woobified first by the fandom and then the writers, who ruined everything in the Abomination to “fix” the mistakes he had made in the course of season 2. I have rehabilitated and improved him in my fics, but I hate canon Wyatt with the burning passion of a thousand suns, not sorry, and the way everything else got dragged down by his deadweight. Basically, I enjoy the setting and the characters and the premise as inspiration for fics and fanworks more than, at this point, I enjoy anything about Timeless show canon itself. I’ve never felt the need to revisit or rewatch after the Abomination, sadly, because it was just that terrible. But I DID finish the story by writing a full-length Season 3 and 4, a major fan project that I’m very proud of, at @timeless-season-four. I did it because I was just that full of spite at how the “official” ending handled things, I knew I could do it better for every single character and story, and I did. I think that I do handle a lot more of the complexities of history in my episodes than the show ever did, but then, I’m coming at it from a different perspective.

So... there’s that. You’re obviously under no obligation to continue if it’s not your super cup of tea (and as I said, the Christmas Thing will never be forgiven by me, but hey, it’s cool). I still love parts of it (characters, lines, episodes, my beloved OTP that they did so dirty) even if not the whole, so if you still need to have something in the background while ironing clothes, it could be worse. But yes, well, there’s my relationship with it in a nutshell, and I definitely agree with everything you’ve said, especially for someone approaching it from outside the U.S. It’s definitely made from that perspective, for better and sometimes decidedly for worse, and that’s just what it is.

#timeless critical #anonymous #ask

13 notes · View notes