For me, what makes Guardian "trash" is the endearingly bad special f/x and the teeming crowds of ten people and t-shirts in Dixing. [...] It's trash because you can recognize most of the main villains by the silliness of their wigs/dye-jobs. It's trash because mid-battle when Shen Wei gets cut, Zhao Yunlan grabs him to demand why isn't it healing, and the bad guys just stop attacking to watch because they find WeiLan as crazily adorable as all of us do. It's trash because China demanded Morality and so there is an episode about how Video Gamers Will Kill People -- but to make up for it they gave us Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan defusing a bomb with a ridiculous amount of wires and who cares if it's cliche because Zhao Yunlan kneels before Shen Wei and basically looks like he's proposing, and he grins and Shen Wei curls his lip in a way that absolutely means "Please stop turning me on when I am HOLDING A BOMB."
Haha, I RELATE. XD I mean, honestly, I think it's easier for me to understand exactly what you mean right now because my main fandom (we all know the one) is one in which I have to actively ignore/write around/headcanon out a significant chunk of canon in order to get it to work, because it's either badly written, completely contracts something in another part of canon, is something I genuinely dislike, or it's just like ... I think I get what they're going for there, it's just that it literally DOES NOT come across on the screen, but I plan to write it as if it WAS actively on the screen if they'd had either a better budget or more coherent writers, or both. XDDD
And yet, the parts that I like are incredibly iddy and fun and infinitely rewatchable for me!
So I'm kinda writing the best-parts version that exists in my head and which consists of me end-running around the parts of canon that make my inner writer quietly scream into a pillow. And I sort of ... typically talk about it as if it is that version.
But I also do genuinely enjoy the affectionate mocking thing. Honestly I think that's why I have been so much more successful at getting people into this show than into, say, Agent Carter, which I love so much that I really can't handle criticism of it. It's difficult for me to talk about it with people who are not all the way out to the "squee" end because it's so intensely personal to me that I tend to nope out of conversations that tend to go in an even mildly critical direction. Whereas Iron Fist, and really everything in the general Defenders stable of shows, for me anyway, are just sort of fun to gently mock because they ARE kind of cheesy and ridiculous and not quite all they could be, but I'm also not sure if I'd love them in the same way or find them as easy to talk about if they fell into that "perfect canon, I cannot bear criticism" kind of category. I not only can bear criticism, I am sometimes the first person bringing it. XD But I also have written reams of fanfiction about them and just kind of want to cuddle them like a big silly puppy. Which I kinda get the feeling is how you relate to Guardian, too. (Which I honestly think I WOULD really like; I just haven't been in the right headspace lately for a new show like that!)
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Haha, I RELATE. XD I mean, honestly, I think it's easier for me to understand exactly what you mean right now because my main fandom (we all know the one) is one in which I have to actively ignore/write around/headcanon out a significant chunk of canon in order to get it to work, because it's either badly written, completely contracts something in another part of canon, is something I genuinely dislike, or it's just like ... I think I get what they're going for there, it's just that it literally DOES NOT come across on the screen, but I plan to write it as if it WAS actively on the screen if they'd had either a better budget or more coherent writers, or both. XDDD
And yet, the parts that I like are incredibly iddy and fun and infinitely rewatchable for me!
So I'm kinda writing the best-parts version that exists in my head and which consists of me end-running around the parts of canon that make my inner writer quietly scream into a pillow. And I sort of ... typically talk about it as if it is that version.
But I also do genuinely enjoy the affectionate mocking thing. Honestly I think that's why I have been so much more successful at getting people into this show than into, say, Agent Carter, which I love so much that I really can't handle criticism of it. It's difficult for me to talk about it with people who are not all the way out to the "squee" end because it's so intensely personal to me that I tend to nope out of conversations that tend to go in an even mildly critical direction. Whereas Iron Fist, and really everything in the general Defenders stable of shows, for me anyway, are just sort of fun to gently mock because they ARE kind of cheesy and ridiculous and not quite all they could be, but I'm also not sure if I'd love them in the same way or find them as easy to talk about if they fell into that "perfect canon, I cannot bear criticism" kind of category. I not only can bear criticism, I am sometimes the first person bringing it. XD But I also have written reams of fanfiction about them and just kind of want to cuddle them like a big silly puppy. Which I kinda get the feeling is how you relate to Guardian, too. (Which I honestly think I WOULD really like; I just haven't been in the right headspace lately for a new show like that!)