I started this post AGES ago, but I'm going to try and finish it. Finder has come out, and was a bust (unsurprisingly, though a little sadly).
I was thinking about House the other day because Bones did a potential pilot (more on this possibly later in a separate post) and one of the comments from Hart Hanson was they wanted to make a House like character -- someone who is in many ways unlikable. I find this idea intriguing, and I certainly find characters who are not all sunshine and roses all the time to be the ones I gravitate towards.
It occurred to me then that if I like this sort of character, I should write this sort of character. I've never gone full out and made a House, or Sheldon Cooper -- at least I don't think so -- but then again I rarely find either of these characters unlikable. But this is a product of relatively good writing, and I am nervous to go full out with what I would like to do. Anyways, the thought was then -- I write, for the most part, from the view point of women. Not that I am particularly girly, or that I don't write men, but I am a woman, so it makes sense for me to write women. With this in mind, I started thinking about women in media (TV specifically) and how they interact and if it would be possible to write a woman who was House-like.
There's a line in Studio Sixty about how the world tells women they shouldn't be funny. I can't remember exactly what it was, but Harriet's face when she says it keeps coming back to me. And it occurred to me that I couldn't think of any examples, at the time, for a woman who takes on a role that is generally unlikable because women, as a general rule, are supposed to be eternally pleasant and good.
My initial thought was of Temperance Brennan from Bones, because she is loud, and smart and not afraid to say what she thinks. She is not likable when you first meet her (indeed, she was not the main reason I continued to watch the show, it was the squints). If there was someone who was going to be House-like, it would be Temperance Brennan you would think. But when you look at her, and you watch the show, there are some things that set them apart. Temperance Brennan's story is codified into the societal norms that make it okay for her, as a woman, to be the way she is -- something that doesn't happen for House for six seasons. Example: Temperance is cold because she was abandoned as a child. Her story is one of melting the ice queen, learning to be more feminine and accepting Booth's love.
Compare this with House, who may have had some emotional damage from his family, but in truth, is more plagued by his intelligence than anything else. His story may also be about learning to accept love, but as season six has shown -- Cuddy doesn't love unconditionally, and he ends up pushing her away and being a hero for it. Temperance ends up going through psychosis before she can deal with Booth dating Hannah.
I'm not saying that Temperance Brennan is any more likable as a result of her history -- but there is a sense that her behavior has to be explained, while House just is and you accept him or you don't. And this is the crux of my problem -- Temperance Brennan has to make up for being smart.
This is seen in Kara from Legend of the Seeker as well, where her emotional stuntedness is explained by being tortured as a child. Now I know, there is a certain amount that this has to have happened for her character, but when you see her in the alternate universe where she was never a Mord Sith, she is totally feminine -- her personality is stripped to a bare minimum making the torture the only reason for her crass sensibility in-universe. Again -- its the fact that she had to be tortured to act like that bothers me, because it implies that women can't be as complex as men without having had something terrible happen to them.
Robin from How I Met Your Mother has a tendency towards this, though I wouldn't call her unlikable. Robin's personality, tendency towards guns, her ability to 'bro-out' and everything that makes her less feminine, is attributed to her distant relationship with her father (that and the fact that she is from Canada). Her lack of female like qualities is again codified in a way that males would not have to go through. Men who are distant from their fathers, may have an episode devoted to it (think Wesley from Angel), but it doesn't define their personality.
I found this to be especially annoying when it came to Starbuck, in Battlestar Galactica. She wasn't allowed to be awesome just because she was dealing with losing her entire life, and the variety of things that happened to her in the show, no she had to have a backstory of abuse to explain why she's unfeminine.
Indeed, the only character that came to mind who was unfeminine who had no abusive or terrible past that I could think of, was Faith from Buffy/Angel. But that's cause Joss Whedon is good.
More on that later.
