Week of Awesome Ladies -- Day 5
Sep. 16th, 2011 10:14 amStill playing catch-up...
Kate is a tough one. She's an uncomfortable character -- she's raw, she's angry, she gets humiliated (most frequently by her father), she's addicted to her own pain. This is all stuff that happens routinely with male characters and it tends not to bother us. We (the collective 'we') even celebrate it. It's angst! It's man-pain! Kate is, at the core, Angel's mirror -- at least through the end of Season 2. But for whatever reason it's a more difficult story prospect when the character is a woman, particularly someone a little bit grating like Kate. I love her for her gruffness, her awkwardness, but can see why it doesn't work for everyone.
In fairness, though, I do think some of the reason audiences didn't quite respond to her is because of the writing. When her original character arc was axed, I think the writers had to scramble to figure out exactly what they wanted to do with her -- and never quite got her story back to where it needed to be.
That said, there's an AU in my head where Corrupt happened as originally written and Kate gets her arc -- and it's pretty awesome.
There's also a AU in my head where she comes back to L.A. in Season 3, post-Sleep Tight, just in time to meet up with Wesley before he hits rock bottom. I've always wanted to finish it and writing about her this week made me open it up and give it a hard look for the first time in a long while. So here's a bit from the beginning of the fic. This scene is mostly set-up for the action to come, but I think it fits the female-focused theme of![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
womenlovefest nicely.
From Dark Waters (Alternate Season 3) -- a scene in which Kate Lockley meets her LAPD 'replacement.'
( 'Well, it’s nice to know they had a spare.' )
Kate is a tough one. She's an uncomfortable character -- she's raw, she's angry, she gets humiliated (most frequently by her father), she's addicted to her own pain. This is all stuff that happens routinely with male characters and it tends not to bother us. We (the collective 'we') even celebrate it. It's angst! It's man-pain! Kate is, at the core, Angel's mirror -- at least through the end of Season 2. But for whatever reason it's a more difficult story prospect when the character is a woman, particularly someone a little bit grating like Kate. I love her for her gruffness, her awkwardness, but can see why it doesn't work for everyone.
In fairness, though, I do think some of the reason audiences didn't quite respond to her is because of the writing. When her original character arc was axed, I think the writers had to scramble to figure out exactly what they wanted to do with her -- and never quite got her story back to where it needed to be.
That said, there's an AU in my head where Corrupt happened as originally written and Kate gets her arc -- and it's pretty awesome.
There's also a AU in my head where she comes back to L.A. in Season 3, post-Sleep Tight, just in time to meet up with Wesley before he hits rock bottom. I've always wanted to finish it and writing about her this week made me open it up and give it a hard look for the first time in a long while. So here's a bit from the beginning of the fic. This scene is mostly set-up for the action to come, but I think it fits the female-focused theme of
womenlovefest nicely.From Dark Waters (Alternate Season 3) -- a scene in which Kate Lockley meets her LAPD 'replacement.'
( 'Well, it’s nice to know they had a spare.' )