Watch This! Bye Bye Binks

[dreiser]

And once again, Bianca makes her exit from Pine Valley. I'm a spoiler whore so I'm going to talk more about that and a bit of random ranting in terms of people trying to convert my soap opera allegiances after twenty four years of viewing.



I love hearing from people who somehow know me through fandom. It greatly entertains me and I honestly like talking to other people about nerdy predilections we might share. That being said, I find it slightly annoying when people keep telling me over and over that I simply must convert my longtime obsession based love for All My Children over to Guiding Light because they perceive the latter doing a better lesbian storyline. I mean, it's all well and good, simply spiffy if people believe GL is going to stomp AMC in long term quality of their ship and I won't really argue if they say writing is better on GL because as much as I love AMC I can admit its shit writing faults.

But here's the thing... I don't care. Honestly. I've been watching All My Children and One Life To Live since I was a little girl with my mother who would tape them on our ghetto VCR and we'd watch them together after dinner in a weird bonding ritual. Susan Lucci is the Queen of Soaps to me and I love All My Children endlessly for its bad writing and it's pure insane soapy storylines. The show makes me happy in ways I can't really properly explain. While I love the character of Bianca Montgomery and I super love the fact that they made her a lesbian because she's the irreplaceable golden child of the show's lifeblood diva, Erica Kane, I don't watch AMC purely for Binks. I watch it all year round, I just get much happier when she's on the scene, so to tell me to switch soap opera viewing for random characters I know nothing about is weird to me.

Soaps are all about history. Storylines can go on for decades or more. Check out Marty Saybrooke's story on One Life To Live, that shit has been dragged out forever and it just gets more awesome. I have years and years of attachment to AMC and its characters while I know absolutely none of the background about any of the characters on Guiding Light. I don't even know the name of the town they live in. Why should I care if two of their female characters are hooking up besides the fact I'm a lesbian and I like writing lesbian fanfic? I dunno. It just bugs me people keep telling me how much superior GL is to AMC and then they expect me to immediately start writing Otalia fanfic because of this belief.

Also, I ship the pretty and I'm sorry, I don't find half of that couple pretty so I can't do it. lol. I'm shallow that way.

Enough about the show I don't watch and refuse to watch despite everyone telling me to! Which probably just makes me dig in my heels and refuse to watch even more. I'm stubborn that way. Spoilers about my soap opera true love, AMC, have been crazy as shit. Namely that Reese gets into a bitch fight with Kendall that causes her to go crashing through a glass table which results in blindness. Which I guess is why Bianca returns to Pine Valley. I would hope someone fucking calls her after her sister blinds her former wife. Is it former though? We don't really know if Reese signed that annulment, we never saw it on screen. Huh.

This blindness thing is probably yet another reason people would harp that GL is superior to AMC since it's so fucking soapy and ridiculous but I'm sorry, I giggled with glee when I read this spoiler. It's so great! lol. You just know Reese will get her sight back when Bianca comes to visit with the girls or something. It's bound to happen. Another thing that makes me perversely happy is Thorsten Kaye who plays Zach is still in contract negotiations and I'm praying he doesn't get what he wants and won't resign to extend on the show. I would loveeeeee it if Zach "died" as a result of Ryan's revenge shenanigans and that's what causes Ryan to shift out of his beady eyed anger mode. Plus it could hook up Kendall and Ryan again who have effectively "killed" each others love interests. lol. Nice.

Also, Zach dying an unconfirmed soap opera death would take away a lot of Kendall's anger with him and Bianca about Gabrielle. She would see Gabrielle as part of her dead husband whom she loved instead of proof of his betrayal. This could help to mend Kinks a lot. Although I was encouraged to see Kinks sort of on their way back today. Kendall is really fucking off though. I can't wait for her to find out Zach shot Josh in the head. Would someone tell her that already? It's going to make her go ballistic, it should rock.

All right. I'm done prattling. Watch the clips top to bottom in chronological order.

Comments

[deepthinker16.livejournal.com]

Ah, someone else who agrees with me about GL and not wanting to convert. I could care less about GL.

Completely agreed with this entry and the Reese goes blind spoiler made me giggle, too! It's so soapy and good!

[dreiser.livejournal.com]

I'm so sick of people trying to make me watch GL and using the insult AMC method in their attempts. It just makes me want to watch GL less and honestly, I don't find Crystal Chappell attractive in the least so that doesn't help their efforts to make me write Otalia fanfic.

Blindness spoiler is almost as good as if Reese got amnesia. lol. I swear, they're getting their soapy story worth out of poor TB while she's in town.

[deepthinker16.livejournal.com]

Crystal Chappel doesn't do anything for me either. I don't find her attractive at all. Like you, I love AMC and will admit to its faults in the writing, but I still love the show. GL is the bottom of the barrel and it couldn't hold my attention during the two episodes I tried to watch during my Christmas break from work.

Of course we all know the blindness will lead to the miraculous "I can see you" moment. Typically soapy.

[dreiser.livejournal.com]

I've been forced to sit through GL twice now by two different people and honestly, the way the show is shot bugs me. It looks like it was done by one random dude with a small hand held video camera. I don't like it. I wouldn't call GL bottom of the barrel, to me that's General Hospital which has progressively sucked harder and harder each year that passes, and also because I haven't watched GL enough to judge but I do know I was bored out of my skull watching it.

I will admit there is a nice chemistry between Natalia and Olivia but I know nothing about the show, these characters, or their background together so it's hard for me to just jump in and start shipping them. Particularly since I'm so used to only watching my ABC soaps of AMC and OLTL where I know the show history for twenty years and back.

[murasaki1200.livejournal.com]

Hey, I notice that you have only the Reese scenes from today.
I had to hunt around youtube to find clips to get all the Bianca + Jack, Zach, Kendall, Erica scenes which were kind of important today.
I agree on the GL bit, but more because I don't want to start watching another soap ever, no matter what. I'm seriously getting AMC fatigue as it is, but I have to watch again when Bianca comes back.
Actually this whole experience watching a soap reminds me of why I stopped reading comics after reading them all my life and through grad school. One day, I got fed up that comics are all about build up and teasing without payoff, because if there was a payoff, the story couldn't continue. That's what's so great about fanfic. It's all about the payoff part of the story.

I don't know about the blindness thing. I guess it's so silly. It *is* kind of funny. But it would be really unsatisfying if just because she's blind, everything got magically fixed between her and Bianca. Although maybe that would be just as well because that would mean they'll divorce again for sure very soon and then the torture can stop. Reese can go find someone who has a family she can handle, and Binks can find someone with more self awareness.

[jetgirl78.livejournal.com]

This blindness thing is probably yet another reason people would harp that GL is superior to AMC since it's so fucking soapy and ridiculous but I'm sorry, I giggled with glee when I read this spoiler. It's so great! lol.

Personally, I LOVE that they are going to blind her. Can't wait to see how TB plays it. I love the fucking soapy shit that is happening to her character. It is so ridiculous, but I love my soaps with heaping spoonfuls of ridiculous. Now, if they just reveal Reese as a lost Chandler.. that would make my life complete.

I agree with your devotion to a soap because of the history. That's why I love this genre (and the reason most of my friends loathe it). I love to really get how insane the Marty storyline is you have to know what went down in 1993.

I've been watching GL off and on since 1992, so I can watch that storyline with some interest. I've wanted to get into Young and the Restless because of Liz's role, but I find it almost impossible because Y&R was never on my soap viewing list. And like you said, I just don't care about the Abbotts and probably never will.

[dreiser.livejournal.com]

See, I can watch Y&R because I watched it since the late 90's on and off, just like you did with GL. I've been watching AMC religiously and then OLTL to a lesser extent since I was a little girl. Soaps are so based in background that I really don't get it when people can just jump in for a single storyline. I would be confused as fuck and when I was forced to watch GL those two times I was confused as hell and pretty bored.

I had to do a bit of venting on my LJ just because it feels like suddenly AMC is the redheaded stepchild of lesbian daytime soap storylines thanks to the sudden Otalia phenomena. It's all good if people love GL and think it's better than AMC but don't force that belief on me. lol. I just get cranky.

The Marty storyline is batshit when you consider her gang rape with Todd. But it's why I love soaps and honestly, OLTL is so much better than AMC these days. This thing with David Vickers being Rex's dad is cracking me up. I love David Vickers so.

[allaine77.livejournal.com]

I'll agree that "ridiculous writing" isn't a reason to stop watching AMC, because anyone who starts watching a soap opera for writing grounded in reality is delusional. Even if sometimes the "ridiculous" becomes the "ludicrous". (I once argued with my mother for a month that Janet Green could not possibly have killed Will Cortlandt because all nine planets and a few thousand stars would have to have aligned for her to pull it off. And of course . . . )

For me, I stopped watching AMC because the show made me so ANGRY. I always felt like AMC was trying to see how far they could push their fans before they broke. They killed my favorite characters, annihilated my favorite couples, introduced horrible new characters, brought back horrible old ones - and really, when characters witness two other people at the worst possible moment for the SEVEN HUNDREDTH TIME, I lose patience.

But I wouldn't have gone running off to GL if they'd had this Otalia pairing back then. If I'd started watching a new soap, it would have been OLTL, and I didn't. I was just burned out on soaps after 10+ years.

Still, I will always miss the AMC of the mid-90s to early-00s (Bianca kisses Lena, the first Kendall, the SECOND Kendall, Greenlee/Leo, Adam and Tad throwing panties at each other, Janet hires an actor to be her ex, Trevor/Natalie as castaways, little girl Amanda, Edmund comes to his own funeral, Dmitri, Palmer, David/Anna, Jack/Erica, Stewart/Marian, Hayley catches Alec with Arlene, Noah/Julia, Laurel dies, Vanessa dies).

Sincerely, Allaine

[dreiser.livejournal.com]

All soaps have issues, I think they all love to hurt their fans. I think I just don't have that much attachment to the shows and the characters I love so it never bugs me to see them perpetually jerked around. I think that's the nature of the show itself. Getting rid of Zach would do a lot to improve the current AMC landscape, imho.

[xanjames.livejournal.com]

When Zach was just staring at Bianca yesterday, I wanted to reach through the t.v. screen and strangle him. "And now, the winner for best acting by a wooden plank...Thorsten Kaye!" Yup, hope the impasse becomes permanent.

I think the spoiler about Reese is HILARIOUS but since I don't care about her character or her "journey", I'm skipping until Bianca's return.

And I think the time has come for Eden to decide what she wants to do: be on or be gone and let them recast. Bianca has never driven her own plots; in a lot of ways, she is treated as a social issue rather than a character. But if the character were on for a couple of years, there might be a chance of not seeing the utter drivel that's been passed off as "groundbreaking storyline" for three of the last four months.
Absolute props to her for representing for the last eight years, though--without her there would be no Otalia.

[dreiser.livejournal.com]

I guess... but I since I'm sick of hearing about Otalia I wouldn't mind them going away. lol. I know I'm supposed to be all great, yay, more lesbians on tv since I am one but I'm so sick of hearing about that ship. I'm at the point where I see Otalia or GL on my friendslist and I just scroll quick as I can past that entry.

Here's my thing. Nothing that calls itself groundbreaking is groundbreaking and I think it's an overused word and I wish people would stop applying it to almost every single gay and lesbian storyline that appearances on a lot of shows. Why can't it just be a fucking story? I dunno.

At this point I'm tired of ER coming and coming for such a short amount of time. I either want her to resign for a longer period or just allow a recast.

[xanjames.livejournal.com]

I too don't give two damns about Otalia and I used to watch GL and so could probably drop-in and get caught up if I wanted to. Don't want to.

And on the Breese board at one time, people were scratching their heads because the mod from Tamara Obscura was championing a Zeese storyline. "But, but, she's a lesbian...how can she be fangirling a straight pairing?" Good to know the ONLY thing I can watch is a lesbian couple--must've missed the memo.

Yep, Eden needs to get nabbed by some discerning nighttime show and cut AMC loose.

[dreiser.livejournal.com]

I think that's mostly why the Otalia conversion people bug me. They don't seem to get I watch AMC all year long and honestly, my favorite couple on the show is (gasp shock surprise) A-Team of Aidan and Annie. The straights! lol. I read tons of shoujo manga and almost all of them are heterosexual romance too. I had no idea I was only supposed to be a nerdy romance geek about lesbian couples. Yeesh.

By the same shocking vein, just because it's a lesbian couple and a lesbian storyline isn't enough for me to instantly become interested in it. I hate the idea that I somehow have to like it because I'm a lesbian myself. That's just retarded.

I'd actually prefer Eden to just renew long term on AMC. She's been away from that shoe permanently for a long time and all we really got from it is Imaginary Bitches which is great but I don't have a lot of hope she'd get a nice network primetime gig. I dunno, it would be great if she did but I suspect if she doesn't renew on AMC she'll do S2 for Imaginary Bitches and I won't see much else from her. Though to be fair, I don't stalk ER's career like I do Dina Meyer's who is on Burn Notice this week.

[xanjames.livejournal.com]

Well, YEAH, I'd love for Eden to sign on for a couple years. In this economy, maybe she will but I'm not holding my breath.