Confessions of a Hawthorne Fangirl

Before his death earlier this year, Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant completed his final project: the spin-off novel Red Dwarf: Titan.

Now, Grant's co-author Andrew Marshall has opened up about his hopes for the beloved band of comedy characters as they return in the alternate reality novel – including a more fleshed out Dave Lister (who was played by Craig Charles in the TV series), and more developed female characters.

"Rob wanted Lister to show a little bit more maturity by the end than we usually see, which I think makes an interesting part," Marshall explained to Radio Times. "I was very interested in showing there's a tiny speck of something in Rimmer that he might just be saveable."

He added that Grant "was very keen – as was I – to develop the female characters a little bit more".

"So Kochanski has a much, much bigger role in this, and there's also a couple of other new female characters for you to have a look at," he continued.

"So that's that was quite interesting, and certainly creating a sort of nemesis/weird romance character for Rimmer was also an interesting challenge, and you'll see how we got around that."

Asked whether the show needed updating for a modern audience, Marshall added: "Yeah, it did need updating a little bit. That's the way we looked at it, anyway. It's just bringing it more into line with how things are these days, but it was very interesting.

Well at least until my great grandma basically turned his still into an IED with some gunpowder and stuff

The cops pretty much let her get off scott free because she played the role of the widow who was so shocked that her husband was involved with something so horrible as moonshining that they felt pity towards her when she had literally just blown her husband up with a homemade bomb

My great-grandparents were straight off the boat from Italy, so this happened somewhere in the 1920s.

Now, my great-grandfather, a hard man himself, lived with my great-grandmother and their 5 (living) kids. The sixth died in a tragic accident. In any case, in the wake of this sixth kid dying (a daughter who was 5 or 6 at the time), he and my great-grandmother took in his then-niece. See, his brother was an abusive alcoholic whose wife had “gone missing” and he was incapable of taking care of his 5 year-old daughter. 

My great-grandparents, seeing this shit-show, and possibly having doubts about what happened with the wife, offered to take in his daughter for a little while until my great-grandfather’s brother got back on his feet. When the daughter showed up, she was undernourished, had rickets, and was afraid of everything.

A couple of months, and the kid began to flourish. 

And my great-grandmother adored her. Doted on her. And wanted to keep her. And my great-grandfather, hard man that he was, couldn’t find it in him to say no. So he asks his brother to make the temporary arrangement more permanent.

Nope, says my great-grandfather’s brother. He wanted his daughter back. Tough shit.

So, my great-grandfather offers to pay him. Payment accepted. His brother fucks off for awhile. 

Then he runs out of money and comes back for another taste. More money, or he takes the kid.

My great-grandfather agrees to meet and talk terms.

And wouldn’t you know!

While they were walking up to his brother’s third-floor tenement apartment to negotiate, his brother tragically falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. Declared dead at the scene.

The cops didn’t question too closely because, well, it was obvious the dude was drunk when he fell down the stairs. They could smell it! And my great-grandfather was soooo traumatized seeing his brother dead like that. Wailed about his poor, now fatherless niece, and swearing by the Virgin Mary that he and his wife will raise her up like their very own to be a good Catholic girl.

And then he went home.

And nothing more was said about the dead brother. And said niece became said “baby of the family” and apple of her new-mother’s eye.

But, see, since we knew my great-grandfather, we all pretty much knew the truth of the matter without it being said.

To this day, even down to my generation, we say amongst ourselves when recounting family history that, well, Auntie’s birth daddy fell down the stairs *wink* and that’s how we all got ourselves an Auntie who’s easily the best cook in the family.

(I’ve got a copy of all her delicious recipes.) 

The one weird thing that I do, though, is that I set my alarm for 5:15 a.m. to take my dose, that way nothing I eat will interfere with the medication (I go back to bed after taking my pill and get up normally around 6:30 .am., take my vitamins around 7 a.m., and eat breakfast around 8 a.m.). My doctor thinks it’s flat-out weird, but she agrees it’s a smart work-around because there’s a lot of *normal* things that can interfere with absorption if you do them (or drink them or eat them) within 1 to 2 hours of taking your meds.

Crazy as this sounds (and I’m sure you’ve tried this), maybe alter the time you take your pill? Alternating doses seems somewhat dangerous to me, because it messes with the steady state necessary to control the condition.

Read this to others.

PAGET: Frankie and Jeff were supposed to be romantically involved.

ME: 🤨

PAGET: But Joel, you put the kibosh on that.

ME: 🙂

JOEL: True. I asked.

ME: 😌

PAGET: And I wouldn’t want to mess with the Annie thing. I LIKE the Annie thing.

Me (then):  C’mon. There’s NO WAY they would do something like that. Do you know how shitty that would be? A last-minute swoop in from a new character rather than go with the pairing they’ve been teasing for six fuckin’ years?

I think the issue is that Joel had a kind of character-actress conflict. On the one hand, Annie is 18. On the other, Alison very much is not, and is a shitload more comfortable playing romantic than Gillian (not a slam against Gillian...she has come out and said she is hella uncomfortable doing any kind of kissing/romance and was even more so at the start of Community).

It also doesn’t help that sometimes when things would get tremendously weird on-set (which according to the cast happened all.the.damn.time because of their crazy-ass shooting schedule), Alison and Joel would kick back, pretend they were a married couple, and that they were hosing an out-of-control dinner party. (This was also recently revealed.)

I think Joel has kinda-sorta changed his mind on the whole Jeff/Annie thing, in part because “Annie” would be in her late 20s in-universe. Also, because Joel is very much a “give the people what they want” kind of guy, and he knows Jeff/Annie is easily the second most popular pairing after Troy and Abed.

PAGET: Frankie and Jeff were supposed to be romantically involved.

ME: 🤨

PAGET: But Joel, you put the kibosh on that.

ME: 🙂

JOEL: True. I asked.

ME: 😌

PAGET: And I wouldn’t want to mess with the Annie thing. I LIKE the Annie thing.

Me (then):  C’mon. There’s NO WAY they would do something like that. Do you know how shitty that would be? A last-minute swoop in from a new character rather than go with the pairing they’ve been teasing for six fuckin’ years?

I think Dan Harmon is not big on romance in general, he went with J/A because they had the best romantic chemistry out of everyone and that kept people interested - I’m also fine with the way the ended them in S6 and I also understand why show runners (ever afraid of the moonlighting curse) don’t want to commit to getting will-they-won’t-they couples ever properly together (I mean, Chris Carter arguably blew the entire latter seasons of X-Files on just not committing to a committed Mulder/Scully pairing with ended up being downright comical because the story went against everything that these characters had grown into). 

But what I don’t get and what annoys me, is playing audiences for fools. Harmon is trying to cover his bases retroactively in that interview to keep the pearl-clutchers appeased while still reaping the views and the “revenue” from using J/A as a main romantic focus of the show. And even that I understand - but he could just be honest about it. That would make the pearl-clutchers angry tho, so here we are. With people who enjoy the pairing (which, and you’re the best example) aren’t just juvenile “shipper”-girls, getting the boot and a bad rep. 

I’m tired of that thing in particular but Harmon’s far from the only creator who operates this way - putting blame on largely female fan-groups who care about the human interactions and relationships of the characters for being “too invested”, while simultaneously joyfully taking their money and enthusiasm and catering outside of the material to the largely male audience members who complain loudly about everything else, assuring them that the dumb relationship-stuff is useless anyway. Only it’s not because obviously, it works. Shippers make or break shows, shippers help save shows. If all the “dumb little girls” stopped watching and interacting and tweeting and being invested, many, many shows never make it longer than a season. That’s why Britta exists. They put a will-they-won’t-they couple in the PILOT because it works. The least they could do is respect the people who are invested in things they put in the show to make it successful and not trash them for it. Or essential call all of them “young women who fantasise about older men”.

If you’re new to Community fandom, welcome to what us veterans call “Dan Harmon’s Lucy-and-the-Football Move.”

(By the way, I predicted it would go down like this in this post here.)

Harmon, as is tradition, goes around and backhands Jeff/Annie shippers in the lead up to and during production of a new season (or possibly movie). And then, when future media/seasons/income is on-the-line, he’ll start whispering sweet nothings and swearing up and down that Jeff and Annie are in love and destined to be together “in the future.” Just stay tuned, kiddoes!

Unless it’s S6. In which case he’ll pretend it was all in our heads all season long, to the point of blocking people from social media asking, “WtH, dude! This goes against what you said the S5 finale episode was about!” Until the end of of S6, where we’re right back where we started to the point that Jeff/Annie dominates the series finale!

It’s maddening!

I have always said, from the time I started watching Community when S3 was airing on NBC through to today that Jeff and Annie was not the story Dan wanted to tell. Jeff and Annie was the thing he wanted to play with as a side bit of storytelling to throw a wrench in the romantic story he really wanted to tell, and then when it became popular, felt he couldn’t drop it because he was afraid of losing almost half his audience.

The “romantic” story Dan wanted to tell was “two narcissists colliding and falling backwards into love.” Jeff/Britta was Dan’s aim, as stated in the Pilot, and was always going to be endgame in his head. There’s just one problem:  Most of the audience haaaaaaaaated Jeff/Britta.

Now, granted, there have been some Jeff/Britta like couples in cult sitcoms in smaller venues (”You’re the Worst” formerly on FX and “Love” ironically starring GIllian Jacobs as a more realistic take on Britta on Netflix), but in order to make that couple work, you have to commit to the idea that these fucked up people are terrible to others, selfish as hell, and totally deserve each other because they’re such trainwrecks that they’d be a curse for anyone else who tried to love those pieces of shit.

Which, in the end, Dan can’t commit to. In a weird way, Dan isn’t misanthropic enough (or at least he lacks the sensibility) to write those characters when they are played by flesh-and-blood human beings. Cartoons he can, but he can’t seem to do it when it involves real actors, especially if those actors are people he actually likes. He can’t help but give them redeeming qualities. He can’t help but write characters where you think: “You know, maybe these two are a bad romantic match and they should go be with someone who makes them actual better people and who actually loves them.”

In the end, he liked Jeff and Britta too much to make them a poisonous couple. I mean, to the point that he literally admitted, on screen, by putting words into other characters’ mouths that Jeff and Britta together were toxic and spread that toxicity out to others.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah!

The point is, Dan never, ever wanted to really explore Jeff and Annie in a relationship, which is why he avoided it mightily even as he kept desperately trying to breathe life into his original endgame couple all the way up until the end of S5.

• abed is orpheus

• troy is eurydice

• annie is persephone

• jeff is hades

• shirley is hermes

• britta clones herself and she’s all three of the fates

(if u know how the myth ends u can draw parallels btwn that and the ending of geothermal escapism :^))

Annie is Hades (she grabbed Jeff in full view of witnesses and dragged him down into the underworld back in Debate 109) and Jeff was Persephone (you know, as the grabee kissed against his will).

Oh! And then there’s the traditional offering of food in the Underworld when it’s just the two of them. Annie (Hades) offers Jeff (Persophone) a quick kiss on the lips. And Jeff turns around and eats Annie’s face in response. Which ends up haunting both of them to a greater or lesser degree for the next five damn years.

I think their personalities more fit with the traditional Hades/Persephone dynamic:  Annie pretty much never wavers once she decides what the rules are and that she should be in charge of enforcing them (Hades). In fact, at the end of the series she’s going to the FBI as an intern. It doesn’t get more law enforce-ish than that.

Jeff, both personality-wise and as a defense attorney, is always looking at ways to creatively get around or enforce the laws (if you look at Greek mythology, Persephone is the one who is always doing this, whether it’s coming up with creative punishments, or giving people a pass on them through creative interpretation of the rules). Plus, he escapes Annie’s circle of influence (Greendale) every summer, while Annie is no doubt preparing for her return to Greendale all summer.

Troy and Abed got big reactions so they downplayed the Troy/Pierce dynamic and we got TroBed. 

Jeff and Annie really popped in episode 6, so they tested the waters with Debate 109, it got positive reactions, and J/A became central to the show. 

Britta was consistently unpopular until they started playing her up as kind of an awkward fuck up rather than trapping her in the stereotypical woman-in-a-sitcom role where she just lectured everyone for being funny.

It was around the early-midpoint of the season that these shifts started happening and its not a coincidence that people pretty commonly say episodes 7-9 are where the show gets good. 

Honestly in its first 5 or 6 episodes, Community is good, but its kind of generic and bland. Its not that different from Outsourced or any of the other sitcoms at the time that would last a year or so and then fade away. The changes made to its characters and their relationships are what propelled it to the heights it eventually reached. 

1)  Dan admits in the commentary for pilot that Britta as a character literally had no motivation. She was nothing more than “the prize.” That was her whole purpose. She didn’t even have a motivation. She had no character. And worse...Dan even to this day admits that he doesn’t know if Britta believed Jeff’s lie about him being a Spanish tutor.

To give you an idea how bad this is (considering that Britta was originally supposed to be the female lead of the ensemble):  Annie and Shirley actually had more character motivation and the writers’ room knew their motivations while writing the pilot while Britta was nothing more than a plot point. In fact, Dan says in the commentary for the pilot that Annie was originally set up to be Jeff’s antagonist for the series, which you can clearly see in the pilot and the first couple of episodes.

2) It was the women in the writers’ room who were behind the change in Britta’s character in mid-season one and beyond. The *HATED* Britta. They told Dan that if they knew Britta as she existed in the first half of season one in real life,they would avoid the shit out of her. They were the ones that made her a kind of loveable loser.

3) For anyone who things Britta got dumbed down or turned into a slacktivist fake, clearly didn’t watch the second episode where Britta flat out admits she’s a slacktivist fake who often talks out of her ass. Imagine the second episode of the series in Season 3 where people say Britta is the most flanderized. Do you think that would be all that out of place in Season 3? Now take “Science of Illusion” (the one where Britta decides to play a practical joke on Chang and it spirals out of control) from Season 1 and put it in Season 3. It’s a perfect fit! What I’m saying is, if either one of these Season 1 episodes were filmed and aired in Season 3 instead, people would be claiming that Dan was Britta-bashing.