#stan tv

I was up all night watching #VeronicaMars and just woke up after a few hours sleep and I have some thoughts that have been processing about everything I saw last night.

While I appreciate the fact that we the fans received another season of a show we love, with a main character we love, I really feel that the paternalistic attitude towards the story has left me raw and shaken. We were told that we "needed" this - even if we didn't "want" it.  No matter how Noir the story, I reject the idea that the character (or us) “needed” to go through more trauma to emerge on the other side a more enlightened person.  And once again, Veronica is tormented for the sake of this very male perception that through pain, we learn who we are.

The fact of the matter is, it all felt false - another female character written under the male gaze - that tried too much and fell too short and if anything felt like this was an attempt to pull the character back from the predominately female story telling of fanfic. Veronica has always been a complicated character - often told as the “male” to Logan’s “emotional female” dynamic and this season highlighted that thought.  Veronica is a very emotional person, who feels very deeply, and covers for those feelings because she doesn’t know how to deal.  Making her hit rock-bottom to climb her way out is just another way to torture a female character with no real payoff for anyone - the character or the audience.

Because the truth of the matter is there was another, more interesting way of telling this story. But instead of taking the long way around and delving into the deep dark reasons why Veronica is the way she is, we got a caricature of a person in 8 ep, only brushing the surface. I wish they had more episodes to work with.  I wish they had extended this to give us a reason to look towards a season five.  I wish for a lot of things for this character rather than have her lose another person she loved for the sake of “storytelling.”

And really, at this point, I don't know if I want to know what happens to Veronica now, cut loose from everything and everyone, because it doesn't feel like Veronica's rock bottom, but the *show's* rock bottom.