Angel and Gunn

[beccaelizabeth]

The more I watch the more frustrated I get about Gunn's story. He starts out as a leader, protecting homeless kids, fighting the good fight together, facing vampires and... well, dying, sometimes, but also winning some, which is as good as it gets with no super powers or backup. er, or with them, mortality being what it is.

Then Angel comes along and it's like Gunn loses all his... everything. Leadership abilities. Friends. Connections. And in character you can say he lost heart after his sister died and wanted to go be a follower for a bit, but on a writer level, Gunn actively sought out white guys to call boss of him, because writer says so.

And it diminishes him and what he and his people can do. And it makes no damn sense.

The worst bit is the hotel. I don't know what the writers were thinking, maybe they just wanted a pretty reception desk and didn't think it through. But you've got Angel with his shiny new hotel of his very own, and you've got Gunn and his homeless friends, and I cannot think of a single solitary reason those two things would not go together and spell bigger crew. Anne and her lot even, they need a roof or three. Angel can help out at her shelter but not offer his own? It takes all the way up to Jasmine to have the hotel populated and then it's somehow evil. Why? What were they thinking?

Because what it looks like is that the Powers put this big shiny in Angel's path and he didn't even notice the massively obvious because he was too busy thinking how cool it would be once he'd killed the right people.

But I don't know if the writers thought that far or just... didn't have a clue what they were doing to Gunn.

Ugh.



My endless MarySue get to sleep story has a hotel full of hunters who train in the hotel and spread the knowledge from Wesley's library. Watchers: LA with less class bullshit or hereditary privilege.

Why did that never happen?

Comments

[executrix]

FWIW, in Blakes7 they have this fuckoff huge spaceship and hardly anybody in it, and it's not because they deliberately avoided offering shelter to poor people of color, but because it's really hard to write a show with good, meaty roles for more than about four or five people.

[beccaelizabeth]

yes.
and I have been frustrated about that for even longer.

the Enterprise manages pretty much fine.

[executrix]

I hope there is never a B7 reboot because they'd ruin it, but one thing that would help if Liberator was a wonderful BUT VERY SMALL ship so they couldn't fit in a lot of people. Although it would be cool in a different way if Blake had to content with a terrible spaceship and then Avon got a marvelous one (and probably still screwed everything into the ground).

[jesuswasbatman]

My personal theory is that Shawn Ryan (who wrote the early Gunn episodes) was the only Angel writer who felt confident in writing working-class black characters, and after he left to do The Shield the other writers were frightened to write anything about Gunn's original friends in case they ended up being racist. (As a result of which, they ended up being racist in a different way.)

[restfield]

Oh, yes, Gunn suddenly leaving everything to become Angel's sidekick never made any sense to me, too. They even ditched Cordelia/Gunn romance opportunity, which could given some motivation to the whole weirdness. It would be lame motivation, but it would be at least some motivation.

And the hotel thing makes AI team look so bad, especially after the appearance of Anne. They have so many opportunities to help people, but they continue to interpret helping as killing baddies. Which raises a question - do they actually want to help people, or they just like killing things?

[baronjanus]

Gunn needs to go hang out with Sam and Rhodey. Discuss their annoying sidekick friend/boyfriend and his hair choices. Kick ass.