The thing with writing for TV is that you do have to exercise care not to drive away huge chunks of your viewership, which means going easy on plotlines that fall outside the general premise of your show.
I understand that a procedural's "crime of the week" setup involves sacrificing major character subplots, and that's why I feel a sense of trepidation if they decide to pick up the male rape storyline for Hotch.
They screwed up Reid's drug addiction and PTSD storyline; more specific to Hotch, they dropped the bombshell in "Natural Born Killers" way back in Season 1 that Hotch had an abusive childhood, and then... not just nothing, but confusing contradictions that have spawned so many theories but no proper answers.
CSI Miami had a one-off episode about a male victim who was raped, but it is completely different to have a main character experience rape and then not deal squarely with the consequences, uncomfortable and possibly "taboo" as that may be for fear of audience alienation. So if CM is thinking about playing it straight to preserve the vast majority of their squickable (non-fannish) viewers, then I'd rather they not open a controversial issue and then ignore it or make it magically go away. It simply does not do justice to something as grave and serious as rape.
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momijizukamori
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Date: Sep. 26th, 2009 05:45 am (UTC)I understand that a procedural's "crime of the week" setup involves sacrificing major character subplots, and that's why I feel a sense of trepidation if they decide to pick up the male rape storyline for Hotch.
They screwed up Reid's drug addiction and PTSD storyline; more specific to Hotch, they dropped the bombshell in "Natural Born Killers" way back in Season 1 that Hotch had an abusive childhood, and then... not just nothing, but confusing contradictions that have spawned so many theories but no proper answers.
CSI Miami had a one-off episode about a male victim who was raped, but it is completely different to have a main character experience rape and then not deal squarely with the consequences, uncomfortable and possibly "taboo" as that may be for fear of audience alienation. So if CM is thinking about playing it straight to preserve the vast majority of their squickable (non-fannish) viewers, then I'd rather they not open a controversial issue and then ignore it or make it magically go away. It simply does not do justice to something as grave and serious as rape.