#arrow criticism

[littlemissonewhoisall]

[so-caffeinated]

What would your ideal season of Arrow be like?

Consistent. 

Like that’s the short answer, obviously, but the lack of consistency is my biggest pet peeve. And I mean that in every way. Respect for the established history of the characters and show is key (aka Felicity remains allergic to nuts). Actions should be dictated by characters, not by the desired outcome of the writers, as often feels the case. Emotional beats need to be scattered throughout. Action, fighting, danger, plot… all of that needs to come back to personal connections on a regular basis. I care more about what’s happening to a character if I see how it’s effecting the people around them and how they interact. 

I’m all for a big bad who arcs across the season, but it seems that they frequently rely on a name and a mask to carry them through rather than making the villain have depth (exceptions being Prometheus, to a point, and - back in season two, anyhow - Slade). I strongly prefer when the show is grounded in reality, too. Damian Darhk’s powers were a big miss, IMO, and his character felt like a cliche from start to finish (in spite of fantastic acting).  

This is where things are gonna get more negative. I wanna emphasize this is my opinion and where I’m at with the show right now. Some people are surely going to disagree with me about most of the points on here. I don’t really care to debate them. But it ties in directly to the question I was asked and this is how I see things right now. 

There remains for me, at this point, a cringe factor with the show that harkens back to the influence of Kreisberg and Guggenheim - and yes I am painting them with the same brush because of a litany of comments made by Guggenheim (compiled by @geneeste). There are strokes of good fortune (an IT girl) and some brilliant characters (Felicity) with tremendous actors (EBR, Amell, Ramsey) who keep me engaged with tangible chemistry (OTA). However, too frequently there are serious issues brushed across that are swept under the rug. Gun violence. Nyssa and Oliver’s forced marriage. Felicity’s paralysis. Ray (definitely, absolutely, no matter what Guggenheim says) stalking Felicity. The reintroduction of Felicity’s father to her life and revelation it was her mother who forced him out. The erasure of Baby Sara. All of the massive amounts of psychological trauma inflicted on Thea by Malcolm…

The list could go on forever, but all of these elements are things that they glazed over and brushed aside rather than dealing with in a realistic way. While the list could surely include more, the ones that came to mind immediately all had to do with problems faced by women. And I think it’s evident at this point that women are not something the EPs care about or even understand. It’s left these character consistently short-changed and that’s significantly impacted my enjoyment (and viewership) of the show. 

So my ideal season, I suppose, would be one with Beth Schwartz and Sarah Tarkoff at the helm along with Wendy Mericle. It would balance an empathetic, grounded villain with emotionally bonded characters who act in ways that always feel true to who they are and follows through on the impact of trials that the characters undergo. 

That’s a season of Arrow that I’d surely love to see. 

[therewas-a-girl]

i think what bothers me about this whole spin arrow is taking with oliver and felicity is that, despite how cute they look, and they do, 1 - i feel like this is a rehash of something old, the way arrow does the so-called parallels. aka by literally doing over what they did once before that seemed to work. and therefore making it seem like they have no idea how to come up with newness when it comes to relationships.

and 2 - that they have spun this ride so many times, and each and every time all the decisions, all the cards, all the agency has always been in oliver’s hands. and felicity is just ... y’know, there. looking really lovely. all her decisions feel like reactions. from the pot of what i know is hazy memory of all that has happened before, it seems to me like all the time since s3 she has had zero initiative. they don't seem to decide anything together. it’s oliver making decisions and felicity scrambling to catch up when the narrative lets her, or making her to be stupid/cruel/insensitive when it needs her away. 

the more i think of it the more it seems to me like she has no internal logic of her own, as a character (from the writers pop i mean). her internal logic is ‘what does oliver’s story need now’ 

[habibialkaysani]

Hey so I saw in the ask meme that you did you said you hated the olicity argus hospital scene. I also had problems with it and when I see people say that they don't like it I'm curious if it's for the same reasons. Can you explain why you didn't like it?

hey anon. sorry it took me a while to get to this. I wanted to do this answer justice but to be quite honest it’s kind of exhausting just thinking about my reasons for disliking that scene. to put it simply - what it boils down to is that felicity shouldn’t have had to take back the (very valid) reason why she broke up with oliver. her saying “I get it now” is a very poorly written attempt to retcon what happened in s4b. he lied to her. not once but repeatedly, for a prolonged period of time, and he proposed to her and even pushed forward the date of the wedding because he wanted to marry her more than he wanted her to know the truth. he could have said that he had to keep something from her and he couldn’t say what it was, and at least maybe then she wouldn’t have been led into wanting to marry him. what bothers me is less the lie itself (that in itself was poorly written too) and more everything oliver did in spite of that lie. 

and the thing is. I don’t mind oliver most of the time. I chalk up his behaviour around laurel to shitty writing. I chalk up his actions in this shitty storyline to the same thing. and I think if the original timeline was restored and felicity found out about william from barry early on, and she confronted him and they had it out there, it would have culminated in something very different because he only hid it from her for a few days at most. but in the timeline that exists now, he kept something from her and proposed to her in spite of it. and that’s what bothers me. 

and I get it. look, I know oliver’s been through a lot of trauma and his time on the island has made him a damaged person. and some people argue that the storyline and that hospital scene was the show’s way of indicating that felicity was more accepting of said trauma. but when her character - and oliver’s - was assassinated in the process, it just doesn’t work. add to that the fact that the word ptsd has never been mentioned on the show (bar one time, to which ollie’s response was “I’m not crazy”) and they had a wealth of missed opportunities to explore his ptsd recovery in season 4 and I just think the show missed the mark when it came to exploring oliver and felicity’s characters in the end of that episode. and that’s a shame because I enjoyed the majority of it. 

I hope that all makes sense. thanks for asking, anon, and apologies for getting to this later than expected.

[punchdrunkdoc]

Mini Twitter-rant

So you may have seen the comments Marc apparently made at Wondercon this weekend:

These pissed me off. And sparked a mini twitter rant this morning, which I thought I would share with you:

[geneeste]

Why Susan Williams is a Terrible Representation of Journalists (with Sources!)

So this (rather funny) post is going around, and I though it might be helpful (and cathartic!) to explain why people (read: citizens and actual journalists) are so annoyed with Susan’s characterization as a “professional” “journalist.”

A little background on me: I was a journalist for about 4-5 years and a public information officer for 2-3 before I went into my current field. I wasn’t a government/current affairs reporter like Susan; I was a business journalist for most of my career, although I would argue that business journalists need a firmer grasp of ethical reporting for obvious reasons (lots of money and influence involved in that game).

Anyway - I can’t believe I’m going into this kind of rant over a fictional character on a TV show, but LET’S DO IT ANYWAY.

So here’s the main three complaints most people have regarding Susan:

She has a personal and romantic relationship with a public figure on whom she’s reporting;

She’s paid for interviews/in exchange for information;

She’s broken a confidential relationship with a source.

Based on my own research (which I’m happy to give you if you’re interested!), there are four basic and overarching standards that reporters of all kinds try to follow:

The media serves the public interest.

The media has an obligation to the truth.

The media should commit to an objective method of reporting.

The media should maintain its professional independence.

Now obviously these standards can be explained in way more detail (and should be), but for our purposes and simplicity’s sake, these are the main ethical standards through which we’re going to evaluate Susan. Here we go!

Alrighty, starting with number one: Susan has a romantic relationship with someone she’s supposed to be reporting on.

Yes, this particular point is going to be way longer than the others, because it just boggles my mind that the show decided that Susan could sleep with Oliver while reporting on him, and then portray her firing as a disservice to her. No. No no no.

This one violates basically every ethical journalism standard we’ve listed, but especially the standards on objectivity and professional independence. And to be clear, when we’re talking about objectivity, we’re not meaning that Susan can’t have informed thoughts or opinions about Oliver or the mayor’s office - it is impossible for a reporter to divorce their judgment from their reporting, and we as citizens wouldn’t want them to. 

What we as citizen do want is to be able to see the process a reporter went through to arrive at the conclusions and framing she’s presenting to us. We also want to be sure that other journalists, if following the same evidence and process, can arrive at roughly the same conclusions. That’s objectivity - the assurance that a journalist has established a method through which they find and verify facts, present all sides thoroughly, and conteract their own bias and opinions, and that that process is reproducable. (If that sounds familiar, you’re right: the scientific method is built on the same general principles.)

One issue here with Susan is that she is way, way too close to Oliver (who isn’t even a source - he’s the subject of her reporting!) to have an objective method of investigation that is trustworthy and credible. But the other very major issues are: 1) Does her relationship with Oliver constitute a conflict of interest? Yes. 2) Is she disclosing this conflict of interest to her editors or to the reading audience? Likely not, or she would not still be reporting on the mayor’s office, or the public would likely demand her firing due to lack of trust. 3) Can she maintain her professional independence despite this conflict of interest? NO. NO NO NO.

Look, I wrote a whole 50-page thesis on the embedding program during the Iraq War criticizing, among other things, the lack of distance and independence between reporters and their subjects (military troops), and those reporters WERE NOT EVEN SLEEPING WITH THEIR SUBJECTS (at least, not that we know of). If simply living and forming attachments with your subjects represents a threat to your objectivity and independence as a member of the fourth estate (and it does), then can you imagine the threat having sex with your subject would pose to your credibility and trustworthiness? WHY IS THIS EVEN A QUESTION.

Basically: Susan should have recused herself from reporting on Oliver and the mayor’s office altogether, or she should have disclosed the relationship to her editor and likely have been removed from the government beat completely. This sounds harsh, BUT THAT’S WHY YOU DON’T SLEEP WITH THE SUBJECT OF YOUR REPORTING.

“Now,” he added, “That’s short of misconduct: you don’t want to be sleeping with people you’re covering.”

“Now down to brass tacks. If you’re sleeping with a continuing source who is integral to your beat, you’ve got a whole slew of different ethical problems. If you’re doing this and you’re still on the beat, I’m not sure you should be in the profession, though absolutes are hard to lay out here.”

“To secure the public’s trust, we must make it clear that our primary allegiance is to the public. Any personal or professional interests that conflict with that allegiance, whether in appearance or in reality, risk compromising our credibility. We are vigilant in disclosing to both our supervisors and the public any circumstances where our loyalties may be divided – extending to the interests of spouses and other family members – and when necessary, we recuse ourselves from related coverage.”

Onto to point 2: Susan giving money in exchange for interviews/information.

First, I need to say that I’ve actually seen very little of Susan’s scenes, so I can’t say with certainty that she actually did this. If she did pay a source, however, yes, it’s a problem (well, potentially - not all news outlets agree on the ethics of this in all situations. So a problem, with caveats noted in each source below).

This is called checkbook journalism, and is (usually) considered ethically unsound for a couple of major reasons: 1) once you’ve exchanged money for information, you’ve established a business relationship with your source which threatens your professional independence, 2) exchanging money for information naturally calls into question the accuracy of the information and the reliability of the source, and 3) checkbook journalism creates an environment in which potential sources are encouraged to invent news or stories in order to turn a profit (this would be of particular concern in a place like Star City).

And lastly: Susan breaking a confidential relationship with a source.

Same disclosure as before, I can’t confirm she did this. This is also slightly more difficult to comment on without context, as there are some instances in which it’s justifiable (and important) to reveal confidential sources, and some intances in which it isn’t.

So instead of discussing Susan’s specific case, here are some general perspectives on why (or why not) journalists protect their sources, and you can decide if Susan violated her ethical responsibilities:

“Confidentiality of sources is central to the ethics of journalism. As a journalist, you rely on people telling you things. Sometimes those people do not want their identity revealed to others. Although it is always better to be able to quote someone by name, in certain circumstances you have to quote what your source says without revealing away their identity. If you name a source who has given you information in confidence, you betray their trust. They will probably never give you confidential information again. But more importantly, anyone who knows that you cannot be trusted will probably refuse to give you information in confidence. If people mistrust you, they might carry that mistrust to all journalists. Any journalist who betrays a trust weakens the whole of the profession.”

“A journalist should only be ordered to disclose the identity of a source if there is an overriding requirement in the public interest, and the circumstances are of a vital nature. The CoE Recommendation states that this could be the case only if disclosure was necessary to protect human life, to prevent major crime or for the defence of a person accused of having committed a major crime.The interest in disclosure should always be balanced against the harm of ordering disclosure to freedom of expression.”

“To protect their credibility and the credibility of their stories, reporters should use every possible avenue to confirm and attribute information before relying on unnamed sources. If the only way to publish a story that is of importance to the audience is to use anonymous sources, the reporter owes it to the readers to identify the source as clearly as possible without pointing a figure at the person who has been granted anonymity.”

[agentsassydirewolf]

That Arrow Show: Arrow S05E15: Fighting Fire with Fire reaction

Arrow S05E15: Fighting Fire with Fire reaction

[therewas-a-girl]

blackcanarydinah replied to your post “i think what bothers me about this whole spin arrow is taking with...”

it rly doesnt feel like parallels? it's actually a lot like what most of us wished to have had w s3. for now it does feel like most the initiatives are oliver's but he always makes sure to involve felicity befor e making a decision this time around. to me it's not that theyre rehashing old sls but rather they want to show that oliver learned from his mistake which is good 

i get all of that, its easy to see actually. but that’s not what i meant - i don't mean literal parallels. it feels like they’re doing this the way they do the parallels. I'm not even sure that the is the best way to say this, honestly.

besides, i don't get this feeling from the inside-the-story pov. like, oliver’s thinking, felicity’s thinking. oliver involves her etc, and this is great. (even though be honest, after five years of watching this show, it feels like this turn is coming too late, or like i’ve kind of seen it before or something? because the fact that he’s doing this now, undermines stuff he did before? that back then looked like he was doing one thing but now it turns out he wasn’t? christ, i don't know how to explain this, whatever.). (this is not about the portrayal about his mental illness so much as about the storytelling, and how it confuses me because there seems to be no continuity. or internal logic or something.) 

but its not about that. it’s a feeling i have from the writers. the way they tell the story, something i became aware of a while ago and that now i can't unlearn, you know. it’s everywhere, and it really keeps me from enjoying any aspect of the show. every time i get the urge to write something that validates canon, this feeing is like a slap to the face.