Say WHAT?

[apocalypsos]

As pointed out elsewhere, check out this quote from Syfy's Merlin character pages, regarding Gwen:

If there's one thing Gwen might wish for, it's that she could be just a little bit prettier. With her wonky teeth, uncooperative hair and glasses, not even the most charitable person could call her beautiful.

o.O

A few things: 1.) Well, of COURSE the black girl has "uncooperative hair"; 2.) Funny, because if you asked me who out of the Merlin cast has the wonkiest teeth, I'd point to Bradley before I ever pointed to Angel, but then again he IS the pretty blond white boy; and 3.) ... GLASSES?!

Also, "not even the most charitable person could call her beautiful" makes me want to drive to Syfy's headquarters and hit whoever wrote that line in the face with a two-by-four.

In summation: Bite me, Syfy.

Comments

[elecktrik.livejournal.com]

WHAT.

I am not very charitable at all & I think she's gorgeous.

[wrenlet.livejournal.com]

SHINS. KICKING. SO HARD. >:(

[akamarykate.livejournal.com]

What the unholy fuck is WRONG with them?!?! Gwen is the prettiest by FAR.

[spyderqueen.livejournal.com]

God SyFy is pissing me right the fuck off lately.

[trinity_clare]

..........................

If you want a partner in crime when you go on your mission of righteous vengeance, I am SO THERE with you.

[anne-jumps.livejournal.com]

...?! Really?

[vivien]

I just... what??? Gwen is lovely. They are blind and stupid.

[impertinence.livejournal.com]

they're so right, man. What a dog. Ugliest person on the sh-

[florahart]

Actually, you know what I wanna know?

Those little character things (all or which are a little odd) are written by someone who uses the spelling "learnt" which is unusual in someone from the US. Did they get this info from someone at BBC? In which case, good god, they don't even watch their own show? Or, like, did they find a (possibly teenaged) Brit somewhere who claimed to have seen it, and asked? Because, Imean, as you've already noted, wtf. Gwen is downright radiant a large proportion of the time, and these people are batshit.

[ort.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiosity, what spelling do Americans normally use?

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Learned.

[daenarys.livejournal.com]

Good god! Really?

[heather.livejournal.com]

JUST. ARRRRRGH.

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Up until the glasses thing, I would have said "Oh, look, another LAZY-ASS PRESS KIT using the $#(*& casting breakdown instead of describing who the character actually ended up being."

But... GLASSES?? I mean, I've only seen like three eps of Merlin, but I can't imagine that she acquired actual glasses. And if she did, WHAT? I'm sorry, I meant to say WHAT??

I mean, I want to see more glasses-wearing heroines and all, but in that milieu, it'd be completely impossible for them to be anything but stereotype shorthand.

[mpoetess.livejournal.com]

I'm about 80% certain that another lazy-ass press-kit using the casting breakdown is exactly what this is, yupty, based on Morgana's and Gaius' bios as well. And no, Gwen's never had glasses.

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Most of them are. :-P It leads to some astonishingly stupid things going out to the public that were never intended for public consumption.

There's a certain level of code operating in breakdowns, designed to elicit submissions of the right actors from agents, that just isn't applicable to anything else. It pisses off the casting directors who write them at least as much as it does us.

In this case, of course, it means that (a) "not beautiful" translates as exactly the kind of unconventional gorgeous they cast, and (b) it's about how Gwen sees herself, not about how she actually is. The phrasing of it is totally designed to give clues to the actresses coming in to audition.

[fyrdrakken]

You know, it's not until you said the above about them being more towards casting than actual final characters that it really clicked for me that the given description sounds just like book!Hermione in HP. Which does produce an interesting mental image for the kind of character the initial concept for Gwen might in fact have been...

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

I was reminded of Hermione immediately, though I wasn't sure about the thing about the teeth. It's been too long since I read the books.

Still, they're all attributes of a type that Hermione certainly belongs to. And you're right, it's very interesting to think that it's what the creators originally had in mind for Gwen.

It makes me wonder if the casting director did put the glasses thing in there for that reason. It's stretching a point a bit, but I've seen stranger things in breakdowns. Heck, some casting director might have been rushed and ended up with an intern copy/pasting the breakdown from when Hermione was cast!

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the breakdown for Hermione read exactly that way... and then resulted in Emma Watson.

I actually have a bit of a pet peeve about breakdowns making their way out into fandom (whether via lazy PR or leakage). It's unavoidable in this day and age, but the results are invariably annoying. You end up with either situations like this, where everyone is going WTF at the inaccuracy of it; or like Stargate Universe, where Chloe was pre-judged and dismissed as a shallow party girl by many, many people, who have simply not bothered to observe that the character who actually made it to the screen bears very little resemblance to that image. I don't even especially like the show, and that pisses me off beyond words.

People just don't realize how much changes from pre-production. Hell, one of my best gigs to date was originally posted for someone twice my age. I came in for a completely different role, and the director changed his conception of the one I got after my reading. The casting director writes based on a script, and an early draft at that.

[fyrdrakken]

I was reminded of Hermione immediately, though I wasn't sure about the thing about the teeth. It's been too long since I read the books.

Been a while for me, too, but her taking advantage of the removal of a curse that landed on her teeth to have them "fixed" in a way her dentist parents had refused to was one of the bits that really stuck with me. No glasses, but glasses are a symbol for a character type anyway.

And your comment about the SGU actress reminds me of Neil Gaiman on the Neverwhere DVD commentary, complaining about how his intention with the hunter character was to have her cast as this gorgeous woman who didn't look dangerous, so that when she claimed her line of work involved "physical services" the POV character would obviously be thinking she was a prostitute rather than this awesome famous fighter, and then the director cast a woman who (though attractive) looked dangerous as a honed blade. I liked the casting (Gaiman's concept came a little too close to being Buffy) but it stuck with me as an example of trying to cast someone who doesn't at all look like the character they'll wind up playing, precisely because the show intends to subvert expectations viewers will have based on how the actor/actress looks.

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool! I know some of the things he's said about it (e.g. the thing about how the Velvets are each supposed to feed on something different), but I didn't know that.

And it's a really good example, too. Because in Neil's head (or even in a novel), there's room to stretch out with nuance and duplicity and maybes and what-ifs. In a heavily visual six-part series, though, it's infinitely cleaner storytelling to have a Hunter who is exactly what she is, exactly what she appears to be, and who in fact has precious little patience with those who aren't. (Thinking of how, even as she's dying, she's scornful of de Carabas' trick of hiding his life in a box.)

It makes her about the only fixed point of certainty in a very wild ride, and having her appear other than she is would undermine that.

[fyrdrakken]

I hadn't heard that particular bit about the Velvets (or if I had, it didn't stick in my memory), but I was somewhat disappointed with the commentary because so much of it was Neil complaining about how he wanted this and the final miniseries wound up with that because the director chose otherwise or the budget wouldn't run to it or whatever, and how he wound up writing the novel precisely to "fix" what he hadn't liked about the onscreen version. And I didn't like knowing that, that he was trying to get his own way on how the story had gone, rather than it having been originally a novel that got televised as I had assumed. (But I have to admit, I had really enjoyed the book and felt kind of meh-ful about the miniseries.)

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

I actually saw the series before he wrote the novelization, so it didn't bother me as much. Though it did definitely impress on me that he has a bit of a love-hate relationship with visual media. There are things you can do there that you can't do elsewhere, but the limitations are frustrating to him. Which, with an imagination like his, isn't too surprising. *wry g*

[fyrdrakken]

I saw the series first, but I was sleep-deprived at the time and watching at the behest of someone else and probably not paying all that much attention, so when I turned up the book later the screen version hadn't made that strong an impression on me.

And I'm very much of the viewpoint that one of the major issues with screen media is that there are so many different contributors that it can be difficult to maintain a unified vision, and things can get lost by the wayside, or repeatedly changed up as the production may undergo changes in management in midstream. There are strengths and weaknesses in both formats, there are certainly onscreen adaptations that have been marked improvements on the original novels, but to have come up with the original idea and then had to sit back and watch others control the version that gets seen must be especially maddening to someone used to the by-comparison less-intrusive editing of print media.

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

I thought "Hermione!", too, but then I remembered she didn't wear glasses. A great deal was made about her uncontrollable hair, and she definitely had buck teeth in that first book. I believe Malfoy maliciously gave her rabbit teeth in the second book, which gave her an excuse to work on them until they were straight, ordinary teeth (vs. the buck teeth she'd started out with.)

[fyrdrakken]

See my excessively-wordy comment above, regarding glasses as a symbol of a character type, and yes to the teeth-shrinkage in the books.

[theliel.livejournal.com]

More mass media fail.

4srs. glasses canz be 100% sexxxy. Just look at The Baroness. (and I have the dragon*con pictures to prove it)

But yha.....it's like the taylor swift video. glasses == ungood or something.

I don't get it. I just know a goodly number of people at Sy Fy could do with a good neckpunching.

On General Principle mind, not for just this one incident.

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

OMG, I've only seen one ep of Merlin and I know how wrong that is.

Sounds almost like someone mixed it up with an entirely different show. (unless glasses have shown up along with the other creative anachronisms that I've seen people complain about.)

[torificus.livejournal.com]

>:( >:(

Dear SyFy,

I'd say 'fuck you with the unfriendly end of a rake', but then you might think me a bit uncharitable and maybe wouldn't even believe me when I called her beautiful.

In conclusion, fuck you with the unfriendly end of a rake. >:(

-Tori

[misty-writes.livejournal.com]

What in the WORLD?? Gwen is GORGEOUS. X A MILLION. X INFINITY. She's my favorite lady on the show and a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm shallow and she's PRETTY.

[laurelin-kit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's SO far off I'm willing to bet that description got mixed up with someone else's along the way.

[st-aurafina.livejournal.com]

What the actual fuck? She's gorgeous. FFS.

*boots SyFy up the bum*

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

Fuck them.

There are so many things wrong with that blurb, but in addition to everything else: Holy fucking shit, when did Gwen change into a woman whose greatest wish is a makeover?

I mean, she doesn't wish for, I don't know, the welfare of her friends and family?

[purple-smurf.livejournal.com]

I... what?!

[purple-smurf.livejournal.com]

Yes, she's clearly the vision of a troll. Sigh. I'll be in my bunk.

[marag.livejournal.com]

I've never seen an episode, but I went to look at the pictures of her and...I'm sorry, what were we talking about? I got distracted by the hot smiling woman on my computer screen.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

The "uncooperative hair" bit is startlingly obvious code for woman of color, I can't believe it wasn't intentional on some level.

[themadfish.livejournal.com]

I don't think Gwen is beautiful. She looks like a perfectly normal girl, with nice hair and no glasses. Oh wait. Of course. If she's not "Hollywood Beautiful" then she's obviously butt ugly and has no self esteem. >.> Christ. I do think Gwen is pretty, and pretty in a non artificial way. I LOVE the way she looks. And I love how she doesn't give a crap about what she looks like. Fuck Syfy.

[aurora]

.............WHAT.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

Not familiar with the show, but is it possible that would be the character's assessment of herself? I mean, the writing could be clearer, but usually something like that is meant to describe a swan who thinks of herself as an ugly duckling. I d'know.

[heather.livejournal.com]

That's the thing that's so crazy about it; nothing about Gwen's characterization throughout the series is based on her looks, how she feels about her looks, or how anyone else feels about her looks, at any point ever.

[andraste]

What the fuck is wrong with these people? No, wait, I don't even care. Wait here while I get my flamethrower ...

[shiegra.livejournal.com]

Aha what. what. what. I am bubbling with contempt and anger. And incredulity! Gwen is one hundred percent the prettiest fucking person on that whole show, and her hair is gorgeous. (Just like everything else.) The two by four is too kind, in my opinion.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

Holy fuck. *seethes*

[myniamh.livejournal.com]

It's as if they've taken it from some AU fanfic they found by googling. It can't have been written by anyone who has seen the show.

[xzombiexkittenx.livejournal.com]

She's totally cute! What are they talking about? And her teeth are fine. She has American TV Actor teeth (straight and white) not British TV Actor teeth (anything goes) and also uncooperative hair? WTF?! Seriously?! Wow. Just...wow. FAIL.

(also, glasses? Have they even seen this show? What crack are they smoking?)

[exsequar.livejournal.com]

Are you fucking kidding me? Angel Coulby is incredibly beautiful!! I would never have even thought to describe her teeth as wonky - her smile is so lovely. And uh. GLASSES??

That's some of the most blatantly racist and hateful tripe I've seen in a while. Wow.

[deire.livejournal.com]

Clearly the syfylis has reached their collective brain.

[sagejupiter.livejournal.com]

*Hulk desk*! Syfy you BOOBIES!

[lothlorienbaby.livejournal.com]

Late to the party, but I think Syfy changed their description because I'm not seeing what you mentioned at the link anymore.