Metacommentary

I didn't have a chance to catch any of the reruns, so I'm afraid that the initial impressions are all you get for episode 2 of Top Chef. And yes, I'm seriously considering if I can shoehorn a DVR into my budget to make this easier.

In the meantime, I'm still reading random recaps over at TWoP, and am a little irritated by one of the recappers.

See, the thing is, I rather enjoy reading the recaps there, and in fact the recapper in question (Strega, for Angel) is pretty funny. But there's one habit she has that I find particularly annoying, and that's the habit of slathering [sic] all over dialogue she's quoting.

I have two problems with this. The first is that, frankly, I'm annoyed by the concept. Dinging dialogue in fiction for grammar is a big no-no in my book (and in many other peoples' as well). This is because, well, people don't always speak grammatically. They take shortcuts. They use slang and dialect. It happens. Making a big deal about it as a flaw is really over-the-top, and it's not like there aren't plenty of other things to criticize about the show. (Of course, what I feel those things are and what she does often vary, but that's another post entirely.) If every character sprouted completely grammatically perfect sentences at all times, it'd be far less realistic. If she were recapping a reality show, I wouldn't have an issue with it, but writing characters to have the same flaws as real people is something I want to encourage, not complain about.

The second reason it irritates me is that in some cases, the things she points out weren't errors in the first place. For instance, it irritates the hell out of me when she throws a [sic] after the use of "they" to mean "some single person we don't know the gender of", because, like it or not, this is not only accepted usage these days, but it's actually how it started. The use of "he" to mean the same thing is a later invention than that particular use of "they", and going back to it makes sense to me, since English doesn't provide a singular non-gender-specific pronoun otherwise. I want people to just get over it already. Another example that stood out was the [sic] after a character's use of "priorly", which is not only a word but was used correctly, albeit perhaps slightly awkwardly.

So that this isn't just a massive bitchfest, let me repeat that I mostly enjoy the recaps. I like seeing how other people viewed a television show and what they got out of it, even when I totally disagree with them on which parts were good and which weren't. If I wasn't into that sort of thing, this blog probably wouldn't exist. And TWoP is a great site overall, with some really witty recappers. I think that's actually the reason it irritates me so much when one of them exhibits a habit that I dislike... if they weren't so good to begin with, I probably would just ignore it and not use the site, but because I tend to enjoy what they're doing, it just highlights the bits that drive me nuts.

And to give it a little more relevance to the blog: I've been thinking about putting up my own recaps/reviews of certain shows I own on DVD, that mainly being Buffy, Angel, and Babylon 5. I don't own the complete run of any of those, alas, but I have enough (six, three, and four seasons respectively) to do a fair overview of the shows. I suppose I wouldn't be considering it if I didn't sometimes disagree with the recaps I've read, so there's a good side to that... even if I'm not sure for whom.