Arduinna

I have hit that point of not posting where posting is hard and I feel like I need to work and rework everything to make it good enough to put out there, which is ridiculous and yet. (Even more ridiculous, as I still have a couple December questions to answer, and at this point we're coming on for February...)

So this post has been written in three phases. I'm just going to post it as is, a little disjointedly, because trying to mesh it all into one thing that looks like I wrote it in one sitting will take me another month, and I'd rather have it up while last week's episode is still vaguely "new". ish.

So!

For astolat: Talk to me about Harold/John! Especially Harold/John right now! (I totally want help with my own rowing.)

I'm writing I was writing this with half an hour to go before tonight's last week's episode (3x13), and may well rue this by the time it's over. But I've been thinking about the past few weeks, and how I'm making them work in my head, so.

( spoilers for s3 of POI )

Okay, so at that point the ep had been airing for half an hour and I couldn't take it and had to go watch. So now I am caught up to 3x13 and will be talking about that, too.

( more spoilers! 3x13, '4C' )

Man, we are just zooming for the finale.

( Spoilers for In Extremis )

I can't wait for next week. Maybe I'll take a sedative first, though.

So as should be obvious from my (sadly few, so far) posts about Person of Interest, I'm in it for the Finch/Reese, which the show delivers in spades, and which makes me ridiculously happy. Watching John tell everyone he meets how much Harold means to him, while Harold is listening in, is just... ♥melts♥

But it does some other amazing stuff, too.

Like how it handles women. Other than Finch and Reese, almost every other powerful person in this universe is a woman. And more than that, they're women with their own agency, their own agendas, their own reasons for being in this universe entirely separate from Finch and Reese.

And that is just bizarre, given what tv and movies are usually like.

I mean, look at it: POI is nominally entirely about two men. Pretty much every episode focuses on one or both of them. Their backstories are hugely important; their relationship is the entire point of the show. They're flip sides of the same coin: two highly skilled specialists who broke in the face of 9/11 and responded by taking their skills to a new, terrifying level of ends justifying the means in a desperate attempt to keep it from happening again.

Both faced a terrible personal loss as a result of their choices -- neither caused the death of the person he loved, but their choices led directly to those deaths, and each knows it. Those losses broke them again, and turned them both away from the single-minded path they'd been on even as it drove them both into deeper isolation -- until Finch found Reese and started healing them both by focusing them on the needs of the one, rather than the many.

And they've each taken that desperate need to protect the country and turned it into a desperate need to protect each other, which, wow, makes me happy.

Usually in a show like that, women would be there to give them something to angst about or long for, and not much else. ( And that does exist, a bit )

And yet, there are also all kinds of strong women everywhere, on every side of the equation. In fact, the more competent someone is, the more likely she is to be a woman.

( Look at John and Harold's helpers )

More than that, ( cutting for major plot spoilers through currently aired eps )

And all of these characters, women and men both, have lives outside of Finch and Reese's little world. Which is normal for men -- look at something like Grimm, and the difference between Monroe and Adalinde, and which has a more fully realized self as a character. Or Monroe and Juliette. Or hell, Adalinde and Bud the beaver dude.

On POI, not only do the women get to have lives, they get to have lives even if they're not related to or romantically/sexually involved with the male leads. (Grimm, once again I am looking at you, much though I love you.)

( Like, say )

Which is great not just in a characterization way, but in a universe-deepening way: things are happening in this universe that have absolutely nothing to do with John and Harold. Leading me directly into ( Booked Solid (2x15) and Relevance (2x16) )

... I think I've lost the thread of this, having rambled too far. Oh well.

On a fandom-related rather than canon-related note: DeviantArt, which I find very hard to navigate other than completely randomly, turns out to have something called Groups, which I discovered when I saw links to some POI groups while randomly looking for fanart. So I joined! Then stared, baffled, at the total lack of any indication that I'd joined them, or what one does with them. Eventually I found a help page that said "you can add the Groups widget on your user page" and after some frustrated poking at Settings (completely useless for this purpose), I figured out that I needed to edit my profile page and add the Groups widget there. Then I could see the Groups I was in. Still don't know how they work, but hey. At least there are presumably collections of fanart there...

I put links to them on the Person of Interest page on Fanlore, which yes is a blatant plug to get people to go look at that page and maybe add more things to it while they're there. *g* Look, fanart! *tempts*