Sex and the New Age, Bitter, Single Bitch

Ah, the internet.

Obviously, it's been a while since I last blogged.  I'm going to be frank here - I stopped watching back in November when it was clear to me that the writers decided to once again yank the rug out from under Ejami fans.  As a shipper, I was furious.  As a lover of soaps, I did an awful lot of eye-rolling.  Let's face it -- Days, as hard as they try to bring the show out of the dark ages and into the light of the 21st century (and I'm really giving them the benefit of the doubt here when I use the word "try"), are just incapable of writing for women.  But are they incapable, or just too fucking lazy to give it a shot?

Before I get into talking about the affair (and I will get into it - trust me), there's something else I wanted to talk about.  And by "talk", I mean "rant sarcastically" for a little bit.

In a world where we're inundated with information, new ideas, and opinions via online news sites, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and blogs, Days has continued to contentedly let the sand in the hourglass they've been trapped in slowly but steadily bury them alive, particularly over the last ten years.

While women are demanding representation and cultural diversity, Days pairs the only black man on the show with the only black woman on the show because in Salem it appears that skin colour trumps chemistry.  Black, Jewish, East Asian, East Indian...Come on, Days.  There's a whole world out there.  Seriously.  I'm not making this shit up.

Represent, yo.

Look out your window, Cortomsell.  Or stay in and open your damn laptop.  You do have a laptop, don't you?  Because plenty of stories you've done of late suggest to me that you haven't a freaking clue how cellphones, laptops, or tablets work.

But I digress.

A lot of shows that are popular with us ladies (and that other sex you tend to cater more to, despite the fact that the majority of soap viewers are women) include Orange is the New Black, Scandal, Sleepy Hollow, Elementary, The Walking Dead (I know it's hard to believe, Cortomsell, but us women do watch shows with zombies in them - we don't just piss ourselves and throw our heads into the lap of the nearest man).  We like shows with women in them.  All kinds of women.

Don't be this dick:

"From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race.  What we realized is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the race of the individuals doesn't matter.  They're supposed to be stand-ins for all people.  Either you end up with a Benetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise.  You either try to put everything in there, which just calls attention to it, or you just say, 'Let's make that not a factor, because we're trying to deal with everyman.'  Looking at this story through that kind of lens is the same as saying, 'Would the ark float and is it big enough to get all the species in there?'  That's irrelevant to the questions because the questions are operating on a different plane than that; they're operating on a mythical plane."

- Noah screenwriter Ari Handel addressing criticism about the movie's all-white cast

I know, I know.  This means you'll have to hire someone who isn't old, white and male.  While you've been struggling to write stuff for Maxine the Magical Negro to do, women from all walks of life have been learning how to read, write, and do all sorts of other neato shit both behind and in front of the camera.  They're out there, Cortomsell.  I promise.  You just need to bother to look for them.

When it comes to the affair, I've decided to just stick to four things that really bothered me.  At least for now.  Because I could honestly rant-type all night about this storyline.

WHO IS THIS GUY?

Over the years Sami and EJ have done terrible things to each other, but like Emily Bronte's Heathcliff before him, no matter how much venom he spat or acid he spilled, viewers never doubted EJ's love for Sami.  Can you love someone and still have an affair with someone else?  Personally I believe it's possible.  And, yes - cheating is unacceptable, but I also believe it can be forgivable.  Does that mean I want to watch EJ breaking out of eight years' worth of character to fuck Abigail?  No.  Not at all.  

"It was like fucking a tree.  I'd rather have fucked the tree."

Yeah, I believe that it's possible to forgive cheating, but only if the person who committed the crime, as it were, has shown remorse.  Buckets of remorse.  Otherwise you've just got a guy who's just sorry he got caught.  EJ might not always be the good guy, but he's owned a helluva lot of his mistakes over the years.  During this hot mess of a storyline, EJ not only fucked someone else, he spent more time covering his ass than showing viewers he was sorry, which would be fine if we didn't know better.  

But I understand, Cortomsell, that serial drama is like a curse.  People watch everyday, they get to know and understand these characters, and then you're screwed.  Damn our loyalty and our ability to remember shit that happened way more than three weeks ago.

Anyways, it wasn't until that dream fake-out (a whole other mess you don't even want to get me started on) that we saw EJ, confronted by Sami, finally looking, feeling and/or sounding sorry for what he'd done, and that was only after seeing the emotional toll the affair took on Sami.  

Oops - I mean "Sami".  It was a dream, after all.   

Okay, I lied...

I DREAMT YOU WASTED A WHOLE DAMN HOUR OF MY TIME

I wasn't going to talk about it, but really - what was the point of those scenes?  Nothing came of them.  Instead of EJ coming away from the dream thinking, "I should tell Sami before she finds out about the tree-fucking from someone else", he came away from the dream with...Oh, wait.  He didn't come away from that dream with anything, did he?  It added nothing to the story.  It was just a way to fake the viewers out.  A stunt.  A lame-as-arse stunt.  Sure - the acting was amazing, but the acting from James Scott and Alison Sweeney is always amazing.  It was like listening to an iTunes sample -- I'm hearing part of the song, and it's great, but I want to hear the whole song, not just that one-minute clip over and over again.  Then I pay the $0.99 and the rest of the song doesn't sound anything like that sixty seconds I enjoyed so much.

"SAMI SHOULDN'T GO ON ANY BUSINESS TRIPS"

One of the absolute last straws for me was the Days official Twitter account tweeting that Sami shouldn't go on any business trips.  You know, because it's unreasonable to expect that your significant other won't fuck someone else while you're away for a couple of days taking your job seriously.

In a similar vein, the other problem I had with all this is that it's practically bashed over our heads that part of the reason EJ had sex with Abigail is because Sami had kicked him out of their bedroom.  This tells us two things - the first is that Sami should have kept having sex with EJ despite the fact that she was well within her right not to.  The second is that if a man isn't getting sex from his partner, he must get it from somewhere else, otherwise his dick will curl back into his body, shrivel up and die.

Crotch rot.

SOMETIMES WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND 

AND HITS THE WRONG PERSON IN THE GONADS

So let me get this straight - the one thing people have been looking forward to all this time (remember that this storyline started at the beginning of January) was Sami confronting Abigail.  So what do the writers do?  They have Sami confront Abigail, who did something legitimately shitty to her, then proceed to have the entire town light torches, grab their pitchforks and go after Sami for wanting to do something just about everyone on this show has had every right to do when they've caught the man/woman they love cheating.  Even if Abitwat is supposed to be the wide-eyed innocent in all of this (which is laughable given that we saw several instances after the initial encounter where Abigail chased EJ down and begged for it to happen again), the writers are doing more damage to her than I think the character can take.  She played Chad and Cameron against one another for what felt like eons, she tried to destroy Carrie and Austin's marriage, she refused to forgive Melanie for dating Chad (even though at that point Abby was armpit deep in Austin's ridiculous hat at the time), the beloved Jack Deveraux died saving her so she and Jen could mourn him for the time it took to zip up the body bag and label the toe tag.  

Then Abigail goes ahead and sleeps with Sami's fiance.

But, wait!  Abigail was was merely a pawn in all of this.  She just happened to be standing a little too close to the dark vortex that is Ejami and fell in.  And at the bottom of that vortex was EJ's erect penis.  Totally not her fault.  Abigail is a woman (allegedly) in her mid-twenties who still has no idea that you shouldn't sleep with someone else's fiance, apparently.  Not that I think she deserves any favours, but this ain't doing shit for the character.  Too Dumb to Know Better does not a soap heroine make.  Sami is getting the usual "that's what you get for trusting EJ" grief from her family while Abigail gets the "it wasn't your fault - your dad is dead" pat on the head.  Let the girl take her lumps like a good little soapy homewrecker and let's move the fuck on.  We've seen Sami put a bullet in EJ's head.  We've seen her set him on fire.  We've seen her taking his kids away from him about a hundred times.  Now we've seen her get him thrown in jail.  Enough.  I want to see Sami eviscerate Abigail.  

I was waiting for this.

Instead, I got this.

That's the most modern thing I've seen Jen wearing in ages.

We've been waiting for it since January.  Give us a fucking break, writers.  Story has been sacrificed at the altar of unpredictability, and even your unpredictability has been predictable.  And the one time unpredictability worked, it just made viewers angrier because it was a waste of an hour of our lives.  Not that I'm not used to Days wasting hours of my time, but, well you know what I mean.  

The point is, Sami versus Abigail was really all you had left, and you've already squandered it big-time.