Sunday, January 05, 2003

Warning: This Post Rated "R" for Adult Situations and General Poor Taste

In my surfings-around the other day, I came across this Buffy sex chart, which displays, in graphical form, which characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer have had sex with which other characters. (It also includes kissing.) Mind you, I probably shouldn't have looked at it, since it seems to contain spoilerish stuff for a couple of epsiodes I haven't seen yet, but I've watched so much of that show completely out of order that I suppose it scarcely matters any more. Anyway, it's interesting to look at, because apparently it connects up pretty much everybody in Sunnydale. Here's hoping none of these people had VD, or they're likely all in for a trip to the clinic...

I thought it might be fun (or at least, mildly boredom-relieving) to concoct a similar chart for Farscape, and I actually started drawing one up, but I rapidly began running into problems. I mean, to begin with, I would have had to do some serious research to figure out all the guest characters who ought to be connected to Chiana and D'Argo. I don't think we ever did get some of their names. I also realized that I really ought to add a different kind of connecting line for characters who didn't have sex and didn't kiss, but nonetheless engaged in activities I can only describe as "groping." There turned out to me a disturbingly large number of these. And then, what constitutes a kiss, anyway? Does it have to be on the lips? And why does pretty much everybody have to kiss Rygel at one point or another? I mean, ick. Having to sort through all the things that only happened in Crichton's imagination/hallucinations vs. things that happened in reality proved a bit of a stumbling block, too, if only because I wasn't sure which category to put the entire episode of "Scratch'n'Sniff" into. On top of all that, I was unhappy because I could link up almost all of the main characters in one way or another, but I couldn't work in Scorpius at all. Doggone it, why couldn't he (or for that matter, Sikozu, 'cause I can tie them together with one of those "ambiguous/unknown" lines) just give Rygel a big fat smooch like everybody else? Noranti didn't fit in, either, unless you want to count that interesting little long-distance experience she shared with D'Argo in "Coup by Clam." Which I don't, particularly, but once you start thinking about that sort of thing it's hard to stop, and you soon find yourself being led into a definitional morass of positively Clintonian proportions. The answer to the question of which characters have had sex really does depend on how you define the identity of a given character, and what one means by "having sex," and, yes, I swear, what the definition of "is" is. I mean, how do you handle characters who get to the "groping" stage while inhabiting other characters' bodies? What about alien possession? Psychic sex? Psychic sex with an alien possession? Do I need to split the circle for Crichton off into two branches when there are two of him? And, my god, what about Harvey, considering that he was actually present when T-John and Aeryn were...

No. You can see why I stopped. This doesn't just get complicated, it gets downright disturbing. Yeah, leave it to science fiction to challenge our definitions and assumptions. And sanity. But how come they don't seem to have those sorts of problems on Buffy? You'd think with all the demons on the chart, things would be a bit... weirder.

Man, I really do need a life, don't I?

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