omg wall of text, sorry

[erilyn]

Confession: I've been dipping my toes back into my childhood (and teen years) stomping ground of daytime soaps (omg I swear the acting wasn't always this bad). Except...why is Kish the smoosh pairing name for Kyle Lewis and Oliver Fish? Surely Kysh would be fairer?

I'd seen a couple of Kyle/Oliver clips from One Life to Live, but this week I've watched a lot of their storyline (I've gradually worked around to watching it in order, I didn't start out like that). Hurrah for multiple people on youtube sharing clips. Also, hurrah for surprise All-American Rejects! They got to be a concert date for Kyle and Oliver *and* the background music for a brutal gay bashing :\

I grew up on Days and Young & Restless because my grandma, who lived with us, watched them. Then my sister and I got seriously hooked at different times to plots on Days, General Hospital and Bold & Beautiful and would tape them (such a good way to watch soaps, you can ffwd through the plots you don't care about).

Man, I miss being addicted to soaps. Well, not really, but I do love good trashy love triangles/quadrangles, faked pregnancies, unknown family relationships (I'm your mother/brother/son/half-aunt *and* half-sister), or people coming back from the dead (oh Stefano and Marlena, no one does it like you two do). I loved the continuing nature of the storylines, that you always found out what happened next.

When I was a kid, and I loved a book or movie or tv show, I wanted to know what happened to my favourite characters afterwards (hello, big reason I was drawn to fanfic - there's always more adventures for your favourite characters!) Soaps, you always find out what happens next, until the person runs out of storylines and dies (often temporary), rides off into the sunset or goes upstairs to fix some curtains and is never seen again. All set against an incredibly complex backstory of decades of preposterous relationships.

I think good badfic (you know, the sort which is competently enough written that its not painful to read, but is ridiculously over the top, out of character and can be so satisfying to wallow in) pushes many of the same buttons for me as soaps.

And watching clips from a soap with which you have no previous exposure (One Life to Live has never aired in Australia) is really entertainingly confusing. I have no idea who people not directly connected to the Kish storyline are or understand a lot of the relationships/history. Now, if this storyline was on Days, Young and Restless, General Hospital or Bold and Beautiful, I'd have some ideas (though I'm years out of regular viewing, except for occasionally seeing the last 5 minutes of Bold when waiting for it to end and the news come on, which is totally enough to keep somewhat current with it).

Anyway, kudos to OLTL for the Kyle/Oliver relationship. It's been done pretty well, though I feel it could be improved if Kyle's evil identical twin was to show up at some point.

Comments

[ariadne83]

I do love good trashy love triangles/quadrangles, faked pregnancies, unknown family relationships (I'm your mother/brother/son/half-aunt *and* half-sister), or people coming back from the dead

Haha then you'd love some of the other stuff that's happened in the last couple months on One Life To Live. The Mitch Lawrence storyline has all of those.

[ariadne83]

And I don't know about evil twins but Kyle did have an evil sister who died last year LOL

[erilyn.livejournal.com]

The bits I've seen of the Mitch Laurence storyline (some Kish people share more context than others) do have me quite intrigued. That's some quality soap opera crazy right there :D

[erilyn.livejournal.com]

I just watched some stuff the other day with mention of the sister. He didn't seem that distraught by the sister thing - he was upset when told, but got way more caught up with the kidnapped baby thing at the same time (begging to be told that the baby was ok). Were he and his sister supposed to be close?

[ariadne83]

I don't even know - maybe Kyle and his sister hated each other, maybe they were close, maybe she grew up in a psycho religious cult. On this soap anything goes.

[ariadne83]

My favorite Mitch moment so far was when he rose up from a coffin in the middle of someone else's funeral.

Yeah, if I catch a bit of the storyline that interests me I look up the full episode here: http://www.youtube.com/user/OLTLViewersChannel

[jewelianna.livejournal.com]

Trust me, I watched OLTL for YEARS and with the exception of Bo Buchanan and Dorian Lord, none of the other people associated with Kish are mainstays of the show. I only barely remember the other roommate (the guy, something Vega? Is he Christian or was that his brother?) from more than a couple of years ago. Everyone else is new.

[erilyn.livejournal.com]

How about Mitch Laurence? Since he's obsessed with Stacey's baby, that's a Kish connection, and I don't really get his history at all. Need to go find a good OLTL history if I'm gonna keep watching clips...

[i-naiad.livejournal.com]

Have you checked out the Gays of Daytime blog? I'd really recommend a couple of the foreign soaps they highlight. The forums are usually an entertaining read too.

[erilyn.livejournal.com]

don't encourage me! soaps are my fucking achilles heel, I'm already getting intrigued by a couple of other things on OLTL from seeing some of it while watching Kish-centric footage (mostly anything involving awesome hilarious stripper Kim, or Roxy).

*toddles off to check*

[jewelianna.livejournal.com]

Even he wasn't on a few years ago when I gave up checking in regularly.

[jewelianna.livejournal.com]

You need to discover Christian and Olli with English sub titles. Just do it sometime when you can sit and be sucked in for hours.