![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I do not know how this happened
So I have been shamefacedly watching a few-years-old sitcom called "Less Than Perfect" because Zachary Levi is in it and I have been in Chuck withdrawal. If you want to see bits without subjecting yourself to whole episodes, I've been uploading a (mostly Kip-tastic) selection of clips to youtube (Kip being Zachary Levi's character).
This is a sitcom. It's driven by Idiot Ball more than my usual run of cheese. It hurts me often but fannishness has been creeping up in various ways. I considered asking for Less Than Perfect for yuletide. I even thought of what I would ask for (it's Kip-related. surprise). I was thinking about vidding it, because it would be less painful than trying to write it.
But I've just found the pairing I like for it. *headdesk* This is terrible.
Quick rundown of what this show is about: Claude is a cute, chubby, insecure floater/temp at a network news business who usually works out of the fourth floor with her quirky friends Ramona and Owen. Until one day she gets assigned to be the news anchor's assistant on the twenty-second floor for a week, and he likes her so much he hires her permanently. Claude is worried about not fitting in on the twenty-second floor, where the people, mostly Kip and Lydia, seem to all be vain, shallow, back-stabbing, ambitious, self-absorbed, bitchy, snooty tarts, but the job is so good and she has such a crush on her charming but oblivious new boss Will Butler that she stays and survives by inviting Owen and Ramona up a lot. From then on it's floor warfare.
I've come to the terrible conclusion that my pairing of choice is Lydia/closetedgay-denialy!Kip. See, Lydia is usually only interested in sleeping with men with better positions than Kip, Kip is (merely an assistant) just her partner in witty bitchery, but one day she realizes that Kip is not actually hot for her and it is Lydia's position that all men should be hot for her at all times. He makes her work for it and that makes her want to work for it, want to have him to prove she can in fact have anybody. I cannot yet fully articulate the part where this works for Kip, but that's because this version of Kip has like, eight layers of lies in his own head. Kip canonically breaks up with any woman he dates after three weeks. Clearly he continues to date women to maintain a facade of heterosexuality but he has no real desire for them and so dumps them before they can figure this out. Lydia is his longest running relationship of any kind with any human being on the planet, including family, because Kip really has nothing to do with his family; it was kind of inevitable that eventually Lydia would stop thinking about herself for five seconds and realize Kip's terrible secret, especially if she's spending time trying to figure out why he doesn't want to sleep with her, a line of inquiry that is at heart all about her and therefore of great interest to her. (Why Kip regards this as a terrible secret: Kip wants to be a face. They don't have out gay men anchor the news. It's his ambitions that keep him in the closet. Clearly his career is more important than claiming this piece of his identity or finding personal happiness.) Kip faces a terrible conundrum: to protect his secret, he has to have sex with Lydia so she will stop thinking about what reason there could possibly be for him not to want her. But Kip can never break up with Lydia in any meaningful sense, because they are bitch buddies forever. His usual cover pattern will not work. If he dumped her, who would he go laugh with about breaking her heart? And then he would be terribly lonely, because Lydia is all he has. Fortunately this is not likely to happen because in fact Kip is all Lydia has either. Even when she's sleeping with or engaged to powerful men, there's no connection there. Kip is her only friend.
You see the myriad ways in which this is horrible and it pains me to contemplate writing.
This is a sitcom. It's driven by Idiot Ball more than my usual run of cheese. It hurts me often but fannishness has been creeping up in various ways. I considered asking for Less Than Perfect for yuletide. I even thought of what I would ask for (it's Kip-related. surprise). I was thinking about vidding it, because it would be less painful than trying to write it.
But I've just found the pairing I like for it. *headdesk* This is terrible.
Quick rundown of what this show is about: Claude is a cute, chubby, insecure floater/temp at a network news business who usually works out of the fourth floor with her quirky friends Ramona and Owen. Until one day she gets assigned to be the news anchor's assistant on the twenty-second floor for a week, and he likes her so much he hires her permanently. Claude is worried about not fitting in on the twenty-second floor, where the people, mostly Kip and Lydia, seem to all be vain, shallow, back-stabbing, ambitious, self-absorbed, bitchy, snooty tarts, but the job is so good and she has such a crush on her charming but oblivious new boss Will Butler that she stays and survives by inviting Owen and Ramona up a lot. From then on it's floor warfare.
I've come to the terrible conclusion that my pairing of choice is Lydia/closetedgay-denialy!Kip. See, Lydia is usually only interested in sleeping with men with better positions than Kip, Kip is (merely an assistant) just her partner in witty bitchery, but one day she realizes that Kip is not actually hot for her and it is Lydia's position that all men should be hot for her at all times. He makes her work for it and that makes her want to work for it, want to have him to prove she can in fact have anybody. I cannot yet fully articulate the part where this works for Kip, but that's because this version of Kip has like, eight layers of lies in his own head. Kip canonically breaks up with any woman he dates after three weeks. Clearly he continues to date women to maintain a facade of heterosexuality but he has no real desire for them and so dumps them before they can figure this out. Lydia is his longest running relationship of any kind with any human being on the planet, including family, because Kip really has nothing to do with his family; it was kind of inevitable that eventually Lydia would stop thinking about herself for five seconds and realize Kip's terrible secret, especially if she's spending time trying to figure out why he doesn't want to sleep with her, a line of inquiry that is at heart all about her and therefore of great interest to her. (Why Kip regards this as a terrible secret: Kip wants to be a face. They don't have out gay men anchor the news. It's his ambitions that keep him in the closet. Clearly his career is more important than claiming this piece of his identity or finding personal happiness.) Kip faces a terrible conundrum: to protect his secret, he has to have sex with Lydia so she will stop thinking about what reason there could possibly be for him not to want her. But Kip can never break up with Lydia in any meaningful sense, because they are bitch buddies forever. His usual cover pattern will not work. If he dumped her, who would he go laugh with about breaking her heart? And then he would be terribly lonely, because Lydia is all he has. Fortunately this is not likely to happen because in fact Kip is all Lydia has either. Even when she's sleeping with or engaged to powerful men, there's no connection there. Kip is her only friend.
You see the myriad ways in which this is horrible and it pains me to contemplate writing.