The Anti-Dawson/Joey Thread #47: Pacey is so sick of DJo, he's going to start tearing out his fingernails for relief!
Welcome to the 47th Anti-Dawson/Joey Thread http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...d/2d0f540b.png "Fifteen years of watching PG movies in your bedroom, followed by another year and a half pretending to be grown up only to drop each other at the first sign of crisis? That's your history? Come on, man. And you call this woman your soulmate?" http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...hread/djbw.jpghttp://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...hread/pjff.jpg Need we say more?
100. If you have sex with your "soul mate" you hair gets ruined for a year. "The truth is I've never thought of Joey in a romantic context. I've always thought of her as like a sister. I just don't think I could ever get past that. If Joey and I got together it would be, a little incestuous."
01. They are way too co-dependent. Top 5 Fights #1 The Longest Day - 3x20 http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...ead/fight1.jpg "The way that I feel about him [Pacey] is completely separate from the way that I feel about you and our friendship." #2 The Song Remains the Same - 6x02 http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...ead/fight2.jpg "Joey you and I both know if either one of us had stopped and thought for even a second last night, then what we did never would've happened." #3 Be Careful What You Wish For - 2x16 http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...ead/fight3.jpg Face, meet cake. #4 The Dance - 2x06 http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...ead/fight4.jpg "There's no justifiable reason why the girl who spent the last 15 years of her life pretending I was the only thing she wanted ended up kissing some other guy and lying about it." #5 Parental Discretion Advised - 2x22 http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...ead/fight5.jpg "What I have to say you're not gonna like, so I'll say it quickly. I hope one day that I will be able to forgive my father for all of this. And I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive myself. But I know that I will never forgive you. See Dawson, there are certain circumstances that love cannot overcome and from now on, I don't wanna know you."
"I like it but it... it's not love." - Dawson
http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j...ad/cake300.gif QuotesDawson: Even if Joey came up to me today and said, "I forgive and I forget," I wouldn't.
Just two old friends making a big mistake. http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/j.../dawcryfff.gif
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TFTNT, Ali! :D
I love the side by side comparison of Joey's facial expressions in the OP. :lol: Really does say it all. |
Rachey I definitely am!!! :)
TYFTNT! I just read through the OP, and I love it! This seriously might be my favorite thread ever! |
TFTNT!!
Continuing on from the old thread, when Joey says "Goodbye" to Pacey i hate how she glances quickly at Dawson as if she needs to see if he's okay with her saying "goodbye" Like seriously, has Dawson done so much emotional damage to you that you can't even say one word to Pacey without feeling like you're betraying Dawson somehow? Okay, Joey. Get a spine. And Dawson. Get a life. |
Well said, clarkson-fan! :lmao:
Dawson treated Joey like his property. He didn't love her enough to want her to be happy--even if that meant being happy with someone else. He only wanted to possess her and be the most important person in her life. Meanwhile, Joey let herself fall prey to Dawson's emotional blackmail. And she almost lost the love of her life as a result. Imagine if Dawson hadn't finally told her to go to Pacey? She would have just let Pacey leave and continue to be miserable by Dawson's side throughout the entire summer. I'll just never understand why she let Dawson have that much power over her. :rolleyes: If she had stood back and looked at the situation like an adult, she would have seen that if Dawson really cared about her and really considered himself to be her "soulmate" *gag*, then he would have eventually forgiven her for following her heart. And if he didn't forgive her, well, then that should tell her something... |
This thread is so funny to me. :lol: I have no idea why thought. I just love reading the reasons why they would never be. "When soulmates have sex, there hair looks bad for a year" :lol:
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The thing is Joey eventually forgave Dawson for making her turn her father in to the cops. He could have given her the same sort of forgiveness when she fell for Pacey. Dawson was one of the most selfish characters I've ever seen. Selfish and spoiled. Nobody had a life separate from him they were all supporting cast to his internal leading roll.:sick:
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Well said clarkson_fan - worst thing is Joey was portrayed as such a strong character. When it came to Dawson she was always like a love sick puppy.
The speech Joey gives Pacey in 'Self Reliance' I can't remember the exact words but she says whenever she's around him she feels 15 again. I'm watching S4 DVD's at the moment and I hate the way Joey is so upset by the notion of Dawson and Gretchen, why should she care? She's with somebody she loves and as long as Dawson isn't pining after Joey anymore then the triangle ceases to exist right? And Pacey is so understanding towards her precious feelings for Dawson, in the real world she would have some serious explaining to do. :rolleyes: One more thing, Gretchen is constantly making references about Joey to Dawson as 'this girl he broke up with last year' - they broke up soooooooo long before that and their brief relationship hardly set the world alight! Very annoying!! |
Summarizing "Dawson's Creek:" blessed are the peacemakers
If asked to summarize DC's message in one sentence, I'd say:
"Dawson's Creek" depicts the vicissitudes of mate selection in the contemporary West, and elicits sympathy for youth's subjection to them ironically, by focusing on a character, Dawson, who longs for an unattainable escape from them by cultivating a doomed fantasy that he is predestined to marry an all-but-biological sister close to him from early childhood. Dawson is kind and throughly likable, and to fail to sympathize with his fantasy would be heartless. But to fail to realize that it is unattainable, that Dawson must give up his fantasy, is to miss what modern Western society cruelly requires of its young. I suspect that this may be why the show was so successful - popular even among highly educated adults, as a creative writing professor then at Yale, now at Harvard, Jane Rosenzweig, noted in an essay, "Reality Lite," in The American Prospect magazine in July 2000. The burden of choice and uncertainty in modern youth is heavy and historically novel. In traditional society, one did what one's father or mother did for a living, lived where they had lived, and married one of a very small set of available mates, usually in one's teens, and usually in a match arranged by one's elders. The advent of specialization of labor over the past two centuries has utterly changed all that. Now there is a vast choice of careers, locations, and mates, extending over an adolescence prolonged by educational requirements, during which one lacks the income and stability needed to marry and raise children. Now, throughout one's decade of greatest biological lust, one is unable to comply, short of celibacy, with the demands of traditional sexual morality, namely to gratify lust only in marriage, to channel desire into posterity. The contemporary popular culture that has arisen in response to the inapplicability of traditional culture to social conditions created by specialization of labor is less a rejection of traditional sexual morality than an attempt to adapt it to those novel conditions, to salvage as much of it as possible. Modern popular culture does this by romanticizing serial monogamy as a norm preferable to the libertinage of casual sex or the emotional isolation of celibacy during the unnaturally and cruelly protracted adolescence: it seeks above all to inspire courage to commit emotionally to relationships likely to be transient, at best uncertain in duration, to shoulder the yoke of heartbreak as the only alternative, throughout our decade of greatest lust, to casual sex or celibacy. "Breaking up is hard to do," as the classic rock song put it. The core moral problem is that compassion requires sustenance from passion, especially in youth, and neither libertinism nor celibacy provides compassion with the support it needs. Would a society in which the professional classes -- doctors, lawyers, MBAs, academics -- were either libertines or celibates until their late 20s or early 30s, serve well the ultimate goal of traditional morality? Would it be a society in which people were better able to love their neighbors as themselves? A society in which people were better prepared, at a late age, to marry and raise children? The problem is that the emotional cost is high: we arrive at marriage and child-raising not only later but more scarred emotionally, less trusting, than we once did; to cope with this and fight against it, it helps adults to understand that they are scarred, and why. Modern adults cannot understand and fight their own emotional malaise without understanding how unnatural are the hardships of modern youth that gave rise to it. Hence the appeal of WB teen dramas to "boomers." The genius of the WB network's teen TV offerings, and of "Dawson's Creek" in particular, was to show contemporary youth culture from a perspective with which people committed to traditional culture could sympathize, and thereby to evoke the sympathy of the traditional for the contemporary. The kids on the WB shows were unrealistic: that they were more beautiful physically than real kids merely masked and complemented a more important difference: they were more moral than real kids. The protagonists all had active consciences, and struggled to do the right thing, under social conditions in which traditional morality offered no readily applicable guidance. But these shows also evoked the sympathy of teen-aged viewers for the core of traditional morality, suggesting and perhaps helping them to understand the moral traditionalism of a popular culture widely disparaged as undermining rather than salvaging traditional sexual morality. The WB's teen dramas tried to serve, in a modest way, as peace-makers in America's "culture wars," increasingly the main conflict of American politics, and "Dawson's Creek" was particularly good at it. (To see how consciously its writers tried to serve in this role, one need only consider the character of Jen's grandmother, a devout and saintly Christian, portrayed with utmost sympathy.) Having lived in societies where arranged marriages are still common, and having seen that such traditional mate-selection can function well, and being keenly aware from my fondness for reading history that modern mate-selection in the West is very different from anything seen in any past society, I personally am quite sympathetic to Dawson's fantasy. But there is no way to return to traditional mate-selection unless we are prepared to curtail specialization of labor and return at least part of the way to growing our own food, spinning and weaving our own clothes, etc. Absent such a return, traditional youth is dead, and the traditional family is doomed. We still have not understood this, and failure to understand it gives rise to America's "culture war." Nor do we want to understand this, because it is not a happy predicament with an easy solution. But the WB's teen dramas, and "Dawson's Creek" in particular, help to nudge us, unwilling though we be, toward greater understanding of our modern predicament. |
Glad you guys like the OP! I'm still adding quotes from the last thread. I know there are tons more too we haven't thought of. :evil_lol:
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So true. And it took him over 15 years to even realize he was "predestined to marry" Joey, his practically-adopted sister. This sums up what is wrong with them as a couple and what's wrong with their chemistry over all. Its practically incestuous. :sick: |
Yes, Rainydreams, but if one fails to empathize with Dawson's fantasy, one misses the point of the show. The empathy is all.
Dawson's fantasy would NOT have been unrealistic in Europe or America 200 years ago. It would not be unrealistic today in a rural village in Africa, India, or China. Dawson's fantasy is in fact natural and historically normal, and that is is no longer realistic for us is a cruelty that specialization of labor inflicts on modern youth. We pay a higher emotional price for our material prosperity than we commonly understand. |
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Blessed are the peacemakers
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The society you're describing mostly doesn't exist anymore. |
Finnegan, I see what your getting at. I'm not entirely sure which thread would be the correct place to discuss that topic, but its probably not this one. Your talking about Dawson's entire character arc-- that the point of the entire show was the death of childhood fantasies. Because that's what growing up requires. This thread is a place for us to discuss why we don't think DJo worked as a couple and the reasons they brought out the absolute worst in each other. Which they did, repeatedly.
Yes, the show was about growing up. Dawson was a dreamer and he looked at the world through rose-colored glasses. His fantasy was not what I had a problem with. I had a problem with his behavior towards Joey, in relation to that fantasy. So, while I can somewhat empathize with his situation, I do not sympathize with him as a character. At all. |
The DJ dance throughout the whole series is seriously sickening.. The way that Pacey describes it in "Valentine's Day Massacre" is spot on. I just finished re-watching "The Anti-Prom" and "True Love", and I just can't stand how Joey is so easily manipulated by Dawson.
I think she mostly allowed for that because she was so fearful of the future, though. Dawson was familiar, safe, and comfortable, and family to her. She thought that if she let that go she wouldn't have the safe-haven anymore. Joey knew Dawson well enough to know that if she went with Pacey things would change between them. In "True Love" when they're talking on the docks she says she wants to know that Dawson won't hate her and that things won't change between them, and he can't say that because he knows they will and so does she (which of course should NOT be the case). Joey was just always so scared, and Dawson knew how to manipulate her because of that fact. Finnegan I'm highly doubting that Kevin Williamson's mission in creating "Dawson's Creek" was to depict the mate-selection process in the contemporary West. |
Let's drop the discussion about Africa, India, China, etc. That has absolutely nothing to do with this thread.
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Even from the first season on, Joey had a more honest relationship with Pacey then she ever did with Dawson. She could never tell D how she felt, even though it was obvious to everyone around them and he was amazingly obtuse. But with Pacey she could joke, be a smart ass, cut loose. The scene where they are collecting snails, after Pacey's ill fated menage a snail, is indicative of who she is despite Dawson. I think that she fell for D because she didn't know any better. Joey lived a pretty insulated life, the same small town, the same people. Pacey did too, but even though he was small town in body, he was not in spirit. He fostered growth in everyone around him and I think that this is what made Joey fall for him. As she said in True Love (not verbatim by any means), everyone tried to hold her back but not him. He challenged her, made her world bigger just by being in it. P showed her what love is supposed to feel like.
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fringe_du_jour i really agree with what you said here. It makes a lot of sense. And not to mention that she had a lot of fun with Pacey and with him she did things that she never did with anyone else. She took risks. She dared to actually live her life because Pacey helped her live it.
Dawson never dared her to live it. He always wanted her to live his life, not her own. And on top of how wrong that is in the first place, his life wasn't exactly realistic. He had his rose-colored glasses and a fantasy most of the time. |
It makes sense that Joey would *think* she loved Dawson in a romantic way when she was 15 years old. He was someone she could rely on throughout her entire young life, and when she had nothing else, she had Dawson and his family. He represented safety, security and happiness. So, when you don't know what falling in love feels like, then it makes sense to mistake other feelings for love.
As soon as DJo got together, I think Joey started to doubt her feelings for Dawson. She, of course, still loved him as a friend and almost-relative, but she didn't love him as a boyfriend. And when she fell in love for real, there was just no going back to Dawson for anything other than a sense of security. |
I agree. It was clear to me at about 4 episodes into S2, she was doubting how strong her feelings for Dawson really were. She had built their relationship up in her mind as this grand thing and I think she realized that it really wasn't.
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I do actually like their friendship, it's when they think it's romantic that it bothers me. For e.g. Coda - I like the episode until they have to kiss at the end. :rolleyes: I can see why it's so significant that the two characters are leaving Capeside and venturing off on their own for the first time. But how Joey can kiss him again after only just breaking up with Pacey, in a completely devastating way no less, I can never understand. She always goes running back to him, no matter what the circumstances! |
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I know what you mean. I love Joey on her own or with Pacey, she's such a strong, intelligent woman but that all disapeared whenever her and Dawson were together. They're always 15, in his room, having the same conversations over & over again. Eeek, very annoying.
In S4 I just don't know how Pacey and Gretchen both put up with how obsessed DJ were with each other. It can't be very nice for the exsisting partners, if JP had broke up for any reason it should have been because of their never ending dance, that would be enough to drive anyone away. |
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