Wow.I know a lot of you have issues with Big Bang Theory, and much of the time I totally share them, but I just watched the hundredth episode from two weeks ago and sweet damn, that pushed my biggest, least-satisfiable competence narrative button like
crazy.
Spoilers under the cut -- major ones, so if you haven't seen it yet you definitely want to wait.
( Spoilers. )It's so hard to do this arc well, the arc where you go from insecure or shy or a minor character to an assertive badass, because it's so easy to go overboard; it's hard to write convincingly about growing up.
It's one of the stories I love best -- we got it with Ianto, I came
so close to getting it with Lupin, and it's something I'm constantly writing about in my own work. Nameless is sort of about it, and tons of my fanfic is: Sweet Home, Man With Fedora, to some extent the Rulesverse. The only time I've really written it to my own satisfaction is in Dead Isle, with Jack's arc about coming out of his Mad Inventor shell, but it's been a theme I've worked hard to explore. So seeing a great example of it in a show I've been watching and alternately crowing at or cringing over for four years was like twenty-five minutes of pure joy.
Also, the penis jokes were funny.