#for those who have been missing Rem on your TL

[tsarinatorment]

Okay, so @thunderbirds-are-no asked me in response to This Post about idealistic changes to TAG “Can I ask why would you scrap Kayo?”

Out of respect for that post’s op (in case they’re a Kayo fan or just don’t want this in their notes), and anyone else who follows me and doesn’t wanna see why I think Kayo is by far the biggest mistake TAG made, I’m gonna put my answer in a new post under a cut.  I’ll also leave this out of the Kayo tag ‘cause it’s negative (although it’s TAG related so it’s still going in that tag... just don’t read this if you don’t want negative stuff about Kayo)

Okay, if you’re this far you’re under the cut (or on some version of tumblr that doesn’t like cuts, in which case I am sorry), so this is your last warning that I do not like Kayo and this is not Kayo-positive at all.  I welcome civil discussions about her if you’d like to discuss anything I say here, but please don’t bring out the pitchforks if you don’t like my reasonings.  I’m not stopping anyone else from liking her, just don’t ask me to.

And yes, to put a very blunt tl;dr answer to the question “why would [I] scrap Kayo” - I think she is a terribly designed, shallow character who doesn’t fit Thunderbirds’ narrative and also is a continuation of the propaganda currently going around in most mainstream media that either the only Strong Female Characters are tomboys or they need a man in their life.  In short: she’s a Strong Female Character written by a Man.  And I am sick of those.

Also, pertinent to the rest of my original post’s point about scrapping her: as far as an adaptation of Tin-Tin goes, she’s lost literally every thing about Tin-Tin that made her awesome.

At this point, there is a confession to make: if Kayo was a character in another action series, where main characters were expected to fight, and was not a remake of a beloved character from an earlier version, I would probably like her.  I do not have an inherent issue with female characters who punch first and ask questions later, nor do I have any issue at all with tomboys (in fact, I’ve always been one of those myself!).

So, I think that’s the introduction and very basic outline sorted.  Let’s get into the details, because it’s me and I like writing long essays on things I have Opinions on.  And yes, this is long.  And is Opinionated so watch out for that.  It’s not my intention to be aggressive about this, but... I do have opinions.  And they’ve been brewing for a long time because I’ve refrained from talking about this unprompted.

I’ll go through the brief points I made in order so I don’t miss anything, so here goes.

Her characterisation:  Now, again, she’s at a disadvantage to most of the cast because I was already very familiar with the Tracys and the rest of IR, so it was kinda like watching some old friends and one new, intrusive, girl barging her way in without so much as a by your leave.  And compared to the rest of the boys... she’s shallow.  We are told things about her, but we do not see things about her.  Quite frankly, the only lasting impression she’s managed to make on me is that she likes to punch first, ask questions later, and is generally a very aggressive character with no other character traits beyond literally being aggressive.  And I don’t like that.  Maybe there are nuances that Kayo-fans have spotted that I haven’t, but honestly she has never grabbed my attention enough for me to bother trying to look harder.  (Don’t come to me with the butterfly phobia thing; yeah, they tried a little harder in S3 to make her ‘relatable’ and maybe if they’d had her playing up more on the familial banter from the start I wouldn’t grumble so much, but... too little, far too late.)

This is, in part, due to the writers themselves clearly not knowing what to do with her.  She did have a fun story arc of “the Hood is my uncle and the boys don’t know and they’ll hate me when the find out”, which is quite honestly the only thing I find remotely interesting about her and that’s why when I do bother to remember she exists in fics, I normally centre her around that.  However, they dogpiled 90% of that arc into what, three episodes at the end of season 1?  Which was also entirely too much Kayo all at once for me and also ruined any chances she ever had of me liking her.  I wasn’t particularly enamoured with her from her first appearance, and quite frankly the more I saw of her the less I liked her.

Doesn’t fit Thunderbirds’ theme:  Before we go any further into this one, yes, I know TOS had some IR killing people (Scott, Gordon, Penny, looking at you), but International Rescue has always been about saving people.  Their stance might be a liiiittle morally grey at times in TOS, but in TAG it’s very much “everyone should be saved, killing is bad”.  This is a hard line, and I did an essay on how much I love Scott for it a while back because it’s a very difficult line to follow, especially in their vocation, and I have great respect for the characters for sticking to it.  Kayo’s disposition for being an Action Girl and Beating Everyone Up the moment she doesn’t like them directly contradicts the message the rest of the show is trying to send.  Scott even straight up tells her this in Touch And Go and she completely ignores him and manages to get her way regardless.  Which - and yes being a Scott girl does make me biased here - absolutely appals me because it shows a blatant lack of respect for both Scott and International Rescue itself (on a side note, behaviour like this is also the reason I can’t stand shipping her with Scott, even if I didn’t already consider it incest because she canonically refers to them as her brothers and that’s enough for me - but my Kayo/Tracy opinions are irrelevant to the question so I’ll just move on).

Strong Female Character Gone Wrong:  I have many, many beefs with this, and a lot of it overlaps with the Tin-Tin comparison so I’ll leave that for that section and focus here on where I think they completely messed up making her Strong in the show.  Starting with an episode I very rarely rewatch purely because of this: City Under The Sea.

Yeah, I think whoever wrote that ep completely messed up Gordon, too, and because we have no confirmation that TAG uses the WASP backstory for him I’ll leave those opinions out of this, but Kayo in this episode is an absolute nightmare.  Her handling of TB4 is quite frankly ridiculous, and that’s before we get into the coup de grace.  Gordon didn’t know she knew how to pilot TB4.  At all.  Never mind her then pulling off moves he claims he didn’t know TB4 was capable of.  I am calling straight up bullshit on all of that - Gordon is the Head Aquanaut of IR, TB4 is his ship, and there is literally no-one else in IR that could train her up.  Gordon is the only aquanaut.  And as for someone piloting a ‘bird better than that ‘bird’s designated pilot...  Rubbish.  Complete and utter hogswash.

It’s by far the worst example, but it’s also not the only example of Kayo being “perfect” or “better than the boys” in the series and this really gets my goat because she has no right being better at them than they are at their own specialties.  I mean, her taking Rigby down a peg in Chaos - and also acknowledging she doesn’t know GDF handsigns - is a nice change of pace, but quite frankly the writers seemed afraid to make her anything less than Perfect at anything she did and it’s both unrealistic - even for a show like TAG which suspends disbelief on the regular - and boring.  And very frustrating at times.

Comparisons to Tin-Tin:  And this is the crux, and why I would absolutely love to have Tin-Tin in TAG and relegate Kayo to the scrap yard.

We’ll start with the overlap from Strong Female Character, because honestly one of the things that frustrates me the most about her character design is the complete scrapping of anything that could be construed as girlie.  Okay, there’s some hint that she might wear makeup, maybe, but it’s not obvious and the boys look like models ready to go on stage themselves anyway.

Tin-Tin wears pretty dresses.  She wears gorgeous dresses and does her hair up in intricate styles and likes boys and going out on dates or to night clubs (which roughly translated to modern times would be closer to going out for dinner at a nice restaurant that has live entertainment - 1960s night clubs were not the clubbing we have nowadays). She has make-up and jewellery and is quite frankly, girlie.  Kayo has... none of these.  And yes, budget, no clothes changes etc. has some role in that, but they could have made some effort with her civvies to not be, well, boring (and I say that as someone who basically wears her civvies as my regular day-to-day ensemble.  I am not bemoaning the tomboyness out of a lack of representation of myself, because honestly she’s a better representation of me/me as a kid than Tin-Tin ever was).

And there was no reason to strip Kayo of all this depth (which would also have given her more character, funnily enough) because it didn’t detract from Tin-Tin’s awesomeness at all.  In fact, it added to it, because it gave her some personality, some obvious things she likes/doesn’t like, and made it perfectly clear that women can be feminine and still awesome.

I really, really, do not like this current trend of stripping female characters of just about anything traditionally female and assigning stereotypically male assets (front line fighter, aggressive, etc.) to them to show them off as being strong.  And Thunderbirds was the perfect platform to challenge that because they had Tin-Tin (and Lady P., who is a discussion for another time) to start from!  No-one was expecting a Tomboy Action Girl out of TAG!  We didn’t need one!  Keep those for the other new shows they’re churning out, and the background female characters they introduced (who I adore; I think TAG did a fantastic job with their strong background female characters, they just entirely flubbed up Kayo, and I have side-eyes for Lady P. and to some extent Grandma as well).

But anyway, continuing on with the Tin-Tin comparisons.  Tin-Tin did so much for IR, both directly and indirectly.  She was Brains’ assistant!  She helped with all the behind-the-scenes for the Thunderbirds and other vehicles, we see her doing maintenance on Thunderbird One in Martian Invasion, I think it was, and when she went out in public as Brains’ assistant, no-one batted an eyelid (which for the sexist 1960s was a big deal, and thank you, Sylvia Anderson, for making sure your main female characters were given their fair dues).  She was also a co-pilot for Thunderbird Three, and went out as a medic, not to mention all the help she gave Jeff with his business (being a secretary is not easy), and Grandma and Kyrano around the house.  And in case that wasn’t all enough, she helped Lady P. out on spy missions as well!

So you take this woman who can do all this stuff and you... what?  Strip her down to an Action Girl whose single trick is Punch Things?  No.  Just no.  I still cannot believe they did that.  Did Tin-Tin need some adapting to fit 2015 instead of 1965?  Of course she did, I’m not denying that.  Did they need to strip everything that made her a decent character and shove in a shallow, boring, Action Girl instead?  Absolutely not.

(And because it’s related: I appreciate Thunderbird Shadow as an aircraft.  I think she would have been fantastic as a military craft in the GDF.  Thunderbird Five pulls off more successful rescues than TBS during the series.  TBS is a cool-looking craft and I love her, but she, like her pilot, does not belong in International Rescue).

So?  Why would I scrap Kayo?  Because of all that.  Because she’s terribly designed, is missing anything that makes her a remotely appealing character, clashes with the core ethos of the series she’s been written into, utterly fails at being a believable strong woman, and can’t even begin to hold a candle to the character she’s replaced in the series.

Bring back Tin-Tin.

#tsari analyses things #thunderbirds are go