Ichabod Crane + Living The “What Would Abbie Mills Do?” Life

SH fans: Pandora!

SH writers: *reveals she was doing it for her hubby all along*

SH fans: WE WANT ICHABBIE!

SH writers: *danabbie, joenny, crane/interchangeable bland chick*

SH fans: Well we love Joe at least!

SH writers: *kills Joe*

SH fans: JUST DON'T BRING BETSY TO THE PRESENT FFS WE HATE HER

SH writers: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Dance at the Maker’s Feet

A small piece of work I made during pauses between E3 conferences, waiting for DA4 announce.

And still there was none. Bioware, this is unfair and the purest suffering.

P.S. too hyped for Fen ”The Big Bad Wolf” Harel boss fight in front of Golden/Black City gates, ohh yeaahh

strong female characters are allowed to have relationships, be it with a hero, an anti-hero, a villain, whomever.  being in a relationship DOES NOT diminish a female character’s strength or their agency.  a female character does not have to forever be a lone wolf in order to validate her strength. 

More thoughts

I posted this at Project Fox in the hopes that maybe they’d listen. I know. Crazy, right?

But I needed to do it for myself.

Interested to know all your thoughts, too. :)

I have thought about this a lot and I wanted to post an opinion here in the hopes that maybe someone at Fox would actually listen. Perhaps a futile hope, but one I wanted to attempt.

A lot of people are upset about the treatment of Nicole Beharie and the character, Abbie Mills, and how she represented a viewpoint of a severely underrepresented population in American TV. And I am fully sympathetic to that viewpoint, even if I can’t fully understand it, being a Caucasian woman myself.

I don’t want to address that here. What I want to do is to address the problem with the writing and direction of the show.

I’ve got 20+ years of experience in writing, in a myriad of forms. And I understand that television writing is a group effort with a lot of creative control over a script being out of the hands of any individual writer. Raven Metzner intimated as much himself in one of his interviews.

However, there needs to be someone at the helm with whom the buck stops–who has a definitive, overarching view of the overall narrative and where the story is headed.

And that, right there, is what the problem is with Sleepy Hollow.

The original fans of the show tuned in due to its crazy premise of a time traveling Ichabod Crane fighting monsters, in particular, the famous Headless Horseman, with the modern day police officer, Abigail Mills.

The second season tampered with what made it successful. It stymied the action by coming to dead halts in the narrative. Emotional problems for the Crane family became the focus of the story. So the fans who came for the romp with monsters and who weren’t interested in emotional drama left.

And what you were left with were either (1) fans of emotional drama who liked Katrina and the romance with Ichabod or (2) people who came for the relationship between Ichabod and Abbie–whether they wanted them together romantically or not.

These fans were your base.

And season 3’s removal of Katrina, Henry and Frank Irving took a lot of those characters’ fans with them. So you’re left with people who have stuck with the show only for Ichabod and Abbie.

Season 3 didn’t bring back the comic book boys because the mythology was suddenly changed. The Headless Horseman was captured. The definition of witnessing was retconned. The history of Ichabod Crane was retconned and ruined by having him have romps with Betsy Ross during the time period where he should have been in love with Katrina. Those creative choices made certain that the fans who watched the show for those reasons had no reason to return.

Season 3 had basically nothing happen. Interesting characters and mythology would be introduced, only to be destroyed in the next episode. The villains provided no real menace and lurked around doing nothing. The week to week episodes came off as if they reflected arguments in the writing room where one writer would attempt to push a certain aspect of the show forward–an Ichabbie moment, or a well written history moment or a particularly fleshed out B plot–and then, the next week, the next writer would gleefully stomp on what the previous writer had attempted to do.

It came off as incredibly disjointed and unprofessional. And it seemed as if it was an adage of too many cooks spoil the soup.

The only reason people remained is because of the talented ability of Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison to elevate the material and to find moments that rang true for the characters and kept the fans on the edge of quitting staying.

So to kill off Abbie Mills completely demolishes what is left of the show. The relationship of the two characters is the binding of the story. Without that binding, the book falls apart. It cannot survive.

The failure of the writing staff to understand that is what has killed the show. Whatever backstage arguments there were, and believe me, we know there were, are irrelevant to that fact.

A fourth season for Sleepy Hollow reincarnated as a historical X-Files would have to find a completely new audience.

The genre audience is small–and well networked. And no sane fan who reads the history of Sleepy Hollow and what terrible things they did to the mythology, the characters, the actors and the fans is going to touch the new season with a ten foot pole.

And the remaining fanbase died when Abbie did.

It is time for the creative people on Sleepy Hollow and the financial people at Fox to acknowledge the mistake, let the actors and crew free to find other work and cancel the show.

It is not saveable.

How to Make a Buttercream Succulent Cake

So you've been with my former lover AND my son? 😂

I'm dying laughing at this!

“I’m sure we’re gonna laugh ourselves sick about all this one day.”

Sleepy Hollow 3x17 Truth Bomb             We cannot hide who we truly are, Lieutenant.

So this is it. The trending time is 3hrs. Why such a long trend?

Abbie’s death and our disappointment deserve a much longer time.

this is also a protest against Abbie’s treatment, not a memorial

this treatment is systemic and there are media projects featuring black female leads coming down the pipe, everyone needs to know that they can no longer do this easily and quietly

Why deserves instead of deserved?

 Abbie Mills Deserves Better is a classic tag for this fandom. Under the Abbie Mills Deserves Better tag we did so much. Forced a course correction in S2,got characters and storylines that were dragging the show down booted, and even got a show runner replaced.

In hindsight we understand it was already too little, too late, but its a powerful tag for us and we’re sticking with it. 

The trending period is three hours. The goal is to disrupt the tags and make as much noise as possible for as long as possible. We want to force them to deal with us just like we did before. 

I know some of you are depressed. You gave your all and no longer see a point, but there is point. Our Abbie deserves this, we deserve to do it for her. She was unique in all American television and now she’s gone. We cannot allow her to go quietly or peacefully into the night. We cannot allow them to say what they did was meaningful or right when we know it was wrong. 

To quote Zora Neale Hurston, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you liked.” That is what they are trying to say about Abbie right now. 

We must have the final word, we must shout the truth for all to hear, Abbie Mills Deserves Better! 

We’re also inviting other fandoms and ships to participate with us. 

100:

I love the fact that some of you have reached out to us, and are asking about what happened and in turn I took a moment to read up a bit on the recent death of the character Lexa. We definitely have something in common both of our groups were promised representation, both shows used our needs and our interests to string us along and in the end the promises were betrayed in an all too familiar pattern. 

Your hours long twitter trend was amazing and we’d appreciate your help with the trend.

WestAllen,Olitz,Richonne and fam:

There is a lot of overlap. I watch The Flash, I’m still a Scandal viewer, I watched Merlin, some of you ship  Richonne, some of you watched True Blood, Doctor Who, some of you watched Person of Interest. 

We’ve all felt and experienced this before, its all too familiar and while Abbie was unique she had something very important in common with Martha Jones, Nyota Uhura, Queen Guinevere, Joselyn Carter, Michonne and too many others to name right now. I hope whether you watched Sleepy Hollow or not we can count on you show up and help us trend just like you know you can count on us, because this is for Abbie and all of you and all of us.  Let’s send Abbie Mills out with a bang not a whimper.

The Incident at Stone Manor

Last things first:

Do I want to see kisses and declarations of love? Obviously. I’ve written about a million of them. But if that never happens, if the writers continue to be the writers, I feel like I got what I needed. This episode so obviously confirmed that no matter what they say, this is a romantic relationship on the deepest, most spiritual level. They are halves of one whole, tethered through space and time.

Now, do I think the show is strongly telegraphing romance? I do. Granted, we’ve thought that before, but really the last two episodes were a series of love letters between Abbie and Crane, a clear declaration that there is no one without the other. Tom and Nicole have abandoned any pretense of acting platonically – if there is such a thing as “platonic handholding” between adults, that was assuredly not it. If the writers choose to ignore that, well, I can’t fix that and I’m tired of feeling angry.

But this gave me what I needed emotionally from this couple. For me, it was a confirmation of everything I’ve felt about them. So not that I don’t want the physical stuff and the declarations; I do. I do. But this fulfilled something for me. Your mileage may vary.

Let’s do this thing:

The first thing – the first person – Abbie calls for is Crane. While this is thematically on point for the episode and hits me in my shipper zone, I don’t feel it’s in-character. Abbie just got herself blown up for Jenny, yet Jenny is the last person she calls for?

Our poor baby hurt, limping, so small in this huge, vast world. The water and rocks were such a huge change from our normal forests and caves and candlelit rooms. It gave the Catacombs a fantastic sense of space and otherworldliness and that sun that never moved. Really, superbly well scouted and filmed.

Current sexuality: Abbie Mills with a rusty, vicious cutlass. Shame she didn’t keep it. But of course, she’d leave it for the next poor soul who was stranded there. Might have left a note, though. To save time.

Good Lord, she looks so, so beautiful with her natural hair. And a great explanation for how it ended up that way. 10 months of complete isolation, complete stasis, not even the respite of sleep? They truly devised a cruel torture for her. And I hope they honor that pain and give it the attention it deserves. She couldn’t possibly come back OK.

Gargoyle: Kind of a cool idea for a monster, shockingly bad execution both in mythology and makeup. It looked like a bad Faceoff look. He couldn’t even move his mouth, and the actor was clearly trying!

Our first introduction to Papa Mills was a letdown. Obviously they’re going to develop it further, but seeing him so normal, in such a normal house, still using his same name, living in the same state but not giving a shit about his daughters? Left a bad taste in my mouth.

Jenny “Why Talk to Your Father When You Can Break into His House” Mills.

Both Lyndie and Zach were off their acting game today. Granted, they were given some real clunkers to say – “I hope you know you can trust me with what’s going on in here *gently taps chest*” is a real groaner – but this show is all about making awful lines sound good. Neither were up to the task this week.

Building a spirit cabinet is easier than raising a barn? When the everloving fuck did Gentleman/Professor/Soldier/Spy Crane have time to raise a barn?

Oh and also spirit cabinets were totally a thing, and a really cool thing! More an element of stage craft than a real way people tried to contact spirits, but I approve of their use, and that Jenny had to think of it, since it didn’t exist in Crane’s time.

How sad, how crushingly sad, that neither Jenny nor Abbie had *anything* of their father’s they could use in the ritual. And I love that Crane doesn’t press about her father; this boy knows daddy issues. He just nods and lets it go.

The bond of Witnesship being stronger than the bond of the sisters? Again, I get the theme they were building here, but not sure I buy it in either a magical sense – very few things stronger than related blood – or an internal show-logic sense. But that has never really been a strong suit.

Maybe the B-plot in this ep is awesome (pretty sure it wasn’t, but maybe), but it was impossible to care about anything besides Grace Abigail Mills.

Unlike Crane and Abbie imitating each other these last two eps, Jenny and Joe doing it felt too meta. Like, writers, if you’re aware of how formulaic the MotW scenes are, change them?

Abbie making her own chess board out of rocks and pretending to play with Crane. Because she knows him that well and misses him that much. And that’s who she turns to. No one else. Crane.

How many times do you think she imagined she heard his voice before she actually did? Ten months. Remember – even in our world, going mad is her greatest fear. How much would that be amplified in a world where it’s almost impossible to stay sane? How much would that fear have gnawed at her across day-lit nights when sleep did not exist? And then there it is and it’s real and he’s real but not quite real enough to touch and can she be sure? Can she really be sure?

Nicole’s acting was a true and absolute gift this episode. From the furtive way she moves, a woman hunted, eyes darting, quick movements, to how she talks to Pandora with steely resolve through her tears to her utter despair…she deserves so much. Thank you, Nicole.

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