Very nice essay. Of course, after the later seasons of BtVS and AtS, we all know that if Firefly hadn't been cancelled, Simon would have chosen to save River over Kaylee at some point, and Kaylee would have been captured and horribly tortured and killed her torturer and been reduced to a broken shell of a person and Simon would have had angst.
My only slight disagreement is with your take that the Kaylee/Bester thing was just hormones - I tend to think that Kaylee grew up in some very boring small-town environment, was desperate to get away to somewhere more interesting, and deliberately shagged him in the hope that he'd be her ticket away. But that's part of my general impression that Kaylee deliberately plays up the innocent/girlish aspect of her personality because of the problems of living in confined quarters with a load of unattached men, and that that isn't all there is to her.
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Date: 2004-10-29 02:25 am (UTC)My only slight disagreement is with your take that the Kaylee/Bester thing was just hormones - I tend to think that Kaylee grew up in some very boring small-town environment, was desperate to get away to somewhere more interesting, and deliberately shagged him in the hope that he'd be her ticket away. But that's part of my general impression that Kaylee deliberately plays up the innocent/girlish aspect of her personality because of the problems of living in confined quarters with a load of unattached men, and that that isn't all there is to her.