Most Polarizing Characters?

[Khan]

When was Gypsy Rose Lee on a soap opera?

[Cheap21]

that silhouette is hilarious...LOL

[Khan]

It reminds me of something...but of what?

Oh, yeah.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Ms5JjalME

[Skin]

Circling back to a previous conversation because I just had thoughts on a comment on the first page:

I have to disagree here on sorts in regards to Natalie vs. Jessica conversation. While I agree at the end Natalie's character had more dignity (Teen Jessica and the Ford story killed any diginity Jessica had as a character, unfortunately), but I still feel that in large part Natalie became so watered down that she was only deemed relevant by her romantic rivalries. At the end of the series, Jessica was deemed much more important out of the two of them.

I was thinking about this earlier today, and while both Natalie and Jessica lost their way during their tenures on OLTL, Jessica is the one out of the two of them that seemed to have survived with a somewhat salient character intact and in the end she was the leading sister of the two. Natalie, needed competition from other characters in order to remain relevant and she was greatly damaged by the McBain relationship. See no further then that ridiculous rivalry she had with Marty for proof. Natalie was consistently fighting over a man or serving as a rival or antagonist to another woman. If it wasn't Jessica, it was Jennifer, if it wasn't Jennifer, it was Evangeline, if it wasn't Evangeline it was Marty, if it wasn't Marty it was Jessica again. And round and round it went to the point where you had to question where Natalie was in these stories if not just a perpetual Betty to another Veronica. There was a big block of time where you would question where she was in these storylines. She became just as much as a romantic chair as any other female character on OLTL, but at least Jessica felt as if she had more agency in her romances and stories. She often lead a lot of her romantic stories with Nash, Ford and Brody by comparison while Natalie seemed to more or less react to John, Christian and Jessica. Natalie consistently seemed as if she was picking up scraps or as if she was constantly being dismissed for something or someone else who was deemed more important. That's not to say she didn't get better towards the end of the show. I think Cutter and Brody helped her character in some of these aspects, but still in many ways it was Jessica or Tessica who was feeding her stories in that regard, to the point where Natalie was just as "hapless" and "victimized" just as Jessica was in her stories with Antonio Vega and Mitch Laurence. Natalie never really returned to her peak of prominence that she had during her debut and prime years (2001-2003).

All in all, Jessica was the character who more or less had drive continuously through out her term -- while Natalie was progressively seen as one of two love interests who she had to compete against for another man's attention.

[Vee]

Jessica had almost no airtime in the last several months of the show on ABC because they couldn't play her crazy anymore. To me that says it all.

She had no story as her own person, certainly no sense of herself as a character. Almost all the women on the show chased men, but I always knew who Natalie was and why she did it. I haven't known who Jessica was since at least 2004. Jessica had no drive, no career, no focus. All she did was get pregnant, go crazy and !@#$%^&*] new men, not necessarily in that order.

[Cheap21]

Jessica's character on OLTL was an absolute mess for pretty much her entire last 5 or so years. Natalie fared much better than her. Jessica had story, yes, but that doesn't mean that was a good thing. She was a joke, a damn plot device. A good chunk of her story, wasn't even her bc they had to create Tess (and a host of other personalities) to give her material and it was clear that Bree preferred playing her over Jessica. RC especially kept trying to find ways to keep Tess around bc he had no use for Jessica. She was pretty much irrelevant to him. Jessica as a character barely seemed to exist for any consistent amount of time towards the end before they were ruining or dismissing her.

[Khan]

Jessica was definitely a joke by the end of OLTL's network run. Then again, so were most of Viki's kids.

[marceline]

Agreed. The irony to me is that if a writer wanted to rebuild Jessica, it would've been easy because by the end of her run she was just a collection of tics and tragedy.

[AlexElizabeth]

The final straw for me was that Wes nonsense. That was truly awful.

[Cheap21]

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As if he/she couldn't tell there was no penis when she went to the bathroom

[cassadine1991]

Definitely Kevin, Joey, Natalie and Jessica were shredded. Only one who fared better was Megan and it was because she was deceased and no one trashed her Cartini definitely ruined the last several years of OLTL, it barely was able to recover last year

[marceline]

I'm trying to think of what it was that destroyed the character. It would be easy for me to blame the recast but I don't think this is a case where the recast changed the character. I think the writers changed the character and chose an actress to fit their new vision. I could blame Natalie but the interactions between Nat with ET's Jess were very good regardless of how heinously Jessica's birth was retconned.

It had to be the DID and the kiddie porn. That when the final shreds of the Jessica we knew were obliterated.

Maybe my next thread should be "Most Destroyed Characters" because I think Jessica Buchanan is in the top ten.

[Cheap21]

It probably was the DID. That's the story where I was completely over Jessica. I actually preferred Tess and was waiting for them to reveal that she was the real person and Jessica was the alter. I thought Tess got better writing whereas Jessica morphed into a one dimensional shell. She was nothing more than a vessel that her whacky personalities used to come alive

[cassadine1991]

Didn't know which alter was worse? Tess, Bess, Teen Jess, Wes, all of them were horrifically bad

[marceline]

I didn't see Wes but IMO Teen Jess a.k.a. Regressica was the worst because she was nothing like actual teenage Jessica. The audience knew real Teen Jess so that made Regressica fake and insulting on two levels.

I loathe Cartini but they don't deserve all the blame for what happened to Viki kids. It took years and spanned regimes.