it's sort of full of people with one huge thing to be miserable about who find a lot of small ways to be happy. Can you just keep saying insightful things like this? Please? That is also exactly it, and makes me really damn happy. This is how you properly do hope. (I don't know if you've ever seen Buffy, but it's very easy to fall into the Buffy-happiness expectation pattern on TV: relentlessly terrible things happen. Characters are afforded a respite, occasionally with a moment of genuine happiness. If moment of genuine happiness happens, characters are punished with relentlessly terrible things. And after a while that gets kind of wearing, you know? And it happens on a lot of shows -- off the top of my head, BSG and Doctor Who also do this -- so dS is very nice that way. In a lot of ways it really doesn't try to be realistic at all, but sometimes I suspect that it's actually really quite realistic about human emotion.)

Re: Fraser/RayK, YES, it really does lend itself to personal investment. Maybe someday I will grit my teeth and actually talk about why it resonates, and then find out if my own weird personal reasons for it being THE OTP OF PERFECT HAPPINESS are the same as anyone else's.