General Hospital Message Board

Prior to that, Sonny had been a small time hood, running a strip joint, getting an underaged girl (Karen Wexler) hooked on drugs, trying to get her and Jagger whom he had beaten up, and then, in one electric moment, while Sonny was chasing Jagger, Sonny's eyes met Brenda's.

That one fateful glance lit up GH and at that point, tptb knew that they had something extraordinary. They made the wrong choice to keep Sonny in the mob. At nearly the same time, Jax joined the show and he was tall, gorgeous, rich and powerful. Sonny needed a powerbase to equal Jax's, so he became the Godfather via a lame story.

What drove GH to the brink of insanity was that the writers had to show why Brenduh would choose a murdering thug/Godfather over a gorgeous good guy when she supposedly loved them both. Tptb had to focus on the good side of Sonny, brushing aside the fact that he was The Godfather, had people murdered, committed all sorts of crimes and was a career criminal.

To keep this character as a romantic lead, and by now, MB had a huge fanbase, and to keep him as the head of the mob, Sonny had to stay out of jail. To do that, everybody else had to be dumbed down and/or corrupted. Bad guys bad things was good as doing bad fit their job description. When they did good things, it was wonderful, beyond good. When, however, good guys did bad things--out of desperation since abiding by the law got nobody anywhere on the morally inverted show, they were evil beyond belief. When they did good things, they got no credit as it was their job description and was what they were supposed to do, anyhow. The cops suffered worst of all being written as stupid, corrupt and capable of committing crimes in order to bring the mobsters, who were portrayed as nice guys in alternate lifestyles, to justice.

It's no wonder that GH suffered because of this insanity. Then, to top it all off, we had Jason, a former good guy who suffered brain damage, become a hitman, a guy who routinely murdered people on Sonny's orders, and be regarded by nearly all of Port Charles as saintly. Insane.

It was the moral inversion that began with the electric Sonny/Brenduh moment that began the horrendous decline. Had Sonny not been in the mob, not been elevated to the status of all around good guy who could get away with terrible crimes, Jason would not have had a place to bring Michael to 'rescue' him from the Qs and keep him for Carly. At that time, Jason was acting as head of the mob after Sonny left Brenduh at the altar. Had Jason been an ordinary guy without mob connections, AJ might have been able to reclaim his son. Later, when AJ married Carly and was trying to be a family, Sonny intervened at Carly's behest. It was at that time that we had the meathook incident where AJ was told to sign the custody papers or die.

It never ceased to amaze me that anybody could write murdering thugs, organized crime figures as more morally righteous than the disfunctional Q family. That was simply insane and GH suffered mightily for it, suffers still.