ABSTRACT
One of the enduring formative features of soap opera, as well as a major source of its pleasures, has been its reliance on the creation and slow consolidation of a unified, fictional community, a community whose rules and logic form an ordered normative system to which all characters—despite their differences and antagonisms—are ultimately subjected. In this sense, the traditional soap community can be seen as a metaphor for (the ideal of) modern society. (Ang and Stratton 1995, 122)
