Notes on Buffy 2.21: Becoming, Part I
Standard disclaimer: I'll often speak of foreshadowing, but that doesn't mean I'm at all committing to the idea that there was some fixed design from the word go -- it's a short hand for talking about the resonances that end up in the text as it unspools.
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. ( Read more... )
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. ( Read more... )
There is only one thing I wanted to add: You spoke about Angel and his youth but imho human Liam was at the time of his siring a full grown adult. We deal with an era where even little children were working full time and people were founding families at an early age due to their shorter life-span.
To me this fact is important to understand because it explains the conflict between Liam and his father. Often people assume that Angel was some kind of misunderstood artist and his father a evil hypocrite but this completly ignores that in the 18th men of the middle class had lots of liberty and time to have fun in life but also were basically expected to take responsibility for their extended families at a certain age. Liam however seemed to have spend nearly a decade with whoring and drinking and I saw no clue that he did claim any responsibility for his own family. Besides he is portayed as molesting a servant of the family who is helpless due to her social position and whose whole life is mostly going to be destroyed in the process of his advances. In a nutshell Liam´s father has every right to view his son as a fail and I find it disturbing how many traits of Angelus we can see in Liam.
English is not my mother tongue and I am embarrasingly bad at it thus I was not able to present my argument in a coherent way but I hope that I made my point at least understandable.
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Good point about Liam as an adult. I think of him as a youth, but you are right that there's not really a social category for that at the time. He's certainly presented as a good-for-nothing.
Your English is great and perfectly clear! Where are you from?
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I am from Germany and to fulfill the cliché I even live in Bavaria :-)
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It occurs to me that Angelus' control issues (and finding purpose through reshaping the world) are a reaction to Liam's complete lack of control (and his lack of purpose as he's directionless except for his hedonism--and his father thinks he's doing little to affect the world). It's destructiveness, but where Liam lacks the drive to really dedicate himself to it, the demon provides a way to focus that raging at the world.
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