I totally agree with you about the binary thinking -- and was trying to use the essay to suggest that things are much more complicated than the light/dark imagery might lead us to expect.
I hadn't thought enough about the nature of the accident -- you are right that accident has something to do with the way Faith was throwing herself into things. That had been a theme earlier in the episode. Because things are not binary, etc. etc. it's difficult to write an essay that doesn't leave lots of nuances on the cutting room floor. One of the points I wanted to make, but ended up leaving out was that Faith does feel inferior to Buffy. At the top of the episode, Buffy is ragging on Faith precisely for being reckless, not thinking etc. etc. -- in that superior tone Buffy can get. And I think that's what provokes Faith's reaction here. The accident does horrify her. But it also shows that Buffy was right. Right about something that has turned out to be important. So Faith's first jump is not a good one. But I stand by my broader claims. Being a bit careless is not the same thing as deliberately hurting someone. And the conversations between Buffy and Faith do shift the perception of what happened away from it being an accident towards it being something more morally weighty.
Also a great observation about Buffy's temptation to go cold. I'd read that as a symptom of her refusal to acknowlede the 'dark' in herself. For me, Buffy's coldness is the expense of her active construction of herself as 'good', and the concommittant failure to really be honest with herself.
I hesitated before concluding that Buffy had not had a moment of truth. Certainly she has lots of moments that look like the could be moments of truth. The trouble is that they don't often change things, or there is back-sliding. (I forget who, but someone once talked about all the false epiphanies on BtVS). I think she's still constructing herself as light at the end of BtVS. I don't see any moment where she acnowledges things like trying to kill Faith, or playing a major role in the badness that was Spuffy in season 6. She sees herself as forgiving both Faith and Spike. And as long as she's in the mode of despensing acceptance and forgiveness, she hasn't hit her bottom. That's what I was trying to get at. Though it is true that she has grown in other ways. I'm just saying that if the rock bottom fall is part of the hero's journey -- it's something that Faith (and Spike) have gone through, but which Buffy has not.
I totally agree with you about the binary thinking -- and was trying to use the essay to suggest that things are much more complicated than the light/dark imagery might lead us to expect.
Absolutely, I think you did a wonderful job and wish I had been able to express that better. The human brain she is wired in opposites, I slipped into setting up my own hot/cold dichotomy mid-comment.
Your point about the effect of the Ted incident particularly made me think and it’s also true that Faith’s the type to have an inferiority complex about her inferiority complex. Still I don’t know if any intervention would have stopped her, the pattern was set already in her first episode. If it’s possible to account for Buffy playing Generalissma in S7 by her caring too much about the potentials and reacting by refusing to care at all, I think the same can be said of the Faith running from having witnessed whatever Kakistos did to her Watcher. And she’s so very young in S3 for all her street cool bravado.
For me, Buffy's coldness is the expense of her active construction of herself as 'good', and the concommittant failure to really be honest with herself.
We probably have to agree to disagree then. I don’t think Buffy constructs her sense of duty/purpose in anything other than a trivial sense, it’s a living thing for her, why in S6 she feels like she’s still dead when it’s gone. There’s no reason to think that Wishverse Buffy is pretending to be better than Wish!Faith or a Wish!Spike if such people even exist but she’s still frozen.
I don't see any moment where she acnowledges things like trying to kill Faith, or playing a major role in the badness that was Spuffy in season 6.
As dlgood pointed out she knowingly set out to kill Faith but pulled back at the last. When Buffy thinks she *has* killed Faith her immediate response is to offer herself to Angel in Faith’s stead. Plot exegeses mean this doesn’t quite kill her but DreamFaith forgives her so she can move on.
I think there’s a big difference psychologically between attempted and actual murder even if the attempt fails by lucky chance alone. I think if Spike had raped Buffy he wouldn’t have been able to get his soul back. This, I believe, is what Buffy is talking about in Villains when she postulates a line that Willow cannot cross, that killing a person changes a person she’s talking from knowledge.
As to her part in the S6 relationship we could argue all night about who was culpable for what but I think Buffy’s describing her side of things extremely honestly when she says she was a monster but that at the same time she let him take her over. “But at the same time” isn’t casually linking the two things, it’s not that one excuses the other but both did happen, the latter most obviously in the Dead Things balcony scene. And both are faults on Buffy’s part, in letting Spike take her over she’s doing a similar thing to Faith letting the mayor direct her actions, she’s absolving herself from responsibility for them.
Good point about Wishverse Buffy. But there are other factors in play there as well. Very often in the Buffyverse (as in real life) there are multiple explanations for why people are the way they are. And they are often all true. So it's hard to answer counter-factual questions like -- would a Wishverse Buffy with friends and family but without a Wishverse Faith or Spike to be superior to have been so cold? In any case, the coldness of Wishverse Buffy strikes me as different from the coldness of our Buffy. All very interesting to ponder.
I don't by any means lay all the blame for the badness of season 6 Spuffy on Buffy's shoulders. I just say she was a player in it. She did acknowledge this to Holden right before she dusted him. But I'm not sure she ever fully acknowledged it to Spike. A bit hard to say because so much between them in season 7 is beyond words. But I just have this nagging suspicion that the dynamic was essentially her accepting and forgiving him, rather than the other way around. (It needed to go both ways, imo). The issue certainly lurks. Spike alludes to it when he's tied up in the chair in her bedroom, but she jerks in a way that strikes me as defensive. Spike again alludes to it in Touched, and again her reaction strikes me as defensive. Of course, Spike has also played a big role in putting her up on a pedastal and so he's not making it easy for her to realize that there needs to be more mutuality in all the reconciliation/healing in season 7.
In any case, it's the ambiguity of Buffy's situation at the end of The Chosen that makes me so interested in seeing how season 8 plays out. So far I'm not clear on how any of these issues are advanced -- but it's early days still, so I remain hopeful. If we just stop with The Chosen, however, we can at least say that it's striking that at the end of the day we can't quite be sure if the heroine has fully grappled with her biggest issues. The advantage of being the Prodigal Son is that the turn around point is clear. It's always harder to tell about the Elder brother who stays with the father, but is clearly not fully righteous.
I hadn't thought enough about the nature of the accident -- you are right that accident has something to do with the way Faith was throwing herself into things. That had been a theme earlier in the episode. Because things are not binary, etc. etc. it's difficult to write an essay that doesn't leave lots of nuances on the cutting room floor. One of the points I wanted to make, but ended up leaving out was that Faith does feel inferior to Buffy. At the top of the episode, Buffy is ragging on Faith precisely for being reckless, not thinking etc. etc. -- in that superior tone Buffy can get. And I think that's what provokes Faith's reaction here. The accident does horrify her. But it also shows that Buffy was right. Right about something that has turned out to be important. So Faith's first jump is not a good one. But I stand by my broader claims. Being a bit careless is not the same thing as deliberately hurting someone. And the conversations between Buffy and Faith do shift the perception of what happened away from it being an accident towards it being something more morally weighty.
Also a great observation about Buffy's temptation to go cold. I'd read that as a symptom of her refusal to acknowlede the 'dark' in herself. For me, Buffy's coldness is the expense of her active construction of herself as 'good', and the concommittant failure to really be honest with herself.
I hesitated before concluding that Buffy had not had a moment of truth. Certainly she has lots of moments that look like the could be moments of truth. The trouble is that they don't often change things, or there is back-sliding. (I forget who, but someone once talked about all the false epiphanies on BtVS). I think she's still constructing herself as light at the end of BtVS. I don't see any moment where she acnowledges things like trying to kill Faith, or playing a major role in the badness that was Spuffy in season 6. She sees herself as forgiving both Faith and Spike. And as long as she's in the mode of despensing acceptance and forgiveness, she hasn't hit her bottom. That's what I was trying to get at. Though it is true that she has grown in other ways. I'm just saying that if the rock bottom fall is part of the hero's journey -- it's something that Faith (and Spike) have gone through, but which Buffy has not.
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Absolutely, I think you did a wonderful job and wish I had been able to express that better. The human brain she is wired in opposites, I slipped into setting up my own hot/cold dichotomy mid-comment.
Your point about the effect of the Ted incident particularly made me think and it’s also true that Faith’s the type to have an inferiority complex about her inferiority complex. Still I don’t know if any intervention would have stopped her, the pattern was set already in her first episode. If it’s possible to account for Buffy playing Generalissma in S7 by her caring too much about the potentials and reacting by refusing to care at all, I think the same can be said of the Faith running from having witnessed whatever Kakistos did to her Watcher. And she’s so very young in S3 for all her street cool bravado.
For me, Buffy's coldness is the expense of her active construction of herself as 'good', and the concommittant failure to really be honest with herself.
We probably have to agree to disagree then. I don’t think Buffy constructs her sense of duty/purpose in anything other than a trivial sense, it’s a living thing for her, why in S6 she feels like she’s still dead when it’s gone. There’s no reason to think that Wishverse Buffy is pretending to be better than Wish!Faith or a Wish!Spike if such people even exist but she’s still frozen.
I don't see any moment where she acnowledges things like trying to kill Faith, or playing a major role in the badness that was Spuffy in season 6.
As dlgood pointed out she knowingly set out to kill Faith but pulled back at the last. When Buffy thinks she *has* killed Faith her immediate response is to offer herself to Angel in Faith’s stead. Plot exegeses mean this doesn’t quite kill her but DreamFaith forgives her so she can move on.
I think there’s a big difference psychologically between attempted and actual murder even if the attempt fails by lucky chance alone. I think if Spike had raped Buffy he wouldn’t have been able to get his soul back. This, I believe, is what Buffy is talking about in Villains when she postulates a line that Willow cannot cross, that killing a person changes a person she’s talking from knowledge.
As to her part in the S6 relationship we could argue all night about who was culpable for what but I think Buffy’s describing her side of things extremely honestly when she says she was a monster but that at the same time she let him take her over. “But at the same time” isn’t casually linking the two things, it’s not that one excuses the other but both did happen, the latter most obviously in the Dead Things balcony scene. And both are faults on Buffy’s part, in letting Spike take her over she’s doing a similar thing to Faith letting the mayor direct her actions, she’s absolving herself from responsibility for them.
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I don't by any means lay all the blame for the badness of season 6 Spuffy on Buffy's shoulders. I just say she was a player in it. She did acknowledge this to Holden right before she dusted him. But I'm not sure she ever fully acknowledged it to Spike. A bit hard to say because so much between them in season 7 is beyond words. But I just have this nagging suspicion that the dynamic was essentially her accepting and forgiving him, rather than the other way around. (It needed to go both ways, imo). The issue certainly lurks. Spike alludes to it when he's tied up in the chair in her bedroom, but she jerks in a way that strikes me as defensive. Spike again alludes to it in Touched, and again her reaction strikes me as defensive. Of course, Spike has also played a big role in putting her up on a pedastal and so he's not making it easy for her to realize that there needs to be more mutuality in all the reconciliation/healing in season 7.
In any case, it's the ambiguity of Buffy's situation at the end of The Chosen that makes me so interested in seeing how season 8 plays out. So far I'm not clear on how any of these issues are advanced -- but it's early days still, so I remain hopeful. If we just stop with The Chosen, however, we can at least say that it's striking that at the end of the day we can't quite be sure if the heroine has fully grappled with her biggest issues. The advantage of being the Prodigal Son is that the turn around point is clear. It's always harder to tell about the Elder brother who stays with the father, but is clearly not fully righteous.
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