Comical
BtVS fandom, a large unruly clan famous for constant internecine wars that had just begun to settle down when the Jossfather decided to hold a big drunken re-union in comic form. Fist-fights are already threatening to break out on the lawn.
I don’t think I realized quite how prophetic these words would turn out to be when I wrote them. Or that I might become part of the ensuing bunfight. Mostly on team baker - my only real comics “Oh no they didn’t” moment was when Renee got fridged and even then it could have been worse. At least it didn’t trigger a Xander-gets-his-Rambo-on arc or happen solely so he and Dracula could have fat ass-grandchildren together. Still, two issues to go and war has broken out in earnest. Again. Joss is being mean to Angel and Buffy’s a worthless bitch and feminism is under attack and I’m not quite sure how at least two of those things follow from the actual book…
1) So the feminism thing. This only works as a criticism if you believe the Chosen ending was feminist in the first place but I do. It was about changing the system not individual empowerment and about women connecting and the Slayer, as a role imposed by men and not the superpowers per se being destructive. I vidded this.
One of the things I like (a lot) about S8 is the many different aspects of what happens after the revolution that it’s touched on. In the early issues the joy in their newfound sense of purpose and connection, the choices opened up to them that the former potentials feel. The one Slayer with any real resevations about her new status is a demented duchess whose main complaint is that she hasn’t been given enough power over the peasantry. Backlash is a theme from the beginning but at first the anti-Slayer movement is a secret society of mad generals who chaff at not being allowed to bomb anyone they deem not to jibe with American interests and shoot their prisoners without trial. Later humanity becomes aware and a vocal section of it is more afraid of Slayers than Vampires. I still like the storyline because while Buffy overthrew the Council she never thought to revise their policy of never asking people if they wanted to be protected. Sometimes revolutions don’t go far enough. The anti-Slayer movement is still presented as ill or misinformed and even when it ends with 206 girls and probably an equal number of soldiers dead the take home message still seems to be not that the revolution was a bad thing but that the forces of reaction were too strong for it to hold.
With the Twilight arc the story focus became more narrow. Buffy gots to be the one girl in all the world all over again and her fears that sharing the power started the war making her personally responsible for everything that went wrong became paramount. One thing led to another and in the final arc sharing the power is being cast as the event that allowed the new universe to initiate its predecessor’s destruction. Were it to succeed, that would cast the original act in a straightforwardly negative light. It would have become a story about how revolutions turn sour, how Bolshevism leads to Stalinism, Animal Farm with stakes. I wouldn’t like that but the world hasn’t ended yet and if even Dollhouse can conclude with a eucatastrophe I doubt the last two issues of this season will be all rocks fall and everybody dies. I see personal devastation for our heroes in the near future but not universal despair.
2) The Angel thing. I never was much of an AtS fan. It always seemed too much of a boy’s own fantasy of dark knights and dead damsels but every so often there would be an episode that made it worthwhile. A Reunion or a Home. In those I even like Angel himself (and in Smile Time and The Girl in Question and Guise Will be Guise). There is a tragedy to Angel, he’s a believer with no faith. He can mouth Whedon’s existentialist philosophies (If nothing we do matters…) but he can’t live with them. He’s a fatalist overcome by fate and this isn’t his book (although he’s still had more chance to explain himself than Cordelia did with the very similar but less gender bended Jasmine arc). In his battle with Miss Kitty some of what can make him sympathetic returns, I can see that even through the fog of her possesion this hasn’t been easy for him. I do think that at the last minute he will do something to make himself worthwhile - he has that in him. Even as a puppet (my reading of the state of him in Twilight) that long term perspective, that need for things to end for no more fighting did have a specifically Angel-like flavour and I think it did reveal something important about the character. He *will* live to see Connor die, the hardest thing for any parent. He’s been fighting so long.
3) The Buffy thing. There’s been criticism of the season as being all metaphor and no character but I don’t see that. It’s been looking at the characters by pushing them to extremes, letting big moments happen and seeing what they do, what they want. None more so than Buffy. By the time Angel unmasks himself she’s had her dreams that she might end the constant cycle of apocalypses and move on to something better beaten down, the humanity she’s thought she was protecting had turned against her, she’d tried giving up the power only to have it returned tenfold and been told it was power taken from her own dead. She’d come to believe although no-one would let her say it that she personally was responsible for all the deaths, by sharing the power she’s started a backlash that had claimed all those lives currently fueling her weird new powers. She went to fight Twilight hoping that slaying the big bad was the one thing she could still do right. Maybe he *was* to blame for all the hate (because it was hate killed those girls not guns). But was it ever really likely that one man in a mask could create so much antipathy? The first thing Angel told her was that the hatred was already there and from then on I don’t think it really mattered to her what his role in it all was. Whatever he’d done she started it. It’s at that point that Angel offers her an alternative. It’s our destiny, try it, make that leap of faith with me. Help me because I can’t do it alone. Follow your instincts. Jump. She jumped and never noticed the world falling apart as she fell. Since then the charges against her seem to be insufficient gravity and being too forgiving of Angel post-Twilight (the place). The former based on what she says to Angel to send him away, a conversation that begins with her telling him she doesn’t trust him and yet nothing else she’s said or done since seems to be given anything like the same weight in judging her. The latter when giving people second chances is what she does. For good or for ill, all murderers on team Buffy.
I don’t think I realized quite how prophetic these words would turn out to be when I wrote them. Or that I might become part of the ensuing bunfight. Mostly on team baker - my only real comics “Oh no they didn’t” moment was when Renee got fridged and even then it could have been worse. At least it didn’t trigger a Xander-gets-his-Rambo-on arc or happen solely so he and Dracula could have fat ass-grandchildren together. Still, two issues to go and war has broken out in earnest. Again. Joss is being mean to Angel and Buffy’s a worthless bitch and feminism is under attack and I’m not quite sure how at least two of those things follow from the actual book…
1) So the feminism thing. This only works as a criticism if you believe the Chosen ending was feminist in the first place but I do. It was about changing the system not individual empowerment and about women connecting and the Slayer, as a role imposed by men and not the superpowers per se being destructive. I vidded this.
One of the things I like (a lot) about S8 is the many different aspects of what happens after the revolution that it’s touched on. In the early issues the joy in their newfound sense of purpose and connection, the choices opened up to them that the former potentials feel. The one Slayer with any real resevations about her new status is a demented duchess whose main complaint is that she hasn’t been given enough power over the peasantry. Backlash is a theme from the beginning but at first the anti-Slayer movement is a secret society of mad generals who chaff at not being allowed to bomb anyone they deem not to jibe with American interests and shoot their prisoners without trial. Later humanity becomes aware and a vocal section of it is more afraid of Slayers than Vampires. I still like the storyline because while Buffy overthrew the Council she never thought to revise their policy of never asking people if they wanted to be protected. Sometimes revolutions don’t go far enough. The anti-Slayer movement is still presented as ill or misinformed and even when it ends with 206 girls and probably an equal number of soldiers dead the take home message still seems to be not that the revolution was a bad thing but that the forces of reaction were too strong for it to hold.
With the Twilight arc the story focus became more narrow. Buffy gots to be the one girl in all the world all over again and her fears that sharing the power started the war making her personally responsible for everything that went wrong became paramount. One thing led to another and in the final arc sharing the power is being cast as the event that allowed the new universe to initiate its predecessor’s destruction. Were it to succeed, that would cast the original act in a straightforwardly negative light. It would have become a story about how revolutions turn sour, how Bolshevism leads to Stalinism, Animal Farm with stakes. I wouldn’t like that but the world hasn’t ended yet and if even Dollhouse can conclude with a eucatastrophe I doubt the last two issues of this season will be all rocks fall and everybody dies. I see personal devastation for our heroes in the near future but not universal despair.
2) The Angel thing. I never was much of an AtS fan. It always seemed too much of a boy’s own fantasy of dark knights and dead damsels but every so often there would be an episode that made it worthwhile. A Reunion or a Home. In those I even like Angel himself (and in Smile Time and The Girl in Question and Guise Will be Guise). There is a tragedy to Angel, he’s a believer with no faith. He can mouth Whedon’s existentialist philosophies (If nothing we do matters…) but he can’t live with them. He’s a fatalist overcome by fate and this isn’t his book (although he’s still had more chance to explain himself than Cordelia did with the very similar but less gender bended Jasmine arc). In his battle with Miss Kitty some of what can make him sympathetic returns, I can see that even through the fog of her possesion this hasn’t been easy for him. I do think that at the last minute he will do something to make himself worthwhile - he has that in him. Even as a puppet (my reading of the state of him in Twilight) that long term perspective, that need for things to end for no more fighting did have a specifically Angel-like flavour and I think it did reveal something important about the character. He *will* live to see Connor die, the hardest thing for any parent. He’s been fighting so long.
3) The Buffy thing. There’s been criticism of the season as being all metaphor and no character but I don’t see that. It’s been looking at the characters by pushing them to extremes, letting big moments happen and seeing what they do, what they want. None more so than Buffy. By the time Angel unmasks himself she’s had her dreams that she might end the constant cycle of apocalypses and move on to something better beaten down, the humanity she’s thought she was protecting had turned against her, she’d tried giving up the power only to have it returned tenfold and been told it was power taken from her own dead. She’d come to believe although no-one would let her say it that she personally was responsible for all the deaths, by sharing the power she’s started a backlash that had claimed all those lives currently fueling her weird new powers. She went to fight Twilight hoping that slaying the big bad was the one thing she could still do right. Maybe he *was* to blame for all the hate (because it was hate killed those girls not guns). But was it ever really likely that one man in a mask could create so much antipathy? The first thing Angel told her was that the hatred was already there and from then on I don’t think it really mattered to her what his role in it all was. Whatever he’d done she started it. It’s at that point that Angel offers her an alternative. It’s our destiny, try it, make that leap of faith with me. Help me because I can’t do it alone. Follow your instincts. Jump. She jumped and never noticed the world falling apart as she fell. Since then the charges against her seem to be insufficient gravity and being too forgiving of Angel post-Twilight (the place). The former based on what she says to Angel to send him away, a conversation that begins with her telling him she doesn’t trust him and yet nothing else she’s said or done since seems to be given anything like the same weight in judging her. The latter when giving people second chances is what she does. For good or for ill, all murderers on team Buffy.