Angel & Faith #2 - "Live Through This", part 2

[boot_the_grime]

My belated thoughts about Angel & Faith #2 (that I didn't post before for no other reason than that I didn't find time for it).

I'm more ambivalent about this issue than about #1, because there are things I really loved, and some things I was bothered by - in the sense that they show how the series might go wrong. However, it all depends on

Comments

[eilowyn]

My comic book shop was sold out when I went to look for Angel & Faith #2, but descriptions had me worried about some of the same issues you brought up. The backwards logic of Faith's defense of Angel bothered me, but I'm glad to know Christos realizes it's backwards logic.

[stormwreath]

Nice to see those comments from Christos: conformation that he really has thought through some of these things that are striking readers as off, and there is a reason for them.

Faith and Giles believed that killing bad people isn't that bad. Hm. OK, that's something I actually expect from Faith, not so sure about Giles.

Really?

BEN: Need a ... a minute. She could've killed me.
GILES: No she couldn't. Never. And sooner or later Glory will re-emerge, and make Buffy pay for that mercy. And the world with her. Buffy even knows that, and still she couldn't take a human life. She's a hero, you see. She's not like us.
BEN: Us? *mmfg gmff mmf* *urrrgh*

I wouldn't say Giles would necessarily say that killing bad people in cold blood is *good*, but he'd still do it without a moment of hesitation or regret.

[boot_the_grime]

Giles didn't kill Ben because he thought Ben was a bad person. He killed him because he thought it was necessary to prevent Glory from emerging.

If he thought it was OK to kill bad people, then he should have told Buffy and Faith in season 3 that there was nothing wrong with killing the deputy mayor.

[stormwreath]

Maybe we're talking at cross purposes? I'm not saying Giles would go out of his way to hunt down and kill people proactively, just because they were in some way "bad" - but he also doesn't show the slightest hesitation to kill bad people if they're a threat. Or might be a threat someday. And part of the definition of being 'bad' is that you're likely to be a threat someday, so where does that leave us? :)

Giles's reaction to the death of the Deputy Mayor can be summed up in one sentence: "It's tragic, but accidents have happened." He very noticeably didn't offer any moral condemnation. And for that matter the DM was certainly not unambiguously a "bad person"; he may have been an innocent bystander

[boot_the_grime]

All those examples (apart from the Mayor, which was just impulsive and pointless) were about Giles being pragmatic and removing a threat (or trying to). Whether it was about a good or a bad person is beside the point. I see no reason to think that, for instance, Giles thought that souled!Spike was still a bad person, and he knew that Spike had no control over the trigger, so Spike's moral credentials were beside the point

[anonymous]

This is probably going to sound odd, but do you know if your ban from the comic section on BuffyForums is permanent? I miss seeing your stance on things. :(

[boot_the_grime]

It was a two weeks ban, it finished today. I've started reading the discussions...

You posted as anonymous, can you tell me who you are? (I should have said, Who are you?, it goes with the avatar :p )