That Promethea-Season 8 Thing . . . What Up?
(Okay, so I totally titled this post what I did because I really wanted to use this icon. I've never been able to use this icon, and I really, really wanted to. Yes, I'm childish.)
Recently, there was a lot of discussion over at angearia's journal about the similarities between Season 8 and Promethea. Now, speaking as someone who's first foray into comics (other than reading Watchmen because everyone and their brother said it was the pinnacle of superhero comics) was Season 8, I was inclined to push aside all my misgivings with the storytelling as being the change in medium; the pacing, worldbuilding and characterization of anyone, really other than Xander making it difficult for me to connect with my favorite 'verse like I wanted to. I've read plenty of manga back in the day, mostly of the shoujo (written for a female audience) variety, and recognized that there were some difficulties in the serialized form; I'd much rather be reading a completed series rather than a series in progress, mostly because of the pacing issue. So, I could discount my dislike of Season 8's pacing as a medium-wide problem, and put it aside as a barrier to my enjoyment. I'd just have to accept the snail-like pace of the storytelling, and leave it at that.
The worldbuilding was another issue; to make comparisons, I could use True Blood as an example of building a world where vampires are a known entity to society, and recognize that its usage of a gay rights metaphor makes the worldbuilding translate much better to the audience. Harmony on the Colbert Report, while amusing, is not enough worldbuilding to convince me why the sudden fascination and sycophantic adoration of vampires is happening in Buffy's world. I learn more about the world of True Blood in the snippets of Nan Flanagan (that's the Vampire Rights advocate, right) on CNN playing in Sookie's kitchen than in 30+ issues of the Buffy comic. Well, sometimes the world of Sunnydale didn't come clear (wouldn't most news sources have glomped on to the story of a high school blowing up at graduation? Where's Anderson Cooper when you need him?), so maybe I'm just being picky, and maybe it's just the medium, again. However, the only manga I still continue to follow, Bleach, has a hellluva lot of worldbuilding put quickly into place within the first thirty or so issues, admittedly through the adorably terrible illustrative drawings/diagrams of one of the characters, so really I can't blame the medium here. And Bleach regularly expands its universe - we'll get more teams of different fighters and warriors and bad guys and good guys at every arc; each team with its own rules, idiosyncracies internal politics, and that's done pretty seamlessly . . . so what was it about Season 8?
Oh, well, maybe it'll be the characterization of people that I love that will keep me connected . . . only one problem: people aren't as recognizable as they used to be. Sure, I can look at group shots as see "guy with eyepatch" is Xander, "redhead" is Willow, and usually I can tell which brunette is Dawn and which brunette is Faith . . . most of the time. But that's not what I mean by recognizable.
What I mean by recognizable is see these characters, hear their voices, and have them hold the same resonance as their television counterparts. I wanted to see what happened after Chosen . . . and I don't. Whatever amount of time between Chosen and the start of Season 8 changed these characters significantly enough that they don't feel like the Buffy, the Willow, the Dawn that I knew. They don't contain any of the character growth I watched in the later seasons; if anything, it's high school bubblegum Buffy and her pals, but with helicopters. This is why Jo Chen's cover for #37 resonated so much with me: at last I see the Buffy I fell in love with, with the world on her shoulders. That was the first appearance of adult Buffy, of later season Buffy, for all that people have been telling me that Buffy's shattering under the pressure or whatever so much that boinking her tenth grade boyfriend (who's been offing her army this whole friggen time) sounds like a good idea.
Now, I've taken all this personal criticism of the comics in, tried to give the apologists their say, but still can't be other than disappointed with Season 8 as a whole, for all that I'm looking forwards to Spike kicking ass and taking names again in issue #36. Yes, there could be good things, happy-making things coming up, but when there's good things in a crack!fic, it doesn't change the fact that you're still reading crack!fic. I can be happy with where we are, but still disappointed that the writers decided we had to go there in the first place.
Because I didn't like being so disappointed with Joss Whedon, with the Buffyverse, with this official product labeled as "canonical," I decided that I had a problem with the Western Comics medium as a whole. Sure, I could admit it: I didn't get it. I'd rather criticize my grasp of the medium than the product itself, if that leaves the Buffyverse innocent of my condemnation.
Then I read Promethea.
Now, imagine you're new to Batman films. Never seen one in your life. Then one day, you think "hey! I like George Clooney! let's rent Batman and Robin!" This, of course, is your first foray into the world of Batman films. Maybe you watched some Batman cartoons, found them pretty good, so you're thinking this new one you're gonna watch should be pretty good, too.
Well, you watch it. Watch Uma Thurman pull one of the worst acting jobs of her life. Watch George Cloony don the Batsuit that will forever be the punchline of his career. Watch the very reason why it's a good thing Arnold Schwartzenegger left movies and went into politics. And you know what? It sucks.
Well, maybe it's just you don't like Batman movies, right?
Then someone gets you to watch The Dark Knight.
Now, I don't think I need to link any critics sites for you to get the idea of my analogy:
Season 8:Promethea::Batman and Robin:The Dark Knight. Even my mom gets this one.
When you read Promethea, you see an execution of concepts and ideas explored in Season 8, particularly in the Twilight arc, but done so much better. It's hard to specify what translates exactly between the two comics, but when reading Promethea, you get an idea as to what Meltzer was going for all those months ago when he first proposed his penultimate arc to Joss . . . and you recognize why it's so incredibly flawed.
It's not a matter of plagarism; it's a matter of using the Campbellian concepts of transcendent stories and ideas, and doing them well. Promethea does it, Twilight falls flat. The Buffyverse mythology change we were promised in the Twilight arc seems shoddy and derivative in a very negative way; whatever Meltzer pitched, however brilliant it must have been to convince Joss to throw out the slayer mythos we knew for seven seasons, we didn't see it. What we saw was crappy Bangel porn where they fucked a new reality into existence while competing with BP for world destroying capacity, with some half-assed exposition by Giles that makes no logical sense whatsoever.
Yes, Promethea can get garbled and esoteric and there is some amount of WTF-ery, but the worldbuilding is so consistent throughout the entirity of the book (as someone commented on Emmie's post, it was as if they created an entirely different mythos for the second half of Season 8) that you can buy into the kabbalic journey and tarot history and all the other deep mysticism running through the narrative, because it ran through the narrative from the beginning. Twilight came with no foreshadowing, nothing in any issues up to #32 giving any hint that Twilight the character was anything but a bad guy - not someone Buffy has any business boinking. Fanwank is the only way you can make some semblance of logic out of the arc and it's place in the story; and really I only see some form of sense-making when I'm on strong medication or really, really drunk.
So no, when we say we see in Promethea what Season 8 tried to be, we are not accusing Joss of ripping Alan Moore of wholesale. It may sound like that, but that's the internet, where snark and sarcasm may not translate very well. Hence, when we joke about Joss writing Alan Moore fanfic, we are being snarky, saying Joss is fanboying Moore so hard he's messing with Promethea, but with Jossverse characters. This is called sarcasm, it is not an accusation of plagarism or a violation of copyright. Sarcasm.
One point Emmie made in Joss' favor was that the one-shot, Goddesses and Monsters, did synthesize the universal concepts explored in Promethea and attempted in Twilight, and did it well, grounding it in a Buffyverse sensibility that made these universal ideas its own. Twilight didn't ground itself in the Buffyverse, other than the people fucking in space were Buffy and Angel, and some of the locales in Twilight could be seen as the Bronze. That's about it; it's playing in the Universal Themes and Concepts sandbox, without making them translate to the Buffyverse. Goddesses and Monsters did it, Twilight didn't. Because Twilight was supposed to be the OMFG mind-blowing arc of the season, it fails miserably in its aims. Promethea has similar aims and succeeds. That is the gist of our argument: we found something that works with the Universal Themes and Concepts, and it makes Season 8 look bad, and really legitimizes all the criticism I wasn't willing to label it with before reading Promethea.
Recently, there was a lot of discussion over at angearia's journal about the similarities between Season 8 and Promethea. Now, speaking as someone who's first foray into comics (other than reading Watchmen because everyone and their brother said it was the pinnacle of superhero comics) was Season 8, I was inclined to push aside all my misgivings with the storytelling as being the change in medium; the pacing, worldbuilding and characterization of anyone, really other than Xander making it difficult for me to connect with my favorite 'verse like I wanted to. I've read plenty of manga back in the day, mostly of the shoujo (written for a female audience) variety, and recognized that there were some difficulties in the serialized form; I'd much rather be reading a completed series rather than a series in progress, mostly because of the pacing issue. So, I could discount my dislike of Season 8's pacing as a medium-wide problem, and put it aside as a barrier to my enjoyment. I'd just have to accept the snail-like pace of the storytelling, and leave it at that.
The worldbuilding was another issue; to make comparisons, I could use True Blood as an example of building a world where vampires are a known entity to society, and recognize that its usage of a gay rights metaphor makes the worldbuilding translate much better to the audience. Harmony on the Colbert Report, while amusing, is not enough worldbuilding to convince me why the sudden fascination and sycophantic adoration of vampires is happening in Buffy's world. I learn more about the world of True Blood in the snippets of Nan Flanagan (that's the Vampire Rights advocate, right) on CNN playing in Sookie's kitchen than in 30+ issues of the Buffy comic. Well, sometimes the world of Sunnydale didn't come clear (wouldn't most news sources have glomped on to the story of a high school blowing up at graduation? Where's Anderson Cooper when you need him?), so maybe I'm just being picky, and maybe it's just the medium, again. However, the only manga I still continue to follow, Bleach, has a hellluva lot of worldbuilding put quickly into place within the first thirty or so issues, admittedly through the adorably terrible illustrative drawings/diagrams of one of the characters, so really I can't blame the medium here. And Bleach regularly expands its universe - we'll get more teams of different fighters and warriors and bad guys and good guys at every arc; each team with its own rules, idiosyncracies internal politics, and that's done pretty seamlessly . . . so what was it about Season 8?
Oh, well, maybe it'll be the characterization of people that I love that will keep me connected . . . only one problem: people aren't as recognizable as they used to be. Sure, I can look at group shots as see "guy with eyepatch" is Xander, "redhead" is Willow, and usually I can tell which brunette is Dawn and which brunette is Faith . . . most of the time. But that's not what I mean by recognizable.
What I mean by recognizable is see these characters, hear their voices, and have them hold the same resonance as their television counterparts. I wanted to see what happened after Chosen . . . and I don't. Whatever amount of time between Chosen and the start of Season 8 changed these characters significantly enough that they don't feel like the Buffy, the Willow, the Dawn that I knew. They don't contain any of the character growth I watched in the later seasons; if anything, it's high school bubblegum Buffy and her pals, but with helicopters. This is why Jo Chen's cover for #37 resonated so much with me: at last I see the Buffy I fell in love with, with the world on her shoulders. That was the first appearance of adult Buffy, of later season Buffy, for all that people have been telling me that Buffy's shattering under the pressure or whatever so much that boinking her tenth grade boyfriend (who's been offing her army this whole friggen time) sounds like a good idea.
Now, I've taken all this personal criticism of the comics in, tried to give the apologists their say, but still can't be other than disappointed with Season 8 as a whole, for all that I'm looking forwards to Spike kicking ass and taking names again in issue #36. Yes, there could be good things, happy-making things coming up, but when there's good things in a crack!fic, it doesn't change the fact that you're still reading crack!fic. I can be happy with where we are, but still disappointed that the writers decided we had to go there in the first place.
Because I didn't like being so disappointed with Joss Whedon, with the Buffyverse, with this official product labeled as "canonical," I decided that I had a problem with the Western Comics medium as a whole. Sure, I could admit it: I didn't get it. I'd rather criticize my grasp of the medium than the product itself, if that leaves the Buffyverse innocent of my condemnation.
Then I read Promethea.
Now, imagine you're new to Batman films. Never seen one in your life. Then one day, you think "hey! I like George Clooney! let's rent Batman and Robin!" This, of course, is your first foray into the world of Batman films. Maybe you watched some Batman cartoons, found them pretty good, so you're thinking this new one you're gonna watch should be pretty good, too.
Well, you watch it. Watch Uma Thurman pull one of the worst acting jobs of her life. Watch George Cloony don the Batsuit that will forever be the punchline of his career. Watch the very reason why it's a good thing Arnold Schwartzenegger left movies and went into politics. And you know what? It sucks.
Well, maybe it's just you don't like Batman movies, right?
Then someone gets you to watch The Dark Knight.
Now, I don't think I need to link any critics sites for you to get the idea of my analogy:
Season 8:Promethea::Batman and Robin:The Dark Knight. Even my mom gets this one.
When you read Promethea, you see an execution of concepts and ideas explored in Season 8, particularly in the Twilight arc, but done so much better. It's hard to specify what translates exactly between the two comics, but when reading Promethea, you get an idea as to what Meltzer was going for all those months ago when he first proposed his penultimate arc to Joss . . . and you recognize why it's so incredibly flawed.
It's not a matter of plagarism; it's a matter of using the Campbellian concepts of transcendent stories and ideas, and doing them well. Promethea does it, Twilight falls flat. The Buffyverse mythology change we were promised in the Twilight arc seems shoddy and derivative in a very negative way; whatever Meltzer pitched, however brilliant it must have been to convince Joss to throw out the slayer mythos we knew for seven seasons, we didn't see it. What we saw was crappy Bangel porn where they fucked a new reality into existence while competing with BP for world destroying capacity, with some half-assed exposition by Giles that makes no logical sense whatsoever.
Yes, Promethea can get garbled and esoteric and there is some amount of WTF-ery, but the worldbuilding is so consistent throughout the entirity of the book (as someone commented on Emmie's post, it was as if they created an entirely different mythos for the second half of Season 8) that you can buy into the kabbalic journey and tarot history and all the other deep mysticism running through the narrative, because it ran through the narrative from the beginning. Twilight came with no foreshadowing, nothing in any issues up to #32 giving any hint that Twilight the character was anything but a bad guy - not someone Buffy has any business boinking. Fanwank is the only way you can make some semblance of logic out of the arc and it's place in the story; and really I only see some form of sense-making when I'm on strong medication or really, really drunk.
So no, when we say we see in Promethea what Season 8 tried to be, we are not accusing Joss of ripping Alan Moore of wholesale. It may sound like that, but that's the internet, where snark and sarcasm may not translate very well. Hence, when we joke about Joss writing Alan Moore fanfic, we are being snarky, saying Joss is fanboying Moore so hard he's messing with Promethea, but with Jossverse characters. This is called sarcasm, it is not an accusation of plagarism or a violation of copyright. Sarcasm.
One point Emmie made in Joss' favor was that the one-shot, Goddesses and Monsters, did synthesize the universal concepts explored in Promethea and attempted in Twilight, and did it well, grounding it in a Buffyverse sensibility that made these universal ideas its own. Twilight didn't ground itself in the Buffyverse, other than the people fucking in space were Buffy and Angel, and some of the locales in Twilight could be seen as the Bronze. That's about it; it's playing in the Universal Themes and Concepts sandbox, without making them translate to the Buffyverse. Goddesses and Monsters did it, Twilight didn't. Because Twilight was supposed to be the OMFG mind-blowing arc of the season, it fails miserably in its aims. Promethea has similar aims and succeeds. That is the gist of our argument: we found something that works with the Universal Themes and Concepts, and it makes Season 8 look bad, and really legitimizes all the criticism I wasn't willing to label it with before reading Promethea.