The Feminist Filter: Halloween

[gabrielleabelle]

Alright! Let's do Halloween! This one is particularly rich in the feminist text, so make yourself some tea. :)

Mission Statement:This series is intended to outline the feminist text of each episode so as to provoke and encourage open discussion. It's not so much about making value judgments about events and/or characters but about analyzing the

Comments

[angearia]

RIGHT. This also fits with her need to actually re-shape the world through magic. Because that's the only way for her internal world to be acknowledged by ~others. She's tired of being ignored, so she changes the external to reflect the internal -- or sometimes to change the internal by creating an external she ~wishes~ were true.

Our analysis of Buffyverse relationships sometimes makes me feel cynical about relationships. Was Tara only Willow's greatest love because Tara helped Willow connect with herself more fully? But is that bad or is that just the reality that's romanticized into something else? Is Tara as much a person to Willow as Spike is to Buffy? (Have you read The Awakening? Because the protagonist, Edna, loves a man who connects her with her true inner self and awakens her sensual nature, helping her to live more fully as herself.)

It doesn't matter what she does when she's alone, because she doesn't even exist alone

She fears this is true, sometimes she believes it. But I think ultimately her story proves that her actions do affect her internally -- this shift towards darkness -- and she as an agent then affects and changes the external. She keeps trying to make it secret and unwitnessed, thinking that if it's all internal, she can keep it inside, but her belief system of thinking everything inside her is ~invisible to an extent -- it's flawed.

Willow-as-an-object makes me think of Willow feeling like a ~force~ in Season 6. It's like Willow's awareness of societal perceptions gets taken too far in placing all the power for identity construction onto ~outside forces. She's still unable to fully grasp her sense of self, not until she actually travels WITHIN HERSELF and finds the ephmeral is undefineably real. But she's unable to communicate this with others like Buffy and Xander and especially not Kennedy -- she's also unable to communicate the sense of loss when magic is gone. Magic made her insides real, gave her ephmeral internal identity literal shape and contour that she could understand. How can she know herself without being able to quantify what's within her?

THE GUY WHO WAS ON THE UNICYCLE? :D

[local_max]

RIGHT. This also fits with her need to actually re-shape the world through magic. Because that's the only way for her internal world to be acknowledged by ~others. She's tired of being ignored, so she changes the external to reflect the internal -- or sometimes to change the internal by creating an external she ~wishes~ were true.

YES

I think that Willow & Tara have the same problems as Buffy & Spike, in terms of personhood. To an extent though, I think it's okay. Because Buffy and Willow are 21 in season six. That's young. And they're both emotionally damaged. Willow did know Tara as a person, and I think she loved her -- but she NEEDED her more than she loved her, if that makes sense. I think that it's somewhat mutual, actually -- Tara needed an escape from her abusive family, and Willow "brought [her] out so easily." Tara ultimately had a core confidence and sense of self that Willow didn't -- like Buffy, she has an ultimately positive mother -- though she ultimately submitted back to Willow in Entropy and died indirectly as a result (tear). I think Willow loved Tara as much as she was able...but, well, it's not complete love is it, if you *need* the person so much that they have to be the person you need them to be, and have to block out from either your perception or from their own mind aspects of them that you can't handle.

Obviously what Willow does alone affects her internally! I'm more stating what Willow's attitude is. Hm. Willow in season six seems to me to be someone furiously, and in a blind panic, trying to wipe invisible blood off her hands. I should read Lady M's lines before season six. But anyway, Willow is *guilty*, and I don't think that is just about consequences that have happened. And she continuously tries to change reality toward one in which those bad things didn't happen. Some of that is by wiping memories. Some of that is by changing her own self-perception -- she's an addict, *not* a bad person. Some of that is by projecting onto an Other, as she does with Warren, recognizing the evil in getting off on having power over other people. And some of it is just losing her identity entirely and just trying to *become* magic, as she does with Rack. She is running/hiding all season. But the assumption that underlies much of it is that *if* she can make the evidence disappear, she actually *will* be a good person again. It's not even, I think, a matter of trying to hide what she's done so that other people don't find out she's bad, it's about erasing the existence of her being bad.

And yeah, the material on being a force. Magic allows her to actually connect to the outside world in a literal meaningful way, and make the outside in and inside out. And suddenly that's gone and she's trapped in her puny body again.

[angearia]

Obviously what Willow does alone affects her internally! I'm more stating what Willow's attitude is.

Right, I agree! Just that Willow doesn't seem to realize that what she does alone affects her, and by affecting her, she affects others in how she later interacts with them. She thinks she's in control of herself internally because she's able to do magic now, but it's actually the opposite. And the ripples affect everyone. Oh, TOYL. RIPPLES.

[doublemeat]

S6 Willow is obsessed with control, with the illusion that she can make everything better if she just does the right spell. Taken to the extreme after the loss of Tara (which is a double blow to Willow's sense of identity: she's lost her external conscience and her ideal[ized] source of gratification at once), you get Dark Willow.

This is why, like you, I go back and forth on Wrecked, BTW. At times it almost feels like it's trying to "explain away" Willow's magic addiction as simple hedonism, when it's obviously more than that. OTOH the magic is a source of immediate gratification, as well as being instrumental to her for the control thing. So maybe the drug parallel isn't completely forced.

I think you're on to something when you say Willow sort of wants to see herself as an addict in the classic sense. There's that whole "it wasn't me, it was the magic" evasion in play.

[local_max]

I agree with all this. I think that the reading of Wrecked-as-mislead (or a deliberate, if probably unconscious, reframing of Willow's own magic issues) is pretty good and resolves a lot of the problems Wrecked seems to prevent. I think too it serves a good purpose in the season: Willow does need to convincingly make "progress" without actually confronting her actual deeper issues, and I think allowing her to make a mistake centred around her more hedonistic, and also ESCAPIST side -- which is not, I think, irrelevant, but is not really the most important issue obviously by a long shot -- and then recover from that, without confronting her deeper demons about power, control, her idealization of Tara, etc. helps give the end of the season more power. I think stormwreath popularized the Wrecked-as-mislead theory.

[doublemeat]

Our analysis of Buffyverse relationships sometimes makes me feel cynical about relationships.

I am loving this whole discussion so much! I just want to say that.

Anyway: on the Willow/Tara stuff. I don't think it's cynical to realize that all human relationships have a degree of selfishness or neediness to them. It's just who we are. A mark of really good writing is that it doesn't try to deny that or gloss over it. W/T's problems explicitly stem from that selfishness, that conflict between them, rather than from external stuff. It's probably the most realistic of all the relationships depicted on the show; and yet it's also the most typically "romantic", with the baby talk, sweet gestures, dancing, making dinner together etc.

[angearia]

I am loving this whole discussion so much! I just want to say that.

YAY! I'm glad. Max and I sometimes go off on tangents, but at least they're interesting, right? :P

I think I still have a few romanticized notions about love, so I sometimes have to remind myself to not demonize selfishness and neediness. (But that's my issues. ;))

[doublemeat]

Well, I think it's easy to overstate the selfishness involved in W/T if we only look at certain aspects of it. Sure, they used each other sometimes (maybe Willow more so than Tara -- although that's arguable), but the bottom line is Willow would've cheerfully taken that bullet for her. The reality of love isn't lessened by the reality of selfishness.