Origin Stories: The Backstory
Like thuviaptarth, I've been stunned and amazed and so, so happy about the response to Origin Stories. We've both been lurking around various discussions of the vid and it's been wonderful to see how much conversation the vid has inspired.
As I hoped she would, thuviaptarth has posted her interpretations of the characters and her thoughts about the vid here. As a supplement to her post, I'm writing about the how the vid was structured to convey the points that thuviaptarth wanted to make. None of this should or is intended to take precedence over any other interpretations and absolutely none of it is necessary to an understanding of the vid, so it's totally fine to skip over this post entirely.
(Honestly, this post is probably more navel-gazing than anything else, not to mention being seriously, seriously tl;dr, so feel free to ignore it - the vid should speak for itself, anyway).
But, to the extent anyone is interested, here goes.
The Initial Constraints
After the auction, thuviaptarth presented me with a bunch of different vid options. This was her first choice, but that had nothing to do with why I selected it. I selected it because not only could I see exactly what she had in mind - her vision was incredibly clear and it was an amazing match for the song - but also because I loved the song itself, both musically and as the basis for a vid. It's a great song choice for vidding partly because there's so much emotion in it, and partly because it has several distinct musical "sections," each of which can be used to tell a different part of the story.
As you can see from her post, thuviaptarth wanted to make a political argument - about the treatment of characters of color, and of women - through a particular device, namely, by telling Robin's story. This is a critical point in how the vid was structured, because you can make political arguments in many ways, and a political argument made in the form of an individual narrative has certain strengths and weaknesses relative to other forms of argument.
The strengths are that it can be very emotional, and create empathy in the viewer. Additionally, in this particular case, argument in the form of narrative rectifies the very error that thuviaptarth saw in the text itself - a failure to give due respect to narratives other than Spike's.
The main weakness of a narrative form of argument is that it's limiting; there might be things that contribute to the political argument, but to the extent they don't contribute to the narrative, they must be discarded.
And, in this particular case, the other weakness was a lack of source. The whole problem with the text was that we never saw the true "stories" of various characters; that meant there was a severe lack of footage. So these two weaknesses were essentially what governed the vid generally: the story had to be told with limited footage, and even within that limited set of footage, some scenes could not be used within the structure of the story.
So, because of these weaknesses, there was additional emphasis placed on potential slayers and Kendra (to make up for the lack of footage), and Spike was given more prominence than thuviaptarth intended, and than I would have liked. This was because we only ever saw the Chinese slayer in relation to Spike, and Nikki nearly so. Kendra was seen in other contexts, but because this wasn't Kendra's story - this was Robin's and, to a lesser extent, Nikki's story - the vid couldn't make use of the additional Kendra footage without risking drawing narrative focus away from the "main" characters. Spike thus became the narrative through-line for the three dead slayers - the Chinese slayer, Nikki, and Kendra. Even though Kendra hadn't been killed by Spike, the vid attributes responsibility to Spike by showing him kissing Dru immediately after Dru kills Kendra.
(An example: The opening montage shows Robin, Nikki, the Chinese slayer, and Kendra fighting. We were trying to delay the introduction of Spike as long as possible in order to highlight these characters. Because the Chinese slayer was only seen fighting Spike, all that could be done was to grab clips of her fighting but where Spike was out of frame. The same was mostly true of Nikki; the only other footage available of Nikki consisted of her conversation with wee!Robin, and that was too static and repetitive an image to be paired with the opening chorus. So, once those choices had been made regarding Nikki and the Chinese slayer, a similar choice had to be made for Kendra, or else she would have had special prominence in the opening montage, which would have confused the viewer as to whose story was being told.)
With these initial choices in mind, the vid was structured in three acts based on the demands of the story, the music, and thuviaptarth's vision. The first two acts deal with Robin, Nikki, and the other slayers/potential slayers, and the last act deals with Dana.
Act One: The Set-Up
The first section, which runs from the first chorus ("We don't need no walkie-talkies") through the second chorus, is the part of the vid that is, itself, the origin story. Here's where we meet the various characters, and where we actually see the creation of the First Slayer, the creation of the potential slayers, and Robin's transformation from boy to slayer-ally. We also see Spike's initial "transformation" to slayer-ally - as thuviaptarth suggested, Spike is paired with the lyric "the new recruit/with the play-doh spine," and, as some viewers may have noticed, the clip used is the moment when he joined Buffy's side of the fight in Doomed.
This section of the vid is actually the most complicated narratively, because it does a lot of things. First, and most importantly, it attempts to build up the slayers/potentials/Robin as powerful, strong, brave, and valiant. One example: In their fights with Spike, the Chinese slayer, Kendra, and Nikki are all shown as winning. This was done both to show the beauty of the neglected characters for their own sake, and to make their eventual defeat that much more tragic in the next part of the vid. The potential slayers are also shown as being the heirs to the same tradition as the earlier slayers; at about 00:39, the vid fades from the potentials striking a particular exercise pose to the Chinese slayer, who is posed similarly.
The next thing that this first section does is set Spike and, to a lesser extent, Buffy, in opposition to the other slayers/potentials. thuviaptarth believed that the Buffy/Spike storyline was elevated above the other storylines, both by writers and by fans; visually, the easiest way to portray that was to turn Buffy-the-character into a stand-in for the writers and fans who had elevated Spike over Robin. So in this vid, she's never quite with the slayers and she's constantly choosing Spike over them. Buffy is introduced wrestling with the First Slayer; she's bemused when the potentials enter her home; she flirts with Spike during a training session while the potentials watch in bewilderment; she literally stands between Spike and Robin when they confront each other.
Spike is also shown in opposition to the slayers/potentials. Most obviously, he fights the Chinese Slayer, Kendra, and Nikki. And even when he's "reformed" as a "new recruit," hopefully, he looks as out-of-place to the viewer as he must have appeared to Robin.
Finally, this section sets up the initial confrontation between Robin and Spike, through Robin's various glares, Spike's donning of the coat, and the reflection of Nikki in the mirror.
The entire section is also structured to provide relatively logical transitions from portion to portion. The first vocals introduce our main characters - Robin and, chronologically, the three dead slayers. Kendra is then shown looking across the fire at the First Slayer, and the lyrics pick up with the First Slayer. The next transition - from the First Slayer to the potential slayers - is accomplished by location: the First Slayer tumbles into Buffy's living room, and the potential slayers enter the house. The vid stays on the potential slayers and their training, then transitions to the Chinese slayer by mirroring the work-out poses of the potential slayers to the fighting stance of the Chinese slayer. The transitions from the Chinese slayer to Kendra to Nikki are based on opponent - Spike - and the transition to Robin is based on his witnessing of the Nikki/Spike fight. Robin is established as a fighter and slayer-ally, and that's the moment that Spike is jarringly introduced as a new member of the team.
Act Two: Confrontation
The second section of the vid - which runs from the end of the second chorus through Robin's fight with Spike - is where we see the consequences of what occurred in the first section. All of these characters are taken down, Spike is blamed either literally or by association, and Buffy, despite witnessing it all, allows it to happen.
First all the potential slayers fall, and then Spike kills the Chinese slayer. This is meant to indicate an equivalence between the potentials' deaths and the slayer's death; they are on the same moral plane, and Spike is characterized as being on the same side as Caleb/First Evil and the ur-vampires. And this section demonstrates one reason why it was necessary to bring the potentials in at all - in the absence of additional slayer footage, the parade of deaths helps highlight the pain/wrongness of the slayer deaths.
The vid shows how Robin feels about this; his reactions are horrified and frustrated. Because this is his point of view, Spike is depicted as a monster, and Buffy literally gets into bed with the enemy. Robin's reactions here are meant to build to the moment when he will attack Spike in "Lies My Parents Told Me."
The section culminates with Buffy bestowing the amulet on Spike - textually, the greatest moment of Spike's elevation - followed by a shot of Robin on the lyric "Fuck you, peace" and then the scene where Spike kills Nikki.
At the "TAKE NO PRISONERS" bridge, we see the fight between Robin and Spike - which essentially replays the fights we earlier saw between Spike and the other slayers. Just as with those fights, Spike is initially depicted as being on the losing side; he eventually comes back to defeat Robin, just as he defeated the Chinese slayer, Nikki, and (by association) Kendra.
Act Three: History Repeating
The vid then moves to the third section, i.e., the Dana section. It was thuviaptarth's idea to focus this section on Dana and to end on her "kidnapping" by Angel and Wesley, and - as viewer reaction has confirmed - that idea could not have been more perfect. I think on an emotional level, it works as a real gut-punch because Angel and Wesley are so beloved by fans; to see them introduced in the vid solely in this particular context is appropriately shocking.
In general, the Dana section is probably a lot easier to parse than the earlier sections, and therefore requires less explanation. The lyrics are more audible and it's got the closest clip-lyric matching of any of the sections. Dana is paired with images that draw the connection between her and her slayer heritage and, just as the other slayers and Robin before her, she initially defeats Spike only to lose the battle at the end - this time through the interference of Angel and Wesley. thuviaptarth had suggested intercutting Dana's section with scenes from the Spike/Robin fight, but the vid ended up using the images of other slayers in part because that's what happened in the actual episode - Dana accessed the memories of the earlier slayers. The intercuts were meant to portray visually what was actually a plot point.
The Beta Process
In the beta-process, the biggest point of disagreement between thuviaptarth and myself was the manner in which the vid conveyed the political argument. She wanted certain changes that would reinforce the argument through the manner of storytelling - like additional close-ups on Nikki, Kendra, and the Chinese slayer during their fights, and the deemphasis of Spike generally. From my perspective, this was problematic for a couple of different reasons, including a lack of available footage, and because - as explained above - Spike was a focal point almost by necessity given the other constraints. Ultimately, the disagreement was resolved when a second draft inserted more footage of Nikki and Robin in other portions of the vid - thuviaptarth liked the change because it made the political point stronger and strengthened the POV; I liked it because it made the story clearer, and, in particular, helped to build Robin emotionally to the point where he would attack Spike.
Our second biggest disagreement was over the degree to which the vid would match clips to lyrics. thuviaptarth wanted a relatively close association; my general feeling was that the lyrics moved so quickly, and were so hard to hear, and were so abstract, that strict matching attempts would interfere with the overall narrative; they would be sort of penny-wise and pound-foolish. In the end, the vid made a deliberate attempt at matching where the lyrics were particularly audible (the Dana section, and various points throughout the other sections), or where clip-lyric matching was relatively easy to do within the narrative structure; in other places, no real attempt at matching was made, although sometimes it all just worked out anyway.
And... that's generally that. The basic animating principle here for me was that because thuviaptarth was making her political argument through storytelling, the vid should focus on effective storytelling and not on the politics. The theory was that if the storytelling was successful, the politics would naturally follow. As a result, the vid contains a lot of details that were included to assist the narrative, but that viewers have interpreted as having political significance - which was exactly the goal.
As I hoped she would, thuviaptarth has posted her interpretations of the characters and her thoughts about the vid here. As a supplement to her post, I'm writing about the how the vid was structured to convey the points that thuviaptarth wanted to make. None of this should or is intended to take precedence over any other interpretations and absolutely none of it is necessary to an understanding of the vid, so it's totally fine to skip over this post entirely.
(Honestly, this post is probably more navel-gazing than anything else, not to mention being seriously, seriously tl;dr, so feel free to ignore it - the vid should speak for itself, anyway).
But, to the extent anyone is interested, here goes.
The Initial Constraints
After the auction, thuviaptarth presented me with a bunch of different vid options. This was her first choice, but that had nothing to do with why I selected it. I selected it because not only could I see exactly what she had in mind - her vision was incredibly clear and it was an amazing match for the song - but also because I loved the song itself, both musically and as the basis for a vid. It's a great song choice for vidding partly because there's so much emotion in it, and partly because it has several distinct musical "sections," each of which can be used to tell a different part of the story.
As you can see from her post, thuviaptarth wanted to make a political argument - about the treatment of characters of color, and of women - through a particular device, namely, by telling Robin's story. This is a critical point in how the vid was structured, because you can make political arguments in many ways, and a political argument made in the form of an individual narrative has certain strengths and weaknesses relative to other forms of argument.
The strengths are that it can be very emotional, and create empathy in the viewer. Additionally, in this particular case, argument in the form of narrative rectifies the very error that thuviaptarth saw in the text itself - a failure to give due respect to narratives other than Spike's.
The main weakness of a narrative form of argument is that it's limiting; there might be things that contribute to the political argument, but to the extent they don't contribute to the narrative, they must be discarded.
And, in this particular case, the other weakness was a lack of source. The whole problem with the text was that we never saw the true "stories" of various characters; that meant there was a severe lack of footage. So these two weaknesses were essentially what governed the vid generally: the story had to be told with limited footage, and even within that limited set of footage, some scenes could not be used within the structure of the story.
So, because of these weaknesses, there was additional emphasis placed on potential slayers and Kendra (to make up for the lack of footage), and Spike was given more prominence than thuviaptarth intended, and than I would have liked. This was because we only ever saw the Chinese slayer in relation to Spike, and Nikki nearly so. Kendra was seen in other contexts, but because this wasn't Kendra's story - this was Robin's and, to a lesser extent, Nikki's story - the vid couldn't make use of the additional Kendra footage without risking drawing narrative focus away from the "main" characters. Spike thus became the narrative through-line for the three dead slayers - the Chinese slayer, Nikki, and Kendra. Even though Kendra hadn't been killed by Spike, the vid attributes responsibility to Spike by showing him kissing Dru immediately after Dru kills Kendra.
(An example: The opening montage shows Robin, Nikki, the Chinese slayer, and Kendra fighting. We were trying to delay the introduction of Spike as long as possible in order to highlight these characters. Because the Chinese slayer was only seen fighting Spike, all that could be done was to grab clips of her fighting but where Spike was out of frame. The same was mostly true of Nikki; the only other footage available of Nikki consisted of her conversation with wee!Robin, and that was too static and repetitive an image to be paired with the opening chorus. So, once those choices had been made regarding Nikki and the Chinese slayer, a similar choice had to be made for Kendra, or else she would have had special prominence in the opening montage, which would have confused the viewer as to whose story was being told.)
With these initial choices in mind, the vid was structured in three acts based on the demands of the story, the music, and thuviaptarth's vision. The first two acts deal with Robin, Nikki, and the other slayers/potential slayers, and the last act deals with Dana.
Act One: The Set-Up
The first section, which runs from the first chorus ("We don't need no walkie-talkies") through the second chorus, is the part of the vid that is, itself, the origin story. Here's where we meet the various characters, and where we actually see the creation of the First Slayer, the creation of the potential slayers, and Robin's transformation from boy to slayer-ally. We also see Spike's initial "transformation" to slayer-ally - as thuviaptarth suggested, Spike is paired with the lyric "the new recruit/with the play-doh spine," and, as some viewers may have noticed, the clip used is the moment when he joined Buffy's side of the fight in Doomed.
This section of the vid is actually the most complicated narratively, because it does a lot of things. First, and most importantly, it attempts to build up the slayers/potentials/Robin as powerful, strong, brave, and valiant. One example: In their fights with Spike, the Chinese slayer, Kendra, and Nikki are all shown as winning. This was done both to show the beauty of the neglected characters for their own sake, and to make their eventual defeat that much more tragic in the next part of the vid. The potential slayers are also shown as being the heirs to the same tradition as the earlier slayers; at about 00:39, the vid fades from the potentials striking a particular exercise pose to the Chinese slayer, who is posed similarly.
The next thing that this first section does is set Spike and, to a lesser extent, Buffy, in opposition to the other slayers/potentials. thuviaptarth believed that the Buffy/Spike storyline was elevated above the other storylines, both by writers and by fans; visually, the easiest way to portray that was to turn Buffy-the-character into a stand-in for the writers and fans who had elevated Spike over Robin. So in this vid, she's never quite with the slayers and she's constantly choosing Spike over them. Buffy is introduced wrestling with the First Slayer; she's bemused when the potentials enter her home; she flirts with Spike during a training session while the potentials watch in bewilderment; she literally stands between Spike and Robin when they confront each other.
Spike is also shown in opposition to the slayers/potentials. Most obviously, he fights the Chinese Slayer, Kendra, and Nikki. And even when he's "reformed" as a "new recruit," hopefully, he looks as out-of-place to the viewer as he must have appeared to Robin.
Finally, this section sets up the initial confrontation between Robin and Spike, through Robin's various glares, Spike's donning of the coat, and the reflection of Nikki in the mirror.
The entire section is also structured to provide relatively logical transitions from portion to portion. The first vocals introduce our main characters - Robin and, chronologically, the three dead slayers. Kendra is then shown looking across the fire at the First Slayer, and the lyrics pick up with the First Slayer. The next transition - from the First Slayer to the potential slayers - is accomplished by location: the First Slayer tumbles into Buffy's living room, and the potential slayers enter the house. The vid stays on the potential slayers and their training, then transitions to the Chinese slayer by mirroring the work-out poses of the potential slayers to the fighting stance of the Chinese slayer. The transitions from the Chinese slayer to Kendra to Nikki are based on opponent - Spike - and the transition to Robin is based on his witnessing of the Nikki/Spike fight. Robin is established as a fighter and slayer-ally, and that's the moment that Spike is jarringly introduced as a new member of the team.
Act Two: Confrontation
The second section of the vid - which runs from the end of the second chorus through Robin's fight with Spike - is where we see the consequences of what occurred in the first section. All of these characters are taken down, Spike is blamed either literally or by association, and Buffy, despite witnessing it all, allows it to happen.
First all the potential slayers fall, and then Spike kills the Chinese slayer. This is meant to indicate an equivalence between the potentials' deaths and the slayer's death; they are on the same moral plane, and Spike is characterized as being on the same side as Caleb/First Evil and the ur-vampires. And this section demonstrates one reason why it was necessary to bring the potentials in at all - in the absence of additional slayer footage, the parade of deaths helps highlight the pain/wrongness of the slayer deaths.
The vid shows how Robin feels about this; his reactions are horrified and frustrated. Because this is his point of view, Spike is depicted as a monster, and Buffy literally gets into bed with the enemy. Robin's reactions here are meant to build to the moment when he will attack Spike in "Lies My Parents Told Me."
The section culminates with Buffy bestowing the amulet on Spike - textually, the greatest moment of Spike's elevation - followed by a shot of Robin on the lyric "Fuck you, peace" and then the scene where Spike kills Nikki.
At the "TAKE NO PRISONERS" bridge, we see the fight between Robin and Spike - which essentially replays the fights we earlier saw between Spike and the other slayers. Just as with those fights, Spike is initially depicted as being on the losing side; he eventually comes back to defeat Robin, just as he defeated the Chinese slayer, Nikki, and (by association) Kendra.
Act Three: History Repeating
The vid then moves to the third section, i.e., the Dana section. It was thuviaptarth's idea to focus this section on Dana and to end on her "kidnapping" by Angel and Wesley, and - as viewer reaction has confirmed - that idea could not have been more perfect. I think on an emotional level, it works as a real gut-punch because Angel and Wesley are so beloved by fans; to see them introduced in the vid solely in this particular context is appropriately shocking.
In general, the Dana section is probably a lot easier to parse than the earlier sections, and therefore requires less explanation. The lyrics are more audible and it's got the closest clip-lyric matching of any of the sections. Dana is paired with images that draw the connection between her and her slayer heritage and, just as the other slayers and Robin before her, she initially defeats Spike only to lose the battle at the end - this time through the interference of Angel and Wesley. thuviaptarth had suggested intercutting Dana's section with scenes from the Spike/Robin fight, but the vid ended up using the images of other slayers in part because that's what happened in the actual episode - Dana accessed the memories of the earlier slayers. The intercuts were meant to portray visually what was actually a plot point.
The Beta Process
In the beta-process, the biggest point of disagreement between thuviaptarth and myself was the manner in which the vid conveyed the political argument. She wanted certain changes that would reinforce the argument through the manner of storytelling - like additional close-ups on Nikki, Kendra, and the Chinese slayer during their fights, and the deemphasis of Spike generally. From my perspective, this was problematic for a couple of different reasons, including a lack of available footage, and because - as explained above - Spike was a focal point almost by necessity given the other constraints. Ultimately, the disagreement was resolved when a second draft inserted more footage of Nikki and Robin in other portions of the vid - thuviaptarth liked the change because it made the political point stronger and strengthened the POV; I liked it because it made the story clearer, and, in particular, helped to build Robin emotionally to the point where he would attack Spike.
Our second biggest disagreement was over the degree to which the vid would match clips to lyrics. thuviaptarth wanted a relatively close association; my general feeling was that the lyrics moved so quickly, and were so hard to hear, and were so abstract, that strict matching attempts would interfere with the overall narrative; they would be sort of penny-wise and pound-foolish. In the end, the vid made a deliberate attempt at matching where the lyrics were particularly audible (the Dana section, and various points throughout the other sections), or where clip-lyric matching was relatively easy to do within the narrative structure; in other places, no real attempt at matching was made, although sometimes it all just worked out anyway.
And... that's generally that. The basic animating principle here for me was that because thuviaptarth was making her political argument through storytelling, the vid should focus on effective storytelling and not on the politics. The theory was that if the storytelling was successful, the politics would naturally follow. As a result, the vid contains a lot of details that were included to assist the narrative, but that viewers have interpreted as having political significance - which was exactly the goal.