Long-Delayed Fiction: A Rant
Think back to 2003. "Chosen" has been released, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is over, and a number of fans started considering the post-Chosen world. There isn't one Slayer, nor two, but hundreds. Thousands. What's going to happen? A lot of people heard Giles say Cleveland and Hellmouth and assumed a Slayer School in Ohio, like Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, but everyone has the same power. For everything good I may think about my Eyeless-verse, it is at core an X-school bit, and that's kinda dumb.
But we got a few glimpses into the Slayer side from the last season of Angel. Xander is in Africa. Willow is in South America, then in the Himilayas and the Astral Plain. Buffy and Dawn are in Italy. Except maybe they aren't, not any of it, because Angel works for Wolfram and Hart, and they are not to be trusted and helped. The singular canon post-Chosen Slayer we see is Dana, who was abused, put into a coma, and had Slayer dreams fill in the parts of her head that hadn't already been traumatized. The response? Have Andrew (the most expendable of the survivors of Sunnydale) go in, because he has no connection to anyone in Angel's team, and when Dana is captured and sedated, they flood the zone with Slayers and take her themselves. (I have read some of the Buffy comics, and I like some of it, like the "No Future For You" subplot, but largely it reads like not-so-good fanfic.)
This is interesting, and one of my favorite parts of that season, but I have questions. You have a girl with superhuman strength and reflexes, filled with rage against the world for the injustices against her and against women since, essentially, the beginning of time. And you have the Core Four, none whom are trained for any of this, in charge of her rehabilitation. I, an fanfic writer who knows canon, has to think that we start with Cruciamentum juice and Lethe's Bramble to get her to where she's safe to be around, but the show would come up with something exciting and new. But there is no show, so now she's in this netherworld, not recovered, not recovering, not doped to the gills, and not dead, but all and none of these things. There was a fanfic challenge, "When The Clock Strikes", that was intended to awaken a Slayer in all 24 time zones. We got more than half. For me, the interesting bit about post-"Chosen" is that there's all this lore that we know, but the people involved don't, so we get to create this world in their image. How do they fit in their cultures? How do they learn of the weirdness of this world? How does their worldview filter that knowledge?
My story for that challenge is "Y Jehová la Bendijo", and the key thought kinda came from discussing Faith with nwhepcat in the comments of my Faith's first slay story. I say "She didn't feel power. She did feel alive." Hepcat responds "I wonder if Faith ever really feels power, even now."
We stick a pin in that and move to the Old Testament of the Bible, where Samson, God's Chosen Warrior has been shaved, weakened, blinded, and is chained between two pillars. He asked God to give him strength so he may tear down the building, killing himself and a thousand Philistines. The translation to my story's title is "And God Blessed Her". You think "Super strength! Super speed! Super healing!" but show me in canon where Buffy feels particularly blessed. I see it as burdoned.
I had ideas for more, but Mexico is not my culture, so my ideas felt false to me, plus over time, the scene died. The one I liked the most is that Nena, my slayer, wants to learn more about fighting with swords, and swords are how bullfighters kill bulls, so she finds a matador to teach her. An older, fit but battered matador who gets turned, and Nena has to be the "bull" to kill him. Some of the scenes still exist in my head, but I never got enough into even make a drabble out of it. And ultimately, the story ends with her finding her way to the Xavier School. It's best to leave Nena where I did.
But I did have another idea.
What was going on at about the same time as the finale of Buffy? The invasion of Iraq. What were some of the things involved as invasion took over for occupation? The museums were looted, causing a number of artifacts to be sold on the black market to fund further acts. The DRI under Walsh was much more about biology and physicality than it is about artifacts, but there's a lot of mystical artifacts in the Buffyverse, and some of it is end-of-world deadly.
Also, you had women locked out of combat forces, but there being a need for them to detain and search female detainees, so women from combat support MOSs like military police were brought in for that purpose. Sounds like a back-door to get a Slayer awakened and into Riley's snake-eaters. How Sam joined - a sideways move from the Peace Corps to the War Corps, and her stories about the disposability of shamen - makes it clear that we can have, for example, a disgraced watcher sheep-dipped into uniform, the daughter of an Iraqi watcher as an interpreter, and tweaking, black-eyed shamen in desert camo. I wrote a small overlay of this idea called "Tales of the Agents: Interrogation" where Riley and his shaman take a tour of a detainee's memory with magic.
Let's consider how the military works. As shown through Buffy and the Initiative, you see a lot of powerful and armed young men. That is a limited view. The Department of Defense has it down to a science. In an invasion, you send soldiers, because soldiers control the ground. They have soldiers? Well, you send artillary and blow up their soldiers. They have bunkers and emplacements? You send tanks. They have airplanes? You send airplanes. You send missiles. You destroy their radar (ability to see), communications networks (ability to send orders). There's the OODA loop - Orient, Observe, Decide, Act - and when you can change the map while they're still trying to orient, you can make decisions faster than they can. The military does not like to lose. The Initiative was in an underground bunker in a populated area, making it difficult to bring in air support and other weapons systems. Nothing in this system is designed to fight fair; it is designed to win. There's a song I love, "No Fair Fights" by Prick. Song as a whole doesn't address these topics, but I love it as a title.
The problem here is that you have a lone Slayer. One with a support system, which has the answers to some but not all of your questions. Will a post-Chosen Buffy be any more willing to accept calls from Riley than she was from Angel and Spike? With a mandate that spreads from Islamabad to Istanbul, from Djibouti to Tashkent, it is possible that the destruction of Sunnydale didn't get on Riley's radar. Will he know that his Slayer is one of thousands? Messages get passed up to him and back down - "We're to provide you anything you need to help assface here. Those were his exact words, ma'am." - but are we to assume the Scoobies and Faith are "in the wind" and out of his surveillance?
At this point, I have a few other Tales of the Agents stories, adapted from what I know about intelligence and special operations. I read about an operator in Yemen, I think, who got sick from eating uncooked meat, and thought about an operator who became a lycanthrope, and the options he has back in the world. I read about CIA's memorial wall, with certain stars being of diffent color because their lives are still classified, and considered a third color that might be applicable when you're dealing with the posessed and the undead. Beyond those, we might be able to look into middleeastern fantasy, with inspiration from 1001 Nights to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
But as established, there's limited interaction from the outside, so to get our Slayer to know what's going on with the rest of the world is to send her home and then make home weird. IEDs solve that issue, and provide all sorts of issues, beyond the PTSD, that serve to separate the happy young women from the tortured Slayers we love to write and read.
But then we get into a line from the Sex Pistols: "A cheap holiday into other people's misery." The military hasn't been my culture since my 18th birthday (AF brat), and I never really saw the working part of it. We say that the undead are drawn to the misery of war zones, and it's ... okay when it's the Boxer Rebellion 100 years ago but seems wrong for the Second Battle of Fallujah. Too soon and all that.
Plus, practically, because I have a lot of in-theater flashback stuff, I kinda need the fic to be long so it isn't overpowered by all that flashbacky, and if I'm doing Gen, I need at least a Walsh-into-ADAM quality bad. Faith's S4 arc took four episodes, so I need about four episodes worth of content. I had none of that in the early 2000s, so I let it sit.
I'm finding that my creative outlets change with where I'm working, and with my new job, I'm engaging my fannishness for the first time in a decade. I believe I know who the big bad is. I believe I know the through line. I have tightened up some of the flashbacks, I have sketched out some supporting characters, and I have a sense of the arc. I actually have a cracker-jack ending as well.