Cheery Valentine’s Day Post of Cheeriness
I started reading Retreat - the sixth volume of BS8 - last night. That was a mistake.
I already had a good feeling that there was insomnia in my near future, since I had been home sick all weekend and had stayed up until 4 the previous night for reasons that are not known to anyone including me. But I felt the urge to read a comic, and this one was next up on my stack. I knew it was the Return of Oz, but I wasn’t expecting how excited his return would make me. That simple re-introductory final-frame “Huh.” told me instantly that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep without reading on a bit more. No big - it was still before midnight - so I started in on “Part Two.”
I was so upset after I finished the issue that it took two hours, more than a dozen Cracked articles, and “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs” to finally put me to sleep.
Let me be clear about this: I had no desire (okay, a little desire, from a purely fanficy fangirl who doesn’t care about story or realism stance) or delusion that Willow and Oz would get back together. Nor did I want to see him pining away after her or any crap like that. I genuinely wanted him to be happy, to have benefited as much (or rather, MORE THAN) the others from no longer being in Sunnydale. I care about this character; he’s one of my fictional family members, just like the other Scoobies and Angel’s…Angels*? If I had read ahead of time that Oz had settled down with a nice - if occasionally hirsute - young woman and had a werewolflet, I would not have paused a second before saying, “Good for him (y’know, assuming he’s happy…which is a big assumption, given the story).” (Yup, I would have said all of that. And I probably would have then thought for a second and added something along the lines of, “Bet she dies by the end of the book.”) But seeing it with no warning, kinda awkward missus-and-the-ex introduction vibe going on and all, it really upset me for reasons that I could not (until about an hour before writing this) explain beyond “It hurt me in the gut.”
Because this is BtVS and it wasn’t enough that I was upset about what I was seeing, and guilty-upset about being upset, and quickly entering the Brittany Taylor Feeling Bad Spiral of Doom, they had to throw in that flashback. I figured they would leave it at the “Run” frame, that a writer like Espenson trusted the subtleties of that little bit of dirty-blonde hair to do the trick. But, no. No, it was subtle, in that they didn’t dwell on it or even mention her by name, but the top of the next page showed WereOz chasing Tara down the dorm hallway. We have not, unless I am very much mistaken, seen Tara in BS8 at all, and, had it happened earlier in the “season” before Jeanty really hit his stride, I probably wouldn’t have been quite as affected. But it was Tara. It was so clearly, perfectly Tara. And she was terrified. And it hurt.
I don’t like Kennedy. I just don’t. I don’t get any sense of close cuddliness between her and Willow, which is what makes Hannigan-character relationships WORK. Instead, I get a sense of convenience, of “There’s another lesbian in the house; may as well.” (Am I saying they couldn’t make that work? Absolutely not. Am I now beginning to think Willow and Satsu wouldn’t exactly be the worst couple ever? Well…I’ll definitely take her over Kennedy.) Some of this has to do with Will purposefully keeping Kennedy away from Buffy (and, by extension, us) for quite a while, so we don’t get a good, lengthy chance to see how they interact together. I am fairly confident, though, that I still wouldn’t like her even if we did, in the same way that I’m just never going to like Faith all that much (no matter how much time she and Giles spend being best buds**). It’s probably me projecting, but I don’t feel that Willow really cares all that much for Kennedy, either - particularly not when compared to how much she cared about her previous partners. She had two really sweet, really solid relationships, and now…this, whatever this is. I mean, I sure as hell don’t care as much about Kennedy and their relationship, and I have been known to think like Willow on occasion.
Like, for example, right now. I’m busy having this existential panic attack crisis over here with hardly any input from Willow, but then how does Willow and Oz’s conversation leave off at the end of the issue? Basically, “I don’t mind that you found someone, and I want to be happy for you…but...but baby and family and, you know, life, and I’m jealous because life is working for you, and it’s not for me. It’s SO NOT for me.”
Not just on a family/not family level, either. Oz is exactly where he should be, doing what he was born to (being himself, kind of alone, but with people who love him, completely removed from societal expectations, helping people who need help…) Willow’s stated goal - becoming the badest-ass Wicca she can be - has gone…not quite as well. To say the least. She is, in fact, facing her, what, fourth major intervention? Seeing Oz where he is makes it extraordinarily difficult to see Willow where she is - or is not - and to throw both of her previous doomed-but-once-blissful relationships at us along with an explicit conversation between two of the three people who know and care about her most about how she HAS been lost to them again, almost assuredly for keeps… Seeing all that was too much for me last night.
Which has led me to the somewhat surprising conclusion that, much as I thought it had, BS6 didn’t sever my connection to Willow. We may, in fact, be as much alike now as we have ever been (well…to a point). I am speaking primarily of the fact that we both find ourselves in jobs we were, to one extent or another, forced into, and which threaten daily to desensitize us, to destroy our moral compunctions, to dishearten us, make us lose sight of what is important, and take us forever off the path to where we want to be. And there sits Oz, appearing to be more sensitive, morally centered, self-confident, focused, and happy than we have ever seen him.
And it HURTS.
I’ve gotta watch some HIMYM.
(I swear to Tinkerbell Jebus, if Lily goes Dark…)
Oh, also, what the bloody frickin' HECK. Riley?!
And one more, now that I've finished "Part Three" and am nearly as worked up as I was last night: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Dammit, Xander, what is your problem?! Okay, okay, not as bad as Willow/Dawn or Giles/Faith. Not that bad, because of the relationships. But pretty damn close.
...I want to go back to my Spike comics, now, please.
* I’ve just realized how badly the Angel Investigations gang needs a handy nickname. Seems like they should have given themselves one somewhere along the line… If nothing else, Spike must have called them something snide… I clearly must get back to rewatching.
** At some point, I thought I had read that Giles and Faith have a _sexual_ relationship in the comics. I might possibly have been dreading that plot arc even more than when I thought I had read Willow and Dawn were lovers. Hold on just a sec; I’ve got a little bile in my mouth.
Silly but vaguely-related addendum: I was considering an observation Captain Chaotica!! recently made about how much werewolf fiction she has kind of accidentally been consuming lately, and it dawned on me that I have kind of been doing the same...but that mine have been specifically _Scottish_ werewolves: Dog Soldiers, Wolfsbane, "Tooth and Claw," Lupin (uh...in so much as Hogwarts is in Scotland...I'm stretching a little...but not as much as in the last example, coming up...now), and this comic, which begins in Scotland and heavily features one of the Whedonverse werewolf characters. Weird.
In other news, Aw, poo.*** And, um, this could? be good?
Finally, for those of you who didn’t get enough anti-loveness from me this year, here’s a sneak preview for next year that I discovered about 20 minutes ago.
*** “If this is the only way, then so be it!” “That's one small step for crime, one giant leap for the criminal mind.” “To the lumber yard!” And various other lines that influenced my childhood/adolescence.
ETA (because this post just isn't schizophrenic enough...): HOW had I never seen "Stanley's Cup" before? I heart Stan so much...
I already had a good feeling that there was insomnia in my near future, since I had been home sick all weekend and had stayed up until 4 the previous night for reasons that are not known to anyone including me. But I felt the urge to read a comic, and this one was next up on my stack. I knew it was the Return of Oz, but I wasn’t expecting how excited his return would make me. That simple re-introductory final-frame “Huh.” told me instantly that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep without reading on a bit more. No big - it was still before midnight - so I started in on “Part Two.”
I was so upset after I finished the issue that it took two hours, more than a dozen Cracked articles, and “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs” to finally put me to sleep.
Let me be clear about this: I had no desire (okay, a little desire, from a purely fanficy fangirl who doesn’t care about story or realism stance) or delusion that Willow and Oz would get back together. Nor did I want to see him pining away after her or any crap like that. I genuinely wanted him to be happy, to have benefited as much (or rather, MORE THAN) the others from no longer being in Sunnydale. I care about this character; he’s one of my fictional family members, just like the other Scoobies and Angel’s…Angels*? If I had read ahead of time that Oz had settled down with a nice - if occasionally hirsute - young woman and had a werewolflet, I would not have paused a second before saying, “Good for him (y’know, assuming he’s happy…which is a big assumption, given the story).” (Yup, I would have said all of that. And I probably would have then thought for a second and added something along the lines of, “Bet she dies by the end of the book.”) But seeing it with no warning, kinda awkward missus-and-the-ex introduction vibe going on and all, it really upset me for reasons that I could not (until about an hour before writing this) explain beyond “It hurt me in the gut.”
Because this is BtVS and it wasn’t enough that I was upset about what I was seeing, and guilty-upset about being upset, and quickly entering the Brittany Taylor Feeling Bad Spiral of Doom, they had to throw in that flashback. I figured they would leave it at the “Run” frame, that a writer like Espenson trusted the subtleties of that little bit of dirty-blonde hair to do the trick. But, no. No, it was subtle, in that they didn’t dwell on it or even mention her by name, but the top of the next page showed WereOz chasing Tara down the dorm hallway. We have not, unless I am very much mistaken, seen Tara in BS8 at all, and, had it happened earlier in the “season” before Jeanty really hit his stride, I probably wouldn’t have been quite as affected. But it was Tara. It was so clearly, perfectly Tara. And she was terrified. And it hurt.
I don’t like Kennedy. I just don’t. I don’t get any sense of close cuddliness between her and Willow, which is what makes Hannigan-character relationships WORK. Instead, I get a sense of convenience, of “There’s another lesbian in the house; may as well.” (Am I saying they couldn’t make that work? Absolutely not. Am I now beginning to think Willow and Satsu wouldn’t exactly be the worst couple ever? Well…I’ll definitely take her over Kennedy.) Some of this has to do with Will purposefully keeping Kennedy away from Buffy (and, by extension, us) for quite a while, so we don’t get a good, lengthy chance to see how they interact together. I am fairly confident, though, that I still wouldn’t like her even if we did, in the same way that I’m just never going to like Faith all that much (no matter how much time she and Giles spend being best buds**). It’s probably me projecting, but I don’t feel that Willow really cares all that much for Kennedy, either - particularly not when compared to how much she cared about her previous partners. She had two really sweet, really solid relationships, and now…this, whatever this is. I mean, I sure as hell don’t care as much about Kennedy and their relationship, and I have been known to think like Willow on occasion.
Like, for example, right now. I’m busy having this existential panic attack crisis over here with hardly any input from Willow, but then how does Willow and Oz’s conversation leave off at the end of the issue? Basically, “I don’t mind that you found someone, and I want to be happy for you…but...but baby and family and, you know, life, and I’m jealous because life is working for you, and it’s not for me. It’s SO NOT for me.”
Not just on a family/not family level, either. Oz is exactly where he should be, doing what he was born to (being himself, kind of alone, but with people who love him, completely removed from societal expectations, helping people who need help…) Willow’s stated goal - becoming the badest-ass Wicca she can be - has gone…not quite as well. To say the least. She is, in fact, facing her, what, fourth major intervention? Seeing Oz where he is makes it extraordinarily difficult to see Willow where she is - or is not - and to throw both of her previous doomed-but-once-blissful relationships at us along with an explicit conversation between two of the three people who know and care about her most about how she HAS been lost to them again, almost assuredly for keeps… Seeing all that was too much for me last night.
Which has led me to the somewhat surprising conclusion that, much as I thought it had, BS6 didn’t sever my connection to Willow. We may, in fact, be as much alike now as we have ever been (well…to a point). I am speaking primarily of the fact that we both find ourselves in jobs we were, to one extent or another, forced into, and which threaten daily to desensitize us, to destroy our moral compunctions, to dishearten us, make us lose sight of what is important, and take us forever off the path to where we want to be. And there sits Oz, appearing to be more sensitive, morally centered, self-confident, focused, and happy than we have ever seen him.
And it HURTS.
I’ve gotta watch some HIMYM.
(I swear to Tinkerbell Jebus, if Lily goes Dark…)
Oh, also, what the bloody frickin' HECK. Riley?!
And one more, now that I've finished "Part Three" and am nearly as worked up as I was last night: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Dammit, Xander, what is your problem?! Okay, okay, not as bad as Willow/Dawn or Giles/Faith. Not that bad, because of the relationships. But pretty damn close.
...I want to go back to my Spike comics, now, please.
* I’ve just realized how badly the Angel Investigations gang needs a handy nickname. Seems like they should have given themselves one somewhere along the line… If nothing else, Spike must have called them something snide… I clearly must get back to rewatching.
** At some point, I thought I had read that Giles and Faith have a _sexual_ relationship in the comics. I might possibly have been dreading that plot arc even more than when I thought I had read Willow and Dawn were lovers. Hold on just a sec; I’ve got a little bile in my mouth.
Silly but vaguely-related addendum: I was considering an observation Captain Chaotica!! recently made about how much werewolf fiction she has kind of accidentally been consuming lately, and it dawned on me that I have kind of been doing the same...but that mine have been specifically _Scottish_ werewolves: Dog Soldiers, Wolfsbane, "Tooth and Claw," Lupin (uh...in so much as Hogwarts is in Scotland...I'm stretching a little...but not as much as in the last example, coming up...now), and this comic, which begins in Scotland and heavily features one of the Whedonverse werewolf characters. Weird.
In other news, Aw, poo.*** And, um, this could? be good?
Finally, for those of you who didn’t get enough anti-loveness from me this year, here’s a sneak preview for next year that I discovered about 20 minutes ago.
*** “If this is the only way, then so be it!” “That's one small step for crime, one giant leap for the criminal mind.” “To the lumber yard!” And various other lines that influenced my childhood/adolescence.
ETA (because this post just isn't schizophrenic enough...): HOW had I never seen "Stanley's Cup" before? I heart Stan so much...