In defense of Joss (like he needs it)
I'm highly... disturbed.... by people who seem to think Joss doesn't know his own canon.
Did these people not see Serenity? Joss knows his canon. He choses to change it to fit the story he wants to tell. His changes usually are logical or meaningless to the over all story kind of like the whole "vampires have no breath but Spike can smoke" thing.
( Read more... )
Did these people not see Serenity? Joss knows his canon. He choses to change it to fit the story he wants to tell. His changes usually are logical or meaningless to the over all story kind of like the whole "vampires have no breath but Spike can smoke" thing.
( Read more... )
In the beginning of BtVS, we are told that Buffy is the odd anomaly, the one Slayer that's not been found by the Council before being called. Hence, she's different, she doesn't conform, she's a loose cannon. This made a lot of plots possible over the run of the show.
In "Bring on the Night", Giles tells Buffy when he arrives with the Potentials that "there were many more like them all over the world, but, um, now there's just a handful, and they're all on their way to Sunnydale."
This implies that the Council knows all of the Potentials, and there are not many left, and what arrives over time in SD are the last Potentials that survived.
The First wants to erase the line of Slayers, starting by killing those Potentials. The Potentials we see hunted down in the early S7 episodes all appear to be aware of what they are.
Cue "Chosen". Willow does the scythe mojo, and we get a shiny slow-mo montage, and suddenly, out of some black plot hole, emerge all those Potentials, women and girls who're all empowered by the essence of the Slayer.
Says little old canon-whore me: WTF?
With one fell swoop, all we knew, or thought to know, about Slayers goes right out of the window.
Without any explanation. And that the Council's made all of it up is one I really don't buy, considering how absolutely thrown they were by Buffy's mere existence. Or the one where the Council was utterly clueless about the whole Slayer thing. Only, how could that have worked for such a long time if that's the case? There would have to have been cases like Buffy before if the Council was unable to keep track of the majority of Potentials, there had to have been, statistically. Only, we were told there weren't.
Post-Chosen, we suddenly have several thousand Slayers, of whom apparently most have never had a Watcher. They need to be tracked down first, i.e. by sending Xander to Africa, trained etc. etc.
It pretty much renders the Slayer lore that's been canon up to that point invalid. And no, I don't think that was an elegant twist, as shiny as the slow-mo montage was.
So, yeah, it might be possible that Joss messes up canon in the comics, because he's done it on the show in a big way, IMHO. If it's true in this case, I can't judge, obviously.
/rant
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I find it rather more fascinatintg when a writer is able to work in plot twists which change the story completely without negating the facts previously established in the fictional universe. I enjoy being thrown a curveball, but it has to make some sense.
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in season 1, Darla opens Angel's fridge and he's drinking human blood.. later they change Angel's diet to pig's blood... (simply because they're still working out his character), but continuity wise they keep it when they go back to Angel in the 50's (and he has a bottle of human blood).
There's a difference between good retcon and "Oh wait that was all a dream".
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Perhaps it bugs me so much because I've never been a comic book reader, except for the Sandman graphic novel I've hardly read anything worth mentioning. Perhaps I'm just an anal-retentive nerd, but I actually don't mind being one. *shrugs*
There's a difference between retcon and sloppy, or perhaps there isn't.
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OTOH, I believe it's his baby, and he can change anything he wants.
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With "Battlestar Galactica" it's like this. RDM has planned out how it ends. but not every step on the way there. During S3, we find out there is a huge unanswered question. Turns out at the early stages, the producers and writers have no idea how that question is answered. Towards the end of the season, RDM comes up with an answer. It's completely unexpected for me as the audience, because it changes my perception about four more or less important characters on the show. It doesn't rewrite their history, though. Well, it does, for the characters, but nothing we thought we knew about them before is made invalid.
Anyway! Before people don't know how JW handled Warren's return in issue #4, it's a bit too early to decide if he's cheating the audience, or if it's a brilliant plot twist that doesn't assume we buy everything thrown in our lap. I just thought that with Joss, you don't automatically have a guarantee that the reader doesn't have suspend their knowledge of the mythology and history to follow the author into the newly explored territory.
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And I know Joss already has thrown in some things people went huh? and then the lightbulb was added later (Oh!)
This is extremely twisty turvy... so I suspect Joss is doing something evil (he always is).
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