I had to struggle through snow that came halfway up to my knees to get this issue of Season 8. I hope you all appreciate my sacrifice. :-) ( Review of 8.39 'Last Gleaming' Part 4 )
I watched his interview: I was a bit disapppointed that they didn't intend the "Giles kills in The Gift/Giles gives his life in Last Gleaming" parallel delibarately; but the analogy still works from a literary level. On the other hand, I'm pleased to see I nailed the "Angel needs to repent, and this story makes his need even more urgent" character development idea.
There's a disjuncture, though, between all the mayhem shown in #34 and on and a bunch of tourists strolling around.
Well, the reading of the events in 8.34 I prefer is less "The world is being destroyed!" and more "The world is starting to tear itself apart" with the emphasis on starting. It's lots of little changes - waves moving faster, a volcano in the Philippines erupting, earth tremors in the Arctic. Things you might not notice or connect unless you already knew something bad was happening, but the implication being that they'd get worse and worse and more and more intense over time. As for the destroyed cities - I think it's more that a small number of
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It'll be interesting if they can do a meaningful repentence story for Angel. I look forward to it. (It's more than just beating up a few bad guys and calling it quits -- but Allie seems to get that
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The volcano erupting looks impressive, yes - but remember that if they'd wanted to, the writer and artist could have drawn people screaming and burning up as molten lava flowed through the streets of a city. For some reason, that's not the image they chose to show. Why not?
In my eyes, it's because they wanted to create an impression of "This is serious buiness; the Apocalypse is imminent (again)" rather than "Oh my God the world has been destroyed (already)". They're still fighting to save the world this issue, not fighting amidst the rubble of a world that's already gone.
I'm pretty sure that prior to season 8 most ordinary humans screamed and ran when they saw a vampire in vampire face.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they looked at them in a puzzled manner and said "Is there something wrong with his face?" Or speculated about gangs on PCP. :-) Besides, don't forget that even in Season 8 most humans have only ever seen vampires on TV, looking beautiful and glamorous and just a little bit dangerous.
In our world the fact that people are turned on by the idea of fictional vampires doesn't remotely mean that we'd go gaga over real vampires if they actually showed up
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Lots of her slayers have died gruesome deaths. Lots of soldiers died. The people in those buildings died. A volcano doesn't erupt like that without killing people. No reason to take any of that seriously. There's a difference between seriously and literally. I think we are supposed to assume lots of slayers and soldiers died gruesome deaths because they showed them dying. They didn't show any people in those buildings or anywhere near that volcano (the most recent eruptions in that area of the Phillipines caused zero deaths). The Buffyverse has a long track record of meterological events being used of portents of the real bad to come rather than the bad itself. I don't think it's unreasonable to read the events of #34 the same way and it hardly lets Angel off the hook. In #37 he leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes and that's when he's trying to make up for things. There's no need to invent thousands of offscreen civilian casualties to make the point.
Only if the buildings have people in them to begin with. Empty buildings being knocked down (like the one Buffy and Spike demolished in Smashed) rarely make the headlines but that doesn't mean they don't or can't exist. These particular buildings were explicitly drawn empty before Angel knocked them all down while killing demons.
The writers/artists made a deliberate choice to show only soldiers and Slayers fighting and dying specifically, but to hint at a general rising tide of worldwide crisis while leaving it vague how bad it really was. That was obviously a deliberate artistic choice, because it would have been ever so easy to show dead civilians instead if they'd wanted to emphasise the death and destruction rather than the impending doom.
Think of disaster movies where they show world landmarks being destroyed - Big Ben, the White House, the Sydney Opera House. They could have done that here too, but they didn't.
The volcano erupting looks impressive, yes - but remember that if they'd wanted to, the writer and artist could have drawn people screaming and burning up as molten lava flowed through the streets of a city. For some reason, that's not the image they chose to show. Why not?
It's an unglamorous answer but here it is: drawing people is hard.
It's the same reason while in school when doing presentations I'd choose to draw trees around the building and rarely (unless needed for scale) people. Trees are easier (and good to cover up the ugly bits) and I didn't have a hell of a lot of time.
It may be hard but Jeanty was perfectly capable of it during the Retreat arc and in #39. Including the Italian scenes in #39 when all the people were alive.
So if we don't see dead people it doesn't count? I assume that that plane Angel threw down was drone piloted then. We didn't see a pilot so I guess no pilot died, no matter how counter-intuitive it may be.
It's a story not a documentary and the dead people who aren't drawn tell that story just as much as the ones who are. Whether or not the plane Angel threw was on autopilot we saw a whole bunch of soldiers being blown up when it landed. Hence that was a scene drawn to point out the human cost of Angel's actions. Conversely the conspicuous lack of drowned people in Venice and New York in #38 confirm to me that the seaquakes and other phenomena of #34 were literary devices comparable to trains going though tunnels, magic snow, the sun being blotted out over LA, cats giving birth to snakes, Whisper Lake boiling and boys being born with their eyes facing inward.
There's a middle ground between the claim that hundreds of millions of people were dying in a worldwide catastrophe - which a lot of people were making before this issue came out - and saying that nobody at all died as a result of this apocalypse, though.
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Some fanfic authors have made the Buffyverse interesting without magic. At the very least, I'm curious to see how [well] Joss does it.
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I watched his interview: I was a bit disapppointed that they didn't intend the "Giles kills in The Gift/Giles gives his life in Last Gleaming" parallel delibarately; but the analogy still works from a literary level. On the other hand, I'm pleased to see I nailed the "Angel needs to repent, and this story makes his need even more urgent" character development idea.
There's a disjuncture, though, between all the mayhem shown in #34 and on and a bunch of tourists strolling around.
Well, the reading of the events in 8.34 I prefer is less "The world is being destroyed!" and more "The world is starting to tear itself apart" with the emphasis on starting. It's lots of little changes - waves moving faster, a volcano in the Philippines erupting, earth tremors in the Arctic. Things you might not notice or connect unless you already knew something bad was happening, but the implication being that they'd get worse and worse and more and more intense over time. As for the destroyed cities - I think it's more that a small number of ( ... )
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In my eyes, it's because they wanted to create an impression of "This is serious buiness; the Apocalypse is imminent (again)" rather than "Oh my God the world has been destroyed (already)". They're still fighting to save the world this issue, not fighting amidst the rubble of a world that's already gone.
I'm pretty sure that prior to season 8 most ordinary humans screamed and ran when they saw a vampire in vampire face.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they looked at them in a puzzled manner and said "Is there something wrong with his face?" Or speculated about gangs on PCP. :-) Besides, don't forget that even in Season 8 most humans have only ever seen vampires on TV, looking beautiful and glamorous and just a little bit dangerous.
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There's a difference between seriously and literally. I think we are supposed to assume lots of slayers and soldiers died gruesome deaths because they showed them dying. They didn't show any people in those buildings or anywhere near that volcano (the most recent eruptions in that area of the Phillipines caused zero deaths). The Buffyverse has a long track record of meterological events being used of portents of the real bad to come rather than the bad itself. I don't think it's unreasonable to read the events of #34 the same way and it hardly lets Angel off the hook. In #37 he leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes and that's when he's trying to make up for things. There's no need to invent thousands of offscreen civilian casualties to make the point.
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The writers/artists made a deliberate choice to show only soldiers and Slayers fighting and dying specifically, but to hint at a general rising tide of worldwide crisis while leaving it vague how bad it really was. That was obviously a deliberate artistic choice, because it would have been ever so easy to show dead civilians instead if they'd wanted to emphasise the death and destruction rather than the impending doom.
Think of disaster movies where they show world landmarks being destroyed - Big Ben, the White House, the Sydney Opera House. They could have done that here too, but they didn't.
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It's an unglamorous answer but here it is: drawing people is hard.
It's the same reason while in school when doing presentations I'd choose to draw trees around the building and rarely (unless needed for scale) people. Trees are easier (and good to cover up the ugly bits) and I didn't have a hell of a lot of time.
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