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 )
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.
Buildings don't collapse without killing people. They showed us buildings (plural) collapsed. And a few dead bodies just to make the point.
Some local disasters don't have to mean that the entire world is destroyed. But they do have to mean that lots of people are dead. Do we kick back and think it was sweet that Buffy had her bestest day ever on the day she only caused tens of thousands to die rather than hundreds of thousands?
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.
It's an interesting story-telling thing that Allie acknowledged in one of the interviews. We've always known Angel had a lot of bodies behind him. But it takes him killing Giles for us to know that he's got real blood on his hands that will require more than a few days being a "champion" for him to be back to being a pure hero. Red shirts are always just red shirts.
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.
Buildings don't collapse without killing people. They showed us buildings (plural) collapsed. And a few dead bodies just to make the point.
Some local disasters don't have to mean that the entire world is destroyed. But they do have to mean that lots of people are dead. Do we kick back and think it was sweet that Buffy had her bestest day ever on the day she only caused tens of thousands to die rather than hundreds of thousands?
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.
It's an interesting story-telling thing that Allie acknowledged in one of the interviews. We've always known Angel had a lot of bodies behind him. But it takes him killing Giles for us to know that he's got real blood on his hands that will require more than a few days being a "champion" for him to be back to being a pure hero. Red shirts are always just red shirts.
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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.
Reply
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