Song Meme

[sunclouds33]

I'm doing the username song meme, from kikimay, beer_good_foamy and lokifan. Post one song for each letter in your username. I even spelled out the "thirty three".

Space Oddity: Starting this off with a tribute to the late, great David Bowie.
Union Maid: By Woody Guthrie, and special plaudits to the Judy Collins/Pete Seeger version. It's a song to practically cheer to! "Now

Comments

[sunclouds33]

I think I was primed to be OK with the Willow-one because I saw the Jed Bartlet video first. Jed Bartlet is a top-10 level favorite character of mine- but I'm not defensive about him like Willow. West Wing fans generally love him, I actually think I have a darker view of him than most so I don't walk into every conversation fearing unfair bashing like I do with Willow. With Jed, I still thought there was enough of a ring of truth even though technically when the video got into the heinous meglomaniacal crimes section, half of the explosions and gunfire was attributable to terrorist attacks in story instead of military strikes that Bartlet commanded. So, I felt like I had to be more OK with the Willow vid where she actually did everything portrayed in the video. ;-)

However, I still felt like the Bartlet one was a fairer critique than the Willow one. First, the maker of the vid made great pains to explain that it was more a critique of the American presidency than Jed Bartlet. Second, one of Jed Bartlet's cute but troubling traits is his straight-forwward arrogance. You can practically hear him rapping "I can tell you about Lief Erikson, I know all the words to De Colores and I'm proud to be an American." Willow has a subtle-arrogance but I really don't regard her nearly as much of a self-promoter. She undersells her abilities more than she oversells them. Third, the Jed Bartlet didn't show a character progression. The scenes were all out of order. The Willow one had a "this is how it all ends up" quality. Actually, maybe the Willow vid could have been more powerful if the scenes were out of order- some quirky productive late season scenes as well instead of just keeping all of the lighter fare in S1-3. I think a similar broader point could have been made.

However, I also thought the vidder was critical but sympathetic. I kind of think that vidding such an technically accomplished movie almost requires some fannishness about the character- but I could be wrong/easily impressed by fannish skills out of my wheelhouse. I was thinking of writing a meta about how much I don't care for this gifset and minor trend comparing Willow to Cersei Lannister. http://gargomons.tumblr.com/post/129264378569/she-never-forgets-a-slight-real-or-imagined-she

And I've happily compared Willow to famous anti-heroes- i.e. Walter White who's arguably less sympathetic than Cersei. However, this rubs me the wrong way- especially some bullshit line that Willow "never forgets a slight, real or imagined" when Willow is so forgiving and one of her flaws is that she can't recognize slights for what they are.

I see the commonalities in the actual gifset proper "and she is greedy for power, for honor, for love." However with Cersei, there's this sallow passive mentality that she makes her little schemes but she both chafes and reverts to the sexism of her land to not go all out for her goals. And that mentality is a part of her dastardly selfish make-up. However, it's a far cry from Willow who's not just greedy for her goals but actually puts her weak human body, her bruised and rejected spirit, her meager income, her outlaw status on the line every single time to achieve her magical and romantic goals and that's partly why she's a hero of modern times.

[sunclouds33]

But I think most of all, it fits into fandom's mistaken arguments about Willow just in BtVS. Forget the fandom comparison game. People really think that Willow sits on a tuffet making failed schemes mainly out of greediness, while not being enough of a doormat for Buffy or Cordy and having the nerve to see a slight as a slight or believing that she has the power to interpret dissent as defiance even though Willow's not even high status enough to even think in terms of dissent v. defiance most of the time.

I don't want to drag you down- but I've been thinking about it. At any rate, I positively compare the Handlebars video to that. I kind of demand lots of words to back up a harsh critique of Willow- if you're going to talk shit, than back it up. However obviously, visual art can be as valid a critique as written meta. However a long time spent matching up Willow's scenes to "Handlebars" fairly accurately in terms of lyrics to scene and taking the attitude above that Willow is an active participant in her own goals or more of a Walter White than a Cersei Lannister makes sense. Just posting random gifs with mis-attributed pictures and being all "Willow's varied lesbian romances can be just as perverse as Cersei/Jaime in the greedy for love section!" feels like hiding dumb ideas behind gif making skills and acting like because you put the time in to make the art, it means that you have something intelligent to say.

Hmm, I didn't really see the Cordelia one as a critique. It felt more like a celebration. But word to your comparison on Willow's and Cordelia's strength/weakness package.

[local_max]

Gonna eat dinner soon, but: the Cordelia one was obviously intended as a celebration, but if you author-is-dead it it totally reads the other way too. "Only thing I wanted was the world...."

Also absolutely that Willow is way more Walter White than Cersei Lannister in terms of method, motivations, strengths, weaknesses etc. -- independent of where they actual score in the evilmeter.

[local_max]

It is pretty depressing that these are pretty commonly held beliefs about Willow. It's actually not that Willow doesn't have pent-up anger and resentment at slights -- she does. But context. Willow is exceptionally forgiving most of the time. Who else keeps in touch with their former bullies years later, or tries comforting someone on their wounded male ego immediately after they try and fail to murder her? There's an intense kind of cherry-picking. I think that Willow's rare but important outbursts tend to show that she is not quite as forgiving as she tries to be, but rather than recognizing in this that Willow normally behaves a certain way but that the truth is more complicated, the times when Willow acts super-forgiving are totally erased and it's, yup, "no one expected Willow to still care about Giles yelling at her in the last real conversation they had together before he ditched town, now that he's come back to maybe kill her! see how she never forgets a slight!"

[local_max]

Part of why I think the vid is (properly, lol) Willow-sympathetic is that includes Will's "Willow's a loser" speech from "Two to Go" in the description as context -- and so it's definitely a vid about Willow's compensating for self-loathing. Whether it is fair to the parts of Willow's power-drive which aren't about compensating for self-loathing is a reasonable question to ask, of course. And comparing this to the Doctor Who vid BGF linked above (which I know you don't have the series-watching context for), the Willow vid also goes out of its way to establish early Willow's powerlessness and sadness and also the trauma pile-up (e.g. the bloody handprint from "Prophesy Girl", Tara's death later on), so that the power escalation is linked to how her life also keeps getting worse (or potentially worse). I mean, I think that the vid probably should have included a shot of Buffy's corpse at the end of "The Gift" and Willow's reaction before the elaborate resurrection sequence, but then I don't know how to vid.