Bring out your dead

[thespikeofit]

So one of the discussions I've been following around fandom this week seems to centre around how many people have been killed by the recent events in season 8. The views range from only as many as we've seen explicitly dead bodies within the comic (ie very few)  right through to millions.I actually think the question is doomed to never be resolved

Comments

[shapinglight]

I think the constant genre-switching in BtVS can at times lead to a sort of moral whiplash, as it were. While watching, we don't think Willow is callous for not being horrified at Harmony being a vampire because the revelation is used for comedy. We clearly aren't meant to think about how upset Harmony's family must have been that their daughter died etc.

However, I do think that Joss has raised the stakes (heh! pun) too much in the comic, with this world ending.

[thespikeofit]

Yep, I wasn't bothered at all by the Willow/Harmony scene at all when I watched it, it's just something I realised much later on. Within the show I can accept that they drew a veil over the real world ramifications of such an event but I think that's harder to do when they're busy showing us global destruction.

[shapinglight]

Well, all you can really say is that even Joss and Allie have admitted they were possibly wrong to 'go global.'

No wonder the comic just doesn't seem like BtVS to many people.

[thespikeofit]

I think they both just thought of the notion that in a comic they could do anything and not be bothered by budget. The problem is they don't seem to have considered it any further than that. They've pulled in all these new slayers but none of them evidently had friends who mattered and would join the cause, it's only Buffy whose allowed to keep her support system and consider the balance between slayerdom and normality (though admitedly she seems to have given up the battle on that one).

At the end of season 8 it'll be interesting to discuss what the worst mis-steps of the comics have been but I think this one will be a front-runner.

[shapinglight]

I agree (even though the Spike stuff will always rankle with me most

[thespikeofit]

Short of anything horrific in the next two I suspect nothing will rank as high with me as the Buffy/Spike reunion but I also accept that's a fairly peripheral element of the comic and says more about my focus than anything else.

It really hasn't held together as a cohesive season with so many elements that just seem to have been put on hiatus while Joss replays season 2 for whatever reason. It was always going to be hard because of the drip nature of comic storytelling compared to TV and the decision to stretch it out over so many years.