Comments | lostboy_lj: Why the Buffyverse?

lostboy_lj

Why the Buffyverse?

Jan 29, 2013 14:09

I was reading a fanfic musing over at shapinglight's journal. I started to respond, but it was getting a little long-ish, so I decided to do a post instead. It's an interesting read in general, but this question in particular stood out to me:

Which leads me to wondering why it is that the Buffyverse is still the only fictional world invented by other people ( Read more... )

btvs fanfiction, thinky thoughts, btvs

Comments 64

kikimay January 29 2013, 19:41:29 UTC

Right here with you at monogamy.
Which is also not so accurate for me, because I just wrote a Thunderfrost story in 13 chapters! XD So, I guess I'll say that the Buffyverse is like a home. You can travel all around the world and actually like so many places, but there is no place like home.
(Ps: I'm still writing a big Buffyverse story, so I'm still really involved with fanfics on BtVS)

lostboy_lj January 29 2013, 20:06:29 UTC

A home is good too! :)

local_max January 29 2013, 19:49:15 UTC

I think I am more a Joss Whedon fan than you, and I have a particularly close attachment to his other works (especially Firefly, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible, and his run on Astonishing X-Men, though I quite like The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods too). (And Much Ado About Nothing is not really a bazillion dollar blockbuster!) I loooooove Firefly and I love Dollhouse and I dig those movies a lot. I even like the comics, or at least season eight. I bring this up not so much because I want to debate their quality as that I think it's noteworthy how wide a range there is to reactions in BtVS fandom and I want to lay my cards on the table -- I do fan certain people from the show in a way that other fans don't. I do think that the things I love about BtVS are more about Whedon than about any of the other writer/directors. ON THE OTHER HAND, I think that the Whedon/Noxon collaboration especially, and in general the Whedon/Noxon/Espenson/Petrie/Fury/DeKnight/Goddard/etc. confluence produced something much stronger than any of them as ( ... )

lostboy_lj January 29 2013, 20:44:00 UTC

I haven't seen much of Firefly (and none of Dollhouse), and I don't really read comics all that much (and no serial comics at all), so it's hard to comment on those. Dr. Horrible, Penny, Captain Hammer and Bad Horse are all people I very much dig, and I've watched that short more than twice. I did like both "Cabin" and "Avengers", but I wasn't particularly blown away by them. They were entertaining. and I thought "Cabin" had a few interesting ideas ( ... )

local_max January 29 2013, 20:55:11 UTC

As for Whedon's work on Buffy, without getting into a whole Death of the Author sort of discussion, I think it's fair to say he had a lot of influence on various things that I liked about the show, but that his wasn't the only detectable set of fingerprints on the things I liked (I think that's especially true in the 4th when he was focused on getting "Angel" off the ground). I also suspect, as is usually the case with showrunners and "bigshots" like George Lucas, he probably winds up getting credit for certain aspects of the product that he doesn't really deserve. Just looking at the evolution of Doug Petrie's role over the years, for example, tells me that he probably played a very big role in getting the post-Angel transition right, and refocusing the show on a larger scale.I definitely agree with this. In season four, I do credit Whedon with my three favourite episodes of the year -- "Hush," "Restless" and "Who Are You" -- but "New Moon Rising" and "Pangs" (though I have some ambivalence about "Pangs") and some others, like ( ... )

lostboy_lj January 29 2013, 21:17:06 UTC

The other thing is endurance. So many serials just exhaust themselves early on and wind up being redundant, irrelevant or worse.

For instance, I mentioned "Boss", the first season of which I was really blown away by. The second season? Not so much. It felt like it shot its whole load in those first eight episodes, and there was nothing really of interest left to tell. Cue gratuitous sex scenes, brainless melodrama and illogical intrigue. It's not really bad, now, just average. Then again, maybe average is the worst sort of thing to be when it comes to art.

With Buffy, the seven-season journey felt paced almost exactly right (I'm actually working on a little graphics project right now to try to illustrate why I think that is).

Thread 11

Response, part 1 aadler January 29 2013, 22:38:52 UTC

I’ve done some musing on that myself, the question of why the Buffyverse is my primary (not only, but nearly-only, since I’ve done 53 Buffyverse stories and only four in other fandoms) fanfic focus. Why does this fandom, this universe, this particular combination of setting, mythos, and characters, attract and captivate and enable me in ways nothing else does?

Unlike you, I had already done fanfic before BtVS came along (as I’ve observed elsewhere, I was writing fanfiction before the term itself was invented) … but with certain caveats. My first exposure to the phenomenon was by accidental acquaintance with a trio of girls in California who were recreational Trekkies and wrote stories to go along with that; and, yes, those stories were happily and unapologetically of the “me and my girlfriends on board the Enterprise” brand. I wrote in response to those tales, doing the same kind of shameless self-insertion. It was fun and never intended to be anything other than fun, but I cut my writing teeth in those exercises, and still remember ( ... )

Re: Response, part 1 lostboy_lj January 29 2013, 23:15:45 UTC

Some of it, I think, comes with possibilities. That’s one of the most potentiating things about the Buffyverse: it’s magic, literally. You can (and I have done so) turn back time, explore other universes, summon up the ghosts of the past, imbue people with extraordinary abilities and see what happens as a result, raise the dead, rewrite the past … and it’s still consistent with the laws of that canonical reality. (Maybe that’s one of the secrets of why the original STAR TREK inspired so much fan-writing, its setting providing any number of jumping-off points.)Yeah, I think this is very true. The material definitely lends itself to diversion, extrapolation, experimentation, etc. And I can't discount that it was this, plus the built-in ease of internet publishing, that tempted me to write my story in the first place, and that I probably wouldn't have done so absent either element. I guess that makes me kind of a wimp, creatively speaking, particularly if the bit about Internet ease is true. Would I have submitted stories to fanzines ( ... )

Re: Response, part 1 rebcake January 30 2013, 04:36:03 UTC

Are you me?

I do know that I'd never even considered writing fanfiction at all before 2006, and never considered writing it about anything else. I'd written...

In my case, some short fiction, comics, and essays that got published in various places. Oh and that one quickly abandoned rip-off of The Hobbit when I was eleven. Heh.

I didn't get much enjoyment out of the writing itself, and at times it was excruciating.

Like you, writing for me is, um, not fun. There is a Robert Crumb comic that sums up the experience for me: Hippy gnome Mr. Natural is faced with a sink full of dirty dishes. He sighs, pushes up his sleeves and washes them, cussing a blue streak and snarling the whole time. At the end, the dishes are gleaming, the sun is shining through the window, and he says with a smile, "Ahhh. Job well done!"

Re: Response, part 1 lostboy_lj January 30 2013, 04:57:47 UTC

Are you me?

I just conducted some sciencematifical tests, and have determined within a 97.9989% certainly that I am "not specifically you." I know, I was also surprised, but we can't argue with Sci Ants!

There is a Robert Crumb comic that sums up the experience for me: Hippy gnome Mr. Natural is faced with a sink full of dirty dishes. He sighs, pushes up his sleeves and washes them, cussing a blue streak and snarling the whole time. At the end, the dishes are gleaming, the sun is shining through the window, and he says with a smile, "Ahhh. Job well done!"

Yes! I recall this one, and that general vein in his stuff. It's interesting... some of the artists I disagree with the most (like Crumb and Douglas Adams, to take two examples), are also among my favorites. WHAT IS UP WITH THAT, YO?

(rhetorical question)
(unless, that is, you have a good answer)
(EDIT: and as long as that answer isn't "42")

Thread 6

Response, part 2 aadler January 29 2013, 22:38:58 UTC

Some of it may have to do with when we encounter a fandom: where it occurs in relation to the world around it, and where it occurs within the life and development of the individual being introduced to it. When I first read Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Swiftly Tilting Planet”, I found it disjointed and unconvincing; reading the same book again, only a few years later, I was captivated by the interrelations she wove between past and present, and the way present could influence and change the past, which connections I hadn’t even been able to recognize during my first time through.

And, possibly, some of it may have to do with how well a support community is already established. My discovery of online Buffy came midway through Season 3, by which time there were thousands of fics and discussions and tropes and developments and fic-typings already established. I could evaluate and navigate and decide within the context of things that had already been explored to some extent by others before me.

Some of it, though, can’t be quantified. ( ... )

Re: Response, part 2 lostboy_lj January 30 2013, 00:07:36 UTC

Some of it may have to do with when we encounter a fandom: where it occurs in relation to the world around it, and where it occurs within the life and development of the individual being introduced to it.Yes, this can't be discounted either. I guess anyone on my f-list who's known me for a few years probably knows that I didn't really like BtVS the first time I saw it, and it was really something that my wife (then girlfriend) loved, to the point she would go to "Buffy Nights" with her friends to watch the latest-greatest. Lots of things were happening around that time (not the least of which 911, and the attendant chaos in my city/country/job/life), and I recall that I wasn't especially in the mood for something I assumed was pure fantasy and escapism, and most likely coupled with the sort of postmodern 90's fluff I despised. "Angel" was well into it's fourth season before I actually began to watch that, but I found I was gradually becoming far more interested in reruns of Buffy. Then, one Christmas, I bought several "Buffy" ( ... )

Re: Response, part 2 red_satin_doll February 8 2013, 16:41:07 UTC

Buffy called me, hooked me, reeled me in, and still holds me, and past a certain point one must simply accept the thing-that-is and recognize that some parts of the phenomenon go beyond our ability to understand and analyze.

I love every word of this.

embers_log January 30 2013, 01:25:44 UTC

I've been reading the comments here w/great interest... the attachment we all feel for BtVS is amazing. And I felt that right from the opening of the first episode of the first season (when we assumed that the little girl in the Catholic School Uniform would be the victim...) we could see Joss setting up expectations and then surprising us with the twist. Joss could always make me look at things in a new way ( ... )

lostboy_lj January 30 2013, 05:15:01 UTC

I am really looking forward to S.H.I.E.L.D. to see what Joss creates with that (I'm kind of hoping for the created family of Firefly and the edgy audacity of Dollhouse... but I'm not sure if it will have the universal appeal of Buffy... we'll see).

I'm not so well versed in Whedon's latest activities, but I do agree that he is, if nothing else, a very talented storyteller. It will be interesting to see what he does with his newfound celebrity, if only to compare it to fellow directors like Peter Jackson (who I think is similar in his rise from dark horse clique to Hollywood superstar) or Sam Raimi (who I think is similar in his small bore approach and project trajectory).

rebcake January 30 2013, 06:58:06 UTC

Dollhouse was harder to love, but I still enjoy rewatching it with interest, seeing how impossible the show's theme is, but how interesting a lot of the elements are (human trafficking is impossible to love, but the political/military/corporate stuff was very satirical and interesting... to me).

Oh man, my intellectual love for Dollhouse knows no bounds. I feel almost the exact feels for Caprica (a Jane Espenson-run show) as for Dollhouse, and probably for the same reasons. Those themes of identity, selfhood, and technology were like catnip to me. Those were good TV times!

I'm kind of hoping for the created family of Firefly and the edgy audacity of Dollhouse

I'm trying not to get my hopes up about S.H.I.E.L.D., but then you say stuff like that! Guy! *hopes with you*

embers_log January 30 2013, 16:20:59 UTC

LOL
Okay I always feel that I have to acknowledge people who found Dollhouse unwatchable, because I can understand that reaction (I cannot watch L&O:SVU because it is always women and children as victims... it just makes me upset and angry). But really I agree w/you:
"Those themes of identity, selfhood, and technology were like catnip to me. Those were good TV times"
There was so much about Dollhouse that was amazing, fascinating, and fun (and not like anything else on TV). I'm hoping that Joss will be free to push the envelope in S.H.I.E.L.D.! He might have more latitude because ABC is owned by Disney, and they want to have his work w/Marvel to succeed. And because it is a Sci-fi world and you can always get away with more stuff in that genre (like with Caprica).