Returning to old lives

I was reading a thing about Riley, and it said
He returned to the military as he would likely return to his faith, but now taking a different position within them -- one where he became truly active in his own life.

Which struck me as wrong, but not, on reflection, wrong in canon. I'm not sure we get enough canon to figure either way.

Riley was in the military, went all secret black ops, got betrayed by them, stopped being military for a while. Went all... undone, all his previous things he called himself not working any more. Not a soldier, not a superhero, not Buffy's beloved, not a whole lot of things, from his point of view. Flirted with dying, because really, getting fed on by a vampire is way too close to getting yourself killed. And then the military threw him a lifeline. Drowning and normless, he got offered a nice ready made identity and set of rules, all clear and decided, and from a part of his life where he hadn't had to do any of that messy thinking.

Maybe he took all his contradictions back in with him.

But maybe he just tried to rewind and start over, be nice uncomplicated by the book boy again.


This is how my Ethan see Giles returning to the Watchers, as running away and letting someone else do his thinking for him. So I look at Riley, and figure, there's a lot of things in common with Giles. Differences too, but things in common. Duty. Rule books. Buffy not actually needing them. Reacting badly to Buffy not actually needing them.

... this is the kind of train of thought that usually leads to /, but I don't want to go there.



Both guys, they had a bad patch. Specific comparison, Giles mentioning his Ripper years in connection with the vamp suck jobs.

Both guys went back to a rigid structured environment they had previously been part of.

But what did that mean? Did they bring their new understandings to the old job? Or did they throw them out and pick up from where it hadn't gone wrong yet? The former would be a positive response, but the latter would be ignoring the whole thing where before it went wrong was in fact part of the path to going wrong.

Its a bit like, Giles can be read as a bit of a rebel as a Watcher. Or, he can be read as basically a by the book Watcher who got fired.

He changed his mind and went against the Council once, at a point where it was pretty much too late, when he'd already done his part of the bad things. The way he trained Buffy was nothing like how Kendra was trained, but Faith had a Watcher too and she wasn't much like Kendra either. The 70s Slayer Spike killed must have been un-Kendra-like too, or there wouldn't be offspring. And when Giles tried to be the boss, Buffy was all "and you would be stopping me how?" so I think how he ended up being was an ongoing negotiation between his preferences and hers. I mean, even Wesley was a bit less of a prat after he'd been there a while. So even shiny Council employees can be a bit flexible.

If Giles set out to do things different, that is one version of him. If he just sort of ended up with a very different Slayer, that is another.

I tend to figure always it is a bit of both, for people are complicated. Janus faces, looks like two but is one.

We didn't see much of Riley after he decided to go back to the before people. We did see a lot of Giles. Still both of them might have done it as a positive progress or a negative retreat.

God doesn't want you? Story doesn't particularly want god...

Someone in a window I now seem to have closed mentioned in passing that crosses and holy water don't really work very well. That is, if your goal is to destroy vampires, they aren't very effective. Sure, they burn, but the burns heal. And crosses mostly just make a vampire keep back. The only time they actually kill is if they end up right in a vampires heart, like if they stake them with a cross, or if the swallowed holy water burns through. In other words, if they do the exact same things you have to do with any chunk of wood.

If you start out with the idea of an all powerful Christian god being the reason the holy symbols work, it seems a bit... underpowered.

I mean in AD&D if you're a high enough level cleric you just destroy undead from a distance, whoosh, bit of prayer and they're all gone.

Reckon that would work in the Buffyverse?

If there are a whole bunch of powers competing, then it makes a bit of sense - cross-power and vamp-power get in a fight, cross-power has a bit of an edge so gets that cowering effect, but vamp power fights back.

But if any one deity is supposed to be omnipotent... well, basically you're back to the problem of the existence of evil, only more so. Because supernatural power is pushing back supernatural power, so god is doing something about it, but not a whole heck of a lot.

So you end up with the idea, god doesn't actually want to destroy vampires. On account of, if an omnipotent god wants to destroy something, then destroyed it is.

So why does that god want vampires around???

Why smallpox, basically. Ends up a tricky theological problem.

If you start with a whole bunch of smaller and more specialised godlikes, then the problem is different. Antibiotics are specific, and the other dudes are finding ways out around the edges all the time. Or, theres a goddess can keep vampires from your door, but the only goddess of vampire slaying is incarnate.

And the cross and holy water thing? Well, they might not do much more than plain old stakes, but the bit more they do is enough to save lives. In ways that don't kill anyone, which seems appropriate for a god with a bunch of commandments about don't kill and turn the other cheek.

But if its meant to be non-violent, why does it burn?
I have this theory that actually, its not god doing the ouching at all. It is the demon, rejecting god. Wouldn't do to let Angel get too close to all these redemption symbols, might get away from the demon. So make the body ouch, to keep the soul in the clutches of the demon.



All this being not particularly canon, just wandering around speculations.


And the reason it isn't in canon is because the parts that are important to us are the choices the characters make. Crosses and holy water are tools to them. As soon as we start getting into what gods are doing, what choices gods make and what their priorities are, then gods become characters. And then they have to get written in in interesting ways. I guess somewhere around then you end up with Hercules or Xena. Not that I've watched much of either show. But the gods are players there, making choices and stuff, so they're characters.

If we want to concentrate on like Buffy and Angel and such, the gods don't be being characters, any more than like the president would be. Any more than the dude that makes the guns in action movies. Because they aren't who the story is about.

(no subject)

Just re-read the writing I did the other day, including the little speech I did for Ethan. I still like it, but I realise I pretty much made my point in the first two lines. So now I'm wondering, do I trim it down, or is the actual point that Ethan's making his point a whole lot on account of all the points stick in when they're heard?

Going to have to change the last couple of lines. They sounded cool when I first wrote them, but they aren't right today.

I keep doing this, sitting down to write and instead revising the stuff I've done so far. And that means every time I sit down it takes longer to start writing, on account of all the thousands adding up. Is not very clever.


I still haven't got to the action part of the plot. I could, from a things happening perspective, have skipped this entire section and said "Giles made plans and talked to Ethan on the plane. Then it landed." Only, that wouldn't be telling the story. Because the action stuff is not the story.