Giles and Ethan and Chaos and possibility
Feb. 1st, 2023 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI think the Ethan Rayne I've been building up in my head for the last twenty odd years got political in ways other people's fic mostly doesn't.
I keep thinking about Giles/Ethan because order meets chaos and new creative possibilities emerge between them.
But even when fic keeps Ethan around long term he sort of ends up joining in with Giles' life? Like Watcher or Magic Shop or something.
Or they keep doing the Ripper type stuff and it all goes dark and ends badly.
Because we like Giles enough to keep watching for seven seasons, we probably didnt spend those seven years complaining about the underlying philosophy, mostly, so, ideas come out sort of more Giles shaped than chaotic. A bit of gradual movement, a bit more actual talking to demons, an emphasis on Slayer being a job choice not a prison.
Which, yeah, good start, but...
If the spells that appeal are the ones that change the entire town at once, that show them magic, give them transformation, and at a scale seldom worked on to some extent change the world...
... why would Ethan do that? And why would he ever give up?
So to achieve Giles shaped goals, sure, make the Watchers suck less, support Slayers, that's excellent.
But Giles managed to run a magic shop for years without apparently using magic? While himself anyway. We don't get a feeling he wants things magic can supply.
... he wants music and dating and going home, but what he wants from magic...
... well A New Man might demonstrate, but you have to read it slightly sideways.
I mean it's entirely possible that Ethan changed him entirely without cooperation and against his will, but, they did that compare contrast to the new witches working together, so... if any of that was magic externalising Giles' desires?
He's angry, he wants to be stronger and able to fight for himself, and he feels he's a monster.
Which, you know, check, check, and check, as far as I can see.
Which could be why he doesnt apply magic to his problems any more. Standard Bruce Banner problem. The werewolf doesn't want to change.
But look at the world he lives in.
Look at the world.
Reckon a lot of things need to change.
... not that being a Fyarl is likely to fix much of anything. But...
I keep looping back around to Ethan in more of a Mage the Ascension way. The sleepers must awaken.
Like, if Giles is right and Ethan does magic to hurt people, there's not much you can do with that.
E:"Don't wish to blow my own trumpet, but it's genius. The very embodiment of 'be careful what you wish for.'"
G:"It's sick, brutal, and it harms the innocent."
That's a bad guy doing bad things for bad guy reasons.
plus fiction isn't subtle and Giles is good so Ethan is e...
... but the story doesn't say good vs evil, it's about chaos.
The world they live in has got so much going on in the shadows, magic decides everyone's lives, but very few people know that, apparently. Jenny and her friends on the internet, magic shop owners and patrons, those all suggest a vibrant and well connected magical community, but, there's so many people with no idea all this is going on. Two speed society with masquerade and silence. It gets a lot of people killed and it's fundamnetally anti democratic, since not only can the people not make good decisions on bad data, people like Giles in specific and particular are hiding information and the real levers of power. I imagine Giles as posh enough his family has land and possibly a minor title, not because of what gets said on screen but because it's part of him representing patriarchy and empire and all of that old powers mess. The few, mostly old families, know how things really work, and sort things out between them without recourse to law. Giles and the Watchers know magic, know demons, and leave people in general to stumble around in the dark.
Probably while telling themselves its for their own good.
... how that interacts with magic shops could get interesting, but never actually did.
I see their world as choking on a restrictive order.
Ethan is antidote to that.
Except instead they shove him in a prison cell, so nothing changes.
The story on TV resolved the patriarchy thread by letting every girl who wants the power have the power
but the comics weren't much for letting that make the world better, when I stopped reading.
The other stuff, the Jenny wants to free magic from smelly books stuff, that never went anywhere, mired in the metaphor of magic addiction.
But if you write Ethan as someone with an alternate value set, someone who wants to shake up the world and show everyone, show them what they can be and do, what they already know if they let themselves, how people are being treated by repressive systems...
Well the ending isn't enough.
But, what does the world look like if Ethan wins?
What is the Ethan Rayne edition of be careful what you wish for?
... I kind of fear it looks like Pathfinder's Golarion.
Or other rpg systems where magic is routine.
If magic is easily accessed, widely available, and out there changing the world...
you get wonders and terrors both, always.
Because you get people, remaking the world in their own images.
Many of which will clash.
And people can be capable of shocking brutality, as well as astounding grace.
So I can see why Ripper stories have a tendency to crash. There are so many ways to crash, even before you add magic. Take off the limits of tradition and ignore established pathways to power, and you can get... all kinds of everything.
But...
YOU can get all kinds of everything.
And I feel like stories need to cope with a future where people can just choose who and what to be today, because that future is always both further away and closer than we think. The things technology can do are astonishing, and getting easier to distribute. Sufficiently advanced technology and all that...
Science Fiction that I have been reading tends to take one change from baseline at a time and explore the impact, or else I get a bit lost. It takes a whole series to lead to some of the really far out there possibilities where everything is true at once.
But the world changes so many things at once we're probably not even aware of all of them.
Future is going to be kitchen sink varied because everyone's going to have their own kitchen.
So you can write stories about magic where the few have it and the laws regulate it and try and put it back in the box
and that maps a bit to... well, so so many modern technologies.
But magic is an idea, a story they can learn together and then just live in.
It's like how the internet potentially connects everyone and everything.
... and we're looping back around to 'I totally get why they end up with dystopia'.
In a Giles/Ethan context I can see Ethan, or Jenny, moving into Giles' life and shaking it up a bit and making him make more connections. ... or I can see either one of them in his life sort of allowing him to quarantine all the unaccpetable behaviour and cut himself off from more things, like letting Ethan go to demon bars and cast magic, so Giles doesnt have to.
A canon Giles shaped life ensues, nothing big about the plot changes, and it's easier to call in character. Just a sprinkling of change, maybe pulling Giles more neutral, or maybe letting him be more Lawful. Tension either way.
But if you start with what I've been figuring for an Ethan shaped life, all about magic and changing things up, and then apply a little Giles... you get attempts to salvage the best bits of tradition and Law, to carve out a surviveable space, and pull back before we get to those all magic dystopias.
It's harder to get Giles there because we know more about him. What he didnt choose to do.
So after the end of season 7 he has to let something change him.
Ethan is all about change.
But Giles has been resisting that particular set of changes for a While now.
Willow. Sort out the magic metaphors and addiction stuff and you end up with someone who went all the way dark and, with help from friends, came back. Willow can inspire change.
Willow can also connect with the magic community and, you know, demonstrate there is one and how it relates to the world, not just off screen.
I feel like I should read what the comics did but also that I will not like it.
I also feel like dropping Ethan into Golarion to show him the careful what you wish for world, the high magic everyone can do this world, post multiple apocalypses.
Easy enough to use canon from both sides to get him there, multiple Adventure Paths have characters go from Golarion to Earth, and one has time travel in case anyone wants to complain about timelines not lining up.
Plus it's pretty easy to imagine him going 'anywhere but here' after canon left him.
... Getting Giles to follow after him probably involves his exit being a bit catastophic for Buffyverse local spacetime. Which is very achievable.
Picking the right adventure path to drop him into though... if what I want is the G/E romance then any background will do, but if I want to poke this politics stuff, it needs a political background.
Which gets tricky when they're from the far away. Going and improving the locals, not what I meant as the point.
Could always write more of a fusion where their counterparts grew up there. But that changes them with every political background change, and like I said, what Ethan seems to me to be most interestingly trying to do to the Buffyverse, wake everyone up to magic, has long since happened to Golarion.
What would happen if everyone woke up able to do magic?
Fort Salem did that as their big ending, but Fort Salem had set up two problems, the power being manipulated into militarisation, and the culture that was being lost as a result. Don't reckon everyone having the power would be a simple answer for the culture.
It's easy to see how everyone knowing about magic would cause massive conflict, not so easy to see a way through that to a good life.
But the spells I like in Golarion are the really simple low level food and water spells. Ones that can feed everyone, mend everything given time, neutralise poisons, just fix problems. Ones that any individual can do, without having to protect a bit of land to grow things on, just by saying some words.
That would be a world changer too.
I dont know, I havent pulled together a coherent story yet, just...
There were so many problems in the Buffyverse and giving the power of epic punching to even a really large number of young women doesn't seem likely to fix them all.
Neither would magic, but wouldn't it be fun to try?
So I'm trying to think up an Ethan shaped world, and see how Giles would balance it out, instead of the other way around.
I feel like Giles probably thinks the world is basically okay, apart from all the demons and undead and cults tearing holes in the world, and that's pretty frustrating.
I keep on getting focused on villains because they keep being the ones saying
This Is Not Okay
and, well, *gestures at everything*
The people who want to preserve the world have an important point, but they can't be the only ones driving, you know?
So.
Don't reckon G/E will be the key to sorting out the worlds problems
but wouldnt it be fun trying?
I keep thinking about Giles/Ethan because order meets chaos and new creative possibilities emerge between them.
But even when fic keeps Ethan around long term he sort of ends up joining in with Giles' life? Like Watcher or Magic Shop or something.
Or they keep doing the Ripper type stuff and it all goes dark and ends badly.
Because we like Giles enough to keep watching for seven seasons, we probably didnt spend those seven years complaining about the underlying philosophy, mostly, so, ideas come out sort of more Giles shaped than chaotic. A bit of gradual movement, a bit more actual talking to demons, an emphasis on Slayer being a job choice not a prison.
Which, yeah, good start, but...
If the spells that appeal are the ones that change the entire town at once, that show them magic, give them transformation, and at a scale seldom worked on to some extent change the world...
... why would Ethan do that? And why would he ever give up?
So to achieve Giles shaped goals, sure, make the Watchers suck less, support Slayers, that's excellent.
But Giles managed to run a magic shop for years without apparently using magic? While himself anyway. We don't get a feeling he wants things magic can supply.
... he wants music and dating and going home, but what he wants from magic...
... well A New Man might demonstrate, but you have to read it slightly sideways.
I mean it's entirely possible that Ethan changed him entirely without cooperation and against his will, but, they did that compare contrast to the new witches working together, so... if any of that was magic externalising Giles' desires?
He's angry, he wants to be stronger and able to fight for himself, and he feels he's a monster.
Which, you know, check, check, and check, as far as I can see.
Which could be why he doesnt apply magic to his problems any more. Standard Bruce Banner problem. The werewolf doesn't want to change.
But look at the world he lives in.
Look at the world.
Reckon a lot of things need to change.
... not that being a Fyarl is likely to fix much of anything. But...
I keep looping back around to Ethan in more of a Mage the Ascension way. The sleepers must awaken.
Like, if Giles is right and Ethan does magic to hurt people, there's not much you can do with that.
E:"Don't wish to blow my own trumpet, but it's genius. The very embodiment of 'be careful what you wish for.'"
G:"It's sick, brutal, and it harms the innocent."
That's a bad guy doing bad things for bad guy reasons.
plus fiction isn't subtle and Giles is good so Ethan is e...
... but the story doesn't say good vs evil, it's about chaos.
The world they live in has got so much going on in the shadows, magic decides everyone's lives, but very few people know that, apparently. Jenny and her friends on the internet, magic shop owners and patrons, those all suggest a vibrant and well connected magical community, but, there's so many people with no idea all this is going on. Two speed society with masquerade and silence. It gets a lot of people killed and it's fundamnetally anti democratic, since not only can the people not make good decisions on bad data, people like Giles in specific and particular are hiding information and the real levers of power. I imagine Giles as posh enough his family has land and possibly a minor title, not because of what gets said on screen but because it's part of him representing patriarchy and empire and all of that old powers mess. The few, mostly old families, know how things really work, and sort things out between them without recourse to law. Giles and the Watchers know magic, know demons, and leave people in general to stumble around in the dark.
Probably while telling themselves its for their own good.
... how that interacts with magic shops could get interesting, but never actually did.
I see their world as choking on a restrictive order.
Ethan is antidote to that.
Except instead they shove him in a prison cell, so nothing changes.
The story on TV resolved the patriarchy thread by letting every girl who wants the power have the power
but the comics weren't much for letting that make the world better, when I stopped reading.
The other stuff, the Jenny wants to free magic from smelly books stuff, that never went anywhere, mired in the metaphor of magic addiction.
But if you write Ethan as someone with an alternate value set, someone who wants to shake up the world and show everyone, show them what they can be and do, what they already know if they let themselves, how people are being treated by repressive systems...
Well the ending isn't enough.
But, what does the world look like if Ethan wins?
What is the Ethan Rayne edition of be careful what you wish for?
... I kind of fear it looks like Pathfinder's Golarion.
Or other rpg systems where magic is routine.
If magic is easily accessed, widely available, and out there changing the world...
you get wonders and terrors both, always.
Because you get people, remaking the world in their own images.
Many of which will clash.
And people can be capable of shocking brutality, as well as astounding grace.
So I can see why Ripper stories have a tendency to crash. There are so many ways to crash, even before you add magic. Take off the limits of tradition and ignore established pathways to power, and you can get... all kinds of everything.
But...
YOU can get all kinds of everything.
And I feel like stories need to cope with a future where people can just choose who and what to be today, because that future is always both further away and closer than we think. The things technology can do are astonishing, and getting easier to distribute. Sufficiently advanced technology and all that...
Science Fiction that I have been reading tends to take one change from baseline at a time and explore the impact, or else I get a bit lost. It takes a whole series to lead to some of the really far out there possibilities where everything is true at once.
But the world changes so many things at once we're probably not even aware of all of them.
Future is going to be kitchen sink varied because everyone's going to have their own kitchen.
So you can write stories about magic where the few have it and the laws regulate it and try and put it back in the box
and that maps a bit to... well, so so many modern technologies.
But magic is an idea, a story they can learn together and then just live in.
It's like how the internet potentially connects everyone and everything.
... and we're looping back around to 'I totally get why they end up with dystopia'.
In a Giles/Ethan context I can see Ethan, or Jenny, moving into Giles' life and shaking it up a bit and making him make more connections. ... or I can see either one of them in his life sort of allowing him to quarantine all the unaccpetable behaviour and cut himself off from more things, like letting Ethan go to demon bars and cast magic, so Giles doesnt have to.
A canon Giles shaped life ensues, nothing big about the plot changes, and it's easier to call in character. Just a sprinkling of change, maybe pulling Giles more neutral, or maybe letting him be more Lawful. Tension either way.
But if you start with what I've been figuring for an Ethan shaped life, all about magic and changing things up, and then apply a little Giles... you get attempts to salvage the best bits of tradition and Law, to carve out a surviveable space, and pull back before we get to those all magic dystopias.
It's harder to get Giles there because we know more about him. What he didnt choose to do.
So after the end of season 7 he has to let something change him.
Ethan is all about change.
But Giles has been resisting that particular set of changes for a While now.
Willow. Sort out the magic metaphors and addiction stuff and you end up with someone who went all the way dark and, with help from friends, came back. Willow can inspire change.
Willow can also connect with the magic community and, you know, demonstrate there is one and how it relates to the world, not just off screen.
I feel like I should read what the comics did but also that I will not like it.
I also feel like dropping Ethan into Golarion to show him the careful what you wish for world, the high magic everyone can do this world, post multiple apocalypses.
Easy enough to use canon from both sides to get him there, multiple Adventure Paths have characters go from Golarion to Earth, and one has time travel in case anyone wants to complain about timelines not lining up.
Plus it's pretty easy to imagine him going 'anywhere but here' after canon left him.
... Getting Giles to follow after him probably involves his exit being a bit catastophic for Buffyverse local spacetime. Which is very achievable.
Picking the right adventure path to drop him into though... if what I want is the G/E romance then any background will do, but if I want to poke this politics stuff, it needs a political background.
Which gets tricky when they're from the far away. Going and improving the locals, not what I meant as the point.
Could always write more of a fusion where their counterparts grew up there. But that changes them with every political background change, and like I said, what Ethan seems to me to be most interestingly trying to do to the Buffyverse, wake everyone up to magic, has long since happened to Golarion.
What would happen if everyone woke up able to do magic?
Fort Salem did that as their big ending, but Fort Salem had set up two problems, the power being manipulated into militarisation, and the culture that was being lost as a result. Don't reckon everyone having the power would be a simple answer for the culture.
It's easy to see how everyone knowing about magic would cause massive conflict, not so easy to see a way through that to a good life.
But the spells I like in Golarion are the really simple low level food and water spells. Ones that can feed everyone, mend everything given time, neutralise poisons, just fix problems. Ones that any individual can do, without having to protect a bit of land to grow things on, just by saying some words.
That would be a world changer too.
I dont know, I havent pulled together a coherent story yet, just...
There were so many problems in the Buffyverse and giving the power of epic punching to even a really large number of young women doesn't seem likely to fix them all.
Neither would magic, but wouldn't it be fun to try?
So I'm trying to think up an Ethan shaped world, and see how Giles would balance it out, instead of the other way around.
I feel like Giles probably thinks the world is basically okay, apart from all the demons and undead and cults tearing holes in the world, and that's pretty frustrating.
I keep on getting focused on villains because they keep being the ones saying
This Is Not Okay
and, well, *gestures at everything*
The people who want to preserve the world have an important point, but they can't be the only ones driving, you know?
So.
Don't reckon G/E will be the key to sorting out the worlds problems
but wouldnt it be fun trying?