beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I had been reserving judgement on the Buffy reboot until it actually existed because before that all is rumour
but apparently it is back to Not Existing
so apparently now I have thoughts.

The thing with Buffy is:

We need a theme.
- It has to be a socially conscious theme.
One that reflects the students' growing awareness of...
...and involvement in the world around them.

That's the movie talking about naming the school dance, but compare any given season of Buffy.
We grow up, we notice new and stabbier problems, we realise we are the ones meant to deal with this, however unfair that seems.

And you get that pretty smoothly in the high school seasons, culminating with the theme and practice of Graduation Day.

But there are people who are less impressed with the development of the characters after that.

I read in a screenwriting book that you have to bear in mind that the vast majority of your viewers went to school, but only a majority of the writers room went to college.

The way society is set up for the past few generations we have this unifying experience of sitting in rooms where everyone has to be, being told a bunch of stuff that's meant to get us ready for the world outside school, with varying degrees of success.

But after that everyone's experience fragments, and the viewers reactions cannot be relied upon to come from a similar point of view.

Which, yeah but no but. A, could they ever? And B, Buffy did not spend overly much time in a classroom.

The core shared experience of the characters was
we have all this compulsory stuff to deal with that we're being told endlessly is Super Important
but now there are Things
which are actual life and death important
yet must be dealt with after and around school.

You can build out a lot of experiences from there. Like season six and the quest for more money. There is compulsory stuff, and now, also, Trauma. You somehow have to juggle both.

But part of what makes that heavy is the way even the closest support systems of the main characters simply do not acknowledge the life and death stuff. The trivial and transitory is compulsory, the being attacked by vampires is somehow not a problem anyone needed to prepare you for or admit is happening.

Relatable!

... no really, there is a very light metaphor skin on so much that is super relatable there.

And a lot of that is being prepared for the wrong things the wrong way. There's so much pressure on You, Yes You, Personally, Alone, doing things perfectly right first time Or Else End Of The World.
... exams must lead to the perfect start or life is wrecked forever, etc.

And this is all wrapped up in Patriarchy and how the Important tasks are *somehow* not the ones that Someone needs to do every single day or everyone dies. Home Ec is not a high status set of lessons despite the fact they're actual baseline essentials. You are not expected to make bank by doing the things that keep other people alive. Someone has to clean, cook, care, patrol every night, and hey, look who it is again.

Watchers get paid, Slayers get Called. Patriarchy at its finest, core to the metaphor.

(Making it Patrol, defense safety violence and therefore traditionally gendered and valued differently, is part of the defamiliarisation that makes Buffy work.)

And who can you go to for help?
Actually varies by season, and to some extent having the help crumble out from under you and growing to replace it is a core mechanic.
Parents, teachers, Watchers, government, all the support systems and institutions do what they can, demonstrate why they left the world the way the youngers find it, and crumble out of the way, while the protagonists grow to fill their roles.

Change that and you change the genre significantly.
Horror believes in the injury but not the hospital, in crime but not policing, in the threats but not defenses.
Coming of age stories see all that and say, our turn now.



So you put together all these constraints and you get the framework that the actual plots and characters build out on. You get Giles being slightly useless because he's an older in a story about growing up, you get schools that purport to help but become the source of threat, you get youngers that have to push back and take over.



So what do you do with all that
twenty years later
when you still have *Buffy* the vampire slayer?


It's easy enough to posit a world that still has vampires, but what does that say about *Buffy*? Yes, that the task is never ending, but also, why is someone still in school being Chosen to step up and help with it?

Buffy ended the show by sharing her power, so everyone that can stand up will stand up. Slayers all.
Equals, and within the framework of the show, as grown up as they are getting.

She went from the new kid in school to the general of an army.

What institutions did she set up after that?

How did they fail?

If they didn't fail, why do we have a plot?



And I think this is a fascinating set of questions, if Gen Z ask Gen X about them.
... I just had to look up the likely generation age ranges and apparently Gen Z are the ones who got born after Buffy started saving the world and are at youngest 14 now, so quite the age range there.

What world did they get born into, how did Buffy fail to fix it, who has she become in response to that, who can the youngers go to for help and Why does that fail in such a way we get plot?


Seems like we could look at the world and mine a rich seam for all of that, even if we focus primarily on gender.
If the text looks in the eye the race problems of the original we start getting proper interesting.


And I personally would start with the core concept of Slayer and the assumption that the ability to stake your problems will ever make them go away, but that's because I look at the genres I prefer to read watch listen to and tend to go But What If Completely A Different Thing.

... diplomatic solutions with non humans would change the baseline metaphor so much. but. So many years of BtVS and Angel presenting vampires and demons as basically people? The stabbing gets problematic.



The problem is all this either shifts Buffy into a different character with a non protagonist status, or leaves you running parallel coming of age and middle age stories. Which would be tricky! But the thing Giles had to reckon with in the background where the institution he gave his life to was... kind of sucktastic, and the person he thought he wanted to be in his early twenties turned out to just leave problems for the next generation, well, that's a start.


I think Buffy restarted right now could be fascinating.

But it could not be the same story. Writing the same story already makes it a different story. You would have to grapple with the differences.

I am rereading a fic set in late season BtVS
and they just got started being told 'from beneath you it devours'
and this time around my brain has decided
it's not that deep?
well, obviously,
the Sunnydale sinkhole was just that deep,
but it's not that deep/obscure/symbolic.

Something was yelling at the whole town that it was about to be swallowed.

Then the town mostly evacuated, except people who wanted to fight the being swallowed, which... I mean, it wasn't swallowed into a hell dimension as far as we know? So that fighting maybe helped? Or the fighting triggered it. But in a year when the other outcomes were worse.

But due to the past/reruns/fiction not being something you can have a conversation with I cannot tell the characters that.

Also the show really tried to make it seem like supernatural evil
rather than a giant cave collapsing
so it's probably not intended to be simples.

But like, from beneath them it devoured.

Dreamed of Rupert Giles today, turning up in a caravan and needing somewhere to stay.
He looked about the same age as he did in the first episode.
I looked him up. That could plausibly be the age I'll be this year. I'm catching up.


Weird, watching and feeling perspective shift as generations change.


Now I'm imagining someone saying I'm the Chosen Mentor, me and my library, so I have to whoosh off to another continent and do all That.

... and then get criticised for my qualities as a father, despite being a very late addition to a 16 year old's life.

... still say he's a Teacher, not father.

Me and my cosy worn in life and my routines and vague feeling I should join a club with more people in it
but mostly staying home and reading (slightly older and more erudite) books...

You know, I thought I understood Giles pretty well back then, but from here?
That's a Lot.


And teenagers are ever so very much younger.


Yikes.



... Giles thoughts kind of day...

Also also Buffyverse meta:

That one review that made it all about bad boyfriends... okay, I get where you're coming from, Buffy had a fascinating map in that respect, though what is with all the Riley erasure and simplifying it down to Didn't Love Him?

But they seemed to conclude with saying passion is what makes life worth living, and meant specifically romantic passion.

And I mean, they might have been quoting? "If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow." That sort of thing.

But, small point to remember, that was serial killer Angelus talking.
We do not uncritically accept the admittedly artistic monologues of serial killers.

Saying without romantic passion, the kind that leads us into bad relationships, our lives would be empty? Eeew. I mean, way to write off aro aces there. But also, eeew. And saying we have no choice about who we love? Yeah, but, no. Love is a choice. You wake up every morning and put the work in. You learn someone and learn how to see them. You decide to fit your lives together. And love is a promise. A commitment to act a certain way, in the beloved's best interests. And yeah, love and passion can turn up for unhelpful people, but, after that, you grow it or you don't.

And granted I'm sitting here perpetually single and baffled by most humans, but still, pretty sure I'm right even for people with the big overrides in their heads. We get plenty of choices. Just some are more appealing than others.

Plus how can someone see fandom and only understand passion as a romance thing?

... wait, 'ship wars, fic read as primarily about a 'ship, I can see it. But. Wrong.

People get full of energy for many things, and it can lead them astray in far more contexts, or drive them on to greatness.

Forgetting that and flattening every relationship that doesn't work to bad boyfriend passion? Does story such a great disservice, let alone people.

Buffy had many passions and many loves and each of them changed her and helped her and hurt her in various ways, because bumping into other humans does that.

But romantic passion isn't the only way to do it.

The thing is, about all I can think is, since when did I have twenty years of adult life? Surely I'm not old enough for this?
... it's not like I'm looking at forty from here...

I have about a bazillion tabs open right now because everyone is saying something col about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And it was a game changing feminist excellence, for all its flaws.

But for me it was fandom and friends and the first few years of my degree, including getting the message board for the Soulful Spike Society unblocked because I was doing cultural studies and we were there studying proper cultural texts.

... also because the random pep talks and cheerleading were on occasion how I got through the day, and the early years of the course.

Highlander was my first convention going fandom, and Highlander saved my life, but Buffy was the convention after that, and many more. And it saved my life at least as much. A number of three in the mornings have been survived with the help of Spike singing.

And as for the possibilities that opened up for all that thinking about Ethan Rayne...

... and all my icons from this great feminist show are blokes, which says something about me, but Willow and Tara, Faith's arc, Buffy standing up and saying hell can choke on her, and everyone who can stand up, will stand up...

those are the stories that get you through the dark.




So, now we just need to get on with making something that's twenty years better...

I've had 'write about buffy season 6 and 7' on my to do list for long enough that I have, on the whole, forgotten what I was going to write. So, ticklist:

( Read more... )




Hope that was what I wanted to write about ... mostly season 7 as it turns out. Think I forgot a bunch of things by waiting this long, but so it goes.


Meanwhile I'm on the last episode of Angel season 1, and one of the most interesting things about it is how, when Buffy turns up, she swiftly seems entirely irrelevant. Way to establish your show as its own independent thing. And way depressing if that's supposed to be the love of his life: as soon as they're not fighting the exact same good fight the exact same ways, side by side? All they've got left is arguments.

I don't ship it.



I do like to watch it though.

Sometimes I just get really wound up about the lack of appropriate mental health services in urban fantasy.

... I know, but, I just watched Spike get so thoroughly screwed over in season 7, and it's just, like...

He did his best, right? He let people know he wasn't coping. ( Read more... )

So I get just very wound up, even entirely independent of the real world parallels where mental health services, especially for homeless people with a lack of documentation, can be a bit difficult to access. I just, I really feel that even vampires should be able to get help if they need it.

But instead there's just Buffy deciding when to use her stake. That's it. That's the only way their universe copes with having non humans with divergent thought processes and difficult dietary requirements.

( Read more... )

I do like how Buffy really worked to avoid treating mental illness with a good being killed.
This season.
And in season 5 the dude that did that was clearly the bad guy.

I'm not so keen on how there's Dru and now Spike making an apparent connection between mental illness and tendency to do violence. TV does that a lot.

But I get stuck getting upset about how nobody helped Spike until it got really, really bad. I'm not saying Buffy should have, because his victims really sincerely don't owe him care, but there should be someone who can help.

I watched the whole rest of the season.
Once you get up to Seeing Red it's full of upsetting and I kind of have to let it play through or my feels get stuck.

It's nearly midnight and I need to sleep so I'll reserve actual full length write up for tomorrow, but

that is at the same time one of the more powerful and effecting pieces of drama I've ever seen
and really, really disappointing.

( Read more... )

Just... is this the story we get? Is this the story we needed?



It makes me tired just when it's also making its strongest points.

Gone is less fun when you've heard James Marsters was not in fact having fun.

Rewatching in order means rewatching Doublemeat Palace. Other than 'I can get money' explaining the plot in later episodes, there's not a whole lot worth watching in Doublemeat Palace.

Having Anya's demon friend point out the thing where Xander criticises Anya and it's not cool kind of... if the vengeance demon is saying it then it's easier to dismiss. I don't think it should be dismissed.

And then there's 'Dead Things', which is really difficult to watch and super dark.
( Read more... )



I don't know why this is the story we got. Interesting, yeah, but...
Why mess her up this precise way? Fighting depression, sure, that's cool, I liked Gone for that, but all this mess of hitting people or magic forcing them, that's misuse of their power, so why is that the important story? An important story I'll grant, but, I still feel like this show about women with power has problems with women with power. Hence the repeated stories of men feeling useless or now being useful as punching bags. It's messed up.



I think I'm looking forward to being done with this season.

You know the most frustrating thing about the magic addiction storyline is that up until Tabula Rasa it's pretty much perfect. ( Read more... )

But, that part hasn't happened yet this rewatch. Just Tabula Rasa.

Which this time was less funny.

Actually first there was Once More With Feeling, which I listened to this time mostly noticing the wobbly accents and how American it sounds. I know, weird, but I've been watching little TV and that often with the sound off, American is not what I usually listen to, so I keep actively noticing it.

Giles across these episodes... ( Read more... )


It's also vastly frustrating to me that a story about a woman finding her power and saving the world (a lot) is, repeatedly, a story about men feeling and in fact being useless, weak, knocked on the head a lot, standing in the way, unemployed because she doesn't need him any more. It's like... like when I've heard pitches for Supergirl stories that start 'Superman's off planet, because if Superman is around you don't need Supergirl'. Or it's like every paranoid nightmare of inverting the patriarchy. Women using their own power doesn't mean men are suddenly powerless, far from it. They don't need to be got out of the way to leave room for women to shine. If Giles was always the badass we know he can be that would make Buffy shine the brighter when he still needs her.


It's right up there with my frustration that Buffy might have power but she's portrayed thus far as wanting mostly 'to be like other girls'. The hell? Actually liking your power seems to be a symbol of badness, even when actually, everyone has power, like that one and only episode the whole school worked together. Power isn't something you have to be miserable about, just careful with.


Aaaand we've looped back to the other reason the magic addiction plot kind of sucks.

Because this girl power fantasy we've been watching really has a problem with women having power.

It's not cool.




Spike... if Spike is meant to be the bad boyfriend, at this point, I'm not seeing it. ( Read more... )


I like Spike. He's on a really interesting trajectory about rejecting evil and remaking himself. It's just that seems to have been rather on accident and involve readings counter to what writers have said about him?




It's a lot of interesting layers of story going on.

My brain is just not a comfy place.
Everything is Wrong but nothing is in fact wrong so this is not external or fixable. Except maybe by meditating. And waiting it out.
Yesterday I declared a Blanket Day because I, well, stayed under my blanket pretty much all day.

I can't have another Blanket Day in a row, and also it is Cleaner Day. So I've done teh Cleaner Day tasks, except for vacuum cleaning, because I already feel like the sky is falling and it's just difficult and awkward.

But I will do vacuum cleaning. Because it is Cleaner Day. So things will get Clean.



I have a whole stack of thoughts lined up about Buffy season 5 but they're staying somewhere behind the whole... impending apocalypse fear. *sigh*

I found myself getting really, really angry at the end of season 5. Because really? Heroic sacrifice? Again? ( Read more... )

... I'm angry because they swapped in a giving up when there should be a woman taking up her own power.

I know heroic sacrifice has a long and storied tradition to back it up, but it's just... ( Read more... ) This is good stuff.

I just... I get angry now that there's no better stuff.

I just watched Riley leave Buffy. And I've got to say, good.

Not good that the guy felt that messed up in the first place. He got messed with biochemically, got depressed (see moping, drinking alone, sitting in the dark, and being convinced nobody loves him and he's useless now), went looking for extreme experiences to feel something through the grey, especially adrenalin rush stuff, and ended up really screwed up.

But he blamed Buffy for how he was feeling. Instead of saying 'I feel disconnected' he's all 'she's distant'. And I get the sinking feeling the source text meant to agree. Like, the writers actually think Buffy did something wrong. Xander's little speech as writer ventriloquism.

Problem though? It's utterly baseless. ( Read more... )



But the further it gets from the moment of production the more prominent the last problem gets:

Riley has a phone.

Riley has a mobile phone, in his pocket, which he used to phone the army guys in the previous episode. And which Willow then used to phone him. So Riley has a perfectly ordinary phone with a phone number the Scoobies know.

Buffy is in the alley behind the magic shop, which has a phone.

And Buffy has 20 minutes to get a message to Riley.



... the more we get used to everyone having a phone, the more egregiously stupid missing each other by seconds looks.



But okay, the writers wanted rid of reliable Riley, so they demolished him and sent him away.


Spike is fun, but a story that gets rid of the solid guy to make room for super drama is less fun this time around.



Also, I cannot understand why Riley didn't stake him. I mean, that's an ongoing problem, but Riley fake staking him just makes no sense no way up. Intervention of writer.




The story we actually saw, where Buffy is right and Riley couldn't cope with her being strong and in charge so he stopped doing what she told him and just pissed around trying to get a reaction, that's an interesting story about masculinity and the flaws thereof.

The story Riley and Xander tell us we saw? Ugh.

Just blame Buffy for her boyfriend being a dick while she was dealing with life and death stuff elsewhere. Why not. Ugh.



I think sometimes the liking Whedon stories is based on reading it one way up and the epic dislike is reading it the other way up but it's usually duckrabbit and both is there. Only sometimes he'll do something where it's all ducked up and then you just look at all the other times you thought it was rabbit and start to doubt it ever was.

Xander is so wrong. And if he's wrong, the story is interesting.

I just am making such yuck face at the idea the writers think he's right.

I have now finished watching season 4.

... I'm trying to have any thoughts about anything after A New Man, but I get far more worked up about them dragging Ethan away (they had no right! the military have no right to arrest people! what crime would they even accuse him of? Where's his lawyer! When was his trial! How do team good guy live with themselves about being so smug when he's being taken for 'rehabilitation'?) than I do about... most other things, possibly including much of real life. *sheepish*

So I try to muster any thought about anything else, and keep circling back.

New Moon Rising, compared to A New Man, makes me super annoyed. Oz actually and for real attacks someone, so everyone is willing to commit treason, piss off the soldiers, throw the rest of their lives away, to go get Oz back. Because friendship. And I like Oz, and I'd really like to just be cheering them on. But, well, Ethan. Fixes Giles' little demon problem, warns them about 314 which turns out to be Adam and the location of the secret demon triborg manufacturing lab, and for his sins gets dragged away and locked up while people make smug self satisfied faces.

... I kind of really want to smite Riley when he does that. But then he does indeed get pretty thoroughly smote.

Oz needs hugs though. He gets bit, he does his best to make himself safe, he finds out he's screwed himself over instead and he can only cope if he doesn't care. Ouch.

Also, Oz so cute, very bad when bad happens to him.

Capturing people and keeping them until they're determined to be a threat?
All this Initiative stuff looks much worse after the Guantanamo bay stuff. ... after. Wiki reckons "As of June 2015, 116 detainees remain at Guantanamo." From what I've read some of those are people they've decided are not in fact a threat, they're just... keeping them anyway. I really prefer it when my far fetched demons TV is a little more unrealistic.

I mean you can read it as metaphor for racial profiling and shit with not much stretch, but with the military thing, it just looks...

I have nothing new to say about shit everyone agrees is awful. Not going there, depressed enough.



So, metaphors: first three seasons, high school is hell. Fourth season, girls go off to college, guys spend a year feeling and pretty much being useless. Then the Yoko Factor and Spike's little speech about college making them grow apart. So that's the college year metaphor? Little weak.

The spell where it takes all of their good qualities, that Xander thought of more or less, not subtle, but pretty satisfying.

The whole military thing though, with Xander wavering between fake military guy and thinking of going to be actual military, and Riley there being the good soldier and then 'anarchist'... I still don't know what they were doing with that, or why it was to do with Buffy. I mean, it's her show, if there's going to be a military theme it kind of ought to be something to do with her. And she had her history of being given orders and then saying she graduated. So... something should connect those up.

The year seems very about guy issues. Like, the guys are the ones having issues. Buffy just has practical problems, which is a whole other thing and doesn't drive the plot so much.

Riley has arc. Challenges and problems and making big life changing decisions. A lot of arc.
But we're not watching the Riley show so really I'm wondering how this is about Buffy.

Willow has the Oz-then-Tara thing. But that had to be so subtext behind the magic. Annoyance. Cool in its way though.
I like Willow less this time around though, because noticing the misuse of magic thing and her arrogance towards other magic users right from the start.



I've been mentioning a lot not liking people, and I've been harsh to Xander. Partly that's because it has been a while since I rewatched like this and I'm surprising myself with how my perspective changed. They seem way more teenage and unlikeable than I remember. Since I remember them from being rather a lot nearer their age... guess it's only a surprise to me. So that's why I keep writing it down, it's like, what's with these people, not growing up when they're in reruns. :eyeroll:


Watching Buffy but not Angel makes Angel turning up just really, really random. And creepier. Like, Buffy has this whole life going on, and her ex turns up to beat up her new boyfriend? Got to say, Angel's issues? Not just the soul thing.

Riley is just a seething mass of jealousy and violence at several points too, but still.

The both of them need to grow up.



The Scoobies joining voluntarily and because they care about each other vs Adam and his creations being made by involuntary joining, people forced together by orders, hierarchy telling them who they should care about and trying to turn them into weapons... interesting stuff.

Kind of weaker when the First Slayer turns up to object? Like, the voluntary-involuntary comparison goes poof because there's this one spirit in there whether she likes it or not.

I like how Buffy is like yeah, no, waking up now.

I do not like how the First Slayer is described as animal and beast and then cast as a black woman with initially no voice, who gets told off by a white girl. Blergh.



BtVS has race issues.
... duh.
It bothers me in layers and I kind of have to set things aside as they come up if I'm going to stick around and enjoy watching more.


I pretty much am enjoying watching. Season 4 is not best. Has good points, but is not best.