Age does not wither her
May. 25th, 2006 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkThey’re discussing the infamous decline in quality of aging TV dramas on Whedonesque. Again. I was going to post this but it seems the membership is closed.
I watched Buffy from the beginning but although I always found it entertaining it’s the last two seasons that transformed liking into love. I’d agree that they are different from the preceding seasons. All the seasons are different but these two more so both in tone and in the way they use metaphor.
Not that there’s no metaphor. In season six I found Buffy’s death and inability to re-connect with her old life a great overarching metaphor for the depression and loss of identity many young people go through when they finally move out from the relative safety of family/education. On top of that I would also argue that the very lack of the phlebotinin type elements that acted as metaphors in previous seasons is a metaphor for the seeming mundanity of the life most people have to settle for when forced to leave their childhood dreams behind.
Season seven happens to be my favourite and is different again. On the surface it looks like a return to the old storytelling approach but I think it’s more literary. It’s a little like the way books like 1984 and Ishirigo’s Never Let Me Go are terrible novels if you judge them in sf terms, their world-building is shambolic to put it mildly but that’s not the point, the point is the people not the world.
As for the idea of the series ending with The Gift I have to admit that although season five had some great episodes (Fool for Love and The Body) I thought the attempt to weld a big epic story onto Buffy never really worked (it was a much better fit on Angel) and I have serious misgivings about Buffy giving up her life for Dawn as a series ending. It’s a little too close to Darla’s self sacrifice in Lullaby in the way it seems to conflate motherhood and lethal self–abnegation, the idea that death is the best you can do for your children. I do like the line about the hardest thing in the world being to live in it but particularly because in season six we get to see that confirmed. Lots of times and in lots of different ways.
And now I'll get back to not marking scripts.
I watched Buffy from the beginning but although I always found it entertaining it’s the last two seasons that transformed liking into love. I’d agree that they are different from the preceding seasons. All the seasons are different but these two more so both in tone and in the way they use metaphor.
Not that there’s no metaphor. In season six I found Buffy’s death and inability to re-connect with her old life a great overarching metaphor for the depression and loss of identity many young people go through when they finally move out from the relative safety of family/education. On top of that I would also argue that the very lack of the phlebotinin type elements that acted as metaphors in previous seasons is a metaphor for the seeming mundanity of the life most people have to settle for when forced to leave their childhood dreams behind.
Season seven happens to be my favourite and is different again. On the surface it looks like a return to the old storytelling approach but I think it’s more literary. It’s a little like the way books like 1984 and Ishirigo’s Never Let Me Go are terrible novels if you judge them in sf terms, their world-building is shambolic to put it mildly but that’s not the point, the point is the people not the world.
As for the idea of the series ending with The Gift I have to admit that although season five had some great episodes (Fool for Love and The Body) I thought the attempt to weld a big epic story onto Buffy never really worked (it was a much better fit on Angel) and I have serious misgivings about Buffy giving up her life for Dawn as a series ending. It’s a little too close to Darla’s self sacrifice in Lullaby in the way it seems to conflate motherhood and lethal self–abnegation, the idea that death is the best you can do for your children. I do like the line about the hardest thing in the world being to live in it but particularly because in season six we get to see that confirmed. Lots of times and in lots of different ways.
And now I'll get back to not marking scripts.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 02:32 pm (UTC)(I'd never post this at Whedonesque because the mods don't want it to turn into a TWoP-bashing site, and I have to respect their wishes.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 09:02 pm (UTC)Now that you mention it, BtVS was always a universe in flux... romantic tension between characters was resolved instead of being dragged out for years... the kids graduated and went to college. Buffy dropped out of college. She acquired (basically) an adopted sister. She lost her mother. Willow apparently changed sexual orientation. All of that happened before Buffy came back from the grave in S6.
For all that they claim to dislike TV cliches, I think the TWoP VIP's are deeply attached to the idea that television is a shallow medium: Trite formulaic, predictable. Believing this helps them maintain an air of superiority when writing about the medium. BtVS was something they could never quite wrap their minds around: It was a fluffy teen drama on the surface, with a deeply serious foundation, and this contradiction confused them. When it became less fluffy and more serious in the later seasons, they naturally didn't like it any more.
Heh, I could make my own post out of that thought, but it might not make me too popular. :D