I have never considered Willow's arc in Season 6 as being related to her fear of being in charge. I always saw it as a study of what happens when someone intelligent is not exposed to sufficient peers so they get an over-inflated idea of their own importance. Your take is a very interesting angle.
The trouble with subverting storylines, is that sooner or later it becomes so expected that the trick no longer works. Maybe I'm naturally suspicious but the very first time I watched I expected Darla to be the one doing the biting, from the moment they climbed in through that window it was obvious it was going to be a subversion. And I think we were supposed to guess. (Rather similar to the first appearance of Aeryn Sun in Farscape - any fool knew it was going to be a woman under that helmet.) As such I think maybe these situations are not just being played to subvert the expected, but to flatter the viewer into thinking they guessed the trick just ahead of the reveal - much as a good detective story will let the reader work out who the murderer is just a shade ahead of the detective, so the reader gets the thrill of having got there first. So I think subversion only really works as just subversion if your audience somehow believes the subversion isn't possible for some reason.
And on a tangential thought, why is female curiosity so often portrayed as the origin of sin in folklore? Their own sin as an individual, sure, I can understand that might be something you wanted to teach your daughters, but why should curiosity cause all sin generally? That seems to be over-egging the pudding.
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I have never considered Willow's arc in Season 6 as being related to her fear of being in charge. I always saw it as a study of what happens when someone intelligent is not exposed to sufficient peers so they get an over-inflated idea of their own importance. Your take is a very interesting angle.
The trouble with subverting storylines, is that sooner or later it becomes so expected that the trick no longer works. Maybe I'm naturally suspicious but the very first time I watched I expected Darla to be the one doing the biting, from the moment they climbed in through that window it was obvious it was going to be a subversion. And I think we were supposed to guess. (Rather similar to the first appearance of Aeryn Sun in Farscape - any fool knew it was going to be a woman under that helmet.) As such I think maybe these situations are not just being played to subvert the expected, but to flatter the viewer into thinking they guessed the trick just ahead of the reveal - much as a good detective story will let the reader work out who the murderer is just a shade ahead of the detective, so the reader gets the thrill of having got there first. So I think subversion only really works as just subversion if your audience somehow believes the subversion isn't possible for some reason.
And on a tangential thought, why is female curiosity so often portrayed as the origin of sin in folklore? Their own sin as an individual, sure, I can understand that might be something you wanted to teach your daughters, but why should curiosity cause all sin generally? That seems to be over-egging the pudding.