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Nostalgia but also new stuff
I watched a couple of FNL vids recently and it made me think how region/nation specific sporting associations are. Like food, there are foods that are just what’s for dinner and there are foods that remind you where you come from. Marmite and candy shrimps, soggy chips and soft fruit. In the summer mother bought us cherries in brown paper bags.
Most sports bring up less pleasant associations, I have a deeply conflicted relationship with football (soccer) being something of a widow to the game and yet strangely drawn to it. Rugby is good in 10 minute bursts, like watching herds of wildebeast, while cricket is a strange religious rite that goes nowhere and lasts days. Still I think I could watch a movie about any of those and it would mean something whereas American Football has no more resonance than a videogame. It’s a theoretical point really, what sporting movies are there that aren’t Bend it like Beckham or about baseball? Although baseball movies are curiously watchable. Maybe from playing rounders at school, or perhaps because most of them seem to be metaphors for something else. The Natural that was about King Arthur wasn’t it? Or Lancelot and Morgan Le Fay and Robert Redford was shiny back in the day.
So if you made it past the spoiler warning you already know that in S8 Dawn is a giant. She was a giant in the first issue already although maybe not for long as at that stage she hadn’t started to worry about the implications of being trapped in one set of clothes. She was still a giant when last seen (in issue 7), which means it’s been going on for at least a week – in comics time like so many things doesn’t conform to the laws of physics. Although actually the thing I like best about giant Dawn is that she is very bound by her physicality, she eats and drinks and sweats and stinks and bleeds all over the castle. Her transformation rather than being fairy tale-like resembles that of Gregor in Metamorphosis, every panel she’s in has some reminder of the physical details, the problems of finding enough to eat, or shelter from the cold, of having no clothes to change into. And everyone’s talking about her but she can’t talk to them, she waited for Willow but Willow has no time and makes the same crass assumptions that Buffy did.
Gregor was the hero of his own story and a metaphor for his own self-loathing and inability to make human contact. Dawn is a secondary character in Buffy’s story and although at first sight her giganticism looks like an allegory for teen pregnancy or the sexual shame/pride of first timers or a cry for attention Dawn denies such literal interpretations and the story makes fun of them in Buffy’s dreams. More interesting, I think, is the way larger-than-life Dawn is a metaphor for Buffy’s new celebrity status. It used to be that everybody underestimated her but no more. She’s feared by her enemies, adored by her followers, envied by aristocrats, spied on by sorcerers, sponsored by the rich and everybody wants to be her. Everybody’s talking about her, her clothing choices are constrained, and if she’s not thinking about food she’s consuming or regurgitating it.
Clearly this state of affairs isn’t ideal for all readers, myself I’ve always thought Dawn was a character who worked best as a foil or in the background. The two Dawn-centric episodes All the Way and Older and Far Away are the twin low points of S6 but she was wonderful in Bargaining and Dead Things and in her own little section of CWPD. My favourite run of Dawnness actually comes after that episode watching her let Joyce’s warning fester and sublimating her frustrations by bonding with Anya and torturing Andrew until the boil was finally lanced in Potential. I think the ending of that episode often gets misread as a sign that Dawn’s real talent lies in research but the point of Xander’s speech isn’t that everybody is special in their own way but that even those without any particular star quality can be extraordinary. Of course being a star isn’t quite how it looks from the stalls. Giant Dawn bursts into the limelight and finds it uncomfortable and overexposed yet still hard to relinquish. It’s the fractal follow up to Potential the same and yet different, shown more than told.
Most sports bring up less pleasant associations, I have a deeply conflicted relationship with football (soccer) being something of a widow to the game and yet strangely drawn to it. Rugby is good in 10 minute bursts, like watching herds of wildebeast, while cricket is a strange religious rite that goes nowhere and lasts days. Still I think I could watch a movie about any of those and it would mean something whereas American Football has no more resonance than a videogame. It’s a theoretical point really, what sporting movies are there that aren’t Bend it like Beckham or about baseball? Although baseball movies are curiously watchable. Maybe from playing rounders at school, or perhaps because most of them seem to be metaphors for something else. The Natural that was about King Arthur wasn’t it? Or Lancelot and Morgan Le Fay and Robert Redford was shiny back in the day.
So if you made it past the spoiler warning you already know that in S8 Dawn is a giant. She was a giant in the first issue already although maybe not for long as at that stage she hadn’t started to worry about the implications of being trapped in one set of clothes. She was still a giant when last seen (in issue 7), which means it’s been going on for at least a week – in comics time like so many things doesn’t conform to the laws of physics. Although actually the thing I like best about giant Dawn is that she is very bound by her physicality, she eats and drinks and sweats and stinks and bleeds all over the castle. Her transformation rather than being fairy tale-like resembles that of Gregor in Metamorphosis, every panel she’s in has some reminder of the physical details, the problems of finding enough to eat, or shelter from the cold, of having no clothes to change into. And everyone’s talking about her but she can’t talk to them, she waited for Willow but Willow has no time and makes the same crass assumptions that Buffy did.
Gregor was the hero of his own story and a metaphor for his own self-loathing and inability to make human contact. Dawn is a secondary character in Buffy’s story and although at first sight her giganticism looks like an allegory for teen pregnancy or the sexual shame/pride of first timers or a cry for attention Dawn denies such literal interpretations and the story makes fun of them in Buffy’s dreams. More interesting, I think, is the way larger-than-life Dawn is a metaphor for Buffy’s new celebrity status. It used to be that everybody underestimated her but no more. She’s feared by her enemies, adored by her followers, envied by aristocrats, spied on by sorcerers, sponsored by the rich and everybody wants to be her. Everybody’s talking about her, her clothing choices are constrained, and if she’s not thinking about food she’s consuming or regurgitating it.
Clearly this state of affairs isn’t ideal for all readers, myself I’ve always thought Dawn was a character who worked best as a foil or in the background. The two Dawn-centric episodes All the Way and Older and Far Away are the twin low points of S6 but she was wonderful in Bargaining and Dead Things and in her own little section of CWPD. My favourite run of Dawnness actually comes after that episode watching her let Joyce’s warning fester and sublimating her frustrations by bonding with Anya and torturing Andrew until the boil was finally lanced in Potential. I think the ending of that episode often gets misread as a sign that Dawn’s real talent lies in research but the point of Xander’s speech isn’t that everybody is special in their own way but that even those without any particular star quality can be extraordinary. Of course being a star isn’t quite how it looks from the stalls. Giant Dawn bursts into the limelight and finds it uncomfortable and overexposed yet still hard to relinquish. It’s the fractal follow up to Potential the same and yet different, shown more than told.