![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Vid rec
Origin Stories by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
giandujakiss has been recced all over and much commentated on already (also here). These are my mixed-up and conflicted responses:
This is a powerful vid. An angry and polemical vid that starts out with an establishing sequence as provocative as the final section of Women’s Work. The Dana story with which the vid ends is equally effective, the visual matching her tormentor’s drug stash with the Shadowmen’s demon essence box especially striking.
Those early shots of Nikki and Robin, Robin as an adult, Nikki, the Chinese slayer and Kendra have a visceral angry power that is shaming to watch. But it gets more complicated and diffused with the introduction of the potentials. Does their disproportionate whiteness signify that they’re part of the problem or is the vid rooting for them too. We see all them fighting and all of them dying, Rhona and Amanda, Chloe and Eve. The role played by Buffy is even murkier, she’s repeatedly shown taking Spike’s part, siding with the oppressor but other scenes portray her more sympathetically reacting to the death and injury of the potentials. Is it meant to be significant that the victims in these particular clips are white? Probably, there are similar scenes involving Kendra and Chloe that could have been used. In which case it does work as commentary on Buffy (the show) focussing disproportionately on those of the Caucasian persuasion and I should stop reacting with fannish defensiveness as if attacking my favourite character were all that were at issue.
Buffy, however, is not the main subject of this vid and I do think the vid itself blurs the boundaries between fannish loyalties and metatextual analysis by making Robin the main POV and ultimately only through him the non-eponymous Vampire Slayers. Robin has his own story to tell but having him speak for the Slayers, leading the potentials into the school, telling them where to go, re-appropriating his mothers coat, feels problematic. Robin when all is said and done is not Nikki. Biologically he’s her son but he was raised by a Watcher of unknown ethnicity in the privileged surroundings of Beverly Hills. Textually he cleaves to the Watcher’s side, it’s Giles he entrusts with his mother’s identity and when he speaks of the potentials as weapons, as soldiers, he's paraphrasing Quentin Travers and the Council's definition of them as instruments in the war against evil. The vid ends by cutting from Dana’s capture and shooting by ex-Watcher Wesley to Robin’s defeat by Spike to Spike putting his mother’s coat back on. There is justice in that but it feels as if some other point is being misappropriated. Robin, like Dana and the Slayers she remembers, has suffered at Spike’s hands but his heritage is also Wesley’s. I don’t know. It feels a little as if Nikki’s story has once again been set aside in favour of a narrative about two men fighting over her coat, as if that lousy piece of leather had more significance than she did.
giandujakiss has been recced all over and much commentated on already (also here). These are my mixed-up and conflicted responses:This is a powerful vid. An angry and polemical vid that starts out with an establishing sequence as provocative as the final section of Women’s Work. The Dana story with which the vid ends is equally effective, the visual matching her tormentor’s drug stash with the Shadowmen’s demon essence box especially striking.
Those early shots of Nikki and Robin, Robin as an adult, Nikki, the Chinese slayer and Kendra have a visceral angry power that is shaming to watch. But it gets more complicated and diffused with the introduction of the potentials. Does their disproportionate whiteness signify that they’re part of the problem or is the vid rooting for them too. We see all them fighting and all of them dying, Rhona and Amanda, Chloe and Eve. The role played by Buffy is even murkier, she’s repeatedly shown taking Spike’s part, siding with the oppressor but other scenes portray her more sympathetically reacting to the death and injury of the potentials. Is it meant to be significant that the victims in these particular clips are white? Probably, there are similar scenes involving Kendra and Chloe that could have been used. In which case it does work as commentary on Buffy (the show) focussing disproportionately on those of the Caucasian persuasion and I should stop reacting with fannish defensiveness as if attacking my favourite character were all that were at issue.
Buffy, however, is not the main subject of this vid and I do think the vid itself blurs the boundaries between fannish loyalties and metatextual analysis by making Robin the main POV and ultimately only through him the non-eponymous Vampire Slayers. Robin has his own story to tell but having him speak for the Slayers, leading the potentials into the school, telling them where to go, re-appropriating his mothers coat, feels problematic. Robin when all is said and done is not Nikki. Biologically he’s her son but he was raised by a Watcher of unknown ethnicity in the privileged surroundings of Beverly Hills. Textually he cleaves to the Watcher’s side, it’s Giles he entrusts with his mother’s identity and when he speaks of the potentials as weapons, as soldiers, he's paraphrasing Quentin Travers and the Council's definition of them as instruments in the war against evil. The vid ends by cutting from Dana’s capture and shooting by ex-Watcher Wesley to Robin’s defeat by Spike to Spike putting his mother’s coat back on. There is justice in that but it feels as if some other point is being misappropriated. Robin, like Dana and the Slayers she remembers, has suffered at Spike’s hands but his heritage is also Wesley’s. I don’t know. It feels a little as if Nikki’s story has once again been set aside in favour of a narrative about two men fighting over her coat, as if that lousy piece of leather had more significance than she did.
Re: "Origin Stories," part 2
Spike wins, and at the point appears to still be fooling himself that killing those Slayers was winning some kind of honorable duel
Or the nature of things that you and selenak were discussing over on her journal. I think what the show is reaching for here (and throughout the season) is not that vampires killing Slayers is natural but rather a natural consequence of the ‘One Girl in all the World’ set up. Spike was Nikki’s murderer but if she had killed him she still would have likely died in some other battle accepted as part of the mission she could never share or take a break from. Spike, misogynistic and brutal while he might be, is not the patriarchy but its instrument. The bigger enemy is the system that gave one woman the non-choice between a short life filled with violence and letting the whole world go to hell.
Re: "Origin Stories," part 2
Also Spike has always been a character of extremes, he can be hero guy and he can be “I didn’t give a piss about your mum” guy but the one can never excuse the other. It's true that he's a character of extremes, although I feel it's not as difficult as it should be for viewers to conclude that even though Spike murdered thousands, it's all "worth it" because of how it led him to the end, dying to save billions of people. (More or less what Darla concludes before she stakes herself to birth Connor, except that she's not dying to save the world. We know Darla's sense of morals, if any, don't encompass caring about anyone else besides possibly Drusilla, very possibly Angel/us and now Connor, though.)
Spike was Nikki’s murderer but if she had killed him she still would have likely died in some other battle accepted as part of the mission she could never share or take a break from. Spike, misogynistic and brutal while he might be, is not the patriarchy but its instrument. The bigger enemy is the system that gave one woman the non-choice between a short life filled with violence and letting the whole world go to hell. Yes, this is all true.