![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkOrigin 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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: "Origin Stories," part 1
Date: 2008-02-27 10:26 pm (UTC)Thank you for all the links especially the Patricia Hill Collins (and for including my ill-formed ramblings in the halfamoon post). As a biological rather than a social scientist I’m a very feral feminist, it’s good to see the theory laid out. That particular quote has some personal relevance – my family is Scottish Presbyterian so having a partner of Irish catholic extraction became something of a learning curve. Wherever people fall in the intersection there’s always that very human tendency to see themselves as the oppressed not the oppressor. That was something of a theme in Buffy as well as a problem with it.
Re: "Origin Stories," part 1
Date: 2008-02-28 12:52 am (UTC)Oh, absolutely. I'm glad you pointed out the patriarchal overtones of Robin leading the Potentials into the school - he's only one offshoot of the Slayer line, and not at all the cumulative endpoint, for a lot of reasons, even if he might be looking harder at some of its problematic aspects.
Re: "Origin Stories," part 1
Date: 2008-02-28 04:34 am (UTC)You're welcome - selenak pointed me here when I recced her story "Five in One" at halfamoon. I hope people see the rec post and get interested enough to follow the meta links; there have been some really corking thoughts on the vid from you and other viewers. I like the Collins reading because it's relatively short *g* Actually, I was just looking at it again and the closing sentences are something we can probably agree on, especially in the context of "Origin Stories":
... This means that we must all learn to see our experiences as partial, situated in specific contexts, and unfinished.
It also means that no one is always placed at the centre of the analysis or gets to speak for all women.