Meta-meanderings

[hazelk]

Reading reviews of the last of the Star Wars films is interesting. One of the most common reactions seems to be a certain disappointment with the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall or at least with it’s execution. I’ve read people talking about how they’d looked forward to seeing this story since the first trilogy made it clear that Luke’s Father hadn’t always been evil and been reminded of a similar experience I had with the prequel to the Lord of the Rings. I must have read the book at least 20 times as a teenager and the thing that kept bringing me back after the first few reads was very much the desire to find out more about the back story, the battles of the First Age, the nature of the Great Enemy, the story of Beren and Luthien. So when The Silmarillion came out I could hardly wait to get hold of it and devour all that information.

I was never so disappointed in my life. The book delivered, I had all the answers but they felt so much better as questions. Perhaps some things are just better viewed through a glass darkly, put a spotlight on them and they shrivel and die, all mystery gone.

Another interesting thing about RoTS was the idea that part of Skywalker’s fall and the Sith’s evil was due to an inability to accept the inevitability of death, their own or other's. The desire for eternal life seems a common root for evil in fantasy. It’s there in Tolkein with the fall of Numenor, integral to U. K .LeGuin’s Earthsea series and present with Voldemort in Harry Potter. Not in Buffy though, there the villains already have immortality. What they seem to lust after is corporeality/mortality. The First, the Mayor even Angel/Spike with the desire to Shanshu. Is that an existentialist’s perspective? To be afraid not of death but of lacking reality?

Staying with Buffy but returning to the problems of prequels it strikes me that some of the issues people have with S7 may have to do with it being a complete failure in the prequel department. I mean chronologically it’s not a prequel but there was all that back to the beginning schtick and what looked like a return to mystical adversaries after S6 and the nerds. Being the last season maybe it wasn’t unreasonable to expect some clarification of the Slayer mythology and yet all we got was a deeply unsettling version of the origin story in GiD and further muddying of the issue with Beljoxa’s eye dropping hints about a weakness in the line and the arrival of the Guardian and the discovery of the Scythe. More new questions than answers, this season wasn’t an clarification of the Slayer myth but a critique.

Comments

[fishsanwitt]

Season 7 was *such* a muddle. They should have kept it simple. The First, the original Watchers - dump Botox's Eye (or however it's spelled) and the Scythe - wt? was *that* about - and that old woman lurking - I really thought they were just playing it for laughs. And Caleb - Lord help me - he seems to have shambled in from that Robert Mitchum movie - where he's the creepy preacher!

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I disagree. The muddle wasn't the problem.

In previous seasons, you had the capabilities of the Big Bad clearly defined, and you knew what he was doing. He had talks with the Prime Minion (The Master and the Chosen One, Spike and Dru, Angel and Dru, Mayor and Deputy Mayor, Mayor and Mr. Trick, Mayor and Faith, the Trio, etc) to tell you as much of the plan as the writers had figured out. You had clear "Send the flying monkeys" scenes whenever the Big Bad send minions against the Scoobies. In S7, up to a point, you didn't have that. Who set up the talisman in "Lessons"? When did Spike get the song brainwashing? Where did the jacket in "Him" come from? Where did the stupid high-school kids get the demon idea? Was the First a player in any of that? We don't know. "Conversations With Dead People" works because of the muddle, because of the confusion of the capabilities and goals of the First. The "CWDP"-"Show Time" arc relies on Buffy's confusion and self doubt, which was finely crafted through what I call S7.1 ("Lessons" through "Him" -- the "back to high school" episodes) and honed through S7.2 ("CWDP" through "Show Time"). It's when Joss came back after Firefly and swept away the muddle, the smoke and mirrors, that you got the lame S7.3 ("Potential" through "Lies") and the nonsense ending in S7.4 ("Dirty Girls" through "Chosen"), when we get a Prime Minion in Caleb and the Big Bad explaining itself.

To my mind, we were caught up in Buffy's muddle, with her not having a good view of reality (remember, she thought it was still October when Christmas came up) and the goal was to be that she was to get so muddled that wrong would become right and she'd bring about whatever result the First wanted. Something I'm not convinced didn't happen.

[fishsanwitt]

Oh, this is a very different interpretation. Very interesting. What the First wanted, eh?

I'll have to think about this a little more.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

Here's some context:

Spike had the bauble that had to be worn by a non-human hero. Pretty much had to be him or Angel. This blew away the First's army. Why?

The First messed with Spike, screwing with his mind and beating him up. There was nothing to keep it from having Spike turned into a handful of dust, and yet he wasn't.

The First messed with Angel's mind, and when he said "I just have to wait for the sun to rise", the First's response was "That's not the plan, but it'll do."

The First, more than anyone else, enjoyed messing with the vampires with a soul just because. Could the messing be intended to make the vampires less confident in themselves and more reliant on the Slayer, so when "the plan" came around, the VwaS would be right there, ready to take the bauble? But why would the First want that, if it meant the destruction of the army? Because the army was a means to the end? Demons coming out of the Hellmouth and destroying the Earth is "not the plan, but it'll do"?

[fishsanwitt]

So, what's the 'real' plan? That's the puzzle :)

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

The Council serves as the eyes and memory for the Slayer, alerting her to problems and giving her the information she needs to combat them. It also serves as a moral guide, correcting her (at times lethally) if she begins to drift. Remember, the First poked here and there at Slayers, but it used drastic, building-bombing measures against the Watchers.

A bunch of Slayers without a bunch of Watchers to keep an eye on them? What mischief might come from a situation like that?

[fishsanwitt]

And the First/Cassie *did* tell Willow that it liked to draw things out.

[mediumdave.livejournal.com]

For the same reason, DC Comic's Justice League gives me the willies... a bunch of self-selected, uncontrolled superheroes with a secret base on the moon; who knows what they're up to.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

You get a Watchmen problem either way: The slayers watch the vampires, but who watches the slayers? The watchers watch the slayers, but who watches the watchers? In the first case, you get Faith. In the second case, you get Cruciamentum.

You have read Watchmen, right? Thing is, with the JL (Teen Titans, Avengers) , you're seeing the world through their eyes and thus know and trust them. (Or not.) I'm surprised at the lack of in-context objection to superheroes in non-Spidey, non-X-Men books.

[mediumdave.livejournal.com]

Hmm. So getting back to BtVS S7, in that case whose eyes do you see the world through?

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

This answer is filtered through my view of S7. I think the First wanted Spike there. I think the First wanted Spike there because of his role with the bauble. I think the First messed with Angel in S3 because the First wanted Angel there back when everyone thought Angel was the vampire with a soul, rather than a vampire with a soul. The vampire with a soul's role was to wipe out the First's army, so it follows that the First's plan required his army to be wiped out. I believe that the death of the Council and the rise of an expanded Slayerdom was the First's plan all along. In short, I think S7 is the season where the Big Bad won.

If the Council was what the First Evil hated and thousands of Slayers was what the First Evil wanted, then I suppose it is right and good to like the Council and hate the new regime. Separated from that greater issue, it is clear that the Council is Good but it could be better. I'd accept the Cruciamentum a lot more in an organization like the Initiative, where the members are volunteers who know what they're getting into, than the Council and their drafted Slayer. It's hard to be an open organization when every time you say what you do, you either bring everyone in earshot into mortal danger or tempt them to throw you into a loony bin. The problem with comparison is that we have only the slightest idea what the new system would be in Joss' mind, so there's not much for comparison.

[mediumdave.livejournal.com]

That's not quite what I was getting at... see, in the case of a superhero comic such as the JLA titles, we tend to assume that the heroes are trustworthy because that's part of the genre convention. And the story is told from their point of view, as you said.

Watchmen does this a little bit differently, but its messages are somewhat mixed... the public is suspicious of the superheroes, but it's mainly a knee-jerk reaction to their "otherness", and the public is mistaken about what the nature of the threat (if you can call it that) is.

But with BtVS we don't have much of a genre convention to rely upon, so we, the viewers, have to choose and balance the perspectives. Which makes the interpretation very, um, interesting...

It occured to me when reading your post that the First Evil might be your preferred reference point, and hey, there's nothing wrong with that.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

There's a precedent in genre convention for collected groups of zombie hunters lead (well, work with me here) by an intellectual European. Dracula had Van Helsing, Mina Harker and a group of adventurers chasing Dracula back to Transylvania. They, like the Scoobs, are considered without flaw within the novel and nobody knows what they're doing outside the group. I have no problem with that, as long as they stick with that. Thing is, they strayed in S7.

I've looked at S7 from the perspective of the First only becaue it takes that kind of work to understand what's going on. The 7.2 section works best when you remember that she slips easily between dream stage and awake stage, and that there's a lot of dreamlike imagery (the Giles that never touches anything, Xander sweeping in the background when she's talking to Joyce), so you read her (and presumably the Scoobs, although that's less clear) having a more and more tenuous connection to reality. So, you have to see things not from Buffy's view but the First's view in order to understand what's going on.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

The First messed with Spike, screwing with his mind and beating him up. There was nothing to keep it from having Spike turned into a handful of dust, and yet he wasn't.

The First messed with Angel's mind, and when he said "I just have to wait for the sun to rise", the First's response was "That's not the plan, but it'll do."

All through S7 I was convinced that the First's core plan for Buffy in both Amends and S7 was for her to kill a souled vampire who she cared about on utilitarian grounds and become morally corrupted by the act.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Why do you think S7.3 was lame? I thought Potential-First Date worked perfectly well as stand-alones while everyone but Giles was lulled into a false sense of security allowing the First to do what it does best and hit Buffy where it really hurts by getting one of her charges to kill herself. So she makes her first big mistake with the ‘everybody sucks but me speech.’, Which actually works for Spike and Willow but alienates the Potentials and Anya so that they’re not going to cut her any slack if she lets anyone else get killed. Which she does because she’s not good at Cold Wars and a Caleb to actually fight is just too tempting. And S7.4 has pacing issues but Chosen makes everything better for me. For example The First finally works because when Buffy told it to get out of her face I suddenly realized that it had never told anyone anything they couldn’t have worked out (or in Andrew’s case imagined) on their own. It really was no more and no less than the sum of their fears and weaknesses.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

The pressure got let off and the smoke and mirrors fell away. There's good elements in most of 'em ("Potential"'s Dawn-as-wannabe and Xander's speech; "TKIM"'s use of Amy, whose power-up from before is a "was that a First thing?" question that draws "STSP" back into question; "GID" has the return of badass!Spike and Willow using and confronting the problems with using magick; "Storyteller" was funny) but we lost the paranoid dreamlike quality that made 7.2 work, as well as specifically invalidating so much of 7.2. Six straight non-BigBad episodes made the threat go away, and when Buffy becomes more difficult because of the "increasing" threat when we see a decreasing threat, the audience goes WTF.

"Chosen" doesn't do it for me because between the lingering strength of 7.2 and the lameness of much of the later stuff (for example, you can't convince me that "The Guardian" wasn't the First in disguise, offering Buffy more perspective-altering bulldada), I can't help but believe that opening the Hellmouth and using the Scythe to expand the Slayerdom is the First's plan all along. The First gets it's way, Anya dies and a good chunk of California real estate falls into a hole and we're supposed to consider this a win?

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I’ve got no defense for the Guardian just a feeling of relief when Caleb turned up. I can live with her as a parody of the ‘Gaia, Gaia, moon, moon, primordial matriarchy’ wing of radical feminism but that’s pushing it.

I suppose I didn’t get so much paranoid dreaming from 7.2 apart from the final scenes so there wasn’t so much to lose. And I really loved the creeping despair of Empty Places so I’ll trade you that. Overall I guess it comes down to whether you want the series to end in tragedy. Buffy’s my one true female/feminist hero so I don’t and I don’t think I have to, the hopeful ending works for me. Whether the First wanted it or not I see liberating the Potentials as a good (if scary) thing like most freedoms and have no great attachment to abandoned California real estate. Anya, I wish she could have lived. Anya, wah. But she died finally facing her fears and there was that beautiful moment with Xander and Andrew, the storyteller, showing how a lie can be truer than the literal facts.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

It's not that I want it to end as a tragedy. I want to understand how the creator wants it to end, and messages A, B and C tell me not to trust what they showed me. For me, it's the definition of irony: "an expression marked by a deliberatecontrast between apparant and intended meaning."

"Empty Places" -- The Xander fan in me loves that the vote of no confidence from Xander was the last straw, and the way he said it ("I'd love to see your point, Buff, but I guess it's somewhere off to my left, 'cause I just don't") is so cold without really meaning to be.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

And I hated that Xander-Andrew moment, personally.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

That’s OK, chacun son gout, all that. I think there are meta reasons for not seeing the First’s ironic victory as Joss’s conscious intent, he calls himself a feminist after all. But I think I could be convinced by a fanfic that took that line. I would have issues with any implication that a self-selected elite group of watchers would necessarily be better guides for Slayers than the women themselves or the people as a whole. I mean now there are multiple Slayers it would be possible to hold elections for which might hold office…
I’m not a fanfic writer. It shows.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I do get the objection, I do. Thing is, the way the Slayer thing works, there can be no history, nothing handed down from one generation to the next. (Big objection here to the [not a] scythe and Robin's bag of tricks, but I'll glide past.) The only way to provide a history, a knowledge base and a support structure is by coming up with a Council-like thing, but inevitably, the permanent institution (Council) sees itself as controlling the transient party (Slayer) rather than equal partners or a subservient organization. I can't help comparing it to Yes, Minister, which I've borrowed and am working through. The Secretary gets assigned by the PM to head the Department, but the Permanent Secretary, who was there before the Secretary and will be there after he's gone and knows how everything works. There's just no way for one Secretary/Slayer to learn everything that the Department/Council knows, and even if she does, this does no good for the next Secretary/Slayer.

Props to Joss, he created a superhero system with a built-in angst system. Spiderman, the Teen Titans and the New Mutants never mourn the idea that they're guaranteed a young and painful death and thus lose this possibility of plot.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

That's a good ananlogy with Yes Minister. And will there be crossovers?

Back in the day it (Yes Minister) used to get props for being accurate as well as funny but I thnk power has moved somewhat away from the mandarins now. I suppose with the advent of the internet it's much harder to convince people that the knowledge base can only be accessed by the appointed experts. Kind of reminds me of a discussion on superplin's journal relating Willow's Slayer spell to movement from centralised to distributed knowlege. Arguably it was the Council's centralised records that Caleb was targetting rather than the Watchers themselves.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

It's hard to imagine how. Let's see.

"Bernard, what's this, then?"

"That's the appropriation for the Council of Watchers of Britain."

"Council of Watchers? What's that? Some sort of quango? What is it they watch, anyway?"

"I'm not sure, sir."

"Probably a bunch of Oxford academics and philosophers, trying to save the world from something that doesn't exist. Environmentalists and all that. What does Sir Humphrey have to say about it?"

I can't force it beyond that, but I'll put it on the back burner.

And a lot of it is knowledge of how things work.

MY major objection to "Slayer School" fics is the decentralization angle. As dlgood says, in a world where a Slayer is necessary, a Slayer is insufficient. So, now we have thousands of Slayers, presumably placed by whatever places with some foreknowledge (the same way Buffy was at Hemery HS when the vampires attacked Hemery, not Eagle Rock) so if this Slayer is called in a boring suburb of Oslo, or Papua New Guinea, or Tokyo, perhaps that's where the trouble will be and pulling the Slayer out of there to spar with other Slayers is a bad idea. However, really, while the tools of Slaying, the weapons with which we do battle, are decentralized, the knowledge is really even more centralized, from a minor bureaucracy with agents in most countries to Giles, Willow and Xander. The occult knowledge they need is now even more hidden. Considering the minimal way the Council uses itself as a weapon, preferring to use the Slayer, it's hard to separate the knowledge base from the people who maintain it. Caleb, of course, separated both from this plane of existence instead.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

For example The First finally works because when Buffy told it to get out of her face I suddenly realized that it had never told anyone anything they couldn’t have worked out (or in Andrew’s case imagined) on their own. It really was no more and no less than the sum of their fears and weaknesses.

I agree absolutely, and moreover this is the moment of real victory - of course there is a battle going on, and fancy spell done by Willow, and Spike's sacrifice, but as Buffy's story goes - this is the turning point. And I love It!