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

[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.