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]

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.