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8.36: The Preview Pages
So with four days left to go before #36 finally comes out, I figure I'd waste some time pondering the preview pages. They came out on a pretty crummy day, so I was grumpy when I first read them. Random thoughts below the cut.
1. So this is Angel from the future, or at least from 'a' future -- one where 'we' lost the war. The war in question was in LA, but that may or may not be a purely local deal. At the end of the preview we find out that future!Angel has some issues with the cheerleader.
The time travel angle has been in play all season long -- at least since #10 when Buffy talked about changing things if she was in a time loop. Time travel gives me a headache, and I can only hope this is written in a way that doesn't boil down to some "the characters get an infinite number of chances to make things right so nothing really matters" sort of a deal. The drama of life is that we only get one shot at it (says the woman who wishes she could have a do-over on a daily basis).
2. I love that Angel gets smashed by the O. More call backs to season 2.
3. DOG shows up. His first line is "I know I'm a dog. What a world, right?". Reminds me of Spike in School Hard talking to Angel about what a world it is where people buy all that Anne Rice stuff. There are a few other places where DOG sounds Spike-ish. Fortunately there are places where DOG sounds not at all like Spike.
4. So the world's back the way it was supposed to be. Fortunatley this is DOG speaking which means we don't necessarily have to assume that we really are playing the "reset and redo as many times as it takes to get it right" game. The whole idea reminds me of fanfic, much of which is about resetting the game and getting it right. Which is a perfectly fine and enjoyable game to play -- in fanfic.
5. Angel pushes the O back into place. Superpowers already in place then.
6. Another joke about balls! Probably just the usual joke about why dogs lick themselves. But it'd be cool if DOG turns out to be channeling Saga Vasuki -- a female type would probably be very entertained by the situation.
7. Mention of Wesley. Along with Angel's reaction to mention of Buffy makes me think that future!Angel isn't from so very far in (his) future. The loss of the war rankles, and doesn't seem to be a dim memory.
8. Angel is twitchy about "chosen". Immediate reference is that he's twitchy about Buffy, which raises the possiblity that she had something to do with the war that was lost. DOG asks what they're going to do about that, which Angel takes to be a threatening remark about Buffy. I'd love it if the subtext here is that Angel is twitchy about who Buffy chose in Chosen, and that's what he ought to do something about. Probably wishful thinking, since honestly having the first pages be about Angel was disappointing to my Spike-centric self.
9. DOG is waiting for Angel to feel it. Could mean Angel's superpowers -- maybe Angel didn't notice he had them when he pushed the O back up. But this line resonates with FDW waiting for Buffy to feel it -- the weight of her failure. In this case, Angel could be asked to feel something of how this world has changed. Dunno. It's pretty open ended.
There are two possible shoutouts to LOST: DOG looks like Vicent; there's an airplane about to crash. Certainly the preview reminded me of the un-joy of watching LOST where questions piled up faster than answers were granted. It's the last arc! But we knew there had to be some big back story on Angel. A war weary Angel who has lost everything makes some of Twangel easier to understand. The cynicism about the inevitable deaths of mortals. The lack of concern about seeing a world lost (since he's in a world that just got reconstituted after having already been lost).
My big wish is that DOG be related to Saga Vasuki and/or Willow. That's a plot line that needs to be joined. Angel listening to chaos means that the story isn't necessarily selling Angel as the poor hero who just had to become Twilgiht to save the world. And who knows, maybe they plucked the version of Angel who'd been through the crushing defeat because they knew that was the version that would most easily be their patsy? Could work. But time travel and alternative universes need to be employed with care. Makes me nervous, in a grumpy sort of a way.
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Okay. This is not how I see these panels, but maybe it's my shipper's bias. ;-)
Which appears to be that the bad guys wasted a year in elaborate schemes to "undermine Buffy's moral certainty" rather than just launching an all-out attack on her in issue one, like General Voll originally wanted.
See, the problem with this kind of logic is that, eventually, it stands behind all totalitary regimes. Fascists, communists - they all justified killing as a necessity to create a better world.
Angel's goal was to juice Buffy up with power at the expense of lives of 200+ slayers. I quote from the #38 blurb: "he was given a clear mission in regard to Buffy - help her reach the next plane, together create a new world, and end all suffering". As a person who lived in a communist state the first half of my life, I see a direct reference to the communist ideology. That's exactly what communists were telling to peasants and workers in 1917 when they were stirring them up to start a revolution.
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"He was given" ergo this reflects the ideology of the dogmasters but not necessarily Angel's. Riley accepted the mission to place the world over the girl but was still working for the girl. We don't yet know whether there's a distinction between what Angel's would-be masters thought he was doing and what he thought he was doing or whether either of them screwed it up entirely. However, in this instance none of that is particularly relevant because the question is what Buffy thought Angel was doing and the alternative to "I have randomly turned into a good old, evil because I'm evil, tie-metropolis-to-the-tracks, OOC (which everybody criticising this storyline seems to agree on) comic book villain" that Angel gives her is not that he was killing thousands to save billions. He denies that he's killed anyone (as far as we know and certainly as far as Buffy knows that's literally true). He's pointed out that governments and demons were hellbent on slayercide with or without his involvement and claims that while he hasn't been able to stop them, he has diverted them so that far fewer slayers were killed than would have been without him. He's not (at this point) claiming to have killed to create a better world, he's claiming not to have been able to save everyone. The while I push side of the equation hardly seems to register with her it gets lost in the argument that her powers don't come from her dead.
To sum it up, you think that Buffy's mind was completely clear when she stopped attacking Angel. She stopped because she believed Angel when he said that he did it for her own good. She made the decision to have sex with Angel on her own free will, because was happy to leave her worries behind and enjoy herself.
I would phrase it quite differently. Buffy stopped because she believed that Angel had not undergone some random personality transplant and that he had intended if not good then least worst as far as he was able. As had she when she changed the world. Her good seemed less at issue than everyone else's good, she raged sat him for her girl's deaths and putting "us" through hell. She's less self involved than in the days when "nobody messes with my boyfriend" was her sine qua non. She made the decision to kiss Angel and follow where that led not our of heedless hedonism but because there was nothing else she could do for her people. She'd failed them utterly, they were dying because of her. There was a chance Angel was right and if he wasn't she'd got nothing.
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Before #33 i predicted that Buffy would take a "timeout" of her daily (job) worries and actually try out the peaceful existence of (suburban housewife) bliss.
And despite of my intellectual knowledge of this twist in the story it STILL kicked me out of the narrative.
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I make no claim to be any judge of whether a story is being told in a very bad way but the sense I get from your comment that these things can be determined by some kind of fandom committee feels off in some way. I don't know why so many have such a massive disconnect. I don't know what proportion of those who feel that way have actually read the text they feel disconnected from with any great attention. I do know of several who also claim to find comic books and graphic novel a difficult medium to parse out a message from. I also remember similar disconnected responses to seasons 5, 6 and 7 of the TV show. It may come down to fans (and I am one) being passionate about stories and with passion goes a certain "it's either very good or it's horrid."
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Still, for me it is a worrying sign if a story - despite my general consent and anticipation to where it is headed - is able to kick me out. I'll leave out the anonymous masses of fans, only speaking for myself (this time ;-)).
I get what You're saying and i follow Your reading (whenever i'm able to concentrate on the narrative, again) - but the disconnect is still there. And, that never happened before with BtVS. So, probably it is just me parting ideas with BtVS. Well, no, not really. As i wanted to see the story we are seemingly getting. But the way it is presented is offputting, to say the least.
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Completely clear in the sense that she was in full control of her faculties and able to make decisions freely: yes. She wasn't emotionless and coldly logical, if that's what you mean.
She stopped because she believed Angel when he said that he did it for her own good.
Yes; or at least, she believed that he thought he was doing it for her own good, and therefore his intentions were coming from the right place. As 8.35 shows, she didn't necessarily agree with his decision and certainly wasn't going to go along with it just for his sake.
She made the decision to have sex with Angel on her own free will, because was happy to leave her worries behind and enjoy herself.
Yes, exactly.
As a person who lived in a communist state the first half of my life, I see a direct reference to the communist ideology.
Me too. Do you remember the review I wrote of 8.35? I directly compared Angel's behaviour to either a True Believer in Marxism-Leninism and the Proletarian Revolution, or alternatively to a fundamentalist Christian who believes in the End Times and the Rapture. Both are ideologies that claim that a better world is coming, and that any suffering which might happen in the meantime is a regrettable necessity, but everything will be made better once the Revolution (or Rapture) comes. At least for the chosen ones. The Twilight prophecy is a pretty blatant metaphor for that.
I don't blame you at all for being repelled by Angel's logic, given your experience; but there have been millions of oeple throught ut history, and still today, who believe like he does. And they don't normally think of themselves as evil; most times, they think their opponents are the evil ones for trying to stop the better world from being created.
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If she believed him, then her intuition let her down - because he lied. Deaths of 200+ slayers was part of the plan from the very beginning. It was a necessity to give Buffy superpowers.
If she "believed that he thought he was doing it for her own good" - the situation becomes uncomfortably close to Pete/Debby dynamics in "Beauty and the Beasts".
But I admit, I may be wrong in my assumptions about Buffy being under the influence. It's just my impression.
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That's never been said. Angel's plan was simply to make Buffy feel under pressure and powerless, while doing his best to delay or prevent the plan of his followers to kill all 2,000 Slayers. I don't think his culpability for the 206 that he failed to save is as cut and dried as 99% of fandom seems to assume.
And the Riley one-shot surely established that he didn't think he was doing it for "her own good" - he was doing it to save the world, and regretted what he had to do to her even if he did think she'd benefit from it in the end?
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Angel says he must "push" Buffy to ascension. Buffy must feel demoralized and stripped of power to ascend. The only way to truly get Buffy on the ropes is to kill her followers.
It's an inescapable means to an end. And Angel knows people have to die for his goal to be reached. Also, when he says to Buffy in #33 that this was already happening, I don't believe it would've happened in quite the same way unless he wanted it to.
Angel is Superman in this scenario. Angel could pretty much stop anything from happening. He could orchestrate a situation where the President's family is endangered and then rescued by Slayers, thereby more firmly pushing them into the heroic camp. There's so many things he could do and doesn't.
Considering this is BtVS, inevitability is a no go.
I find it all the more likely that Angel is committing the sin of self-fulfilling prophecy here. He's simply not thinking creatively enough to defy prophecy. Besides the fact that Angel going along with Whistler and the talking animals leads to a powered up Buffy, spacefrakking, natural disasters that probably killed thousands of people and finally a dimensional pocket opening and demons overrunning the world.
It seems clear Angel's plan leads to the world ending without Buffy and Angel leaving Twilight to stop it. So I don't even understand why anyone's arguing that Angel was working on the side of good. His plan leads to the apocalypse--is he supposed to get credit for paving his own special road to hell with good intentions?
Angel is the Big Bad this season in the sense that he willingly (so it appears) became the figure head of an organization that brought forth the apocalypse--sure, he thought he was saving the world by pushing Buffy into an ubermensche all by carefully orchestrating deaths to push her into despair and make her powerless (she must be powerless to know true power), but it turns out he wasn't working for a greater good. Nope, still just ending the world.
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It seems clear he didn't realise that fulfilling the prophecy would lead to mass slaughter and destruction - or maybe he thought it would be less bad than the alternative, whatever that was. We may know more when the final arc is published. I still disagree that the deaths were part of his plan, though it may be a case of "If he can do it without any Slayers at all dying, that's best, but if some have to die, that's not as bad as not trying at all." It's a war, and not a war Angel started, and people die in wars.
That doesn't make him "good", it makes him a screw-up who did harm with good intentions. Like almost all the other 'Buffy' characters.
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It looks to me as if she's focussing on the in character sense making part of Boondog Angel's account of himself. The part where he says what he was doing was making himself a figure head for the forces already ranged against her in order to divert them from making the 206 a round 500 and much sooner. True she's not pushing him on why he didn't do a better job of it but my reading is that she's more consumed by the godawful mess she's made of her girl's lives (she balmes herself for the war remember). The allusion he makes to "while I push" gets lost in the confusion over not pushing her to soak up power from her dead friends. They end up in Twilight but Angel's seems as surprised that they got there as she is ergo not planed even if he does know more about the place than she does.
Angel is Superman in this scenario. Angel could pretty much stop anything from happening.
But Superman hasn't been able to stop pretty much anything from happening. Spiderman and most of the X-men are hated pariahs, fine for beating up bad guys but with minimal influence on society and public opinion. Buffy herself has had superpowers and hasn't been able to save any Slayers with them and has no plans to use them force or manipulate humanity into changing its opinions. Why should she blame Angel for not making like Dr Manhattan or Ozymandias?
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That was Willow's theory, which Angel said was wrong.
Of coure it's possible he was either lying (I doubt it, but maybe) or misled (more likely IMO).
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