Yeah, #22 is the one of Kennedy and Satsu. Satsu seems to have a bit of an axe to grind on where she is with Buffy.
To get to the other two points, it helps to take the second first:
My point about whether you need to answer these questions as an author of fanfic wasn't that Joss should supply them so you'll know where she is so you can write about her in fanfic; it's that Joss is also a writer continuing her story -- so if you need to answer those questions (however you choose to), surely Joss also has to answer them. For the reason you say: you need to know the answers because it has an impact on the kind of story you are going to tell. Well, Joss has decided what story to tell. Presumably that means he's answered these questions for himself. And since you agree that the kind of story you tell depends on the answers, then Joss knows that for us to understand the story he's telling we need to know how he answers the questions. Which is why I think he's going to tell us.
We can do a compare and contrast. We know exactly where Spike is on all of this stuff. He delayed going back to see Buffy, because it would have seemed anti-climactic to her. I think this loads the dice in favor of the claim that he didn't believe Buffy, or that if he did he doesn't think it's the big kind of love. However, he did go and try to see her in TGIQ, with the self-protective excuse of being in town on business anyway. There, Andrew sure as heck implied that Buffy knew he was back, "loves" him, but is off with the Immortal and might catch up with him (or Angel) somewhere down the road. From Spike's reaction it's a pretty safe bet that he thinks that Buffy knows he's back and is acting exactly how he'd expect her to act given that he doesn't think she loves him. Be that as it may, from Spike's POV the ball is in her court. He thinsk she knows he's back. He thinks she's told him to move on. It's up to her to decide if she's going to try to catch him down the road. So we see him trying to move on. He has started the project of fighting the good fight because he wants to. He's involved in a fabric of friendships (or at least quasi-friendships) at W&H. He's fooled around with Spider, but isn't in love with her. (But is treating her better than he treated Harmony). And he has apparently (and highly inexplicably) zoomed from thinking of Fred as a dear friend who one should NOT sacrifice thousands of others to save, to thinking she's his #1 priority in hell. All of that is important as we try to understand who Spike is.
Buffy is the center of Joss's story and he can't be arsed to tell us even a small fraction of that sort of information? Nope. He's holding it back because we're still supposed to be in a mystery about exactly who this Buffy is and what's motivating her. If not, you are right about season 8 being so awful and Joss has obviously had a lobotomy because he hasn't got the first clue about how to write a good story, let alone one that has the trademark Whedon stamp wherein characters are marked by their histories and can't be understood apart from their histories.
Back to cookie dough: Part of why I want to know the resolution of Spike/Buffy is exactly because I want a sense of how free she is of the past. And if it turns out that the answer is yes, she is indeed past all these issues, she's still a human being which means that it helps to understand her past in order to understand her present. Being independent doesn't mean that we get to be so entirely unaffected by others that we can be fully understood by people who have no idea about the status of our relationships with people who have been pretty darned significant to us.
BTW, I attach an extremely small probability to the possibility that Spike will be part of an on-going romantic story with Buffy. For what it's worth. I do think Spuffy is over, except for the part where we're told how it ended.
no subject
Yeah, #22 is the one of Kennedy and Satsu. Satsu seems to have a bit of an axe to grind on where she is with Buffy.
To get to the other two points, it helps to take the second first:
My point about whether you need to answer these questions as an author of fanfic wasn't that Joss should supply them so you'll know where she is so you can write about her in fanfic; it's that Joss is also a writer continuing her story -- so if you need to answer those questions (however you choose to), surely Joss also has to answer them. For the reason you say: you need to know the answers because it has an impact on the kind of story you are going to tell. Well, Joss has decided what story to tell. Presumably that means he's answered these questions for himself. And since you agree that the kind of story you tell depends on the answers, then Joss knows that for us to understand the story he's telling we need to know how he answers the questions. Which is why I think he's going to tell us.
We can do a compare and contrast. We know exactly where Spike is on all of this stuff. He delayed going back to see Buffy, because it would have seemed anti-climactic to her. I think this loads the dice in favor of the claim that he didn't believe Buffy, or that if he did he doesn't think it's the big kind of love. However, he did go and try to see her in TGIQ, with the self-protective excuse of being in town on business anyway. There, Andrew sure as heck implied that Buffy knew he was back, "loves" him, but is off with the Immortal and might catch up with him (or Angel) somewhere down the road. From Spike's reaction it's a pretty safe bet that he thinks that Buffy knows he's back and is acting exactly how he'd expect her to act given that he doesn't think she loves him. Be that as it may, from Spike's POV the ball is in her court. He thinsk she knows he's back. He thinks she's told him to move on. It's up to her to decide if she's going to try to catch him down the road. So we see him trying to move on. He has started the project of fighting the good fight because he wants to. He's involved in a fabric of friendships (or at least quasi-friendships) at W&H. He's fooled around with Spider, but isn't in love with her. (But is treating her better than he treated Harmony). And he has apparently (and highly inexplicably) zoomed from thinking of Fred as a dear friend who one should NOT sacrifice thousands of others to save, to thinking she's his #1 priority in hell. All of that is important as we try to understand who Spike is.
Buffy is the center of Joss's story and he can't be arsed to tell us even a small fraction of that sort of information? Nope. He's holding it back because we're still supposed to be in a mystery about exactly who this Buffy is and what's motivating her. If not, you are right about season 8 being so awful and Joss has obviously had a lobotomy because he hasn't got the first clue about how to write a good story, let alone one that has the trademark Whedon stamp wherein characters are marked by their histories and can't be understood apart from their histories.
Back to cookie dough: Part of why I want to know the resolution of Spike/Buffy is exactly because I want a sense of how free she is of the past. And if it turns out that the answer is yes, she is indeed past all these issues, she's still a human being which means that it helps to understand her past in order to understand her present. Being independent doesn't mean that we get to be so entirely unaffected by others that we can be fully understood by people who have no idea about the status of our relationships with people who have been pretty darned significant to us.
BTW, I attach an extremely small probability to the possibility that Spike will be part of an on-going romantic story with Buffy. For what it's worth. I do think Spuffy is over, except for the part where we're told how it ended.