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BtBR and all that jazz
BtBR and all that Jazz
I’ve been running around for a few weeks now saying that I remain hopeful about how season 8 will pan out. Part of that hope has been the confidence I have had that Joss meant to jar us with the revelation that Buffy was robbing banks, and that of course he would know that we would need something in the story to help us understand how the Buffy at the end of The Chosen could come to be a bank robber. Not necessarily a flashback to a straightforward report of her making the decision, but something about what’s happened to her that would illuminate for us how she could have come to think robbing banks was a good idea.
Anyway, Allie replied to another question that there really wasn’t going to be anything in the way of “filler” about what happened between season 7 and season 8. That was in answer to a question about whether we’d see Anya’s funeral – and I think it’s safe to say that while a flashback like that would provide closure for fans, it’s not something we need to see in order to understand what’s happening now. Buffy’s decision to rob banks, on the other hand, needs some explaining. There are a variety of different stories about how that evolved and they have bearing on how we understand the story as it unfolds. I asked the following question (via Enisy and Emmie):
I have a follow up question for Scott on a different subject. He has an answer in his latest where he says that they aren't going to do any filler between season 7 and season 8. That's specifically in response to a question about whether we'll see Anya's funeral or anyuthing like that.
What I want to know is whether we should take his answer to mean that we've been told all we are going to be told about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer evolved into Buffy the Bank Robber. Do Joss and Scott think that this is such an organic development of her character that we should have no problem filling in the blanks for ourselves (much as we really shouldn't have any problems filling in the blanks about Anya's funeral)?
And Allie posted the reply late last night:
Yes, I believe this is all you're going to be told about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer evolved into Buffy the Bank Robber. You might learn a little more by the end of the arc. I do think there's a story there, of how she came to make the decisions to do these things, how she looked at her growing army of Slayers and tried to think of a way to finance it all, and settled for crime. But I don't think that's a story that needs telling in Season Eight. I know that the desire to fill in continuity goes directly against the narrative device of in media res, and I know that Season Eight still has a lot of open questions. I think what's important for Season Eight is understanding how corruption/compromise has affected Buffy, rather than how she came to be a little corrupt. I hope the story is succeeding there, in the long run.
So that’s pretty depressing if we take it at face value.
I find it really, really hard to believe that Joss Whedon, for all of his failures and blindspots, would disregard what I had taken to be one of his first principles and that’s that we need to be able to trace out how characters have developed over time and what events and choices have impacted that development. Personally I thought BtBR was the greatest moment of the comics so far. It explained a lot about what had seemed off in No Future For You. And it seemed like such a huge thing, for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to have consciously decided to completely and utterly flout human laws, something that Buffy was capable of, but which she certainly was not necessarily destined to arrive at. Because BtBR helped crystallize for me a good bit of what had seemed puzzling, I took it to be the first in many such revelations, each one of us would give us a better sense of what it is that we’re really looking at. That’s the main reason I’ve been so patient with the fact that we’ve gone nearly two years watching a set of characters who are still not so easily connected to the ones we last saw in Sunnydale.
Beer Good Foamy had some interesting reactions when we exchanged about this a bit this morning:
His remarks:
Thanks a lot for posting that! Wish I could say I was surprised, but I agree that it's depressing.
I don't think that's a story that needs telling in Season Eight.
Because obviously, the motivations of the main character aren't all that interesting.
know that the desire to fill in continuity goes directly against the narrative device of in media res
That's not an argument against filling in continuity; it's an argument against in medias res, at least the way it's being used here.
think what's important for Season Eight is understanding how corruption/compromise has affected Buffy, rather than how she came to be a little corrupt.
Even when the corruption/compromise is in large part due to her own actions? Like I've said before, it makes the story less about free will and having to deal with the moral and practical consequences of your own choices, and more about fate screwing you over.
Oh well, at least now we can stop wondering when the big reveals that make sense of everything are coming and just enjoy it for what it is. Of course it's possible that he's only referring to the bank robbing specifically - which after all is just a symptom of the New And Improved Buffy - and that we'll get a more general backstory on how she (and Willow, and Giles, and Faith, and...) came to stop being whatever she'd been before. Which would be nice, but I do think that's grasping at straws. I'd love to get proven wrong about that, but it looks like after "Chosen", Buffy becoming a criminal with a Nietzsche complex is just the natural order of things. I especially like the point that if we’re just going to focus on the consequences of Buffy’s corruption, we’re missing the sense of how those consequences connect to the exercise of her agency running up to that big decision. It’s really hard to know how to judge or understand what unfolds if we don’t know how it came to be.
Anyway, because this all gives me massive cognitive dissonance – how to square what I had taken to be Joss’s greatest strength with an astonishing disregard of it – I’ve decided to go with plan B and hope that Allie is just misinterpreting what Joss is up to. He’s given us misleading answers on other subjects, and almost always they take the form of answering a specific question in a way that seems to generalize but really doesn’t. In particular, in answer to a question about whether Buffy knew that Cordelia was dead, Allie said we could assume that Buffy knows everything Andrew knows. But that’s belied by the opening scene of the season. Pressed in a follow up it became clear that Allie just wanted to say that Buffy knew that Cordelia was dead through Andrew. In this case, he seems to be tracked on the question of whether we’re going to skip back and have a straight-forward narration of what happened. But that’s not what I need here. What I need is a revelation or something that helps me see just how exactly it made sense for BtVS to become BtBR.
There is some other news in all of this. Having spent time reading Allie’s questions and answers it sure seems like there’s a clear pattern. When asked about something that isn’t going to happen, he tells us. Neither Robin will be back. Tara will not be back. There might be plans to do something with Kumiko but not for a very long time. Etc. When asked about other things that might happen, he replies that it would be spoilers to say. Now, maybe he does say it would be spoilers to say something was not going to happen. But he’s told us an awful lot about what’s not going to happen. Anyway, he was asked about whether Spike would be back and it would be spoilers for him to tell. If there were contracts on Intrade on the question of whether Spike was going to have an impact on the plot in season 8, I’d be buying heavily.
Whether that’s a good thing or not depends a great deal on whether Joss is still the sort of writer who knows that the statement that Buffy just “settled on crime” is not an answer but a big honking question that has to be addressed.
Note: I tried to put in LJ links but it's creating all sorts of problems. Any advice on how to avoid that in the future?
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My read of the situation is that they ("they" being Joss, Scott, and whoever else is involved) see BtBR as in fact very much in character. I mean, this is the same Buffy who stole weapons from the army ("Innocence") and blew up a public building ("Graduation Day"). (There's also her robbery with Faith, but I wouldn't blame you for arguing that that's not Buffy's personality; she was influenced by Faith there and wouldn't have done it otherwise.) We've also seen Buffy become harder and more brutally practical - in "The Gift" she couldn't face the impossible choices she had, but by "Lies My Parents Told Me," she's willing to sacrifice her sister. She's turned into an "end justifies the means" general.
I think the part where Joss and the fans diverge is that there's a huge leap from committing isolated crimes when it's the only way to defeat a Big Bad to adopting a life of crime to finance your operation. Surely they didn't just rob that one bank - with the amount of expensive equipment they have, they must need a regular source of income, not to mention we've now seen other Slayers (namely Satsu) stealing the actual equipment if it's useful to them. Buffy seems to have gone from "crime is occasionally a necessary evil" to "crime is a legitimate way of life" - but I don't think Joss realizes that we need to see how.
Also, re: Spike - have you seen that Brian Lynch announced a new Spike series? What does that do to your trading shares? lol
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There's also a huge leap from being the only Slayer in the world to commanding a global army of hundreds of them.
And we've seen that the lives and welfare of her Slayers are Buffy's absolute top priority. They're her personal responsibility, after all. Maybe she does feel some residual guilt over turning them all into Slayers without asking them first. ;-)
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Er, no, sorry, Buffy gets no kudos from me. "Good job on not committing any crimes worse than robbery" doesn't quite cut it.
Also, I'm not saying that Buffy couldn't end up a bank robber - it's certainly a possibility, given her situation. But, like Maggie, I don't think it's such an obvious next step for her that it requires no explanation.
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All those examples of earlier rule-bending made sense in the wake of an on-coming apocalypse. Was there a big apocalypse that demanded that Buffy form her own band of vigilantes into an army? It'd make a difference in how to interpret what we're seeing. As for the hardening, we were given to hope that her sharing the burden with others would lighten the load We can plainly see she's not sharing the load. Why is that? We've got this whole military operation and no idea, not one jot of a hint, about why it was necessary.
I totally, totally agree with your argument about the difference between one-off crimes in an emergency and a considered choice to adopt it as a lifestyle.
Where we part is I still just really can't believe that Joss doesn't see that. He's a smart guy. Or at least he used to be. Maybe it was just the writing staff he had that made him look good back in the day...
Re: Spike -- lol, I'd be raking in the big bucks if I could trade on this. Spike comic comes later in the fall, so plenty of time for an appearance. And in any case, he could still work into the story in one of those flashbacks Allie says we won't be getting. (Given my forecasting record, feel free to laugh at me behind my back!!)
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I think if anything will be explained, it will be this, although I don't know that it will directly relate to BtBR. Buffy's loneliness and isolation has been emphasized a lot, and so I think this is part of Joss exploring the downsides of the empowerment spell. Buffy thought that would ease her burden, but like a lot of things she thought would be better after the spell, it hasn't happened.
Spike comic comes later in the fall, so plenty of time for an appearance.
It's not so much the timing of the comic's release that matters as it is the time in which the comic is set. If Spike's busy having adventures with Brian Lynch at the same time season 8 is happening, then it'd be harder to fit in an appearance. Of course, I would imagine Joss doesn't need to coordinate with Lynch - if he wants to use Spike, he can use him however he pleases - but as I enjoy Lynch's comics (both ATF and his other Spike series), I would hope that Joss respects them enough not to blatantly contradict them.
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I agree that the hardening seems to be on the table -- and this is where I think Allie's inability to see the big picture might be in play. Whatever caused that hardening/isolation could well be part of the same thing that prompted the BtBR decision. But if it's not labeled "big BtBR decision" Allie might not see that at the end of the day that such a revelation would in fact be what I was asking about. Not sure where all this incurable optimism comes from. It's not normal for me.
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It may not be the same time. If Lynch uses the end of Angel: After the Fall as Spike's jumping-off point, he'll be starting the series immediately post-"Not Fade Away." That means Spike's new series will be set 12 months after the events of "Chosen." BtVS Season 8 begins 18 months after "Chosen." So the two series may not be concurrent.
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"I do think there's a story there... But I don't think that's a story that needs telling in Season Eight."
In other words: yes it's interesting and important, yes it would make a good comic book; but it's not part of the story Joss is writing. Because - the conclusion I'm coming to - Joss wants to tell one particular story and he's not letting himself get distracted too much by the million and one other possible stories in the Buffyverse.
Of course that's disappointing to the people who are hungry to know everything about 'Buffy', or to see their favourite characters get a namecheck. And it's confusing to those poor souls who need everything spelled out in a linear fashion with lots of exposition. But on the other hand, if he did try to cover every question and every story, we'd still be waiting for the end of Season 8 a hundred years from now.
As for the specific question, since I never saw Buffy's bank robbery as especially out of character for her - just exaggerated - I'm not particulaly bothered by Scott's words. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is a story about what happens after Buffy became powerful, and the supernatural became public. All I really need to know about why Buffy made her decision is already there in Scott's words: "she looked at her growing army of Slayers and tried to think of a way to finance it all".
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There are three problems I have with your take (and with what they are doing if that's what they are doing):
1. They've got no hold on people who cannot connect with a Buffy who has leaped so far down her story that they can't make out who she is. It's one thing to say that bank robbing was in her possibility set, it's another thing to say that we should care about her after she got to that possibility in a way that is completely opaque to us. And it was something of a lie to sell this as season 8. Call it season 9 and let us know that it's going to be like skipping from season 2 to season 4 for all that we will know or understand the characters.
2. If we really go with "she looked at her growing army, blah blah blah" this still begs a huge number of questions. Who said she needed a well-financed army? What war are they fighting? What enemy requires that they have castles and helicopters and all the rest? If it's in the public interest, why couldn't they finance it? If it's not, how did Buffy decide that it should be done anyway. Did she slide into this as amatter of expediency; as a well-thought out last resort; in a fit of pique against humans for any number of possible imaginable reasons? Different answers deliver different Buffy's. What we make of what we're seeing is going to depend a fair amount on which Buffy we're seeing. To tell the story they want to tell would seem to require that know something about the character whose reactions we are interested in -- but to understand and gauge the reactions, we need to know what got her into this mess in the first place. Oh, and if we are supposed to have some measure of the "corruption" resulting from this decision, we need to know more about it. The different possible answers to the questions posed above generate different degrees of corruption. That's not relevant to the story about how that corruption playes out?
3. It's a totally and utterly non-trivial issue by the standards of the verse. A huge amount of Buffy's self-identification is that she is NOT Faith, she's the slayer who is still subject to human law; she is the slayer who is prudent, etc. Yes she's hardened. Yes she's always fallen short of her own self-image. Yes, we've seen her modify the requirements of that self-image. But Joss is the one who trotted Faith out into the second arc and begged us to compare and contrast. They've inverted positions. That's important. We know how Faith got where she is. Not the slightest clue of what got Buffy to where she is. So what comparison can we really make? What can we really learn from that carefully constructed mirror? The second issue of the first arc called back that alley way in Dead Things, where Buffy did terrible things specifically in the cause of rejecting the Faith of season 3. So why ask us to ask, if he's already decided not to answer?
Anyway, if this is what Joss is up to, he's got the audience that does care. I'd so like to. I LOVE the questions being raised here But I can't think well about them if I don't know who Buffy is or how she got here. Too frustrating to engage all the complexities when there's a cypher at the heart of them.
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"Everybody calls me 'ma'am' these days."
"There's even three of me."
"More with the 'what the hell am I doing?'" She questions her actions.
"It's not all that different, though." Yet in order to move forward, her coping mechanism is to pretend nothing has really changed => "stuck in the past".
"Their first victims. Gotta get 'em past it." While Buffy is confused about who she is and what she's doing, in this area we finally see certainty. She must lead the slayers she 'chose'. She's "gotta".
"How do we turn into twelve-year-olds all of a sudden? Every time we talk?" Buffy is reverting to an immature state when it comes to her personal relationships. She's in denial. Which incidentally is also a reference to the last time Buffy said this about immaturity amongst siblings:
ANGEL
(mumbling) You know, I started it. The whole having a soul. Before it was all the cool new thing.
BUFFY
Oh, my God. Are you 12?
"Suck it up, Summers. You're a big girl now." Shut up and deal. It's time to move forward and stay on the course Buffy has already chosen even though it's proving harder than she realized.
I think this shows us very clearly where Buffy is at right now and why she might do the things she's done. It's not the apocalypse that's motivating her to steal (as she's done in the past), but the girls she's chosen and feels a responsibility for. Buffy must provide for her 'children'. She will steal if she has to in order to give them what they need. A corrupt mother trying to save her world, her "race of slayers" at all costs.
And here lies the cognitive dissonance we see in Buffy and why she's even more distanced from others. Buffy is incredibly moral. Buffy needs to provide for the girls lives she's irrevocably changed. She must provide for them because she is responsible for them. Stealing is wrong. But Buffy has bent this rule in the past in order to serve a greater purpose. So she tells herself that it was a victimless crime, but underneath she's beginning to understand that by acting "less-than" she's created a deck of cards rather than a fortress of strength. Twilight attacks her morality because that is where Buffy is most weak.
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"...look what she did to her hometown." As General Voll flies over the pit that is what's left of Sunnydale. But no, it wasn't Buffy who did this. It was:
"Spike." - Buffy Chosen
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We do have a few other clues, though. She kept it from Willow. And when it first came up with the demon, she tried to lie her way out of it. She knows it wouldn't fly with Willow, whatever it was. I'm not a lawyer, but isn't that evidence of mens rea? (guilty conscience, if I got the right term). So that makes it harder to argue that she's deceived herself into thinking its a worthwhile trade-off. Unless she's deceived herself about why she wanted to lie to Willow. If it was all "I must provide for my children", you think that'd be a perfectly legitimate thing to mull over with Willow.
I'm also betting a lot that Giles did get in her face about it, and that's why they are now estranged. She's pushing away the truth tellers. (And it explains why she's keeping Xander so close). But again, surely Giles would have been all about helping her find a way to take responsibility for the kiddies. And finally, if its responsibility that's driving this, why so non-chalant when Soledad hangs up on her? Not too worried about that one.
It is true that we have lots of fragments that tell us things. It's just hard to know how to put it together. Which is why I think we're going to get more on it. Other random stray thought: one wonders if Twilight had a hand in setting up the bad decision in the first place. Use Riley to use Xander to influence Buffy? Set up circumstances where she'd feel it's needful. Provoke a war between her and humans by doing a Giant Trio (Life Serial) and make it seem like an ungrateful humanity is actively making her work more difficult? All these possibilities. And how we view Buffy and her corruption depends on which it is.
Two other random Spike thoughts: Why does "suck it up summers" always sound Spike-ish to me? "great muppety odin" was Xander-ish. And yes, I noticed the crater. It's on my list. I left Suck it up summers off cause I'm not sure if I'm the only one who hears echoes of Spike there.
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Joss is telling us the story through Buffy's experience. He starts the first issue by showing us that Buffy is confused about her identity and goes on to show that the only thing she is certain of is her duty to the Slayers she's 'chosen'. All other relationships are called into question in this first issue: Xander denies being Buffy's watcher as she calls him, Buffy cannot connect with Dawn, Giles is absent and Buffy can't find Willow. The only certain relationship Buffy has is the connection to her proteges. And then we see how lonely she is because of this situation she's pulled herself into.
Joss is slamming the entire ground of Season 8 with thematic cues to identity every which way. "Who are you?" (this one is said multiple times) "Her name is Amy." "You don't even know my name." He couldn't be more aware that he's telling a tale of Buffy being in a confused state. The story in Predators and Prey (the Chen TPB in particular) is showing us that Buffy's doubts about her actions ("What the hell am I doing?") are finally coming home to roost. Can we be surprised that the issue following this arc is called Retreat?
Season 8 is a tale of a morally questionable Buffy and she's become this way because she understood her greatest duty was a self-proclaimed burden - she chose these 1800 girls to be slayers. She better than anyone knows how heavy this burden is and she would never condemn them to fight alone. So she leads them at all costs. She is their desperate mother who steals a crust of bread to feed her child. Except her child is a warrior and needs warriors' weapons in order to survive in battle. So she steals millions and tells herself it's a "victimless crime" - she resides in the comfort of her greatest coping mechanism, denial. But Twilight refuses to let her deny the truth and he's attacking her at her weakest front - her morality.
Season 8 is about morality. It doesn't get more textually central. So yes, we are meant to understand how Buffy came to this point. Will this flashback take center stage? No. But will it be made clear? I believe so.
As for Allie, I keep saying this again and again. Don't count on him specifically for details or thematic interpretations. I run these Q&A's (for what it's worth) and I've noticed over time the best areas of his expertise rely on solid facts of issues already in print and vague descriptions of future events. To quote his latest answer, "You're right, I forgot." So don't jump ship because you read his response as the end-all, be-all of what's going to happen in this comic.
It's all coming clearer to me now that we "aren't just imagining things." The Jeanty variant of Buffy's face in pieces resonates both for that issue but also in showing that Buffy is fractured. And the villain himself, Twilight, tells us that the "trick to defeating her is to strip her of her greatest armor - her moral certainty." This battle will be fought on the field of morality. Not only is Twilight trying to convince Buffy that what she did was wrong, but he's convincing the world she's the enemy so that he has a Greek Chorus to echo his chant.
And Buffy's played right into his hands by robbing banks and breaking rules. His criticisms strike her because she's already judging herself for that. It's why she refuses to respond to Willow's criticism during #16 imo. She already knows it was wrong, but she felt it was a necessary evil in order to provide for the slayers she 'chose' and feels she must help them with their burden. If she makes it better for them, then they won't have such a tough time the way she did. Just as she saved Dawn and her own innocence in Season 5, here she saves herself once again by helping all these newly Chosen slayers. She sacrifices herself (again) and her morality to help them. But Twilight makes her wonder was her sacrifice in vain?
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I'm going to take advantage of this to just ramble a bit. (Gives a Willow-like scrunchy I hope that's OK face).
Here's an angle we need accounted for: I can see why Buffy would have a strong sense of connection with these slayers, but why exclude Willow from the care and feeding of the progeny? Willow is also a sine qua non of their being there. (Does that make her a father figure? Oh, no, another absent father figure?) Seriously, though, if your angle is right (and I think it's got to be part of the mix), we are led into the heart of the Buffy/Willow friendship. Which obviously gets complicated as we sort of see in TYoL.
Buffy/Willow links to ponder: Buffy channeling Willow to the point of black eyes in LWH. Was that a connection forged in the slayer spell? It seems to me to be utterly significant that Willow engineers a murder wherein Buffy has to kill her with the Scythe. Seems like some magical something may have gone down. Willow is totally hurt when she discovers Buffy and Satsu together; we learn that she's wondered what Buffy sounds like in bed; we have the whole conversation while Satsu is falling; and I don't think we should dismiss Kennedy's hyper-keep-your-hands-off-my-girl thing as being just about Kennedy's territorial nature. (Who said that Kennedy's spiel about how super hetero Buffy is has a lot to do with her desire to put Buffy in the hetero box to keep her away from Willow?) Anyway, I toss all this out to say that somewhere in the story there has to be an explanation for why Buffy didn't go to her best friend, now magically-bonded person about how to take care of the slayers who are there because of what they jointly did.
I do wonder if Twilight didn't play a role in getting Buffy to the bank robbing part. If that's where the dominos start falling, he's either very lucky or he knew that was how to set things in motion. What role could Twilgiht have played? Use inside man (Xander via Riley and also possibly via Renee) to be the permissive friend, the one who thinks bank robbing is sexy? Orchestrate a series of events that would make Buffy feel defensive vis a vis the human world and therefore more willing to rob human banks to protect her own? All of the above. I can't help but think that the story works best if Twilight is at ground zero of all of this. And if that were so then we ARE going to learn more about how Buffy got to this place.
And finally with Xander, the all-too-permissive friend. I'm just going to toss this out as a big hunk of junk, but if one of our themes is that Buffy and Faith have switched positions, and if Buffy is coming to inhabit more and more of where Faith was in season 3, does anybody feel an unfortunate out of control Buffy/Xander incident coming?
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I also wonder if Twilight didn't play a role in getting Buffy to rob a bank. Like Iago to Othello, leading her down the path. I also wonder if Twilight didn't have those Vamps steal that sub and then lose it to Satsu so it would be used by the Slayers, making them appear even more of a world threat.
Well, Buffy certainly fears that she'll hurt Xander. Her dream about how she can "be gentle this time" comes to mind. I think that's why she turned away from the obvious connection to Xander. In LWH 3, they both reference how it's been a "slow year" regarding Buffy and Xander at separate instances. And Joss doesn't throw away those lines. He deliberately set them up to be close, but Buffy backs away in fear of being "the dark" that will hurt Xander. Instead, she sleeps with Satsu. Yet Buffy just said she feared her loving someone would hurt them in ABS, so isn't it ultimately selfish to reach out for Satsu, a desperate need to hold and be loved, but in the light of 'wolves at the gate' Buffy immediately pushes her away - danger is imminent and it's a bad time for lovers.
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My raising the question about Buffy/Xander is really just asking if there aren't going to be more layers to that than the ones we already see. Yes, she's afraid for her lovers. That's a basic meaning. There are other resonances though. The one I'm pondering, though, is just more structural. Part of Faith's going bad meltdown in season 3 was using Xander for sex and then turning violent with him. So I think it's on the table. It's not as though Buffy is a stranger to the concept of using a guy for sex and turning violent on him. As she says in the dream, she's not just afraid that the dark is going to hurt him, she's afraid she is the dark.
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Suck it up, Summers does sound like Spike. Probably because he's the main character to refer to people by their last names. He calls Xander "Harris" and talks about Buffy and Dawn as the "Summers women".
Did you already notice the reference to 12 year olds then also? Heh. I really need to read your meta again, Mags.
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Am in the middle of a big dissection of Bad Girls/Consequences with my brother. Did you know that Buffy dreams of Faith drowning her? The echoed that in NFFY. Went right over my head.
I've always wanted to argue that the Faith/Buffy thing in season 3 was more complicated than Evil/Good. It is so weird to watch all of that knowing how things end up.
I'm still holding out for more clarification about BtBR, but they have delivered some real goods here.
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LWH 2
Buffy: The first clue this was going downhill? Clearly...
Andrew:...Lando Calrissian's outfit...I'll buy a race of teddy bears with unstoppable tree-trunk technology any day over that outfit on a leader.
It really is about Buffy's outfit! :)
General Voll: (thoughts) Just a suit. Walks and talks, has by chance a man in it.
Or by chance, a woman? It's just a suit. But no, it's more than a suit. Does wearing the Slayer gear mean Buffy has suborned her identity to conform to the needs of the Slayer organization? Is she just a suit with by chance a woman in it? Where did the woman go and when will she stop hiding? Remember in Restless when Buffy says: "I walk. I talk. I shop, I sneeze. I'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There's trees in the desert since you moved out. And I don't sleep on a bed of bones. Now give me back my friends." Where is the Buffy that owns her separation from the darkness of the Slayer? She's lost in "a suit".
More Spike refs in LWH 3:
Ethan: It's an expression, pet. Like 'pet'.
Buffy: Also not okay. How did you get into my dream?
A Spike nickname. That nickname is so clearly owned by Spike in the 'verse that it smells of him, as Xander'd say.
Which leads to Buffy shutting the door immediately on her dream of Angel and Spike. Again, I keep feeling that Buffy is deliberately not saying his name while there are all these things in the issue that resonate with Spike.
Long Way Home always amazes me on re-reads because it's so relevant to every new issue. The Season keeps building and building on it's foundation and wow, LWH is a very strong foundation. I think it's arguably one of the best season openers hands down. If I had the time I'd go through how meaningful and prophetic every line is in these four issues. My favorite is particularly pertinent to the Predators and Prey arc - Buffy: We're being played, Xander. I don't like it.
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Ethan: I told you, lamb: time is a factor.
And above this panel as Willow is falling in one direction from Amy's attack, we shift to Buffy falling in another direction in her dreamspace. Again emphasizing their connection.
Then,
Buffy: Hey, speaking of where the hell have you been...
Willow: Yeah, it's been a funky time. We'll get into it.
Yeah, we sure will get into the funky time, Willow.
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Pretty much sums it up, yeah. :-) In fact, it's exactly the sort of questions they used to love to explore when they used to have a show.
Forgive me if I repeat some of what I said over at my own entry, but what I don't get is why they would think it's so unthinkable to give an explanation for it. I don't think anyone... or OK, I don't think a majority are asking for a detailed description of the events of every single day between "Chosen" and "The Long Way Home", but surely when we're talking about rather radical shifts in the characters' actions which are driving the entire season arc - Buffy's corruption, Giles' estrangement, Willow's affair with Saga Vasuki, etc - it has to be important to at least offer a few solid hints of how they got there? Sure we can always come up with fanwanks, but at the end of the day, that's all they are and like you say, everyone's explanation will be different.
To me, it's a devaluation of an issue that I thought was at the heart of the show: that we are free to choose our own actions, that there are always choices to make even if there's not always a good choice to make, but that those actions always have consequences. By saying that it's irrelevant how Buffy become a morally corrupt criminal with Übermensch tendencies, yet having the fact that she is one be an important plot point, they're essentially saying that the choices we make are irrelevant. If Buffy becoming corrupt is beyond her control, if it's just something that happened to her, they've robbed Buffy of her free will.
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That's pretty much exactly what I meant to say, thanks. And if her reasons for acting in a certain way don't matter, then they are reducing the moral ambiguity - it becomes a simple question of "is action A right or wrong", regardless of the circumstances.
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All those examples of earlier rule-bending made sense in the wake of an on-coming apocalypse. Was there a big apocalypse that demanded that Buffy form her own band of vigilantes into an army?
In The Chain the Slayer army averted an apocalyptic invasion of the human world by Yamanh’s demon hordes. This time they didn’t have an amulet and while they might have defeated Yamanh’s army in hand to hand combat the losses would have been enormous. Buffy does have some legitimate sources of funding (she says so in the first issue of TOYL) but if they weren’t enough to acquire the level of technological re-enforcement she needed in this emergency I don’t believe the Buffy we’ve known would balk at stealing from the rich to save the lives of her poor Slayers (and ultimately those of the rich as well).
The world has changed. In A Beautiful Sunset Buffy, while questioning whether they are doing any good, points out that while they have been fighting more demons it just seems that there are more demons to fight and even speculates that this might be a reaction to the existence of multiple Slayers. As I see the old order may have been corrupt and based on the effective enslavement of one girl in every genration but it had reached some kind of equilibrium (where demons went about their business and the human population tolerated the death rates and pretended the problem just didn’t exist). Now we have the balance shifting. Giant demon attacks are frequent enough to keep Buffy busy 24/7 in After These Messages. Some of that may be due to being able to finally see what’s going on worldwide but either way the problem is order of magnitudes greater than it used to be when all she had to deal with was Sunnydale. Vampires are commandeering subs, the war is escalating and Twilight is playing both sides against the middle but it’s that very middle which may be the determining factor. It’s not just the plain people of Tokyo getting trampled and turned it’s the so-called crack elements, the slug things and the talking trees. These are magical creatures but not demons as such, a new factor that Twilight may not have reckoned with his plans to wipe out magic, babies and bathwater both. Also replace the word magic with aggression and he begins to sound like the Alliance.
But I digress (and overrun the word limit on comments). My main point is that not only was there a major apocalypse but also a constant onslaught of minor ones, which require more than the old hand to hand tactics to keep at bay. TBC
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But that brings me to the real point. We aren't being told how she got there, which means we can't judge her actions. The money line in your comment is:
I don’t believe the Buffy we’ve known would balk at stealing from the rich to save the lives of her poor Slayers (and ultimately those of the rich as well).
But that's assuming what's in question. Is this the Buffy we've known? As I said, she feels guilty enough about it to lie to Willow. Willow's been quietly hinting at some other issues that suggest that Buffy HAS changed -- her being far more comfortable with the idea of killing humans, for example; or her having no way of distinguishing between her and the bad guys beyond attaching a label to herself.
Because we aren't told how she's got here, we have no basis for having a real discussion about what's really going on. You assume that BECAUSE Buffy is a good person and a hero there must be perfectly good explanations for her choices. Others of us look at bank robbing and other signs of real changes in her priorities and so on and wonder if the actions don't shed more light on the person than the other way around. But it could really go either way. And if that's the case, just how on earth does Joss expect us to seriously engage the question of the consequences of choices we can't even characterize because we don't know what drove those choices.
Which is why I'm banking that Allie's statement is either in error, or is misleading in someway (probably unintentionally -- he's unintentionally misled on other issues recently).
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It’s not obvious a priori. It becomes clearer, however, if you *look* at what’s happening and how the world has changed that there are good in character reasons why Buffy might have come to believe that robbing a bank was the best way she could come up with to get the equipment to co-ordinate international activities (never an issue as long as she stayed in Sunnydale) and protect her Slayers from the increased number of demonic attacks (which she notes in the text). It’s not the only interpretation but it has Occam’s razor on its side in that it works with the text that we’ve been given both in the comics and the TV series and doesn’t depend on a whole set of future revelations being made. IF such revelations are forthcoming then I’ll change my mind but not before.
Similarly I would hazard that Buffy’s not talking to Willow for much the same reason Willow isn’t talking to her. They’ve both made decisions that may have made sense in the circumstances but which are far from above criticism not least from their perpetrators. Whatever Twilight’s assertions Buffy is no stranger to self-doubt. I actually don’t think of her as a “good person and a hero.” I think she’s a flawed person who despite that generally tries to do the right thing and that’s what she’s still doing here. She may of course be wrong about what that right thing is and how she deals with that will be interesting.
Others of us look at bank robbing and other signs of real changes in her priorities and so on and wonder if the actions don't shed more light on the person than the other way around
What *actions* other than the bank robbery (which we’ve discussed)? A discussion with Willow where she suggests that Slayers might defend themselves against attacking army units? She’s killed in self-defense before now. A poorly worded warning to Satsu and Co that they have to be and be seen to be more human than human? Killing a Future!Willow who had outlived her humanity and by her own admission bent time itself to bring Buffy to a place where she had to do just that? She killed Angel remember. Everyone sees what they want to see. I like Buffy, I don’t think she’s a paragon but I like her. Other people seem think she’s annoyingly self-righteous and needs to be knocked off her pedestal. What Joss thinks we’ll see all in good time.
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Taking your last paragraph point-by-point:
I take the bank-robbing to be on-going, not incidental. And the proceeds aren't being used just for necessities, some of it is bleeding into luxuries. And I'm still not convinced that all the high tech stuff is necessary either. We aren't given enough context to judge, either pro or con. (That is, if you are happy using consequentialist morals, which I'm not; and which the 'verse has been pretty hostile to).
Killing in self-defense in the moment is not the same thing as contemplating killing in a very blase manner. There's no sign that it *bothers* her.
Poorly-worded or revealing?
Killing without hesitation. Running Angel through devastated her. This girl is MUCH harder.
Actions you've omitted (off the top of my head):
Callous attitude to the dead and dying humans in her battle in #4.
Very nearly killing Gigi when there was no imminent threat to herself, but rather cause she was just mad at her. (And specifically because she hurt a SLAYER. Contrast Buffy's feelings about slayers with her feelings about humans -- it's part of why some of us take her "more than" as revealing).
Not wanting to save humans in ToYL so she could focus on the big picture, and not caring about the humans who would have been killed if Fray hadn't been compelled to jump in. More evidence that "more than" is revealing.
In point of fact, Buffy is only roused to anger when it comes to things threatening the slayer line. She tortured a vamp and set him on fire; and was very cold about killing every last one -- because the slayer line was threatened and Renee killed. These are not bad of themselves, but compared to her lack of concern for human well-being it further suggests that "more than" is revealing.
And "more than" matters because it was the "more than" that separated Buffy from Faith and it's the "more than" that Buffy felt bad about feeling in CwDP.
I don't think Buffy needs to be knocked off her pedastal. I think she's off. She's not a compelling heroine. She's a hardened leader who seems to be primarily concerned with the welfare of her own tribe. She has lost the mission.
And I think we are meant to see that. In NFFY we start off thinking that the mirror is Gigi and Faith -- rogue slayers, mirrors in the bathroom. But the true mirrors are Gigi and Buffy. They are in castles. They don't show signs of caring about their lessers. They have red-headed mages working for them. NFFY begged us in a million different ways to see that Faith is now what Buffy once was, and that Buffy is in danger of becoming what Faith once was.
That's the comics I'm reading. I find it interesting. And as for how much sympathy I have for Buffy? Depends on how she got here. But we haven't been told that.
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In A Beautiful Sunset Buffy describes Willow as being upset about her Thomas Crown affair. Singular. What luxuries have you observed, as in items not directly connected with Slaying or self defence? Even Faith is using high tech rope shooting gun thingies to get around Cleveland. Both the frequency and the luxuries are your assumptions with no direct evidence in the text. They’re what you think Buffy would do based on your opinion of her.
Killing in self-defense in the moment is not the same thing as contemplating killing in a very blase manner. There's no sign that it *bothers* her.
But that’s exactly how Buffy typically reacts to things that do bother her. She keeps up a surface façade of “it’s our guarantee.” One of the things that’s struck me most about her in these comics is the difference in demeanour between the public face she shows to the new slayers (and to a certain extent to Willow possibly because lately they haven’t been around each other much) and the much more introspective thoughts she has when she’s alone or occaisionally with Xander (in A Beautiful Sunset).
Poorly-worded or revealing?
Could be either.
Killing without hesitation. Running Angel through devastated her. This girl is MUCH harder.
Your main problem with her seems to be that she’s not emotional enough. But she looks pretty devastated all the way through stabbing Willow starting with that single tear and breaking down to her knees whaen re-united with current Willow. Her Sunnydale-Pleasantville dream specifically chooses Angel as the character to address the Willow issue. The difference is that now she can’t afford to indulge her emotional breakdowns the way she could when she was a teenager.
Callous attitude to the dead and dying humans in her battle in #4.
She knew Willow could save them. All of them. If she didn’t care whether they lived or died it would have been much easier to kill a few as she did the Knights.
Very nearly killing Gigi when there was no imminent threat to herself, but rather cause she was just mad at her. (And specifically because she hurt a SLAYER. Contrast Buffy's feelings about slayers with her feelings about humans -- it's part of why some of us take her "more than" as revealing).
Buffy’s a trained swordswoman. If she really intented to kill Gigi she wouldn’t be waving the sword around over her head, she’d be going straight for the heart. Buffy’s feelings about Slayers are the same as for her people, Xander (Renee’s death affected him directly and her first instinct was to protect him and leave the other Slayers to fight their own battles), Willow, possibly even Andrew. Being prepared to risk the nameless mass of humanity in order to save her friends or family is a flaw she’s always had as I noted in the second half of my original comment.
She's not a compelling heroine. She's a hardened leader.
Then we simply have very different ideas about what makes for a compelling heroine. Hardened leader Buffy has always been more interesting to me than the schoolgirl who let her emotions rule her. Not surprisingly, I find Elinor more compelling than Marianne.
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Because as they’re showing with the current arc the ‘public’ and certainly those with access to the money such armament requires aren’t necessarily going to be presented with an accurate picture of the situation. Twilight has powerful allies in the military and (it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to conclude) in the media. Even before he became a player the world Buffy knows was manipulated into complacency by Wolfram and Hart et al. I do think taking matters into her own hands was short sighted of Buffy and that will be addressed but it’s hardly out of character. It took a very public message of support in The Prom for her to even contemplate recruiting the other members of her High school class to her cause. These were people she met everyday, people she knew the names of. She's never approached the citizens or authorities of Sunnydale for assistance. With reason given their record of either institutionalizing her or accusing her of murder or being an unfit guardian for Dawn.
A huge amount of Buffy's self-identification is that she is NOT Faith, she's the slayer who is still subject to human law
Buffy is less obsessed with Faith than Faith is with Buffy (which is part of the problem but they never came to blows over breaking human *property* laws. Buffy never returned the items she liberated from the Sport’s Goods store and only seemed to worry about it because she got caught. When she talks about human laws being respected the laws that she’s talking about are the ones relating to murder. Faith killed Finch and the hapless vulcanologist. Warren killed Katrina. Giles was going to use Faith to kill Gigi and yet people seem to think he’s the person who should be offering moral guidance to Buffy.
As I read this isn’t Buffy’s version of Angel’s beige arc or Faith’s fall and rise. It’s more like S7 where a pre-exiting flaw is being exposed by a change in circumstances. Then it was her Slayer isolationist crap as it impacted on her attitude to those around her, friends and family. Here it’s in part her long-standing distrust and disconnection from the very people she’s protecting. It’s also a quality that has been regarded as one of her great strengths – her loyalty and protectiveness towards those she regards as family who now include all the new Slayers working for her.
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Um, NO, Mr. Allie, I think not. How someone becomes corrupt is almost always more revealing of character than what they do once they are corrupt (which tend to be depressingly similar.)