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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.