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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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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.