Entries tagged with buffy

I just read this post: Oops, she's dead". Once more with no feeling:

I'm fed up with stories (and Buffy S8 isn't the worst example of it out there, I can also point to Torchwood, many superhero comics, and, quite overwhelmingly, Heroes) with central characters who treat protecting other people's lives as self-expression, who make no attempt to practice and improve their skills or to truly form a team that works like a well-oiled system, who demand that they be given the respect due to those who protect society but who fuck up and fuck up and have hecatombs happen on their watch and then expect us to sympathise with them afterwards because it was just so horrible for them, even tough they're usually still alive and walking at the end of it, unlike hundreds of others who weren't in the opening credits.

...and was reminded that I had a locked brainstormy post about class in speculative fiction I never got around to tidying up. Thus, a summary of the main ideas and some links since I have a follow on post I'd like to make (eventually)
( Read more... )

This vid, Origin Stories, is made of awesome. It's a Buffy Angel vid (mostly S7 Buffy) which perfectly captures some of the serious problems I had with the show, especially Spike. (It focuses largely on race while I personally had more noticed the issues with gender, but that's probably an issue with me not the vid :))

Basically, we are expected to sympathise with Spike above all else, because he is pretty and he is sad, and that is much more interesting than all the boring grumpy people who just had their mothers killed in front of them or whatever. To see anything he's done wrong primarily as a source of Pretty Woobie Angst and to despise anyone who goes against him as a Big Meanie. This despite the fact that unlike Angel there is no clear cut distinction between souled Spike and unsouled Spike, in fact (imho) they deliberately kept him a "bad boy" because it was cool, despite the very negative message this sends about him not making any real effort to distance himself from the mass murdering would-be rapist he used to be (the scene in the vid? Where he takes back his coat? Guh!)

(In my mental version of season seven, Spike is dead, and we have the new character William, who is not the same as pre-vamped William, in the same way that Liam =/= Angelus =/= Angel. But I could have lived with a less problematic Spike-as-Spike-but-with-a-conscience.)

Class and speculative fiction

Origin Stories and the end of Buffy