Reblogged comradesummers
btvs s6 is the best season of the show bc it’s about what if you and all your friends were in your 20s now and everything sucked so bad
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I'm pretty strongly skeptical about the proposed Buffy reboot/sequel for any number of reasons and if it were up to me in any capacity it would simply never happen. I think Chosen was a very good point for Buffy's story to end and I don't think any follow-up telling us what "canonically" happened next is something to look forward to. But at the same time I'm more than slightly baffled by all the takes I see saying something like "oh, it would be better to have a flashback series to one of the Slayers before Buffy!".
Because, uh. Would it? Why? I mean, we already know the life story of every pre-Buffy Slayer. They're all variations on the same theme. Once upon a time there was a teenage girl who was forced to become a weapon to defend the world against supernatural evil and she never broke out of the patriarchal system she found herself trapped in and then she died young and was immediately replaced by another girl just like her and the cycle continued. No amount of period costume or location filming is going to make that any more interesting. There was a girl, she died, and absolutely nothing changed.
Surely if the last twenty years of Star Trek have achieved nothing else (and they haven't!) they've at least made it abundantly clear how futile and unsatisfying it is to continually 'reboot' a series by endlessly retelling versions of the same handful of prequels and backstories over and over again? A Buffy prequel series would have no stakes and no tension and no point. There isn't any big mystery there that needs to be explained. Imagine watching the original Buffy knowing for a fact that Buffy herself was going to die in her early twenties and that she wouldn't be able to replace the Council or meet another Slayer and that none of her surviving friends -- if she had any friends to begin with! -- would be able to reform the system either and nobody in the future would even remember her name. Seriously, what is the appeal of that supposed to be?
(I know some of you weirdos think The Gift would have been a good ending for the show -- you're wrong, by the way -- but even there at least we didn't know in advance that Buffy was going to jump.)
If the new Buffy series is going to be good -- which, well, of course it won't be, but let's be silly and pretend it might -- it will surely only happen if:
- it respects the new status quo set up by Chosen (no handwaving away all the new Slayers or resetting things back to the way they were before)
- it mostly focuses on a new generation of protagonists -- a new Slayer (or Slayers) who we've never met before -- and villains who weren't in the original show
- it never spells out explicitly all the details of what happened to Buffy and her friends in the twenty years after Chosen and (other than SMG) we don't get any cameos or special gust appearances from other members of the original Buffy cast (especially not the ones who are meant to be dead!)
- it actually tries to do something new that we haven't seen or heard about before; to tell stories that weren't possible under the old narrative rules or to somehow surprise the audience
I honestly think a prequel series is the worst of all possible worlds. Better no spin-off at all, but if we have to have one then at least let us have something that at least pretends to engage with the present and not just be a soulless exercise in empty nostalgia.
(And we really don't need a third actor to be cast as Nikki Wood, surely?)
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Honestly have got to give it up for the angst potential of pre-series Buffy. 15 years old and bearing the weight of the world completely alone bc she’s just watched the one person who was supposed to guide her be brutally murdered. And after avenging him she’s now lost everything: She’s been kicked out of school, her parents have divorced (which she's blaming herself for), and she’s lost all her friends. Her last friend, who’s the only one who knows the truth about what she’s going through, has just abandoned her in Vegas. So after all that she’s left w nothing but a completely frayed relationship w her parents. She gets blamed for all these things she didn’t do, while also grieving and dealing w some horrific trauma. S1 Buffy was truly going through it.
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the reason buffy summers is a much better protagonist than a lot of the main characters in other teen supernatural shows is that those characters tend to be good people in a passive, boring way. they're generally nice and care about doing good, but they're rarely placed in situations where they have to make difficult decisions with no good outcomes, or pushed to extremes that force them to contend with the ugliest parts of themselves. btvs meanwhile is absolutely obsessed with the idea that passivity is inherently unethical. as such, in order for buffy to be a good person, she constantly has to make active choices. she never gets to be indecisive in the face of a moral dilemma. she always has to choose, to make tough calls, and that makes her genuine heroism and goodness far more compelling than a character who's just kind of passively nice.
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in s7, dawn makes a quip about those "try-to-kill-your-sister types" directed at faith despite the fact that buffy is the one who for sure tried (and almost succeed in!) to kill faith. so i have a question:
I think Dawn -- both as the symbolic part of Buffy who hasn't been worn down by years of being the Slayer and as an awkward pre-teen girl who honestly thought Faith was really cool and wanted to be her friend -- would have taken a lot longer than everyone else to accept that Faith had turned evil and was working for the Mayor. Even after she accepted that it wasn't a misunderstanding or a trick, she'd have been insisting to Buffy (the way Buffy insists to everyone else throughout Season 3) that deep down Faith had to be really unhappy and desperate to be helped to reform, right up until the end of the season.
I think Buffy would have tried to tell her, after the fact, that she was trying to kill Faith to save Angel and that's why Faith is in a coma now (I think Dawn wasn't there at the time because Joyce took her out of town when she left). But I also think Dawn would have deliberately misunderstood her and insisted that Buffy must have been defending herself and that Faith tried to kill her first, and that Buffy would have eventually given up trying to correct her.
I also think that Buffy must have taken Dawn to see Faith in hospital at least once over the summer (I don't think anything substantial can change in the past because of Dawn's presence, but I think Buffy probably went to visit Faith at least once by herself or else why is she getting calls from the hospital next year about Faith waking up?), and -- in the same way Buffy only gives up on redeeming Faith after the body stealing spell in Who Are You? -- I don't think Dawn really blamed Faith for trying to kill Buffy until after Faith woke up her coma and threatened to hurt her mom. Until then, I think it was something Dawn came up with to try to justify why Buffy had had to hurt Faith, and why it wasn't really her fault.
But, after seeing Faith again in Season 4, I think Dawn gave up on Faith even more dramatically than Buffy did. I think she suddenly believed everything bad about Faith anyone had to say, including the idea that Faith tried to kill Buffy (even though this was something Dawn herself came up with and Buffy just stopped trying to argue with).
This is also my take on why Faith is talked about so little in Seasons 5 and 6 (only once, actually: in Checkpoint when the Council are about to visit), despite being talked about quite a lot during Season 4 [both before and after This Year's Girl]. Everyone suddenly remembers that talking about Faith just makes Dawn angry and upset, so they stop doing it.
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Unpopular opinion for the ask game: admittedly I would not describe myself as the world's biggest AtS fan, but even accounting for that I really don't understand why Fred is such a popular character.
I mean, Fred seems perfectly tolerable on an individual level. I wouldn't object to hanging out with her if she were a real person. But as a character, she just feels like yet another self-indulgent iteration of Whedon's recurring Cute Nerd Girl character archetype (like Kaylee on Firefly and at least arguably Willow in the first season and a half of BtVS before the writers figured out ow to make her interesting). I think Amy Acker is a very good actor -- I really like her as Root in Person of Interest -- but as Fred she just never seems to get anything remotely interesting to do.
The three big Fred story arcs I remember her being involved in are (1) a fake-out where it seems that her parents might be horrible people but -- surprise! -- they're actually really nice; (2) the world's most interminable love triangle (in which Fred's role is mainly to be a prize for Gunn and Wesley to fight over) that forms part of what the show itself will later, via Gunn, describe as a "turgid supernatural soap opera"; (3) randomly getting sick and dying so that the surviving cast (or, well, mostly Wesley) can feel sad about it and Amy Acker can finally have something different to do on the show.
What exactly am I missing? What makes Fred any more interesting than somebody like Oz (another inexplicably popular character with no obvious arc or complexity that I can see)?
strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree
I agree to an extent. I would certainly say Fred is a lot more interesting than Oz, although to be fair I think almost every character ever put on television is more interesting than Oz (whose only role on the show is to be Willow's eerily perfect boyfriend and to Tell Funny Joke).
There are kernels of an interesting character and arc for Fred in S2 and S4 of AtS, particularly in relation to her ruthlessness, anger, and capacity for violence. Her tasering Connor and torturing him in 4.01 "Deep Down" is a great character beat. 4.05 "Supersymmetry," where she wants to sent Professor Seidel to Pylea as he did to her, is a great Fred episode...right up until the end, when the writers inexplicably choose to have Gunn kill Seidel to 'preserve Fred's innocence,' a choice with some profoundly misogynistic and racist implications, and which will lead to one of the most tedious, annoying, and drawn-out breakups in television history. And while Fred gets mired in the love triangle bullshit for most of the middle of Season 4 (as does poor Gunn), she does get an excellent chance to shine in the Jasmine arc, which is probably the highlight of her run on the show. Her threatening Lorne ("I'll kill him, Charles!"), surviving on her own and killing the demon who tries to eat her, telling Jasmine "I loved you so much" before shooting her more times than necessary to wake up Angel -- all fantastic stuff. Unfortunately 4.20 "Sacrifice," the weakest episode in the arc, kind of puts her on the back-burner, but she still gets a great showing in the first two episodes of the arc, and it's believable that she would sign up for Wolfram & Hart in the S4 finale.
Although I think the love triangle was a blight on all three characters and especially Fred and Gunn, IMO the real killer of Fred's arc was S5. In S5 any character traits beyond Cute Nerd Girl get stripped away. The characters (and writers) start treating her like Cordelia, the heart of the group who everyone trusted and confided in, because, um, she's a woman, and Cordelia was a woman, so, you know, they're the same, I guess. She doesn't even get to stay a particle physicist, for fuck's sake -- they have her doing all kinds of random forensics and biology and technology stuff completely unrelated to her actual degree (or almost-degree? I guess she never technically completed her PhD). 5.15 "A Hole in the World" is enraging for so many reasons -- it's a speedrun of what was done to Cordelia in S4 only this time even more egregiously about the manpain of the men around the dying woman, Fred delivers a frankly insulting line about not being the "damsel in distress" when she so blatantly is, Fred is weirdly infantilized in relation to Wesley -- but frankly the part that gets my goat the most is that Fred should never have been excavating that coffin because Fred is not an archaeologist. She is a particle physicist. It drives me nuts that the show does not care about this basic fact of her character in S5. Also, she ran the lab! She should know better than to handle an ancient artifact without protective gear! Wesley tries to blabber later about her being "curious" or whatever, like she's a fucking child, but she's not a child, she's a 30-year-old woman who runs a lab and should know to wear a goddamn Hazmat suit, and she also should've delegated the task anyway because, again, excavating coffins is not her job.
And this lack of care towards her character is, I think, emblematic of the fact that Joss Whedon (and I do blame Joss for a lot of this, though possibly not the love triangle -- no clue whose idea that was) was simply not interested in Fred beyond the archetype she represented. It is, IMO, deeply telling that when Joss saw Amy Acker in the role of Lady Macbeth and realized she was, like, actually good at acting (lol), his immediate response was not, "Gosh, we better give Fred something cool to do on AtS," but rather, "Gosh, we better kill Fred off and give Amy Acker a better character." Which, hey, Jonathan Nolan has said he cast Amy Acker as Root specifically because of her performance as Illyria, so, I guess things work out the way they're supposed to -- but it says a lot about how little Fred was valued as a character that she was so easily cast aside.
So overall, I would say that I think she had the potential to be very interesting and there are times when that potential shines through. But it is true that for a lot of the show she's simply a cute traumatized nerdy waif girl a la Kaylee/River/early-seasons Willow (speaking of Willow, have I mentioned how much I loathe the scene in "Orpheus" where Willow condescendingly tells Fred she has a girlfriend after they've bonded over nerdy stuff?) who is often reduced to the object of men's affections or guilt or grief. I suspect that the reason she's so well-loved in fandom is simply because people like that archetype. Relatedly, it's only recently, in my own fandom experience, that more and more people have started to engage with Willow's flaws and later-seasons behavior, whether it leads them to love her even more or to bemoan her botched character arc or to declare her a bad friend; for a very long time, she was popular simply for being the cute nerdy girl cinnamon roll too good for this world, too pure (the damage that meme has done to the internet is unspeakable). I personally tend to find the archetype a bit grating, although certainly there are moments I found charming from both Fred and early Willow. (The worst example of this archetype in recent memory, IMO, is Willow [no relation] [except she's clearly based off BtVS Willow] from the aggressively middling kids' cartoon The Owl House, who even gets a horrible cutesy voice to go along with the personality.) But that's why I suspect Fred is so popular, despite the fact that the character as she exists is admittedly far less interesting than the character she could've been.
Good answer; thanks.
I actually was going to mention the end of Supersymmetry as one of the Fred plots that annoyed me, but I decided to just lump it in with the rest of the love triangle stuff (I don't actually remember much of the episode except for the terrible resolution).
And I do remember liking some of Fred's moments in the Jasmine arc (not an unpopular opinion to say that I don't generally like Season 4, but I do remember having a very visceral reaction to the moment in [I think?] Shiny Happy People when Fred suddenly starts seeing the real Jasmine that nobody else can see).
I also remember being kind of nonplussed by that Willow and Fred scene. Large parts of the fandom talk about it as if it's canon Fred really was attracted to Willow, but I always assumed that the intended 'joke', such as it is, was that Fred just thought they were bonding over shared interests and only Willow jumped to the conclusion Fred was flirting with her. Which ... hmm. Probably best not to think about the implications of that for too long.
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Opinion: the puppet episode in Buffy season 1 is good actually
strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree
Yes, it's a good episode!
It's not amazing, it's not one of the best episodes of the show (or even of the season), and there are definitely a couple of things I don't enjoy about it, but it is a fine episode and I had fun the last time I rewatched it.
It introduces Principal Snyder, and we immediately get all these classic Snyderisms. Threatening the gang that "Sunnydale has touched and felt for the last time." Scoffing at Principal Flutie's outlandish notion that 'kids are human beings' because "That's the kind of woolly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten." Warning Buffy that "There are things I will not tolerate: students loitering on campus after school, horrible murders with hearts being removed. And also smoking."
The big point against it is that Sid the Dummy (and the constant running joke about how 'limber' and 'nubile' he finds a teenage girl) is pretty gross. Which, well. It is! But Sid himself really isn't in the episode much and there are definitely worse things going on in this era of the show And unfortunate attempts at humor aside, Sid's willingness to meet his fate ("I've lived a lot longer than most [...] vampire slayers") is a nice bit of foreshadowing for the end of the season.
(The other point I have against it, which is admittedly not quite fair, is that I think the whole talent show concept would be more entertaining in a later season where we'd already met more of the participants. As it is, and not for the first time, we have Buffy, Willow, Xander, Cordelia and then a bunch of students we know don't matter and never will matter. But that is pretty much par for the course for Season 1.
Ultimately it's a pretty solid Season 1 episode: not as good as Prophecy Girl or Out of Sight, Out of Mind but better than Teacher's Pet or The Pack and, for that matter, better than quite a lot of later episodes as well. The central plot is fine, there's some nice thematic work going on, and it does a good job of fleshing out, if not the show's wider world, at least most of the core cast. All that and it introduces one of the show's better minor recurring characters too. And it's the only episode to have a post-credits sequence!
("I don't get it. What is it, avant-garde?")
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I did some googling to make sure this is unpopular and I think it is so unpopular opinion for the ask game: S1 of Buffy is pretty good.
Now if I was ranking them it wouldn't be my favourite or my second. But it might be my fourth favourite and I'm pretty positive on it, it's pretty goofy and honestly is probably a distinct enough era even compared to the rest of the high school era that it's not even super indicative of the rest of the show. But it can be a lot of fun, and even in that era with all of the monsters in the world at their fingertips, after a two parter with vampires, setting up the premise of the show natural, a witch, classic choice, they go with giant praying mantis for their third story instead. And I have to respect being willing to go with such an off the wall choice. And the Master? Honestly up there as one my more beloved Big Bads, great look, has a lot of fun with the role and whenever he shows up again after s1 (like the four times I think it is?) is always a treat.
Also I Robot, You Jane is specifically a banger, I love it, Moloch is great fun, introduces Jenny Calendar, the first of the inexplicable Robot episodes which are broadly inexplicably good? Be careful who you meet online it might be the robo devil! I love it.
(I'm distinctly not mentioning Prophecy Girl here because yeah Prophecy Girl rocks that's not unpopular but S1 is good outside of Prophecy Girl)
strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree
I'm not sure it's in my top four seasons -- I'm not completely sure I even have a consistent top four --but I do agree that Season 1 is good. I think you're right that it feels very different to Seasons 2 and 3 (especially from around a third of the way into Season 2).
There are sadly a couple of episodes this season I genuinely dislike a lot (I think they might be contenders for two of the worst ten episodes of the show) and (other than Prophecy Girl which we're agreeing not to mention) there are no episodes that I'd call truly great.
But the opening two-parter is solid, Witch and Never Kill A Boy On The First Date and Angel are all fun and I enjoyed them when I last rewatched this season a couple of years ago. And towards the final third of the season the world of the show starts to get much fully realized and we meet Principal Snyder (who I raved about earlier) and as you say Jenny Calendar (and, for my money, S1!Jenny Calendar is the best iteration of her character) and Cordelia stops being quite so one-dimensional and we even get our first recurring minor character in the form of Harmony.
Sometimes (as in Nightmares) the special effects make it very clear this season was made in the mid-90s with a not especially large budget, and the show is generally a lot goofier and silly than it would later become (the fake cliffhanger endings of Teacher's Pet and Out of Sight, Out of Mind all feel very much of their time as well).
While some of the performances are a little shaky (especially from the one-off characters), I think SMG in particular really nails the role of Buffy right from the beginning of the season. Even without her big scenes in the episode we're not talking about, I think her performance in the title role is a big part of why the show got renewed for a second season. And I like ASH as Giles and Kristine Sutherland as Joyce and, yes, as you say, Mark Metcalf is a really enjoyable presence as the Master, too.
Honestly, I just have a lot of nostalgic fondness for this era of the show. It's not the show at it's best, but it helped lay a lot of the ground work for my favorite seasons. And one plus side of the very episodic nature of this season is that even the bad episodes can't really derail it. The bad episodes of the later seasons are bad partly because they set up long-term subplots that haunt the show for weeks or months, and that just can't happen here (the Anointed One isn't anything like as annoying as people say). Next time I rewatch this season I'm just skipping the two episodes I don't like and it will have no bearing on my understanding of the plot at all. If only that were true for all the show's worse episodes.
Reblogged coraniaid
BEST OF BTVS: Buffy & Joyce — Season One
Reblogged shaissa
to me willow rosenberg is the epitome of a character who's used to thinking of herself as kind and good because she's always been percieved that way by other people, but when other people say "kind and good" what they really mean is "competent yet unassertive." which isn't really a moral value, it's just the kind of personality that makes authority figures like you. so she's in the precarious position of believing herself to be a Good Person while having never really felt the need to develop a moral backbone. and this is of course the main reason why she's a little fucked up sometimes. i love this about her, to be clear.
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My Roman Empire is that, by the middle of BTVS season 2, Jenny was actually set up as a perfect parallel to Giles and then she died and nothing was ever done with this.
Both of them had this inherited vampire-related responsibility that was basically rammed down their throats from a young age, they had such fundamental aspects of their lives decided for them, and so they never even had half a chance of being normal or living a normal life.
They both tried to avoid it, they started going by a different name and pretended that meant they could escape who they were and what they were raised for, and then found out the hard way that they couldn't.
And the irony is that, once all of that is out in the open, it actually put them in the position of being able to understand each other better than perhaps anyone else on the show
And then Jenny just fucking died.
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Thinking about how Willow's early forays into witchcraft are explicitly presented as something that she picked up because of Jenny: she gets into it in the first place after finding a bunch of pagan magic stuff on Jenny's computer and the first spell she casts is the Ritual of Restoration, continuing what Jenny herself intended to do if she'd survived. Through her magic, Willow becomes Jenny's legacy in a way.
And then season 6 happens and all of a sudden Willow isn't Jenny, she's Giles, getting high on magic the same way Giles used to get high on summoning and being possessed by Eyghon, with the same disregard for the danger to themselves and others. And she responds to her grief over the death of the woman she loves just like he did, with despair and rage and a destructive desire for revenge, and she does to Warren exactly what Giles would have done to Angel if he'd only had the power.
Reblogged comradesummers
She still thinks I'm little miss nobody, just her dumb little sister. Boy, is she in for a surprise.
Dawnie 🗝️💚
I started this drawing before hearing the news about Michelle Trachtenberg. Gone too soon, thank you for everything ❤️🩹
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I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.
Some of my favourites include:
Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)
Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?
Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?
Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!
Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?
The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.
So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:
Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"
I love that and want to add my own.
The 20 Minutes Late with Starbucks hypothesis: They noticed us and want to meet us! But since they are several million light-years away and don't have FTL travel, they're just gonna take a while.
Personally I lean towards the First One At The Party Theory. Yeah, the universe is 13 billion years old, but our own life-supporting solar system is 4.6 billion and the majority of known exoplanets are younger than us.
It took about a billion years for life to arise, once our planet existed. If our galactic neighbors are operating on a similar timescale, there might just not be anyone out there yet who’s technologically advanced enough to make contact. Right now, the best we can hope for might be people at similar levels of development to us, looking out at the stars and wondering if anyone else is out there.
Reblogged coraniaid
i love cordelia chase so so much but i'm consistently annoyed by the take that she was never actually a bully because her insults weren't really that serious, and the scoobies were actually super mean to her for no reason. for one, that's just objectively not true. you're cherrypicking only her best moments and conveniently forgetting all of the classist comments she made to everyone but especially to xander, the one working class character, and that time she legit made fun of buffy for having a deadbeat dad or that time she said in front of willow that shylock from merchant of venice complained too much about antisemitism, just to name a few. but also, the cordelia was always perfect narrative is so annoying precisely because her sucking in the beginning is what makes her character arc (pre ats season 4 that is) so good. she went from the thoughtless mean girl to the most loving and empathetic person in the entire buffyverse. that's the whole fucking point!