I Suddenly Find Myself Needing to Know the Plural of Apocalypse (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

So after watching the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer like, three times and being unable to continue because the special effects were old and made me cringe, a friend finally got me to actually watch the whole thing. Actually she told me to skip to "Hush" and then go back and watch the rest, but I just started at the beginning again and wound up mainlining all seven seasons in chronological order over the course of a few weeks, because once I got past the vampire makeup it was pretty hilarious and Buffy is cool and I like watching people hit things and kill monsters. Also, once I got into later seasons, Spike/Buffy exactly fit the parameters for "a ship I will instantly become intensely invested in".

Anyway I just finished the last episode an hour ago and



I need to inhale season five of Angel and like nine years of comics, but also I need a place to scream. And I possibly have, or will have, things to scream about that are not topical to the Floating Dumpster thread. And also I have seen other people yelling about BtVS in other threads and look, now you can yell here too! With me!

 

OH MAN my dad had all seven seasons in box sets of DVDs and for a while when I was in highschool we didn't have cable, so GUESS WHO WATCHED ALL SEVEN SEASONS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND--

Well, to be more honest: I'd skim season one, mainline seasons 2-5, skip around season 6, and then go back and watch everything in season 7. 3 and 5 were the best seasons, imo, but I'm gonna be honest: I do not get the amount of hate season 7 gets, because season 6 is RIGHT THERE.

 

Remember that one episode early on, with the ghosts of that student and the teacher he shot because she broke off her secret relationship with him? I know that plot had a lot of issues, but I fucking loved the fact that Angel got possessed by the woman's ghost and Buffy by the boy's ghost.

I think it was the first point where little me actually realized 'wow, I really like it when stories mess around with traditional gender expectations'.

 

@Scheherazade Yes! That was a fun episode because ghosts (ghosts are great, ghosts that play out their last moments for eternity are awesome). I enjoyed Angel/Buffy when they did that sort of thing.

@KingStarscream Yeah, if I have a complaint about season seven it's just that things got so depressing so fast that it feels a little unbalanced.

Spoiler: Season seven spoilers (do I even need to spoiler a show this old?)

I mean, by the end of the tenth episode of the season the entire Watcher organisation (sans Giles and that Robson guy, I guess?) is kablooey, Slayer potentials are being hunted down and killed one by one, and Buffy's facing a creature that apparently wouldn't be fussed if she dropped a bomb on it. And then it just kind of stays at that level of unpleasantness for the rest of the season, with everyone getting more and more stressed and Buffy getting more and more ground down by the pressure to be a leader and save everybody ... and then everything's resolved with a pep talk, a shiny axe, a spell that takes like five minutes, and a magic amulet that's not even from their TV show.

I really liked the idea of dealing with the problem of potential Slayers getting killed by turning them all into Slayers, even though I was spoiled for that long before I watched the show. It was an effective and nicely dramatic solution for that and for taking some of the pressure off Buffy. But there was so much unhappiness for so long that even with two episodes of things finally going their way it feels a little lopsided to me. Maybe if some of the elements (other than Buffy) that saved everyone had appeared a little earlier it wouldn't feel like that? Given that the the First was already there in the first episode of the season? I don't know.

But overall I liked the season, especially the earlier episodes before things got quite so dire, and the last few after Faith showed up. Except for the part with Buffy getting kicked out of her house because I still don't understand how her friends and her sister could have done that to her, even with the First whispering in their ears all season.

 

Something that is still bothering me: What exactly is the point of repeatedly drowning a guy who doesn't breathe and is already dead? I mean, really.

 

Well, vampires do appear to still feel pain. Even if you don't actually need to breathe, all those soft tissues getting flooded with excess liquid probably feels unpleasant.

 

But ... if they don't need to breathe so they're not inhaling, how's the water going to get in there? Hmm, maybe they still have alive-person reflexes so if you make them sneeze or cough then they inhale automatically...? Now I'm wondering if they ever showed a vampire sneezing or coughing. Aaand now I'm imagining someone squeezing all the air out of a vampire's lungs and then letting go so that they inhale when their lungs expand again, like a sponge or something.

 

It's presumably still an open passageway, yes? Just because the water's not being actively sucked in doesn't mean it won't seep in more gradually.

 

Oh! ...So you could chain someone at the bottom of a body of water and leave them there for a while to get all waterlogged, then haul them out and let them go through the process of getting all the water out of their lungs (which I've heard is more unpleasant than breathing it in in the first place, dunno how accurate that is). That's super creepy and now I'm sad they didn't do that instead of the standard shoving-head-under-water-for-several-seconds-while-they-struggle-and-leak-air-bubbles thing.

 

Update on my progress consuming more Buffyverse material:

Spoiler: Season five of Angel

I'm in the middle of episode nineteen and I'm not even sure what's happening, I haven't been paying much attention except when Angel and Spike are hitting each other because that's basically the only reason I'm watching this in the first place. Okay, also because I have a burning need to have watched everything that has anything to do with Buffy. But the hitting is what keeps me going.

So Fred got turned into an ancient demon god chrysalis and is dead and also her soul is destroyed, I guess? And the demon god wanted to unleash a demon army and take over the world but it turned out she couldn't so now she's hanging around Wolfram & Hart beating Spike up for science. Technically Spike is supposed to be beating her up for science, but she's an ancient demon god whatever with time manipulation powers super demon fighting skills and he's a vampire who likes to hit things, so that's how it works out. Last episode Connor showed up and everyone got their memories of him back, and it was strongly hinted that he got his memories back, too, but preferred to remain with his normal parents, pretending to be a semi-normal college student. There was this whole conversation with Angel where nobody said anything outright and I'm really bad at figuring these things out but it seems like that's what's going on.

This episode there's a lady pregnant with a baby that some demon priest guys are interested in for some reason, and something about The Apocalypse? They're very serious about it being THE APOCALYPSE, for really real this time, I know we've had a dud like every season finale but this time for sure. Also everyone is concerned about Wesley because he's doing too much research, and Illyria the ancient demon god lady has the time flu or something. Exciting!

I'm wondering, how much exactly should I be putting under spoiler tags? I'm fairly sure I'm one of only like five people in my generation who haven't seen both shows, but I'd never even heard of the comics until I was in the middle of watching BtVS and looked something up on the Wiki page. I've been thinking just spoilers for the last seasons of BtVS and Angel plus the comics, but should I be spoiler-ing stuff about season finales from earlier seasons, too?

 

YESSSS THERE'S A THREAD FOR IT. I AM SO HERE

 

Finished Angel (WHAT WAS THAT FINALE, WHY) so now it's on to the comics for me! Um, tomorrow, probably, because it's late-ish here. Never mind, I'm starting now.

 

Spoiler: The Long Way Home: Part One

• The cover illustrations don't look like Buffy and that makes me sad
• Buffy is like Slayer Black Ops now or something, also she has two decoy Buffys and one of them was the Buffy in The Girl in Question who was going out with some maybe-evil-maybe-not guy called The Immortal and whose face we never got to see (and that also made me sad)
• Xander is Buffy's Watcher now except he says he's not
• Also Dawn is a GIANT so there's that
  
• Willow's missing???
• Some military guys went digging around the crater that used to be Sunnydale and managed to dig up Amy, who possibly wants to kill Buffy. AWESOME

Overall I am filled with a) excitement because BUFFY! Yay! and b) grief because Buffy doesn't look much like Buffy. (I really like Sarah Michelle Gellar's face, okay?)

ONWARD.

 

Spoiler: The Long Way Home: Parts Two and Three

• Willow's back! Yay!
• And so is Warren, not yay, I hate that guy, WHY IS HE HERE

 

Spoiler: The Long Way Home: Part Four

• So now Willow can like ... infuse Buffy with her power, or something? That's cool I guess
• Warren and Amy disappear in that ominous "I'll be back" kind of way
• Military dude tells Buffy she and the other Slayers, once they're done punching all the demons to death, will turn on humans, and he, military dude, is not going to wait for that to happen and is going to attack her now and also ~she's at war with humanity~ and Buffy is like "okay" and I'm like ???
• I kinda miss when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was about Buffy Slaying Vampires (and also sometimes dating them, that was fun too) but I guess you can't do the same thing over and over forever, people will get bored

Anyway that's enough recapping for now, gotta sleep and stuff.

 

Buffy what are you doing. Buffy why

(I know why, it's comics, there's Escher girls and you gotta do dynamic poses and angles and stuff.) But man, the BtVS comics are so different visually from the TV series that I'm having a really hard time feeling like they're the same canon. I can't even recognise the characters half the time. Case in point:

Spoiler: Time of Your Life: Part Four

Am I supposed to know who this is? Is that Angel? He's kinda got Angel hair, I think. I'm pretty sure it's not Spike because he definitely doesn't have Spike hair. It seems like I ought to know who he is because he calls himself Buffy's "ever faithful" and indicates that they have a past, presumably pre-comics because I haven't seen him in the comics before this, but at this point I'm just sort of flipping through all the guys Buffy's ever had anything to do with and sorting out all the brown-haired ones as potentially-this-guy.

On a different note: I wish I'd thought to make a poll about favourite characters when I made the thread. Apparently you can't go back and edit one in! So who's everyone's favourite character(s)? I guess mine's Spike, because reformed(ish) villains are my thing. But I also really love Buffy, because she's tiny and hits monsters a lot and that's basically a recipe for me being in love in a major way. And end of season five/beginning of season six Buffybot has the same tiny, hits monsters thing as real Buffy going, plus the adorable robot cluelessness, so I love her too.

 

Could it be Riley? He's got the military shirt and shit, but Riley's married.........

(Also mine is tied between Spike and Xander for faves.)

 

Anya!!!! And Faith.

 

Oh yeah! Riley's got brown hair. And previous government/military affiliation. And I don't know if being married is actually a problem because I think if we take "ever faithful" literally, that rules out, uh, every single dude Buffy has had a thing with in the course of the series? I'm baffled. Will update as the situation unfolds.

 

Update:

Spoiler: Retreat: Part two

Okay, so, I'm pretty sure this guy is Riley, but now I'm not sure if he's the same guy from before. I think probably he is and the difference in the art is just throwing me off? This issue has the same people doing inks and colour but a different person doing pencils.

Also, I figured out another reason the comics feel really different. In the TV series Buffy was living in the suburbs, sandwiching Slaying between school and jobs and other normal people things. In the comics she's the leader of almost two thousand other Slayers, operating out of a castle in Scotland, with tons of money and magic and tech at her disposal. In the later seasons of the TV show, especially six and seven, they were kind of moving away from the concept of Buffy as a super-human with larger-than-life responsibilities in a very normal, pedestrian setting, but now they've completely lost the normal-life aspect. I mean, aside from the basic human stuff like having relationships with other humans. That's why it feels almost like a completely different story.

Edit: Blurb at the beginning of Retreat: Part four confirms that it's Riley. Okay, so. WHERE'S SAM. I LIKED HER.