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

@raybot Hey, welcome to the fandom! Where are you in the series? What's your favourite episode so far? Did you make it to season two yet? My mom and I are watching together and the next episode we watch will be the first episode of season two. Season one can be a bit of a drag (we wound up only watching half of it and I just filled her in on important stuff that happened in episodes we didn't watch) but @PotteryWalrus is right, season two is where it gets really fun.

Restless is a fun episode! My favourite is The Weight of the World, funnily enough because of Buffy's mind ... dream ... loop thingy. I can't even put into words what it is I like so much about it (I just tried three or four times without success), but yeah.

Making that post was the first time it actually registered to me that all the main character vampires were from the same line. It is pretty interesting! Makes sense from a storytelling perspective, I guess, since characters who already have a connection don't need to have a relationship built up from scratch, but I wonder if there were reasons beyond that? It's certainly fascinating that in a world with so many vampires, 100% of the soul-having ones are from the Master's line. I mean, that we've heard of. Maybe there are other soully vampires and they're just smart enough to stay out of Slayer territory, or maybe the ensouled-vampire suicide rate is a lot higher than we've been led to believe.

...And you're right, Drusilla would probably handle being soulified worse than the other two combined. I think I read that it happens in the comics somewhere, but I'm making slow work reading through them so I haven't come across that storyline yet.

 

What on earth is the vampire purring trope??

 

It's just vampires purring when they're happy, being petted, etc. I don't recall anything like that in canon but it shows up quite a bit in fanfiction. (Maybe "trope" is the wrong word? I'm coming up blank for another word meaning "a thing that happens in stories".)

 

Literally what it sounds like - Buffy was probs the first fandom it emerged in, but it's a habit in fanfic to make happy vampires (I've seen elves as well, particularly in Dragon Age fic) purr like giant cats.

Besides making the erroneous assumption that anything that can snarl/growl can also purr (IRL big cats can't purr! The small felid family is the only animal known to make pleased purring noises with their larynx) it usually also glosses over various characterization hiccups. (Drove me crazy even as a tiny spuffy fan reading my first real lemons on fansites and shrines - even allowing for demonage, primate larynxes do not allow for a constant purr - speaking as a primate who actually can purr but only on purpose when I'm breathing out XDD)

 

Huh. Yeah, that's the correct use of "trope", it's just not one I'd encountered.

 

@Elaienar im a few episodes into season 1, but ive had... various spoilers for future plots (like the ending to s1) already spoiled for me (partly from my previous attempt which involved trying to skip to a later season) but im going to try and just watch it through this time!

i dont think i have a specific fave episode right now though

 

I think even unsouled Spike would care enough to work with her. Even prior to vampirization, Angel was a piece of work, and he didn't really become less so as he got older; it's canon that the reason he was in the vicinity to be eaten and turned by Darla was because his dad had thrown him out (on account of the wenching and gambling and drinking, and generally being shiftless in an era where every member contributing if possible was extremely important to familial survival) and the first thing he did after being turned was go eat his own family. Angel expresses a lot of guilt for all the things he did as Angelus, but he's a lot more interested in wearing his guilt as a hair shirt rather than actually doing anything to atone for it.

Even if Angel could do anything but trigger her with his presence, I don't think he would unless someone pushed him into it. And even then, he'd be performatively terrible at helping Dru, just to make it so that no one would make him deal with her any more. As Angelus, he's exasperated by how bad she is at communication and how easily distracted she is, and as Angel, he's also disgusted by her in general because she's a walking example of how terrible he could be when interested in trying.

Spike's at least used to working with Dru and stabilizing her and calming her down - we see her go through bad patches in early seasons, where he has to talk her out of being self-destructive because something's triggered her. I think the main difference between standard Dru and souled Dru would be that there'd be potential for souled Dru to be less crazy (or at least more capable of communicating with the rest of the world, without needing a translator).

Actually, a few of the big cats can purr! I'm about to go to bed, so I can't double-check which ones right now, but if I remember right, it's tigers and possibly also lynxes? Lions can sorta purr, but only on the exhale, so it isn't counted as being true purring.

 

Fuck, I really want someone to write this fic now - or at least RP it with me. I could do end of TV series Spike and I can do Dru from as much as she was on BTVS but I can't write them both at the same time Xdd

 

Ooh. I could do Dru, I think. I don't know if I could really hit the right tone for Spike, though. My main question would be "why does Dru have a soul now?" How did that happen? Was it intentional? (It doesn't feel like something she'd have done to herself, considering how she reacts when she figures out that Spike deliberately got his soul back.) Did one of the Scoobies do it, to try and fix what Angelus did? Or is someone trying to punish Angel for how he's not actually doing much to atone for everything he did during the two and a half centuries he lacked a soul?

Also, "How does Spike find her" and "how does Spike figure it out", but I think Spike's got a bit of Seer to him too (not as broad a streak as Dru, and not as fully expressed, but he's got an uncanny knack for guessing exactly what he needs to do in a situation, especially exactly what he needs to say, and he's really good at figuring out secrets that shouldn't have had sufficient clues for him to draw from). Which would explain 'how does he figure it out' and just leaves 'how does he find her'.

 

Hmm, well, depends if we're going for some amorphous last-BtVS series with Sunnydale still in one piece - it would make sense for her to gravitate back to a familiar Hellmouth to 'fix' herself like Spike did after Prague (not to mention she might well be looking for anything just anything familiar rip it out rip it out i don't want it why ) I can't see Angel having a great deal to do with it, yeah, but maybe someone was trying to undo the work he did on her and just did a whammy without really knowing what to do?

Or hell, maybe just had her captured and threw an extra strong healing spell at a vampire to see what would happen? (Make the clock reverse/bring back what once was hers - meaning her sanity, but instead her soul came back XDD)

Do you have skype or discord? I haven't done Buffy RP in forEVER (like nearly two decades ago) and I'd love to brainstorm in realtine :D

 

I have both! Discord might work best? Skype's prone to issues.

I like the idea of Sunnydale still being intact - and it would make sense that she'd gravitate in that direction if it were still around. Familiar hunting grounds, plus the potential for safety and maybe even help.

I could see someone trying to go after Angel and fix the stuff he's done - and it's not like someone doing a whammy without really knowing what they're doing is unusual in the series. (Hell, it could even be some cleverboots at Wolfram & Hart trying to make Angel suffer, and not thinking through the 'how' terribly well.)

 

My discord's the same as my username on here, so add me if you're around? I might go to bed pretty soon, but I'll try to wait up until you've pinged me :)

EDIT: Going to bed but add me and I'll ping you when we're next online at the same time XD

 

So I've made it back to season five, watching with my mom (I kind of had to drag her through season one but she was proper hooked by the middle of season two). So that means I get to watch Spike's evolving crush on Buffy again. On the downside, I get to watch it with my mom sitting next to me, which is bad because I nearly died of embarrassment the first time and will probably spontaneously combust in the middle of Intervention this time. On the upside, I now have half a dozen texts from her explaining how Plato's Phaedrus apparently contains prophecies of Spike/William's storyline. Or, you know, possibly Whedon knows his classics, but putting it the other way around is funnier.

@turtleDove @PotteryWalrus How's the RP going? I'm asking for a friend (the friend is me, I find your ideas fascinating and would like to subscribe to your newletter).

 

Hasn't happened yet, but I'm looking forward to it once we get started.

 

Update: we finished season five. I did not die of embarrassment at any point.

It's been interesting re-watching because I'm catching things I didn't see the first time around. Um ... oh, for example, the first time I watched Into the Woods I actually loathed Spike for telling Buffy about Riley - not that she didn't need to know, but I thought he was just doing it to try and break her and Riley up and that made me mad (...even though I was already shipping Spike/Buffy at that point). On the re-watch I caught his face when he saw Riley go into the house of recreational bloodsucking and his expression read more as "what the hell" than "aha, a weapon to use against you for my own devious ends!" so I'm thinking I over-estimated how much of an ulterior motive he had.

Also noticed Dawn seems to be pretty good at manipulating people. I need to find more fanfiction that features her prominently, or possibly start reading the comics again to see if she gets up to anything interesting in the later seasons.

 

Xander-focused fic tends to have more Dawn in it, I've noticed (probably holdovers from their heart to heart in Season 7)?

Also a lot of post-series fic. I've seen some really good ones with Dawn going out into the wide, wild world and kicking ass by being perfectly human and they were fun. Lost to dead livejournals, though. :(

 

Yeah, my perception of Spike is that he would absolutely take an advantage he found to use against a rival, but - well. He's also well aware that at that point, he and Riley aren't rivals; that would require him to have a chance at being in a relationship with Buffy, and he does not (at that point, anyways). But he's also got some very strong views on How Relationships Work, and I think the idea of one partner cheating on the other genuinely upsets him. (He's always very distressed when Dru does it, certainly.) Plus, Riley cheating on Buffy with vamps is...well, that's just plain a safety hazard.

Dawn is good at manipulating people, yes! And I suspect that's actually a completely natural thing to her, not something the monks put in. She's also good at research and languages, from what I recall; a lot of the fic I've read tends to involve her getting more in-depth on that and helping out on the research end of things.

 

It might well be a bit of both, with our Dawnie - keys are good for manipulating locks, after all, and language and cipher keys are also a thing :p

After all, I don't think it was mentioned anywhere that she was ONLY the key back to Glory's home dimension?

 

It wasn't. In fact, if I remember right, it was said that Dawnie's the key for the whole dang multiverse. Want to hop from one dimension to the next? Use the Key! It'll take you anywhere you want to go! (Which should really make Dawn a much more sought-after commodity, but I suppose it could generally be disbelieved that the Key is even a real thing; Glory wasn't exactly a shining example of sanity and logic, after all.)

 

So I finally caught up on the Buffy comics (still working on the other ones), and Dawn's Key power stuff actually gets some development in Season Ten - she and Xander do a bit of dimension-hopping. Which was cool! But I feel vaguely unsatisfied with the balance of character development to powers/magic/demon-y stuff development. I think maybe it's harder to hit the right emotional notes in comic form than it was in the TV show, or something.

Also stuff like this happens:



Angel, you lying liar. He was murdering people all over Europe for how many decades, and he never killed a single person without being properly introduced first, or looking up their obituary later? Not likely. I mean, I get that he was all about getting up close and personal with his victims, but I don't buy that he never killed someone whose name he never knew.