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

Spoiler: Buffy Season Eight: Part I Can't Remember and I Don't Care Enough to Check

So this is what Joss Whedon does when he doesn't have a limited budget for CGI? Okay. Okay, fine, sure, there's two thousand Slayers only they give up their magic Slayer powers because people are tracking them with it and then the people find them anyway so they have to put on combat helmets (that were in their submarine? I guess??) and grab some guns to fight the military guys with tanks. (How did the U.S. military get tanks into Tibet? Did I mention they were in Tibet, at a magical werewolf retreat?) And then they decide to get the powers BACK but they can't because they didn't just let them go, they fed them to some ancient Tibetan gods, who, it turns out, can be summoned to fight for you if they're mad enough! Only then it turns out the goddesses (?) got out of the wrong side of the bed and can't tell which side they're supposed to be on so they're just stomping EVERYBODY.

Also Riley was totally working for Buffy the whole time, secretly! That's nice, WHERE'S SAM.

Anyway it's been several days since I finished the series, so I've started re-watching and roped my mom it to watch it with me. She's never seen it before so I get to re-watch all my favourite scenes and watch her reactions to them. (Well, except for some where I know what her reaction will be and don't care to see it.) We're watching Never Kill a Boy on the First Date next. Until then, who wants to distract me from the comic by telling me about:

1) Your favourite characters and why they are the best
2) Your favourite Buffy fanfics and why they are the best (links please)
3) Literally anything Buffy-related you want to

?

 

(I totally have to post my favourite caps from the Buffy comics. Not spoilery, just hilarious)

*edit* well... kinda spoilery, but not like "dammit you ruined the story", more like "mentions things that I had no idea would happen because that's just fucking ridiculous" kinda spoilers?

 

I don't think spoilers are a problem, really, I haven't seen anyone saying they haven't watched the whole thing and need things tagged. I'm still spoiler-tagging comic stuff 'cause it seems like that's not as widely-read, but I think everything else is fair game?

Edit: Of course if someone wants spoiler-y stuff put under a cut they can let us know. But for now I think it's not necessary!

Edit, son of edit: Wow I don't have reading comprehension, I missed that you specifically said caps from the comics. I think the kind of thing you're talking about is fine without spoiler-ing, too. I was only hiding stuff I thought was plot-significant, myself. Post away!

 

Yup! ^^

Edit: I don't recommend clicking the link unless you have an ad-blocking addon installed, apparently it's full of popups.

 

Spoiler: Buffy Season Eight

So I've finished Season Eight and I'm. Just. What.

It turns out that Twilight, the mysterious villain who's been working with Amy and Warren and the military, is actually Angel! Surprise! Angel was doing villain stuff for ... some reason, I don't know. Also he has superpowers, and so does Buffy, so they screw a new universe into existence, that's a thing that happens. Then Angel is like "hey let's live happily ever after in our beautiful new world" and Buffy is like "the old universe is being overrun by hordes of demons who are trying to kill my friends so I'll maybe take a raincheck on the staying in the new universe twiddling my thumbs while they all die horribly thing" and Angel is like "):" and then they go back to the old universe and kill a lot of demons really hard. Then Spike shows up in a really large steampunk golfball airship manned by insect demons, and tells Buffy that there's this thing, like a sort of shiny floating red oval underneath the Sunnydale crater, that's the source of all magic on Earth, and some people want to destroy it, and some people don't, and I forget who and why because I was sort of skimming at this point. Anyway Angel gets possessed by the spirit of the new universe, I think, and he kills Giles and then Buffy destroys the source of all magic and that prevents any new demons from opening portals from hell dimensions and coming to Earth, so that sort of puts things back to normal, which I approve of. Overall: sorta confused but glad that it looks like there won't be so many armies in Season Nine. I don't know why, but armies make it feel less Buffy-ish.

 

So Season Nine is shaping up to be much more like the TV series in tone, which I like, but I'm taking a break from comic-reading to do some fanfiction-reading. I'm learning some interesting things! For example:

• Somewhere out there in some fandom there's a character named Spike who is much more cool and much less emotionally compromised than the Spike from BtVS, and he spends a lot of time romancing Buffy in BtVS fanfic. Who is this suave, intelligent gentleman, who is also sometimes a charming, villainous mastermind. Where did he come from. What did he do with the real Spike.
  
• Man, some people really hate Riley. I mean I don't like him much myself but I haven't seen anyone get the Ron the Death Eater treatment this hard since, well, Ron.
• Xander and Anya basically don't exist.
• Giles, Willow, and Tara exist, but only so that Giles can frown sternly at Buffy and disapprove of her actions, while Willow and Tara hold hands in the background and occasionally Willow does magic to help the plot move along.
• Dawn and Joyce only exist to feed not!Spike hot chocolate when he comes around for his regular Buffy stalking visits to ease his innocent longing for friendly companionship.
  
• I am clearly reading all the wrong fanfictions but I don't know where the right ones are. Help?

Also I've discovered I really hate the vampire purring trope, it is a big no for me.

On the other hand I still love Buffy crossovers (I was reading them long before I ever watched the series). Just finished Legend, in which Buffy wakes up three hundred some years in the future on the starship Enterprise. It's a TNG crossover so I don't really know the cast or canon (I've only watched TOS) but it was a pretty fun read even if the writing felt a bit stilted. Plus, Buffybot also made it to the future. There's some material from the comics as well as the TV series, and the author meshed the two canons together interestingly.

 

I think one of my favourite BtVS characters is Willow, and I wish her characterization hadn't slid sideways so much near the end. (I sorta...generically dislike most of the guys Buffy ends up with, on grounds of "holy shit, how are none of you actually good enough". I loathe Angel, on grounds of "oh my god, why are you such a creeper, stop stalking the teenager, you are two hundred years older than her, stoppit". Riley can go step on a lego, on grounds of being a petty jackass who couldn't get over not being as strong and special as his girlfriend.)

Re: Riley getting Ron the Death Eater treatment - I think a lot of that has to do with how Riley was, from what I recall, built up to be The One; the guy who Buffy would finally be able to settle down with and plan a future with, and a shieldmate who could be at her side in battle and who would understand what she was dealing with. Aaaand then he had fits of jealousy and rage over 1) Buffy being more powerful than him (which he never really got over), and 2) Buffy being able to go "okay, not all demons are a threat, some of them are benign, prioritize going after the ones that are a threat" and not just arguing with him but flat-out stopping him when he tried to attack some half-demon in the dive bar Spike frequented. (And also I don't think he ever really got past Maggie's death, especially since it was initially set up to look like Buffy had done it.) And he kept being a petty dick to Spike, at a point where Spike was trying to show that he was trying to work with the Scoobies, and just...generally didn't cope well with the fact that Buffy had been doing the exact same thing he was, but with less support and more successfully, since she was a lot younger.
And then he did stupid shit to try and get powerful enough to match Buffy (which didn't work, and resulted in him being sick as hell). And then he cheated on Buffy, with vampires, and she found this out from Spike. And then he gave her an ultimatum, when she revealed that she knew he'd been cheating on her, and then he fucked off before she could actually have enough time to make up her mind. (And Xander...urged her to go make up with Riley, I think because he saw Riley as the closest he'd ever get to being with Buffy himself; he didn't really listen to Buffy, when she tried to explain the problem she and Riley were having.)

So how fandom views him tends to be a bit...divided. And generally trends more negative, because not only did he treat Buffy terribly, but the writers treated Buffy terribly in later episodes and had him come back with a hot new wife (Sam), and a great job, and generally with his life (on surface level) being together and going awesome, while Buffy...was working at a fast food restaurant to try and make ends meet so that she and Dawn could keep the family house, and so that Buffy wouldn't lose Dawn, and Buffy was visibly self-conscious about everything (as she would be).

Spike's portrayal, I think, is based off of how he views himself and how he's perceived. Because he does try, very hard, to put on an image of being cool, suave, and intelligent (and he is at least that last one), and he is capable of putting together very competent plans when he takes the time. Plans that would even work, if not for Buffy blundering into the middle of them, and sometimes managing to completely screw things up for him just by being a random element. It's just that later on in the series, he sort of gives up on trying for plans that take longer than a night or two to put together and pull off, because he's realized that even if he manages to keep things hidden from Buffy and the rest of the Scoobies, she'll manage to fuck things up for him somehow. And then he ends up being on the side of the Scoobies, and is forced onto a path where he has to start becoming a better person. And then late season 6 or so, the writers sorta looked up and realized that a lot of the fandom liked Spike, were horrified by this, and went "okay, we have to make him as unlikeable as possible" and fumbled the execution (not that I think there's...really any good way for them to have pulled it off, that far into what turned out to be an entirely accidental redemption arc), and went down the route of deliberately redeeming him by having him go get his soul back, and then being pants-on-head crazy for a while. Because apparently being re-ensouled does that.

 

Oh, yikes. I should have mentioned that I've only visited that site using browsers with the Adblock Plus addon or some other ad blocker installed so I have no idea what kinds of ads and popups you might see there. Sorry!

 

It looks like there's one for Android? And one for iOS. I'm not completely sure that Adblock Plus is the one I was using because I have different ones on different browsers, but it's worth a try!

 

Yeah, I just re-watched some early episodes from season four and I had forgotten how nice Riley was initially - all open and honest and dependable, kinda the anti-Angel I guess. And then it turns out, not so open and honest after all (for good reason! Being open and honest about everything doesn't mix well with being a top secret government dude), and apparently the dependability came with a side of "completely loses it if not depended upon to his satisfaction". And when things got bad for him, he blamed Buffy, who had enough problems without him acting like it was her fault that he couldn't handle his insecurities like a grownup.

I was pretty glad that Riley apparently went on to get his life together and get married and so on. I mean, it was rough for Buffy to see that and compare it to her trainwreck of a life. But I think it gave her closure at the same time? If she had never seen him again, or if he had shown up all miserable and you-ruined-my-life-and-I-can't-forget-about-you, I think it would have been worse for her in the long run.

...Still, it's pretty annoying that he gets to clean up his act (hopefully? apparently?) and move on, and Buffy gets to ... keep struggling with the weight of two worlds on her shoulders, and none of her friends able to support enough of that weight for her to have space to breathe and recover, and a not-boyfriend whose idea of a happy ending is dragging her down into the dark with him. Okay, I'm getting mad just thinking about it. Why is everyone so mean to Buffy? She only saves the world like ten times before breakfast every day, you'd think the movers and shakers of the Buffyverse would have a soft spot for her by now.

Yeah, Spike's not stupid. I think what I'm seeing in fanfic are portrayals of him that miss how entirely controlled by his emotions he is for almost the whole series. His emotional impulses are only trumped by other, stronger emotional impulses - he hates Buffy's guts but he'll team up with her to take down Angelus because he loves Drusilla more; he despises the Scoobies but he'll go to them for help because he fears being weak and starving and alone with the Initiative after him more.

The first sign of any kind of restraint we see from him is when he starts having to decide if indulging in his desire for violence is worth the pain from the chip. Then in seasons five and six there's the occasional refraining-from-doing-something-because-it-would-upset-Buffy, which may not count, because it could be argued that seeing Buffy upset pains him, and so he's simply prioritising his desire-not-to-be-hurt-emotionally over less important things like desire-not-to-be-tortured-horribly. (This could go for the chip, too - could just be prioritising desire-to-not-be-hurt over desire-to-hurt-others.) And he still does things that hurt her if he wants to badly enough (or makes up his mind that it's not really going to hurt her that much). Season seven, the soul introduces empathy and guilt (for people other than Buffy) into the mix, plus a desire to do good, and that's really the first time, I think, that we see him restraining his emotional impulses for any reason other than "doing this will result in more unpleasantness for me than the unpleasantness of refraining from doing it".

I kind of forgot where I was going with this. Uh ... right, fanfiction. All that was to say that I think what's bugging me about some portrayals of Spike is that they're soulless versions of him written with the pre-soul swagger and the emotional control that I'm pretty sure was only possible for him after he got all soul-y and had some altruism to balance out the impulsiveness.

 

Things I almost stuck in the above post but it was getting really long anyway:

• What exactly is a soul in the Buffyverse? It doesn't seem to be a person's mind or personality; those sticks with the body, to some extent, when a person gets sired. What they're calling a soul appears to be whatever tiny part of a person it is that makes someone care about right and wrong. So, more like a conscience?
• On a similar note, what exactly is a vampire demon? Stuff in the comics makes it seem like we're talking about an actual, pre-existing extra-dimensional being getting downloaded into a dead person's body, but when you add a soul on top of that, you don't get a body with two consciousnesses.
  
• How the heck does the chip work? So, Spike can't bite anyone because he gets zapped when he tries to bite them, before any biting has actually occurred, but the zapping comes after all other forms of violence against humans. (Although that's not always the case; in The Initiative, he was pretty violent with Willow before he tried to bite her without a peep from the chip.) So what makes the chip prevent biting? Extremely close proximity to humans while having vampire teeth out? Some kind of unseen physical change that occurs immediately before a bite?

 

In case anyone thought I was joking:

Spoiler: Season Nine: Freefall Part Three

The TV show talks about it as an infection of a kind (in The Harvest Giles says "The books tell the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed, infected by the demon's soul. He bit another, and another, and so they walk the Earth, feeding... Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind. Waiting for the animals to die out, and the old ones to return") which fits a lot better with the way we see vampires-with-souls working than the idea that the demon part of a vampire is an actual consciousness separate from what's left of their human self. The dialogue above seems to contradict that. I'm guessing stuff like this is part of why the comics aren't super popular with the fandom?

 

Anyway, I think it's safe to say that the vampires-are-100%-pure-unadulterated-evil-always-and-forever line, which I think was mostly pushed by the Watchers' Council via Giles, is not terribly accurate. There's a pretty big range of evil just in the four vampires who get significant storylines in BtVS and AtS, from Darla, who has no problem leaving Angelus to be killed if it means saving her own skin, to Spike, who goes from "I think I should chain Buffy up and threaten to kill her if she doesn't say she likes me, that is definitely a good way to encourage progress in our relationship" to "I hurt Buffy so now it's time to risk my unlife for a chance at being the kind of guy who wouldn't hurt Buffy" in the course of what, a season and a half? Even though he apparently thought the soul would convince her to take him back, that's a level of self-sacrifice that doesn't exactly scream pure evil.

Crack theory: The demon-ness passed along in a vampire's blood gets diluted with each generation of vampires. So Darla is less of a demon than the Master, Angelus is less of a demon than Darla, Drusilla is less of a demon than Angelus, and Spike's barely a demon at all, which explains why he was so William-y at first and had to take lessons in How to Properly Evil.

...Hm. Sudden urge to see if I can find fanfiction where Drusilla gets a soul.

 

Tbh, I think Dru with a soul would probably just go from 'word-salad-crazy and sadistic-homocidal' to 'rocking in the corner sobbing and trying to kill herself at every last opportunity'. Angelus did make a real effort to do a number on her sanity and self-worth, after all. He wanted someone precog/psychic like her helpless enough to be easily aimed. Re-souled Spike would probably care enough to work with her, but I can't imagine Angel, no matter how guilty he felt, would do anything but hardcore trigger her with his presence.

Also, I've always found it interesting that the main-character vampires in the whole series are all from the same clade/line.

Sidenote: I've been rewatching the TV-series because I'm laid up with a sprained ankle, and Restless (the last ep of season 4) is still my favourite, because I love surreal/dream shit.

(Quoth my mum - "Why is Spike on a swing?")

 

Also double-post - I've always thought that the reason Dru is shown in season five to have turned Spike but he names Angel as his sire in his first ever episode in S2 is because while Drusilla might have been interested in having a 'baby' herself, she has neither the focus nor the presence of mind to teach him important things and bring him his first meal and stuff like that, you know?

 

i just started this show! i actually tried watching it like.... a few years ago but i recently started back up again and im!!!

 

Personally, I'd advise just skipping Season 1 like I did and come back for it later - Season 2 is where it really hits its stride and that was what really got me into it :P