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thedeadlyhook... from the Palm Springs trip, and it might be awhile before I'm fully caught up, but first off, a huge THANK YOU to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
herself_nyc for the extra months of paid LJ time - the best motivation there is to get me to do more writing. You're the best, sweetie! (smooch)
There'll be more to come about the desert-y trip, along with a few pictures, but in the meantime, I'm sure you've all been breathless to hear my reactions to the Buffy Season 8 comic.
Um. Okay. Let's bullet point it. It'll be faster.
• Resurrected Skinless Warren as the new Big Bad? Right, I've seen that movie already, and it's called Hellraiser. Also, now I'm REALLY wondering why Amy AND Warren would be after Buffy and not Willow.
• Buffy's dream. Oh, wait, not a dream. Dreamspace. Which has never been mentioned before in the entire run of the series, despite the fact that Buffy's once-important Slayer dreams would've been a great window into this idea. Oh-kkaaaaay. Unproductive, but whatever. Let's move on.
• Ethan Rayne. Well, that was... lame. Dracula would've actually been funny, and given the "my love" comment some meat, rather than just making a weak joke about Britishisms. And allowing for some slight 'shipper bait with Buffy reacting to Ethan's use of 'pet.' Eyeroll.
• The Threesome. Riiight. Look, I'm not going to go into huge detail analyzing the content of Buffy's dream - yeah yeah, I'm sure you've all seen the picture by now, Buffy in a sandwich with her two hot vampires - and I don't think it was meant to be analyzed. It's meant to be laughed off, like everything else to do with Buffy now, apparently. (I'll get to more detail on that in a minute.) But two things about it: 1) Unless someone can show me an Alan Moore-style script detailing every item in this image, it's a picture, which means you should credit the artist for its specific content, not Joss (including every piece of wank about whose hands are where and who's looking at who - that's the art, folks, the art) and 2) maybe this is just me being aware of the comic audience not being the usual fan space, but it seemed to me that as of this issue, Joss is really going out of his way to encourage some Beavis & Butt-Head-style gratuitous snickering over Buffy, the Vampire Layer. Again, it's the artist I can probably blame for the specific imagery (Elmer Fudd cherubs? Exploding volcanos and a train going into the tunnel at both ends?) but Joss gets to take the credit for presenting this fantasy, for all its chains and the naughty-nurse outfit, as something from which Buffy does the big scaredy runaway, which doesn't do a ton for her characterization as a sexually emancipated female any more than her dream of popping Xander's head off did. At best, Buffy is coming off as kind of childish here. For truth in advertising, this comic really should be called "Willow the Witch" or "Xander, International Man of Mystery" for all that Buffy seems to be the resolute, action-packed star.
• On that note: also color me not thrilled that Buffy now needs Ethan Rayne to provide a tour of her own subconscious. Because self-guided tours apparently aren't enough for some girl to understand the landscape of her own mind, tee hee. She needs it explained to her. By a man.
• You may have started to notice I'm still having the feminist issues. Wow, Buffy funny! She hit her head on wall, GO BOOM!! So silly! But Xander shout orders and take charge! Ethan Rayne deliver a big long intellectual lecture! Amy get steppped on!
Seriously, though, who in this issue is talking on the phone, having plotsy conversations? Why, Giles and Andrew, of course! (The art is still with the unrecognizable on both of these characters, but at least Giles's glasses are helpful - Andrew desperately needs some identifying marker, like a new nerdy T-shirt per issue.) So far, Willow seems to be the only female character with an all-access pass to being powerful without being made fun of, although I can't say I was pleased by her characterization either. She makes a crude sexual joke at Dawn's expense, and then a cruel joke about Kennedy being dead - hey, just checking, wasn't Willow supposed to like Kennedy? There's fan bait, and then there's stuff that just makes the characters look bad, and that's what I'm getting here, and ditto with Xander's skeevy joke about how he wants in on the "girl parts." Xander, you're creeping me out.
• Actually, there's a fair amount creeping me out in this issue - we got two Make Love Not War! joke resolutions: the 'may I have this dance' ending to a zombie attack story (LAME. Plus, there's nothing icky about that zombies suddenly being all gentlemanly, all Prince Charming at the ball, for a throwaway panel, is there? IS THERE?!?), and the "true love" kiss. Right, fine, I'd expected all along that we'd get handed a fakeout for that one, but dude, that was even weaker than I expected. I mean, visualize a room that's 99.9% full of women and a .1 male remainder, and if you close your eyes and imagine somebody truly in love kissing Buffy, you have two options. One of them makes a lot of young men do the aforementioned Beavis & Butt-Head. Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh.
Joss, my dear, I'm already getting tired of your inner 15-year-old boy. Especially since MY inner 15-year-old boy would've liked to have seen more butt-kicking girls fighting the zombie army.
• And Andrew is so NOT GAY, PEEPULS! HE'S UP IN UR ROOM, STRIP POKRING WITH UR SLAYRS. Because all hot superhero chicks REALLY WANNA take it off for Star Wars trivia-spouting supernerds. I've seen it happen at Comic-Con, ALL THE TIME!!! GIRLZ GONE WILD!!!
You may get the impression that I wasn't too impressed with this issue.
Yeah. Well. I wasn't. It was not terribly well paced, there were a lot of ass-pulls on the dramatic wrapups, and it feebed out on nearly every opportunity to reveal something actually interesting with the characters. Buffy still isn't the hero of her own book - she seems to have been completely reimagined as a hybrid of Gunn and Dawn, the fighting muscle who is also menaced in order to get the plot rolling along. And I gotta say, Buffy's-in-jeopardy-it-must-be-the-Wednesday-of-the-month-when-new-comics-get-shelved doesn't quite have the same postmodern ironic ring.
And the weirdest thing about all this is that I can't help but think that if this story were done by any other writer except Joss, fandom would be up in arms. It's only because it's Joss that he can get away with reducing them like this, making Buffy look silly and having the Scoobies make masturbation jokes. Other writers would likely have too much respect for the characters... or might have, before this. Now it's okay.
I dunno if I'm going to be following much more of this. There's "adult" content here, if you count Buffy's nekkid dream imaginings, but not an adult story - the TV show was written at the level of Joss's inner 25-year-old at least, while this feels inescapably teenaged. And while I can applaud Joss's insistence (in an interview I could probably dig up, if I googled it) that comic Buffy be drawn as a bubble-breasted, thong-wearing supermaiden, he shouldn't break his arm patting himself on the back TOO hard if the only replacement for that is objectifying her in other ways, making her out to be an airheaded ditz that actual effective people either target or protect. There was the same bad taste in my mouth after this issue as the episode "As You Were," where Buffy was presented as someone to feel sorry for.
Canon arguments aside, I'm really not seeing a lot of college-level courses having quite as much to say about the feminism of these comics in the future as there has been for the TV show. Unless it's subject like "How the Feminist Backlash Has Co-Opted the Icons of Modern Feminism."
Huh. Maybe *I* oughtta write that paper.
herself_nyc for the extra months of paid LJ time - the best motivation there is to get me to do more writing. You're the best, sweetie! (smooch)There'll be more to come about the desert-y trip, along with a few pictures, but in the meantime, I'm sure you've all been breathless to hear my reactions to the Buffy Season 8 comic.
Um. Okay. Let's bullet point it. It'll be faster.
• Resurrected Skinless Warren as the new Big Bad? Right, I've seen that movie already, and it's called Hellraiser. Also, now I'm REALLY wondering why Amy AND Warren would be after Buffy and not Willow.
• Buffy's dream. Oh, wait, not a dream. Dreamspace. Which has never been mentioned before in the entire run of the series, despite the fact that Buffy's once-important Slayer dreams would've been a great window into this idea. Oh-kkaaaaay. Unproductive, but whatever. Let's move on.
• Ethan Rayne. Well, that was... lame. Dracula would've actually been funny, and given the "my love" comment some meat, rather than just making a weak joke about Britishisms. And allowing for some slight 'shipper bait with Buffy reacting to Ethan's use of 'pet.' Eyeroll.
• The Threesome. Riiight. Look, I'm not going to go into huge detail analyzing the content of Buffy's dream - yeah yeah, I'm sure you've all seen the picture by now, Buffy in a sandwich with her two hot vampires - and I don't think it was meant to be analyzed. It's meant to be laughed off, like everything else to do with Buffy now, apparently. (I'll get to more detail on that in a minute.) But two things about it: 1) Unless someone can show me an Alan Moore-style script detailing every item in this image, it's a picture, which means you should credit the artist for its specific content, not Joss (including every piece of wank about whose hands are where and who's looking at who - that's the art, folks, the art) and 2) maybe this is just me being aware of the comic audience not being the usual fan space, but it seemed to me that as of this issue, Joss is really going out of his way to encourage some Beavis & Butt-Head-style gratuitous snickering over Buffy, the Vampire Layer. Again, it's the artist I can probably blame for the specific imagery (Elmer Fudd cherubs? Exploding volcanos and a train going into the tunnel at both ends?) but Joss gets to take the credit for presenting this fantasy, for all its chains and the naughty-nurse outfit, as something from which Buffy does the big scaredy runaway, which doesn't do a ton for her characterization as a sexually emancipated female any more than her dream of popping Xander's head off did. At best, Buffy is coming off as kind of childish here. For truth in advertising, this comic really should be called "Willow the Witch" or "Xander, International Man of Mystery" for all that Buffy seems to be the resolute, action-packed star.
• On that note: also color me not thrilled that Buffy now needs Ethan Rayne to provide a tour of her own subconscious. Because self-guided tours apparently aren't enough for some girl to understand the landscape of her own mind, tee hee. She needs it explained to her. By a man.
• You may have started to notice I'm still having the feminist issues. Wow, Buffy funny! She hit her head on wall, GO BOOM!! So silly! But Xander shout orders and take charge! Ethan Rayne deliver a big long intellectual lecture! Amy get steppped on!
Seriously, though, who in this issue is talking on the phone, having plotsy conversations? Why, Giles and Andrew, of course! (The art is still with the unrecognizable on both of these characters, but at least Giles's glasses are helpful - Andrew desperately needs some identifying marker, like a new nerdy T-shirt per issue.) So far, Willow seems to be the only female character with an all-access pass to being powerful without being made fun of, although I can't say I was pleased by her characterization either. She makes a crude sexual joke at Dawn's expense, and then a cruel joke about Kennedy being dead - hey, just checking, wasn't Willow supposed to like Kennedy? There's fan bait, and then there's stuff that just makes the characters look bad, and that's what I'm getting here, and ditto with Xander's skeevy joke about how he wants in on the "girl parts." Xander, you're creeping me out.
• Actually, there's a fair amount creeping me out in this issue - we got two Make Love Not War! joke resolutions: the 'may I have this dance' ending to a zombie attack story (LAME. Plus, there's nothing icky about that zombies suddenly being all gentlemanly, all Prince Charming at the ball, for a throwaway panel, is there? IS THERE?!?), and the "true love" kiss. Right, fine, I'd expected all along that we'd get handed a fakeout for that one, but dude, that was even weaker than I expected. I mean, visualize a room that's 99.9% full of women and a .1 male remainder, and if you close your eyes and imagine somebody truly in love kissing Buffy, you have two options. One of them makes a lot of young men do the aforementioned Beavis & Butt-Head. Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh.
Joss, my dear, I'm already getting tired of your inner 15-year-old boy. Especially since MY inner 15-year-old boy would've liked to have seen more butt-kicking girls fighting the zombie army.
• And Andrew is so NOT GAY, PEEPULS! HE'S UP IN UR ROOM, STRIP POKRING WITH UR SLAYRS. Because all hot superhero chicks REALLY WANNA take it off for Star Wars trivia-spouting supernerds. I've seen it happen at Comic-Con, ALL THE TIME!!! GIRLZ GONE WILD!!!
You may get the impression that I wasn't too impressed with this issue.
Yeah. Well. I wasn't. It was not terribly well paced, there were a lot of ass-pulls on the dramatic wrapups, and it feebed out on nearly every opportunity to reveal something actually interesting with the characters. Buffy still isn't the hero of her own book - she seems to have been completely reimagined as a hybrid of Gunn and Dawn, the fighting muscle who is also menaced in order to get the plot rolling along. And I gotta say, Buffy's-in-jeopardy-it-must-be-the-Wednesday-of-the-month-when-new-comics-get-shelved doesn't quite have the same postmodern ironic ring.
And the weirdest thing about all this is that I can't help but think that if this story were done by any other writer except Joss, fandom would be up in arms. It's only because it's Joss that he can get away with reducing them like this, making Buffy look silly and having the Scoobies make masturbation jokes. Other writers would likely have too much respect for the characters... or might have, before this. Now it's okay.
I dunno if I'm going to be following much more of this. There's "adult" content here, if you count Buffy's nekkid dream imaginings, but not an adult story - the TV show was written at the level of Joss's inner 25-year-old at least, while this feels inescapably teenaged. And while I can applaud Joss's insistence (in an interview I could probably dig up, if I googled it) that comic Buffy be drawn as a bubble-breasted, thong-wearing supermaiden, he shouldn't break his arm patting himself on the back TOO hard if the only replacement for that is objectifying her in other ways, making her out to be an airheaded ditz that actual effective people either target or protect. There was the same bad taste in my mouth after this issue as the episode "As You Were," where Buffy was presented as someone to feel sorry for.
Canon arguments aside, I'm really not seeing a lot of college-level courses having quite as much to say about the feminism of these comics in the future as there has been for the TV show. Unless it's subject like "How the Feminist Backlash Has Co-Opted the Icons of Modern Feminism."
Huh. Maybe *I* oughtta write that paper.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-10 01:33 pm (UTC)