In which I blink my eyes, and three months have gone by

[thedeadlyhook]

Figures that the moment I actually find the time, energy, and something to say on LJ the damn journal chooses to all but shut down. I mean, just getting this text to post has been like fighting a siege.

Seriously, is it just me? My computer is a few years old and not running the latest browser, plus I recently let my account lapse from paid to free (due to financial woes with which I will not bore you), but hoo-boy, those advertisements are browser speed killers. I'm running NoScript to block the worst of it, but it's still bad - if I were a newbie looking for a journal right now, and the community I was eager to commune with wasn't already there, I wouldn't like twice at LiveJournal, not when I can get ad-free accounts elsewhere: Blogger, Twitter, Dreamwidth, etc. Video and audio ads! Jeebus! Facebook is certainly as irritating as hell with its ad content, but at least it's never thrown audio at me. Yikes. Fail, LJ. Gigantic fail.

Sigh. Does that whole invite thing still apply for Dreamwidth?

Anyway, on to the main event. Do I even dare comment on the current Buffy Season 8 hijinkery? Can I resist?

First, fair warning: I haven't read the actual issue. But flake_sake's excellent summary gave me a pretty good idea of what's going on, at least enough to make a critique from 30,000 feet, which is about the distance I prefer to view the comics from these days. So... Um. Where to start.

I do feel compelled to continue being tiresome about accredidation in the comics, and point out that, although Joss can plausibly be given credit for the overall story, he isn't actually writing this. Brad Meltzer is. I'm not doing this to nitpick so much as to observe that it's completely in character for Joss to hand off this kind of material - sex, I mean - to someone else. If I think back over Buffy and Angel, I come up with a portrait of a writer who prefers foreplay - he's great at awkward, teenage-y sexual tension - and wreckage of a relationship after it's over, to the sticky, nuts-and-bolts in-and-out (heh) of what goes in between. That part, he typically leaves to others to detail, and I don't think it's an accident that every major relationship I can think of in his catalog is structured in a way to be mostly about the Before and After, with what goes in the middle set on fast-forward, offscreen, fade-to-black, or just not there. (I'm hardly the authority on Firefly or Dollhouse, but I'd be very surprised if they broke this trend.)

Otherwise, I have no opinion to speak of, other than to observe that whenever an author brings a universal force into a story as an explanation, they are basically talking about themselves - to a fictional universe, the author is, after all, the only God. So what we have here is basically a story about how this is happening because that's what "the universe" wants to happen. Even if that doesn't make a lick of sense. So, um, there. *eyeroll* It's not an elegant plot structure, and I've only ever seen it used effectively maybe once or twice, most notably in that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which Beverly Crusher creates a shrinking bubble universe consisting of her own fears of people disappearing.

And given that observation, I do begin to suspect that the whole thing is a dream. Maybe Buffy's been asleep since the original storyline. (Srsly, Love's True Kiss?) This would make the intervening issues be All About Buffy's Hopes and Fears - a potentially good storyline - explain a lot of cracktastic craziness, generally remove the problem of Angel being so out of character as to be unrecognizable, and confirm that even Buffy's most wish-fulfill-y fantasies about having it off with Angel include squicky reservations about him possibly being evil and "the universe" conspiring to remove all choice from her menu of options. On the other hand, that would also make it a story about the nutty junk inside Buffy's head (Women, eh?) and a comic book imitation of a TV trope at that. (Although neither of those erases it as a possibility.)

That said, I don't actually expect it to be a dream. It's more likely that the whole idea of "the universe" causing things to happen because of "balance" is so coded into the show's DNA that it's now the default explanation. I hated that tie-in book Queen of the Slayers for making similar suggestions about the mechanics of the Buffy world, but with this, I might just have to throw up my hands and admit that this story apparently has no place for free will. And that's sad.

Otherwise, I've missed so many birthdays as to really not be funny. Very Belated Very Happy Birthdays to danceswitwords, asta77, rahirah, sangueuk, makd, paratti, calove, goldenusagi, crackers4jenn, constance_b, revdorothyl, irfikos, entrenous88, sharelle, quinara, eowyn_315, and Happy Birthday in advance (tomorrow) to evilawyer!!!

Comments

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

Ohmigod. I think I would've preferred not seeing.

You're probably right on the money with the Galactica reference. I remembering thinking that "Chosen" came off a bit like JW had just seen Lord of the Rings; now all the exposition in this makes me think he's just mainlined Galactica, and was thus inspired to misinterpret evolution. But the sex is just... silly, really. It plays like a joke, albeit of the sort of potty-mouthed fanboy variety. So glad to see Buffy's love life reduced to the same level as jokes about Captain America's shield. That has dignity.

But if boinking is the key to opening the dimensional portals and letting the Old Ones back in, does this mean we need to go back and reevaluate seven seasons' worth of Hellmouth symbology?

So... the Hellmouth was always meant to be a vagina, giving birth to monsters? But then there's the Slayer with her phallic symbol stake and... yeah, shutting up now.

[toysdream.livejournal.com]

I recall some of our long-ago discussions about how Buffy, whose mission in life is to hunt down the Children of the Night and penetrate them with a big woody phallus, could be seen as a masculinized agent of the patriarchy. (An Auntie Tom, if you will.) So her secondary role in "keeping the Hellmouth closed," i.e. preventing the womb of the demonic Earth Mother from spewing forth legions of demons, seems perfectly compatible with that.

In both cases, she's upholding the supremacy of male symbols (the sun, pointy sticks, axes with pointy stick attachments) over female ones (night, the moon, Earth, caves, magic manhole covers) to keep the world safe for Old White Men In Suits. I guess there was always a limit to how much "subversion" you could read into that, especially after the last couple of seasons did away with all the touchy-feely, consensus-building, empathetic aspects of Buffy's character.

So does that mean Buffy's newfound role as a harbinger of apocalypse, making love not war and opening dimensional portals willy-nilly, actually strikes a blow against the patriarchy? I dunno if I can stretch my formidable powers of rationalization quite that far. :-)

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

One of my bigger issues with the whole Slayer spell idea was that we were told they had "changed the world," and yet when the comic started, we find that everything's right back to the same old status quo: male Watchers, female Slayers, the whole neverending battle of good-vs.-evil still being kept secret for no explicable reason... really not so much with the world-changing. So it's hard for me to see any of this as subversive, especially if you're going to assert that the only effect an army of yin female warriors has on the world is to create some kind of yang counterforce of dedicated villains and a vampire who wants to hit that Slayer booty. Uh-huh.

So would the mystic manhole cover be a diaphragm? And the blood's like... sperm? Clearly I'm thinking about this too hard.

[toysdream.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the status quo as of the start of the Season 8 comic seemed like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." The Watchers Council was back, Xander and Andrew were both in command roles despite their total lack of any qualifications whatsoever, and the "empowered" new Slayers were treated like boot-camp conscripts and disposable cannon fodder. (Which is why I stopped reading it, making my thoughts on the subsequent issues fairly hazy and ill-informed!)

I recall the initial batch of villains were given some sort of cliche "threatened patriarchy" motive, but that's undercut by the eventual revelation that the masked mystery villain they were working for was playing them for suckers all along. For all their talk of "changing the world," did Buffy and friends ever really pose a threat to the status quo, or was that just something Twangel used to manipulate his scaredy-cat henchmen? I was kinda hoping they'd rob a lot more banks and really stir things up, but all they ever seemed to do was train and get attacked. Hey, just like the X-Men! Does that mean Twangel is Magneto?

So would the mystic manhole cover be a diaphragm? And the blood's like... sperm? Clearly I'm thinking about this too hard.

Somebody else on this thread mentioned that the manhole ritual in the final episode was meant to be about menstruation, so I don't know where we'd go with that analogy. But if memory serves, earlier in the season the portal was opened with random blood sacrifices - you spill your precious bodily fluid onto the opening, and it pops open to disgorge a baby monster, kinda like putting coins in a Gashapon machine - so sure, the blood = sperm analogy works there. Then we have Glory's bloodletting ritual, which was also about opening dimensional portals and spewing out monsters. As we all know from Ghostbusters, being the Key(master) is an inherently masculine job description. :-)