Yep, I remember that thread over at Fer's place - started about a discussion of the soul, as I recall, about where it goes after death.
If, in Joss's mind, religion has no power or meaning, why would all the religious symbolism be even worth using in his show?
That's the question that kept nagging at me, while writing this - why use it? Blade is a story about killing vampires that doesn't use it - it just comes right out and says "forget what you've seen in the movies; crosses and holy water don't work." There's plenty of examples of vampire stories that have been done this way - I don't remember religious items coming up in a lot of modern vampire stories, actually, so why this one? And the answer I kept getting from looking at the show was that because then we get to use all this cool imagey for razzle-dazzle and borrowed resonance while making fun of how stupid religion is at the same time.
t strikes me that if you are writing a show about such big moral/religious concepts as good and evil and redemption and atonement, that at least some spiritual awareness and thought should have gone into it.
Amen to that. This essay was the most even-handed treatment I could manage without starting to froth about how slippery the series got in its final years about definitions of good and evil - at the end of the day, good and evil weren't so much defined by actions as by the labels the "good" characters cared to slap on them. Funnily enough, that kind of thinking does nothing to separate Joss's aethist worldview from that of the kind of repressive Christianity he seems to look down on. It's rather like that truism about those who don't their history are doomed to repeat it; Joss, by not knowing a damn thing about religion, managed to replicate many of its own historical contradictions in his critique of it. There's very little in his philisophy as carried out in the show to separate him from John Calvin.
And that soul quote always drove me insane. Um, something so crucial that it's used as the justification for whether or not a character can be killed in all good conscience, and this we don't bother to define? Again, if you believe the soul is hokum, that there's no such thing, why not make that part of the point of the series? Why keep upholding it as real?
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Date: 2005-01-02 10:57 am (UTC)If, in Joss's mind, religion has no power or meaning, why would all the religious symbolism be even worth using in his show?
That's the question that kept nagging at me, while writing this - why use it? Blade is a story about killing vampires that doesn't use it - it just comes right out and says "forget what you've seen in the movies; crosses and holy water don't work." There's plenty of examples of vampire stories that have been done this way - I don't remember religious items coming up in a lot of modern vampire stories, actually, so why this one? And the answer I kept getting from looking at the show was that because then we get to use all this cool imagey for razzle-dazzle and borrowed resonance while making fun of how stupid religion is at the same time.
t strikes me that if you are writing a show about such big moral/religious concepts as good and evil and redemption and atonement, that at least some spiritual awareness and thought should have gone into it.
Amen to that. This essay was the most even-handed treatment I could manage without starting to froth about how slippery the series got in its final years about definitions of good and evil - at the end of the day, good and evil weren't so much defined by actions as by the labels the "good" characters cared to slap on them. Funnily enough, that kind of thinking does nothing to separate Joss's aethist worldview from that of the kind of repressive Christianity he seems to look down on. It's rather like that truism about those who don't their history are doomed to repeat it; Joss, by not knowing a damn thing about religion, managed to replicate many of its own historical contradictions in his critique of it. There's very little in his philisophy as carried out in the show to separate him from John Calvin.
And that soul quote always drove me insane. Um, something so crucial that it's used as the justification for whether or not a character can be killed in all good conscience, and this we don't bother to define? Again, if you believe the soul is hokum, that there's no such thing, why not make that part of the point of the series? Why keep upholding it as real?