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red_satin_doll
"You're standing at the mouth of Hell. And it's about to open up." *
***
"I'm beyond tired. I'm beyond scared.
I'm standing on the mouth of Hell and it's going to swallow me whole. And it'll choke on me." **
* Joss Whedon
** Marti Noxon & Douglas Petrie
** Marti Noxon & Douglas Petrie
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Date: 2013-04-17 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 08:00 pm (UTC)I might like it more if it didn't have cherries on it? Cherries have long been symbols of 1) virginity, and/or 2) sexual desire and fulfillment; so when I saw that print on a dress in which nearly everything is some sort of symbol, I thought "You have got to be kidding me. Really, Joss?"
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Date: 2013-04-17 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 08:38 pm (UTC)I like cherries (esp in RL) so if that dress had shown up in any other episode I wouldn't have given it a second thought. But in an episode screaming "SYMBOLISM!", it's different. I'm actually not crazy about this episode - or at least I like everyone else's dreams but by the time they got to Buffy it was the first time watching the series I actually said aloud "Bored now". (And I was by myself in the room.)
I prefer it when the show weaves the symbolism in for me to find, instead of marking it out with a great big neon sign. (Of course the house falling down in Smashed isn't exactly "subtle" but it still allows for a variety of interpretations as well as the literal level of the story itself. Dream sequences don't work on a "story level" because they are outside the story. I think Dead Things is a masterpiece, but I'm not as crazy about the "dream sequence"; the entire episode has the feeling of a fever dream so ironically sticking a dream sequence into it feels off.)
she wears another cherry dress in The Freshman
She does? I'll look for that on rewatch. I think S4 is extremely underrated.
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Date: 2013-04-17 08:51 pm (UTC)I also think that S4 is underrated. I think it's a nice season to rewatch and I like happy!Buffy. I like all the Scoobies in S4 and I like the stand-alone episodes like Something Blue or Pangs or Hush. I love things that makes me laugh.
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Date: 2013-04-17 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 09:44 pm (UTC)And as
And the introduction of Tara - the first long-term lesbian relationship on TV! You'd think it would have paved the way for more such depictions but - no. It still feels "pioneering" all these years later. The Willow/Tara scenes in Hush and WAY are some of the most erotic of the entire series.
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Date: 2013-04-17 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 10:54 pm (UTC)I'd be fascinated to hear more about your take re: fascism on the show, because I can't pretend to have made a study of it by any means; so what I know is the 101 version. I assume you're referring to the Initiative?
And yes, I agree that Maggie would have made a better big bad for S4, but Lindsay Crouch had to/wanted to leave the show for other projects. I had actually hoped that she would be a role model for Buffy and/or Willow, because mature women on the show are in very short supply. Jenny is killed, Gwendolyn Post is evil, Joyce exists almost entirely as "Mom" and that's really it.
Barring that, Adam could have been a great big bad if they'd handled it right.
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Date: 2013-04-18 09:55 am (UTC)You know, I actually like Adam. It's an interesting creature and the most scary Big Bad. (At least to me. I think he's so scary, brrr!) What did go wrong? I think it was Riley. Professor Walsh was an interesting character and so the concept of the Initiative. IMHO, Riley was the weakest link: we were supposed to being interested in his moral conflict (Buffy VS the Initiative) and being interested in his understanding of the truth and everything ... but we didn't.
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Date: 2013-04-18 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 01:46 pm (UTC)Excellent point. Joss complained later about Riley being a boring character, but that's his job as a writer, to find what is interesting in each character or else what the hell are they there for?
It was Buffy's story that I cared about, and she wasn't particularly emotionally gutted by Adam or the Initiative the way that she had been in previous seasons by the Master, Angelus,and Faith, so there wasn't all that much heart there for me to care about
It's telling that one of my favorite episodes of the season - and one of my favorites of the entire series - is Who Are You, which deals with the fallout of Faith and Buffy's relationship in S4. It's my headcanon that the switch affected Buffy as much as it does Faith. If Faith is altered by being inside Buffy's body and eventually sets herself on the path to redemption, I think the reverse is also true. I don't know if that's canon, but thematically, the episode foreshadows Buffy's increasing darkness, self-doubt, her relationship with Spike in S6 (DT hangs a lantern on this, in fact).
My fondness for S4 stems more perhaps by how the events reverberate through the remaining seasons rather than the season itself. Or, I actually like it quite a bit except for Riley/Adam, so, hmm.
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Date: 2013-04-18 05:30 pm (UTC)Joss also called Riley well-adjusted...which he most certainly wasn't. I can't say as I found him boring, really. It's just he's not the main character and his issues are never really addressed so he just ended up being annoying in many ways.
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Date: 2013-04-18 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 08:20 pm (UTC)I'm not sure if I'd define Riley as "good or bad"; I think he's far more morally ambiguous than he wants to think he is. He wants to see himself as a white hat, but neither does he want to question the system or think about it to hard. As long as he can put things in neat little categories he feels safe. To me in that way he isn't heroic in the way that Buffy and Spike are.
And isn't that at the heart of fascism?
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Date: 2013-04-18 08:30 pm (UTC)It is! Nice catch and nice analysis of Riley. I guess that I see him as "good" because he strongly believes that he's good but he does questionable things and he basically has this strong internal system because he's "the soldier", he's always been the soldier and he will always be. But soldiers are not always heroes.
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Date: 2013-04-18 09:40 pm (UTC)I'm actually cribbing off norwie2010 quite a bit, but thanks!
he's always been the soldier and he will always be. But soldiers are not always heroes.
Might doesn't make right. But if you're carrying the gun, you need to believe that, I think.
I do think he sees himself as lightened and liberal to an extent - liberal but not progressive or transgressive. He admires strong women, he marries someone who is his peer, but he's making adjustments to the system, not radical changes.
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From:no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 04:43 am (UTC)I'm open to negotiation on things like pet snakes and cartilage piercings — but NO DAMN CHERRRIES!
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Date: 2013-04-18 01:50 pm (UTC):) Ironically enough, you just reminded me that when my sweetie and I were first together 17 years ago (I had been a virgin when I met her), "eating strawberries" was our codeword for "making love". I'll leave the "why" to your imagination. So I don't know if that'll affect your feeling on strawberry prints!
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Date: 2013-04-19 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-22 12:58 am (UTC)But then that's your job, isn't it - to protect her? But not protect her too much...and nobody can really tell you how to do it. No user's manual.
I decided in my teens I didn't want to be a parent. Being the oldest of four latchkey kids convinced me of that, and I don't regret it. I would have been utterly clueless, so my hat's off to you for having the courage to raise children, esp a daughter in this day and age. Sex is everywhere, we're saturated in it in ways that would have been unimaginable to me growing up even in the '70's and '80's.
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Date: 2013-04-17 07:57 pm (UTC)I actually used to enjoy wearing long skirts with combat boots and peasant blouses in college because I was enjoying playing with clothes as costumes. (And because I had almost no money and combat boots from the Army surplus store were super cheap and durable.) So there are some rather bizarre choices in S4 but I can identify. Maybe it's part of the "Buffy is trying to find her identity as an adult" idea that I was going through. (Or maybe just some bad choices by the costumers.)
but I loved the way she started dressing in seasons 5-7. It felt like it was the first time Buffy started working what I call "regular clothes", jeans, regular tops, and sweaters that you would actually see in real life, as opposed to many of the bizarre outfits they would put her in early on.
I love her costumes in that period as well. So simple and spartan. (Let's face it - the house scene in Smashes is a 1000x hotter because she's entirely covered up, not despite it. And I love how in that scene and in OMWF, she and Spike are actually colored-matched to one another, and yet it somehow doesn't come off as matchy-matchy.)
I think there is something to this thematically as well, though - it's the period when Buffy has to grow up in a hurry; be a surrogate parent to Dawn, leave college and work, etc; it's her period of downward economic mobility. I also associate this as a contrast to Joyce in the early seasons; it used to annoy me that we rarely saw Joyce work, she was always put-together, the house immaculate, etc; nor did we see her at the gallery. She was as idealized as June Cleaver with her pearls in the 1950's; and maybe it was a blind spot on Joss & ME's part, but in hindsight it actually works very well thematically, at least for me; when I was a kid I certainly had a skewed notion of how hard my mom worked or what her life was actually like, even though we are much lower on the economic ladder than Joyce. It wasn't until I moved out of the house - indeed, until I had to drop out of college - that I really appreciated how hard she worked. And once I had to leave college, the era of clothes as "play" disappeared for the most part. I wear jeans and sweatshirts and the skirts and pretty things rarely come out to play.
Of course Buffy has a much nicer wardrobe than I do, but I think there's something similar here? Playtime is over. (There's also the fact that in S6 after Smashed her clothes are very conservative - she uses clothes to hide rather than reveal her body.)
you didn't see Buffy wearing jeans even once during the high school years
I haven't done enough of a rewatch to double-check that; she does wear a rather utilitarian pair of trousers at the end of Ted (like a more fashionable version of cargo pants); and the overalls and dungarees in Ted, Becoming, Anne, Helpless are more symbolic than anything. (Although I think fandom oversimplifies just what they symbolize.)