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btvsats20in20 Round 10: THEMES & CHARACTERS .

Remember that each post has 20 choices for you to make. You will in essence be voting on each icon twice (or not, as the case may be.) Last round we had four participants, this time it's eight. (Count 'em! Eight!) Last round I also waited until the last minute to really and truly promote it which is inexplicable (and inexcusable) given the amount of time and care that goes into making the entries. This round, I intended to promote early and often.

Also inexcusable and inexplicable? I never showed off the lovely awards banners

starry_night made for me, nor did I properly thank her and everyone who came out to vote in Round 9. So herewith, the banners (click to view full-size):

starry_night knows what I like, and I love the Summers women, oh I do indeed. These banners are so pretty, soft and feminine; you'd never know that the context of both of these is sacrifice, death and grief. More images after the cut:

In terms of Joyce especially this was a "transitional" round for me. Up to this point I'd not done any icons of Joyce alive successfully, only as a body, a ghost, an absence; even if she was alive, her face was out of the frame (6-10 below from Round 5.) I made one last try at the "Buffy & her dead mother" theme ("Shocking") but also two of Joyce from Blood Ties (Category 1 & AC1): alive, warm, a bit careworn and worried for her daughters. I've been wanting to for ages, inspired by

debris4spike's Joyce icons that captured her elegance and beauty; but I couldn't quite "grasp" her somehow, not until this round.

I really hesitated about the "Shocking" icon.

iconsoleander did such beautiful, heartrending icons for The Gift (particularly her Category set) in Round 2 last July and I still had those in mind as examples I couldn't hope to improve upon. But I also had in mind the Buffy & (dead) Joyce icons I made for Challenge 37 of

slayerstillness back in December (1-5). As I recall I was mourning a friend here on LJ who I thought had died 0 then discovered they hadn't, setting off another round of mourning of a different sort.

1 - 6

7 - 12

I think I may prefer the SS ones aesthetically, but I've gotten this award and more to the point, I'm making icons of Joyce as a living person, I'm reading

velvetwhip's gorgeous Answering Prayers, and I am done - for a while at least - the "dead Joyce" theme.

I also hesitated about the Drusilla one for very different reasons. One of course is the very disturbing, phallic imagery, but also the layers of victimhood that form the subtext of this icon. This image captures, to my mind, a lot of the sickness and depravity that Dru has been both a victim and perpetrator of.Vampires are victims, are violated - with the possible exception of Ford in Lie to Me, what vampire in the Buffyverse "agreed" to be killed and turned with anything approaching full knowledge and consent? And Drusilla, sadly, was the one most horribly victimized of the Buffyverse "Fang Gang"; in this shot the tables are turned and she is a victimizer, licking the blood of the dead Slayer Xin Rong off of Spike's finger - and so death, violation, perverse sexuality are interwoven and repeated from person to person, from generation to generation.

"Best Love" was perhaps the biggest surprise of all the ones I won here because it was the simplest Icon I made, the one that had no special effects and I said, oh well, it's not great but it's something, throw it in. No one will look at it. (There's at least one of those in every single round, at least for me. Anyone else?)

Banners by starry_night, do not steal, deface, claim as your own, repost to fanpop.com or any other archives/sites without express permisson of the artist.