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 (And first off, apologies that my formatting here is all over the map.  And I thought LJ was a bitch. Now on the the happy...)

 1) A very happy birthday to local_max (William) today!  I'm very much hoping (when life settles down and the stars align properly) that in the new year we'll be seeing more fics and metas from him, as well as the continuation of the episode reviews on 2maggie2's LJ, to which he adds fresh and provocative insights. His contribution begins with ep 1.05, "Never Kill A Boy on the First Date".   He only has two short buffyverse fics at the moment, both told from Willow's POV: "Closure" is mournful and quietly devastating ("angst" doesn't seem the right word for what he does here), while "Hanakuh Present" is twisty and wicked "oh no you didn't!" fun.

(I don't want to cause you embarrassment, m'dear, but you deserve every word single word of praise.)

2) As a newbie fan to BtVS, I came to the show this year totally unaware of 'ships, 'shipper wars, Spike wars, factions and fractures, etc (and, holy sweet potatoes, the sheer volume of porn!) And am basically rather glad that I missed most of it, to be honest, even if I also missed the boat on the two most fertile periods of fan interaction and creativity so far: during the show's run; and the renewal of interest and activity after the 10th anniversary of WTTH's original airing, or about 2007-2010.

That said, rahirah's metas and commentary on Buffy fandom have been remarkably helpful to give me a brief, incisive run-down on this fandom's history, politics, and personalities. (And that's just the start of her extraordinary contributions to this fandom from "back in the day", including and especially the her epic Barbverse. ) I'm not sure how I missed her comments posted on 12/18  until yesterday, but I think they need to be read by everyone in the fandom, and probably everyone in any fandom. And then taped up to the side of my computer as a reminder to pause, hit delete, and step away from the keyboard when my "feelings" on any subject or especially a character 'verse start to get out of hand, and "Principals" begin to overwhelm my consideration of the people on the receiving end of my rants:

"It's a trifle ironic that a character whose best and noblest trait is her ability to forgive and love her friends, as flawed and fallible as those friends sometimes are, has a fandom that regularly eats its own."  [excerpt, "In Which I Ramble On", 12/18/12]

Very much so.

The sentence above does two things for me personally: First, strikes to the heart of something I have observed in this fandom, that the amount of hatred and lack of forgiveness and understanding for all the characters in the Buffyverse is diametrically opposed to the spirit of the show; we often withhold from these characters the very things they most need, the compassion and tenderness that they long for and lack.  There is more than a shade of difference between holding someone accountable for their own actions and holding it against them forever - an important theme throughout the show, played out in astonishing ways particularly in S7. Is this a reflection of our own lack of compassion for others in real life - or a loud and lusty cry for compassion from others, albeit one that is most like to keep that very thing out of reach?

Second, and I hope Barb will forgive me for this, her summation warms my Buffy-loving heart like a cup of hot cocoa (with extra marshmallows) because yes, as much as I can love or empathize with a fictional character I do love and admire Buffy Anne Summers, in all of her fierce and bitchy, self-absorbed and self-sacrificing glory. And I'm more interested in sharing who and what I love about the show or am interested in exploring further. Yes, I will and do seek out metas that express their love for her, for other characters of the show, for viewpoints I share and identify with. Comfort loves company as much as misery does. And yes I will continue to seek out meta analysis that challenges me to enlarge and redefine my own viewpoints.  If I find meta or fic that rubs me the wrong way because their viewpoint is very far removed from my own, or I get involved in those toxic conversations that Barb describes, "I'm right and you're wrong and here's why!" I'll make a greater effort press the back button and go elsewhere. 

Just, please, for the love of Buffy, keep me away from the fandom wars, the 'shipping wars, the whomever-or-whatever wars. If you love Riley, or ship Buffy/Angel, then follow your heart and do so to the "top of your bent". I'll be over here with my arms wrapped around S5-7 as tightly as I can, including Dead Things (especially Dead Things). I'll tell anyone in earshot that S4 is underrated (Cave!Buffy for the win!), rewatch S1-3 and - who knows? Maybe, someday, I'll even learn to like Angel. Stranger things have happened.  (Just don't hold me to that last one, ok?)

1) I started a DW account - basically because I wanted to read snowpuppies' fics, and now I'm wondering - me, two journals, and ADD-ish-ness.  A potentially bad idea? (Especially given that I still have almost 200 replies from other people on my LJ that I still haven't responded to.)  Is there any point in reposting the metas I've done here, as a lot of your with DW journals do?  I guess I'll have to see what I can handle, brain-wise. 

2) Speaking of snowpuppies', her short fics  "Fractured" and "Innocence (The Remix)" are two of my favorite stories in this fandom.  Pretty much everything she writes is awesome. "Lilies" was one of the two inspirations for my own fic "Untitled (post-The Gift)", but those are my two favorites of her stories. Both AU stories spinning off from different points in the series - but totally plausible in context, thanks to VIVID and well-observed characterization. So much angst I can cut it with a knife, and disturbing imagery.  And neither one is kind to Angel.  (Which is probably not a problem with most of my flist.  Just sayin'.)

"Fractured", AU from "Bargaining" reads almost like a horror movie at first  (what if Buffy came back really wrong?) which is fitting, since the concept of Buffy was originally about playing with horror movie tropes. "Innocence" is exactly what it sounds like, a revisioning of the episode of the same name. It includes graphic sex and dubious consent - which I normally don't care for in fanfics -  but this is not porn. It's disturbing and uncomfortable and traumatic for the characters and it's SUPPOSED to be.  This isn't about the reader getting off on a character being humiliated, which is something that makes me extremely uncomfortable. There's no comfort to this hurt. Both function, in my head at least, as meta commentary on both the show and on fanfic tropes: Buffy as victim, the tendancy of the men in Buffy's life to try to control her because they "know what's best for her", the destructiveness of Buffy/Angel, as well as Buffy/Angelus.

And, "Fractured" is compassionate towards Angel without letting him off the hook for his flaws, his myopia; and I actually felt sorry for him - and for everyone who becomes a victim of his well-meaning intentions in this story. Quite the feat.

Note to self: Try rewatch an episode before writing meta about it.  Because I rewatched "Anne" this morning, and it's even better than I remembered.  In fact, I can say that it and "Bargaining" are my favorite season openers. 

(Note to everyone else: I cannot get the lj cut tag to work, in either rich text or html, even after much effort.  So I apologize for this all showing up on the Friends page. I assume you still love me anyway, gentle reader.)

I mentioned yesterday that "Anne" is an encapsulation of S6's theme of Buffy's depression in a single episode. Watching it again this morning, for the first time since I finished the series, I realized that it's an encapsulation of pretty much the entire seven seasons, (And it captures pretty much everything that makes it my favorite TV show ever: humor and drama in perfect balance, wonderful character work, and a kick-ass fight scene.) 

( Are you seated comfortably? )

First off, there's a lot going on in this episode, such as economic class issues, personified later in the season by Faith; and Xander and Cordy's difficult relationship, characterized by avoidance, dislike, insults and sex that masks genuine affection (shades of Buffy and Spike, anyone?) I'll talk about those in other meta posts, but for this one I want to focus on Buffy's depression arc as reflected in "Anne" and portrayed over the entire series. We tend to think of S6 (and late S5) as the "depression arc" but the show has been very careful to build that aspect of Buffy's character from the beginning of S2.

"Anne":
(Buffy) "This isn't hell." 
(Ken) "What is Hell?  The total absence of hope."

After Life:
"Where ever I was, I think I was happy....I was finished. Complete....I think I was in Heaven. And now I'm not. I was torn out of there, pulled out by my friends....Everything here is hard, and bright, and violen. Everything I feel, everything I touch - this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that, knowing what I've lost. They [the Scoobies] can never know.  Never."

Buffy's monologue in AL, poignant as it may be (all praise to SMG's delivery), is summed in the single shot in "Anne" at the top of this post: despair, depression, PTSD, the sense of having lost everything: family, friends, lover, childhood innocence; exiling herself to an urban setting (L.A.) that is "hard...and violent." Even the reference to her friends' actions in Bargaining, and "They can never know [where I've been, what I've gone through]" is relevant to Becoming/Anne: Buffy never mentions Xander's lie  ("Willow said 'Kick his ass' ") and her perception that her friends abandoned her until S7's "Selfless". 

The dark, fiery setting of the underground factory is a place she returns to both physically and emotionally throughout the series.
She descends to that hell, the utter absence of hope in S5: TWOTW and The Gift; most of S6 up to Normal Again; EP and Touched in S7, finally vanquishing it physically and emotionally in Chosen.



In each instance Buffy must fight to break through her depressive state by renewing connections to her Slayer instincts and to her friends and family on her own terms. The personal (Buffy) becomes the political (the Slayer). In both "The Gift" and "Chosen" her solutions to saving the world are also motivated by a desire to protect loved ones (Dawn in The Gift) or banishing her own fears (of dying alone, in "Chosen".) It's not coincidental that in most instances, with the exception of "Touched", this is facilitated primarily by other women, especially friends and family: Lily and Joyce in "Anne", Willow in TWOTW, Dawn in "Grave", Joyce again in "Normal Again". One of BtVS's strength is that it continually affirms and values relationships between women in a way that was (and is) still relatively uncommon in US movies and tv shows. (See gabrielleabelle's meta "Women, Connecting".)  

"Touched" twists the pattern around a bit: Spike, arguably the most "androgynous" of the male characters (he and Buffy have shifted male/female role expectations fluidly, if not easily, throughout their relationship) reestablishes the emotional connection that allows her to break through and reclaim her identity and purpose. That can be interpreted positively: the male and female halves of Buffy (as well as Spike), the anima and animus, joined together in strength rather than weakness; or negatively: women will ultimately betray one another, and a woman's most important connections are with men. I'm not wanting to engage in a "Spuffy-centric" conversation here, btw; I'm just trying to parse out the writers' intended and unintended messages in the gender twist to the pattern.

Buffy then reconnects with Willow and Faith ("Good thing we're such hot chicks" / "Takes the edge off") to create the Slayer spell and connect through and with them with all the Potentials all over the world. That the spell has a some very unpleasant implications - violation of personal agency, the creation of a master race, etc - is something that has been thoroughly discussed and I'm going to put aside in-depth consideration of it for the moment - again, I'm trying to look at it only in the context of Buffy's depression arc. In this regard, however, I think local_max made an excellent point the other day that in the context of Chosen Buffy is less trangressive than Willow, and I'd argue that Buffy's affirmation of the WC's mission, spreading it outward, continuing the "war" rather than questioning, subverting or rejecting it entirely, supports his observation. In "Anne" the positive negative implications of the Slayer spell are foreshadowed in Buffy's command to a scared and reluctant Lily (a sort of proto-Potential, if you will) that she lead the other workers out of the factory: "You can handle this - because I say so". She acts as "General Buffy", commanding the troops, delegating tasks, and empowering another girl, or more precisely permission (via a verbal kick in the ass) to claim her own power; but she has also makes an assumption about the other girl's ability or willingness to do the task out of immediate practical need without prior proof that Lily can step up to the plate, and is proven only by happenstance.  (What if Lily hadn't pushed Ken off the scaffold?)

That her depressive episodes reoccur over the run of the series (and I am purposefully excluding the comics as I do not consider them head-canon, at least) indicate that simply "getting over herself" is not sufficient to solve her underlying issues.  The show's attitude towards professional therapeutic help ("Beauty and the Beasts", and "Normal Again") is a bit of a mixed bag, and I want to on more in-depth on the subject in another meta.  Suffice it to say, Buffy never receives real help, except of the bootstrap variety; no therapy - or rest - for the Slayer.

(I've got a lot more to say about "Anne": about Joyce's anger toward Giles and the WC, about Xander and Cordy's relationship, class issues, etc. To be continued....)

mcjulie challenged me to write a meta about dopplegangers on BtVS in the convo thread of her wonderful meta "Where Did I Go? A Farewell to the Buffybot".  The jist of her meta is that the Buffybot represents the "I'm Fine" mask that Buffy puts on to cover her grief and depression, starting with her mother's death in mid S5, and continuing through S6. (She also pointed out to me that Buffy is the only character on the show who gets two dopplegangers: the Buffybot and The First.) ( Lots of musings about Xander actually, not Buffy. I'm as surprised as you are. )

So, that little AU post- The Gift ficlety thing I posted here inspired by brutti_ma_buoni's lovely "Goodbye To All of This (And Hello to Oblivion)"  ?  My story has two mommies, except that I'd forgotten one of them.  (Really.)   snowpuppies's "Lillies" is a post The Gift AU fic in which Dawn dies instead of Buffy, and the Buffy is the only one in the world who remembers her.  The tone is different than BMB's; Buffy tries to go about living her life as normal around uncomprehending friends, and there are lovely callbacks to the series (Mr Gordo!).  There's a sense of the story here being strangely in-canon however, in terms of Buffy's depression in S6; snowpuppies gets that tone beautifully, as she usually does.  (Have you read "Fractured"? A non-shippy Angel and Buffy story that goes AU at the beginning of S6 - what if Willow's spell went wrong? - and OMG. Dark, dark dark stuff.  Poor Buffy.)

So I feel like an idiot because while my f'list was being very nice about my first attempt at BtVS fanfic, my brain had grabbed the concept from one story, then conveniently forgot about it, and popped it back into my head reading someone's story. What embarrasses me is not the "theft" so much, as the fact that I forgot to give proper credit. This is a huge issue for me; women artists in particular have, for centuries, had their work misattributed to male artists, or simply called "Anonymous".  And because our history books have so few women artists (writers, painters, etc), the assumption is to default to the standard of Male identity in terms of the person's identity.  There's other issues at play, of course, such as the fact that artists of all genders are having their work stolen to make a profit for someone else without proper attribution, something I became much more aware of when my partner went back to art school. I'm probably being melodramatic; no theft was intended, no profit was made, and all's right with the world. But nonetheless...here's me giving credit, and apologies, and cookies.

Oh, and snowpuppies also wrote a "commentary" for "Lillies" which is worth reading as well.  Actually everything that snowpuppies and brutti_ma_buoni write is pretty phenomenal, so at least I've got damnably talented Muses, which makes me very lucky.

When it comes to BtVS, I'd promised myself that I would not write on my own journal here about subjects that are generally quite well-worn and have been discussed at length - and with great intellegence - by other people. Nevermind that I'll rant or blather at length about a variety of subjects (the comics, the episode AYW, etc etc) on other people's LJ convos. When I write more metas I'll want to focus on topics that are not generally discussed (at least in the few corners of fandom I've seen).

But - BUT - every now and again the random thought does pop in:


( Quite a lot of thoughts, actually, feminist and otherwise. )

So this is the part where someone tries to convince me that Buffy is a closed-off bitch who is unable to express love....and I'm just not buying it. 'kay?

ETA: Screencap courtesy of Buffyworld.com