This post is cute and amusing and I like it. But also I think in that scenario the reviewers are totally right and the ‘me’ character is totally not.
Also wow it’s really annoying that there’s no good way to reblog ‘chat’-format posts to add commentary. Hence my just linking to it.
frankenstein’s monster just lifted up and threw down a dalek
why hasn’t that happened in the reboot series
martha totally could have kicked one over onto its side
This is kind of the problem with the Daleks, though, isn’t it? They just aren’t very inherently threatening. They’re made of metal and they have guns and they want to kill you. That’s it. You can still blow them up or hit them with things or push them off cliffs or whatever. Or at least run away from them, because they move really slowly.
I get why the Doctor finds them especially scary: he knows that there are zillions of them and they’ll never stop, and most of all it’s impossible to sympathize with them, which is his main way of dealing with everything and everyone (except his companions). But the actual nature of their scariness isn’t well suited to the way Doctor Who works as a television programme.
Individually, they aren’t a threat that the viewer can take seriously. In a massed attack they’re a serious threat but also unstoppable. To be a convincing threat that the Doctor can still ultimately defeat, there has to be an imminent danger that they will attack in overwhelming numbers, but that attack has to be contingent on some sort of complicated plan that the Doctor and his companion(s) can personally thwart.
And there’s no problem with that in itself: obviously writers can and do come up with such scenarios. The problem is that there’s no reason why the aliens in those scenarios should be Daleks. Any plot that goes ‘quickly we must do XYZ or else a huge unstoppable army of Daleks will attack’ would work equally well if you replaced the Daleks with any other aliens, because there is nothing that an army of oversized salt-shakers with guns can do that an army of Cybermen, Sontarans, Judoon, Sycorax, Ice Warriors, or even Adipose couldn’t do. And, unlike the Daleks, they would probably do it in a more interesting way than ‘trundle towards you while shooting’ and for a more interesting purpose than ‘we are evil and want to kill everything’.
I sort of wish they’d just forget about the Daleks for at least a few series. New Who has had some great monsters of the week but it’s been pretty lousy on creating good re-usable alien cultures, especially threatening ones. Moffat tried to re-use the Weeping Angels and it just made them rubbish. I suppose the Silence could work if they were brought back at some point, but their shtick is so unusual and specific that they aren’t eminently re-usable. But otherwise, it’s been, what the Judoon? And… I actually can’t think of any others. Someone needs to get working on that.
Then we can stop bringing the Daleks back, and after a few years someone can ask the Doctor what happened to them and he can say ‘Oh, they’re all gone now, Martha kicked them into a big hole’.
It’s as good as the Wire. Oh what, you don’t take it as seriously cos the main characters are both strong women? WELL FUCK YOU THEN IMAGINARY DUDE!
:)
I really enjoyed season one but then season two annoyed me because the plot was a mess (behold my grumbles on that point, if you wish). I think I tried a bit of season three but gave up. Is it still running? Has it got better again?
I think season 4 was amazing, I detect a slight drop in budget. But John Goodman is in it and he’s good value for money, obv. I mean he steals every scene he’s in. In a good way.
BUT I agree about season 2, I’ve mixed up season 2 and 3 in my head now… But season 4 is back to sticking to the single flash forward scene. Which is a lot more interesting, I agree, putting emphasis on one single moment in the future that can be interpreted different ways.
John Goodman! I must try to watch that. I’m glad it’s back to being good. Thanks for the tip!
It’s as good as the Wire. Oh what, you don’t take it as seriously cos the main characters are both strong women? WELL FUCK YOU THEN IMAGINARY DUDE!
:)
I really enjoyed season one but then season two annoyed me because the plot was a mess (behold my grumbles on that point, if you wish). I think I tried a bit of season three but gave up. Is it still running? Has it got better again?
So Tumblr, I’d like your help with something, if you can.
A while ago I wrote a rambly thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and somewhere in there I kind of made up a theory to explain what bugged me about the death of one of the characters. Here’s what I wrote (and I’ll censor for spoilers, although you probably all know it anyway — see the original post for the uncensored version):
I think as audiences we get used to, and get quite good at, working out whether a character is being presented to us as someone we should care about or as someone who just advances the plot. And when a character we’ve been asked to care about, and have agreed to care about, is subsequently disposed of purely to advance the plot, it’s offensive. When real human beings are exploited or treated as tools whose only value is instrumental, it denies their inherent value as people and that offends our sense of justice. Obviously when it happens to a fictional character it isn’t the same thing, but I think it offends in a similar way if that character has been one of the core characters whom we care about for their own sake and not just because of the role they play in the larger drama.
I think it’s also a counter-productive thing for a writer to do because it reminds the audience of the artifice of the whole exercise: we know we’re watching fiction, but you’ve invited us to make the imaginative effort of thinking of this particular character, unlike many of the ones we see in a given episode, as an actual person. If you then do something that transparently reduces that character to a narrative device, you remind us that it’s all fake and that actually none of the characters are real people, which seriously imperils our ability to keep believing in or caring about anything that’s happening.
If [••••] had been killed for reasons that served [••••]’s own storyline and therefore respected her integrity as a character rather than just a role, it would have been sad but not offensive. If [••••] had been killed because sometimes bad things just randomly happen in this fictional world, that again would have been okay. If [••••] had been when she was still just a character who seemed quite nice and who was important to [••••••] but who wasn’t really important to the audience, that would have been fine because audiences accept that sometimes characters are just devices. (Compare the death of [•••••]: she was a very long-running character but it was always clear that she had no real existence or purpose except as part of Buffy’s emotional landscape, so killing her in order to traumatize Buffy didn’t offend in the same way.) But killing [••••] purely to trigger a development in [••••••]’s storyline was, I think, neither fair to the audience nor a good piece of writing.
So that’s the theory. It was off-the-cuff but I’ve been pondering it since then and it still seems plausible. And I’d quite like to expand it a bit and maybe work it up into an article for Ferretbrain. But the thing is, I’d like to test the theory against a few more examples, just to check that it works (or to find out that it doesn’t work before I make myself look silly). And I’m having trouble thinking of other examples, either ones that fit the theory or ones that disprove it.
So that’s where I’m hoping you can help.
Can you think of a fictional character who you felt was killed off (or otherwise abused) just to provide a plot-point for another character? Did it bother you or did you think it was okay? Were they a ‘core’ character who you were invested in for their own sake, or a supporting character?
Also any general thoughts about the theory and whether it works or not would be welcome!
For thoughts that won’t fit in a reply, please visit my ask-box or submit. I won’t publish messages unless I check with you first, and if this does turn into an article then I’ll give you credit for your input (unless you don’t want it). If you think your followers might be interested in helping, please feel free to reblog!
Just bringing this back in case anyone missed it last time.
Also relevant is this post in which I try to explain how I think the above proposition is distinct from (though overlapping with) the idea of fridging female characters to provide motivation for male characters.
kiriamaya answered your question: Killing core characters
I’m reminded of all the zillion and one ladycharacters who are killed off solely for a dude’s development. As if ladies aren’t people.
Yes, there’s definitely overlap with that idea. But I think it’s conceptually distinct. If I’ve understood it correctly, the criticism there is that killing a female character to create motivation or plot for a male character is (at least if done disproportionately, which it is) misogynist, regardless of whether the character who gets killed is a lead character or a supporting one: either way, it plays into the general trend of treating women (fictional or otherwise) as if their only importance is derived from their effect on men.
What I’m suggesting is that killing a lead character (of any gender or none) to provide motivation or plot for another character (of any gender or none) is bad not because it’s sexist (although it may be) but because it draws attention to the fact that all the characters, including the one for whose sake the dead character has been killed, are just devices in a completely artificial process.
I don’t know whether one of those ideas is a subset of the other or whether they’re just things that overlap, but I feel like in principle they’re separate things. But what does anyone else think?
So Tumblr, I’d like your help with something, if you can.
A while ago I wrote a rambly thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and somewhere in there I kind of made up a theory to explain what bugged me about the death of one of the characters. Here’s what I wrote (and I’ll censor for spoilers, although you probably all know it anyway — see the original post for the uncensored version):
I think as audiences we get used to, and get quite good at, working out whether a character is being presented to us as someone we should care about or as someone who just advances the plot. And when a character we’ve been asked to care about, and have agreed to care about, is subsequently disposed of purely to advance the plot, it’s offensive. When real human beings are exploited or treated as tools whose only value is instrumental, it denies their inherent value as people and that offends our sense of justice. Obviously when it happens to a fictional character it isn’t the same thing, but I think it offends in a similar way if that character has been one of the core characters whom we care about for their own sake and not just because of the role they play in the larger drama.
I think it’s also a counter-productive thing for a writer to do because it reminds the audience of the artifice of the whole exercise: we know we’re watching fiction, but you’ve invited us to make the imaginative effort of thinking of this particular character, unlike many of the ones we see in a given episode, as an actual person. If you then do something that transparently reduces that character to a narrative device, you remind us that it’s all fake and that actually none of the characters are real people, which seriously imperils our ability to keep believing in or caring about anything that’s happening.
If [••••] had been killed for reasons that served [••••]’s own storyline and therefore respected her integrity as a character rather than just a role, it would have been sad but not offensive. If [••••] had been killed because sometimes bad things just randomly happen in this fictional world, that again would have been okay. If [••••] had been when she was still just a character who seemed quite nice and who was important to [••••••] but who wasn’t really important to the audience, that would have been fine because audiences accept that sometimes characters are just devices. (Compare the death of [•••••]: she was a very long-running character but it was always clear that she had no real existence or purpose except as part of Buffy’s emotional landscape, so killing her in order to traumatize Buffy didn’t offend in the same way.) But killing [••••] purely to trigger a development in [••••••]’s storyline was, I think, neither fair to the audience nor a good piece of writing.
So that’s the theory. It was off-the-cuff but I’ve been pondering it since then and it still seems plausible. And I’d quite like to expand it a bit and maybe work it up into an article for Ferretbrain. But the thing is, I’d like to test the theory against a few more examples, just to check that it works (or to find out that it doesn’t work before I make myself look silly). And I’m having trouble thinking of other examples, either ones that fit the theory or ones that disprove it.
So that’s where I’m hoping you can help.
Can you think of a fictional character who you felt was killed off (or otherwise abused) just to provide a plot-point for another character? Did it bother you or did you think it was okay? Were they a ‘core’ character who you were invested in for their own sake, or a supporting character?
Also any general thoughts about the theory and whether it works or not would be welcome!
For thoughts that won’t fit in a reply, please visit my ask-box or submit. I won’t publish messages unless I check with you first, and if this does turn into an article then I’ll give you credit for your input (unless you don’t want it). If you think your followers might be interested in helping, please feel free to reblog!
mikkipedia replied to your post: Listening to the Evita film soundtrack for no…
Tommy?
Hmm. It’s been a long time since I watched Tommy and despite consulting the Wikipedia plot summary I’m having trouble working out which two characters have that sort of dynamic. Can you elaborate?
broadwayisinmyblood answered your question: Listening to the Evita film soundtrack for no…
Joseph? the narrator I mean.
Ha, that would make the Lloyd Webber / Rice hat-trick! But do you really think so? Is there any tension or disagreement between Joseph and the narrator? My impression is that the audience is meant to be fully on Joseph’s side in a pretty uncomplicated way and the narrator mostly just narrates without offering any particularly critical perspective on anything. But again it’s been a while since I listened to Joseph so maybe I’m missing something?
Listening to the Evita film soundtrack for no particular reason.
I really like the device of telling the story of a charismatic leader through a cynical, disillusioned narrator / commentator character. It absolutely makes both Evita and Jesus Christ superstar (which I guess is why Lloyd Webber and Rice used it twice in quick succession) and I kind of wonder why we don’t see it more often in drama generally.
Usually we’re expected to both sympathize with and admire the central character. Sometimes you get a more complex dynamic where there’s a sympathetic side-kick character who has reservations about what the central character’s doing but is basically on their side. But the disagreements are generally fairly minor and are about means rather than ends or ideals, so the side-kick functions uncomplicatedly as the point of sympathy and identification, while you still root for the success of the leader. At the other end there are stories about people who are diametrically opposed, where although to a limited extent each one can provide valid criticism of the other, in the end you have to root for one or the other (and usually it’s clear which one you’re meant to root for).
But with Che and Eva or Judas and Jesus it’s somewhere in between. They sort of agree, or at least they used to, on some very general level. They aren’t opponents — they aren’t working against each other. So you can sort of agree with both. But they quite definitely aren’t on the same side, so you can’t fully root for either.
And at the same time, it’s impossible to fully reject either of them. The heroic central characters are attractive and active. They drive events. They appear to have a broadly admirable programme. But they aren’t people you can entirely like or connect with and you suspect there are some serious problems underlying what they’re doing. On the other hand the commentator characters are bitter and have no real constructive ideas. They’re detached and don’t really do anything. You can’t hope they’ll achieve their goal because they haven’t really got one. But a lot of what they’re saying is right. They complicate your view of the central character, undermine them, but also their disappointment and anger inject more emotion and pathos into the central character’s narrative because they care. The relationship splits up and distributes your sympathy, your identification, and your admiration in interesting and unusual ways.
I guess there are a lot of stories where having a counterpoint or chorus figure doesn’t really work, and a lot of stories where it’s important for the central character to be the largely unequivocal focus of sympathy and admiration. Maybe there aren’t that many that could benefit from the dynamic you get in Evita and Superstar. But still, I can’t really think of… well, any other examples at all. Can you?
Hi! I feel like it was recent but I’m not sure… anyway I hope you enjoy!
(For everyone else’s benefit, I sent Tchy a link to the current storyline at the webcomic Bad machinery, which features a selkie in addition to the usual delightful stuff.)
““When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.””—
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (via fuckyeahsouthasia)
^ this quote is something I desperately need to remember
(via deafmuslimpunx)
Oh no no no that’s a terrible thing to say! It’s a line of dialogue uttered in a moment of anger to a young child by her mother, and the book is pretty clear in presenting the serious emotional harm it does to that child. This is very very much not something that should be quoted as something Roy says or would want anyone to believe. In the context of the book it’s shown as a deeply hurtful thing to say. It may be true in some circumstances I guess, I don’t know, but knowing the context of the quotation it makes me sad to think that anyone would endorse it or take it as good advice because it traumatizes that little girl. :(
The thing about academic books is that the end of the book often arrives unexpectedly. With novels — I mean paper copies, not e-reader ones — you can tell how much you’ve got left to read because the substantive content goes almost right up to the last physical page. But with academic books I always forget that there’s going to be an index, and probably some appendices too. Collections of essays are especially tricksy because you can’t even sense when the over-all argument of the book is nearing its conclusion: I often assume there’s one more essay to go and then find the one I’ve just finished was in fact the last one. And then I’m sitting there half-way through my lunch-break with no more book to read, and no new one to start because when I set off that morning I wasn’t expecting to need one.
I guess with an e-reader it must be hard even with novels because there’s no sense of the physical bulk of the book. But then again it doesn’t matter because one reader can have several spare books on it. I don’t know, I’ve never really tried an e-reader.
In a way that feature is quite attractive to me, at least for reading novels. I’m finding these days that I’m almost always slightly dissatisfied with the pacing at the end of a novel, and I think it must be because of the way I read. When I feel I’m approaching the end I start to rush, and it isn’t so much because of excitement as it’s just because I don’t want to have to stop reading with only a few pages to go and then have to pick it up again later with the flow interrupted. In effect, I’m worried about spoiling the pacing of the ending by interrupting it, so I reading it too quickly and then spoil it that way in stead. And then the ending always feels too abrupt.
I think I’m quite a submissive consumer of fiction. I like television, theatre, film, radio because I like to put myself in the hands of a creative team and give them as much control as possible over my experience. Whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience is up to them. With a novel the reader has a lot of control over the pacing, lighting, soundscape, &c., and I know some people really enjoy that about novels, but I don’t really want to do that much work and I worry about getting it wrong. What if this character’s hair-colour is important and I was told what it was but I fail to remember it? What if I skim over the scene-setting description (which I tend to do) and then later find that the whole chapter has been taking place at night when I’ve been imagining it as day-time? So sometimes I try to be a good reader and pay careful attention to everything, but I’m sorry, I’m just not that interested in the bits of a story that aren’t people interacting or doing stuff. I don’t want to spend several minutes making sure I’ve correctly imagined the colour of the sky and the clucking of the chickens and stuff that a dramatic medium would establish for me in seconds.
I’m not saying that novels are inferior or anything, just that I’m not very good at reading them and this is one of the reasons I prefer dramatic presentation to narration. (There are others — I’m generally more interested in personal interactions and large-scale interaction than in the sort of interiority that novels are good at, and I also dislike the way written prose is the default medium for fiction in Euro-American culture even though there are many stories that would be much better told in different media — but I’ll probably grumble at length about those some other time.)
Anyway, what was I talking about? Yeah, I finished my book unexpectedly on Wednesday and didn’t have a spare with me and it was slightly bothersome. ’Cool story, bro’, &c., &c.
eateroftrees replied to your post: Buffythoughts
I think I agree with most everything here. (also its worth noting the abruptly switching metaphors from “magic = lesbian sex” to “magic = hard drugs” has some fairly fucked up implications)
Oh dear, yes, I didn’t think of that but now you mention it… oh dear.
So during April when I moved house twice and was without internet a lot of the time, one of the things I did was finish watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I’d basically never watched apart from a little bit of season one and very brief glimpses of seasons 5 and 6 when it was originally broadcast.
I liked it. And for my thoughts beyond that, spoiler warning for basically the whole seven seasons. Also I guess trigger warnings for mentions of blood, death, attempted rape, drug-addiction.
It took me a weirdly long time to start really liking Buffy herself. I never disliked her, I was just a bit indifferent and was more interested in the supporting cast (liked Willow and Giles, found Xander annoying as a human being but fairly watchable as a character, enjoyed Cordelia, thought Angel was dull as dishwater — the usual thing). I can’t remember quite when I started really liking Buffy but I think it was late season three or early season four; and I’m not sure why, except that she seemed to become more real and started reminding me of real people I know and like. Which meant she changed in my mind from a sort of cartoon superhero into an admirable and likeable human being.
So seasons four and five were pretty good for me. No more Angel (yaaaaaaawn)! Interesting new setting! Anya! Tara! Willow coming into her own! Xander showing signs of being someone you might actually want to talk to occasionally! Dawn! Good times.
The whole Initiative storyline was kind of uninspiring, and Riley was annoying (especially after the reveal that he was a vampire-hunter guy and not just a fairly ordinary guy). I’d go along with everything Garland says about Riley, but his annoyingness didn’t diminish my enjoyment of seasons four and five because I felt like the series supported me in disliking Riley, or at least gave me space to not like him — unlike Angel, who was clearly meant to be awesome and whose profound boringness was therefore a real problem for me in the first three seasons. But the fact that I thought the show was okay with me disliking Riley meant I got an unpleasant surprise when it was framed as a Terrible Mistake for Buffy to ditch him.
I also had a lot of trouble with Spike. James Marsters played him brilliantly (accent aside), so it’s understandable that the writers couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of the character, but for my money they made all the wrong decisions with him — starting with the microchip and ending never. He didn’t work as comic relief and he didn’t work as tragic romantic interest (because between the fundamentally evil and the sexbot and the attempted rape how could you have any reaction to that angle except ‘ew no’?) and, most of all, I was immensely irritated by the way the writers handled the ‘no soul’ issue. Having established a very clear bit of canon in the first few seasons that vampires are evil evil eeeevilll except for Angel when and only when he has a soul, they then made Spike far too sympathetic, drew attention to how not-evil he was by having him go round insisting he was evil, and only dealt with the soul problem way too late by giving him his soul, which made absolutely no difference and only further underlined that they’d been writing him as if he had one already.
And speaking of illogical character-writing, what on earth was going on with Giles’ back-story? He was such a great character but his back-story made absolutely no sense. I don’t believe anybody who was the kind of teenager we see in Band candy could get to middle age and be as nervous and hesitant about courting Jenny Calendar as Buffy-era Giles is. And I don’t believe the writers had any clear idea what his much-hinted ‘dark past’ actually consisted of or how it had formed his character: it all just seemed to have been thrown in to give a vague impression of additionally complexity that really wasn’t needed. And the same could be said of Olivia, who, like most of the characters of colour in this whole very white series, seemed to be of no inherent interest to the writers but was just there to inform our view of a white character and / or to get killed.
Since I’ve started ranting, I might as well carry on. Willow’s magic-addiction thing really annoyed me for two reasons. First, drug-addiction is just way over-used in TV drama in general, both in literal depictions and in lazy copyings where you insert something like ‘magic’ in place of ‘drugs’ but leave everything else the same; and although I have no first-hand or second-hand experience of drug-addiction I get the strong impression that very few people who write this kind of thing are any better informed than I am. And the second thing is internal inconsistency again: over the first few seasons the issue of not abusing magic came up from time to time and it was always pretty clear that the reasons you shouldn’t do it were to do with cosmic balance and other mystical stuff, all amounting to ‘terrible things will happen to the fabric of reality’. Nobody ever said that it messes up the person who does it or that it’s physiologically addictive. And yet when it finally happens, it messes up Willow plenty but there’s very little sign of anything bad happening to cosmic balance or the fabric of reality. (Of course bad stuff does happen, but that’s because Willow does bad stuff, which is different. That isn’t ‘don’t abuse magic or there will be unintended consequences’, it’s just ‘don’t use magic to do bad things’.)
But mostly what got me down about the last couple of seasons was this project of making all the main characters as miserable and disheartened and self-doubting as possible. I feel like there’s probably some kind of proper reason why that sort of thing is bad writing and even bad politics but frankly I just found it really sad and upsetting and unnecessary. If they’d got rid of the Willow-the-junkie storyline — which was really the only thing left unresolved at the end of season five — they could have wrapped the whole thing up with season five and spared me a couple of weeks of increasing despondency. I’m tempted to say it would have been ideal, except that the actual ending of season five made no sense. (How can ‘Summers blood’ possibly be the thing that opens and closes the portal? Before the key became embodied as Dawn, it didn’t have any blood, yet it would still presumably have opened the portal. Okay, but Dawn’s blood is still part of Dawn, who is the key, so that still works, right? Except no, because in that case Buffy, who is definitely not in any way made of the energy that makes up the key, wouldn’t be an adequate substitute. She can only be swapped for Dawn because Dawn’s blood is the same as her blood, i.e. Dawn’s blood is made of organic material from the Summers family, not from key energy. In which case it shouldn’t be able to open the portal, and Buffy’s shouldn’t be able to close it. And that’s before we even engage with the fact that Buffy didn’t appear to actually shed any blood while inside the portal. Gaaaah.)
I think really a lot of the trouble I had with the last couple of seasons is the way you could increasingly tell that things were happening because the writers were trying to achieve something, and not because they were things the characters would actually do or things that made any sense in themselves. Yes Xander’s always been kind of a jerk but even so his running out on Anya was seriously under-explained, both at the time and afterwards: it was transparently done because the writers were afraid that a happily married Anya & Xander would make boring television or something. And Tara — I’ve gone back and forth on whether what was done to Tara was fridging. Sometimes I think not, because the classic fridge is the killing of a female character who’s close to a male lead character in order to give that male character motivation, and Willow isn’t a male character, so it lacks that misogynistic element; on the other hand it’s still a female character being treated as disposable, so maybe it is. I don’t know. But I think what really bothers me about it isn’t any kind of social justice angle but just the treatment of the character as disposable in the first place.
I think as audiences we get used to, and get quite good at, working out whether a character is being presented to us as someone we should care about or as someone who just advances the plot. And when a character we’ve been asked to care about, and have agreed to care about, is subsequently disposed of purely to advance the plot, it’s offensive. When real human beings are exploited or treated as tools whose only value is instrumental, it denies their inherent value as people and that offends our sense of justice. Obviously when it happens to a fictional character it isn’t the same thing, but I think it offends in a similar way if that character has been one of the core characters whom we care about for their own sake and not just because of the role they play in the larger drama. I think it’s also a counter-productive thing for a writer to do because it reminds the audience of the artifice of the whole exercise: we know we’re watching fiction, but you’ve invited us to make the imaginative effort of thinking of this particular character, unlike many of the ones we see in a given episode, as an actual person. If you then do something that transparently reduces that character to a narrative device, you remind us that it’s all fake and that actually none of the characters are real people, which seriously imperils our ability to keep believing in or caring about anything that’s happening. If Tara had been killed for reasons that served Tara’s own storyline and therefore respected her integrity as a character rather than just a role, it would have been sad but not offensive. If Tara had been killed because sometimes bad things just randomly happen in this fictional world, that again would have been okay. If Tara had been when she was still just a character who seemed quite nice and who was important to Willow but who wasn’t really important to the audience, that would have been fine because audiences accept that sometimes characters are just devices. (Compare the death of Joyce: she was a very long-running character but it was always clear that she had no real existence or purpose except as part of Buffy’s emotional landscape, so killing her in order to traumatize Buffy didn’t offend in the same way.) But killing Tara purely to trigger a development in Willow’s storyline was, I think, neither fair to the audience nor a good piece of writing.
So yes, I had problems with seasons six and seven. I’m not qualified to pronounce on whether something is feminist or not but given Whedon’s proclamations about how he wanted Buffy to be a strong role-model and a subversion of the ‘girl as victim’ trope I do feel vaguely unnerved by the zeal and thoroughness with which he destroyed her life and her self-confidence and made her spend most of those last seasons in a very victimish place. Oh, and I forgot to mention another bit of internal inconsistency that irritated me: why no new slayer after Buffy’s second death? I’ve thought of various explanations and I’m not satisfied with any of them. It’s just another example of the writing team ignoring established rules and likelihoods to make sure the plot does what they want it to do. But yes, problems with six and seven. There were good things too: I liked the idea of the proto-Slayers (though it would have been nice if any of them except Kennedy and Rona could act, or indeed do whatever accents they were meant to be doing); I liked Robin; I liked the thing of the First appearing as dead people. I’m glad I watched until the bitter end.
And now I can enjoy Buffy Outfits without fear of spoilers. Yay!
Oops.
As bits of publicity material / leaks about series four of Being human have been becoming more frequent over the last few months, I’ve developed the habit of just scrolling away / turning off the sound on the TV / running away with my hands over my ears every time I’ve seen anything that might possible contain spoilers.
As a result I have singularly failed to notice that the series actually started yesterday.
I feel a bit silly now.
But the up-side is that there’s new Being human! I can watch it tonight on the iplayer! Yaaaaaay!
