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azdak at 09:44pm on 28/03/2004 under buffy meta
azdak at 09:44pm on 28/03/2004 under buffy metaThoughts on S7, uebervamps and redemption, cut for the sake of those on my friends list.
Thanks to the blessing of a bit more free time than usual this week – a two day weekend! What bliss! – I’ve managed to catch up with some ljs and TWoP, as well as watching some of BtVS S3, which I got on DVD for my birthday last week. I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed in this last-mentioned. Over and over again on TWoP I hear how superior the first three seasons are to the abominations that followed, but having finally seen some of S3 I’m now in a position to come out, join the S7 Pride march (probably as sole supporter, forlornly waving my banner in the wind, but what the hell) and say that I think BtVS only became really intriguing in S5, and that I LOVE S7. You can keep your wonderful S1-3, just so long as I can have 5-7. Okay, so I don’t love all of S7. And especially not everything after LMPTM, or that cluster of dull episodes right after Never Leave Me. But everything else. And I think it’s no coincidence that it’s not the supposedly brilliant early seasons that generate the most intense, and the most interesting debates. The later seasons, love ’em or hate ’em, have so much more meat to them. They make the viewer feel uncomfortable, they raise genuine moral dilemmas that people feel passionately about, and they aren’t afraid to make much-loved characters do unpleasant, and even genuinely terrible things. I miss that in S3, so while I was catching up, I also did a bit of rewatching of S7, just to remind myself of the glories that are to come :-) For some reason I ended up watching Bring on the Night and Showtime, both of which I had previously rather disliked, and had a sudden insight into the point of them. Up to now, I’d misread Buffy’s struggle with the Uebervamp - when I first saw the episodes, I was so hung up on my theory that Buffy was going to defeat Uebie by combining forces with the SiTs and getting them all to pitch in, that I thought it was unconvincing that she could suddenly defeat alone a monster she’d stood no chance against before. This time around, the scales fell from my eyes and I realised that that whole mini-arc is about (self) confidence. The uebervamp isn’t as powerful as Buffy initially thinks he is. Yes, he’s stronger than she expected, and tougher, but she’s so appalled when he doesn’t dust after she’s staked him, that she builds him up in her own mind into a force that can’t be defeated (just as the First later tries to persuade her to see its army as a force that can’t be defeated). Buffy gets trashed by the uebervamp because she believes she can’t defeat him. But she’s wrong. Uebervamps can be staked, you just have to use a lot more force than usual (and hell, if Willow can dust an average vampire, then staking those clearly doesn’t require any great physical strength – so there’s no reason why the potentials, with their greater prowess, shouldn’t be able to handle the uebervamps, even if they are a bit stringier). It turns out, once Buffy’s no longer viewing him through a mask of terror, that he’s actually not a great deal worse than ordinary vampires. Her little performance in Showtime is designed to demonstrate to the girls, and to herself, that the real enemy is their own fear. It’s not that the uebervamp suddenly got easier to fight, it’s that Buffy realised she was capable of taking him out. And since his apparent invincibility was a product of Buffy’s own fear and lack of self-confidence, it makes sense that the later versions are so much easier to kill, not because they’ve been cheaply mass-produced but because they never were all that great to begin with. Self-belief is a wonderful thing, as the First well knows, and all its taunting is devoted to trying to rip down that self-belief, convincing its enemies that they are bound to fail, so that the battle is lost before it’s even started.
The other train of thought triggered by my S3 viewing bonanza (okay, so it was only the first four episodes, but still) was about Harmony and Andrew. 'Beauty and the Beasts' may not be the greatest episode ever in terms of intrinsic interest, but it certainly tackles a key recurring theme head on. Oz and Angel, the immediate suspects, the men who are monsters, turn out to be innocent and the guilty party is a normal human boy, complete with soul, who deliberately chose to become part monster. In the course of the action, Giles comes out with a statement that will be crucial for our subsequent assessment of a number of characters.
Giles: In my experience, there are... two types of monster. The first, uh, can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed.
Buffy: And the second type?
Giles: The second is void of humanity, cannot respond to reason... or love.
They key point, of course, is not the definition of a human being as someone responsive to reason and love, but to the emphasis on wanting to be redeemed. Spike and Anya both clearly fall into this category. Spike’s journey is one long path towards redemption. Anya, even with hindsight, is less clearly travelling towards that end point, but she achieves the crucial desire for redemption in Selfless (and a cracking episode it is, too). With these two the decision is clear cut. Both realise they have committed unacceptable acts, both want to change. Neither is fully aware of the implications of that choice – how can they be? – but they choose nonetheless, and their decision has far-reaching implications. The First spends a significant amount of time trying to persuade Spike to reverse his decision, to give up the hope that he can ever be worth anything to the side of good (I’ve always felt that the First made an obvious strategic error in attempting to torture Spike into choosing to revert to evil – ’cos, like, it makes it seem so tempting – but undermining his self-belief – never that strong at the best of times – was a more sensible approach, and I suppose if you count the torture as a way of making it particularly evident that Buffy didn’t care enough to come and rescue him, than perhaps it wasn’t so stupid after all. In any case, I think the main function of the torture scenes, silly though they are, is to externalise Spike’s sense of guilt, his conviction that he deserves punishment for his previous atrocities, and that this is why it all goes on for so long). D’Hoffryn, who had blithely disregarded Anya when becoming human was a punishment not a choice, sends his assassins after her when she ceases to be a demon of her own volition. A monster who not only wants redemption but acts on that sends ripples through the underworld; it upsets the balance; it’s not supposed to happen.
But just as it isn’t only monsters who perform evil acts – persons with souls are just as capable, thank you very much – so it isn’t only characters of the stature of Spike or Anya who can aspire to redemption, though their decision matters very much more in the grand scheme of things. Andrew was pretty useless at being a supervillain; Harmony sucked at being a vampire. Their decision to give up on the whole evil thing isn’t going to rock any cosmic boats. And of course their desire for redemption is contingent, as well. Andrew’s motive for seeking redemption are dubious at best. He’s so caught up in his fantasy life that he has trouble even recognising reality, and redemption for him is more a narrative device to give meaning to his life than the lode star it is for Angel. And he first begins to speak of redemption because he’s now living in Buffy’s house and he wants to fit in (and he’s emulating Spike, of course). Andrew and Harmony both initially want to be good because they want to fit in. Surround them with a bad crowd and they’ll do their useless best to be villainous (‘Look at you, all puffed up and mighty, thinking you're the new Big Bad. It's, uh ... well, let's face it, it's adorable.’) But give them a place in Team Good, a chance to fit in, role models to emulate, successes to aim for, a purpose, and they’ll give up the blood drinking or the demon-summoning, and sometimes they’ll even manage to be quite useful. It’s never going to change the world, of course. It isn’t going to upset the eternal balance the Powers are so anxious to maintain. Andrew and Harmony aren’t the stuff of heroes, they aren’t larger than life, but in a quiet way their decision matters. Wanting redemption can take many forms, and not all of them are written on a grand scale. But it still matters, and it’s good to know you haven’t got to be a hero to have a stab at it.
Thanks to the blessing of a bit more free time than usual this week – a two day weekend! What bliss! – I’ve managed to catch up with some ljs and TWoP, as well as watching some of BtVS S3, which I got on DVD for my birthday last week. I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed in this last-mentioned. Over and over again on TWoP I hear how superior the first three seasons are to the abominations that followed, but having finally seen some of S3 I’m now in a position to come out, join the S7 Pride march (probably as sole supporter, forlornly waving my banner in the wind, but what the hell) and say that I think BtVS only became really intriguing in S5, and that I LOVE S7. You can keep your wonderful S1-3, just so long as I can have 5-7. Okay, so I don’t love all of S7. And especially not everything after LMPTM, or that cluster of dull episodes right after Never Leave Me. But everything else. And I think it’s no coincidence that it’s not the supposedly brilliant early seasons that generate the most intense, and the most interesting debates. The later seasons, love ’em or hate ’em, have so much more meat to them. They make the viewer feel uncomfortable, they raise genuine moral dilemmas that people feel passionately about, and they aren’t afraid to make much-loved characters do unpleasant, and even genuinely terrible things. I miss that in S3, so while I was catching up, I also did a bit of rewatching of S7, just to remind myself of the glories that are to come :-) For some reason I ended up watching Bring on the Night and Showtime, both of which I had previously rather disliked, and had a sudden insight into the point of them. Up to now, I’d misread Buffy’s struggle with the Uebervamp - when I first saw the episodes, I was so hung up on my theory that Buffy was going to defeat Uebie by combining forces with the SiTs and getting them all to pitch in, that I thought it was unconvincing that she could suddenly defeat alone a monster she’d stood no chance against before. This time around, the scales fell from my eyes and I realised that that whole mini-arc is about (self) confidence. The uebervamp isn’t as powerful as Buffy initially thinks he is. Yes, he’s stronger than she expected, and tougher, but she’s so appalled when he doesn’t dust after she’s staked him, that she builds him up in her own mind into a force that can’t be defeated (just as the First later tries to persuade her to see its army as a force that can’t be defeated). Buffy gets trashed by the uebervamp because she believes she can’t defeat him. But she’s wrong. Uebervamps can be staked, you just have to use a lot more force than usual (and hell, if Willow can dust an average vampire, then staking those clearly doesn’t require any great physical strength – so there’s no reason why the potentials, with their greater prowess, shouldn’t be able to handle the uebervamps, even if they are a bit stringier). It turns out, once Buffy’s no longer viewing him through a mask of terror, that he’s actually not a great deal worse than ordinary vampires. Her little performance in Showtime is designed to demonstrate to the girls, and to herself, that the real enemy is their own fear. It’s not that the uebervamp suddenly got easier to fight, it’s that Buffy realised she was capable of taking him out. And since his apparent invincibility was a product of Buffy’s own fear and lack of self-confidence, it makes sense that the later versions are so much easier to kill, not because they’ve been cheaply mass-produced but because they never were all that great to begin with. Self-belief is a wonderful thing, as the First well knows, and all its taunting is devoted to trying to rip down that self-belief, convincing its enemies that they are bound to fail, so that the battle is lost before it’s even started.
The other train of thought triggered by my S3 viewing bonanza (okay, so it was only the first four episodes, but still) was about Harmony and Andrew. 'Beauty and the Beasts' may not be the greatest episode ever in terms of intrinsic interest, but it certainly tackles a key recurring theme head on. Oz and Angel, the immediate suspects, the men who are monsters, turn out to be innocent and the guilty party is a normal human boy, complete with soul, who deliberately chose to become part monster. In the course of the action, Giles comes out with a statement that will be crucial for our subsequent assessment of a number of characters.
Giles: In my experience, there are... two types of monster. The first, uh, can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed.
Buffy: And the second type?
Giles: The second is void of humanity, cannot respond to reason... or love.
They key point, of course, is not the definition of a human being as someone responsive to reason and love, but to the emphasis on wanting to be redeemed. Spike and Anya both clearly fall into this category. Spike’s journey is one long path towards redemption. Anya, even with hindsight, is less clearly travelling towards that end point, but she achieves the crucial desire for redemption in Selfless (and a cracking episode it is, too). With these two the decision is clear cut. Both realise they have committed unacceptable acts, both want to change. Neither is fully aware of the implications of that choice – how can they be? – but they choose nonetheless, and their decision has far-reaching implications. The First spends a significant amount of time trying to persuade Spike to reverse his decision, to give up the hope that he can ever be worth anything to the side of good (I’ve always felt that the First made an obvious strategic error in attempting to torture Spike into choosing to revert to evil – ’cos, like, it makes it seem so tempting – but undermining his self-belief – never that strong at the best of times – was a more sensible approach, and I suppose if you count the torture as a way of making it particularly evident that Buffy didn’t care enough to come and rescue him, than perhaps it wasn’t so stupid after all. In any case, I think the main function of the torture scenes, silly though they are, is to externalise Spike’s sense of guilt, his conviction that he deserves punishment for his previous atrocities, and that this is why it all goes on for so long). D’Hoffryn, who had blithely disregarded Anya when becoming human was a punishment not a choice, sends his assassins after her when she ceases to be a demon of her own volition. A monster who not only wants redemption but acts on that sends ripples through the underworld; it upsets the balance; it’s not supposed to happen.
But just as it isn’t only monsters who perform evil acts – persons with souls are just as capable, thank you very much – so it isn’t only characters of the stature of Spike or Anya who can aspire to redemption, though their decision matters very much more in the grand scheme of things. Andrew was pretty useless at being a supervillain; Harmony sucked at being a vampire. Their decision to give up on the whole evil thing isn’t going to rock any cosmic boats. And of course their desire for redemption is contingent, as well. Andrew’s motive for seeking redemption are dubious at best. He’s so caught up in his fantasy life that he has trouble even recognising reality, and redemption for him is more a narrative device to give meaning to his life than the lode star it is for Angel. And he first begins to speak of redemption because he’s now living in Buffy’s house and he wants to fit in (and he’s emulating Spike, of course). Andrew and Harmony both initially want to be good because they want to fit in. Surround them with a bad crowd and they’ll do their useless best to be villainous (‘Look at you, all puffed up and mighty, thinking you're the new Big Bad. It's, uh ... well, let's face it, it's adorable.’) But give them a place in Team Good, a chance to fit in, role models to emulate, successes to aim for, a purpose, and they’ll give up the blood drinking or the demon-summoning, and sometimes they’ll even manage to be quite useful. It’s never going to change the world, of course. It isn’t going to upset the eternal balance the Powers are so anxious to maintain. Andrew and Harmony aren’t the stuff of heroes, they aren’t larger than life, but in a quiet way their decision matters. Wanting redemption can take many forms, and not all of them are written on a grand scale. But it still matters, and it’s good to know you haven’t got to be a hero to have a stab at it.