Buffy Season 8 or The Emperors New Comic Book
This is my final post about S8, it's less a review and more my personal experience with the comic. It wasn't a good experience. If you're positive about the comic, you'll probably not like it, but you're still very welcome to the debate.
It goes against my grain to judge a book before I read it completely so I had to stick around and read the trainwreck to its bitter end.
Now I have and I think the least I deserve for reading it all is a good bye rant to get rid of my frustration so I can move on to the good parts of fandom. Most of this is not really a review or meta, just my own personal experience with Season 8 and why I did mess so badly with my love for BtVS.
Let me go back to the year 2007, when the whole tragedy started:
I had been in fandom for a few months, maybe a year. By the time I was in there long enough to know that I had missed a lot. I regretted it that I had not been in fandom when the show was still on the air and the fandom was on its creative peak.
You can imagine how happy the idea of a Buffy comic by the Joss master himself made me. First of it was a comic book. I love comic books since I can read. My flat is full with them and whenever I visit new country I take comics home with me. I love the synergy of text and picture. It’s a way of storytelling I adore. As a teenager I wanted to become a comic book artist. I love comics. And this was going to be a comic! And Buffy! And Joss! And I would be there to see it all happen! How fucking unbelievably awesome was that going to be?
I’ll admit it here, I was even a little miffed at the fandom dinosaurs I had befriended because they weren’t all dancing with joy over this news.
Little did I know.
Finally the first issue came out. I had meticulously avoided to read any spoilers about it online and had ordered it via my gaming store in Vienna, meaning it arrived at double the usual price, two months late.
I read through In the 8.5 minutes it takes to read twenty pages of comic book. Wow Buffy! There were some slight miffs with the book, but I immediately started to make excuses for them. The art was mediocre at best, but well, maybe it was because I prefer the European style and after all it was a relatively cheaply produced book to a television show, which I usually avoided. Also the covers were nice.
Who cared about the pictures anyway? It was the content that counted. Good it was a bit slow in the beginning and there was nothing of the brilliance that left me gaping at the screen that the show had possessed. But hey, twenty pages, that was like the first 5 minutes of an episode and I had not been a big fan until the second season.
Also what did the setting matter anyway? The really important part was what had become of the characters. How did the S7 fallout between Buffy and Giles play out? Who the hell was the Immortal? And most of all did Buffy ever learn that Spike is alive? Did she miss him? Did she mean it? Where they going to meet again? Would we get to see a grown up Buffy who takes control over her love life? What about the bit of her not trusting Angel anymore? What had she learned about Wolfram & Hart?
I knew by then that a lot of those things had been invented due to SMG not being able to make time for the Angel finish, so I loved the notion that finally Joss was free of such petty constraints such as actor schedules and could finish the story the way he imagined it.
The long way Home came and went. It really was just a teaser and though there was none of the stuff I had been longing to see, but at least it was still decently entertaining. Ok, there was the completely pointless and anticlimactic death of one of my favorite rare guest characters (Ethan) without us even seeing a reaction from Giles, but maybe that would be retroactively infused with meaning. It was obviously the beginning of a bigger story that was going to be marvelous for certain and hey, the next arc would be about Faith and Giles and by the guy who made Y-The last Man, how cool was that?
Also it had ended on the Chain, which had slightly better artwork and a touching little short story about one of Buffy’s doubles. So it could get better!
And really the second arc could convince. I was relieved. Now the story was on track. I saw the problems of the arc (like the not at all English England and the weird bubble bath scene), but I didn’t find them really disturbing and the spot on characterization of Faith and Giles was worth every penny. Also there was this Twilight Symbol and the bigger plot was looming in the background. Cool, I had not been wrong. The art still sucked (save for the covers), but if the story got better at that rate we were indeed in for something epic.
You have to remember that at the time the story was already 10 issues in and that the series was only supposed to have 30 issues, so I figured that the real action of the season was bound to start off soon.
A beautiful sunset gave another glimpse at was what to come. A masked super villain. Uhm, ok. Well he seemed a bit boring, but Season 4 ended up being great even though it had Adam for a villain and maybe he would grow more interesting.
Next stop Wolves at the Gate. Hm, well yeah…Xacula was fun, but what the fuck was that gig with Mecha Dawn? And while in the beginning I thought the thought of a bisexual Buffy pretty interesting, the notion that she was pressed with tooth and nail into the cliché of the horny college student who just tries it, but firmly stays in camp cock, though it was awesomesauce great sex (because the sex is for the minds of guys actually, so you can’t admit it was bad sex. It was great, but inexplicably men still rule). That was so…so…lame and so mainstream porn lesbianism and so cheap. It was so not Buffy. Buffy used to surprise, Buffy used to push boundaries and now they were paddling backwards into fanboy service.
Ok, maybe it was just a hiccup, it was after all the fun before the storm episode that so many great seasons had. Also it was not written by Joss. The next arc though would be written by Joss and it would crossover with Fray. It would have timetravel and stuff and did I mention Joss.
I was at my enthusiast peak. Now it would really start. Finally we were getting to the beef. And instead we got “Time of your life”, confusing, and in the end fairly pointless and in fact boring. And Riley was a traitor.
I was starting to run out of excuses. This was just…lame. Maybe it would make sense in the end. Maybe at some point the waiting would pay off. But considering how other seasons of Buffy had been constructed, the waiting should be decidedly more fun. Buffy never ever relied so heavily on its bigger arc. While you were wondering about the big bads and secret plans to destroy the world, you always had little bads wreaking havoc, you had personal story arcs developing.
In S8 there was nothing of the kind. Every personal development was so superficial it barely even registered as such. Buffy pines after this and that guy. Xander and Dawn are suddenly snogging. I’m feeling none of it.
Anyway after a lot of confusion that I convinced myself would for sure make some sense in the bigger picture the arc ended on a flashback that featured Angel. And not Spike. They were seriously bringing Buffy back to Angel. Yeah, they always had him on the backburner, but now they really wanted to do it and it had exactly the consequence I dreaded. Buffy has to be stupid and lose all her character development to go with Angel again. The character was off all season, but now she was getting really pathetic and annoying. I couldn’t reconcile her with show Buffy anymore. I had always figured at some point there would be a flashback or a tale that would explain why Buffy robs banks, or why she doesn’t even mention Spike’s name. We never got one. Comic Buffy is just that way, she’s OOC to show Buffy. Her personal development makes no sense.
This is not about bashing Buffy or even blaming her, all the blame go to the writers for letting her angst just for angst’s sake, without giving a real inner conflict. This is also not about not spelling the conflict out, you don’t need to do that, it will reflect in the character as long as you have something in mind. Here they had no conflict for Buffy, just “let her be angsty and a little depressed, that worked on the show”. The misconception starts here. That’s not how the show worked. Buffy had motivation on the show, she did not angst out of the blue, she had reasons, underlying issues. Comic!Buffy is empty. In fact almost all the characters are most of the time, but she’s showing the most, because she’s the lead.
Next stop Predators and Prey. This was the one that really managed to get me from team positive into the negative camp. The “everyone loves vampires” storyline was unbelievably stupid. Faith and Giles in 19th century germany? WTF?
And finally penned by Joss himself the Dawn issue.
With this plot how fucking the wrong guy entitles the wronged man to abuse the girl? How Dawn had it coming? Kenny was not to fault at all. His nature is volatile. When did that argument ever go for vampires or for anyone in the Buffyverse? This was positively treason to feminism (turned out that was forshadowing, because that’s actually a fitting description of the season as a whole). It was like finally finding the dead rat in room that had been smiling funny for a while now.
Buffy was no longer a feminist thing.
Going back in my Buffy history, I never thought of Buffy as feminist when I saw it. Just as good. It had female characters that kicked ass, that were as smart as men, as three dimensional. They had great stories and defied clichés. It was only afterwards that I realized in our society sadly that is feminist.
All those things I had taken for granted were missing in S8. Women were suddenly things again, drawn for a male audience. Having lesbian affairs the way men see them, regressing into little princesses instead of growing up. And if growing up means taking responsibility in the sense that you feel guilty when your abusive boyfriend destroys your live and takes away your control over your own body, then maybe that really is the wiser choice.
On to Retreat. Hey this was JE, it had to be better. Long story short: It wasn’t. The plot continued to be idiotic as its heroine who decided to go with what came to be known as operation sitting duck for a strategy against an invading demon army.
The character voices were good but what was happening was still mostly morose. Buffy all of the sudden has the hots for Xander, who is kissing Dawn for good measure now. I don’t mind Dawn/Xander, but till the end I never saw any real connection between them. I have no idea what they see in each other and I never had that feeling with the relationships on the show. It’s as shallow as comic Buffy.
It’s just so stupid and then Twilight attacks. And while Buffy feels guilty about god and the world she neither feels guilty for coming up with such an incredibly stupid plan or for hitting on what she knows is her sister’s boyfriend. It’s all angst for angst’s sake, without any possible real motivation being actively ignored.
But hey, you haven’t seen bad until you’ve seen the Twilight arc. It has space frakking and the character voices from comic hell.
At the end of retreat Buffy develops superpowers (this by the way makes no sense even now that the season is over) and then meets up with Twilight.
As you all know Twilight takes of his mask and has Jeanty’s slightly goblin like rendition of Angel’s face. He has nothing else of Angel. He’s revealed to be a complete idiot, who basically started to murder slayers and humans to annoy Buffy into developing superpowers, because a talking dog told him so. The two lobotomized characters have sex and open up a new dimension.
Uhm. Yeah. At this point the story loses every appeal it had left. It veers from merely pointless into disgusting. It makes no sense. You read it but you don’t get the feeling that any of the characters of the show would actually act or talk like that.
Even the writer must have felt that because he gave the universe some magic glowjuice to get the characters going. The glowjuice is also magic as a plot device, because in the writer’s intention it takes away just enough agency from the characters to make them do things that go completely against their own agendas, but leaves them just enough will so that it’s not rape (actually it doesn’t because the idea that the consent of two characters being forced by the universe to have sex, is very sketchy, was only brought up by the fans, so they tried to retroactively return some will to them, which made even less sense).
So, we have now an abuse case (Dawn) and a non con sex (Buffy/Angel) but both those things never get called. They are just fine, within the story the women get blamed and that’s it. You might see were I’m coming from when I’m talking about treason to feminism.
It’s a major issue for me and I will return to it one more time, but it’s not the only one. The plotting and general bad writing is another.
If BtVS was a meal it would consist of lots of ingredients , carefully put together and stewed for a long while with a lot of love for detail. The comics read like someone found a page of the Buffy cookbook and now wildly throws ingredients into a pot, not bothering to unfreeze them or even knowing what should come out in the end.
Buffy angsts.
Buffy fucks the villain.
The villain is Angel.
Spike shows up.
People die.
Plot twists.
Apocalypse.
All these are ingredients of the show, but they are not what actually made Buffy so brilliant. People just randomly fucking without a working emotional set up behind them are not emotionally engaging. Character death that’s there just for the sake of a shock effect isn’t sad. It’s ridiculous. Spike just being there is not automatically interesting. Angst is no good for angst’s sake. It’s hollow. It’s nothing. The emperor is naked and this comic book is crap. It has no new ideas and it doesn’t even repeat the old ones in an engaging way.
There is the occasional rare moment, when you feel a very small glimpse of the taste that was the show (some of the character stuff in “turbulence” for example), but it’s gone seconds after only to be washed down with vomit.
I’m bleeding over into the final arc here, because really there is not much to say any more. The finish is abysmally bad. There is nothing to redeem it.
Joss didn’t even write it. Scott Allie did, sending it to Joss for corrections. They do a big battle, Giles dies, Spike hits monsters, Buffy barely remembers him, let alone cares. Angel goes even eviler and kills Giles (who got to ruin his scholarly reputation a short time before his demise by completely failing at evolution). Pod Buffy is sad and ends all magic. It is anticlimactic boring and empty.
Nothing is solved. The characters really are that stupid, there’s no explanation for it. And there we are. In the beginning the comics didn’t do a half bad job in pretending that there was something more to them. That they would go deeper. Things are weird but we’ll get to that point they promised.
And then they never did. It’s as if in S5 Dawn had just appeared because they thought a sister for Buffy would be cool and her popping into existence would never have been made a plot point.
This book is completely point and soulless. It’s not really a part of Buffy and I could never ever see it as canon. If it was fanfic I would not have read past the first three pages. It’s not worth the time. It’s a waste of space and it’s a giant hoax.
I have now why Season 8 went so wrong but to me it looks like the writers are using parts of the Buffy recipe without knowing what they want to cook. Buffy had the killing of monsters, plot twists, character death, game changers and all those things. But on the show they served the bigger purpose of telling a cool story, here they only serve to sell another book.
Allie explained that one of the themes of the season is betrayal and there are other bigger motives attributed to S8. Problem is none of them is new. They are all reheated from the tv seasons and what’s worse they don’t even add something new.
Take Angel, judging by his interviews Allie really thinks he was characterized coherently in the comics and that the plot of angel going evil is somehow adult because Angel’s personality lent itself to falling victim to Twilight. (Maybe it was wearing too short a skirt) He also claims there is more ambiguity than there was with Angelus when in fact there is less.
It’s a possession storyline. Like Spike and the First in S7. Spike was in a fragile mental state so he lent himself as a victim for the First too. That still doesn’t make him responsible for what he did while possessed. Neither is Angel responsible, in fact there is far less ambiguity because as the show went on it became clear (most dramatically when Spike got his soul) that Angel and Angelus are not all that separate and that Angel has good reason to fill guilty for his deeds. Not so much under the Twilight.
Though I’m sure he will be guilty to generate more empty angst for S9.
Allie points at the motive of Buffy betraying herself. Great idea, but why? All I see is her acting incredibly stupid for no good reason. It’s an insult to the character to mutilate her like that. She doesn’t go darker, just dumber.
Entry Spike, who was one of the reasons I stuck around for the finish. In the Positivista world as far as I understand it (feel free to correct me), he’s the shiny hero, who stays on world saving business all the time. Illustrating how morose Buffy is for choosing Twangel over him.
If that’s really how he meant it, I’ll have to hand my shipper card back. Telling a story about punishing the girl for loving the wrong man is barfworthy. In defense of the comic I don’t think that’s what they were trying to do.
I think the case is that Spike is a highly popular character, probably one of those who make the most money on their own aside from the leads themselves. They brought him in, because Spike is yet another ingredient that made the show popular. Only of course they forgot he didn’t do that just by smoking and showing off his abs. He had an arc, a story, an intense emotional plot that ended hanging in the air.
But all that made Spike great doesn’t fit into the comic. So he just gets to stand there, star in a sexy fantasy and end as the butt of a joke (haha, Spike runs off to chase pussy). They just had no idea what to do with him and that’s all there’s to it. He was only there for the sales. Hell they even were surprised the fans still remembered what he looked like.
And it sure worked. I for sure was lured back to the comics by the promise of Spike even if I feel dumb for it now that he’s being set up to be S9’s Xander.
The fact that spike fandom can count itself lucky that he didn’t go off and kill millions of people (just a few tourists on Big Ben for laughs) doesn’t really do it for me. I need my story to be awesome, not only slightly better than the worst imaginable comic book.
Let me return to feminism one last time, now that I have read the last issue. I think a fitting title for it would have been “band aid”.
The last issue had a few character moments that weren’t half bad. It also had a few consequences for the character’s incredible stupid actions in S8, but ultimately it’s a band aid on a severed limb.
Angsting about the deaths and actions in S8 is not engaging because those things never were motivated or made sense in the first place. I don’t even want Buffy to feel guilty about all that bullshit, I just wish it had never been written.
Now that the season is over there is Joss letter and several interviews talking about the “themes” in S8. One of them according to Joss is backlash to feminism. Now there was the bit where everyone hated slayers and loved vampires. Ok, it was clumsy to the nth degree, but I would buy that. Only that was not the only thing. In order to bring the Buffy and the Fray verse together Joss basically (and to be more dramatic as SA said) said that more than two women having power upsets the universe so much it needs to kill itself.
The universe itself is a misogynist.
Just no. That’s not how it works. And it’s not how it feels either. Yes, human ignorance leads to backlash against feminism, but nature so far has only shown that women are every bit as capable as men.
There is however an anti feminist movement that tries to use fake science to pretend it’s women’s “natural” place to serve man. That as a woman you really have nature against you. And this is the argument S8 is making here. It’s saying that it really is against nature/the universe/ the “balance” for women to have power. Wow, thank you. Do not need!
Maybe the reason I feel that way about the comics really is that I’m too stupid, to see the awesome deepness and layers that S8 is supposed to have.
Usually I love storytelling that works on several levels. Back when I was in anime/manga fandom I wrote pages and pages of meta on mailing lists for books like Naru Taru , 20th century boys or monster. I love Sandman and many of Allen Moore’s books. They all engage in metaphorical storytelling and hidden motives.
There is however the phenomenon of pseudo meaning. Thing is you can fake metaphorical storytelling. It’s not even hard, you just mix a bunch of mystic elements give a few cryptic hints and ready is a speculating fandom. I find that extremely frustrating because it’s essentially cheating of the reader by throwing out little bits that appear to be pieces of something bigger and are none. It’s not artful or interesting it’s just crap. It ruined several series for me, most prominent among them BSG and NGE.
And now Buffy. There’s nothing behind it. It’s just a crappy direction less array of pieces that once were Buffy. No new ideas. The emperor has no clothes.
Maybe it is true and I’m just too stupid to see all the poetic subtleties, genius character developments and underlying motives of great storytelling. Or maybe the emperor is just naked.
At any rate, I’m done with the comic. The band aid issue might have been better than what came before it but it can’t undo it, so there will be no S9 for me. Maybe I’m not a fan any more.
But hopefully I still am and will be able to forget this mess within a few weeks and return to the fandom I fell in love with so hard.
It goes against my grain to judge a book before I read it completely so I had to stick around and read the trainwreck to its bitter end.
Now I have and I think the least I deserve for reading it all is a good bye rant to get rid of my frustration so I can move on to the good parts of fandom. Most of this is not really a review or meta, just my own personal experience with Season 8 and why I did mess so badly with my love for BtVS.
Let me go back to the year 2007, when the whole tragedy started:
I had been in fandom for a few months, maybe a year. By the time I was in there long enough to know that I had missed a lot. I regretted it that I had not been in fandom when the show was still on the air and the fandom was on its creative peak.
You can imagine how happy the idea of a Buffy comic by the Joss master himself made me. First of it was a comic book. I love comic books since I can read. My flat is full with them and whenever I visit new country I take comics home with me. I love the synergy of text and picture. It’s a way of storytelling I adore. As a teenager I wanted to become a comic book artist. I love comics. And this was going to be a comic! And Buffy! And Joss! And I would be there to see it all happen! How fucking unbelievably awesome was that going to be?
I’ll admit it here, I was even a little miffed at the fandom dinosaurs I had befriended because they weren’t all dancing with joy over this news.
Little did I know.
Finally the first issue came out. I had meticulously avoided to read any spoilers about it online and had ordered it via my gaming store in Vienna, meaning it arrived at double the usual price, two months late.
I read through In the 8.5 minutes it takes to read twenty pages of comic book. Wow Buffy! There were some slight miffs with the book, but I immediately started to make excuses for them. The art was mediocre at best, but well, maybe it was because I prefer the European style and after all it was a relatively cheaply produced book to a television show, which I usually avoided. Also the covers were nice.
Who cared about the pictures anyway? It was the content that counted. Good it was a bit slow in the beginning and there was nothing of the brilliance that left me gaping at the screen that the show had possessed. But hey, twenty pages, that was like the first 5 minutes of an episode and I had not been a big fan until the second season.
Also what did the setting matter anyway? The really important part was what had become of the characters. How did the S7 fallout between Buffy and Giles play out? Who the hell was the Immortal? And most of all did Buffy ever learn that Spike is alive? Did she miss him? Did she mean it? Where they going to meet again? Would we get to see a grown up Buffy who takes control over her love life? What about the bit of her not trusting Angel anymore? What had she learned about Wolfram & Hart?
I knew by then that a lot of those things had been invented due to SMG not being able to make time for the Angel finish, so I loved the notion that finally Joss was free of such petty constraints such as actor schedules and could finish the story the way he imagined it.
The long way Home came and went. It really was just a teaser and though there was none of the stuff I had been longing to see, but at least it was still decently entertaining. Ok, there was the completely pointless and anticlimactic death of one of my favorite rare guest characters (Ethan) without us even seeing a reaction from Giles, but maybe that would be retroactively infused with meaning. It was obviously the beginning of a bigger story that was going to be marvelous for certain and hey, the next arc would be about Faith and Giles and by the guy who made Y-The last Man, how cool was that?
Also it had ended on the Chain, which had slightly better artwork and a touching little short story about one of Buffy’s doubles. So it could get better!
And really the second arc could convince. I was relieved. Now the story was on track. I saw the problems of the arc (like the not at all English England and the weird bubble bath scene), but I didn’t find them really disturbing and the spot on characterization of Faith and Giles was worth every penny. Also there was this Twilight Symbol and the bigger plot was looming in the background. Cool, I had not been wrong. The art still sucked (save for the covers), but if the story got better at that rate we were indeed in for something epic.
You have to remember that at the time the story was already 10 issues in and that the series was only supposed to have 30 issues, so I figured that the real action of the season was bound to start off soon.
A beautiful sunset gave another glimpse at was what to come. A masked super villain. Uhm, ok. Well he seemed a bit boring, but Season 4 ended up being great even though it had Adam for a villain and maybe he would grow more interesting.
Next stop Wolves at the Gate. Hm, well yeah…Xacula was fun, but what the fuck was that gig with Mecha Dawn? And while in the beginning I thought the thought of a bisexual Buffy pretty interesting, the notion that she was pressed with tooth and nail into the cliché of the horny college student who just tries it, but firmly stays in camp cock, though it was awesomesauce great sex (because the sex is for the minds of guys actually, so you can’t admit it was bad sex. It was great, but inexplicably men still rule). That was so…so…lame and so mainstream porn lesbianism and so cheap. It was so not Buffy. Buffy used to surprise, Buffy used to push boundaries and now they were paddling backwards into fanboy service.
Ok, maybe it was just a hiccup, it was after all the fun before the storm episode that so many great seasons had. Also it was not written by Joss. The next arc though would be written by Joss and it would crossover with Fray. It would have timetravel and stuff and did I mention Joss.
I was at my enthusiast peak. Now it would really start. Finally we were getting to the beef. And instead we got “Time of your life”, confusing, and in the end fairly pointless and in fact boring. And Riley was a traitor.
I was starting to run out of excuses. This was just…lame. Maybe it would make sense in the end. Maybe at some point the waiting would pay off. But considering how other seasons of Buffy had been constructed, the waiting should be decidedly more fun. Buffy never ever relied so heavily on its bigger arc. While you were wondering about the big bads and secret plans to destroy the world, you always had little bads wreaking havoc, you had personal story arcs developing.
In S8 there was nothing of the kind. Every personal development was so superficial it barely even registered as such. Buffy pines after this and that guy. Xander and Dawn are suddenly snogging. I’m feeling none of it.
Anyway after a lot of confusion that I convinced myself would for sure make some sense in the bigger picture the arc ended on a flashback that featured Angel. And not Spike. They were seriously bringing Buffy back to Angel. Yeah, they always had him on the backburner, but now they really wanted to do it and it had exactly the consequence I dreaded. Buffy has to be stupid and lose all her character development to go with Angel again. The character was off all season, but now she was getting really pathetic and annoying. I couldn’t reconcile her with show Buffy anymore. I had always figured at some point there would be a flashback or a tale that would explain why Buffy robs banks, or why she doesn’t even mention Spike’s name. We never got one. Comic Buffy is just that way, she’s OOC to show Buffy. Her personal development makes no sense.
This is not about bashing Buffy or even blaming her, all the blame go to the writers for letting her angst just for angst’s sake, without giving a real inner conflict. This is also not about not spelling the conflict out, you don’t need to do that, it will reflect in the character as long as you have something in mind. Here they had no conflict for Buffy, just “let her be angsty and a little depressed, that worked on the show”. The misconception starts here. That’s not how the show worked. Buffy had motivation on the show, she did not angst out of the blue, she had reasons, underlying issues. Comic!Buffy is empty. In fact almost all the characters are most of the time, but she’s showing the most, because she’s the lead.
Next stop Predators and Prey. This was the one that really managed to get me from team positive into the negative camp. The “everyone loves vampires” storyline was unbelievably stupid. Faith and Giles in 19th century germany? WTF?
And finally penned by Joss himself the Dawn issue.
With this plot how fucking the wrong guy entitles the wronged man to abuse the girl? How Dawn had it coming? Kenny was not to fault at all. His nature is volatile. When did that argument ever go for vampires or for anyone in the Buffyverse? This was positively treason to feminism (turned out that was forshadowing, because that’s actually a fitting description of the season as a whole). It was like finally finding the dead rat in room that had been smiling funny for a while now.
Buffy was no longer a feminist thing.
Going back in my Buffy history, I never thought of Buffy as feminist when I saw it. Just as good. It had female characters that kicked ass, that were as smart as men, as three dimensional. They had great stories and defied clichés. It was only afterwards that I realized in our society sadly that is feminist.
All those things I had taken for granted were missing in S8. Women were suddenly things again, drawn for a male audience. Having lesbian affairs the way men see them, regressing into little princesses instead of growing up. And if growing up means taking responsibility in the sense that you feel guilty when your abusive boyfriend destroys your live and takes away your control over your own body, then maybe that really is the wiser choice.
On to Retreat. Hey this was JE, it had to be better. Long story short: It wasn’t. The plot continued to be idiotic as its heroine who decided to go with what came to be known as operation sitting duck for a strategy against an invading demon army.
The character voices were good but what was happening was still mostly morose. Buffy all of the sudden has the hots for Xander, who is kissing Dawn for good measure now. I don’t mind Dawn/Xander, but till the end I never saw any real connection between them. I have no idea what they see in each other and I never had that feeling with the relationships on the show. It’s as shallow as comic Buffy.
It’s just so stupid and then Twilight attacks. And while Buffy feels guilty about god and the world she neither feels guilty for coming up with such an incredibly stupid plan or for hitting on what she knows is her sister’s boyfriend. It’s all angst for angst’s sake, without any possible real motivation being actively ignored.
But hey, you haven’t seen bad until you’ve seen the Twilight arc. It has space frakking and the character voices from comic hell.
At the end of retreat Buffy develops superpowers (this by the way makes no sense even now that the season is over) and then meets up with Twilight.
As you all know Twilight takes of his mask and has Jeanty’s slightly goblin like rendition of Angel’s face. He has nothing else of Angel. He’s revealed to be a complete idiot, who basically started to murder slayers and humans to annoy Buffy into developing superpowers, because a talking dog told him so. The two lobotomized characters have sex and open up a new dimension.
Uhm. Yeah. At this point the story loses every appeal it had left. It veers from merely pointless into disgusting. It makes no sense. You read it but you don’t get the feeling that any of the characters of the show would actually act or talk like that.
Even the writer must have felt that because he gave the universe some magic glowjuice to get the characters going. The glowjuice is also magic as a plot device, because in the writer’s intention it takes away just enough agency from the characters to make them do things that go completely against their own agendas, but leaves them just enough will so that it’s not rape (actually it doesn’t because the idea that the consent of two characters being forced by the universe to have sex, is very sketchy, was only brought up by the fans, so they tried to retroactively return some will to them, which made even less sense).
So, we have now an abuse case (Dawn) and a non con sex (Buffy/Angel) but both those things never get called. They are just fine, within the story the women get blamed and that’s it. You might see were I’m coming from when I’m talking about treason to feminism.
It’s a major issue for me and I will return to it one more time, but it’s not the only one. The plotting and general bad writing is another.
If BtVS was a meal it would consist of lots of ingredients , carefully put together and stewed for a long while with a lot of love for detail. The comics read like someone found a page of the Buffy cookbook and now wildly throws ingredients into a pot, not bothering to unfreeze them or even knowing what should come out in the end.
Buffy angsts.
Buffy fucks the villain.
The villain is Angel.
Spike shows up.
People die.
Plot twists.
Apocalypse.
All these are ingredients of the show, but they are not what actually made Buffy so brilliant. People just randomly fucking without a working emotional set up behind them are not emotionally engaging. Character death that’s there just for the sake of a shock effect isn’t sad. It’s ridiculous. Spike just being there is not automatically interesting. Angst is no good for angst’s sake. It’s hollow. It’s nothing. The emperor is naked and this comic book is crap. It has no new ideas and it doesn’t even repeat the old ones in an engaging way.
There is the occasional rare moment, when you feel a very small glimpse of the taste that was the show (some of the character stuff in “turbulence” for example), but it’s gone seconds after only to be washed down with vomit.
I’m bleeding over into the final arc here, because really there is not much to say any more. The finish is abysmally bad. There is nothing to redeem it.
Joss didn’t even write it. Scott Allie did, sending it to Joss for corrections. They do a big battle, Giles dies, Spike hits monsters, Buffy barely remembers him, let alone cares. Angel goes even eviler and kills Giles (who got to ruin his scholarly reputation a short time before his demise by completely failing at evolution). Pod Buffy is sad and ends all magic. It is anticlimactic boring and empty.
Nothing is solved. The characters really are that stupid, there’s no explanation for it. And there we are. In the beginning the comics didn’t do a half bad job in pretending that there was something more to them. That they would go deeper. Things are weird but we’ll get to that point they promised.
And then they never did. It’s as if in S5 Dawn had just appeared because they thought a sister for Buffy would be cool and her popping into existence would never have been made a plot point.
This book is completely point and soulless. It’s not really a part of Buffy and I could never ever see it as canon. If it was fanfic I would not have read past the first three pages. It’s not worth the time. It’s a waste of space and it’s a giant hoax.
I have now why Season 8 went so wrong but to me it looks like the writers are using parts of the Buffy recipe without knowing what they want to cook. Buffy had the killing of monsters, plot twists, character death, game changers and all those things. But on the show they served the bigger purpose of telling a cool story, here they only serve to sell another book.
Allie explained that one of the themes of the season is betrayal and there are other bigger motives attributed to S8. Problem is none of them is new. They are all reheated from the tv seasons and what’s worse they don’t even add something new.
Take Angel, judging by his interviews Allie really thinks he was characterized coherently in the comics and that the plot of angel going evil is somehow adult because Angel’s personality lent itself to falling victim to Twilight. (Maybe it was wearing too short a skirt) He also claims there is more ambiguity than there was with Angelus when in fact there is less.
It’s a possession storyline. Like Spike and the First in S7. Spike was in a fragile mental state so he lent himself as a victim for the First too. That still doesn’t make him responsible for what he did while possessed. Neither is Angel responsible, in fact there is far less ambiguity because as the show went on it became clear (most dramatically when Spike got his soul) that Angel and Angelus are not all that separate and that Angel has good reason to fill guilty for his deeds. Not so much under the Twilight.
Though I’m sure he will be guilty to generate more empty angst for S9.
Allie points at the motive of Buffy betraying herself. Great idea, but why? All I see is her acting incredibly stupid for no good reason. It’s an insult to the character to mutilate her like that. She doesn’t go darker, just dumber.
Entry Spike, who was one of the reasons I stuck around for the finish. In the Positivista world as far as I understand it (feel free to correct me), he’s the shiny hero, who stays on world saving business all the time. Illustrating how morose Buffy is for choosing Twangel over him.
If that’s really how he meant it, I’ll have to hand my shipper card back. Telling a story about punishing the girl for loving the wrong man is barfworthy. In defense of the comic I don’t think that’s what they were trying to do.
I think the case is that Spike is a highly popular character, probably one of those who make the most money on their own aside from the leads themselves. They brought him in, because Spike is yet another ingredient that made the show popular. Only of course they forgot he didn’t do that just by smoking and showing off his abs. He had an arc, a story, an intense emotional plot that ended hanging in the air.
But all that made Spike great doesn’t fit into the comic. So he just gets to stand there, star in a sexy fantasy and end as the butt of a joke (haha, Spike runs off to chase pussy). They just had no idea what to do with him and that’s all there’s to it. He was only there for the sales. Hell they even were surprised the fans still remembered what he looked like.
And it sure worked. I for sure was lured back to the comics by the promise of Spike even if I feel dumb for it now that he’s being set up to be S9’s Xander.
The fact that spike fandom can count itself lucky that he didn’t go off and kill millions of people (just a few tourists on Big Ben for laughs) doesn’t really do it for me. I need my story to be awesome, not only slightly better than the worst imaginable comic book.
Let me return to feminism one last time, now that I have read the last issue. I think a fitting title for it would have been “band aid”.
The last issue had a few character moments that weren’t half bad. It also had a few consequences for the character’s incredible stupid actions in S8, but ultimately it’s a band aid on a severed limb.
Angsting about the deaths and actions in S8 is not engaging because those things never were motivated or made sense in the first place. I don’t even want Buffy to feel guilty about all that bullshit, I just wish it had never been written.
Now that the season is over there is Joss letter and several interviews talking about the “themes” in S8. One of them according to Joss is backlash to feminism. Now there was the bit where everyone hated slayers and loved vampires. Ok, it was clumsy to the nth degree, but I would buy that. Only that was not the only thing. In order to bring the Buffy and the Fray verse together Joss basically (and to be more dramatic as SA said) said that more than two women having power upsets the universe so much it needs to kill itself.
The universe itself is a misogynist.
Just no. That’s not how it works. And it’s not how it feels either. Yes, human ignorance leads to backlash against feminism, but nature so far has only shown that women are every bit as capable as men.
There is however an anti feminist movement that tries to use fake science to pretend it’s women’s “natural” place to serve man. That as a woman you really have nature against you. And this is the argument S8 is making here. It’s saying that it really is against nature/the universe/ the “balance” for women to have power. Wow, thank you. Do not need!
Maybe the reason I feel that way about the comics really is that I’m too stupid, to see the awesome deepness and layers that S8 is supposed to have.
Usually I love storytelling that works on several levels. Back when I was in anime/manga fandom I wrote pages and pages of meta on mailing lists for books like Naru Taru , 20th century boys or monster. I love Sandman and many of Allen Moore’s books. They all engage in metaphorical storytelling and hidden motives.
There is however the phenomenon of pseudo meaning. Thing is you can fake metaphorical storytelling. It’s not even hard, you just mix a bunch of mystic elements give a few cryptic hints and ready is a speculating fandom. I find that extremely frustrating because it’s essentially cheating of the reader by throwing out little bits that appear to be pieces of something bigger and are none. It’s not artful or interesting it’s just crap. It ruined several series for me, most prominent among them BSG and NGE.
And now Buffy. There’s nothing behind it. It’s just a crappy direction less array of pieces that once were Buffy. No new ideas. The emperor has no clothes.
Maybe it is true and I’m just too stupid to see all the poetic subtleties, genius character developments and underlying motives of great storytelling. Or maybe the emperor is just naked.
At any rate, I’m done with the comic. The band aid issue might have been better than what came before it but it can’t undo it, so there will be no S9 for me. Maybe I’m not a fan any more.
But hopefully I still am and will be able to forget this mess within a few weeks and return to the fandom I fell in love with so hard.