Rules of Engagement: Violence and Hyperreality in the Buffyverse

[lostboy_lj]

rebcake recently posted a poll regarding the onset of Buffy and Spike's sexual relationship in the BtVS episode "Smashed."  I answered "neither" and began to post a comment to explain, but it started to get long-ish, so I thought I'd just do a long-ish blog post instead.  What I wrote turned out to be somewhat off-topic in terms of her poll, and more

Comments

[red_satin_doll]

Ok, I've read through it and YES to your entire essay here. I remember watching the first season and being a little unnerved at first by all these teenagers dying and then being forgotten, so grieving parents etc - because I had to adjust my expectations to the world of Sunnydale in order to keep watching it. If I had tried to adjust it to MY real-world expectations, then obviously I wouldn't have been able to continue watching. But the show makes very explicit from the first episode that this is NOT the real world. And not just in terms of violence - in small things such as the way nobody reacts or even remembers these terrible incidents (such as the first vampire raid in the Bronze), and how Giles says "I've seen this all the time (Cordelia remembers it as "drug gangs

[lostboy_lj]

Yeah, Sunnydale is like an amalgam of various horror movie settings and tropes, where secret knowledge merges with urban legend to create new kinds of authorities and power structures. Everybody knows something is wrong with Sunnydale, but very few people know exactly what -- or, if they do, can openly accept it. Buffy & Co. (and a few other groups and individuals, like the Initiative, the Mayor's Office, The Watcher's Council, Tucker Wells, etc.) are in the esoteric circle, and everyone else is locked outside in the exoteric one where authorities and institutions like schools, police forces and government bureaucracy are still thought to have some degree of control

[red_satin_doll]

You make a terrific point about Snyder - I think he's the first person to mention "the Mayor" (correct me if I'm wrong), so I started to assume that he was indeed a party to the "big bad". I don't know if that was an intentional mislead or the writer's playing with the notion (I tend to credit it as intentional) but I think it adds a layer of complexity that the show often isn't given credit for, that the banality of Synder's "evil" really predates/predicts the Trio, in a way. (Snyder comes off as a somewhat more hardened, older, fascist version of Warren; I suspect Snyder wasn't popular in school, didn't have too many dates, etc and so has hardened into an attitude of contempt for almost everyone around him, just as Warren does.)

BTW - I love the way you structure your metas - the gifs, captions, the humor ("Buffy the Bunny Snuggler". LOL)

[lostboy_lj]

Hmmm... it's something to think about. I actually tend to lump the Trio in with the esoteric group. They are social outsiders/outcasts, but insiders like the Scoobies when it comes to the Sunnydale game. Warren and his friends walk in the Sunnydale of magic, mad science and demons, whereas Snyder walks in the "normal" Sunnydale that buries its head in the sand.

To me, the biggest difference between Warren and Snyder is not age or hardening, but intellect and ambition. Warren was a genius capable of creating lifelike androids, hi-tech super weapons, etc. Snyder felt like a cog in a machine to me; a dull functionary tasked with keeping the status quo. Warren, on the other hand, seemed hellbent on upending the entire social order (for his own benefit, of course).

[red_satin_doll]

Very good analysis! I was commenting off the top o'the noggin, but what you say here makes a lot of sense.

[lostboy_lj]

BTW - I love the way you structure your metas - the gifs, captions, the humor ("Buffy the Bunny Snuggler". LOL)

Thanks. :)