The thing about movies directed by a famous older white guy starring a famous older white guy is you don't have to go see them. This is relevant every year.
often you will see things online where you just have to be like "what a strange thing to say" or "i don't think that's true :)" to yourself and try to move on or you will lose your mind
Both Watsonian and Doylist readings of a piece of fiction can be appropriate in different contexts. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the characters in a story as if they were real people with motivations and inner lives. That is the surface level on which most works of fiction are intended to be enjoyed! Sometimes it makes sense to admit that the whole thing is something somebody made up and the characters are described as doing things only because that advances the story being told. That is the actual truth, after all.
But there's a very irritating rhetorical trick a lot of you like to deploy, one which I wish wasn't so popular on here: a sort of ad hoc tactical retreat to Doylism.
This is a gambit that is played in the middle of a discussion about a piece of fiction in which everybody involved has implicitly agreed to adopt a purely Watsonian reading. At the very instant it's suggested a character you personally like or sympathize with might have done something bad, you suddenly insist on reminding everybody that none of this is real and the character only did the alleged bad things because the awful writers "made them do it". And then, having derailed the conversation this way, you go back to ... talking about what a nice person the character actually is, now just as much of a Watsonian as you were before.
Of course it is literally true that the character only does bad things "because the writer(s) made him¹ do it". That's the only reason any character in the work does (or says, or feels, or secretly thinks) anything at all. There's no real moral consequence to anything good or bad a character does, outside the entirely fictional universe it happens in. But the idea you can somehow excise only the actions you dislike this way, then go back to talking about the work from a purely Watsonian perspective ... that's just bizarre to me. And yet so many of you do it constantly.
Once you pull out the "it's just a story, none of it's real" card, you can longer talk about any characters on the show being good or bad people. Because you've accepted that they are not, in fact, people at all. They are constructs. Plot devices. They don't exist. But so many people on here seem to (at least implicitly) think they can use a Doylist reading as a kind of scalpel to cut away the parts of a character's arc or personality they don't like, then carry on discussing the work from the perspective of Dr Watson.
"Why is Holmes so upset with Professor Moriarty killing all those people? Doesn't he realize that that lazy hack writer Arthur Conan Doyle made him do it?" Well, you see, from the perspective of fictional character Sherlock Holmes, those fictional murders are as real as anything else he can ever react to. Indeed, he's only "upset" at all because the writer also made him react that way. There's no context in which he as an autonomous individual can react to the interventions of Arthur Conan Doyle.
If you, as a writer, tell a story in which a character murders several people, it is obviously true that no real crime has been committed. It is true that the character only killed anybody because you thought it would advance the story somehow. But it is still true that -- within the context of the story -- that character is now a murderer. That is as much a part of the character as anything else real about them. Yes, the murders happened because that was the story the writer wanted to tell. But that means the writer has told a story about a murderer. You cannot praise Professor Moriarty's brilliant academic career (which the writer made up) but ignore or discount his criminal activities purely on the grounds that the writer (also) made them up. Neither one of them is somehow "more real" than the other.
That is -- no, I'm wrong. Clearly you can do this, I've seen it. I just wish you wouldn't, because it's very silly.
You are not engaged in some form of deep literary analysis just because you want to discuss the story as if it was about real people you like but don't want to admit they ever do anything unpleasant or have any flaws.
Was going to stick to being gender neutral, but it's always some fucking man, isn't it?
I do kind of love the way the Buffy wiki just treats citations as a kind of meaningless punctuation; something you sprinkle in here and there to look more credible and which may or may not have any bearing on what you're actually asserting as fact.
For example, from the article on Rupert Giles, we have:
"Giles accepted his destiny of becoming a Watcher in 1980 [35]"
[35] Welcome to the Hellmouth
So our source for the very specific claim that "Giles accepted his destiny of becoming a Watcher in 1980" is ... the very first episode of the show. Which doesn't have anything to say about Giles' backstory, or about how he became a Watcher, or suggest any reason he might have struggled "accepting his destiny", or of course mention anything at all that happened in the year 1980.
Good. Fine. Sure. Pardon me for making the mistake of asking, I guess.
The idea that Rupert Giles, a man who -- among other things -- we know:
went to a 'public' (i.e. fee-paying, non-state, probably boarding) school in England
went to Oxford University in the 1970s (a time when both Oxford and Cambridge were even more socially exclusive than they are today)
is familiar with activities such as rugby and kayaking and has a personal collection of first editions and wears tweed and is frequently accused by people who know him of being a snob
has enough money to casually buy first a BMW convertible and then a shop, both largely on the spur of the moment, after over a year of unemployment, during which time he seemed entirely uninterested in looking for a new job
shows no signs of ever being frugal or careful with money, or indeed (until Season 6, and then only once) any awareness that a lack of money could be a problem for anybody else
says things like "what I'm proposing, and I don't mean to appear indecorous, is a social engagement, if you're amenable" and "my father gave me a very tiresome speech about responsibility and sacrifice" and "it's a sacred duty, which shouldn't prevent you from eventually procuring some more gainful form of employment", all delivered in an accent noticeably more posh than his actor's normal middle-class speaking voice
has the first name 'Rupert'
is coded as anything other than being born into generational wealth is, I'll admit, a new one to me. I can't say I'm glad to have been introduced to it, exactly, but I certainly can't deny that I have been.
If the system ain't broke, don't fix it, I guess! Accounting may not be the oldest profession, but someone had to keep the books for them.
I mean, in theory I know that Excel is based on the structure of earlier accounting technology that's been around for hundreds of years -- what do we think we did to track commerce before computers? -- but it still kind of blows my mind to, for example, look at my ancestor's journal from a whaling voyage in 1770 and see spreadsheets in the back.
Mentioned this in passing in my big post about the episode, but I wanted to pull this out into its own thing.
A lot of people will tell you that Revelations is the episode where the gang find out that Angel is 'back from hell' or more generally 'back from the dead'. This has been the standard reading of the episode for at least a couple of decades, possibly longer. It's how Noel Murray of the Onion's AV Club summarized the episode back in 2009 ("the news breaks in Revelations that Angel is alive again"); it's how Passion of the Nerd recapped the episode in 2016 ("Xander tells [Faith] about a back-from-the-dead Angel"); it's how IMDB currently summarizes this episode ("all of [Buffy's] friends [are] angry and upset that [she] didn't tell them about Angel's return from hell").
But I think that reading of Revelations is ... not actually true? It's certainly not the language anybody other than (perhaps) Buffy uses in the episode. Not for the first time, I think people are describing a slightly different episode than the one that actually exists.
Revelations is the episode in which Buffy's friends find out that Angel isn't dead. And yes, I appreciate that that seems superficially similar to the claims above. And yes, the reason Angel is back in Sunnydale and no longer dead is because (for some reason yet to be explained¹) he somehow escaped from hell a few months ago. But Buffy's friends do not know this! They do not ask about it! It would be absurd for them to somehow intuit that that's what happened on the basis of what evidence they do have.
From the perspective of, say, Giles or Willow, the timeline is as follows:
In Becoming, Buffy went to fight Angel. After the fight, there was no sign of either one of them. They didn't know what had happened to the two of them, but Willow speculated that perhaps her attempt to restore Angel's soul had worked and they'd left to be "alone together". They wouldn't see Buffy again for months.
In Faith, Hope & Trick Buffy tells them both that Willow's spell to restore Angel's soul worked, but she was forced to kill him. (She uses the word killed three times to describe what she did. "Next time I kill Angel, I'll video it." and later "When I killed him, Angel was cured." and then "I told him that I loved him, and I kissed him. And I killed him.") She mentions Angel being drawn into a hell dimension once, yes, but the main claim she repeatedly makes is that Angel is not alive.
In Revelations, Xander sees Buffy and a very-much-alive Angel kissing. Kissing in the very mansion where Angel supposedly died six months earlier. He immediately tells Giles, who tells the others.
I think the evidence is pretty clear that the conclusion that they then leap to -- which is, indeed, the only reasonable one -- and the reason Giles accuses Buffy of lying to him, is not "Angel died but somehow he got better and Buffy hasn't told us yet". It is that Buffy hasn't been honest about what happened in Becoming. Their conclusion is not "Buffy has been lying [by omission? off-screen?] by not announcing that her ex-boyfriend has returned from hell". Rather it is: "Buffy was lying to protect Angel when she told us that she killed him: he has never been dead but merely left town for a while."
This doesn't seem to be how anybody else interprets this episode -- a lot of reviews of this episode, and not just the ones I quoted earlier, will confidently assert that Xander tells the gang that Angel is "back from the dead", for example -- but I think it's the only reading that actually fits the text.
Let's look at what people who aren't Buffy say about Angel.
Giles, first. "We know Angel is alive. [...] It would appear that you've been hiding him and that you lied to us." Then later, when it's just the two of them: "You should have told me he was alive. You didn't." No word of Angel being "back". A very clear statement that Buffy has lied. We might ask then: lied about what? Lied when? Well, I think "lied directly about killing Angel" makes a lot more sense than "lied [by choosing to keep a secret which nobody ever thought to ask about]". If we assume that Giles believes Buffy did kill Angel, and that she wasn't lying about anything then, what lie precisely has she since told?
Or let's look at Xander and Faith's conversation later. Xander tells Faith he has some "real news: Angel's still alive". Not that he's back from hell: merely that he was alive and he continues to be. Faith is shocked to learn that "Buffy knew he was alive". Not that he recovered from being dead, but that he isn't dead.
None of the others talk about Angel being "back", either. Willow tells Buffy that she understands that "you were scared, you kept a secret", but there's no indication either way as to how long Willow thinks Buffy has been keeping a secret. And Willow, despite being friendly towards Buffy, doesn't ask about when Angel "came back". Despite being interested in magic she doesn't ask how he came back. She shows no sign, in fact, of thinking he "came back" at all.
True, Buffy herself says that Angel is "back" during the intervention scene, but she doesn't clarify what he's "back" from. Back from the dead? Back from his adventures in hell? Or, as Xander later says when he's talking to Faith, merely "back in town"?
Go back and watch the episode. Nobody asks Buffy how or when Angel came from the dead, or if she knows why or how that happened. These are all very pertinent questions if they believe her transgression is not promptly telling them Angel has returned from hell. (For all Giles knows, if we assume he takes for granted that Angel was originally dead, Angel only came back from hell only last night, and Buffy was just about to tell him about it. Does his speech to Buffy suggest he's considered this possibility? If not, why not?)
They don't ask those questions. They have no reason to. They don't ask how long Buffy has known Angel was alive again. They don't wonder if anybody else might be able to come back from the dead. Because as far as they're concerned, they've just found out that Angel wasn't ever dead.
It will never be explained, at least not on Buffy.
You will probably hate me a great deal of the time (S3E07)
This week's episode is the debut writing credit for the second of this season's new writers. And while Jane Espenson's episodes this season are notable for a lack of Faith, the same can't be said of Doug Petrie's episodes.
Like Espenson, Petrie wrote three episodes this season: Revelations, Bad Girls and Enemies. Faith is a key character in all three, and all three are very significant episodes for Faith's arc this season. Petrie would go on to write Faith's return in This Year's Girl next season and (although I cannot prove there's a causal connection) it doesn't exactly seem like a coincidence that Petrie was a cowriter of both Checkpoint (in which Faith is mentioned for the first and indeed only time in Season 5) and Bring On The Night (in which Faith is mentioned for the first time in over forty episodes).
Petrie's writing debut is also notable for a significant increase in what he himself would later describe as the "lesbian subtext" between Buffy and Faith. Of course exhibit A is Buffy (largely unprompted) bringing up the idea of "going out with" Faith when her friends ask if she's dating anyone (and exhibit B is the surprised/disappointed look on Faith's face when she clarifies that they're really "just good friends"). But in the wider scheme of things, it's hard not to notice that the episode reminds us of Xander's crush on Buffy, and makes it clear that this is why he's so quick to assume the worst of Angel, and then has Faith react almost exactly the same way to finding out that Buffy's vampire ex is back in town ("Buffy knew he was alive [...] I can't believe her.")
The other highlight of this episode, to me, is the character of Gwendolyn Post. It's no exaggeration to say she's one of my favorite one-off villains. I think she might be my favorite one-off character on the whole show, actually. It always makes me a little sad when I see people saying that they don't like her because she's mean or sarcastic or makes Giles feel bad about the size of his book collection. That's why she's fun! That's the appeal! (Also, she's not being rude or dismissive for no reason: it's a very deliberate strategy to keep Giles off balance and stop him from thinking things through. But, to be clear, I would support her doing it even if this wasn't true.)
The downside, of course, is that Mrs Post's big evil scheme does not seem to have been thought through very carefully. I mean, I assume it would be nice to be able to summon lightning to destroy your enemies. It certainly looks fun! But I'm not sure it's obviously worth the trade-off of being forced to wear a giant metal gauntlet on your arm for the rest of your life, or having storm clouds constantly follow you around, or being very obviously evil while doing so.
(This is why Mrs Post and the Mayor should have teamed up: they are both fans of elaborate, long-running evil plans that require deception and hiding in plain sight and gathering powerful magical artifacts and getting a vampire slayer to do your dirty work for you and which, ultimately, don't really have the pay-off to remotely justify any of this.)
"Really, we're just good friends." Whenever it's been a while since I last watched the episode I always assume I must have only imagined Faith's disgusted reaction to this, or that it's somehow ambiguous or unclear, but ... no, that's how it happens on screen. She does not like the thought of being "just friends".
It's interesting (okay, it's just a minor continuity error, but bear with me) that Mrs Post mentions it being "a school night Slaying". Presumably the Council know that Buffy goes to school -- and maybe they assume Faith also does? -- but it's hard to square what we've been told about Slaying traditions so far with the idea that they'd care about how well the Slayer does in school.
The shooting script for this week's episode is very close to the final episode. I only noticed a handful of very small changes ("two years ago" becoming the vaguer "a couple of years ago"; the shooting script having Xander mention Buffy's interdimensional adventures in Anne when listing what she's been up to, when presumably he doesn't actually know about this). The biggest deleted line is probably this: in the first scene in the library, the finished episode has Mrs Post go straight from suggesting that Giles has become "a bit too ... American" to talking about Lagos. In the shooting script, we get this (unaired material in red):
MRS. POST: The fact is, there is talk in the council that you've become a bit too… American.
GILES: Me?
BUFFY: Him?
MRS. POST: Operations here seem somewhat haphazard. Sloppy. Faith. Sit up straight and pay attention.
[Faith, surprised, does exactly as she's told. Giles urgently motions for Buffy to do the same, but she just throws him a look.]
MRS. POST: A demon named Lagos is coming here…
"Some demon [...] and I gotta stop him [...] and it's another Tuesday night in Sunnydale." Fun bit of leaning on the fourth wall (since this episode aired, like every episode since Innocence, on a Tuesday night). That said, Lagos is another demon that could -- and I'd argue should -- have been a vampire, I think. I don't know what weakening the definition of demon to include 'stronger than average humanoid with no magical abilities or obvious problem existing in our reality' has really added to the show. If you just want somebody to fill the role of Bad Guy Buffy Can Kill, well ... the show's still called Buffy The Vampire Slayer, isn't it?
"You can stop your, uh, studying." It's never really been clear to me whether or not we're meant to think Giles saw what Willow and Xander were up to in the stacks. It never comes up again either way, but surely the balance of probability is that he did? (The pause before "studying", the fact he's not wearing his glasses when he starts to talk, which we're later outright told is something he does when he doesn't want to have to react to something he's seen...) The shooting script itself is deliberately coy about this: "did he see them? no way to tell", it says.
I think this intervention scene works a lot better than the party fight scene in Dead Man's Party. Everybody's motives are understandable and honestly pretty sympathetic, and equally they all struggle to communicate their feelings clearly (as Willow telegraphs). Something I think people seem to deliberately miss is that the conclusion the Slayerettes have jumped to here is not simply that Buffy lied to them purely by omission (by not telling anyone that Angel was back), but that she seems to have lied to them about Angel ever being dead. The intervention isn't because Buffy didn't come to tell them about Angel coming back (which, for all they know, only happened last night). It's because they think she's only been pretending Angel was dead all this time.
Which, honestly, is a pretty reasonable conclusion! They never saw the fight: the only reason they have to believe that Angel is gone is that Buffy told them she killed him. And now it seems that that isn't true. It's pretty reasonable for them to be surprised and upset by this! And it's not as if Buffy never lies, either: she was lying to Giles about her whereabouts only last week (and doing so, as we saw, to spend time with Angel!).
But equally I understand why Buffy felt she couldn't tell the others Angel was back -- she did come close to telling Giles, but when she tried framing Angel's return as a hypothetical he (unwittingly) reminded her that Angel killed Jenny Calendar and then said he would probably be "a lost cause" after being tortured for decades in hell. And of course the longer she goes without telling anyone the harder it is to tell the truth. Also, everyone's under additional stress that they don't acknowledge here (Giles is thrown by Mrs Post's presence and the suggestion he might be doing a bad job as Buffy's Watcher; Willow and Xander have their own big secret to hide which is making them act strangely).
And while I do think Buffy is right to accuse Xander of disliking Angel in large part because of jealousy (he admitted to still having a crush on her while he was seeing Cordelia! he is, although Buffy doesn't know, currently cheating on Cordelia!), I don't agree at all with the weird fandom take that only Giles has any right to bring up Jenny's death (the show does enough to reduce Ms Calendar to just an accessory for Giles; the last thing we need to do is play along with that idea). Sure, Xander wasn't super close to Ms Calendar (in the way the fandom has collectively decided to pretend Willow was). But she was one of his teachers, one of the few other people in on the big supernatural secret, one of the few positive adult role models he had ("I'd curb that impulse if I were you, Xander."). I think it's pretty silly to pretend he can't actually be upset that she was murdered. (Also, Buffy is not right to assume Xander was spying on her: we see how he found out about Angel being back, and he didn't have any idea Buffy was at the mansion until he saw her with Angel.)
The character who clearly comes out the least well here is Giles, frankly. The idea that torturing Giles is even close to the worst thing Angel has ever done would be laughable if it wasn't so self-absorbed. Back in Season 1 and early Season 2, Giles had no problem at all socializing with Angel, or even encouraging Angel and Buffy to date ("a vampire in love with a Slayer: it's rather poetic, in a maudlin sort of way"). But Angel had, at this point, already killed and tortured hundreds of people. If Giles was okay with that -- which he evidently was! he very pointedly broke things off with Ms Calendar for daring to suggest that Angel having killed one of her family members was worth holding a grudge over! -- on what possible basis can he pretend that being tortured for a few hours (a kind of torture that leaves no permanent injuries and which he was able to literally walk away from and hasn't mentioned once this season, no less) is some kind of moral red line that Buffy can't possibly be right to forgive a newly-ensouled Angel for?
I mean, I'm inclined to give Giles a little slack because Mrs Post has him worrying about whether he's doing a good job as a Watcher or not. I don't think he'd make this speech otherwise. But ... well, only a little slack, because he's not, in fact, doing a good job as a Watcher (see: Faith still living in a motel room that any vampire can walk in to whenever they like, for example) and performances like this don't help. (Especially if we assume, as I think perhaps we're supposed to, that Giles is saying all this while knowing about the upcoming Cruciamentum!) And it's particularly annoying, because reading reviews of this episode I keep seeing people unquestioningly take Giles's side here, but I just don't think that's justified at all. Yes, ASH delivers the speech well -- as ever, he's clearly one of the best actors on the show -- but objectively Giles does not have the moral high ground here.
Also there's frankly a pretty glaring hypocrisy in complaining that not being told about Angel being in town shows that Buffy has "no respect for me or the job I perform" while also not telling Faith or Mrs Post about Angel. Either you think Angel is a potentially dangerous vampire (in which case you should probably warn the teenage friend of Buffy who goes out exploring cemeteries alone at night about him!) or you don't think that (in which case you obviously cannot complain about Buffy harboring a potentially dangerous vampire). Either you think being a Watcher automatically entitles you to a certain level of respect and openness about vampires (in which case you should probably not be having secret meetings which exclude the only other Watcher in town, just because you don't like her) or you don't think that (in which case you can get off your high horse about it). At this point I'd ask rhetorically whether we think Giles has any respect for the job Faith does, but I think it's all too clear what the answer to that question is. (Which just makes Faith's upcoming attempted defense of Giles's non-training of her all the more sad.)
"Training? As in kicking, punching and stabbing? [...] I'm your girl." Post does such a good job manipulating Faith here, and I think this scene is a highlight of the episode, but it's .... honestly not really clear to me why she's bothering? If her plan all along was to grab the Glove and get out of town (on the pretext of taking it to the Council for safekeeping, maybe?), why bother messing with Faith at all? Was she planning on having Faith come with her when she left? Or does she think this is literally the bare minimum she needs to do to be convincing as "Faith's new Watcher", and if so what does that say about the job Giles has been doing?
More generally I'm kind of interested in working out how this all plays out in a world where Angel hadn't secretly come back from the dead. Angel doesn't go to get the glove, so ... Xander gets to it first, right? He brings it back to the library; Buffy and the others (including Post) find out (before Post ever trains Faith, probably). Then ... Post is surprised to find out that the Glove can be destroyed (and probably regrets goading Giles into researching the blasted thing). So she ... what? Grabs the Glove and makes a break for it? Or, alternatively, if Giles doesn't know the Glove can be destroyed, she ... what? What was your plan, Mrs Post? (Realistically, I'm not sure in this scenario if she even finds out about the Glove until after Giles and the others have destroyed it, which ... well, would have worked out better for her, actually.)
I'm less bothered about Angel knowing about the Glove than I expected to be: I figure that it was something Angelus looked into when he was the Big Bad last season, and ruled out actually using himself because ... well, whatever his faults, I don't think Angelus would have been in a rush to stick his hand into a sharp metal thing you can't take off. But equally you can't get some random minion to do it for you, because a minion who can kill you with lightning whenever they want is no longer an effective minion. Good thing he still remembered the details after centuries of torture in hell, I guess!
Although, as @btvsfemslashenjoyer said recently, I don't really think it's credible Angel was in hell for that long. I think there's a throwaway reference to his having been hell for "a century" (singular) years later on his spin-off; and of course the show uses the suggestion that time passes more quickly in hell dimensions to justify Angel's quick return as not 'really' being as quick as it seems. But honestly the only thing I think we know for sure are that there are multiple hell dimensions and time passes at different rates compared to Earth in all of them. On that basis, it's surely just as likely as not that Angel was in one of the hells where time passes more slowly than on Earth: if it was months for Buffy but only day or two for Angel ... well, it would certainly explain the relative weight the two characters put on this going forward.
Much as I wish we'd gotten to see Faith reacting to teenage!Joyce last week, I think it's a bit of a shame we don't get to see Joyce's reaction to anything this episode. (Next week Joyce will learn that Angel is back, but not that Buffy was hiding him in secret for weeks while he recovered from his return from hell. Actually, I'm not at all sure Joyce ever finds out that Angel was ever in hell. When would Buffy have told her?) Would also have been nice to see Joyce interact with Mrs Post, and not only because she'd only be the second adult woman we ever see Joyce interact with. (Well, third, I guess, if we count the time Darla attacked her...) In a world where the show was following up on the tension between Giles and Joyce that Anne had hinted at, Post could have repeated her line about "school night Slayings" (something I think Joyce would also care about), or talked about enrolling Faith in school in a way that revealed to Joyce Giles hadn't bothered to do that, or maybe just innocently asked Joyce how much of his Council salary Giles was passing on to her (since, presumably, for most Watchers taking care of the Slayer means providing room and board, which Giles is obviously not doing himself).
"Faith: she doesn't know. She's blinded by love." In a world where Mrs Post knows that Angel is Buffy's ex who has recently come back from hell, only for Buffy to hide his existence from all her friends and perhaps resume a romantic relationship with him in secret, this is a smart thing for her to say. Especially so if she intuits that (for whatever reason) Faith might be particularly upset by the idea of Buffy being in love with a vampire. Only ... in the world of the actual show, I don't see how Post could possibly have known or intuited any of that. She doesn't know anything about Angel! Like Faith, she wasn't at the big meeting! Literally all she knows about Angel is that he's a "friend of Buffy's" who lives in this mansion and is keeping the glove safe. She only finds out he's a vampire after trying to kill him. Nobody has said anything about a romantic connection between him and Buffy anywhere she could have heard. I don't think it really makes sense for her to suddenly know that Buffy is (or might be) in love with him: she doesn't have any context to work that out!
"I know I kept secrets, but I didn't have a choice". As I always like to say when Buffy offers this up as a defense, compare and contrast with "You have a choice. You don't have a good choice, but you have a choice."
Last scene of the episode is really well done and I think it's a really good place to end the episode (which, to be clear, I really like, for all my quibbling about the exact details of the plot). To quote from the shooting script again:
FAITH: So, is that it?
BUFFY: I guess…
FAITH: I'll see you, then.
BUFFY: Yeah.
[She starts slowly for the door, unsatisfied. Faith looks equally unhappy, stops her with:]
FAITH: Buffy?
BUFFY: (stops) Yes?
[But Faith can't do it. A beat.]
FAITH: Nothing.
[Another moment, then Buffy leaves.]
EXT. MOTEL - CONTINUOUS - DAY
[Buffy closes the door behind her, thinking. A moment more and she exits frame.]
INT. FAITH'S MOTEL ROOM - DAY
ANGLE: FAITH
[Still sitting on her bed. Alone.]
Obviously not the saddest moment in the show, or the occasion for the most 'what if?' style wishful thinking AUs, but ... well. Maybe it is, actually. Maybe.
I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.
It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.
I still wish it had the Google Docs cards, because, bitch, that thing is so good for easy organizing.
we're moving to an internet where children would be banned from reaching out for help and friendship online but abusive parents can post their children's every second online to humiliate and expose them for money with no pushback
mike, it's actually more interesting for audiences that margaret is an abusive religious fundie (and also a victim of marital rape) who tries to literally beat the idea of sin into her daughter, it is actually TIMELY to adapt that correctly at this particular american moment. WHY is he so scared of every piece of source material that has ever been handed to him? i MUST know
theartofmadeline
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