Human rules don't apply

[firemanwhenthefloodsrollback]

rewatching no place like home I'm so fascinated by Buffy's reaction to finding out dawn is the key. I've seen this episode so many time but thought about it so little til now

at the end of the season in the weight of the world when buffy mulls over her willingness to give dawn up, she has to remember what she says to the monk and the way that her first reaction was to tell him to 'unbuild' her memories of dawn. I wonder how much she thinks about it and I imagine it's a lot

[girl4music]

Season 4 of Buffy is really kinda out there in terms of gender expression, association and coding.

They bring in two new recurring characters that act as the love interests of two of the main characters. Riley and Tara. And they bring them in as complete oppositions of each other.

Riley being a man and coded masculine

Tara being a woman and coded feminine.

I know Whedon absolutely intended this but it makes me wonder how the season would have played out without the polar opposite coding or switched.

Say Riley was coded feminine instead and Tara was coded masculine... How would Season 4 have played out then?

First we have Riley... Who is majorly considered the most boring of Buffy's boyfriends. Or the most uninteresting just because he is fully human... Or so we're led to believe to a point. But he is easily the most MASC expressed of Buffy's boyfriends due to being associated with The Initiative and the leading Commando guy. Neither Angel nor Spike express that much masculine in their gender identity despite being men too. At least they don't come across that much masculine to me anyway.

And then there's Tara... Well, Tara is, as a love interest, something we haven't seen in the show thus far. She's a lesbian and we know this for fact because she dates women only and seems to be attracted to women only. And lesbianism is coded feminine for the most part. I mean you have butch expression but it's still femme-leaning. But then there's all the other traits to her identity and personality. Sensitivity, gentleness, magical ability, her connection with the Earth and nature. That's all FEMME expressed too.

But imagine if this were switched. Imagine if Willow's love interest expressed masculine but still identified as a female. Imagine if Buffy's love interest expressed feminine but still identified as a male.

How much different would Season 4, and really the rest of the show, look? And would it have worked for Buffy and Willow that way?

[nomysticalguidebook]

One intriguing element of this that was unfortunately wasted, like most of Season 4's potential, due to the cast change leading to Professor Walsh's death, is Professor Walsh herself. Professor Walsh was originally intended as season 4's primary villain, until the actress left the show. Had she remained, they could have further explored the contrast between the masculine militarized violence of the Initiative (through the manipulative mad scientist of sorts in Walsh) and the masculine condescending manipulation of the Watchers (represented through the rebel-against-status-quo Giles). In addition to, of course, as you say, Tara and Willow, who find feminine power in magic (with Willow leaving behind the technopaganism that died with Ms. Calendar, as technology/science increasingly becomes the realm of masculinity, through Adam and later the Trio).

This isn't really a complete line of thinking, just somewhere interesting I think the series might have but didn't go- I think Tara and Riley need to be feminine and masculine for their thematic arcs to work, but I think this works better if Riley is being overtly manipulated, drugged, and controlled by a female antagonist such as Walsh instead of that plotline petering out due to her death- it would have provided an interesting mirror as regards Buffy's experience with the Cruicamentum, in particular, when she was also drugged by the masculine institution that controlled her life.

[coraniaid]

Been thinking too much about minor Buffy characters this week.  Specifically, Amy Madison.

I’d always assumed – to the extent I’d thought about it at all – that when Amy talked to Willow about going back to see her dad in Smashed and Wrecked she was just lying. I assumed we were meant to think that she hadn’t been back at all.  (Hence her talk about needing a ‘new place’ in Doublemeat Palace and needing Willow to lend her supplies; she doesn’t have anybody else to ask for help precisely because she’s not in touch with her dad.)  

Why would he even still be in Sunnydale, after all?  In Witch we’re told that he broke up with Amy’s mother when  Amy was twelve and that he left town afterwards.  As far as we know, he only comes back to Sunnydale to take care of Amy, after the events of that episode.  But with his daughter dead or missing – and we know that nobody told him his daughter had turned into a rat who was living in Willow’s dorm room, so what else is he going to think? – why exactly would he want to hang around, years later?

But apparently that’s not the intended reading: the original draft of the script for Wrecked has these lines (just before Amy takes Willow to see Rack):

AMY: God, I’m so glad you called. I had to get out of the house.

WILLOW: Already? So, things with your dad…

AMY: Bizarre. I guess after I disappeared he just decided to start over. He’s, like, this new guy with a new wife and a new baby. And I’m this reminder of all his old stuff.

In other words Amy’s unnamed dad – previously probably in the running for father of the year, given the obvious lack of competition – suffered the gruesome fate that threatens all Sunnydale father figures: he turned into Hank Summers.  Also 'new wife’ kind of suggests he wasn’t in a relationship during Seasons 2 and 3, but Catherine says that he left her for another woman.  So is this wife number three, or did the writers just forget about that?

(I also don’t think I’d realized until recently that Amy must have been going to see Rack before she was a rat, which … honestly I’m not sure what I think of, as retcons go.  It interacts kind of oddly with the whole MOO thing from Gingerbread, doesn’t it?)

More generally, while I know that Amy is only in Season 6 to enable the magic-as-drug-addiction subplot, it’s kind of shocking just how utterly unsympathetic the narrative is to her.   I mean, she just spent years of her life as a rat.  Even if she doesn’t remember much of this … well, from her perspective one minute she’s a high school student being burnt at the stake by a mob, now suddenly she’s twenty years old with no friends and no support system and (given that she’s retroactively a high school dropout) no obvious educational or employment opportunities.  And … nobody seems to care. 

Instead Amy’s presented as straightforwardly villainous for being angry about this, which … well, who wouldn’t be angry, in her position?  Did Willow really try that hard to bring her back?  Did anybody else?  (The viewer knows, after all, that Willow could have turned her back into a human as early as Season 4, if not sooner.)

There are some interesting parallels between S6!Buffy and S6!Amy, actually.  Both unexpectedly thrust back into their normal lives (in both cases because of Willow casting a spell); both struggling and failing to adjust to the change; both with (retroactively) shitty fathers and dead/missing mothers.  But the show sort of half-heartedly gestures at this once and then never comes back to it again.  Which feels like a missed opportunity.

(I also really don’t buy the idea that Amy didn’t know Larry was gay: didn’t he come out almost a full year before she became a rat?  And on the other hand, if she didn’t know, and still thought of Larry as the aggressively hyper-masculine jock we saw in Halloween … why exactly did she want to go to the Prom with him?  And the more I think about it the more annoyed I get that this is the one and only time anybody in the show ever talks about Larry after Season 3.)

[scoobygangs]

[comradesummers]

One of the things I love about Buffy is that it presents knowledge and research as an absolutely vital part of the process of world saveage. So much of the show is dedicated to the characters sitting around doing research. And that’s pretty rare. Usually if research is a plot device in these kind of shows, it happens off screen. Which does kind of make sense on a storytelling level - it’s not usually that interesting to watch people look stuff up. But I really like that BtVS finds a way to make it interesting, not only because it leads to a lot of great group scenes, but also because it foregrounds the value of educating oneself about something before engaging with it. Which, you know, is an excellent value to foreground.

[comradesummers]

This post was very much inspired by this tweet.

[nomysticalguidebook]

“It is always different! It’s always complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw the line and that is always going to be me! You get down on me for cutting myself off but in the end, the Slayer is always cut off. There’s no mystical guidebook, no all-knowing council. Human rules don’t apply. There’s only me. I am the law.” – Buffy, in Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, season 7 episode 5, "Selfless"