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I've rewatched Buffy more than any other show. About 5 years ago I decided to do a rewatch for the first time since I was a teenager and it and Angel have been pretty constantly on my mind since. Not because I love them, really, but because they are both good and ways in which they are bad is really interesting to me. As the shows go on, some areas get better, and some get worse. It's got very centrist social attitudes in the rare times when it does brush up against real life and that probably dampens my enjoyment of the shows more than anything else, but it's also just a kind of artifact of how certain people think. As far a basic top level quality discussion on the two shows go I think buffy: s1 is not actually bad, it's just simpler and campier. s2 has episodes of the exact same style and quality, sometimes worse - it just also has the big angelus story and spike/drusilla. s3-5 are consistently good even with the botched initiative storyline, s6 is rocky but so weird and interesting to me, and s7 straight up stinks. angel: s1 is uneven but my favourite premise for the show, s2 is the best one even though they abandon the season arc for a 4 episode joke, s3 is fine, s4 is loving awful, and s5 is like...it's not really that good, despite what people say. it has some good episodes but the premise shift and memory reset is too much, the humour kind of becomes a bit annoying (probably because whedon was TRYING HARD in this season), and it doesn't develop it's main arc well at all, cramming things into a few scattered episodes mostly towards the end. the actual last moments of the show are the absolute best they could've done with the season they had though, and is a good note to leave the world on. overall i like buffy better now, although it was absolutely the opposite when i was 12-16 when i was watching these shows on DVD and as the last couple seasons aired. i thought angel was much cooler and i still think it is 'cooler', but the advantages of the toybox town setting of sunnydale and a more consistent focus on the strengths of the show make buffy just a more complete and enjoyable escapist comedic melodrama. angel as a series kept hitting on these cool things for the show and kept moving on from them to things which didn't actually work as well. i feel like they never had full confidence in the show. even in the main character himself. there is a specific episode (epiphany, 2x16) where angel's personality permanently changes to become just david boreanez, laughing and being petty way too much, and it makes angel a lot less compelling and cool as a character. he becomes a normal guy who has superpowers and enjoys hanging out with his buddies. NikkolasKing posted:my favorite character in Angel, Lindsey, would not work at all in Buffy because he doesn't fit at all with the kinds of themes Buffy was interested in pursuing. He's also one of my favourites on Angel and they shouldn't have written him out for anywhere near as long as they did. There's really an alternate verison of Angel where instead of adding Fred and some of the others to main cast, they elevate Lindsey, Lilah and Kate (who left to do a full time job on another show), which I would have much preferred. More adults with complex personalities, less Whedony archetypes. roomtone fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 21:17
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people say s1 and s6 are maybe the worst seasons of buffy (it's clearly s7 for me, but i guess it's more in-line with what people expect from the show), but in both of those seasons buffy is at her most likeable and relateable. i think that goes a long way to making them entertaining for me, because most of the time in the fan-favourite seasons for me, buffy is just kind of there being a stalwart hero, and it's characters around her i'm enjoying. in s1 and s6 she feels like an actual person with interesting internal conflicts. totally different conflicts, since in s1 she's basically a child and in s6 she's a depressed adult, but more vivid than what she is in other seasons. people say s6 is dark/depressing/etc but the storylines are so out there i never quite take it seriously. s5 is much more loving depressing, the back half of it is actually a drag to watch for me at times. roomtone fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 21:21
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i mean i have plenty of crap to say about any season once you get into it, but my eventual opinion of s3 of angel is that it's just fine. it feels like it's of a piece with s2 because it doesn't have a huge change in premise or tone, and it does have strong elements. i enjoy the darla stuff and it's a good ending for her, i think the concept of the holtz storyline is really good but executed poorly (bad side characters, he barely does anything for most of the season, and i think the actor is maybe just a bad fit despite having his own sort of charisma). lilah keeps the wolfram and hart stuff alive and is improved from her s2 charactisation. the real problems with S3 are in the main cast - angels' character has been stripped of his defining qualities (antisocial and categorically cutoff from normal life, ridden with complex guilt, searching for a way to be good) and is preoccipied with mundane things like a misconceived romance with cordelia and parenthood. fred and gunn were paired up purely because it was unexpected despite the fact those two characters do not gel at all. cordelia matures about 20 years between seasons to make her worthy of being the romantic lead heroine. everything centres around the relationship dynamics of the people who live and work in the hyperion. it's all very insular and focused on dysfunctional family dynamics which runs against the previous strengths of the show, and isn't as interesting to me. the only main character who does well in s3 is wesley. his stuff is very good in contrast, which becomes even more stark in season 4. roomtone fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 22:02
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NikkolasKing posted:So I read this BBC article and I wanna comment on a part of it and connect it with Episode 3 of Season 1. I don't think undercutting a metaphor is necessarily a flaw. Angel's situation is a good example because it *feels* like a boyfriend turning bad, but actually it isn't - it's a boyfriend being replaced by an entirely different person in the same body. That doesn't happen. If 'boyfriend dumped me after he got sex' wasn't a cultural meme, the actual storytelling of Angel turning into Angelus would have still been effective, because it's all well written and acted. Academics and audiences can recognise broad strokes of metaphor and allegory in stories they're analysing, and then start labelling things in the story which don't fit their framing of it as flaws. They reduce the writing down to the thing they want it to be. I'm sure the boyfriend turned bad was the starting point for the story idea in the writers room, because the writers are pretty clear that the way they operated was to take real life experiences as the emotional starting point to tell supernatural stories. They do this so that there is some built in emotional resonance, not because they want to depict the initial experience realistically. If you followed the logical course of what a vampire slayer's life would actually be like, it would immediately veer off into territory the audience would have no personal experience with and reduce the audience appeal down to people who are in to heavy genre fiction. So they don't do that, they use these tropes which you'll see played straight in teen and young adult soap operas as a starting point and go from there. The end result isn't a 1:1 symbolic message delivery system, it's entertainment.
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Mar 12, 2022 02:39
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Open Source Idiom posted:He's not a fan of Willow addiction plot, mostly because he -- correctly IMO -- sees the arc as initially about Willow using magic to manipulate and gaslight her girlfriend, while also giving over to the powertripping narcissism that was always lurking in her personality. (The show's characters are so well formed.) Willow's addiction plot is a good counter-example to the bungled metaphor idea brought up earlier. Where Angel going bad didn't line up with the bad boyfriend, they didn't try to force it to. It was still a basically absurd supernatural story with an emotionally relateable basis. With the Willow stuff in season 6, they go far too hard in making in a 1:1 'she's a junkie!' story. Willow even describes herself as an actual junkie. quote:Yeah, nice. Season 4 in particular is very much a forefront on how serialised television developed over the next decade. Very epic in scope, a lot of narrative, big twists and enormous stakes. Very compelling television -- depending on how you feel about the twist. It is pretty crazy how serialised season 4 became from the show that was 90% episodic in season 1. I don't think it works primarily because the writing in s4 of Angel and s7 of Buffy feels so tired to me. Like everybody was ready to move on - and although I don't like dwelling on behind the scenes stuff too much, I've got to assume that bad blood had started spilling over into the quality of the acting. It obviously did in the writing of Cordelia that season. S4 of Angel is completely serialised, but it's also clear they had no actual plan for the completed story and just keep throwing in curveballs that don't get handled well. Even Angelus's long awaited return is a disappointment, from an acting and writing perspective. Although I'm not a big fan of S5, I can see why they wanted to do a reset and it's impressive that it works as well as it does.
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Mar 13, 2022 04:14
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yeah with xander they basically rehabilitate the character into somehow who has been humbled a bit by life and is no longer as judgmental and hostile, then in season 6 they undo all of this with a vengeance. i don't mind him existing, and i don't actually think the show is pushing you to like or agree with him that hard except at certain times when he is at his best. i do think the writers probably thought that his flaws would be more forgivable than they are, seeing as he isn't physically violent unlike most of the cast, and has his 'humour' - which isn't very good, but has a lot of 90's Chandler Bing mannerisms which were popular at the time. In practice most of the time it's just like, man, Xander you are lucky you have the friends you have. in s4 and 5 it's like he realised this and starts working on himself. then in s6 he has an, again, very Chandler Bingish freakout about marriage and snaps back hard. they also give him all the 'buffy how could you, he's disgusting' stuff about her relationship with Spike in s6. they must have wanted someone to externalise that conflict within buffy but giving it to xander, making sure he maintained his hatred of spike when the fanbase had CLEARLY moved on, you're just not gonna win. the hypocrisy alone - he proposed a woman who had killed/tortured thousands of men - before you even get into the possessiveness. roomtone fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Mar 14, 2022 |
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Mar 14, 2022 23:29
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McSpanky posted:This is why I can't rewatch those shows, Joss was so gross about crossing his (also gross) personal and professional lines that there's no reasonable separation of art and artist possible here. And even if I did, I just don't want to give such a craven abusive manipulative rear end in a top hat any more rent-free space in my head. I mean fair enough but I think Buffy is an example of somewhere that you can separate art from artist because, outside of a probably accurate read on Xander's general presence being due to Joss Whedon liking that kind of person, there's very little directly in the text of the show which reads as 'being an abusive dickhead is cool!'. There's plenty saying the opposite. Even with Xander, he DOES get told off for it most of the time by the other characters like Willow and Buffy, he doesn't win in the end when he acts like this. Also, the particular story you're referring to is, I'm pretty sure, made up. I have read that Joss Whedon made some kind of comment about how in shape Nicolas Brendan was in the early seasons, because Xander wasn't supposed to be physically imposing and a contrast to the jocks of school. That's not season 4, nothing to do with the basement storyline, and I don't think is even necessarily an abuse of power depending on how that info was communicated. Part of being an actor is looking the part. I don't like Joss Whedon and I never have, his claims to feminism with this show always felt false and self-congratulatory to me even when I was like 15 years old. I don't doubt he was abusive to Charisma Carpenter because she's gone on at length about it, and other cast members and his later productions have problems with him. However, reading and honestly half the time, misreading, some exerpts from baiting articles about long passed events doesn't mean you've peeked through the curtain to the truth. It's third hand info, often misremembered by other people who only had third hand info. I do get being put off of shows when you hear about things happening behind the scenes - this is why i basically don't read behind the scenes info anymore. Not even just the horrible stuff, I don't like hearing the most mundane thoughts of people behind creative things which fascinate me because it lessens them. I just don't want to know, it doesn't help anybody that I know. All that's really happened is now I enjoy something less, because of a really vague impression I have about people I will never know not being very good people. If it's not present in the work, it's not my business. There IS stuff in Buffy which I think is hosed up over the run of the series, and Xander's part of it, but I don't assume deep knowledge of the real people involved to form that opinion. It's in the show, we've got all the facts about what the show has to say for itself. roomtone fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 07:49
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banned from Starbucks posted:He was average in 1-3 then buffed up significantly in 4. Around season 5 the actor said he was told to stop working out then in 6-7 he gets kinda flabby. Looked it up when you posted and there are some things around referencing a similar story to the one you gave, so fair enough. Couldn't see anything about the basement storyline being an actor punishment, but maybe you saw it in a clip somewhere. My point about dismissing entertainment and/or prioritising behind the scenes stuff is really what I wanted to say, individual stories aside.
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Mar 15, 2022 09:01
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Spike's arc is a bit messy due to season 6 being messy. At the end of S5 and start of S6, he's sort of elevated Buffy into an idea he aspires to live up to. Yeah he's in love with her, but it continues during the period when she's dead. He's just trying to live up to her memory, the idea of her he has, at that point, by protecting Dawn and the town all summer. He's still only concerned with how he feels about things, but everything he's doing is good. I'd say at the opening of S6 and the first few episodes, he is essentially heroic. When she shows him romantic feelings for the first time though, he backslides into wanting to be with her at any cost and starts doing all the manipulating and undercutting. It doesn't work because Buffy is smarter than he is. She isn't actually being affected by his attempts to drag her to a dark corner, imo, she went there of her own choice because of how she felt anyway, and left when she started to feel ready to move on. He tries to accept that but then gives up on the whole idea and tries to rape her, then runs away. All that stuff is a bit messy because it is a little bit the plot leading the character rather than the other way around. Spike is kind of shoehorned into the role of abusive boyfriend right after they did a lot to rehabilitate him. He was seen being abusive to Harmony, so it's not unprecedented, but they are backwalking a lot of character development to put him there. I suppose it depends on how genuine you thought his attitude was in early S6, or how much you believe someone can oscillate between being decent and awful in a short span of time. It just about fits together for me but it's a fraught balance. Then comes the soul thing to rehabilitate him, this time for real. It's different than it is with Angel, because he and Angelus are always portrayed as basically different people even if the details are murky. Spike is the same guy on either side, the only difference is afterwards he has a bit of a decency injection, so he wouldn't do the really bad stuff he did/tried to do before and does things more explicitly for others. It's more like an actual abuser who reforms over a period of their life, just supernaturally compressed. Spike's basically never 'evil' on the show the way other villains are, at least not since mid S2 when they realised they weren't killing him off. It's more that he is just only interested in how he feels, and acts accordingly. How he feels can either be good or bad for other people. Him getting the soul just gives him the ability to look beyond himself for a second and realise okay maybe how I feel about this isn't the only or even relevant thing. You need to sort of ignore the usual vampire rules when thinking about Spike and just think about him as a person for a lot of it to work. roomtone fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Mar 16, 2022 |
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Mar 16, 2022 15:32
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Khanstant posted:I did a rewatch of most of Angel/Buffy last year and the constant shock of "no no no" with regards to creepy Jossiness aside, one of the most jarring Joss-self-insertions/"using teens to speak his opinions" was when Buffy goes off to college and ends up in this dorm with a new character and it's meant to be about the hassles of suddenly sharing a tiny bedroom with an adult. There's enough passive aggressiveness and conflict to carry the episode, but before they get into that they try to let us know how irritating this character was and one of the big ones was her music taste. I don't even remember the music she liked, except that it was something today that's just seen as fine music of the era, and that it seemed appropriate that either of them might have enjoyed that music, but for an older weirdo man he couldn't get why anyone would like it so assumed everyone else would feel the same. if i remember the episode right, it was that she listened to celine dion constantly and had a big poster of her in the room. i was a kid at the time but i remember celine dion being seen as a corny joke. still is, i think? but anyway, not really cool college kid music to gen Xers, which buffy and pals basically are. i don't know why you think this is coming from joss being creepy. cool 20 year olds in 2000 would think liking celine dion was lame. unless i'm forgetting a scene where kathy is listening to indie rock and buffy is disgusted. it's not a very good episode though.
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Mar 16, 2022 17:56
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just went and checked, it's a remix of believe by cher that she's actually listening to. same kind of thing.
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Mar 16, 2022 18:10
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Buffy isn't my favourite character or anything but yeah, SMG is asked to do basically everything an actor could be asked to do over the course of the series, even deal with some dodgy writing at times, and she pulls absolutely everything off. There's never a point in the show where I think she could've done something better or differently. Other shows have really strong leads, but Buffy gets possessed by other people, is sometimes a robot, goes from slapstick comedy to catatonically depressed, etc. Pretty impressive. As for Oz - I've always liked him. I think it's cool how they manage to make a guy who intentionally doesn't talk much and is self-aware about how cool everyone thinks he is as likeable as he is. He could've easily been an annoying character, but they balance it out with him being very gentle and understanding. The only person he ever really makes fun of is Xander, who needs it. I always bought Willow being in love with Oz a bit more than I did with her and Tara. Tara and Willow together are fine, and I know that it's a major gay relationship on TV which was big at the time, but since I'm not gay I don't have that emotional investment. I think it's functional with some kind of crappy storylines along the way. I never really understood exactly what Willow loved so much about Tara because she was so mousey, something Willow was trying to get over about herself. I only actually started liking Tara a few episodes before they kill her off, specifically around the time Buffy breaks down in front of her and she tries to help. Her decency and wisdom about things comes through there, and in retrospect was always there like when she talks to Buffy after Joyce dies about her own mum dying. They should have developed her and Buffy's friendship earlier and focused on it more, although that would have risked alienating Willow even more since this is around the time when Willow is at her worst. There's also the issue of retconning that Willow is now 100% gay, which never felt right to me. I think it is basically due to the times and writers/network/whatever not understanding that people can be bisexual. I never got the sense that Willow's relationships with men were aromantic and she just hadn't realised she was gay yet, and they didn't even drop any hints in that direction - I don't count the vampire version of Willow thing, it's just a joke. She was pretty far gone on Xander and Oz, and even talks about having a crush on Giles. There are lines like 'hello, gay now', 'gay, 1999 - present' in the show which make it comes off like a gay switch was hit. roomtone fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Mar 17, 2022 |
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Mar 17, 2022 07:18
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Shageletic posted:I feel completely the opposite to this post. What's going on in the background, in the creators minds, their intent, how they view the world, it WILL leak into the show. And if the creators are gross as gently caress I'm not going to watch their poo poo. I'm never going to watch Last Tango in Paris. I had to stop watching Basic Instinct for the first time because even if you weren't how aware how awful Verhoeven was to Sharon Stone, you can SEE it, the basic wolf like disregard for her autonomity just to salaciously exploit her body. I don't know about those two movies, but what's going on in the background of a creators mind unrelated to their work isn't necessarily present in the work at all. There's an old author called Knut Hamsun who wrote a good book called Hunger about being homeless and starving. Turned out he was a huge racist and Nazi party supporter. No trace of that in the book that I read. That's an old example but that's what I mean. On the other hand, I don't watch Woody Allen movies because they are about parts of his personality which I know I don't like. I turned off that one with Larry David in it because it was bad and later, when I heard Woody Allen is a paedo, the whole thing with Larry David dating a teenager in that made sense. It doesn't have to be as stark as these two things. Obviously things bleed into the writing in more subtle ways, but it's usually harder to pin direct blame on 1 personality for being hosed up and making a hosed up thing. quote:And honestly, thinking back, you can see Whedon's hosed up notions on women and romance in his show. Yeah this is a girl, but look she fights stuff! Every guy wants her, and her life is arranged around whether or not she will get with them or whatever. But her personality is defined by kicking rear end and looking good. Buffy's life isn't arranged around whether she will get with guys or not. There are periods of the show when she's single and not looking, she always has other stuff going on - world to save, family or all kinds of stuff. Yeah she's got relationships on the the young adult drama show and they add people to the cast for her to have them with. I don't see the problem with that. You're reducing the show down to the elevator pitch to make it sound worse than it is. There are loads of conservative social attitudes and poorly portrayed groups outside of their white middle class comfort zone all throughout Angel and Buffy, though. I've brought up the bi-erasure stuff with Willow. The failure to integrate Gunn in Angel, the only non-white cast member across both shows, and dumbass treatment of his friends/community is another one. Don't have anything against talking about this stuff. I just don't see much evidence of Joss Whedon's abusive behaviour (that i know of) in the actual shows. There are places where we know his behaviour has derailed what the show was supposed to be doing - like Cordelia being written off of Angel, but she isn't treated like poo poo on the show by the other characters who are then rewarded for it or anything even approaching that. Maybe you do see some more insidious personal sexism coming directly from Joss in how the women on Buffy are portrayed but your characterisation of the show is off. quote:And, I have to be honest, that poo poo you posted about third hand information is also kinda gross. It's something out of 2012. "Often misremembered"? How do YOU know? Not misremembered by the people involved obviously. I meant the people commenting online about what they heard. Anyway, it's fine if you and other people disagree. I know I'm arguing against the popular mentality with this stuff. I don't want to keep going on about it, my intention at first was actually to move away from this kind of talk but I've hosed that up. roomtone fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Mar 17, 2022 |
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Mar 17, 2022 16:58
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quote:-You don't have to tell me but with how heartbreaking Becoming Pt 2 was, I couldn't help but think "....are there any happy season finales?" The Gift is obviously tragic. Prophecy Girl was pretty happy. My dim memories of S3's and 4's finales ae mostly positive...? S6 and 7 are the finales of Buffy Season 6 and 7, so happiness is not allowed. So I guess it 's about half-and-half in my memory at present. i think most of the actual endings of finales are positive. 1, 3, 6 and 7 all end on happy or hopeful notes with all problems pretty much resolved or on their way. 4 is a weird dream episode. 2 and 5 are the only actual tragic endings, i think. 3's is probably the most unambiguously resolved, they could have ended the show there and it would've been complete. glad they didn't but they could have.
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Mar 18, 2022 19:10
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yeah every finale is bittersweet (except 4, it's a totally different thing). even s3 has angel leaving. i was just talking about where it generally leaves the characters, primarily buffy.
roomtone fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Mar 18, 2022 |
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Mar 18, 2022 19:31
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sad question posted:Does... one of the Strengths say "good cock"? good cook, xander.
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Mar 19, 2022 18:41
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Marenghi posted:Also noticing a lot more bloopers but that could be that Disney is using the HD remaster. One episode Spike runs off after being defeated and then he just stops in the background far right of frame. I've never actually watched the widescreen version but apparently the entire series is littered with stuff like this. They blocked the scenes for 4:3, so I've heard there are mics, crew visible, actors in the equivalent of t-poses and stuff like that. When I do rewatch it I'll probably go for that version because it'll probably be good for a few laughs. NikkolasKing posted:Also going to his episode on "Lie to Me," since he explicitly called back to it, he quotes Whedon's beliefs on the purposelessness of life and influence by Jean-Paul Sartre. I was actually reading Sartre right before I decided gently caress philosophy I wanna watch a good TV show. But something that has stuck with me since I myself watched Lie to Me is that Buffy is somewhat simple. I don't mean this in a bad way, not every great piece of work has to enforce moral ambiguity at every turn In fact, a lot of people nowadays get mad if a work has moral greayness to it. But just talking about Buffy, there is an afterlife. There's The First Evil. There is Whistler, a character I did not remember at all. So the world being "indifferent" and inherently meaningless as per Sartrean Existentailism doesn't really apply here. Ford's choices were not simply his own and neither are our heroes'. Angel does some actual existential stuff in mid season 2 with Angel coming to believe that there's no grand plan for the world, no reward, so his actions have to justify themselves. It's something that comes up sporadically in Angel and is how they end the show, but even there I don't think it really pans out with the mythology because there is good and evil and there are so many different kinds of afterlife and otherworlds that the idea of existentialism as we understand it just doesn't apply. There are unseen forces behind everything. The characters know more than 99.9% of the world and even they don't even know what the rules actually are. Buffy is a lot simpler yeah, but it's a show that sort of knows its limits, which Angel never really did (to good and bad effect). I know a lot gets written about Buffy and people have thought about the philosophy and politics of it more than most shows, but it's a show that can't even really keep its own lore straight before we get to a consistent philosophical statement. So, I take the things that episodes and story arcs are saying as individual chunks and if they contradict or don't follow with something that happens elsewhere on the show, that's okay as long as it works within its own context. Like Witchcraft - first it's just witchcraft, but then it becomes a metaphor for being a lesbian, and then becomes a metaphor for being a drug addict. The mythology is subservient to the character stories. I don't know if Buffy actually has a coherent perspective other than 'be a good person', and the show's idea of that is pretty mainstream for the time period. It doesn't seem to be pushing existentialism much at all. Well, maybe in The Body.
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Mar 19, 2022 19:34
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I think the underlying problem with Riley is that he's a hegemonic figure on a show that was trying to be counter-cultural. Buffy is generally going up against the forces that Riley represents. Usually indirectly, but in S4 it's extremely direct and they never do anything to separate Riley from those except the fact that he is in love with Buffy. That's the only reason he rebels at all, his outlook stays the same. Any time Buffy moves towards Riley, she's moving away from the core of the show. It feels wrong and therefore forced when they try to portray it as a positive thing. Riley is a church going soldier who has a persistent issue with wishing Buffy was weaker than him. He's also prone to jealousy and lashes out about it. Not a monstrous guy or anything, and he knows these things about him aren't working in this context, but everything good you can say about Riley is mitigating. 'yeah he sucks but he tries not to i suppose.' He's just coming from a totally different place than the rest of the show. Buffy's other relationships are with people outside of the mainstream who have some kind of major factor keeping them becoming part of it. Buffy's always straddling that line too, and it creates an interesting dynamic because the choices aren't obvious. Angel in S1-3, Faith in S3 (who, thinking about your post, is actually more of her main relationship this season that Angel, even if it is all subtext), and then after Riley, Spike. They all orbit normality from a much farther distance than Buffy does. I don't actually mind Riley in S5 that much because they mostly wrote him off in a way that made sense, but he's a total mismatch from the start. Xander's speech in Riley's defense before he leaves is something Xander would say, but it's completely unconvincing and I think Buffy would've just let him go. I wonder why they decided on a character like him. roomtone fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Mar 22, 2022 |
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Mar 22, 2022 07:13
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i don't think buffy s4 is a bad season. i like it just as much as any of the others on balance, just for a different reason. it's funny and nice to hang around in. s2 and 3 are actually just as inconsistent as 4 is, it's just that the main villains are better. s4's main villains are rubbish but it has the best hit ratio for the standalone episodes, and they're mostly comedy focused in s4. the main cast character work in s4 is as good as ever and willow and xander are probably at peak likeability along with a lot of giles and spike comedy. fear itself, something blue, superstar, a new man, hush, restless, wild at heart, new moon rising, faith 2 parter. all top tier buffy episodes for me. that's half the season right there and the rest of it isn't even bad. roomtone fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Mar 22, 2022 |
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Mar 22, 2022 20:05
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mr trick is weird. they give him very little time and kill him off randomly, but there's clearly something that works about the performance. he could've been a good recurring villain over seasons. instead he's just a lackey who never really does anything. maybe they were concerned about having too many charasmatic vampires around.
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Mar 23, 2022 09:53
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there was percy, the jock who willow helps study. he shows up a couple times in s3 and again in s4. i think percy appears in the graduation day fight, not sure though. amy, who shows up in s1 and 2 before becoming a rat. shows up in s4 for a cameo joke then a real appearance in s6. so she's not there. there's scott who dated buffy for a couple of episodes then disappears, so he's not there. can't think of any others off the top of my head. harmony and larry are probably the two most recurring bg high schoolers besides jonathan.
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Mar 24, 2022 10:04
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Disco Pope posted:I think it is in a show that's in a large part a mash up of geek dominated genre fiction. While nerds were maybe portrayed as undesirable or awkward, I can't think of an earlier show that explored their entitlement and misogyny and especially not a show that was likely to be on their radar. I agree, and I think that's why the nerd storyline eventually ends up working. Warren is the most despicable person, and probably the single most destructive villain, on the entire show, and none of it is because he's so strong and evil. It's because he's a pathetic misogynist. The problem with the nerd storyline is that it spends half the season keeping them in a very trite and unsuccessful comedy subvillain role. The jokes are all obvious star wars crap, and even from the beginning there's a sense of unease that you don't really want to be laughing at these guys because this whole situation is bogus as gently caress. If they'd got to Dead Things sooner, I think would be thought of as more successful, although it's so dark and close to reality that there would always be people uncomfortable with it in what, a couple episodes aside, is really a comfort show for people. Some people do recognise that the nerd trio was exploring the hatefulness and persecution complex that nerdy young men are prone to, but that's something people know a lot more about now than they did at the time it was made. You had to actually be around those sorts of people to know back then, it was still pretty early for the internet. Now everyone knows about gamers and incels etc. Warren is 100% one of those guys. Although, there's probably a good chunk of people who just think they are a huge power downgrade for Buffy to face up against, after people like Glory and the Mayor, who were basically invincible. I think it was a better idea to stop trying to escalate the power level and try to do something different in season 6, and eventually, Willow takes over as the main threat anyway so you still get that and it's still different because now it's Willow rather than a new, unattached monster.
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Mar 25, 2022 14:08
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Open Source Idiom posted:I forgot that Buffy invites what's basically a literal highschioler to her birthday party. She feels like a late twenty something somehow, by comparison. So much of Season 6, particularly this mid season, is really capturing a different sort of, older twenties energy and anxiety -- Buffy becoming a surrogate mother, Anya and Xander's wedding, etc. Yeah in S5, especially with the new Dawn dynamic, they do seem to just decide everyone is basically pushing 30 regardless of the fact these people are like 20, 21 and barely removed from being kids themselves. Xander goes from an unemployed 19 year old with no skills to a mature construction career in about 12 months. In S4 college was everything and afterwards it's almost non-existent. I think the writers just wanted to shift into doing more adult sort of stories and not deal as much with the limbo that early 20's are because it's less well defined as a time of life than high school vs adulthood. Angel also fudges the ages but it's easier to take because the whole setting is different, and most of the characters actually are older, but they specifically stop mentioning non-supernatural characters ages after s3 on Buffy and they never get specific about Cordelia's age a single time on Angel. roomtone fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Mar 25, 2022 |
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Mar 25, 2022 16:14
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If you feel like watching the resolution of Faith's arc for now, going to the Angel two parter with her is a good idea. Buffy's in it, same Watcher hitmen are in it, it finishes Faith's story for now and she doesn't show up again on Buffy for a long time. There are only a few episodes where the shows actually effect each other in an important way. I think the watch guide is sort of overkill and you can totally watch them consecutively. All you really lose doing that is some Buffy and Angel relationship stuff and the second half of Faith's arc in s4. The rest you can pick up on Angel later. 90% of the time after s1 Angel/s4 Buffy, the shows are barely interacting at all. I don't think taking a 4 episode break from Buffy because Angel happened to be airing while Buffy was still on hiatus is necessary. It is kind of cool watching them somewhat in step with each other and catching the references and minor crossovers as they come, but I think it would be just as fun discovering what people were doing meanwhile after finishing Buffy, too. NikkolasKing posted:"This Year's Girl" - Faith's line about a "little sister coming" - don't tell me Dawn was actually planned out ahead of time? Dawn was allegedly planned since season 3. Faith and Buffy's dream conversation makes some references that people have gone back and attributed as foreshadowing Dawn. I'm not sure if the creators ever said that was definitely the plan, and I think Faith's dialogue in that scene is so vague it could retroactively mean anything (i don't think 'counting down from 730' as a reference to the days until Dawn's first appearance is good foreshadowing, even if it is accurate by airdate). Faith's younger than Buffy and a slayer so the little sister line could easily be about herself. But I buy that they did have Dawn planned a couple years in advance, in general. I'm sure they knew she was coming by mid season 4 anyway.
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Mar 26, 2022 15:43
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NikkolasKing posted:"Sanctuary" - an infamous episode among us Buffy preferers. Honestly in my memory I was most critical of Buffy's treatment of Faith here. But having just watched the Faith episodes in BTVS S4, her feelings of anger and violation are certainly justified. That last scene, really just Buffy's final comments about having moved on, are really petty. She's not beyond reproach on Buffy the show, though. Remember 'when she was bad', the premiere of S2? She's horrible to everyone in that episode while repressing her near death experience. Sometimes she doesn't deal with traumatic things that well and what Faith did with the body switch is up there in terms of people actually hurting her. So she lashes out at Angel in that moment, like she was lashing out at her friends when she was freaked out post-Master. She's also got a judgmental streak which comes into play in this episode that makes her feel like she's justified in lashing out, without thinking. Yeah Angel comes out better from the exchange but it is his show. I don't think either are acting out of character or being disrespected, it's just that the priority of Angel is Angel. If this scene was on Buffy, it would be in the middle of an episode and she'd realise that she was wrong to say those things by the end - but they leave that scene for her actual show when she is contrite about it when Angel visits to resolve the fight. It all evens out for me. I like that they give Buffy some moments of being just y'know, wrong. She's 19. She's not going to deal with everything perfectly first time. She sees it later when she's cooled off.
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Mar 27, 2022 17:09
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banned from Starbucks posted:Someone refresh my memory of Jonathan being on Angel. I have a vague recollection of it happening but completely blank on the context of any of it. Andrew shows up twice in S5 of Angel, Jonathan never shows up there.
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Mar 27, 2022 18:25
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Open Source Idiom posted:I'm just about to get to the point where effectively gets replaced, Birthday, and the balls of that arc -- to slowly erase the character as a form of possession masquerading as character development, is very very clever. Very mean though too. full angel spoilers here I don't think that's intended to be the beginning of that arc. It later gets rectonned to be part of Jasmine's scheme, along with everything else in the show. At that point, and for the rest of S3, Cordelia is still Cordelia in S3, she's just part demon. She has changed since S2, but that was something they did to the character to turn her into the romantic lead before this episode, too. It's when she comes back from the higher plane that she's mystically pregnant with Jasmine, but even in S4 there's no hint of this until after the terrible Cordelia/Connor sex scene. I don't know, but I would guess that they didn't actually come up with the Jasmine explanation until they were writing her actual episodes. They would still be writing episodes after the season had begun airing, which is why you get stuff like the Pylea arc in S2 - it wasn't planned to be the ending of S2 from the start. It's known Joss was sabotaging her character on purpose. The reason Cordelia has a pregnancy storyline at all is because Charisma Carpenter got pregnant during/just before S4 and Joss threw a fit. It wasn't what they were planning to do with her. So they had to come up with something which at least explained this massive character assassination they'd done in S4, and also satisfied Joss's desire for revenge by ruining Cordelia and getting her off the show. By the time they get to Skip showing up to explain the evil plan (yet another sacrifice in this miserable arc), the writers were just looking at all the mess they'd created in s3-4, mainly around Cordelia, and trying to weave some kind of sense out of it. Then they wipe their hands of the whole thing and reset the show for S5! It's cool that you enjoy but it, I hadn't even considered that a possibility, because I think it's the worst thing across both shows and I really don't like Buffy S7, but Angel S4 is just...the show is eating itself alive. roomtone fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Mar 29, 2022 |
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Mar 29, 2022 17:21
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I think it comes down to what audience the shows were going for. Buffy - I think, anyway - was primarily marketed toward teenage girls, so the sexualisation is mostly of the men. Angel and Spike get a lot of lingering shirtless scenes, Riley and Xander get some attention - I'm thinking of the swimteam episode. Giles, too, in a different way - they're not showing off his body but there are scenes which are basically fanservice, like him singing in the coffee shop and Willow is suddenly reminded that she had a huge crush on him. I think in general there are more men on the show who are designed to be desirable as an important part of their role on the show, or if not an important part, then it eventually gets some focus. They don't really do that with the women. There are a couple of moments coming from Xander where we're basically in the midst of his sexual fantasies (buffy coming on to him in 2x16 and willow/tara in 4x22), but outside of those the 'gaze' is coming from a female perspective. At one point I was thinking about how it's strange I never had a crush on Buffy or really any of the women on the show when I was younger, because I did have them with actresses on other things I would watch at the time. I think it's due to this inverted gaze thing. The show wasn't signalling to me that the women were to be thought of like that, so I just didn't. I never even thought about who was good looking or not, really. roomtone fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Apr 4, 2022 |
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Apr 4, 2022 07:37
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Mr. Humalong posted:We often discuss how poorly elements of the show have aged and how direly under-utilized a lot of characters were (Jenny Calendar, Mr. Trick, Oz, i agree with a lot of this. lorne is woven into the show way better before he becomes a main cast member, because at that point the show has shrunk to have a very small world and he doesn't have his demon bar, so he's just sort of hanging around. they keep getting rid of all the characters who widen the world in angel, for some reason, and focus on silly nonsense like fred, who i wish never joined the show really. willow's change mostly happened in s5 i think. they were planting seeds since all the way back in s2 but there comes a point where her arrogance is no longer an endearing contrast to her usual kindness and the kindness starts to feel fake. goes along with her friendships fading into the background of the show.
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Apr 12, 2022 14:09
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NikkolasKing posted:"Buffy vs. Dracula" Dawn's crush on Spike is in S5 also, it's all pretty minor stuff. She does become a lot better after S5, once the whole key and extreme teen angst thing is out of the way. S5 is depressing. It was maybe my favourite when I was younger, I like Glory as a villain and it's consistent in terms of episode quality. There aren't many stinkers along the way, just one or two, but Buffy just gets pummelled with bad news all season and I think it's probably more depressing than S6 because even though s6 is 'dark!!', the problems are basically young adult problems which can and will be overcome with time. S5 is alot more well, life for Buffy is just going to be poo poo now. Fun's over. As for Buffy vs Dracula - I think it's a decent episode, and a good idea, but yeah probably not as funny as it could have been. The guy they got to play Dracula doesn't work for me. You know the episode 'superstar' with johnathan - I get the impression people don't know what to make of it, or think it's a weird episode, when it's another obvious spoof. It's not exactly the same thing as Buffy vs Dracula but I think it's a more successful show making fun of itself sort of episode. Better comedy throughout, since the joke is just that everyone is mostly the same except Jonathan is the main character.
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Apr 21, 2022 13:44
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xander finally became good. working on himself, no major judgmental or jealous episodes for a whole year. he's downright likeable. even though i think he misread the buffy/riley relationship, because he probably understood riley's insecurity having been there himself, he confronted buffy about it in a good way - not judging her, just saying that even if you're angry right now, he'll be gone forever if you don't go now so make sure you know what you want. then his scene with anya at the end is one of his best moments. i think xander's likeability is directly linked with how long his hair is, over the course of the show. shame he got it so short for s6. and yeah riley shows up again.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:04
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Pan Dulce posted:I mean, in the comics, he loses his soul for a bit and is still doing good and still accepts it back instead of just saying deuces and being a prick again. sounded interesting so i looked up spike comic lose soul and found a series all about him quote:On his own adventure, Spike is forced to examine the man he once was, the man he is now, and the man he still hopes to become. As master of a steampunk ship filled with loyal, oversized alien cockroaches, Spike embarks on a journey to the dark side of the moon roomtone fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Apr 22, 2022 |
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Apr 22, 2022 21:44
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I think the attempted rape was a mistake to include in the show because you shouldn't spend 2 seasons developing someone as the male lead and 90% of the audience's favourite character, portray them as emotionally insightful, increasingly considerate, and then nuke the character because you want to re-establish what by that point in the show is completely muddled lore about what having no soul means. The way it continues on, with Spike essentially becoming someone else in lore terms (since every other vampire is a different person with vs without a soul), doesn't retroactively justify it being there. For all purposes, the Spike in S7 did not try to rape Buffy. But they try to have their cake and eat it by also making the Spike in S7 almost exactly the same character as he was before, just 'good' now, slate wiped clean. That's not dealing with the consequences of sexual assault, it's papering them over. So it doesn't even work on its own terms. So they ruin a character who is doing a lot to keep the show alive, by going way too far to make a dumb point, and then use magic to avoid dealing with it. Not good stuff. I don't blame people for mostly choosing to ignore it. And I like s6. I just don't like this bit. roomtone fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Apr 23, 2022 |
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Apr 23, 2022 06:42
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yeah I thought about that - he does have some episodes of total sleaze in s6. i did basically say his development in s5 and 6 was consistently towards being good but yeah, it's not true. i do selectively forget certain bits at times, and have watched smashed/wrecked maybe twice maximum because i hate the willow crap in those. in s5 he's still trying to get the chip out, then kidnapping a bunch of women to make them love him, but he develops after that. after Crush (5x14) to once more with feeling, he's almost entirely heroic and decent, if you can forgive the robot thing. then from smashed to dead things they go toxic with him for a bit, but it's still evened out by self-awareness and at least attempting to respect boundaries. buffy dumps him and he's nice again for a while. his crimes and bad behaviour are getting less and less severe, his good side coming out more frequently. it's a bumpy road but it feels worth following. then, rapist. there's a lot of veering left and right with spike because the writers didn't agree, maybe even with themselves, on whether he was at core a piece of poo poo. considering where he started in s2, or even s4 when he joins the main cast, the trend is obviously towards being a good person. that's what the audience was responding to. in seeing red they snapped way too hard back the other way and crashed. the way the real world was, is, you can't just make the fan favourite a rapist and expect people to still be invested. killing people, etc, whatever, in genre fiction you can move on from that - but sexual assault is one thing which you should just stay away from without a really good reason and i don't think they had one other than to hammer in that all that good guy stuff was manipulation (even when buffy was dead, or when he protected dawn from glory, left flowers for joyce with no card etc?) because he's a vampire. your fault for liking the guy we told you to like, audience. like i said there's a version of this which deals with it afterwards, because if you insist on getting REAL with things, rapists aren't demons, they're people. the soul thing is irrelevant. i don't think that would good entertainment in this context, but it would at least be a commitment to the character. instead they purify him with a soul, so you/the show can say he's not responsible because there's room for that opinion in the lore, and they want to salvage spike because he's so popular. i'm not saying the attempted rape is out of character for spike, you can go along and point to various less severe precedents, but that he was a major project of character development which this takes a big poo poo on. yeah he continues to be lovely at times, maybe he WOULD do this, but it's making a character specifically a rapist, especially after so much rehab already, is a hard red line which i don't think was good for the show and was totally unnecessary. so it ends up sort of pointless, for how much damage it does. spike could've been prompted to go and get a soul for any number of reasons but they went with the thing that will repulse most of his fanbase. it feels stubborn and nasty. would've shortened this, it's rambling, but i got to go roomtone fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Apr 23, 2022 |
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Apr 23, 2022 08:06
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i don't disagree with your main point. some stuff i don't think is quite right - his deal with the demon eggs has nothing to do with buffy, and him showing up at the wedding to see if she gets jealous doesn't read as toxic to me because they actually have a good conversation about it for once where they laugh and move on. it's petty, pretty sad, but i don't think it's a real attempt at manipulation like he was doing before. i think they intentionally tone down his manipulation just for the rug pull effect in seeing red. but that's all just detail, in general yes they do put spike in the role of bad boyfriend in season 6. that's his main purpose for the bulk of the season. he's kind to her one minute then trying to manipulate her the next. it means they need to have him regress from the back half of s5 and early s6, but people do regress so it's not a problem, like i said i mostly enjoy s6. spike was good before this because he believed he never had a chance so there was no point in trying to manipulate her. once he knows he does have a chance, after once more with feeling, his worst instincts start coming out all over the place to keep that chance alive, and that's what kills it. it's really just specifically the attempted rape that i don't think they should have put in there. it's too ugly, in a season which already has plenty ugly, even though it is something he would plausibly do. they could've done something else, that's all. roomtone fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 25, 2022 08:26
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that's so much better, would really have fit the show and gotten them to the same place
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Apr 26, 2022 07:53
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I don't think the moment is so important it ever had to be addressed, and when they do it in S7 it feels like the show clutching for connections to its previous seasons because it has gone on so long and is barely recognisable as that now. It was a nice bit of nuanced writing from 5 years beforehand, but it feels like something that happened when they were kids that would either have been brought up wayyyy before then or forgotten. I think Xander's basic jealousy probably was one of the ingredients in him deciding not to tell Buffy they were trying a spell, but other things like - Willow isn't a good witch at that point, magic is unreliable in general, and Buffy would be holding back if she thought there was a chance Angel was going to return any minute - are all valid reasons not to tell her because with the stakes as high as they were, she needs to operate like she's the only remaining line of defense, which she actually is anyway, because Willow was too late. Angelus is portrayed to be a close match for Buffy so if she hesitates, she probably dies and then the world is sucked into hell. So yeah the spell worked but the spell 'plan' failed. roomtone fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 12:02
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XboxPants posted:I dunno if there's any pairing for Angel that I really like. Maybe he's fine on his own, he has his funky gang of friendly gently caress-ups and they seem to all be pretty happy together. I don't think it's a popular opinion but I always liked him best with Darla. In S2 and 3 of Angel when she has her humanising episodes they actually feel like a couple with a lot of history. I don't wish they put them together long term or anything, because part of what I like is how lived-in and already broken the relationship feels, but it does work on a fundamental dynamics and performance level for me. In a different version of the show you could've had Darla survive the birth, Connor be some kind of demon or whatever, and have Darla revisit with a different arc later in the show or something. But her arc resolution was good, even if it led to the worst period of the show. The thing is, by S5 of Buffy, Buffy's matured so much that she and Angel fit much better together, but you never see them together again except for one scene in 5x17 which is up there with the best scenes they ever had, and a crappy scene in Buffy S7 which is just there for fan service. Cordelia and Angel never worked, not the way they did it, which was to change both characters so much they aren't even themselves anymore. I think if they had stuck true to the actual characters, it MIGHT have worked as a sort of contrasting personalities thing, but at the same time, I really liked their earlier friendship dynamic. There was just no need. I generally like Angel better as a loner with a small group of friends/associates, though. I just think he's cooler that way. The Angel series really lost that aspect of him in the latter half.
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Jun 11, 2022 02:04
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an animated series would probably be a good fit for buffy, i'm surprised they've never tried it. they destroyed the world of the show in s7 with all that infinite slayer stuff, so they'd have to either ignore or walk it back, but i think it would suit how cartoonish the world is anyway and also probably be a good fit with the audience demographics. probably just invent a new slayer in a new fake town. it would need some good writers though, who understand that the quotidian stuff was more important to the appeal of this world than the mythology.
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Jun 14, 2022 17:17
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ahahaha, i see. they did try in 2002 - okay, well that was a different era. they should try again.
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Jun 14, 2022 17:24
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