she moves through moonbeams slowly

(so relieved that after two years of no art I am able to still draw, thanks to my muses I had the right motivation to try (started a btvs rewatch and it just got to me). Like imagine my anxiety when I sat in front of my pc and tablet after so long)

Main:

Close shots:

And it's just so arhgghh because in prophecy girl Jenny herself has an unwanted destiny that she wants to escape, and yet, she is still the adult that has to send off the sacrificial lamb. And it jsut adds to her attitude towards buffy in s2, that she's just constantly working for Buffy's forgiveness, that she lets Buffy take out her grief on her. She watched buffy go off to die to save their lives!!! And she couldn't do anything then!!! But maybe she can get angel's soul back!! like it's all so oughhh

Casting yet another white girl to be the primary Slayer the new show was about, as if the original show hadn't shown enough contempt for Kendra and Sineya and Nikki Wood and the murdered Slayer from Fool For Love played by Ming Qui (who never even got a canonical name and was only ever credited as 'Chinese Slayer'). [It's going to be set twenty-five years after the original show! It would have been so easy to just make the protagonist Nikki's granddaughter! Even the first generation of Star Trek spin-offs realized it would be a bad look to keep casting a white character to play the lead, and they managed to figure that out in 1993.]

Pandering to nostalgia by shoehorning in cameo after cameo from characters from the original show at the expense of any new characters or setting or storylines. [Honestly, even too much focus on Buffy herself would have been grating. We definitely don't need to know how Xander and Willow and Giles spent the 2010s, or construct ridiculous excuses to resurrect Tara or Anya or Cordelia. Their stories are over: maybe they didn't all end in the best or kindest way, but they're done. Let those characters rest!]

Undoing the final big spell from Chosen which meant that "from now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer will be a Slayer" in order to go back to the familiar status quo of the original show with a solitary 'Chosen One'. [The ending of Chosen is so, so good! It's the saving grace of the whole of Season 7! Why try to ruin it? And there are so many possible new stories to explore in this radically different setting that couldn't have been told before and are infinitely more interesting than 'what if we did I Robot ... You Jane again, but now with an awkward moral about The Dangers Of Social Media?'.]

Of those three potential stumbling blocks, what's happened so far?

Well, we've definitely failed the first one (something that even the otherwise pretty feeble Slayers audio drama managed to get right! and, again, something that Star Trek: Deep Space 9 managed to get right four years before Buffy made it to the small screen!).

Now SMG is giving interviews where she says things like "my dream is to bring back everyone who died" [everyone?? even Jesse??] which ... okay, it could be a polite deflection to avoid offending any of the old cast who might want to come back by pretending to think about it. Sure. I really hope it is. But it certainly appears that we're going to fail at the second hurdle too.

And frankly given all the marketing talking about the new protagonist as "the" Chosen One, as if she isn't going to be just one super-powered girl of many, as well as SMG's known antipathy for the later seasons of the show, I really have no confidence at all that we're not going to fail at the third hurdle as well. Is anybody, at this stage, really confident that we're not? Would you put money on it?

And, again, the above list wasn't meant to be a hopelessly optimistic "well, if the show does all this I'll love it forever without question" type wish list. I'm not asking for canon Fuffy or the return of Amy Madison or for the new writers to somehow make vampire soul lore make sense. These were literally minimal expectations if the show was going to be anything more than a cynical nostalgia bait cash-in steered by people who fundamentally didn't understand the lasting appeal of the original show on anything but the most superficial level.