#btvs meta

AND SOMETHING I FIND REALLY FASCINATING ABOUT DOING THESE TWO THINGS (reading the script and watching the finished scene) IS HOW DIFFERENT THEY ARE—different lines. different directions. different blocking. different subject emphasis.

Okay…a continuation from my last Faith and food post.

This is the exchange that happens IMMEDIATELY after Faith’s insists that she doesn’t need real food she can live off of popcorn. Not only is Faith NOT EATING but she’s talking about paying people back for the little she is accepting.

And I feel like this is framed as Faith learning to not take what isn’t hers (food, men, possessions) but that’s NEVER been Faith’s problem.

Faith’s actual problem is the she has frequently run from the consequences of her actions. Which in the context of Buffy, a show which is fundamentally about accepting that everyone is flawed and choosing to be forgiving anyway (and establishing that forgiveness can have its limits and is about the wrong party, which everyone will be at some point in their lives) is a fascinating flaw to give an anti-hero. But offering immediately to pay back whoever’s food she’s taken? That doesn’t feel to me like Faith accepting her impact on other people or accepting consequences.

Because part of the problem for Faith is that of all of the characters in the Buffyverse, she has the smallest (even nonexistent) safety net. The consequences for her are so much more dire as a homeless teen without a community that it makes sense she can’t have the same relationship with learning to accept consequences as the Scoobies.

The way the writers express her relationship with food up to AND including this scene prove that they don’t get that.

It’s especially poignant that this is centered in Wesley, because while no one deserves torture, and there is no excuse for how she treated him, he of all of the characters failed Faith. His arc in the previous episode where he believed she was worthy of saving? She NEVER learns about that. She never gets a model of an apology or of accepting consequences from him.

Welcome back to another discussion of faith and food. In previous posts I’ve talked about how in Season 3 of Buffy, Faith is ALWAYS hungry. Which is contrasted with Buffy who “sometimes has a nonfat yogurt.”

I’ve written before about how I read this as the show trying to show her hedonism while ignoring that she’s a food insecure child. Most of her time in season 4 of Buffy she seems to be powered by spite and a cursed locket so we don’t really see her stopping to eat.

It’s crucial to me that the next time we see Faith with food she’s REJECTING most of it and choosing “live off popcorn.” Her material circumstances haven’t changed that much, she’s been squatting and stealing money for food. But her rejecting food is a sign of her rehabilitation.

I might do another post later about how the lines of dialog following this scene are especially wild in how they position Faith’s relationship to food.

One of the important elements of Buffy that doesn't entirely add up is both that governments (and it is governments, in AtS the Nazis are just as much a part of it as the USA was and presumably others would make their own bids) and the Watchers' Council and all the magic families know they live in a world of magic and monsters. So too obviously do the demons.

And yet in the 20th Century most people somehow are unaware of that when older cultures very much did believe in magic and that was without the kind of immense power witchcraft allows in the Buffyverse or actual monsters in the shadows. So how, precisely, could 18th-20th Century rationalism take hold if it's a great big lie?

Well, in the end, it is in fact a great big lie. It is essentially the Watchers' Council using the Screwtape Law that the greatest weapon they can use to weaken their foes is to convince people none of it was real, and that it's all ultimately various tales. This is also, admittedly, a wee bit of a vibe quite intentionally like the comics version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and granted I do apply a bit more of that vibe given this does even apply to a point in universe.

Dr. Jekyll's formula, invisible people, and Dracula in the Bram Stoker sense are all tangible realities, after all. Multiple efforts to create a Frankenstein monster, too. The comics that in the absence of New Sunnydale are still the future of the in-universe world even explicitly name drop the Cthulhu mythos and have a Deep One on panel.

So here, in other words, the Watchers' Council extends its metaphorical role, rich douchebag patriarchy with more money than brains, to the most literal metaphor imaginable and creates the world where people take science over magic and assume Newtonian and Relativistic physics are the only ways to describe a world of hellgods, Old Ones, monsters, and witches and wizards who can remake a town and send people to the cornfield if they disagree.

Essentially the 'Decline of Magic' thesis, regardless of how modern historiography evolves it in real life, is literal reality in the Buffyverse. The censorship field is not a natural thing, it is amplified by various power-hungry magical cabals on greater and larger scales, and the world of the supernatural existed underground after it.

But before all that, the in-universe monsters, just like in real life except with actually valid reasons, were taken for granted. Ironically a lot of the fake monsters from real life that also don't exist in-universe, like blemnyes (the people with faces in chest you see on old maps) are understood to exist as fiction in-universe, too....but only if they ever talk to people from our universe.

And as with the 'Willow and Tara make goo goo eyes and oh yeah, Riley Finn's there too ain't he' episode, fairy tales very much are survival guides to real monsters, just as they included metaphorical tales of stranger danger. In this regard the ultimate arc of the Scooby Gang is that they essentially light a fire under this old order and burn it to its core, only to find that tearing down old orders has its advantages but it also has its disadvantages.

And just to repeat, the Decline of Magic thesis in real life *is* over fifty years old and historiography has become more sophisticated on a topic it started, as it always does. This is also not about real life or non-fiction on the ways human belief changes, it's integrating in the more superstitious magical demon-haunted world of the past and noting in a world where the demons literally do eat you, people are going to take that very differently.

This is also why in every single universe the First Evil exploding the Watchers' Council is a given, those bombs are the heralding trumpets of the final fall of the old order and the return to an open age of a new dark age, of mighty heroes and bold deeds, of witchcraft and sorcery returned to power in a world of high-rise steel and glass buildings and the caged power that sets the stars alight and firearms giving magic more than an equal rival in science.

The story Joss Whedon told is 100% intended to be an allegory of growing up and simultaneously an X-Men like superhero universe. As I don't want to tell Whedon's stories in a different key because fuck that guy (and even if it weren't so, the entire point of fanfic is to play in a sandbox but to tell your own stories, not plagiarize canon, at least to me) and Willow has that much more classic superhero arc (albeit Dark Phoenix) the version I tell ramps up the superhero and magic aspects.

Buffy starts off living in an urban fantasy world of shadowy secrets with a California Gothic vibe and winds up living in a high fantasy world because she and her friends wade into a fraying order in a gasoline soaked room with the torch and set it to burn.

on the OTHER hand, because btvs is nothing without its dichotomies, i feel as the other coinflip of pain is presented in tandem. the flipside of death is life. it is textual, we see this happening the way buffy grows more lively and more in touch with life after she starts her relationship with spike, who has multiple times been connected with the imagery of death. he is the slayer of slayers, he'll make her neck his chalice, he's the one who first brings up the inherent death drive of the slayer and how he took pleasure in killing them. and YETTT. buffy begins her relationship with spike/death that is filled with roughness and bruises and blood and episode-by-episode, we watch her become more connected with her friends and family again. maybe another person has a different reading of this, but i have always viewed that it was this relationship with spike, which was supposed to be that death knell/this unconscious action to get her closer to oblivion, that was instead the feeling (once more, with feeling) given back to her tryst after tryst to bring her back to herself. and she ends their relationship once she's well and truly alive again. i wont discredit the scoobies, her relationship to them is extremely important, but i feel like it really was spike and their affair that led buffy to switch her tracks from death to life.

In the whole argument over the magic decorations and all that, at no point did Tara actually volunteer to do any of the mundane stuff she said could be done by Willow herself. She evidently expected Willow to single-handedly put up the entire set of decorations while she benefited from setting them up and also presumably to take them down as well. I'm pretty sure this yet another case of the writers doing her dirty but even someone less sliding full speed down a slippery slope than Season 6 Willow at that point would have had the Peter Griffin "Whoa Whoa Whoa Whoa" moment about that.

One of the biggest proofs that most Tara fans don't really register her as a person so much as the purest distillation of shipping culture is that she gets treated as a flawless saint even when these same people opt for 'Willow AND TARA' freeloaded in Season 6. Whenever that discussion does turn up it starts 'Willow AND TARA' but then turns into just Willow.

Tara, the actual human being in-universe who had free room and board in Buffy's house and then skeedaddled after the two roofie flower incidents with only intermittent time with Dawn and helping herself to free food at the birthday party (and LBR here, who wouldn't) clearly has no problems returning to the house where she knows Willow is for that party.

So whatever issues they had between them that is explicitly not a deterrence factor, we see that on screen. We know she picks up Dawn, either from school or at that house and presumably brings her back, so that's further proof of it. She has nothing that really stops or her slows her down from going back but it literally never occurs to the character on screen that someone she knows is treading water or up to her eyeballs in it financially might be able to use some help.

*If* you opt for the 'Willow and Tara wuz freeloaders' line then of the two Tara is actually by far the more selfish and her Season 6 self had some of her own biggest jackassery in a different direction to Willow.

If you actually value your favorite character as a person in her own right her growth arc as a person away from the Scoobies does have one very obvious downside that is a mirror of her growth arc being that in her case, selfishness is good after being a doormat for so much of the time (that this is also ultimately Willow's arc at one very abstract level is a deeper irony but that's a different discussion).

So, continuing to think about our three Slayers, now that Faith is here, I wanted to sort of talk about how I see their skills and capabilities comparing.

(I know that calculating comparative power rankings is the lowest form of fanwank, but sometimes it’s fun, darn it.)

So, how do the Slayers stack up against each other?