#jonathan levinson

SUPERSTAR

Favorite BTVS episodes (14/?) -> Season 7, Episode 7: "Conversations with Dead People"

My Favourite EPs: Fool for Love, Hush, The Body, Once More With Feeling, Hell’s Bells, Superstar, Tabula Rasa

Episodes I Hated: Life Serial, Beer Bad, Where The Wild Things Are, Normal Again, Wild at Heart, Into the Woods

Normal Again is almost as effective as Hush as a horror episode, but the ableism and disruptions to the story it causes are heavy reasons for me to dislike it. Even the slight implication that the main story might not be real topples the foundation of the narrative itself—no message it has matters if none of it is real in-universe. This episode is an attempt at a horrific meta fake reality, but if taken seriously, it alters and destroys the meaning of the story. I think the ableism is self explanatory. (Scary schizophrenia trope) 

Anya’s character at first worried me, because her attraction to Xander and her naivety towards human culture gave me the impression that she’d be the “born-sexy-yesterday’ trope, but I ended up loving her in the end. I’m also so glad that she was essentially revealed to be canonically autistic, since her flashbacks showed that she still struggled with social cues, interpreted things literally, and had a distinct manner of speech before becoming a demon. 

Lies My Parents Told Me is an interesting episode which fails in many areas. It’s strengths lie in the uncomfortable bits: Robin seeming vengeance that will do nothing to change the past, Spike confronting the memory of his mother attempting to force herself on him, Giles becoming a person Buffy can no longer trust. The parent-child relationships within the episode are the bulk of its substance. It attempts to present a moral dilemma—Spike killed Robin’s mother, but he’s ‘good’ now, what can be done? Yet, instead of presenting an answer or an opening for the audience to question, it presents false black and white representations of the character’s morality. Robin is presented as wrong for wanting revenge, and Spike is presented as a separate individual from his past self. I am honestly unsure what they intended with Robin’s character. Even as an accessory to Spike’s redemption, he fails to contribute much except confusion. I wish he was integrated better into the story, and given chances for stronger characterization and narrative importance. 

Why have I never seen anyone mention the fact that Spike’s mother accused him of being sexually attracted to her then tried to sexually assault him 

The inherent incestuousness of vampirism ? (Working on something about this) 

Riley isn’t necessarily poorly written, he’s just a representation of the American-Raised Nuclear Family Ideal Man Masculine Hetero Dream, which makes him boring on a surface level. (I have more thoughts on this, which I’m working on building into an analysis)

I wish they went more into Xander’s childhood trauma, especially considering it was instrumental in his breakup with Anya. I also wish he was haunted more by Jesse’s death, since he staked him himself. 

The writers don’t understand what sexual violence is, or how it affects its victims. In the earlier seasons, sexual violence can happen on screen without ever being addressed as such; the violent and sexual natures are made obvious, but the two aspects are divorced from eachother so that sexual violence won’t ever need to be discussed. It is also framed as something that only happens to the weak. Xander attempts it on Buffy and she stops him, Faith attempts it on Xander and Angel stops her, Spike attempts it on Buffy and she stops him, Warren attempts it on Katrina and he kills her. There is an implicit message that if you’re strong enough, you won’t be assaulted. (“I didn’t—“ “Because I stopped you.”) In the later seasons, sexual violence is treated like a crime that can simply be tacked onto any character to make them more evil. Xander and Faith’s attempts were not treated as sexual violence, sexual AND violent, but not sexual violence—because they were not intended to frame those characters as evil. However, Warren and Spike’s attempts are added with the explicit purpose of making them more evil. This is evil, this is what an evil person does. And yes, it does make them appear more evil, but it’s also insensitive. We (as the audience) are meant to be disgusted, but we are not asked to show understanding or sympathy for the victims. It’s always about how vile the act itself is, and never about how it affects the victim. (Also, any message you do have about sexual violence is instantly voided when you attempt to accomplish it by forcing your actors into a scene that causes them lifelong trauma and sends one of the to therapy.) 

I tried so hard to like Faith, but I ran out of straws eventually.

So much pedophilia and misogyny (cough cough Xander)

While I view the event(s) leading up to it as dubious at best, I like how they handled Spike retrieving his soul. The angle of his new awareness of morality going both ways was something I had not considered—but having him see both the wrongs he's done, and the ways he's been wronged is interesting. Without his soul, he doesn't care how Buffy treats him as long as she stays. With his soul, he begins to realize that he doesn’t want to just be used for sex, and flinches away and panics when she tries to touch his wounds because he immediately assumes she wants something sexual. It’s an interesting angle, but I do wish they had him confront more of the harm he’s undergone and how it affects him now. 

Did I mention that writing an attempted rape scene between your endgame couple is one of the worst writing decisions I could imagine 

A house is a building that carries themes 

Cordelia and Buffy should’ve kissed. 🙏

Strangely enough, one of my criticisms is that they treat human life as too valuable in comparison to other life. For the characters, it makes sense, because they’ve been taught to view human life as the most valuable. However, the audience has seen from Anya, Halfrek, and Clem that demons are not intrinsically evil or incapable of change. They are people. The audience also sees from Harmony and Spike that vampires are the same people they were before their death—Tabula Rasa even indicates that the “violent instincts” supposedly innate to vampires, are not present in memory-less Spike. Notably, Harmony also doesn’t express uncomfortable violent impulses. (Btw I think what the Council said about vampires being demons imitating their human self was complete BS made up to control the Slayers.) It’s understandable why they wouldn’t address this, it’s hard to address the fact that your hero has been killing people, but I do wish it was interrogated in some deeper capacity. 

I don’t like what they did with Jonathan. While the incel pipeline is unfortunately realistic for a teen boy in his position, I wish they had went more in depth on his motivations. I have so many questions about what they intended with him. Was he still suicidal during his time in the Trio? Why would someone who previously didn’t want to hurt anybody (ex. when he was planning to kill himself but Buffy thought he was going for mass murder, when he sacrificed his “special” status in Superstar so the demon he created accidentally could be killed) join a pursuit (taking over Sunnydale) that is guaranteed to cause harm? What sort of relationship did Jonathan have with Warren and Jonathan?