Illyria
I liked Fred well enough, but c’mon - Old One!
Also, leather…
Love both characters. Fred/Illyria plus Acker’s turn on “Dollhouse” made it clear to me who the real chameleon in the Whedon stable of actors is.
Fred’s “charm” worked for me because it was clear that she was trying to accomplish an impossible task: to seem normal when she was in fact nuts. And it was reasonable for her to be nuts after what she’d gone through in Pylea. Her enthusiasm was supposed to be an over-compensation, and there were more than a few moments when we saw the darkness and pain lurking beneath it.
If they got their season 6 and the planned “Fred comes back/splits herself from Illyria” arc, how would they have handled the whole “Fred’s soul is gone” thing? Or was that line added after they knew the show wasn’t getting renewed, and presumably wouldn’t have been put in otherwise?
Neither, he was dead.
Poor guy. Couldn’t have the woman he really wanted and had to settle for this.
In the Angel universe, that barely qualifies as an inconvenience.
Nah, in Supernatural death is a mere inconvenience. On Buffy, death was pretty serious. Who was resurrected in Buffy verse?
- Angel
- Buffy
- That Frankenstein episode guy
- Spike, but I don’t think he really died when he burned up(did he??)
Who else actually got resurrected? I wouldn’t count Lilah. I mean, maybe, but we only see her once post-death.
Well, the comment was about the dilemma Wesley would have faced in a hypothetical sixth season choosing between Illyria or a back-from-the-dead Fred, so:
- Fred
And wouldn’t “Back From the Dead, Fred” be a great band name?
Yes he can. Just like you can judge vampires as needin’ killin’. They want to destroy us, we judge them of not deserving to live.
And I really don’t care that Fred’s soul death is not Illyria’s fault. Because, at that point, my suspension of disbelief was shattered. It was clear that the purpose was to get rid of a character I loved in the worst way possible. I do blame Illyria as killing off Fred is the sole reason she exists.
Because, otherwise, it made no dramatic sense. There is no in-story reason why this had to happen this way. Fiction is not real life–everything that happens has to have a reason. An asspull is bad enough when it’s used to help things out, but when it’s used as something as serious as a soul death*? Nuh-uh.
When I learned that Illyria meant that Fred didn’t exist at all, I stopped watching Angel. I only know what I know now because I always read the wiki before commenting.
Lilah was still dead, she just had a contract with W&H that didn’t expire at death.
Also, other than the way all vampires are dead, Angel never really died, he just got sent to a hell dimension at the end of Buffy season 2.
And Spike was very much dead, that’s why he was a ghost at first on Angel.
Another one who did get brought back was Darla.
That it was so horrifying was what made it so great. It was really an interesting way of killing a character off and I wish we had more time to explore it. Alas, it was really time for the show to end.
Or “Once Dead Fred.”
No he (she?) didn’t - if you’re going to lower-case ken you also have to lower-case barbie.
It was a step too far for me, but YMMV, of course.
I’d have ‘liked’ Fred’s soul being gone more if it hadn’t been mentioned as an aside, almost casually, instead of being treated as the really big deal it was.
You didn’t notice how beautiful she is? Angel’s makeup artists worked their tails off trying to make her look plain and mousy. And failed miserably.
I don’t think they were trying to make her look plain at all. In her first full season, it’s obvious that both Gunn and Wesley are in love with her; and half the reason Angel wasn’t in the mix was that he was canonically* in love with Cordelia at that point, though he didn’t want to admit it. Gunn calls her gorgeous to her face. She wasn’t dressed to the nines, true enough, but neither was Cordelia at that point (most of the time).
To the comments about the destruction of Fred’s soul: I think a major reason they did that was because they needed the entire group to go off the rails emotionally at her death. Simple death wasn’t going to do it, I think, because in their world that wouldn’t be hopeless. But she was the emotional center of the group; everybody in it liked her much more than they liked anyone else, albeit in different ways.
The thing I remember thinking most at the time – holy crap, Amy Acker is a good actress! In her Fred character, you can’t really tell she’s acting, and I was tempted to think that like Michael Cera and his roles, Amy Acker was just like Fred.
But then Ilyria came along, and she was completely believable in that character. That fact is emphasized by all of the responses above which accept Fred and Ilyria as completely different characters. It wasn’t Fred trying to act tough and evil. The switch was complete and remarkable. Both Fred and Ilyria were completely believable. And to see “Ilyria” turn into “Fred” when she needed to was both eerie and terrifying. <shudder> What an actress.
J.
Yes, at one point during the Illyria storyline, I thought to myself it was kinda sad that with Fred dead Amy Acker wouldn’t be on the show any more. Then I quickly :smack::smack::smack:'d myself because clearly there Amy Acker was right in front of me, still on the show.