I once watched all seven seasons of buffy one after the other in the most immense television marathon I have ever put myself through. (I did manage to get some sleep in between though. woah. man was that the most insane rollercoaster ride of my life or what. I reallydon’t admire or worship any show on tv as much as I did Buffy, and I am so thankful to whoever bought out that 40 disc box set because it was like christmas and all birthdays come at once.
There were parts I didn’t like, I screamed “shut up, dawn!” during season 5, and then “shut up Kennedy, you’re not getting a spin off!” in season 7. I groaned when I saw Mari Noxon’s name come up in the credits and I hated the whole Spike thing at the beginning but grew to kind of like him. I cried in The Body and in Chosen, when Xander talks about Anya dying and says “That’s my girl, always doing the stupid thing.” I laughed all the way through Once More With Feeling and Band Candy, and giggled like a schoolgirl when I saw Jane Espenson’s name on the opening credits, because she is awesome. I purred at skanky Willow in Doppelgangland, and wanted to give Andrew big hugs on many an occasion. Plus I almost screamed out loud the whole way through Hush, because it was damn scary. And I miss Buffy and Joyce and Xander and Willow and Spike and Andrew and sometimes Dawn and even Kendra a little. But all good things come to an end, and so did this.
I wish I wanted kids so I could name them after the Scoobies, but I guess I’ll just have to have lots of cats instead.
Joss Whedon, I love you, even after I watched an hour of Q & A on the Firefly DVD and wanted to murder you for annoying the hell out of me.
And I have never seen the Buffy movie, heard it was crap. Must get on to it sometime.
I buy the Willow/magic/drugs analogy, because Willow chose to get involved with magic. Angel (well, Liam) didn’t choose to become a vampire. It was done to him, although the implication in the story, as I recall, was that he didn’t fight it. Hmm. Let me think about that some more.
Which episode was that in?
Word.
I watched it before starting to watch the TV series. It set up the story nicely, but it wasn’t nearly as well done. If you’re a Buffy fan, you need to watch it, just for the sake of completeness.
The Buffy movie with Kristie Swanson was pure swill. Happened to catch it after watching the entire series. Crap. Camp. The series was by far superior to the stupid movie.
Innocence, Season 2
since we’re picking nits at the Buffy, one other thing has always bothered me.
The season three premiere, Anne. They state that in the underground slave labor place that hundred years would pass down there for every day in the real world. Breaks down to 25 days passing per minute. Even if we say Buffy and Anne were only down there an hour, should’t they have aged about 5 years? It just didn’t strike me as very consistent.
Err, no. All that means is that they were gone from the real world for only 1/100 second or so.
Oh, what has always bothered me about the Anne episode is that Buffy left so many of the slaves behind to a doomed, miserable existence. Ugh.
The whole “Angel and Angelus are seperate individuals” thing never made sense to me. Especially when it came up in season 4 of Angel. (The whole plot point about Angelus’s memory not being wiped of the Beast because he wasn’t active at the time Jasmine did her spell. Or whatever. I didn’t like it. And that’s easily my least favorite season of either show so I’m not watching it again to try and make sense of it.) So I didn’t have a problem with Spike post-soul being pretty much a morally better version of Spike pre-soul. I felt like that fit in with the show’s mythology better than Angelus as seperate being did. Which I felt got pushed on Angel as a way to have Angelus come in and do bad things without the audience holding it against Angel, who had to remain the hero of the series, after all.
But it was established throughout Buffy (and Angel) that how a person acts when they become a vampire is influenced by how they were as a person. Harmony is very much the same as she ever was as a vampire; outside of the obvious (drinking blood now) there’s really no change to her. Spike, after becoming a vampire, still loves his mother (in a twisted vampire way) and wants to sire her. Gunn’s sister, after becoming a vampire, still loves Gunn (in a twisted vampire way) and wants to sire him. In Dopplegangland when Buffy tries to reasure Willow that the way Vampire Willow acts is no reflection on Willow herself, Angel starts to correct her, before wising up and playing along. In season three of Angel Holtz’s little vampire daughter still acts as a child would act. And while Angel doesn’t love his family after becoming a vampire, he does hate them, whereas a completely seperate individual would persumably just be indifferent to them. And in season two (I forget the exact quote or what episode it’s in) Willow points out to Buffy that, with or without a soul, Buffy is still all Angel thinks about.
It may be that a person dies and a demon sets up shop in their body, and they’re no longer the person they were anymore (which I think was Giles’s take on it when they were talking about Jessie in The Harvest… and now that I think about it, vampire Jessie is still obsessed with the same girl, Cordelia, that human Jessie was obsessed with), but it’s clear that the demon is heavily influenced by the personality, habits, relationships, whatever, of the original person. IMO it’s not the case that a vampire is a completely seperate individual from the person, but rather that vampires are typically evil versons of the live person. So, I’m fine with a vampire that regains its soul being influenced by how the vampire was. Especially since they still retain all those memories.
Though, we also saw that Angel post-soul still tried to be Angelus for a time, so Spike not changing his mannerisms or reverting back to William is actually kind of consistent than that. We don’t see Angel till a 100 years or so after he regains his soul (and then when it happens again he’s already had the experience), whereas with Spike it’s more like 4 months, so their situations can’t be compared that closely.
hmm, maybe I’ve been looking at it backwords.
What is said is:
Which seems exactly the sort of thing a member of the Watcher’s Council should say to a young civilian whose friend has just been vamped and is new at This Sort of Thing and who still harbors delusions that his friend can be saved.
Not that canon wasn’t shiftable. It was. But I think that’s consistent with a bunch of people trying to figure out the vampire and demon world from a bunch of dusty old books written in various languages that none of them speak. Hell, you and I can’t say for certain what a human soul is in our “real” world or what happens to it when we die - why should the Buffyverse be any clearer on the concept? They make their best guesses with the information they have at the time and express those in Exposition, and that propels the story for this episode. As they learn more and storylines dictate, things may change or be expressed differently.
If we want to pick real nits, let’s ask why Spike calls Angelus his “sire” when we later find Dru vamped him. I’ve seen some fine fanwanks on that one, but it boils down to this: When faced with Angelus in season two, it’s more dramatic for Spike’s own sire to steal his girl. Later on, it’s more dramatic for Drusilla to flounce off in a jealous huff and create her own boy-toy. (Really, would Angelus ever turn such a pouf as William? Never in a million years. He wouldn’t even deign to eat him - he’d just break his neck and keep walking down the alley.)
The writers obviously read Emerson. 
I don’t think Angelus would even have broken stride.