Examples of canon violations

Cafe Society
61

In Dopplegangland, Buffy assures Willow that your vampire self is nothing like your living self. Angel says “Actually…” and then off Buffy’s look, wisely backs down from that. In The Wish, Xander and Willow became the Master’s most devoted minions because of their innate loyalty. Before Angelus was turned, he was a “worthless” layabout who wanted to indulge in his own desires–drinking and bar wenches. When he became a vampire, he lost whatever social restrictions he had and indulged himself in in drinking bar wenches, pain, and punishing his father over and over and over (as pointed out in Somnambulist). Harmony was a vapid follower in high school, and she remained just as vapid as a vampire–even her love for unicorns remained intact. And in S2 of AtS, when we see her in LA, she’s the same follower she ever was.

In other words, canon gave us multiple examples that despite what Giles believed, vampires do maintain certain elements of their personalities. It might vary from vampire to vampire, but becoming a demon doesn’t wipe away all aspects of humanity. Hell, the Master even chose to turn Darla because of her potential–a woman smart enough to make a life for herself in the colonies, even if that meant being a whore.

And where do we get the information that when a demon moves in, all humanity is lost? The Council of Watchers. They knew they were wrong about that or else they wouldn’t have chosen the vampire they did in the S3 episode when Buffy turned 18. They specifically chose a former psychopath with mother-issues.

Not really, no. A lot of stuff from S1 was either ignored or abandoned later. Spike showed up at the beginning of S2, which was their first full season. He’s as important to setting canon as the 13 episodes before his arrival.

But he was still his therapist self. He said he felt connected to all the evil in the world, and that he had a major bloodlust, but he wasn’t a mindless killing machine. Spike is like that, except he had about 120 years to work through all that before he came to Sunnydale.

The soul was nothing more than a plot device they needed to explain Angel and the star-crossed love. It worked for its purposes, but the writers spent a whole bunch of time after that trying to deal with the implications, with what it was, with who needed one, and with who had one. Joss said that a soul is more like a guiding star–it pointed towards the right choice. In Angel’s case, a soul is cage that kept Angelus from breaking free. In Spike’s case, a soul was the end game. At one point, in Willow’s case, a soul didn’t matter at all, and she did horrible things even though she had one.

Creating a world with nuances and shades of gray doesn’t mean that the writers fucked up their own canon. I think when it came to characterization, they did an excellent job of keeping the characters stable and responding in expected, coherent ways.

62

To me (and my husband) the biggest violators of canon are the Terminator world writers. They stated the rules clearly and with no ambiguity in the first movie, then proceeded to bend, fold, mutilate and ignore them at will in the next two movies and the tv series. It is my husband’s biggest stumbling block to enjoying the current tv series.

63

Like I said I am sympathetic towards your general viewpoint-albeit with some reservations. I didn’t really mind Spike’s transformation, tho many in the Buffyverse fandom abhor it; if you hung around alt.tv.BTVS during the latter part of the series you may remember all the flamewars. TV Tropes even named one of their entries after him, reflecting (what they see as) a badly-executed series of changes. [Well they used to, but reverted the title of the article] They claim that the original characterization has been stripped away-but as you argue a lot of what we saw later from him were extrapolations from personality traits clearly seen in S2, so I’m not sure if he is a good (bad) example of this trope. I still haven’t seen a plausible way to use the character for four straight seasons if you were to keep him an irredeemable Badass/Magnificent Bastard tho. Wasn’t it the Judge in S2 which sensed “too much” of a stink of humanity surrounding Spike? His tough exterior is a persona he uses to protect his vulnerable inner core-a true Magnificent Bastard really doesn’t have that. [And yes I should stop hanging out so much at TV Tropes]

In any event Marsters sold me on it all, even if Noxon did her best to introduce triteness and banality into the proceedings. I was (am) much more annoyed with what they did with Willow than I am with Spike, tho I am admittedly biased because I found her infinitely…charming right from Day One. :wink:

64

I agree with just abot everything wrote, but I wanted to add that there’s an excellent, in-story reason to be dubious of the early claims Spike’s character. Those claims came not from persons who had actually met h m, but from the Watcher’s Council records, whom I’d call a highly unreliable source.

Sometimes the Council lies for (arguably) good reasons; the claim that a vampire has no psychological connection with the human it was before turning, though demonstrably bullshit, is just the thing you have to tell yourself if you have to kill somebody who looks identical to your friend or family member. (Not everybody is Charles Gunn, and even he had problems doing it).

And sometimes the Council lies to keep control of their Slayers. Make that a lot.

If a Watcher other than Wesley or Giles makes an assertion, I’m going to be suspicious of it.

65

In fairness to Pratchett, his continuity wasn’t perfect anyway. In Guards, Guards Vimes asked Lady Sybil if it was true that Ankh-Morpork used to have kings and she said yes, thousands of years ago. In Men at Arms we learned that it was his ancestor “Stoneface” Vimes who executed the last ruling king just a few hundred years before and Sam was aware of this fact.

Plus, in Feet of Clay, Cheery doesn’t recognize Dorfl as a golem and doesn’t even seem to know what a golem is when they first meet, but later says there was a golem at the Quirm Alchemists guild that had arsenic plated arms from stirring it into mixtures.

The Disc is a magic world. Time and history are a bit like taffy there. They’re elastic, malleable and stick to one’s teeth.

66

One thing that’s always bugged me about “canon” is that people tend to assume that just because someone says something, it must be true. In most cases, this is reasonable. If a character in a sitcom mentions having only two kids, then a third one mysteriously shows up, that’s pretty reasonably a canon violation because the character had no reason to lie about such a thing. However, and this is particularly relevant to the Buffy discussion, we should also remember that characters in a show can be fallible. All that information on what vampires are was provided by people who had a vested interest in portraying the demons in the worst possible light. Now, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the vast majority of them are exactly that evil and you don’t want your slayers spending all their time on the battlefield trying to redeem the un-redeemable instead of just killing them, but it could still be an incomplete picture. Really, if one of the major themes of the show is that the world is filled with shades of gray, can we really be upset that the writers depict the initial rules as being incomplete?

67

I just wanted to agree with everyone who has said–we “know” this because Giles said it to Buffy, in order to get her to remorselessly shove a stake through the heart of her friend. Everything in the show demonstrates that Giles was lying–the connection between the person and the vampire is very close, is a form of personality continuation, to the extent that we could say the two are the “same person”–except one is Evil. The vampire always has a strong connection to the family of the dead person–loving or hating, but never indifferent.

I think that the Ontology of the Vampyre in BtVS is not completely consistent, which is a shame, but I think that it is mostly consistent. Vampires are missing some moral compass, but they have free will, and they can love. They seem to come out of the grave consumed with blood-lust, but if they survive the gantlet of Slayers they can adjust and become members of society, with or without souls.

There is a possible story to be told of a vampire awakening in the world after Season 7, where Slayers are around every street corner–trying to survive in an inimical world.

68

Doesn’t George Costanza mention a brother in an early episode, and then refers to himself as an only child in later ones?
And I’ve always wondered about his mother–in one episode he swears that she has never, ever laughed. I’m curious if she’s ever showng laughing in any other episodes–none that I’ve seen, but I haven’t been combing the DVDs looking for it, either…

69

Star Trek - The Next Generation had a show in which the Enterprise folks deliberately infected “Hugh” with a virus that would basically destroy the Borg’s collective mind. They had a later pair of episodes that deal with that.

Yet along comes the Voyager series… where the Borg are just as Borg-like as ever. And the STTNG movie “First Contact” where, well, ditto.

70

Not to defend Voyager (which not even weekly nude scenes with Roxanne Biggs-Dawson could have saved), but the 6th season finale/7th season opener of TNG dealt with that; Hugh did manage to infect a number of other Borg, but the Collective managed to cut them off before free will spread too far.

71

Not to mention the fact that all of the vampires we’ve seen that were sired by The Master, either directly or indirectly, have been…different than the rest. The Master line is powerful and connected to the world in a way that other lines aren’t.

72

I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think the wonkiness started with Angelus, o possibly Drusilla. You’ll recall that the Judge said that Angelus was the most vicious creature he’d ever met, while Dru & Spike stank with humanity. The vamps Angelus sired were the odd ones; I rather suspect that either Angelus’s turning of Dru went wrong because of her madness and it carried over to Spike and thence to Harmony and the Therapist Vamp, or that Angelus deliberately screwed up the turning so that the vamps he created would continue to suffer in some human sense.

73

Reading the Buffy posts, I have realized that Buffy fans are probably worse than Star Trek TOS fans, though not quite up to the level of Tolkien fans yet.

74

Possibly. Let’s not forget the sailor Angel turned in “Why We Fight,” although that one is tainted because Angel is souled when he does it.

IIRC, the vamps Spike sires while under the influence of the First Evil are kind of wonky as well.

75

Since I’m all three, I’ll reply. Buffy fans will never get to the level of Tolkien fans, as there is insufficient textual density. But we have long surpassed Star Trek fans, as the Buffyverse is less internally contradictory and has more hot chicks.

Well, okay, Trek has more hot chicks, because there’s more Trek series, and because you have to count 60s Nichelle Nichols twice. But the BuffyVerse has HOTTER hot chicks, even after you subtract points for Scarecrow!Gellar and Jailbait!Trachtenberg.

76

My point is that pre-resurrection Darla is more like the Master than she is Dru & Spike; the oddly human vampires are all descended from Angelus. I was excepting the sailor from “Why We Fight”, but if we leave him out because Angelus was ensouled, then Therapist!Vamp is out too.

77

They did, more or less, with Harmony in Angel. She’s not a “good” vampire at all. She’s unrepentently evil, and has no qualms about killing and eating people. But she knows that there’s a fair number of super-powered beings out there who take exception to that sort of behavior, and she decides she’s got a better chance at survival by not going against them, so she stays “on the wagon” as far as her feeding habits go.

It might go back further than that. In the alternate timeline where Buffy never went to Sunnydale, we see the Master having trouble eating people because they “keep looking at him.” Not much to go on, canon-wise, but still an odd reaction for a vampire lord.

78

In the original Knight Rider series, Michael Knight’s evil twin brother was introduced- played, of course, by The Hoff, with a goatee to demonstrate that he was evil.

However, the very first episode had established that Michael Knight, when he was hired by Knight Industries, had undergone extensive plastic surgery so that nobody would recognize him as the cop he’d been before.

Presumably, his brother ALSO underwent the same plastic surgery so they’d still be twin brothers.

According to an interview I read many years ago, the writers’ excuse was, “We didn’t think anyone was paying attention, anyway.”

79

I always thought that Twin!Knight was the son of the Knight Industries founder, whom Michael had been reconstructed to look like.

ETA: Horrifying, I was right. The twin was Garthe Knight.

80

Don’t forget the other vamps Angelus sired–Penn and James. Both of them were very human. Penn was a serial killer in Angelus’ mold, but he was working out his father-issues, and he was genuinely hurt that Angelus “abandoned” him. In fact, pretty much Angelus’ entire family was genuinely shocked/hurt that “Daddy” left them. James was so in love with his lover, Elizabeth, that he couldn’t exist without her. One could argue that his love for Elizabeth was more intense than Spike’s love for Drusilla.

Angelus may have been the most ruthless, heartless killing machine you’ll ever meet, but even he had a strong desire to have a “family.” He never traveled alone–in fact, that was the first way Angel set himself apart from Angelus. He put himself in isolation.

But it’s not just Angelus’ off-spring that behave in human ways. Remember Sunday and her gang? Their ability to feed only worked because they could mingle with the other students on campus. Sunday, Holden, and Harmony are not Angelus descendents, to name a few.

The more I think about this, the more I think that in the Buffyverse, a vampire makes a person evil because they take the basic personality core of the person and corrupt it into something horrible. A self-indulgent, partying pretty boy who’s got some brains and a fair amount of frustrated imagination becomes Angelus. A sensitive poet who only wants love and acceptance becomes Spike, etc.