2maggie2

The Revelation We Will Be Talking About For Years

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:48:06 GMT

A few thoughts about The Revelation:

I've got nothing to add about the "OMG Buffy is Bi" thing of itself. Joss is on record as thinking heroes should be "open minded". So Buffy is open-minded. Good for her. Not so surprising, though. Which brings me to my point. This was sold as the revelation that would have issues flying off the shelves. This is the revelation that we'll be talking about for years. And that might be right. But how lame is that? There's no major shift in orientation for the character as Joss is at pains to tell us in his NYT interview. And the notion that a lonely, sex-starved Buffy might be open to some experimentation just isn't that jaw-dropping. So when we are told that this is something we'll be talking about for years, is that meant as a comment on us? Kind of odd coming from the guy who gave us a solid lesbian story line for years. Is the ante raised by having the hero of the show take a walk on that side of the street?

What's really weird about it, though, is that we DID have a revelation that did shock me, and that upended everything I thought I knew about Buffy. That, of course, was the revelation that Buffy is robbing banks. It's too soon to say if I'll be talking about it for years, but that revelation worked through me like acid. I literally woke up thinking about it for days on end. It put a hole into my stomach. And it gave me the glorious good fun of going back and seeing how it made sense of so much of the oddness that we've been seeing in these comics. We don't yet know why Buffy decided robbing banks was OK. But it's a signal change for her character and has had major ramifications, not the least of which is providing a reason for Twilight to take her on.

So how strange that it's the ho-hum Buffy is Bi thing that is sold as a Really Big Deal. Buffy robbing banks is bold story telling that opens up a huge canvass in terms of drama, character development, and philosophical/moral complexity. Buffy has a one-night stand with a girl. Yes, we'll get some interesting story about whether Buffy is still a taker in emotional relationships, or whether this has an impact on her authority with the rest of the slayers and so on. But of itself? Let's just say that it's not sparking the revolution in my view of the Buffyverse that the BtBR reveal sparked.

One observation about the issue itself that I haven't seen voiced (though it might have been -- I've not read all the reactions). The French farce scene that everyone (including me) delights in has an ominous undercurrent to it. Everyone who runs into the room, is running into the room to announce the attack that is underway. Xander announces wolves. Renee wants to sound the alarm. Andrew announces more wolves. Dawn announces bees. Willow announces an attack. It works to get everyone running into Buffy's room at just the right moment. But I wonder if it doesn't also serve to tie the two threads together. Is Buffy sleeping with Satsu also to be understood as "wolves at the gate"? There's a potential for some layering here as the story unfolds. And who knows? Maybe that will be an unfolding that really will make Buffy sleeps with Satsu the sort of Revelation that We Will Be Talking About For Years.

Essay Posted at Buffyversemeta

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 04:22:25 GMT

Written for the buffyversemeta metathon

Title: Through a Glass Darkly
Summary: Reflections on Faith as Buffy's 'dark' Mirror
Spoilers: Through BtVS 7; AtS 4
Word Count: 2675
Note: Written in response to a suggestion by bookishwench for the buffyversemeta metathon. Unbeta'd

Faith is the 'dark' slayer -- but the mirror relationship between Faith and Buffy is more complicated than that.

Faith as a Dark Mirror

In a ‘verse suffused with characters who mirror one in another in various ways, perhaps the most obvious mirror exists between Buffy and the ‘dark’ slayer, Faith. Buffy is unswervingly committed to the fight of evil; Faith enlists in the service of the evil mayor. Buffy only explores her sexuality in the context of committed relationships; Faith sleeps around. Buffy has friends and family; Faith is a loner. Buffy is the light to Faith’s dark. Heck, she is the blonde to Faith’s brunette. It’s a straight-forward compare and contrast. Except that Buffy is really a bottle blonde, and the tale might be just a bit more complicated than surface appearances would suggest.

Actually the complications are not buried so deep. From Faith’s first appearance in season 3, the question of the darkness lurking in the slayer – any slayer – is raised. In “Faith, Hope and a Trick,” Faith comments to the gang that slaying always makes her hungry and horny, and looks to Buffy for confirmation. Buffy, visibly uncomfortable, confesses to craving non-fat yoghurts. Sometimes. Slayers have appetites. For the hunt, for sensual experiences. They are passionate. They are volatile. That’s why watchers would prefer to start training early – so they can control their slayers the way Kendra was controlled. And Buffy’s own fear of that volatility leads her to deny that she has those appetites. But Faith forces her to admit that there is a joy to slaying (“Bad Girls”). As the series progresses, we learn just how right Faith was about all of this. In season 5, Buffy’s lust for the hunt becomes an explicit theme, and her sexual appetites get vetted in season 6. Slayers really do have a primal nature. So the real contrast between Faith and Buffy does not lie in a difference in their appetites or passions.

Instead, the contrast seems to center on the use the slayer makes of her passion and power. Faith asks why a person with super-powers should feel bound by the conventions of a morality designed for lesser beings (“Bad Girls”). It’s an age old worry about ethics. Way back in Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus challenges the idea of ethics by declaring that ‘right’ is just what the people with power say it is. People without power have to follow the rules of the powerful. But there are no rules for the people with the power. And in the Buffyverse, slayers are the people with the power. So why shouldn’t they do what they like? Faith answers her own question by pursuing the power; Buffy recoils and reaffirms her commitment to using her power to serve the good. It’s not about who has the power. It’s about what you choose to do with the power you have. Buffy and Faith choose differently. Faith’s choice to be a villain makes Buffy’s choice to be a hero shine all the more brightly. That’s how a mirror should work.

But is the key difference between Buffy and Faith really just that Buffy chooses ‘good’ while Faith chooses ‘evil’? Their difference in background invites us to consider the possibility that Faith’s choice was rooted in her not-so-pleasant childhood. As Buffy says to Willow in “Doppelgangland,” -- “Faith had it rough. Different circumstances, that could be me.” Yet, while we can take Faith’s rough life as reason to be more sympathetic with her than we otherwise might, the series seems to definitively suggest Faith’s background is not a driving factor in the difference between her and Buffy – for in “The Wish” we encounter a friendless, family-less Buffy who, hard though she may be, is still firmly committed to the fight against evil. We are back to the position that the root difference lies in that fundamental choice for good or for evil.

And if our encounter with Faith stopped at the end of season 3 that might be all there was to the tale. But in season 4 we learn that Faith’s ‘choice’ to be evil is not, in fact, the deepest expression of herself. It turns out to be a mask, one that she finally cannot bear anymore. Although Faith wakes from her coma and immediately sets out to get revenge on Buffy and otherwise pursue her ‘evil’ schemes, at the end of the day, she can’t see it through. In “Who Are You”, Faith has Buffy’s body and her credit card and is heading out of town to lead a life of pleasure, but she can’t walk away from a televised report of a vampire attack in a church. Faith heads there to pitch in with the battle against evil. And then, in a climactic scene, she pounds on her own body, crying “You're nothing! Disgusting! Murderous bitch! You're nothing! You're disgusting!” Just as Buffy deep down recoils from evil, here we learn that so too does Faith. So much so that Faith moves on to LA where she tries to provoke Angel, the one who had given her the most room to choose good, into giving up on her and just killing her. A Faith who has despaired of the possibility of being good, would rather die than live out her life as ‘evil’. The crucial contrast between Buffy and Faith proves to be illusory.

And just in case we didn’t get the point that Faith isn’t really Buffy’s dark mirror, season 6 offers up a genuinely dark mirror in the guise of Warren. The nerd trio is structured to mirror the Scooby trio. Warren/Buffy serve as the leader; Jonathan/Willow do the magic; and Andrew/Xander are the demon magnets cum side-kicks. If we compare Warren and Buffy we quickly see that however dark Buffy gets in season 6, she doesn’t choose evil the way Warren chooses evil. And unlike Faith, Warren lives very easily with his choice. There’s no regret, no remorse, no second thoughts. He just pursues power so he can do what he wants. End of story. So if we want the mirror of someone who has Buffy’s power but chooses to use it for ‘evil’, Warren is the relevant mirror, not Faith. But if that’s so, how does the mirror between Buffy and Faith really work? Faith’s deepest truth isn’t dark. Does that mean that Buffy’s deepest truth isn’t obviously light?

Faith’s Darkness as a Construct

To get at what’s really going on with this mirror, it helps to ask why Faith chooses ‘evil’ in the first place. It doesn’t express who she really is, so why does she jump to it? Faith makes her pivotal choice in response to her accidental killing of the deputy mayor, who is a human. It’s important to note this. The killing was entirely accidental. Faith thought she was staking a vampire. Nor is Faith unmoved by the fact that a man died as a result of her mistake. We get a few moments when we see that she is clearly horrified. But they are only glimpses. Faith very quickly adopts a stance of wanting to evade responsibility and of not caring about what happened.

Buffy who was slaying with her at the time of the accident is equally adamant about wanting to take responsibility and about caring that a man died. Because we get glimpses of the fact that Faith did care about the death, I think we can leave aside her stance of ‘not caring’ as a protective mask. That allows us to focus on the question of taking responsibility. At first blush, it would seem that Buffy is clearly on the right side of this. Accident or not, a man died. If you hurt someone in an accident, you still have to stand up and take the consequences.

But those are normal rules for normal people. How is Faith supposed to explain to the civilian authorities that the death was accidental, when the accident involved mistaking a human for a vampire? After all, the civilian authorities don’t even realize (or at least don’t acknowledge) that vampires actually exist. In season 6 the issue is revisited in Buffy’s reaction to the death of Katrina. Believing that she has accidentally killed Katrina while battling demons, Buffy is determined to turn herself into the authorities. But as Spike observes, it is unlikely that the authorities are going to come to the right conclusion in a story that involves time going wonky during a battle with demons. Even in regards to this accident, Giles tells Buffy that the usual procedure in such instances is not to involve the civilian authorities, but rather to let the Watcher’s Council handle it. Faith’s evasion of responsibility is at least partly a sensible desire to not submit herself to the police, given that the police cannot possibly properly assess what really happened.

As for Faith’s desire to keep the accident from Giles, I think that can be explained in terms of her reaction to Buffy’s reaction. Buffy takes the killing very hard. She even dreams about it. And she seems offended by Faith’s mask of ‘not caring’. But what sort of concern should Faith be feeling? Should she be feeling guilt for having killed a man, or regret that an accident happened while she was doing her job? Consider the following bit of dialogue from the end of “Bad Girls”:

BUFFY: We need to talk about what we're going to do.

FAITH: I was doing my job.

BUFFY: Being a slayer is not the same as being a killer.

This is the first serious exchange Faith and Buffy have on the subject, and so Faith learns early on that for Buffy this is more about the guilt of killing than it is the regret or remorse about an accident that has happened. Later on in Consequences, Buffy goes on to say that the appropriate feeling is one of being ‘dirty’ – a term which again implies that guilt should be involved. It’s this shift in focus which opens up room for the dialogue to become one about the exercise of slayer power. It is quite conceivable that if Buffy recognized this as an accident, one which perhaps require some action of taking responsibility but not an expression of guilt, Faith would never have felt the need to choose between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. So why doesn’t Buffy see that this as an accident? An occasion for regret, and even remorse, but not for guilt?

I’d like to suggest that Buffy is doing a bit of projecting here. This is not the first inadvertent killing that has happened on the show. In season 2, Buffy kills her mother’s boyfriend, Ted. Now, we are invited to discount that incident, because Ted turns out to be an evil patriarchal robot. But in point of fact, at the time she unleashed the ‘lethal’ blow, Buffy thought she was hitting a human. Moreover, it wasn’t an accidental blow. Buffy didn’t intend to kill Ted, but she had been looking for a fight with him, and was quite happy to beat him up. And in the interval between the time she ‘kills’ him and the time she learns that he really was an evil robot, Buffy quite obviously felt a good deal of guilt. She even wore her overalls of shame to school the next day. And when Xander and Willow try to explain away what she did, Buffy says as almost an aside that maybe the reason she hit Ted was because she just didn’t like having a new man in her mother’s life.

So it is in the incident with Ted that we see a slayer exercising her power to suit herself. It just turns out that Buffy gets off because Ted wasn’t really human. In “Bad Girls” Faith was exercising her slayer power in the line of duty. It just turns out that she’s ‘guilty’ because the person she slays really was human. There is a lot of mutual identification between Buffy and Faith. Here, Buffy reads her own experience with Ted onto Faith’s situation with the deputy mayor. The question of how to exercise slayer power gets raised, not because Faith accidentally killed a human, but because Buffy once intentionally hurt someone she thought was human. There is a lot of ambiguity about how to live in a human world with slayer powers. The series of dialogues between Faith and Buffy in “Bad Girls” and “Consequences” unfolds in a way that allows Buffy to take the high ground, even though she doesn’t fully deserve it in view of what happened with Ted, and for Faith to take the blame for the dark side of the exercise of slayer power. Faith accedes to this because of her own vulnerabilities, and because she cannot possibly know the darker corners of Buffy’s heart. Faith’s role as a dark mirror for Buffy is a construct, though neither Faith nor Buffy can really be aware of the dynamic that has played out between them to make it so.

Faith as the Light Mirror that Could Have Been

One consequence of constructing Faith as the dark slayer is that it allows Buffy to evade her own darkness and her own weaknesses. As we learn later on in the series, Buffy suffers from a bit of “self-righteousness” (OMWF) and some guilt about her superiority complex (CWDP). She really does think she’s better than others. And in particular, she thinks she is better than Faith (Enemies). But by constructing herself as the one who is “not dark like Faith”, Buffy is forced to be self-deceptive about her own ambiguous choices. To take the most stunning example, consider her confrontation with Angel (and Faith) in “Sanctuary”. There she says that Faith and Angel are in a club she can’t join – namely that of murderers. It’s a rather breathtaking claim to make, considering that Buffy tried to kill Faith, and did succeed in putting her into a coma. I’m not aware of any moment where Buffy admits that at least once in her life, she deliberately tried to kill another human being. Instead, she maintains the line that killing humans is wrong, even despicable ones like Warren. Buffy gets progressively harder and finds it increasingly difficult to love. And at least part of the reason for that is that she never really has a moment of truth, a moment of confronting herself without the masks or the constructs. And that means that she has never accepted herself, either.

By contrast, Faith does get that moment of truth. She stopped competing with Buffy for the status of “best slayer” after the accidental killing of the deputy mayor. She drops the construct of herself as ‘evil’ in the rainy alleyway at the end of “Five by Five”. And at the end of Sanctuary she stops refusing the judgment of others. Faith finally realizes that she needs to let go of any and all attempts to control how others see her, and she turns herself in. She stops constructing – either as good or as evil – as powerful or as weak. And in the closing shot of Sanctuary we see Faith as she confronts herself. She is locked up in a cell. She is experiencing everything she ever feared. She is experiencing everything that Buffy ever feared. She has no friends, no family, no status. But she finally has herself. A moment of honesty.

When we next see Faith in season 4 of Angel and season 7 of Buffy, she is in a vastly different place. She has no illusions about herself. She is much more relaxed. One has the feeling that she is in a position to be a tremendous slayer, one who is not plagued by the self-righteousness that limits Buffy. The hero’s journey requires the moment of absolute fall. The moment where all of our self-illusions have to be let go. Faith has embraced that moment. Buffy has not. The mirror has inverted entirely. And as long as Buffy constructs herself as the ‘light’ slayer, she will never be able to learn from Faith’s deepest and best moments.

Hello and a quick comment on the canon wars

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 03:38:04 GMT

My first LJ post! I suppose a brief introduction is in order. I was introduced to BtVS/AtS two years ago, stormed through all 12 seasons in a brisk 3 months, and turned to fanfiction about 3 months after that. I love the complexity of the Buffyverse, and am a pure Spikeophile. Not sure why I've felt the urge to de-lurk of late. But every now and then my pesky opinionated self just has to say things!

So the topic of the moment seems to be the question of whether B8 and A6 should be considered as canon.

I suppose my opinion is closest to rahirah's. Joss is the author of the 'verse, and as long as he maintains continuity with the other elements of the 'verse, then it's at least presumtively canon. But the one thought I wanted to add is that the question of whether or not the comics are canon can't be definitively answered ahead of time. Authorship and continuity matters. But canonization also requires that the texts be received as canon. In other words, the community of readers/viewers gets the final word. If the community give the comics the same authoritative status as the TV shows, then they are canon, regardless of what other criteria you might wish to apply to the question. And if the community ignores the comics, then they aren't canon. And if that happens, it won't matter how much Joss insists that they are. Because reception is key, it makes no sense to try and prejudge the issue.

We can, however, make guesses about how it will turn out. My guess would be that the comics end up in a sort of in-between zone, as a sort of apocrypha. They will be given some weight, but not the same weight that is afforded to the TV shows themselves. I'm guessing that because the canon has appeared to be closed for three years, and readings of the 'verse have had time to get more entrenched. There will be more resistance to story lines that upset those readings. There seems to be enough sentiment in the community resistant to the comics for those reasons as well as the change in medium that it seems unlikely that the comics will end up as full canon. But if they turn out to be compelling additions to the story we've had so far, then all bets are off. My point for today is that as of now, no one can really say whether the comics will be canon or not. We have to wait and see how the comics are received.