btvsfemslashenjoyer

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Who are the Order of Aurelius? (Plus ramblings about religion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Early in episode 5, the master is reading from a prophecy to an audience of three nervous-looking minion-vamps. He gets to a bit that mentions “the brethren of the order of Aurelius”, and then he does a hand gesture. One reading of the gesture is “that’s you”: these specific minions who will never be seen in any other episodes are the order if Aurelius. (Call this the narrow reading.) But I think it could also be read as “you know who that is, it’s us, obviously”, which make the Master also a member (call this the broad reading), or as “more specifically, you guys”, which leaves open that other members of the order are around (possibly including the Master) but identifies these three as the specific brethren being tasked with fulfilling the prophecy.

Which is the right reading? Well, Buffy and Giles in this episode clearly take the narrow reading: the Order of Aurelius are a new group who have just turned up in town to serve the Master. And nothing in this episode or any others in this season or the next suggests that they’re wrong. So Ockham’s razor does support the narrow reading.

But others, including a lot of fan wikis, and some brief flashbacks in ATS, adopt the broad reading, on which the Master, Luke, Darla, fork guy, etc. are all members of the Order of Aurelius. I don’t think that’s supported by this episode, but I also don’t think it necessarily contradicts it. Rather, it requires us to read Buffy and Giles as having an incomplete understanding. For whatever reason, some members of the order wear a special ring (“the brethren”?) and when Buffy first finds that ring they realise the order is present in Sunnydale. But they think that means it’s just arrived, when actually it’s been here all along, they just didn’t make the link. I don’t think this is a huge stretch (Buffy and Giles do, after all, misunderstand what’s going on in this episode, prophecy wise, in a pretty big way). But it is a stretch.

Personally, I actually prefer the broad reading, and I think you can see why it emerged later on. It responds to a shift in the evolution of how vampires are depicted in the show. In season 1, we’re told that vampires are a vestige of the old ones. So them being enthusiastic about opening the Hellmouth and bringing back the old ones seems natural. These guys with their bowing and chanting and prophecies and general cult-y vibes? That’s just what vampires are like.

But then in season 2 and onwards, the show wants to tell a wider range of stories about vampires, so you a much wider variety of vampires with different outlooks on life. And suddenly the vampires from season 1 look like outliers: why are they all so religious? Why are they constantly kneeling and doing homoerotic “my body is your instrument” ceremonies in submerged churches? Clearly, they’ve got some weird thing going on. And “the Order of Aurelius” is right there as a handy label for “the culty vampires from season 1.”

And this in turn reflects the show’s interesting and evolving relationship with religion. You might naturally expect vampires and religion to be presented as opposites: one is darkness and demons and lust and violence, one is light and peace and goodness and restraint. And the show does, after all, stick to the lore that crucifixes and holy water (and maybe even communion wafers? And consecrated earth?) are efficacious weapons against vampires.

But the show basically never leans into that thematic opposition. Instead it adopts, as I see it, two slightly distinct strategies.

One is textual silence: the characters just never talk about religion, outside for occasional one-liners (a recently risen vampire in season 6 asks Buffy if there’s any word on whether God exists; she says "the jury’s still out"). It’s honestly pretty implausible when taken straight: these people spend years struggling with a literal portal to somewhere called “hell”, using crucifixes, dealing with the spirits of the dead, etc., and as far as we see it just never strikes them as an interesting question what this might imply about religious belief. It sort of reads like the show treats religious musing like urination: we should assume that the characters do it offscreen, because you can’t show that on TV (at least without alienating a bunch of viewers).

But alongside this textual silence, the show also leans pretty hard into a subtextual alignment of religion with vampires (and with demons, witchcraft, and the various forces of darkness). This is partly just a consequence of its genre-subversive premise: crosses and churches and demons and vampires are all classic gothic horror, along with the dusty tomes and candles and Latin incantations. Hence Buffy and her friends constantly undercut both, as modern, irreverent, wise-cracking teens.

But the show goes further in this direction than its basic premise requires: the master reads from books like a Sunday school teacher, Luke intones “amen” when plotting the apocalypse, there’s a scary vampire literally called “Christ” (or “the Anointed” in English)… and the overall effect is to almost make it seem like vampires and Christians are both, equally, ancient evils that Buffy must beware.

All of which is crystallised in a rather funny observation (tying this back to episode 5 and thus justifying the #btvs-weekly-group-rewatch tag). Andrew Borba is very clearly a psychotic monster, and strongly implied to be a double murderer, even before he becomes a vampire. His reaction to being repelled by a cross is “why does he hurt me?”, indicating that the terrifying apocalyptic judgement he keeps ranting about is specifically a Christian one. This makes him, in fact, the first Christian character introduced in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and possibly the only Christian to appear for at least a couple of seasons.

This parallel between vampires and religion is something that relaxes a bit in later seasons, not because religion gets to be cool and fun and irreverent and quippy, but but because vampires do (think especially of Spike, Mr. Trick, and to some extent Harmony). As I said, I sort of prefer the broader reading of who's in the Order of Aurelius, even though it's more of a stretch as a reading of this episode, because it makes it easier to talk about (and write fic where vampires debate about) the contrast between modern 'secular' vampires and the Old-One-cultists of season 1.

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Thoughts on rewatching “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date”

Very solid episode, didn’t stick in my mind that much from the first time I watched because it's all vampires and so sort of blends into the general season 1 arc plot. But on rewatch it feels like it executes what it’s doing very competently. Two themes that I am still chewing over my thoughts on are: religion (and what is the order of Aurelius?) and secret identities (does it really make sense to cut off Owen but keep Willow and Xander around?). But for now, various quick observations:

The fact that the vampire’s ring survives their death just underlines the weirdness of clothes turning to dust when the body does. I guess the idea is that things with their own… mystical aura, however faint, can resist being caught in the imploding aura of the vampire?

(Thinking about Robin Wood wanting to get his mother’s coat back from Spike in season 7… does he have to make sure to get it off Spike before he stakes him, to avoid it turning to dust too?)

The master is a bit like the teacher in Pink Floyd’s “the wall”, in that he loves reading from books, but is also loves being snarky about it

Buffy babbling to Owen about a security blanket is cute, also a nice parallel to the beginning of season 4, where she tells her new college friend that her only security blanket is Mr. Pointy

Owen’s almost-believably-innocent delivery of “who else?” is fun. Take that Cordelia. And Buffy then putting a tray on top of her food.

“It’s a liquid” is a wonderfully deranged thing for still-alive Borba to say about sin…

A vampire hijacking a bus by just standing there and getting hit is pretty cool, one of these unobvious but logical implications of being undead, like being able to walk down to the sea floor.

I kinda like that the dreamboat hunk figure is… the sensitive bookworm loner.

”If the apocalypse comes, beep me!” Iconic line.

Episodes 1 and 2 are pretty straightforward about what the danger is, because they’re setting it up and explaining the world. But every episode since then has worked fairly hard at misdirection and fakeouts. The Amy/Catherine thing worked well; having fork-guy as a red herring to the she-mantis arguably didn’t. I think the misdirection with Borba vs. the Anointed works pretty well? Partly because it actually fools the protagonists!

Cordelia says that Angel “is going to need serious oxygen when I’m through with him”, which is funny because his lack of breath is a minor plot point later on…

Giles sliding out on the morgue’s tray is peak comedy, I love it

Also Willow and Xander franticly building a barricade and then having to dismantle it quickly.

Also the way that vampire-Borba talks (and moves) is weirdly like a video game character with stock phrases (“why does he hurt me?”), like he never talks to anyone he just narrates his own comings and goings in atmospheric nonsense phrases

Are we meant to think that the Aurelius brethren vamps deliberately turned Borba as a distraction, in order to keep the slayer off the trail of the anointed? If so, it's a clever move. ("Hey guys, we've got a total psycho here, that gives me an idea...")

If I had just watched this episode for the first time, I would be totally hype about this creepy child vampire. But because I’m rewatching, I’m just like, ugh, he turns out to be such a damp squib…

Giles says he doesn’t have an instruction manual; next season Buffy will be surprised when Kendra casually mentions the “slayer handbook” that Giles then says he didn’t think would be any use for Buffy.

People have noted earlier in this rewatch that Buffy starts out as already a pretty richly realized character, and this episode does exhibit especially clearly that the standard pattern is to begin the episode with Buffy wanting something that conflicts with her slaying duties and fighting about it with Giles as the voice of responsibility… but before the end of the episode, she’s voluntarily enforcing responsibility on herself without Giles needing to. Here this comes out as her first fighting over taking particular nights off for dates, but then giving up the whole prospect of dating Owen without Giles being involved at all.

(And I think over time you maybe see Giles realizing that he doesn’t actually need to be responsibility guy in too big of a way. When people like Wesley and Kendra turn up, they almost all react with surprise that Buffy gets so much free rein, because they’re taken in by the beginning-of-episode dynamic that foregrounds her bubbly fun-loving persona (she plays into this by telling Wesley that after missions “I get a cookie”) and they haven’t seen a full episode yet so they don't realize that she is actually really hard on herself (eventually to the point of major depressive disorder...)

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

I know that Joss Whedon didn’t write this episode, and that the whole “Xander is Whedon’s self-insert” thing is very overblown. But I feel like part of what drives that idea is that this ambivalent attitude of being both attracted to powerful women while also uneasy and insecure about their power is both a fairly consistent trait of Xander’s, and seems (based on various things, maybe) to be a trait of Whedon’s, so it’s hard not to perceive some kind of connection…

OK, one last post about Teacher's Pet and then I promise I'll shut up about it.

I want to talk a little bit more about that opening scene again. It's certainly not the most egregious part of the episode, but I do find it pretty annoying and it certainly didn't incline me to be particularly sympathetic to the rest of Teacher's Pet during my rewatch.

Yes, the episode intends Xander's extended fantasy sequence to be ludicrously over the top, as @thesearemycurrentobsessions points out. We're certainly not meant to think Xander actually is cool or suave or heroic; the sequence literally ends by cutting away to reveal that he's fallen asleep in class and the girl he has a crush on has noticed that he's drooling. As @badwolfwho1 notes, this scene is in some ways an early take on Jonathan's power fantasy from Season 4's Superstar. The writers of the episode are inviting us to laugh at Xander.

So, what's the problem? Basically I think there are four somewhat interlinked issues here.

First, the fantasy sequence itself is just too long. It's obvious very quickly, at least to somebody familiar with the characters, that this isn't really happening, but the scene just keeps going on and on for over a minute more. Maybe that's because the episode was running short in early drafts and needed some padding (as I've seen speculated). Maybe it's because the writers knew this was only the fourth ever episode of the show and most potential viewers wouldn't be familiar with the characters, and didn't trust the audience to figure it out unless it was this over the top. Maybe they just thought it was much funnier than it is.

But that leads us to the second point, which is that it's ... honestly not very funny? The scene is over a minute long, and there's ... one joke? Two, if you count the real Buffy breaking through the dream and telling Xander that he's drooling. I think the problem is that we don't know these characters well enough yet. Part of the reason Superstar works as an episode is that the audience can be trusted to know that the idea of Buffy struggling with fighting vampires and so having to go meekly to (universally beloved and admired) Jonathan Levinson to beg for his help is absurd. But, again, this was only the fourth ever episode of the show. It was only two weeks ago that Buffy did need Xander to help her push a heavy door shut to keep out some vampires, and then to pull her to safety as she tried to escape them. Buffy itself was famously pitched as a subversion of the trope of the blonde cheerleader character being lured into an alley and killed by a monster, and the show isn't developed enough yet that the writers should be trying to subvert that subversion. The result is that the show has to have dream!Buffy and dream!Xander act very, very out of character to make the fantasy obvious to the original audience, which in turn leads to the next problem.

The third point is that, I think largely unintentionally, this fantasy sequence makes it feel like Xander isn't attracted to Buffy on anything but a physical level. As @probably-hyperfixated points out, dream!Buffy doesn't act or even dress like the real Buffy. So who exactly does Xander have a crush on, anyway? When Xander first saw Buffy back in Welcome to the Hellmouth his reaction was to immediately fall off his skateboard (so badly he'd never be seen with one again) because she was "pretty much a hottie" although he quickly admitted to his friends that didn't know anything about her. And this scene -- along with some of Xander's behaviour so far these four episodes -- just makes it feel like Xander still doesn't really know (or care about) Buffy as a human being at all. The girl he has a crush on in this dream sequence could be replaced with any of the cheerleaders he repeatedly drools over and the scene would play out just the same.

This is something I actually think the show will handle somewhat better in later seasons. For instance, Faith, Hope & Trick implies that Xander is attracted to Faith at least in part because she is a Slayer (his reaction to Cordelia threatening to dress up like one and "put a stake to your throat" is a fervent "please don't let that be sarcasm"); and by The Freshmen he'll tell Buffy that "when it's dark and I'm all alone and I'm scared or freaked out or whatever, I always think, 'What would Buffy do?'  You're my hero."

And I think playing his Season 1 crush on Buffy as, in part, a kind of hero worship -- in which he is attracted to her in part because she is much stronger than him, or anyone else he knows, and she does regularly fight and defeat monsters -- would both make a lot of sense and make his feelings much more sympathetic. Have his fantasy be that he's strong enough to fight alongside Buffy, or have him watch admiringly while she slays three or four vampires before he casually stakes one she missed and jumps into his guitar solo. But the show is instead positioning Buffy's calling as a Slayer as something which makes Xander uncomfortable and insecure and something that his fantasy of her deliberately plays down. He doesn't just want to impress her or save her life, he wants her to be somebody who needs saving. And that just isn't who Buffy is! Maybe the audience can't be trusted to know that, but Xander himself should.

(As a quick aside: there's a bit of fanon I've seen on here before that suggests that Xander is terrified of becoming his own father, who is heavily implied to be abusive, and that is at least subconsciously part of why he is attracted to Buffy and not Willow. He is specifically drawn to somebody who is physically much stronger than him because (subconsciously) he thinks they are safe around him in a way that Willow would not be. I think that's a really interesting take on his character and it does tie nicely into things like the fake vision of his future he'll be shown in Hell's Bells ("is she okay? what did I do?") but it's obviously not compatible at all with how Xander has been written in these first four episodes.)

And that leads me to my fourth and final problem with this scene, which is that, as @btvsfemslashenjoyer put it: "the show thinks Xander’s dumb macho posturing is more relatable than it is". And this is something that goes back to The Harvest, and Xander's response to Buffy matter-of-factly reminding him that she has supowerpowers and he doesn't: "I knew you'd throw that back in my face ... I'm inadequate [...] I'm less than a man". The fact that there is literally a single woman in the world who can do something dangerous that Xander can't do himself is treated as inherently an insult, as a challenge to Xander's entire concept of masculinity, something she could only possibly bring up to deliberately offend him. And that's not a cute look? Xander having a crush on Buffy is fine -- Buffy is pretty and brave and strong and smart and funny -- but Xander having interchangeable fantasies about every teenage girl he knows (except Willow) in which they are reduced to just being A Hot Girl is not.

We're being invited to laugh at Xander in this scene, sure. But it rather feels like we're being asked to laugh at him for the wrong reasons, or with a lot more tolerance of his worldview than I think is entitled. I mean, it feels like the joke is "Xander fantasises about being a Real Man who Buffy would swoon over, but [ho ho!] he's actually a loser virgin who we should all being laughing at". But the actually risible thing here isn't Xander's failure to live up to this macho image; it's the fact he's so uncritically wedded to that ridiculous ideal at all. (See also, the punchline of the episode itself being that Blayne is also a virgin and thus, implicitly, as much of a sad loser as Xander. Rather than, you know, both of them being children who are the victims of a horrific sexual assault by an adult teacher, which is what the episode actually show us is what happened.)

And that's why I think this opening scene -- and so much of the Xander-having-a-crush-on-Buffy arc this season -- just doesn't work for me. It goes on for too long, it isn't very funny, it implies (I believe unintentionally) that Xander doesn't really see Buffy as a person in her own right, and it feels like the writers have far, far more sympathy for Xander's view of the world than any reasonable adult possibly could.

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Thoughts on rewatching "Teacher's Pet" (3/3)

A few miscellaneous observations:

Dr. Gregory mentioning that Flutie showed him Buffy's permanent record really underlines the hollowness of Flutie's performative ripping it up in episode 1.

It's sweet how motivated Buffy is to first impress, and then avenge, Dr. Gregory. You can sort of already see how desperately she doesn't want to disappoint any more people: all he has to do is convey that he's expecting her to do the homework and she becomes obsessed with doing it. And by season 5 she's showing the strain of years of constantly disappointing one person in order to avoid disappointing others even more. (I count letting someone die as a form of disappointment)

Big fan of Carlyle, and not just for the comedic value of “I don’t care what time it is, unlock his cell, unstrap him, and bring him to the phone”. It’s also that this is such a classic Lovecraftian theme, the bookish professor driven mad by getting too close to what they were studying. After all the references in The Harvest to “the old ones” and them coming to reclaim the earth when the stars or right, the show feels like it’s leaning on Lovecraftian motifs hardest at this early stage, in its gestures at how this world is meant to work, and I think I slightly prefer that to some of the motifs that dominate later on (like a multiverse, pagan gods).

We get another reference to the Hellmouth as a "center of mystical convergence", but I don't think we've actually got any clear sense of what that means. Like, do the creatures find themselves drawn here against their will? Or is like a pleasant seaside town, where there's just "something in the air" that makes them feel better, a nice thin veil between worlds that stabilises their quantum demonalism or something? Does the she-mantis come here because it's the most hospitable environment for her eggs to develop? Or is like just a serendipity system, where lots of things end up here by apparent coincidence (including Buffy?)?

*Why* is Angel so cryptic? Like I know that dramatically it's to preserve mystery and entice the viewer, but what is the actual Watsonian reason? What is his motivation?

(Uncharitable reading: If you asked, he'd say that he keeps his distance to avoid Buffy getting hurt by being too involved with him, but in actual fact it's clear that the cryptic msytery-man act is enticing to her just like it is to us, and makes her more rather than less interested in being involved with him. As Spike says about Parker, he gets her to pursue him and feel like it's her idea. More uncharitable readings of Angel to come when we get to episode 7!)

I'm intrigued by Giles' comparisons to sirens and sea-maidens. I mentioned in my last post that the she-mantis makes the most sense to me as a the product of some sort of supernatural accident, experiment, explosion, whatever, that fused human and mantis bodies into a being that is biological enough to reproduce by laying eggs but supernatural enough that it needs the virgin sperm of another species to do so. It seems possible that similar things might happen a few times, but with a different animal each time (fish, or birds - depictions of sirens have varied). And there are definitely lots of snake-maiden monsters in Greek mythology. Always female because of some quirk of the reproductive process?

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Thoughts on Rewatching "Teacher's Pet" (2/3)

So I rather like the she-mantis as a monster, and I’m going to try to figure out why. A lot if it is just that I like bugs, and mantises in particular, so there’s that. Partly it’s that the various little build-up moments (vampire being scared of her, eating a bug sandwich, head rotating 180 degrees, the screams from downstairs during Xander’s seduction) work for me to give the sense of something weird and creepy even by Sunnydale standards. Admittedly the final reveal is… well, the special effects maybe benefit from the scene being shot in darkness.

But I think I also appreciate this monster because it’s…just a creature. It’s never referred to as a demon on screen, and although you sometimes see it referred to that way in some commentaries, it doesn’t feel like “a demon”. It feels like this is something anomalous and supernatural but still biological and belonging to this dimension. The crucial source is an entomologist, not an occultist! It feels halfway between a cryptid (an animal that’s just not known to science yet) and a demon (a being from beyond with a completely non-biological, or even non-corporeal, nature).

This is for a few reasons. One is that its imperatives are so biological-feeling: it needs sperm to fertilise its eggs. Of course it’s a bit weird that it needs virgin sperm: biologically, having sex doesn’t reach up into the balls to change all the sperm produced going forward. But that just solidifies that it’s not just a animal, but something supernatural.

(And if I were going back to the drawing board entirely, I would probably say not to reify virginity as a metaphysically real property… I did wonder when Giles mentions sirens and sea maidens eating sailors if male sailors who have only had sex with each other count as “virgins” for these creatures…)

(Post-chosen storyline idea: Willow becomes incandescent with rage when some virgin-specific magic works on her current lover because the spell employs a heteronormative definition of “virgin”…)

Another factor is the prominence of earthly biology in fighting the she-mantis: there’s no suggestion that you could make progress by using the right sigils and incantations, but studying insect life-cycles and ecology does help.

And just to go off on a tangent, the show makes the rather weird claim that bat sonar paralyses insects, which I’ve never heard anywhere else, and which doesn't make a lot of sense… why would you evolve a nervous system that goes haywire when your predator perceives you? But from what I can tell the kernel of truth is that some mantises, and other insects, can detect bat sonar and tend to respond by suddenly altering their flight paths, sometimes by freezing and dropping out of the sky. So I think the best interpretation here is that this is an involuntary response that is adaptive for regular mantises, but has become a weakness for this giant version because of course it doesn’t have to fear bats but would have to fear plummeting to the ground. Using the sonar against it is like finding a way to induce an involuntary startle or freeze response in a human at an advantageous moment.

Which I think reinforces the sense that this is a supernatural-but-still earthly creature. A demon that just happened to look mantis-like wouldn’t have this quirk; nor would a naturally evolved animal, if the quirk was maladaptive. But a being formed suddenly from some sort of bizarre spell or supernatural fusion of human and mantis might!

(And also the she-mantis doesn’t feel like a demon partly just because the show hasn’t expanded the concept “demon” into being a catch-all category for every weird monster. The gribbly beings that appear in, e.g., S5E09 “Listening to fear”, S5E17 “Forever”, S6E15 “As you were”, are all described as demons but I feel like if they appeared in seasons 1 or 2 they might not be.)

Anyway that’s a long tangent about the creaturiness of this creature. And the point is just that I appreciate that because we don’t actually get many other creatures, compared to the amount of undead, demons, and black magic we get. This is basically the only one this season, and then season 2 has the bezoars, the swim team, and I guess Oz as a werewolf. Maybe Norman Pfister the man who was bugs. I’m not sure if seasons 3 and 4 have any? And I think having some creatures in the mix helps a lot with making the world feel large and interesting and mysterious. They’re an important food group in the monster diet!

I mean yes, there is an opposite risk: too many radically different monsters can break immersion, by making the world feel disjointed. I often feel that way about the robots! It’s completely unclear why a world of demons and magic that are “vestiges of the old ones” would also be a world where multiple Californians can just build Turing-test-passing robots in their basement. And I don’t really have a recipe for when a given category of monster is going to be too disparate vs. a necessary food group. Mileages may just vary. But all of this has been my very long ramble about why the she-mantis sticks in my head so much.

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Thoughts on rewatching “Teacher’s Pet” (1/3)

Something I’ve learnt through observing fandom discussions is that this is a widely disliked episode, and looking at it as an adult I can get why. But that was initially a bit of a surprise to me because I remembered it very fondly, and I think that’s mostly because I love bugs and when I watched this as a kid I focused on the bug stuff and let the weirdly confused sexual themes fade into the background. And yes, even the bug monster is, in some respects, very goofy, but there were enough things about it that worked for me that I still have a soft spot for this episode.

So I’m going to organize my thoughts into three posts.

The whole virgin thing

The she-mantis as a monster

Other stuff

The whole virgin thing

So, the problems here are layered. Layer 1 is that the story we see on screen is symbolically one about an adult sexual predator in a position of authority taking advantage of impressionable schoolchildren, but the story the show thinks it’s telling is one about stupid horndog boys and their dumb macho posturing getting them into trouble. The conjunction of the two yields a very victim-blamey whole: laugh at these teenagers for being preyed on by this adult! As people have pointed out, this would be more obvious (hopefully…) if the genders were swapped as everything else was kept the same. Hopefully it would even be obvious if the sexual predator didn’t turn out to be a giant insect monster, which the episode sometimes suggests is the primary reason to worry about what’s going on.

Ok but layer 2 is that it feels like the show thinks Xander’s dumb macho posturing is more relatable than it is. And so we have to spend a lot of time with the most annoying and unsympathetic aspects of his character on screen, and it’s just… something I always want to fast-forward through.

(I mean, this will always be the issue with Xander’s endless gender insecurities: the show knows that they’re stupid and wrong, but it also thinks they’re relatable and familiar and fun to poke fun at in ways that, at least to me, they’re not.)

Also, I think it’s especially grating because the show doesn’t seem to want to distinguish among three things: Xander has an unrequited crush on Buffy (understandable, who doesn’t?), Xander wants to score with girls to win the respect of random boys (gross), and Xander feels insecure in his gender because his female friend has super-powers and he doesn’t (also gross).

If the plotline were that Xander is tormented by unrequited feelings for Buffy in the way that Spike (or Faith) are, where they are obsessed and captivated by her uniqueness and power, that would be a lot more sympathetic! But instead his feelings all revolve around wanting to undo that, wanting her to be weaker and need him, wanting to make her the sort of interchangeable girl who adds to his “score”… But also, see again that I am ranting about how annoying and unsympathetic Xander is, in an episode where he is actually textually the victim of a sexual predator...

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

The Fat Amy Manifesto

Ok one more thought prompted by S1E03, “Witch”, and by being a member of the lamenting-the-missed-opportunity-that-is-Amy-Madison club (with @coraniaid and @badwolfwho1).

Coraniaid notes that “the show deserves a couple of points for tying Catherine Madison's status as Sunnydale's Worst Mom to an obsession with dieting and staying thin, and for suggesting Amy apparently "losing a lot of weight" since Willow last saw her is a warning sign something is wrong with her home life. And for linking Amy's newfound happiness after being freed from her mother's control to making plans to make brownies and taking about "getting fat".

However, it loses all those points (and about a million more) because Amy is not, in fact, fat at any point we see her on screen and never becomes so, something that can be equally said for every single female actor who ever appears on the show.” (https://www.tumblr.com/coraniaid/785935725923319808/giles-why-should-someone-want-to-harm?source=share)

I would go further: if you’re writing fic about Amy Madison, she should either be fat or be the active victim of malignant magic/personal crisis!*

Her weight in this episode is suggested to be an aberration (our first introduction to her is someone saying “you’ve lost weight!”, her last line is “I'm just happy to have my body back. I'm thinking of getting fat.”

It is explicitly a product of an abusive parent enforcing starvation on her, AND thematically linked to that parent literally stealing her body

that parent goes away, but every subsequent time we see Amy she is 1) skinny again, and 2) involved in some sort of body-snatching/metaphorically bad and fucked up magic (love spells, rat transformation, weird-magic-drugs-thing, revenge spells, etc.). If she’s skinny she’s in a bad place!

Some people may tell you this is because the show doesn’t really think about or care about this character, and because TV shows tend to only cast skinny actresses as a matter of course, but ACTUALLY it’s a commentary on the destructive effects of diet culture, internalised fatphobia, and eating disorders. Amy keeps repeating the harms that her mother imposed on her.

Therefore any thematically serious happy resolution for Amy has to involve not just being 1) not a rat and 2) not evil and 3) not a drug addict, but also 4) being fat and feeling ok with it.

(Also: If you want to play up the theme of Amy feeling jealousy and resentment against Willow, this is low hanging fruit. Willow always shared brownies with her, i.e. Willow’s house was always somewhere where you could eat brownies without restriction. And Willow is, fairly clearly, not doing strenuous exercise or anything like. She is nevertheless very skinny, because people have different metabolisms, which is fine and not her fault but to multiply-traumatised Amy could easily be a maddening disconnect between seeing with her eyes that Willow does none of the “taking care of herself” that she tries to do, and absorbing the cultural message that Willow’s skinniness must be proof of superior virtue. Hence her rant in season 7 that everything “just came so easy for her. The rest of us—we had to work twice as hard to be half as good. But no one cares about how hard you work. They just care about cute, sweet Willow.” So just, if you want that drama. There it is.)

(*Obviously you can in fact write whatever fic you want, I’m a femslashenjoyer, not a cop)

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Ok, scattered thoughts on The Witch

"A veritable Cornucopia of fiends and devils and ghouls to engage!" I love it when Giles is enthused and unseemly, he so often gets stuck being the disapproving voice of reason…

“You’re the slayer and we’re, like, the slayerettes!” Honestly this would have been a better name than “the scooby gang”, I wish it had stuck

I like that so many of the season 1 episodes have multiple red herrings, setting you up to think it’s one kind of evil thing and then it turns out to be something else. Spontaneous human combustion! Even the “tribal art display” feels like it could be setting up some sort of supernatural magic art display thing (the way that S3E2 does).

Xander pronounces “cretin” like “Cretan”, is that a California thing?

“It’s not Amy’s fault, she only became a witch to survive her mother” The fact that Buffy will go on to have relationships with two different vampires that Xander wants to kill is effectively foreshadowed her by her determination to find the sympathetic motivation behind any given antagonist (and his reflexive jump towards violent resolutions)

The cat? What happens to the cat? Was it hiding inside a chest? For how long? Is it a real cat or like a familiar spirit? (I’m sad we don’t see it again. Not enough cats in this show.)

“It was my first casting, so uh, I may have got it wrong.” Giles why do you LIE?

Obviously the elephant in the room for this episode for me is the wasted potential of Amy Madison.

Others have written better than I could about how weirdly uninterested in her the writers are, how inconsistent and unsympathetic her portrayals are (e.g. https://www.tumblr.com/coraniaid/691569499058667520/been-thinking-too-much-about-minor-buffy).

But something that really jumps out at me is that how much potential there is here. Willow’s relationship to witchcraft is fascinating but it’s basically just one more academic thing to excel at: she goes through science, computers, witchcraft, psychology, and they all come roughly as easily as each other. She’s good at school and then discovers a way that being good at school can be turned into virtually limitless power to hurt and help people. And that’s enormous fun! But Amy, as presented in the first couple of seasons, has this really fucked up and interesting relationship to magic, where she’s constantly shifting between being a victim of magic, and being identified with or attacked for it.

Like, it’s introduced as what her mother used to abuse her…and a year later it’s also something she’s started using herself (apparently to cover for the fact that she’s very much not doing well at school). And she gets blackmailed about it, into doing a spell which then takes away her control over her own mind, and then in season 3, for a second time, she loses control of her body due to magic, only this time it’s her own magic… and it’s in the middle of everyone around her trying to burn her to death “for being a witch”. And her father, who’s never shown, we know that he left partly from fear of her mother’s magic (they got married right after homecoming? a love spell?) and while he’s supposedly back in her life after this episode, there’s no indication that when she turns into a rat and is missing for 3 years he makes any particular effort to find her. You have to wonder if he found out, or at least suspected, that she had started “taking after her mother”, and how it affected their relationship.

Anyway, that’s all to say, an actual exploration of how and why Amy goes into witchcraft, this thing that she’s both constantly being hurt by and constantly being hurt by others for being into, would be potentially very compelling.

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Ngl I would've preferred it if they changed Dawn's lore just a little bit, so that she supposedly had been living with her dad, and moved back with Buffy and Joyce when he moved to Spain or wherever. Buffy is surprised by her suddenly showing up but she remembers having a little sister all her life.

Bonus points if Willow is then like "but Buffy you never mentioned having a sister" and Buffy is like "I must've mentioned Dawn my little sister Dawn. I don't talk about her much but I must have told you about her at some point." Even Riley is like "I'm sure Buffy mentioned being an only child." And Buffy thinks her friends are just forgetful, after all she wouldn't have talked about Dawn much because they were estranged for a long time so it was a sore subject.

So Buffy is insisting this is her precious little sister Dawn, while her friends are noticing details that don't quite add up. And it becomes more like a horror story for them because how did this child show up and insert herself into Buffy's life when nobody else knew she existed? Who is she really? What is she?

It would also make things more immersive for us the viewers, becayse we'd be racking our brains trying to remember if Buffy ever mentioned having a sister. Are Buffy's friends right? Did Dawn really not exist before or did we just firget she was mentioned? Is she some kind of evil entity?

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Ok here's a final thought on making sense of the cosmology on Buffy, very much my own creative interpretation but might be interesting to others.

Let me start out by saying that I’ve always been somewhat not-a-fan of what we might call “reality altering” magic. Specifically, magic that alters wide swathes of reality, including people’s memories, to accommodate a particular idea in some person’s mind. Like the wish in The Wish, or Willow’s “My Will Be Done” spell in Something Blue, or Jonathan’s Superstar Spell, or Ethan Rayne’s halloween costumes, or the retroctive insertion of Dawn, or all sorts of nonsense that I hear happens in ATS.

(This contrasts with magic that provides a specific new tool or mechanism, e.g. a spell to make a specific person forget something as opposed to a spell to make Jonathan have always been beloved, and give everyone whatever false memories that implies.)

This kind of reality-rewriting is of course often great fun, dramatically (I can’t entirely hate anything that gives us vampire Willow…) But from a worldbuilding pespective I hate how… solipsistic it feels. Like, all these people’s lives are completely rewritten by the butterfly-effects of one person’s random thoughts. The Master is alive again, not because of his power or anything his worshippers did, but because one teenager worded something unwisely! In “Something Blue”, multiple demons are created out of thin air to pursue Xander, again because of a quirk of wording (What’s it like to be them?)! Not to mention that, from season 5 onwards, none of the main cast should trust any of their memories - who knows which parts are real and which parts are monkish falsehood! When Willow rewrites Tara’s memories in S6, it’s treated as a major violation of her, and many fans (largely including me) see it as tantamount to a form of rape. But by that standard Jonathan, Anyanka, and the monks all mind-raped hundreds, perhaps thousands of people at a stroke. It grates on me, that this is treated as relatively casual and easy.

So I feel very attached to a somewhat random scrap of dialogue from season 4, during Superstar, where Adam, the personification of science, is completely unaffected by the spell.

He looks at its products and says "These are lies. None of this is real. The world has been changed. It's intriguing but it's wrong. […] I seem to be the only one who is not [affected, because] I'm aware. I know every molecule of myself and everything around me. No one - no human, no demon - has ever been as awake and alive as I am. You are all just shadows. […but] These magicks are unstable, corrosive. They will inevitably lead to chaos.”

Not to hang on an entire world-interpretation on one probably-not-very-thought-out conversation, but… I’m gonna do that.

My take is that this kind of magic is inherently unstable because reality itself resists it. (And Anyanka’s Wishverse Sunnydale was such a large and complex departure from reality that it was probably bound to collapse at some point...) Reality is not a plaything, it has its own weight.

AND (to finally bring this back to Giles’s monologue in The Harvest) I think that resistance put up by reality is the reason why demons (“pure demons”, “the old ones”) can’t persist for long in reality (unless bound within a human form like Glory was). Their nature is tied to this solipsistic sort of magic, that rewrites reality according to some individual’s whims. Instead they have to live in their “hell dimensions”, which aren’t simply “other worlds like ours that happen to have demons in them”, but rather pocket dimensions defined and sustained by a pure demon’s inherent magic. They’re like playgrounds, where a ruling demon makes whatever they want happen just by willing it. Hell dimensions are not actually entire galactic-scale universes whose inhabitants we happen to call “demons” (when really “aliens” would be a better term), they’re the natural product of a being that can selfishly rewrite reality whenever it wants. They’re hellish because being utterly at the mercy of such a being (down to your memories) is a miserable and abject condition to be in.

And, in this reading, humans “drove out” the demons because their possession of “souls” (empathy, morality, concern for others in their own right) somehow strengthens the resistance that reality exerts against demon magic. Humans, at their best, don’t want the world to be their solitary playground where whatever they want happens automatically: they want to share a world with others who they can relate to as equals. And that requires reality to be predictable and regular, something that can’t be completely reversed and rewritten by someone you’ve never heard of saying the right words in California one day. Hence the more humans there are around, the more inhospitable reality is for pure demons.

(This also might make Adam a touch more interesting: not only is he not technically a demon, but in his drive to simply understand how reality, including himself, objectively is, rather than to impose his will on it, he’s actually the anti-demon, the polar opposite of a pure demon.)

Anyway, that’s my take. Very clearly going beyond what the writers ever intended but not, I don’t think, contradicting anything presented in the text.

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

I voted Vampire Willow, but I think either one winning would be fine because they're both switches

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Huh, actually he idea that humanoid demons are just what really really old vampires turn into is really neat, I think that does a good job of clearing up the weird redundancy where we’re initially set up to just have big weird Old One demons who aren’t in this dimension, and then vampires who are human-demon hybrids, and then… we’re suddenly shown a bunch of humanoid demons who are clearly still in this dimension.

I mean actually (and not to jump the gun to episode 8) I think at this point the show is still incredibly undecided about what “demons” are, and there’s actually an interesting shift in season 3.

I mean, consider a list of “demons” in seasons 1 and 2. First, seven that (I think) are referred to explicitly as demons:

Moloch from “I Robot, You Jane”

The brotherhood of seven from “The Puppet Show”

Machida from “Reptile Boy”

Eyghon from “The Dark Age”

The Judge from “Innocence” and “Surprise”

Der Kindestod from “Killed By Death”

Acathla from “Becoming”

We can add, if we want, a cluster of beings which might be read as demons but aren’t explicitly called that:

The she-mantis from “Teacher’s Pet”

The man who was bugs from “What’s My Line”

The bezoars from “Bad Eggs”

Observe that these are incredibly varied in how they work and what they want, and not a single one of them falls into the “big humanoid strong guy who growls and then you have to beat him up until he’s dead” category. (The show is still using vampires for that)

Several of them don’t seem to have an organic body of their own at all (Moloch is on the internet or a book or a robot, Eyghon posseses people, Acathle is a statue). Several of them operate through either mind-control or just having a cult of human worshippers (Moloch, bezoars, Machida) or some sort of disguise (the brotherhood, the she-mantis, Der Kindestod).

(And the one case where there’s a fully mobile physical demon who doesn’t hide what they are or rely on minions, the Judge, is presented as a somewhat unique threat, precisely because of how non-tenuous his hold on reality is)

In general, they’re all incredibly unique and in each and every case, the episode revolves around the characters needing to learn and understand how this particular demon works and figure out a specific way to find and defeat it by working through that. And although this doesn’t work super well with the mythology established in this initial episode, it does at least somewhat fit the idea that demons are hanging on to reality by their fingernails: they can’t just exist and be normal about it, they need to be tricking people, stealing organs, possessing bodies, or something weird like that.

And actually the first demons seen in season 3 are like this too: one is tricking runaway teenagers into becoming workers, one is a mask that raises the dead until someone puts it on. And similar interesting demons do keep appearing (like Sweet or the Gentlemen or the “Gingerbread” demon).

But then fairly early in season 3 we see this shift, where writers seem to decide “ok demons, been there done that, they’re just tough guys who you have to hit until they die”. Episodes 5, 6, and 7 show us a succession of demons (Kulak with the spiky head thing, Lurconis down in the sewers, and Lagos searching for the glove of Mynhegon) who are essentially afterthoughs in their respective episodes (which are mostly about Slayerfest, Ethan Rayne’s candy, or Gwendolyn Post’s deceptions), and who are dispatched in one scene after achieving nothing. And none of them seem to have any trouble existing in our dimension: they were just solidly there, until Buffy killed them. And then in season 4 the show leans into this so much that the Initiative can apparently capture all sorts of demons and just treat them like random weird animals, and in season 5 there’s this whole clan of weird warty robedudes who seem to just hang around being minions for Glory and literally no interesting or distinctive features of their own.

I don’t know if I have a particular point about how best to fit all of this together. It’s just a shift I noticed, and which I don’t really like: it makes demons sort of boring, and also makes them fit even less well with the show’s official mythology.

Ok so thoughts on The Harvest! I’m always interested in worldbuilding so it’s hard not to focus on two key pieces of lore which are hammered home in this episode and then… sort of maintained for the rest of the show without ever really being explained that much more. I am referring, of course, the origins of demons and Vampire-Human Non-Identity Thesis.

So: the episode opens with Giles doing a little exposition speech about how demons used to rule the world and will try to take it back and… I have mixed feelings. What I really like is that it efficiently communicates two big things that the show is not going to do. First, it’s not a Christian show. Despite the fact that crosses and holy water seem to work against vampires, and (in S2E1) consecrated ground burns them, this is not a setting where angels, God, or Jesus are going to save you. And the show mostly sticks to this! There’s even a semi-explicit swipe at genesis: “contrary to popular mythology, [the world] did not begin as a paradise.” Second, it’s not going to try for some tenuous “scientific” explanation where vampirism is a virus or a fungus or something like that. It’s going in between: clearly supernatural, but basically agnostic. Science and religion are both wildly off-base.

What I don’t like is… how vague and uninformative it is? Giles says “this world is older than any of you know” like what do you MEANNN? How old do you think we think it is? Older than 6,000 years of biblical stuff or older than 4,000,000,000 years of geological records? “For untold eons demons walked the Earth […] in time they lost their purchase on this reality. The way was made for mortal animals, for, for man.” Which mortal animals? All of them? Am I supposed to interpret this as saying that demons ruled the world 550,000,000 years ago and then their disappearance caused the Cambrian explosion? First demons, then trilobites? Or is it that demons ruled the earth until a couple million years ago, when humans in particular somehow drove them away? So demons co-existed with dinosaurs? Or am I supposed to conclude that the whole evolutionary story about the evolution of life is false (which, I’m sorry Mr. Rupert, I refuse to do, you will need more than a really old book and an English accent to persuade me of that)?

In particular, I don’t think we ever get a clear account of how or why demons left this reality… which is actually pretty important, given that the prospect of them taking it back is so frequently raised as a great big threat? Whatever it is that drove them out, if it’s still present then why would they be able to recolonise the world just from a portal being opened?

But also: I know that really I should be grateful, because if they had really committed to a specific origin story… it would probably be bad? Maybe it is better that I can stick with my Cambrian explosion headcanons?

Ok and: this episode really commits to “the person you knew is already dead, there’s just a demon piloting their body around.” It’s a bit ironic that they use Jesse for this, since Jesse’s personality, read uncharitably, is basically vampire-in-waiting: all we know is that he desires this person (Cordelia) and doesn’t seem to care what she wants. So it’s hardly surprising that he expresses no sense of loss or remorse about becoming a more purely predatory being. I dunno. Probably in his own head there’s a rich and sensitive interiority but we never see it so… anyway it is too late to start arguing about Buffy soul lore so I won’t…

One other random thought: I loved “They’re close.” “How can you tell?” “No more rats.”

Sometimes I think when Amy got returned to human form she should have retained more rat-affinity (can turn into a rat at will? because her body remembers? natural rapport with other rats?) and become a major asset, given how there are rats all over town and they seemingly don’t like vampires. But of course wanting Amy to have something to show for spending years as a mostly-forgotten joke would presuppose the more basic level of caring about Amy as a character and we know the writers don’t…

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

happy pride month 2025!!

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Ok so thoughts on The Harvest! I’m always interested in worldbuilding so it’s hard not to focus on two key pieces of lore which are hammered home in this episode and then… sort of maintained for the rest of the show without ever really being explained that much more. I am referring, of course, the origins of demons and Vampire-Human Non-Identity Thesis.

So: the episode opens with Giles doing a little exposition speech about how demons used to rule the world and will try to take it back and… I have mixed feelings. What I really like is that it efficiently communicates two big things that the show is not going to do. First, it’s not a Christian show. Despite the fact that crosses and holy water seem to work against vampires, and (in S2E1) consecrated ground burns them, this is not a setting where angels, God, or Jesus are going to save you. And the show mostly sticks to this! There’s even a semi-explicit swipe at genesis: “contrary to popular mythology, [the world] did not begin as a paradise.” Second, it’s not going to try for some tenuous “scientific” explanation where vampirism is a virus or a fungus or something like that. It’s going in between: clearly supernatural, but basically agnostic. Science and religion are both wildly off-base.

What I don’t like is… how vague and uninformative it is? Giles says “this world is older than any of you know” like what do you MEANNN? How old do you think we think it is? Older than 6,000 years of biblical stuff or older than 4,000,000,000 years of geological records? “For untold eons demons walked the Earth […] in time they lost their purchase on this reality. The way was made for mortal animals, for, for man.” Which mortal animals? All of them? Am I supposed to interpret this as saying that demons ruled the world 550,000,000 years ago and then their disappearance caused the Cambrian explosion? First demons, then trilobites? Or is it that demons ruled the earth until a couple million years ago, when humans in particular somehow drove them away? So demons co-existed with dinosaurs? Or am I supposed to conclude that the whole evolutionary story about the evolution of life is false (which, I’m sorry Mr. Rupert, I refuse to do, you will need more than a really old book and an English accent to persuade me of that)?

In particular, I don’t think we ever get a clear account of how or why demons left this reality… which is actually pretty important, given that the prospect of them taking it back is so frequently raised as a great big threat? Whatever it is that drove them out, if it’s still present then why would they be able to recolonise the world just from a portal being opened?

But also: I know that really I should be grateful, because if they had really committed to a specific origin story… it would probably be bad? Maybe it is better that I can stick with my Cambrian explosion headcanons?

Ok and: this episode really commits to “the person you knew is already dead, there’s just a demon piloting their body around.” It’s a bit ironic that they use Jesse for this, since Jesse’s personality, read uncharitably, is basically vampire-in-waiting: all we know is that he desires this person (Cordelia) and doesn’t seem to care what she wants. So it’s hardly surprising that he expresses no sense of loss or remorse about becoming a more purely predatory being. I dunno. Probably in his own head there’s a rich and sensitive interiority but we never see it so… anyway it is too late to start arguing about Buffy soul lore so I won’t…

One other random thought: I loved “They’re close.” “How can you tell?” “No more rats.”

Sometimes I think when Amy got returned to human form she should have retained more rat-affinity (can turn into a rat at will? because her body remembers? natural rapport with other rats?) and become a major asset, given how there are rats all over town and they seemingly don’t like vampires. But of course wanting Amy to have something to show for spending years as a mostly-forgotten joke would presuppose the more basic level of caring about Amy as a character and we know the writers don’t…

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

This. The show consistently emphasises an ironic contrast between Sunnydale's cheerful wholesome quiet appearance (it's in the name!) and the rampant evil and dark forces that menace it. But it does feel like in season 1 the irony is for the viewer, who gets to see this *actually genuinely quiet* town be suddenly and increasingly menaced by dark forces, whereas later on (especially in season 3) the irony is more in-universe: the wholesome image has always been false and artificial, it's always been a hotbed of supernatural violence. Naming it Sunnydale goes from being simply a joke made by the writers to being actually (probably) a joke made by Richard Wilkins when he named the human farm town that he founded.

Just how dangerous is Sunnydale before Buffy arrives?

Later seasons of the show will offer a pretty clear answer to this question. Sunnydale's Mayor is an immortal who works with vampires and dabbles in demonology and the police force are involved in a long-running conspiracy to cover up vampire attacks. In Season 3 Mr Trick will applaud the fact that Sunnydale has a morality rate which "makes DC look like Mayberry", Oz will claim he doesn't know if the school paper is getting depressing because he "always goes straight to the obits", and Buffy's classmates will enthusiastically applaud her for her efforts in ensuring that "the Class of '99 has the lowest mortality rate of any graduating class in Sunnydale history".

But, way back in Season 1, I don't think the question is so easily answered.

This is something I'm going to be trying to track as I go, but for now I'll just note a few things. While a vampire does kill a boy and stuff his body in the school locker at the very beginning of the season, and vampires are actively hunting victims in the Bronze even before the night of the Harvest, the impression I get from rewatching is that vampires haven't really been active much since the Master was imprisoned.

Giles tells Buffy that "that boy [that Darla killed] was just the beginning", which certainly implies there wasn't a steady stream of vampire murder victims before Buffy arrived. In order to "just" be the beginning, you have to be a beginning.

Giles also tells Buffy that "the influx of the undead" is "getting worse" and that "it's been building for years". So I don't believe the "fairly odd occurrences" he mentions as evidence the town is on a Hellmouth are meant to be as dramatic as frequent murders.

The ceremony we then immediately cut to strongly implies that the Master himself has been inactive for some time before this moment ("the Sleeper will wake" implies he was previously, well, asleep)

When Giles sends Willow to research things later, she tells him that before the earthquake of 1937 which buried the Master the town's newspapers reported "a rash of murders". The clear implication is that murders in Sunnydale are not the norm, and that after the earthquake -- after the Master became trapped -- the murders abruptly stopped.

Nobody in the Bronze reacts in a way that suggests they've seen vampires before when Luke and the others take them hostage, and nor do I think we're meant to think they have and just failed to realize it (yes, Giles does say that people have a way of forgetting things they can't rationalize away, but I don't think we're meant to assume that they've repeatedly done this before).

Of course, if for whatever reason you're wedded to the idea that the show does represent a consistent secondary world, it's not too hard to explain all that away. Giles is a new arrival in Sunnydale and doesn't know much of its history. Even if the Master wasn't sending out minions to bring him food, other vampires unrelated to the Master existed and could have filled the void he left. Maybe strange murders continued after the earthquake but the Mayor intervened to get the papers to start hushing them up.

But that's not really the way of approaching the show that appeals to me. I don't care if different seasons have slightly different settings or backstories, as long as the characters stay consistent and the season's worldbuilding makes sense internally to that season.

Oz's reaction to learning that vampires are real next year ("actually,that explains a lot!") makes sense for the world which the show had, by that point, largely settled on. But equally, I think, Willow and Xander's disbelieving and incredulous reaction to learning that vampires are real in these opening episodes also seems to make sense for the version of the show's world that existed at this point.

As I said, I'll keep an eye on this as we go, but my memory is that this doesn't really change until early in Season 2. (Even in When She Was Bad we learn that Sunnydale was unusually quiet while Buffy was away in LA, and that vampires only seemed to return to the town when she did.) Yes, by the time of The Prom Sunnydale has always been incredibly dangerous and Buffy is doing wonders to keep as many people alive as she is. But, at the time of The Harvest, Sunnydale is a mostly safe place which Buffy is trying to protect from the intrusions of the supernatural.

Sure, nobody seems to care that Jesse dies, but I don't get the sense there is a whole sequence of murdered and equally unmourned Sunnydale students of which Jesse is merely the latest example. Not yet, anyway.

[btvsfemslashenjoyer]

Mostly made this tumblr to participate in @coraniaid's Buffy rewatch, though I'm running a bit behind (just finished "Welcome to the Hellmouth”, will do “the Harvest” tomorrow). Very pleasantly nostalgic though I’m glad Xander never tried skateboarding again.

Various random thoughts:

The chairs at the Bronze get turned into stakes so often over the years. Also the pool cues. Probably a major operating expense, alongside death benefits.

The fact that the shows has this odd writing challenge from being spun off from a movie which most viewers never watched, and so has to introduce its protagonists not-quite-at-the-beginning-of-their-journey, with Buffy already having slain some vampires and knowing the basic slayer mythology, forces it into some interesting devices for bringing the viewers up to speed. Some of this ends up being very efficient and effective (other people in this tag have noted that Buffy comes across as already a very rounded character because of how she keeps switching between girl and slayer personas, and expressing annoyance at having to do so).

But it does force a lot of things to get so compressed that we never actually get a clear answer. Case in point: Giles says it’s not a coincidence that Buffy came to this town at this time. But I don’t think that we ever get any clearer sense of what that actually means. In later seasons the “Watchers’ Council” is a plausible explanation (they pull strings to get Joyce a job opportunity and Buffy a spot in school), and in ATS the “powers that be” provide an alternative explanation (mystical destiny forces… also ensure that the jobs and schools line up the right way?), but neither of those really exist at this point? So it’s just sort of left hanging.

Lesbian Willow foreshadowing: her first romantic interaction in 11 years is entirely prompted by how Buffy makes her feel, even though its actual object is a completely random dude who she’s never met before and doesn’t really seem at all interested in. Displacement much?

Comparing Buffy’s battle with Luke and Episode 12’s battle with the Master brings out that they’re threats in very different ways: brute strength vs. hypnotic command. This is something I sort of wish the show had done more with in later seasons, the idea that different vampires might have different supernatural abilities. It comes out a little with Drusilla, who hypnotises both Giles and Kendra, and even more so with Dracula, but it always feels like it’s just these oddball individuals (Drusilla was a psychic even before being a vampire, Dracula is described as having learnt or developed Romani magical capabilities…).

Obviously this could become excessive, if you ended up with Vampire-the-Masquerade-level clans and power ups and tech-trees for different vampire powers, but a little more variety in what sort of danger vampires pose might have helped the show keep them as meaningful antagonists after… around the middle of Season 3? Which I feel like is when they sort of get downgraded to being minions for a succession of other bad things