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I was seventeen years old and I sold my soul for a truck. Not this truck?

Don’t go dissin’ my girl.

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Angel Rewatch 3.13 “Waiting in the Wings” (4/?)

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Final Best Episode Poll (Poll 11/11)

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Best Episode Poll (Poll 10/11)

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I’m the Slayer. Slay-er? Chosen One. She who hangs out a lot in cemeteries. You’re kidding. Ask around. Look it up. Slayer comma the.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003)

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so I was thinking about the Key plotline as I often do, and the line “the monks made her out of me” is suddenly really interesting to me.

obviously what this means is that they made dawn’s body to have the DNA of joyce and hank, hence her being buffy’s sister and having the same DNA as buffy (“summers blood”). but like imagine taking that line literally.

“the monks made her out of me.” buffy has an identical twin.

obviously they didn’t do this because 1, they wanted a younger character to be in peril and provide variety in the cast, 2, having your lead actor play two characters would probably be much too much for them, and 3, the cost of having sarah play two characters and having to use split screen and doubles and stuff with the limited cgi of the time would just be too much. (dopplegangland was great but they probably couldn’t feasibly do that every episode for three whole seasons)

but just the concept of it is so interesting to me. this twin literally has buffy’s face, buffy’s voice, buffy’s body. but she’s not the slayer. dawn has to deal with being in the shadow of her slayer sister all the time, but the added strain of looking exactly like her and being the same age as her would just be so heartbreaking and interesting to explore.

I also think the impact of the reveal would just slap more. oh my god there’s two buffy’s!?!?!! oh my god buffy has a twin all of a sudden?!?!!!? there would also just be another level of angst, with buffy feeling violated that the monks just made another version of her and essentially used her body, and with the twin feeling like an afterthought, a duplicate, an impostor, etc.

plus them being twins would emphasise their bond more, as twins are supposed to have a really close and special relationship for obvious reasons. the monks made dawn so that buffy would protect her - the two of them having a strong twin bond and remembering a life of growing up doing everything together would really help with that!

also also I just love the idea that if the buffybot still got made, then at one point there would be three buffy’s but only one of them would actually be buffy. absolutely hilarious to me, smg would be working some serious overtime!!

I just love this concept and I might write it as a fic if I can come up with an actual plot. can any of you think of any names for this twin? or would she still be called dawn (what with the whole symbolism of the sun coming up in chosen, the foreshadowing, etc.) if you come up with any more ideas or discussion points about this au please lmk in comments/reblogs/asks etc, I’m obsessed with this idea and I need to talk about it!!!!

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But what the writers didn't do was flesh out what happened on those dates in a way that would have proven their compatibility, to make us understand why it's Riley that Buffy wants, and not his best friend Graham (who is equally handsome and strong and brave) or Forrest (esentially because he's black but that's something the show couldn't admit at that time and we have had to wait for season 7 to see her flirting with a black guy). And no, the fact that Riley took the first step towards her doesn't matter, she wasn't that desperate to meet someone after Parker.

This romance was treated like an assignment - it's like the writers were filling out a list of things they need to do to establish Buffy and Riley as a couple, but at an accelerated pace. They literally fast-forwarded their relationship - preventing the emotional progress that came with it and that Buffy and Riley should have experienced as a couple, from being as impactful, from being as captivating as it should have been. In short, their romantic scenes largely lacked the wow effect that should have made us swoon.

I don't understand why, because it's not like Whedon hasn't written a perfect, blissful romance on the show before. He built all the major milestones of Oz and Willow's love story.

In one of his interviews or maybe in the DVD commentary (I'm not sure), he talked about how difficult it was for him to convince viewers to accept Oz as Willow's new boyfriend, after they spent more than a season watching her have an unrequited crush on Xander, for which their shippers still hoped for a happy ending, and yet Whedon did it: he wrote the van scene for them in Innocence.

I can say with certainty that it worked thanks to the effect it had on me: I ship intensely Oz and Willow and i can list even without rewatching the episodes, more than a dozen moments that involved them. Their scenes, little or big, are a dream come true. They embody everything a romantic relationship should be: cute, funny, tender, sweet and passionate, honest, authentic, full of wisdom, with some real mistakes along the way but always engaging and compelling.

While there are many examples I could cite, one of my favorites is how they met and started dating. From the decision to make Oz fall for her at first sight, to let him be in awe of Willow, to the fact he got to see the different sides of her personality before ven talking to her: the invisible girl (when they bumped into each other while she wore her ghost costume in Halloween), the quirky and original schoolgirl in her Inuit costume, the sexy and mysterious stranger in the outfit that Buffy picked for her (in Halloween again). He was impressed by all that she was or could be and was always trying to figure out who was the real her. Every moment of those first steps in their romance has become iconic, in a somewhat nostalgic way.

This path should have been Buffy and Riley's path too. Instead there was a lot of mixed signals coming from Riley.Like the fact that he kept repeating how much special and mysterious Buffy was - Forrest in Hush tried to make him notice that the constant excitement about her specialness was turning into an obsession - but Riley ignored him. In his case, it seemed something that he learnt to repeat ad nauseam to please the girl he wants, or to impress his friends, or even sometimes to convince himself that she was how he wanted her her to be. He never defined what makes her special for him, and yet he seemed fixated on the idea that she was different from all the other women.

When i say their dates weren't fleshed out, i mean:

Their first official date during Something Blue was a picnic which was quickly crashed by a depressed Willow still haunted by Oz's abrupt departure. Buffy spent the rest of the episode holding Spike's hand, sitting comfortably on his lap and kissing him passionately. Indeed, she needed to overcome her attraction to bad boys, but it could have been done during I Remember You on Ats with Angel. Instead of making the crossover the 100th performance of their "impossible tragic love," it could have been a big fight between the ex-lovers that opened her eyes to his bad side. The writers preferred to entrust this subplot to Spike and played it as a joke at the expense of Riley, making him look like a man easily duped (by Buffy who lied to him without shame)

Between Hush and Doomed, there was no date but a bag of mixed impressions. They shared two kisses and a hug during these episodes, but they were more symbolically separated by the tension and conflict between them than they have ever been before. It started at the most basic level with Buffy and Riley struggling to come up with something to say during the conversation they had after she dreamed about the Gentlemen. At this point, their usual civilian selves have clearly reached a limit in terms of the compatibility of their personality and their common interests, and this is the reason why they both wanted to tell the truth as they respectively admitted to Willow and Forrest.

The reveal of their secret identity didn't happen because the plot demanded it (it happened in Hush because it was the episode written by Whedon but Doomed or A New Man offered too many opportunities for this twist) or by the pace of their relationship. If the dialogues in Hush during their walk on the campus established that Buffy was doing a poor job of trying to hide what she did after school, it could hardly be described as the couple reaching the point where it got too hard to lie to each other.

As proved by their dialogues:

RILEY So what have you got going on tonight? BUFFY Patrolling. RILEY Patrolling? BUFFY (quick cover) Uh, petroleum. RILEY Petroleum. BUFFY Uh huh. RILEY Tonight you have crude oil. BUFFY And homework. What about you? RILEY Oh, you know, grading papers... BUFFY Well, that'll be fun. RILEY Not "petroleum" fun, but it passes the time...

Does this seem like the culmination of an unbearable tension that would force them to tell the truth?

Their scenes lacked passion not because of the acting but because of the writing: if they couldn't talk about their respective secret lives, they had nothing else to say, was the message of the screenwriters. And indeed, sharing the slaying became their almost exclusive activity (with sex) after the truth was revealed, and it remained that way for most of season 4.

A New Man established a power imbalance between them and created Riley's insecurities: he realized that not only would Buffy always be physically stronger than him, but she would also lead because that's who she is, and all he could do was follow. The writers offer no solution at this point - he said he liked that she was independent and a leader but he also said he still had hopes of beating her with more practice - until this problem is remembered in season 5 as his main reason for refusing the operation which could save his life because he was convinced that Buffy would not date a normal man, but also because he did not want to be a normal man (which was an attitude more consistent with his military training and competitive spirit).

They finally shared their first sexual connection in The I in team, but this scene is the most uncomfortable to watch: they were supposed to make love, instead it was cut and interspersed between different stages of a group fight scene where they were slaying a demon with other Initiative soldiers. It looked like a performance, like a mise-en-scène written to respond to an aesthetic scripted in advance. A mix of sex appeal and violence that was the opposite of the magic, intimacy, tenderness, sweetness I expected since they were supposed to be the true soul mates that Buffy and Angel don't. couldn't be. And I won't even go into the fact that this special moment was heavily tainted with disgust due to the violation of their privacy by Maggie Walsh, who filmed them...

There's more to say about what happened to them when Maggie died and Faith and Angel showed up, but this post is really already too long.

Bad boys are dangerous: that's the whole point of this trope. It sends a message to society as a whole. This is the wrong choice that many young girls make every day due to their inexperience, lack of emotional maturity and lack of a functioning family to protect them. It seems clear to me that was the message the show wanted to send with Angel and Spike, but for some reason Whedon found it difficult to fully impose that point of view on his own shows, and we were left with the wrong impression about Angel, that he was one of the good guys while Riley was considered a weak version of a hero.

Buffy Rewatch: season 4

I'm not doing this rewatch in order, so i have a lot of thoughts who pop up and often contradict themselves. But i know that i'm not going to write real, full reviews, so it's better than nothing to share them under the form of "shorts" (as much short as i can do, which is not really short) comments.

I really wonder what made Whedon believe that the best way for Buffy to get over Angel, was to create a character (Riley) who was the opposite of Angel in every way, an anti Angel.

Whedon said indeed:

"The important thing for us was to find a character that was the anti-Angel and to have Buffy go through something very different, part of which was the question, 'How do I get over Angel?' That was the same thing the audience was going through. We knew it wasn't going to be easy and it was very hard trying to find somebody. But Marc [Blucas] has a quality that I love very much: he has sort of an un-David-like, firm, strong, trustworthy quality. I always think of him as Gary Cooper."

Source

I mean it seems obvious that to define someone as anti someone else means the influence and hold of the character that is seen negatively is more powerful than ever. An anti Angel means that Angel's shadow never left the show, that he is still haunting Buffy in every way, except she keeps the obsession that he represents at distance with a more positive boyfriend, who she uses like a talisman to keep her thoughts about him from becoming too intrusive.

Why couldn't Riley be himself, a regular and normal guy in appearance but with a double life of demon hunter that matches Buffy's mission, someone that Buffy would have realized she wanted in her life just by living, fighting at his side and learning to love him daily instead of being a reversed image of her ex?

In the anti Angel scenario, even if her relationship with Riley had worked, she still would have been trapped with an improved version of Angel, different but still too close. On the show, the writers didn't make as opposite as Whedon claimed to want them. Actually both men shared many common opinions and personality traits:

a sexist worldview,

the need of being needed as Angel's savior complex proved it on Ats especially with damsels in distress,

insecurities about virility developed during the crossover episode in Ats "I will remember you" where Angel gave up a possible human life at Buffy's side because he couldn't handle to be less strong than her to not be in capacity to protect her).

I don't see how creating with Riley an idealized version of Angel (one who can take her on a picnic, see her in the daylight, who would accept his strength inferiority because he can't do anything about it, one who can have as much sex as Buffy wants, who can marry and have children), someone that Angel could never be because of his personality souled or souless, would fix Buffy's problem of dependency and later of emotional distance/self centeredness?

It feels like the writers were rather presenting us of what Buffy would think to be her ideal man based on her unique romantic relationship with Angel. A Frankenstein version of the Prince Charming not in the sense that Riley is a monster, he's a good man, a brillant man and a hot man, but because he's also in some way closer to what would look like a puppet stitched based on Buffy's preferences and to who life would be given.

The problem is not only Riley's personality, but also the execution of their romance mostly the timing of it.

I think that the writers got it right when they made Buffy hook up, before making Riley her official boyfriend, with guys who are all about sex (Parker) or are bad boys at heart (Spike). In real life, any young/teen girl would have repeated the same mistake few times with other boys similar in looks or darkness/personality to the one she loved deeply and who hurt her, before growing enough to learn from the past. The solution to make her involved with Spike was more credible than to push her in Riley's arms immediately, especially when they had nothing in common in term of interests.

But the timing is all wrong: there is less than 7 episodes between her one night stand with Parker in The Harsh light of Day (4.03) and her picnic and first official date with Riley in Something Blue (4.09). The picnic happened in the same episode as 'the thing" with Spike (i don't know how to call it), and just after an entire episode on Ats where she spent a lot of time in bed with Angel. She almost ruined her relationship with Riley because of Spike (Something Blue), so by the time they had their first kiss, i didn't scream "finally the good guy she deserves" but rather " it's too much romance and disappointment in one season, and he will never make up for it because the show is already creating conflict over his identity."

Conflicts kept piling up indeed during the second half of the season: from the revelation of their secret identities to Buffy's refusal to give a chance to Riley, from her change of mind and full involvement in his life to the point she joined The Initiative for him to the shock of Maggie Walsh's attempt to kill her and Walsh's murder by Adam, from Riley's change in personality due to the effects of The Initiative's medicine on him to Faith's intrusion in their lives etc...

That's a lot to deal with in such a short period, especially when we consider too the fact that despite all those ordeals that they faced together as a couple, Riley never got passed this image that he was less than her ex vampire boyfriends. Diminished by his lesser fighting skills, the lesser danger he represented, his less cool attitude: Buffy called him a doof, Forrest said he's a mama's boy, Willow for his defense argued that "he didn't seem like he could tell a little white lie, let alone a whole bunch of big dirty ones"; though his cool potential changed depending on what the script needed him to be, and based too on his double identity.

Coming after such radical personalities (Angel and Spike) with extreme views and violent actions explain why so many fans see him as bland and boring (which he is not): they can't shake the feeling of being overwhelmed by Angel and Spike, not matter how wrong their values, their feelings, their actions were.

I read a lot that Riley was supposed to be her endgame but i don't see how it would have worked if it was planned to introduce Dawn and kill Joyce since season 2, as the rumor says. That meant Whedon knew very early that Buffy was going to die during season 5. After all that she went through to find the right guy, was Whedon going to pretend that she was leaving behind the love of her life in a grand gesture of sacrifice to save the world? Even though it looked and felt liker rather a suicide, in a season where the accumulation of misery was leading to her death anyway? What would have been the point of getting over Angel if she was not going to survive?

For me who perceives the show mostly from the angle of trauma, to get her past her relationship with Angel was in all cases a necessity because he literally stole her life: he made a mess of it, of her vision of love and she needed to heal.

But it would have required to not treat Riley as someone who was always going to suffer from the comparison, and also to make clear at one point that she chose him over Angel (during one of the crossovers with Ats preferably), and that her decision was definitive in her mind.

Riley really didn't need to be the anti Angel, and the writers shouldn't have taken the risk to fail at delivering this tale of happiness for Buffy (if they really wanted her to be happy) by trying to force on him this fake personality.

No more than they should have let Buffy trapped in the mindset "that real love and passion have to go hand in hand with lots of pain and fighting". that it's "where the fire comes from", questioning the possibility that "a nice safe relationship can be that intense".

Buffy and Riley didn't have nice and safe lives so their relationship couldn't be nice and safe and yet she still had doubts even after she started to date him.

A vision of love on which she was still clinging so strongly that she even blamed Angel for calling her his ex (during the crossover with Ats when Angel came back to Sunnydale after helping Faith, allegedly to apologize), which sent her back right to the regret that she couldn't be with him and which confirmed indirectly that Riley was a default choice.

Which begs the question: what kind of reactions did the writers expect from the fans when they didn't seem to even bother to establish Buffy and Riley's romance as a more desirable relationship for Buffy?

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truly i find that like. 90's tv relationships are somehow both more earnest and nuanced in a way modern shows rarely come close to achieving

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enamoured

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WINIFRED BURKLE ANGEL THE SERIES | (3.13) “Waiting in the Wings”

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