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Desperately needed to have this on my blog

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Watched an online presentation today regarding book trends, both in retail sales and library borrowing. Romance gets a big section of course, being (I think) THE most popular genre, with several heavy-hitting subcategories including romantasy and supernatural and historical and contemporary and on and on.

I wasn't surprised to hear the presenters bring up the uptick in sports romance as a subcategory, particularly hockey, because yeah, I've seen that. Unavoidable lately if you have... uhhh... entered bookstores + logged onto library websites + actually follow NHL hockey on any social media platform. Still unsurprising, even if you have done none of those other things, if you have any passing awareness of the behemoth that is Sports Real Person Fiction in general and Men's Hockey RPF in particular on AO3. (As of me going to check just now: nearly 200,000 fics and nearly 40,000 fics respectively. Damn. HRPF is nearly 25% of the parent tag there. People are having fun over there.)

I WAS taken aback, however, when the presenter brought up a few titles to watch in the coming year, in regards a potential rising type of sports romance: motorracing sports romances. Now, this is not actually SURPRISING if you have any passing awareness (which I again did) of the other behemoth that is Formula 1 RPF on AO3 (nearly 49,000 fics on AO3, more than HRPF), but I simply hadn't actually thought about the industry potential before now. It did make me think to myself, "How many book industry analyst people are taking cues from AO3 now? I mean, it seems very reasonable to pay fanfic some attention for a bunch of different reasons (it does indicate a potential ready market, I presume there are simply plenty of fanfic pleasure readers in the publishing industry, etc.), but wow... time flies and culture changes."

And also: "Huh. Can we play the game of predicting future popular book genres, specifically romance subcategories, 5-10 years from now based on what's popular on AO3 right now?" Now, I don't actually keep up enough with broader fandom trends to do this well or accurately, but it's still fun to look at various fandom trends and imagine their future professional publishing counterparts that I will simply Not Understand because it's Not My Thing. If they actually figure out how to file the serial numbers off of Minecraft letsplayer RPF or something someday and it becomes the next big thing, no one tell me, because I want to get blindsided, just absolutely bodied by bafflement, when I walk into a bookstore. It'll be fun.

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Rings my fucking bell, like a perennial fucking plague maiden:

Center harm, not disgust!

When in doubt (and when not in doubt, just swept by problems bigger than you and assured by someone that they know the answer, so don't think right now, just Do!), center harm.

Focus on what specific harm you're reducing with your actions. Make sure it's tangible and concrete. If your actions are minimizing hypothetical harm at the cost of real, tangible harm on others, 9 out 10 times you're on the wrong fucking side, being weaponized by propaganda.

If a conversation revolves around disgust as a driver for action, you're being radicalized. If a call to action depends on your emotional response, you're being manipulated. I'm sorry, this isn't the 90s anymore, social media has eroded the web of respectability of the pre internet society. The primary axis for misinformation to spread in this day and age is emotional response: half the things you believe are true and share as such are not based on fact, expert opinion or personal research. Social media has conditioned us (all of us! You and me and most dangerously of all, the idiots we put in power) that if something feels true, it probably is.

But do you know for sure it is? Do you think it's true because you have first hand experience or actual time spent on reputable sources learning it to be fact? Or just because it aligns with your worldview and it would be nice for you if it were true?

Are you taking action because you're angry and a group of fellow angry folk invited you to join them? Do you have a plan or is this just catharsis? Are you aware of the consequences of your actions or are you drunk on rage and focused only on the immediate future?

Center harm. Center specific actions and their consequences.

Discomfort is not harm. Disgust is not harm. Hypothetical paranoia is not harm.

The reactionary pipeline is real and your self-image as a progressive is not actually enough to save you from falling down the hole. Radicalization is not hinged on politics alone. Saying you're a leftist is worthless if your thought process and actions themselves are indistinguishable from qanon losers. Conspiratorial thought has literally no politics inherently, and your insistence it does is pure lack of critical thought on display.

Center harm, not feelings, not politics, not group think.

Center harm, and remember that individual actions cannot dismantle systemic structures on their own, so anyone who calls for individual action at the cost of community structures is not actually trying to change anything, and instead actively suppressing efforts to make anything better in any way.

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the horrors persist but my friends write beautiful fanfic

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i’m not sure why you would want the settlers in an apartheid state actively commiting genocide to “be safe” but okay bro

If private American citizens expect grace from other countries, and understanding that we are not universally reflected by, nor in agreement with, all the actions of our government, we have to extend it to other private citizens as well.

I'm sure there are horrible people in Israel who support the genocide in Gaza. But I'm also sure there are Israelis who don't, because there have been protests against it in Israel, and also because human beings are not a monolith

I wouldn't want my right to safety determined by the worst actions of my government. Would you?

(also, I'm a woman and my pronouns are in my bio- please don't call me "bro")

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Tumblr is the reason why I have something I call the cashier test which is, if i told this to a random cashier at the grocery store, would they think you're crazy at best or at worst would they be warranted in leaping over the counter and beating the shit out of you. Karl Marx mpreg is crazy, but not beating the shit out of you crazy. The cashier will probably talk about you to their coworkers and it might even make their day. Telling someone they're complicit in their own oppression by working a minimum wage job at a grocery store makes them warranted in leaping over the counter to beat the shit out of you.

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reblog if you’re okay with people writing fanfics of your fanfics and/or fanfics inspired by your fanfics

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hello! i'm not sure if this is entirely the right place, but do you have any tips for getting back into writing? because of real life stuff i haven't been able to write for months, and now that i have the time i just have... no idea where to begin

Oh man, I know that feeling. There's nothing quite like feeling "rusty" to make something seem almost impossible to do.

There are a couple of approaches to take (and I'm sure folks can suggest even more in the notes), and I'll start with the most common suggestion:

Start small. If it's been a while, you might not want to start with a huge fic. Knock out a oneshot, maybe even just do some free writing sprints, just to get into the habit of writing again.

Find your writing space. Relearn what position you like to sit in, whether you prefer to type on a keyboard or tap on your phone. Figure out whether you want a playlist going and what songs you want to include on it.

Don't begin with the intention to post. Start with the goal of writing not with the goal of having written. Write something that you are utterly enraptured by, something that absolutely tickles you in whatever way you want to be tickled. Connect to your id or to your inner child or to whatever part of you really wants to come out and play, and let that part of you loose onto the page.

Which leads me to my last point

Find a story that you can't stop thinking about writing. It doesn't have to be huge. It could even just be a single moment or scene. But if you can feel that inspiration hit you and experience that drive to capture that inspiration in words, that feeling can go a long way to getting you back into writing again.

Inspiration can come from other people, from music or art, from prompt memes or challenges, from the daydreams you drift off into when you're zoning out on the bus. Personally, I have a lot of success with just thinking of a joke that makes me giggle hysterically, and then I write 500 words that gets me to the punchline I want to hit, and I'm done.

What about the rest of you? Where do you pick up writing when you haven't done it for a while? How do you get started again after a break?

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What do you think about the series treatment towards Muggles?

Most of the muggkes we hear of, are nasty towards wizards who did nothing to them.

Most of the wizards, even the ones who are supposed to be accepting, Seem to treat them as foolish at best or animals at worst.

Even Hermione, began drifting further away from her parents as time passes.

Honestly, I think it's a structural problem that one of the villain's main talking points is that muggles are stupid, lesser, and kind of suck... and then all the muggles we meet are stupid, lesser, and kinda suck.

Like the Dursleys suck. Dudley's friends suck. Tobias Snape is abusive. Mrs. Cole is an alcoholic. The Muggle Prime Minister is a foolish, comic character. (So are Mr. and Mrs. Mason, in like, the one scene they appear.) Tom Riddle Senior is apparently a snooty airhead. The citizens of Little Hangleton are both stupid and mean... probably the most sympathetic muggle character in the whole series is Frank Bryce - who is also crotchety, bad tempered, and (to he honest)... boring.

Once we hit the Fantastic Beast films, we get abusive villain Mary Lou Barebone, some ineffective senators... and Jacob Kowalski. The only muggle character treated unambiguously positively. And I'm not sure I can even give JKR 100% of the credit for him, since I think it's pretty likely he's a recycled Dr. Who companion... and he also gets a wand in the third movie. I would bet money that if the series had continued, he would have been revealed to be some kind of magical something.

What's crazy to me is this is a very fixable problem. Just give Hermione's parents first names and slightly more time on the page. Even just giving them a little more of a moment back in Book 2 would have made a difference. Or (this is my favorite) - make Ted Tonks a muggle, not muggle-born. It changes nothing, and boom. Now at least we have A positive muggle character going into Book 7.

You are completely correct that even the pro-wizard Muggles like Mr. Weasley have a condescending, paternalistic view of muggles, and Hermione's decision to commit 100% to wizarding world culture is treated as a complete non-issue, a foregone conclusion. And the books... are apparently fine with all this.

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I think we need to drop the word "problematic" entirely when talking about fiction. There's absolutely nothing wrong with fiction. It makes us sound like hypocrites, like we're secretly agreeing with antis that we're apparently fucked-up and causing problems.

There's no such thing as "problematic" fiction.

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Hot take but I really do think that some of y’all need to consider how/why/when/how often you’re making fun of straight people for being straight

I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever

But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”

This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it

And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit

So, I dunno, I think maybe some of y’all should think about that too

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Dear Diary,

Today I have acquired a new blorbo. It is, of course, a wretched little man with a somewhat twisted sense of honour. I put him in my blorbo basket and carried him home. Tomorrow I shall display him on the mantel when my friend comes for tea.

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Throwback Thursday, Fandom Edition: "Our parents are super-villains!"

I read the first six issues of Marvel’s Runaways – collected in a manga-sized paperback called Pride & Joy – at the recommendation of two fandom friends.  The series’ initial 18-issue run had already ended at the time that I wrote up my immediate reactions in my LiveJournal.

…it’s got a great concept, fun dialogue, unobtrusive art, and interesting characters. And as if that weren’t enough... I mean, come on, the plot involves dynamic teenagers who find out that they’ve been the victims of deception at the hands of people they trust the most. It’s got angst, aliens, mind control, relationships that hint at complexity, and in-jokes for the refined Marvel geek. So I am quite smitten, and I’ll probably nab Volume 2 at some point during my stay in the city. And I wouldn’t necessarily rule out the crafting of a Runaways fic in the foreseeable future. I’m becoming fond of both Gert and Alex, and while Molly stays just on this side of “too cutesy to handle”, one can’t help but feel sorry for her. Her dad’s line, “I’d hate to have to mind-wipe the neighbors again,” threatens promises to send the plotbunnies hoppin’ after yours truly.

Runaways relaunched for the first time in early 2005 – it might have been the first comic whose publication I eagerly anticipated – and, a few months later, I heard the book’s co-creator speak on a panel at a New York City convention.

When I flip through that little manga-sized book now, I am aware of (though not surprised by) the aspects of the writing that have aged poorly. I don’t mind the early-2000s slang or pop-culture references, but I have a lot less patience for the use of the R-word on the second page of the first issue, after which it’s repeated twice (and acknowledged to be a slur, but Vaughan could have just… not included it).  Karolina’s queerness is presented through a filter of plausible deniability, which could have been either Vaughan’s choice or the publishers'… though I think it’s a valid choice to write a character as closeted, and she did eventually get to kiss other girls on-page. And I can’t ignore Vaughan’s choice to give Alex, the one Black character in the main cast, an entirely mundane criminal family background, or to reveal him as a traitor to the rest of the group before killing him off.

I didn’t give those problematic storytelling choices much thought when I raised my hand to ask Vaughan whether Alex’s death – and Nico’s attempt to resurrect him – would continue to impact the story.  I only knew that Alex was an interesting character and I wanted to see more of him.  His betrayal continued to affect the surviving characters, especially Nico, emotionally, and although his return was teased in the first arc of the relaunch (in connection with a support group for former teen superheroes, which I still think is a really fun idea), that turned out to be a red herring for a story whose conclusion infuriated me.  I continued to follow Runaways for a few more years, but it started to lose its appeal after my other favorite character, Gert, was murdered.  And I did write a fair amount of fanfic, though only some of it focused on Molly's mind-controlling parents.

(Rainbow Rowell brought back both Gert and Alex, when she started writing Runaways in 2017.  One of the fandom friends who recommended the title to me in the first place – she also dedicated an Alex/Nico fic to me; we exchanged enthusiastic emails and IMs after the 2005 relaunch; and she shared my excitement after that convention the following summer – covered Rowell’s first issue as a professional entertainment columnist.)

All of that said, the very beginning of the story reminded me of why I loved it immediately despite its flaws.  The characterization and much of the dialogue are clever and effective, the humor and drama balance each other well, and the story continuously strives to live up to its simple, irresistible premise and theme, which have resonance both in the Marvel Universe and in our own world.  

The summary on the back of Pride & Joy reads, “At some point in their lives, all young people believe their parents are evil… but what if they really are?” I’m not surprised that that line was reused in future installments of the series: it captures something essential about what made the book work.  It’s unlikely that anybody in the target audience was the child of time travelers or evil wizards who aided ancient inhuman monsters in the destruction of the world, but plenty of readers know what it’s like to distrust their parents (even, sometimes, while still loving them) or question the version of reality that older generations have handed to them.  And some young people might do what the six original Runaways did: form a new family based on shared experience, even if that family doesn’t live in a cave with a dinosaur.

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There's something hilarious about how so much subsequent media has positioned Vampires and Werewolves as, like, binary opposite entities, and then you read Dracula (1897) and realize that wolves are that guy's preferred solution to every problem. You'd say something to Dracula about "ah yes, werewolves, vampires' great eternal enemies," and he'd just be like "you mean my subcontractors?"

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I said in my last rewatch post that Witch was an episode primarily about Buffy and her mother, so let's talk a little bit about Joyce Summers.

Just in case anybody who reads my posts hasn't already noticed: I like Joyce a lot. I certainly don't think the way she behaves is always particularly admirable and I'm not under any illusions about how uninterested in her the narrative of the show often is. But I do like her. I think she is, on balance, an interesting and largely sympathetic figure. And I'd argue pretty strongly that Buffy's relationship with her mother is just a much bigger part of the show and a much more important element of understanding Buffy Summers than a lot of people seem to want to admit.

To some extent, I suspect, this is a subconscious over-correction on my part to what I think is a pretty ugly trend in the current Buffy fandom. That is to say, I think a very vocal minority of people are incredibly unsympathetic to Joyce, in ways that I simply don't think can be explained by either of the (true) observations that she's rarely the focus of an episode or that she and Buffy often have a very strained relationship, especially in the early years of the show. Frankly, I just don't think some of you like middle-aged women very much. But then, that being said, I'm not sure the writers of the show do either.

Indeed, as I've said many times before, it is hard not to unsee the fact that Joyce Summers is basically the only middle-aged woman of any prominence on Buffy at all. Or not to notice that the handful of other older women with prominent parts in the narrative are either outright villains (Catherine Madison in this very episode, Season 3's Gwendolyn Post, Season 4's Professor Walsh) or die abruptly (this season's Jenny Calendar) or both (it is noteworthy that not one of the five women named in this paragraph is alive for the show's final fifty episodes). Bluntly, it often feels that the show's supposed feminism extends only to the grudging admission that perhaps (thin, white) women under twenty five (or centuries-old demons and vampires who look like they're under twenty-five) might be real people, but their mothers definitely aren't.

And, well, that's evidentally what large parts of Tumblr still think, so perhaps the show was ahead of its time.

[Note, please, that the preceding paragraphs are by no means an invitation to tell me I'm wrong and that Joyce is actually an abusive monster. If you are tempted to do so, please believe me when I say I simply do not care about your opinion and I will not listen to or respect it if offered. That goes double if you bring up that stupid retcon from Normal Again which obviously doesn't make the slightest bit of sense and isn't consistent with any previous or subsequent episode.]

That preface out of the way, let's talk about Season 1's Witch.

As I've already mentioned in a different post, Witch marks the end of a run of three consecutive episodes in which Joyce Summers appears, something she won't do again until halfway through Season 2. I don't think this undermines my point that Buffy's relationship with her mother is important to understanding her character, but I do think it's a sign that the show is still figuring out what to do with her.

You could say much the same for Angel (who also wasn't in the pilot, and won't even manage three consecutive on-screen appearances until next season) or even for Willow (who was in the pilot, albeit played by a different actor, and will appear in every episode, yet who so far has had a much smaller role in the plot than either Xander or Giles and whose importance to Buffy won't really start to solidify until the end of this season). Both these characters will become a very important part of Buffy's story, but I think it's fair to say that as of Season 1 we're not quite there yet.

It's also of note that all of Joyce's seven scenes so far have taken the form of one on one conversations with her daughter, with nobody else around. We haven't seen Joyce interact with anybody else in the show (and, in fact, we won't see this happen except for one episode this season). But I don't at all accept the suggestion I sometimes see people make that Joyce is particularly inconsistently written in these opening three episodes. She has a very clear voice and set of motivations throughout.

Let's look at those scenes:

These are:

Joyce driving Buffy to her first day of school in Welcome to the Hellmouth, assuring her she's going to "make friends right away", urging her to "think positive" and awkwardly encouraging her to try not to get kicked out;

Joyce checking in on Buffy while Buffy prepares to go out to the Bronze for the first time, telling her to "be careful" around any boys she might meet, talking about her new art gallery for the first time and assuring her daughter that she thinks "we can make it work here";

Joyce catching Buffy in her room as she prepares to go out to stop the Harvest, telling her that she got a call from Principal Flutie about Buffy skipping classes and worrying out loud that "it's happening again, isn't it?" before (unsuccessfully) forbidding Buffy from leaving the house as an attempted punishment (while offering to make her dinner but telling her she "won't hold it against you" if she prefers to stay in her room and sulk);

Joyce unpacking inventory in the kitchen when Buffy gets back from her first attempt at cheerleading tryouts and offering Buffy vague encouragements before before forced to admit she wasn't sure what Buffy was trying out for, but that she's glad she's taking up cheerleading again because "it'l keep you out of trouble";

Joyce reminiscing about her time in high school, showing Buffy her old junior high yearbook and encouraging her to think about joining the yearbook staff since "the cheerleading thing didn't work out" and it might be "a lot of fun". When Buffy insists that she's not interested in that and that people who work on the yearbook (something which Joyce has literally just told her she did and has fond memories of doing!) are all remarkably unpopular and get rightly bullied for it, her mother is obviously slightly offended and when Buffy insists she's "into my own thing" she snaps that "your own thing, whatever it is, got you kicked out of school!" (which, while she's wrong to say, ... is true? Buffy's "own thing" that she keeps hidden from her mother is Slaying, and Slaying did in fact get her kicked out of school)

Joyce making orange juice in the kitchen the next morning before Buffy leaves for cheerleading practice (not yet realizing that she's been cursed) and attempting to apologize to Buffy for the argument that they had the other day, then being (understandably) baffled when a magically-drunk Buffy starts babbling about being a vampire slayer;

Joyce telling Buffy at the end of Witch that despite "doing a lot of thinking" she has trouble seeing things from Buffy's perspective because she's not a sixteen year old girl herself anymore, but -- when pressed -- admitting that the thought of being sixteen again herself is "a frightful notion" and she certainly wouldn't want to do it

I think that all presents a pretty coherent picture, no? (I vaguely recall somebody on here complaining it was inconsistent that Joyce thought it was safe to let Buffy go the Bronze one minute, but then decided it was too dangerous the next day, but that's very clearly not what's going on here. Joyce has no idea Sunnydale is dangerous: she doesn't let Buffy leave in The Harvest as an attempted punishment, that's all.)

What does Joyce want? Well, she wants Buffy to do well in school, and make friends, and not get into trouble. She wishes she had a better relationship with her daughter and that Buffy wouldn't keep so many secrets from her, but is willing to give her space when she thinks she needs it and apologizes when she recognizes that she's crossed a line. She's very busy with her new job -- do we know if Joyce even had a job, back in LA? I'm not sure we do -- and it doesn't give her much time to do anything else. (Which is necessary, in plot terms, to explain why Buffy is so often able to sneak away to fight vampires or investigate strange goings-on after school, but also informs Joyce's character to a pretty significant degree.)

Despite this, we know that Joyce is trying hard to be a good parent. In Welcome to the Hellmouth she mentions having "read all about the dangers of over-nurturing" and in The Harvest she says that "the tapes all say I should get used to saying [no]". It's true the show itself has a slightly contemptuous attitude to this attempt at self-improvement, and that we're sort of being invited to laugh at Joyce for listening to 'experts' who inherently can't know why her daughter is really behaving the way she is because they don't know anything about vampires or Slaying, but I'm not sure why we should agree with this.

The strong implication here is that a year ago, Buffy and Joyce's relationship was completely different. Then Buffy dropped cheerleading, started getting into fights and staying out late without warning her parents where she was going, and then burned down a school building and got expelled. And she won't (can't) tell her mom why. Why is it unreasonable for Joyce to worry about Buffy getting into trouble again, or to try to find new ways to connect with her or understand her? Would she be a better parent somehow if she was more relaxed about the prospect of her daughter getting into trouble again at her first week in a new school?

Now, I do think it's fair to say that Buffy and Joyce's relationship is in a pretty poor state at the start of this episode. Buffy's reaction to 'Amy' telling her how much she's been training with her mother is to joke "that much quality time with my mom would probably lead to some quality matricide". This is, in fact, the first thing Buffy says about her mother this episode. And yet the last thing Buffy says about her mother -- to her mother, in fact -- is a declaration that she loves her. In fact, Joyce is the first person Buffy will tell that she loves on screen while not under some sort of malign magical influence. So, what changes?

Well, first of all, I'm not sure we should take Buffy's initial reaction to 'Amy' all that seriously. Buffy's first actual conversation with her mother this episode -- in which she brings up how often 'Amy' trains with her mother -- makes it pretty clear that she does actually wish her mom was more involved in her life. But equally she reacts pretty badly to Joyce's suggestion she try to join the yearbook staff instead: in part out seemingly out of genuine disinterest ("Have you seen the kids that do yearbook? Nerds pick on them") but also because she feels this is an attempt by her mom to force her into following in her footsteps. "I'm not you! I'm into my own thing!"

This is, of course, the whole point of this episode. We're invited to compare and contrast Joyce with Amy's abusive mother Catherine, a woman who never got over high school and refuses to accept that her daughter could possibly be into her own thing. After seeing what Catherine does to Amy in her pathetic attempts to relive her own glory days, Buffy is meant to realize how much better than that her own relationship with her mother is.

No, Joyce doesn't understand her the way she used to -- she can't, because [in the literal reading] Buffy is a Vampire Slayer, something she'll hide from her mother for another year and a half, and because [in the metaphorical reading, made explicit by Joyce herself] Buffy is now a teenage girl with teenage problems of her own and no longer the child she used to be -- but that doesn't mean that Joyce doesn't love her or that Buffy no longer loves her mother.

I'd argue that Joyce plays a metaphorical role in the early seasons of the show similar (but distinct from) the role played by Cordelia or Dawn. No, she's not one of Buffy's shadow selves or anything, but -- just like everyone else on the show -- she does exist to tell us things about the character of Buffy Summers. Like Cordelia or Dawn, she represents a link to Buffy's old, pre-Slayer life. She's the only person Buffy is close to who doesn't know about Buffy being the Slayer, something that will continue to be true for a while, and one suspects that she's also the only person who, if she did know, would try to talk her out of it.

Joyce wants Buffy to be a normal girl with a normal life. She wants her to do well in school, take part in extracurricular activities, make friends, go to the school dances and get into a good college. She tells Buffy that she's a "good girl [who] just fell in with the wrong crowd" and -- for some definition of 'the wrong crowd' that wouldn't ever occur to Joyce -- she's right. All of Buffy's problems really did start when she fell in with a group of dangerous weirdos who told her she alone was responsible for saving the world from vampires.

Yes, when the show starts being more explicit in its hints that being "the Slayer" might be a metaphor for Buffy being queer -- when Buffy comes out to her mother at the end of next season and Joyce frets that this is happening "because you didn't have a strong father figure", or we start getting lines about "marching in the Slayer Pride parade" in early Season 3 -- that desire on Joyce's part for Buffy to be "normal" very quickly gives the impression that Joyce herself is (metaphorically) a little bit homophobic, or at least that her view of the world is somewhat unthinkingly heteronormative. (It's noticeable that Joyce claims she's "tried" to march in the Slayer Pride Parade in a way that she suggests she's not actively trying anymore, all while talking about how much she "hates" the fact her daughter is a Slayer.)

[Although, frankly, I think this shows up some of the weakness of Slaying as a metaphor for Buffy being queer, too. It's not unreasonable for Joyce to be upset to learn that Buffy died, which is the context of the quote above. It's not wrong for her to wish Buffy didn't have to risk her life fighting monsters every night. And -- while Joyce's various self-improvement books might have prepared her for what to do if Buffy ever told her she was bi -- there's no way Joyce can be expected to know what "a vampire Slayer" is without a lengthy explanation before Buffy comes out, since there is very literally a global conspiracy in place to keep that information from her!]

But I don't really think that's a factor in Season 1 at all, when "being a Slayer" is a much broader metaphor for, well, just being a teenager and having problems you can't convince your parents are important. And it's important to note that the things Joyce wants for Buffy are, in fact, all things Buffy wants for herself (okay, except for being on the yearbook staff: Joyce is just projecting there). Buffy wants to do well at school! Buffy wants to make new friends! Buffy doesn't want to get kicked out! Buffy wants to go to the big school dances and have her picture in the yearbook! Buffy wants to eventually go off to college! None of these things are unreasonable hopes for Joyce to have about her daughter at all, and Buffy herself will never act as though they are.

And it's noteworthy, I think, that in this season Buffy's relationship with her mother is at its best when Buffy herself is ambivalent about being a Slayer (in the very first episode, when she's insisting to Giles she "doesn't care" about vampires leaving bodies in the school, or at the end of the season when she tries to quit and asks her mother to take her out of town for the weekend). And that Joyce doesn't interact with any of Buffy's friends who know about Slaying until Angel, when a vampire will intrude on Buffy's home life and drag her mother into the world of the supernatural against her will.

(Also, while I'm rambling, I'd argue that Joyce not knowing about Buffy trying out for cheerleading -- something that we don't actually know for a fact she was ever told about in the first place! -- but encouraging her when she finds out is far, far more reasonable than Giles's reaction of trying to forbid Buffy from doing it because he doesn't understand why she'd want to and clearly doesn't think she should have any social life outside of Slaying. I mean, this post isn't about Giles and the show really hasn't settled on the idea of Giles as a father figure yet, but it does really irk me that people who do read Giles as Buffy's metaphorical dad as early as Season 1 are so willing to give him a pass for what is objectively a far shittier thing to try to do.)

(And also also, when it comes to characters whose metaphorical reading as one of Buffy's links to her previous 'normal' life means that they can easily be read as homophobic, it's worth remembering that Joyce is hardly unique. Cordelia repeatedly warns Buffy against associating with "freaks", fully buys into the narrative in Ginerbread that "witches killed those kids" and therefore witches like Amy and Michael deserve to be harassed -- and we all know what "witches" are a metaphor for, right? -- and responds to learning that her best friend in high school has died and been replaced by a demon with immediate relief because, as she herself puts it, the alternative was that said friend was a "great big lesbo". Why do the people who spend so much time talking about Joyce's supposed homophobia as if it's the defining aspect of her personality just airily dismiss all of that? I mean, apart from the fact that Cordelia doesn't remind them of their mother?)

This post is getting too long already, but I do want to jump ahead to a couple of later scenes in the show that I think cast Joyce's behaviour here in a slightly different light. Of course, as I've argued before, I don't think we should think of these as "revealing" things about the character -- I don't believe the show was planned that far ahead -- but I do think they are very consistent with what we've seen on screen so far.

The first is the flashbacks in Becoming (Part 1) when we see a glimpse of Buffy's home life just before she was called as a Slayer. Buffy comes home unexpectedly late, pretends she was staying with her boyfriend Tyler, and this prompts her parents to have a pretty ugly fight (or, well, Hank to scream at Joyce a bit, if I'm being honest). One of the things Hank complains about is that Joyce "can't discipline [Buffy], [so] I have to be the ogre".

This ties pretty nicely into Joyce's earlier line about "the tapes" telling her she needed to get used to saying "no" to her daughter, I think. Buffy reacts to being grounded in The Harvest in much the same way Willow does in Gingerbread: I'm not sure we're meant to think Joyce has ever tried to punish her this way before. Sometimes, later in the first two seasons, I agree Joyce will definitely overreact and ground Buffy for very silly reasons. But I think that's better understood as a temporary phase that happens while Buffy is still being told to keep Slaying secret from her mother despite all the problems it causes her. It's not a fundamental part of what she's like as a parent.

The second is a conversation Joyce and Buffy have early in Season 4 in the episode Fear Itself.

Buffy and her mother are reminiscing about her childhood, Buffy brings up her parents' divorce and suggests she still blames herself for it (because "I'm starting to feel like there's a pattern here: open you heart to someone and he bails on you"). But of course, as Joyce picks up on, this sentiment applies just as much to her as it does Buffy. Joyce is the one who actually got divorced, after all, by a man who (as we'll learn at the end of this first season) Joyce met when she was (at most) nineteen years old.

"You must have noticed that I am not exactly the social butterfly I was when I was with your dad. I don’t think I made a single new friend the year we moved to Sunnydale [Why not?] Fear. I didn’t believe I could trust anyone again."

So, while Joyce is telling Buffy that they're going to make things work in Sunnydale -- encouraging her to take up new hobbies and assuring her that (as she says in her very first scene on the show) "you're going to make new friends right away, just think positive" -- Joyce herself is … working late hours and weekends at a struggling art gallery, trying (and often failing) to reconnect with her daughter, and doesn't have any friends in town.

Now, granted, as I've been saying for a while, I don't think it makes sense to analyse the show through the perspective that anything the show introduces as fact in later seasons must be the only true way to understand previous seasons. Beyond the obvious things like the big Normal Again retcon we won't talk about, the show can't even keep the name of Joyce's sister consistent, and she's only mentioned in two episodes that aired within the same calendar year!

But what we're told in Fear Itself certainly doesn't contradict anything we're shown on screen this season. Joyce doesn't really seem to have much going for her in terms of a social life. All her (brief) attempts at dating again revolve around men (or murderous robots) she meets at work. She's in a reading group, she has one (fairly unpleasant) friend who gets eaten by a zombie, and a sister (in law?) who lives on the other side of the country and who she visits for Thanksgiving once, and that's it. Her life is her job, and her daughter. And that's pretty sad, I think.

It's possible to take this reading to extremes. You could compare Joyce here to Buffy in late Season 5 / Season 6, working in a job she hates to pay the bills (Joyce will letter admit to having nightmares about bills) and worrying that if she can't make Dawn go to school she'll be found unfit to be her guardian (Buffy burnt down a school building! Joyce must've fought pretty hard to keep her out of any more serious punishment than expulsion, and surely the threat of Buffy being taken away from her parents in some way or another was at least raised in private?) and telling herself she doesn't need a life of her own because "I have Dawn's life". But I don't think that's necessarily the best reading, and it's slightly at odds with the explicit moral of Witch itself.

The real reason that Joyce doesn't seem to have much of a life outside of being Buffy's mother is that ... well, the writers of the show just don't find her very interesting or sympathetic. Much like any fictional mother on that era of network TV -- Marge Simpson comes to mind -- Joyce's life is largely empty because the writers of the show she's on can't conceive of a middle aged woman having anything going for her except being a wife and mother. The tragedy of it all isn't really intentional. But that doesn't mean it isn't there in the text.

Maybe the version of the show in my mind -- in which Joyce is a fully rounded character whose relationship with Buffy is at least as important as Buffy's relationship with a man she met for the first time at sixteen -- isn't that close to what the writers of the show were aiming for. But I don't really care, because it's better than the alternative reading where Joyce is merely a one-dimensional obstacle to Buffy's destiny as a Slayer. Better and, I believe, just as consistent with the actual show as it made to the air.

[forest-of-stories]

What with how the past several decades of Dracula adaptations have been going, I feel like there's a golden opportunity for a meta version that appears to be going the "reincarnated One True Love" route at first, only for Mina to quickly figure out that this is just a pickup line/recurring scam Dracula dusts off every century or two. I'm picturing one of the Brides taking a weary drag on a cigarette all like "he said he'd crossed Oceans of Time to find you too, huh?"