#ifer rambles

[all-seeing-ifer]

this is how all the guys in the terror look to me

[artsying-ifer]

Do you think Cordelia should have been mad at the Fang Gang after the events of season four?

Sorta depends what you mean by "should" I guess! From like, a moral high ground perspective, I don't really know. Like I think you can justify them not being more suspicious about her behaviour with the fact that they're facing an apocalypse that season and have a whole lot of other shit to worry about and so on. Plus as much as it is shitty that they don't realise anything wrong with her I am inclined to be like it's not their fault your honour the writing was just bad. It's not their fault the writing made everyone fucking stupid.

If we're talking purely from a character perspective, though.... yeah absolutely lmao. She should have been pissed. Like not to be on my possession horror shit again but I think there is a lot of untapped potential in the genre when it comes to the horror of "What if you were no longer yourself, and the people who loved you didn't even notice?" - like that's such a visceral and disturbing thought that you could get such great characterisation out of, and I think if the writers cared about Cordy as a person at this point at all they should probably have done something with that.

Also like not to put too fine a point on it but all the other horrific shit aside, I do think if I found out that my closest friends in the world all thought that (folding ideas guy voice I am going to say the next part without questions, commentary, or asides) having sex with my best friend's teenage son who I helped raise as a baby was something that I would do and the idea that I'd do that raises no suspicions.... I do think that would break me psychologically. I cannot lie to you

[all-seeing-ifer]

pov you're sister carpenter

[all-seeing-ifer]

Fucking horrendous that caritas isn't real. I should be there. Right now

[all-seeing-ifer]

hitting u all with psychic beams that make you listen to tsv

[all-seeing-ifer]

I wouldn't say I think buffy is already suicidal in season 2 the way she is in season 6 and arguably lage season 5 but I do think ALL THINGS CONSIDERED it feels... a bit telling that buffy hears a story about a guy in the 50s who killed himself and just Immediately understands and identifies with him

[all-seeing-ifer]

while i'm herablogging i do think it's interesting from a medium perspective that bc of the medium it's in w359 is able to do something with hera which most sci fi doesn't get to do with ai characters, which is to completely erode the boundaries between hera and the rest of the cast. the spaceship ai that only manifests as a disembodied voice is a common sci fi trope, and usually the disembodied voice aspect serves to distance the audience from that character, even if that's not the intent. even if they're intended to be one of the gang, as it were, there's always going to be a level of disconnect for the audience. but because w359 is an audio drama... well, experientially for the audience, everyone is a disembodied voice, so hera truly is no different from any other character. yeah there's effects added to her voice to make it sound digital, but after a certain point that doesn't really registser any more than like, hilbert having a different accent to the others does. and there's many reasons why i don't think wolf would ever work if adapted into another medium (at least not without changing many many things) but a big one is that i just don't think hera's arc would work as well if she were presented by the medium as obviously different from everyone else

[all-seeing-ifer]

you know what after all the years of people mistakenly giving tim burton credit for henry selick’s work, seeing selick being called a “visionary director” in the wendell & wild teaser feels unbelievably fucking vindicating

[all-seeing-ifer]

I am btvs season 2's biggest dickrider we all know this but I do think it's an insane characterisation missed opportunity that angel's early seasons shitty basement flat has a bed with a fucking bedframe. i have literally never seen a man who more obviously does not own a bedframe. everything about him exudes this. frankly i'm shocked enough that he'd own a mattress

[all-seeing-ifer]

i need to like shut gunn and buffy in a room together i think the resultant combined level of elder sibling syndrome would cause a minor explosion of some sort

[all-seeing-ifer]

it's actually so unfair to me personally that anya and angel never got to interact in one of the btvs/ats crossovers I think it would have been so fun. vampire who is desperate to be turned human and demon who was turned human and is so not happy about it. their shared "I need to be the most normal person in this grocery store" complexes. it would have been everything to me

[all-seeing-ifer]

i actually love talking about angel the way that 1950s misogynists would talk about women it's my favourite thing in the world. that man was forced to be a detective who fights evil monsters but born to be a stay at home dad

[all-seeing-ifer]

At the end of the day gunn is a guy who gets told its his last day on earth and to do whatever he wants with it and he chooses to help out at a local homeless shelter. And that's all I gotta say about him

[all-seeing-ifer]

The thing about Gunn is that in his early appearances he does, in a lot of ways, represent the ideal that the first episode of ats is pointing Angel towards. As Doyle puts it, Angel's problem at the start of the show is that he wants to help people but he's also completely cut off from them. He wants to help the helpless but in a way where he's apart from them, watching over the world but never part of it. And then you see Gunn, who is also a protector but he isn't cut off from the people he helps at all. He knows them. He has a very clearly established role as a guardian figure in his community but he's also very much a part of that community. You see him at the party in First Impressions and he's saying hi to everyone he sees, there's a real sense that he's the kind of guy who everyone knows and who knows everyone. His desire to protect people doesn't come from a nebulous sense of justice and seeking redemption (well, not entirely), it comes from a very real sense of obligation to the community that he's a part of and the people he knows and cares about. Protecting people is personal for him in a way that it isn't for Angel at the beginning. They're such perfect foils for each other and the fact that the show just sort of forgets that that's how they set up Gunn and ends up making him just "the muscle" is like. one of the greatest injustices in the show imo

[all-seeing-ifer]

I've spent so much of the last few months reading all these books and essays and such about asexuality (and about aromanticism when I can fucking find them) by aspec people for my master's and it's been such a lovely experience but also. idk shit's weird man. like you take even a cursory look at the literature and discussions and there's such a wealth of new and interesting and nuanced perspectives on consent and rethinking the way we talk about sexual trauma and the insitution of marriage and discrimination against single people and the institution of psychiatry and the limits of modern discourses of gender and sexuality and relationship anarchy and capitalism and reproductive rights and culture and history and narrative structure and feminism and how all of it is influenced by race and gender and disability and culture and it's WONDERFUL but also. every single time I read something like angela chen's ace or sherronda j brown's refusing compulsory sexuality I can't help but wonder about how much we've missed out on. how much interesting thought and discussion and new ideas have we missed out on because of all the years these communities lost to the fucking "ace discourse". how many important conversations could we have had sooner if a small number of entirely disingenuous bad actors and a larger number of the most useful idiots on the planet hadn't declared it open season on an entire subsection of the queer community because they wanted an excuse to bully 16 year olds online. how much more could we already understand.

[all-seeing-ifer]

It is REALLY funny actually that wesley just stops needing glasses once he's meant to be Cool and Tortured. They gave him a 90s teen movie makeover