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shadowkatWell, I’m hibernating today. Probably will hibernate tomorrow as well. Damn I feel like a bloody bear with all this snow.
1.
We had a lull for a while, no snow for two hours. Yippee. Now storm two has started and there’s 0 visibility again. The news commentators think we’ll get between 3-6 inches – don’t know, from my window it looks more like 6-12. And it isn’t even winter yet. Winter doesn’t start until closer to the 25. We couldn’t have waited until January? (And no, I do not want it to snow around the 16th, please, I have to fly to Hilton Head on the 16th and I haven’t been out of NYC since well last Xmas…so if you have any interest in my sanity, pray that nothing prevents me from going to visit my family for Xmas. Well except for a job, of course.) Hasn’t 2003 been wet enough? Not that travel is a problem at the moment. As I told a friend – the subways are still running, at least I think they are – haven’t seen a subway pass over the elevated track outside my windows in quite a while. (They are far enough away that I only see them and occasionally hear them. Don’t feel them. I have a great view of southern Brooklyn out my southern windows.) At any rate – assuming they are still running, the news hasn’t commented otherwise, so they probably are – I find it rather amusing that the only thing that has stopped all the subways in NYC for more than a day was an electrical failure caused by someone in Ohio forgetting to trim the trees next to the electrical tower cables. Yep, that’s what caused the great blackout of 2003 – some dope didn’t keep the trees trimmed. I found this out on some news program, did a double take, and burst out laughing. Darwin award for stupidity goes to the Ohio Con Edison Plant.
The snow is sort of nice though…blankets sound, makes everything nice and quiet. Also covers all the dirt – the city looks like someone threw a huge white blanket on top of it. I could do without the clacking of the radiators… but it has gotten better, which means someone downstairs may have finally figured out good radiator etiquette and turned the valves on? Hint – if your radiator leaks? Or makes lots of banging sounds? Check your radiator valves, then check the people who have radiators connecting to yours – if they or you have shut off the valves or turned them half off – then there’s your problem. NEVER turn off a radiator – the only way to regulate a radiator is by turning down the thermostat connected to it. How do I know this? Well, a nice plumber informed me when three of my radiators sprung sizable leaks the first year I moved into my apartment. He said and I quote: “Don’t turn off radiator valves. Always keep them open. The valve releases the pressure in the pipes that builds up. When you turn off the valve anywhere in the system, you cause the pressure to build without any release and it bursts from the pipe causing a tear or leak. If you want to control your heat? Use the thermostat.” Course this is a big problem when you aren’t the one in control of said thermostat and the people below you are – but the plus side is you don’t have to pay for the heat, you can’t be charged for anything you don’t regulate. The downside? Well, mine is two-fold:1) the people below me may not realize the whole don’t turn off your radiator rule, most people don’t know this apparently, and 2) whomever is in control of the thermostat turned it up and somehow activated both the radiators in my small bedroom, causing me to go from having no heat, to having more than I need. Apartment ranged from 75-80 degrees last five days. I got it down to 70/68 by opening two windows a crack. And complaining to the landlord, who is unfortunately out of town – coming back late tonight (uhm, yeah, right – not with this snowstorm, he’s not). But I think he may have got a message off to the downstairs neighbors because the radiators appear to have settled down and it’s actually comfortable in my apartment today, for the first time in days. Nice.
2. Marvel and Printers
In a snippy mood today, hence the somewhat sardonic tone to this post, spent the majority of the last two days wrestling with my printer. My problem is simple: I need to print off a short story, plus an application form, to send to Marvel in order to apply for their writer position, dang it! Can’t apply without printing off the story, b/c Marvel wants it by snail mail not email. It’s a legal thing. Granted it’s a long shot, particularly now that I’ve announced the position to every person who reads my live journal, which hopefully isn’t that many. But hey, it's no more a longshot than the other 100 jobs I’ve applied to this month. It’s not a great story but as my Dad, the self-published writer, stated I won’t be satisfied with anything I’ve written and he actually liked that story. Dad’s a strong believer in taking risks. But Dad doesn’t understand why I’m applying to be a comic book writer – said something snippy about how he supposed that Marvel would hire a lawyer to write comic strips. (He thought I was applying to Marvel for a legal job. I did actually – that was another job – I’ve sent three applications to Marvel this year – the latest for Licensing Manager. I believe in covering all my bases. )
“They aren’t comic strips. They are comic books, Dad.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Have you ever looked at a comic book? There’s a huge difference.”
“Not really, speaking of which what are you planning to do with all those boxes of comics you’ve got cluttering my closet.” (This from the man who wanted to be a cartoonist when he was in his 20s)
“You could look at one of those books in the closet, you know.”
“Have enough stuff cluttering my brain.”
“Dad, you are a snob.”
“That’s true. Have no argument with that. You should send the story in, though. It’s a good story. Besides what do you have to lose? You aren’t going to be satisfied with anything you write anyway.” (If you want to know what my Dad is like – watch Gerald Palmer on Time Goes By – actually my parents relationship is a lot like the couple’s on that show. Dad? He looks like a cross between Dick Van Dyke and Dennis The Menace’s father. Which may be why I have certain fondness for Dick Van Dyke – both tall and skinny with bulbous noses.)
Actually a lot of people liked my story. My creative writing class liked that story. My friends liked it. Said it would make a great film or comic. The New Yorker just didn’t, but the New Yorker is, I admit, somewhat snooty, and the story is just a tad on the dark/noir side of things. No, I’ve never posted it online. Don’t want to risk copyright infringement. )
Back to the printer fight, we wrestled - the printer won. Finally gave up and contacted tech support. After several hours - they sent me a series of printer self-tests, at the end of which, I discovered that the problem was the damn color cartridge. The printer prints whenever I remove the color cartridge. Oh it will argue with me first, mentioning in a loud cheery male voice – wait, there’s a problem with the printer, up comes the screen telling me that the color cartridge appears to be missing do I still want to print, I roll my eyes and press the little “ignore” button and it shrugs its shoulders and prints. Ugh. My kid brother warned me about this – don’t get a color printer, he tells me, the color always gets screwed up, the only problem with this is that they don’t sell plain ink-jet printers any more. I hate technological progress.
Technological progress is responsible for the internet kicking me off every ten minutes – it never did that when I had MSN6. But MSN8? Constantly. This reminds me of what Time Warner started doing a year ago with my cable – everything started getting hazy until I dropped the premium channels and opted for DTV, they intended that I keep the premium channels and get DTV (ie. over 1000 channels instead of just 1000 – paying tons more, but I outwitted them and dropped HBO/Showtime package. Much cheaper. Heck, I can live without Sopranos and Six Feet Under, I just can’t live without Angel and BTVS. (Or rather, Angel, Wes, Spike, Gunn, Fred and Lorne). Now the stupid internet servers are doing it – trying to convince me to drop my cheap dial-up for the more expensive cable-modem/DSL service. Ugh. Die Capitalist Pigs! Die! (Don’t get me wrong – I think Communism invariably leads to Fascism and therefore never works. People are just too damn greedy and power hungry for communism to work in my humble opinion. But a little socialism never hurt anyone – National Healthcare? Welfare? No stupid Insurance Lobby? These can’t be bad things…plus, Canada, England, Australia, and France seem to be doing pretty well – lower crime rates, gun control. Sigh. Can I defect to Canada? Could use the free health insurance. Mine’s about to break me.)
3. Sissyphus, Angel and Me
Because of all of this, I find myself beginning to identify with Angel and the Greek Sissyphus (which I can’t spell). Like Sissyphus we seem to be doomed to be forever pushing that damn rock up a hill for no good reason.
Here’s Angel’s arc since he got that soul, and mine since I graduated from high school and started hunting for a career:
1. Ohhh…that’s not that big a rock, I can push that up that hill in no time. All Inspired and Excited about pushing rock up hill.
2. Actually much bigger rock than it looked, kinda heavy and is this hill ever going to come to a point?
3. Why am I even bothering? Is there a point?
4. Oops…lost contact with the rock…noooo! Come back rock!
5. Races after rock
6. Loses Rock. All Depressed because lost rock and now back where we started.
7. Someone comes along and convinces us to get a new rock and start pushing it up the hill again.
Meanwhile along comes Kid Bro (Spike)…
1. Sees rock, picks it up and somehow comes up with a bizarre contraption to shoot rock to top of the hill, which uhm excuse me is against the rules.
2. Races after rock, because he miscalculated the distance and ended up shooting rock to the next hill, so not only has he skipped the hill entirely, he’s onto the next one. Wait! There’s a second hill? You mean I have to push this damn thing up two hills? And how’d he get so far ahead? Ugh!
3. Now he’s whining about pushing rock up second hill and telling me, me who has followed the rules and worked for years doing this, that I have it easy? Hmmm, how did kid bro develop that contraption again and maybe I can do one too except designed to hit kid bro in the head.
4. Whoa…the second hill exploded taking kid bro out with it. That sucks. Really. I’m not laughing here, honest. Feel bad. Really bad.
5. Damn. Kid bro popped up again. Right behind me no less. Can’t the guy stay down long enough for me to make it to the top of the hill? No…has to pop up again distracting me like a bloody jack in the box…apparently the explosion caused a displacement in time/space continuity and he’s been sent back as a ghost but can’t get past the first hill until I do…Heh! Cool. He’s dependent on my success.
6. Just lost rock, some light hits kid bro and turns him corporeal, he grabs rock and now it’s a competition on who gets to push rock up to the top of hill first. As if this wasn’t hard enough before he showed up. Hey, that’s my rock! Get your own rock!! Doesn’t have your name on it, does it? Besides - Finder’s keeper’s – says kid bro. (Ugh. And to think, I taught that sucker how to walk…This is the thanks I get??)
7. Kid bro loses rock. Hee Hee. Except now we’re both back at the bottom of the hill. Kid bro decides to get drunk. While I wait for new inspiration.
This is actually more true to Angel’s situation than mine - my kid bro not only made it past the second hill, he’s working on the third.
4. Spike - a brief paragraph on character
Oh this next bit is for my dear friend pumpkinpuss who wanted me to post it on a board somewhere, but I didn’t have the guts. She wants me to, so she can quote it to people. But I don’t trust the fanboards right now with Spike posts. Live Journal on the other hand grants me the control that I don’t have on a listserve or fanboard – ie. If you bash me or my favorite characters? I can delete your ass! Besides you can quote live journal entries, people do it all the time. (Yes, I’m chicken, I admit it. But a person can only take so much rejection without exploding and I got my quota for 2003 thank you very much. Actually I think I got enough to throw onto 2004. 2003? Not a memorable year.) But don’t worry, non-Spike fans, I’m hiding it.
Spike – A Character of Extremes or Why People Just Don’t Get Him
(it helps if you listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice ditty the Rum Tum Tugger while reading this…also you might consider reading the great essay by Laura Resnick entitled The Good, The Bad, and The Ambiguous in the Buffyverse in the recently published book of Buffy essays entitled – Seven Years of Watching Buffy, available at a book store near you. (you don’t have to buy it, cjl and I just stood in B&N and read the essays.) The most humorous by far is in Search of Spike’s Balls – in which the writer hypothesizes that Buffy is a testerone sucking vampire and Chosen was all about passing the balls…I don’t agree with the essay, but I’m still not completely sure she meant it to be taken seriously. It read like a tongue firmly in cheek satire to me.)
I get annoyed when people try pigeonholing Spike...as bad boyfriend or cad or gentleman or chivalrous knight. When truth is he's all of the above. That's what makes him such a riveting character. If he was just the gentleman or the kindhearted guy who always was nice to the girl we'd be bored.
Spike can be a right bastard at times - there's a great essay by Laura Resnick in Seven Years of Watching BTVS - the book of Buffy essays that just came out, which describes Spike as being a character of extremes. He's both the chivalrous gentleman and the complete jerk. One minute he is saving Fred and sacrificing his own corporeality to do it, the next kicking Harmony across the room when she attacks him. One minute he is boinking the Buffybot, the next he is undergoing torture at Glory's hands and refuses to give Dawn away, he'd rather die than have Buffy suffer. This makes him impossible to pin down. The mistake people make with Spike is attempting to pigeonhole him - the "moment" you do - is the moment you've lost the character. Resnick points out in The Good, the Bad, and The Ambiguous - that Spike is a character of opposite extremes. He's the cad, the gentleman, the hero, the anti-hero, the jerk, the confidante, the comfortador, the conquestador, he's the big brother/mother/nurturer and the destroyer/immature child all rolled in one. It's why he fascinates us so much. We can't pin him down. The moment we have him nailed as the bad boyfriend, he goes off and does something heroic and selfless, the moment we have him nailed as the chivalrous knight he goes off and does something dumb and mean. Yet people keep trying. And the show always proves them wrong - causing fans to write long whining posts about how Spike's been ret-conned or is out of character, when truth is? They just can't figure him out, he's too complex.
Now, I can just imagine the range of responses I'd get for that one. Including my all time favorite: "we get him fine. He's a one dimensional spiteful, petty immature jerk and you are a Spikeapologist and..a plot device..etc". Oh and the fact that I'm leery of this response, makes me an evil person who proposes censorship. Sigh. Are these people ten years old? They certainly act ten years old. This is why I hesitate to post on Spike anymore.
Was going to listen to my Nine-Inch-Nails CD - Downward Spiral, but decided snippy mood would be better served by Big Star.
1.
We had a lull for a while, no snow for two hours. Yippee. Now storm two has started and there’s 0 visibility again. The news commentators think we’ll get between 3-6 inches – don’t know, from my window it looks more like 6-12. And it isn’t even winter yet. Winter doesn’t start until closer to the 25. We couldn’t have waited until January? (And no, I do not want it to snow around the 16th, please, I have to fly to Hilton Head on the 16th and I haven’t been out of NYC since well last Xmas…so if you have any interest in my sanity, pray that nothing prevents me from going to visit my family for Xmas. Well except for a job, of course.) Hasn’t 2003 been wet enough? Not that travel is a problem at the moment. As I told a friend – the subways are still running, at least I think they are – haven’t seen a subway pass over the elevated track outside my windows in quite a while. (They are far enough away that I only see them and occasionally hear them. Don’t feel them. I have a great view of southern Brooklyn out my southern windows.) At any rate – assuming they are still running, the news hasn’t commented otherwise, so they probably are – I find it rather amusing that the only thing that has stopped all the subways in NYC for more than a day was an electrical failure caused by someone in Ohio forgetting to trim the trees next to the electrical tower cables. Yep, that’s what caused the great blackout of 2003 – some dope didn’t keep the trees trimmed. I found this out on some news program, did a double take, and burst out laughing. Darwin award for stupidity goes to the Ohio Con Edison Plant.
The snow is sort of nice though…blankets sound, makes everything nice and quiet. Also covers all the dirt – the city looks like someone threw a huge white blanket on top of it. I could do without the clacking of the radiators… but it has gotten better, which means someone downstairs may have finally figured out good radiator etiquette and turned the valves on? Hint – if your radiator leaks? Or makes lots of banging sounds? Check your radiator valves, then check the people who have radiators connecting to yours – if they or you have shut off the valves or turned them half off – then there’s your problem. NEVER turn off a radiator – the only way to regulate a radiator is by turning down the thermostat connected to it. How do I know this? Well, a nice plumber informed me when three of my radiators sprung sizable leaks the first year I moved into my apartment. He said and I quote: “Don’t turn off radiator valves. Always keep them open. The valve releases the pressure in the pipes that builds up. When you turn off the valve anywhere in the system, you cause the pressure to build without any release and it bursts from the pipe causing a tear or leak. If you want to control your heat? Use the thermostat.” Course this is a big problem when you aren’t the one in control of said thermostat and the people below you are – but the plus side is you don’t have to pay for the heat, you can’t be charged for anything you don’t regulate. The downside? Well, mine is two-fold:1) the people below me may not realize the whole don’t turn off your radiator rule, most people don’t know this apparently, and 2) whomever is in control of the thermostat turned it up and somehow activated both the radiators in my small bedroom, causing me to go from having no heat, to having more than I need. Apartment ranged from 75-80 degrees last five days. I got it down to 70/68 by opening two windows a crack. And complaining to the landlord, who is unfortunately out of town – coming back late tonight (uhm, yeah, right – not with this snowstorm, he’s not). But I think he may have got a message off to the downstairs neighbors because the radiators appear to have settled down and it’s actually comfortable in my apartment today, for the first time in days. Nice.
2. Marvel and Printers
In a snippy mood today, hence the somewhat sardonic tone to this post, spent the majority of the last two days wrestling with my printer. My problem is simple: I need to print off a short story, plus an application form, to send to Marvel in order to apply for their writer position, dang it! Can’t apply without printing off the story, b/c Marvel wants it by snail mail not email. It’s a legal thing. Granted it’s a long shot, particularly now that I’ve announced the position to every person who reads my live journal, which hopefully isn’t that many. But hey, it's no more a longshot than the other 100 jobs I’ve applied to this month. It’s not a great story but as my Dad, the self-published writer, stated I won’t be satisfied with anything I’ve written and he actually liked that story. Dad’s a strong believer in taking risks. But Dad doesn’t understand why I’m applying to be a comic book writer – said something snippy about how he supposed that Marvel would hire a lawyer to write comic strips. (He thought I was applying to Marvel for a legal job. I did actually – that was another job – I’ve sent three applications to Marvel this year – the latest for Licensing Manager. I believe in covering all my bases. )
“They aren’t comic strips. They are comic books, Dad.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Have you ever looked at a comic book? There’s a huge difference.”
“Not really, speaking of which what are you planning to do with all those boxes of comics you’ve got cluttering my closet.” (This from the man who wanted to be a cartoonist when he was in his 20s)
“You could look at one of those books in the closet, you know.”
“Have enough stuff cluttering my brain.”
“Dad, you are a snob.”
“That’s true. Have no argument with that. You should send the story in, though. It’s a good story. Besides what do you have to lose? You aren’t going to be satisfied with anything you write anyway.” (If you want to know what my Dad is like – watch Gerald Palmer on Time Goes By – actually my parents relationship is a lot like the couple’s on that show. Dad? He looks like a cross between Dick Van Dyke and Dennis The Menace’s father. Which may be why I have certain fondness for Dick Van Dyke – both tall and skinny with bulbous noses.)
Actually a lot of people liked my story. My creative writing class liked that story. My friends liked it. Said it would make a great film or comic. The New Yorker just didn’t, but the New Yorker is, I admit, somewhat snooty, and the story is just a tad on the dark/noir side of things. No, I’ve never posted it online. Don’t want to risk copyright infringement. )
Back to the printer fight, we wrestled - the printer won. Finally gave up and contacted tech support. After several hours - they sent me a series of printer self-tests, at the end of which, I discovered that the problem was the damn color cartridge. The printer prints whenever I remove the color cartridge. Oh it will argue with me first, mentioning in a loud cheery male voice – wait, there’s a problem with the printer, up comes the screen telling me that the color cartridge appears to be missing do I still want to print, I roll my eyes and press the little “ignore” button and it shrugs its shoulders and prints. Ugh. My kid brother warned me about this – don’t get a color printer, he tells me, the color always gets screwed up, the only problem with this is that they don’t sell plain ink-jet printers any more. I hate technological progress.
Technological progress is responsible for the internet kicking me off every ten minutes – it never did that when I had MSN6. But MSN8? Constantly. This reminds me of what Time Warner started doing a year ago with my cable – everything started getting hazy until I dropped the premium channels and opted for DTV, they intended that I keep the premium channels and get DTV (ie. over 1000 channels instead of just 1000 – paying tons more, but I outwitted them and dropped HBO/Showtime package. Much cheaper. Heck, I can live without Sopranos and Six Feet Under, I just can’t live without Angel and BTVS. (Or rather, Angel, Wes, Spike, Gunn, Fred and Lorne). Now the stupid internet servers are doing it – trying to convince me to drop my cheap dial-up for the more expensive cable-modem/DSL service. Ugh. Die Capitalist Pigs! Die! (Don’t get me wrong – I think Communism invariably leads to Fascism and therefore never works. People are just too damn greedy and power hungry for communism to work in my humble opinion. But a little socialism never hurt anyone – National Healthcare? Welfare? No stupid Insurance Lobby? These can’t be bad things…plus, Canada, England, Australia, and France seem to be doing pretty well – lower crime rates, gun control. Sigh. Can I defect to Canada? Could use the free health insurance. Mine’s about to break me.)
3. Sissyphus, Angel and Me
Because of all of this, I find myself beginning to identify with Angel and the Greek Sissyphus (which I can’t spell). Like Sissyphus we seem to be doomed to be forever pushing that damn rock up a hill for no good reason.
Here’s Angel’s arc since he got that soul, and mine since I graduated from high school and started hunting for a career:
1. Ohhh…that’s not that big a rock, I can push that up that hill in no time. All Inspired and Excited about pushing rock up hill.
2. Actually much bigger rock than it looked, kinda heavy and is this hill ever going to come to a point?
3. Why am I even bothering? Is there a point?
4. Oops…lost contact with the rock…noooo! Come back rock!
5. Races after rock
6. Loses Rock. All Depressed because lost rock and now back where we started.
7. Someone comes along and convinces us to get a new rock and start pushing it up the hill again.
Meanwhile along comes Kid Bro (Spike)…
1. Sees rock, picks it up and somehow comes up with a bizarre contraption to shoot rock to top of the hill, which uhm excuse me is against the rules.
2. Races after rock, because he miscalculated the distance and ended up shooting rock to the next hill, so not only has he skipped the hill entirely, he’s onto the next one. Wait! There’s a second hill? You mean I have to push this damn thing up two hills? And how’d he get so far ahead? Ugh!
3. Now he’s whining about pushing rock up second hill and telling me, me who has followed the rules and worked for years doing this, that I have it easy? Hmmm, how did kid bro develop that contraption again and maybe I can do one too except designed to hit kid bro in the head.
4. Whoa…the second hill exploded taking kid bro out with it. That sucks. Really. I’m not laughing here, honest. Feel bad. Really bad.
5. Damn. Kid bro popped up again. Right behind me no less. Can’t the guy stay down long enough for me to make it to the top of the hill? No…has to pop up again distracting me like a bloody jack in the box…apparently the explosion caused a displacement in time/space continuity and he’s been sent back as a ghost but can’t get past the first hill until I do…Heh! Cool. He’s dependent on my success.
6. Just lost rock, some light hits kid bro and turns him corporeal, he grabs rock and now it’s a competition on who gets to push rock up to the top of hill first. As if this wasn’t hard enough before he showed up. Hey, that’s my rock! Get your own rock!! Doesn’t have your name on it, does it? Besides - Finder’s keeper’s – says kid bro. (Ugh. And to think, I taught that sucker how to walk…This is the thanks I get??)
7. Kid bro loses rock. Hee Hee. Except now we’re both back at the bottom of the hill. Kid bro decides to get drunk. While I wait for new inspiration.
This is actually more true to Angel’s situation than mine - my kid bro not only made it past the second hill, he’s working on the third.
4. Spike - a brief paragraph on character
Oh this next bit is for my dear friend pumpkinpuss who wanted me to post it on a board somewhere, but I didn’t have the guts. She wants me to, so she can quote it to people. But I don’t trust the fanboards right now with Spike posts. Live Journal on the other hand grants me the control that I don’t have on a listserve or fanboard – ie. If you bash me or my favorite characters? I can delete your ass! Besides you can quote live journal entries, people do it all the time. (Yes, I’m chicken, I admit it. But a person can only take so much rejection without exploding and I got my quota for 2003 thank you very much. Actually I think I got enough to throw onto 2004. 2003? Not a memorable year.) But don’t worry, non-Spike fans, I’m hiding it.
Spike – A Character of Extremes or Why People Just Don’t Get Him
(it helps if you listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice ditty the Rum Tum Tugger while reading this…also you might consider reading the great essay by Laura Resnick entitled The Good, The Bad, and The Ambiguous in the Buffyverse in the recently published book of Buffy essays entitled – Seven Years of Watching Buffy, available at a book store near you. (you don’t have to buy it, cjl and I just stood in B&N and read the essays.) The most humorous by far is in Search of Spike’s Balls – in which the writer hypothesizes that Buffy is a testerone sucking vampire and Chosen was all about passing the balls…I don’t agree with the essay, but I’m still not completely sure she meant it to be taken seriously. It read like a tongue firmly in cheek satire to me.)
I get annoyed when people try pigeonholing Spike...as bad boyfriend or cad or gentleman or chivalrous knight. When truth is he's all of the above. That's what makes him such a riveting character. If he was just the gentleman or the kindhearted guy who always was nice to the girl we'd be bored.
Spike can be a right bastard at times - there's a great essay by Laura Resnick in Seven Years of Watching BTVS - the book of Buffy essays that just came out, which describes Spike as being a character of extremes. He's both the chivalrous gentleman and the complete jerk. One minute he is saving Fred and sacrificing his own corporeality to do it, the next kicking Harmony across the room when she attacks him. One minute he is boinking the Buffybot, the next he is undergoing torture at Glory's hands and refuses to give Dawn away, he'd rather die than have Buffy suffer. This makes him impossible to pin down. The mistake people make with Spike is attempting to pigeonhole him - the "moment" you do - is the moment you've lost the character. Resnick points out in The Good, the Bad, and The Ambiguous - that Spike is a character of opposite extremes. He's the cad, the gentleman, the hero, the anti-hero, the jerk, the confidante, the comfortador, the conquestador, he's the big brother/mother/nurturer and the destroyer/immature child all rolled in one. It's why he fascinates us so much. We can't pin him down. The moment we have him nailed as the bad boyfriend, he goes off and does something heroic and selfless, the moment we have him nailed as the chivalrous knight he goes off and does something dumb and mean. Yet people keep trying. And the show always proves them wrong - causing fans to write long whining posts about how Spike's been ret-conned or is out of character, when truth is? They just can't figure him out, he's too complex.
Now, I can just imagine the range of responses I'd get for that one. Including my all time favorite: "we get him fine. He's a one dimensional spiteful, petty immature jerk and you are a Spikeapologist and..a plot device..etc". Oh and the fact that I'm leery of this response, makes me an evil person who proposes censorship. Sigh. Are these people ten years old? They certainly act ten years old. This is why I hesitate to post on Spike anymore.
Was going to listen to my Nine-Inch-Nails CD - Downward Spiral, but decided snippy mood would be better served by Big Star.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Oh dear.....
Date: 2003-12-06 02:43 am (UTC)Rufus
Re: Oh dear.....
Date: 2003-12-06 09:16 am (UTC)Now to Spike and Angel for that matter. What the hell do the respective fans think either guy did as a vampire to become number one and two of evil? Play Yatzee? They killed people...a lot. They were monsters like in monster movies. To downplay each characters capacity to be right pricks is to diminish their attempts at being good.
Yes, one does wonder where some of these people are coming from. The whole point of Spike and Angel's struggle is that they did really horrible things. That they need to find a way of taking responsibility for those things, because it taints you. Angel did the worst things imaginable - it's why the show is about him - it's about the worst person imaginable trying to overcome the horrible person he was and in some small ways, still is - b/c what he did does taint him, it does inform who he is now. Whedon's
central hypothesis is:"Can we redeem a horrible person?
Is this possible? And if so, how? How do you reclaim a life you've misused?" That's the theme of Angel and why the characters are far darker on this show - b/c the question is can we overcome the horrible things we do.