Troubling Buffy essay...found on pop matters site

[shadowkat]

Interesting perspective on Buffy's choice or according to Pop Matters avoidance of it in the Gift. Not sure I agree with any of it, but it is an interesting perspective all the same.

The writer seems to think that Buffy should have chosen to either kill Dawn or allow Dawn to make the final sacrifice in Chosen, and by not permitting Buffy to make that choice, the writers failed the viewers. That the viewers "deserved" to see Buffy choose to kill Dawn, and the writers copped out?

But, that's assuming the following:

1) That the choice to sacrifice oneself for the greater good isn't a choice but avoiding the situation, that it was indecisive or a cop out (I don't think that's true.)
2) That the correct choice is sacrificing someone else or the person responsible (I don't think this is true.)
3.) That the audience deserves a decisive choice? That sacrificing oneself isn't a decisive choice?? Or even noble? That it would have been more noble and decisive to kill Dawn? How very Machiavellian.
4.) Our choices define who we are absolutely? I don't know about that.

I don't know.

It's a more literal view of the episode than I perceived. There are no comments. So...

But what I found troubling about the writer's essay on the episode -- was the end comment:

Insofar as a story places the hero in a predicament, we deserve to witness her, or him, not only pushed to the boundaries, but also acting on those boundaries. Should the hero refuse to act on those boundaries, frozen with indecisiveness, he, or she, must afterwards contemplate their failure to act; they must confront self-doubt in realizing that, when it counted, their principles did not render one course of action superior to another.

This perspective, regardless of the story it is about, troubles me. I'm not sure the audience deserves anything. We, the listener or viewer or audience, makes a choice when we decide to watch/read/listen to another's story. But it is their story. It's a story that came from them. We make the choice to listen. And the story is not being written or shown to reinforce or validate our worldview or perspective, it's another person's perspective and world-view in which they are sharing with us. I think that by stating that we "deserve" something specific from the story - means we have stopped listening to it. We are instead listening to our own ego, our mind, our mental noise, and projecting that onto the story?

I'm also not sure you can accuse Buffy of being indecisive or not confronting her self-doubts afterwards - what was S6 about, if not confrontation of self-doubt? Also, it's pretty decisive to choose to sacrifice oneself. Taking one's own life is a decisive action with serious consequences.

Troubling essay. But then we do live in troubling times. (shrugs)

Comments

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to bore everybody with details, but the only logical, world-saving, way out of the situation in the Gift was to let Dawn die. The only thing the audience 'deserved' was a story that made sense in context. The truth is this: There was no evidence anywhere in the whole season that Buffy's statement, that Dawn was made from Buffy's own blood, was in anyway accurate. Without that being established beforehand, Buffy's 'sacrifice' is just pointless suicide and the Joss-world should have ended. Is that a story I would have wanted? No. But it's the only one that follows from the whole season of episodes, if Buffy dies in place of Dawn. I suspect the notion of Dawn having 'Summers blood' was supposed to have been introduced in the course of the arc, and someone was doing a horrible job of supervising story continuity that season. Joss didn't seem to care.

[rahirah]

I think the audience deserves the best story the author is capable of telling under the circumstance, but that's about it. What kind of story it is is up to the author.

However, that view was very prevalent in fandom in S5. I remember seeing tons of disgruntled posts about it on the Usenet newsgroup at the time, bemoaning Buffy's sentimentality, and complaining that by making the portal close for her death as well as Dawn's, Joss was cheating and taking the easy way out by allowing Buffy to avoid the difficult but correct decision to kill her sister. Considering the tack Joss took in Cabin In the Woods, though, I think that if Buffy sacrificing herself hadn't worked, Joss's opinion would be that the world deserved to burn.

[spikesjojo.livejournal.com]

And yet if Buffy had gutted Dawn like a fish and tossed her into the portal, there would still be those who complained....
Dying to save the world is avoiding a choice if you can kill your sister, or let the world be destroyed...I have to say that logic does not work for me! I also assume that if the portal had not disappeared then Dawn would have jumped as she was prepared to do. This wasn't just Buffy's choice.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Yeah, even if we agree that Buffy should have killed Dawn in that situation (which, like you, I don't think is necessarily true), that is obviously not the point of the story anyway. It's quite literally about how Buffy emotionally needs not to kill Dawn and to defend her even when the world tells her to kill her. It's about whether being a slayer just means being a killer or if there's more than that. The story promised us nothing; the Knights, Giles etc saying she will have to kill Dawn is not a promise to the audience. Buffy nearly does kill Dawn in Normal Again and considers she would have let Dawn jump in LMPTM (and implies she would have murdered Andrew in Storyteller, though she leaves open whether she would have gone through with it if the tears didn't work) so it is hardly settled with no revaluation. Buffy killed Angel in s2 so the story of her going through with killing a loved one was also done. It's not even that I am certain it is worth letting the world be destroyed to protect Dawn for a few more minutes until she dies too, but at least on the narrative level the ending is by design the answer to the problem. Maybe the design is faulty (I don't think so, but maybe), but to understand the show you have to understand that Buffy dying for Dawn is the answer for which the *question* of The Gift's apocalypse was created by Whedon et al. It's a category error to put the blame on the show for not delivering Dawn's head; if The Gift fails (which, again, I don't think it does), it fails in delivering the ending we got properly.

What troubles me is the idea that killing a teenage girl is somehow required for good storytelling (and a good coming of age story). You aren't a real grown up until you accept and execute child murder for the greater good. Uh-huh. I think I associate it with the problem of the US/the West (I know I'm Canadian, but I am taking responsibility as part of the West rather than trying to point fingers as if I am part of a different culture) where you have Donald Trump saying we need to go after terrorist's families or the Obama administration sending drone strikes which kill children by accident in a way that suggests indifference. The casual acceptance that it's just a part of adulthood to accept child murder is a little ingrained right now. (And I'm not necessarily saying that it is different outside the West.) And that's sad, because I think it breeds indifference and cynicism, to believe that this is so necessarily part of the world that there's no point trying hard to stop it.

ETA: Also, IMO, I think Buffy would have let Dawn jump at the end had she not had her epiphany. She planned for everything to save Dawn but seems surprised that Dawn wants to jump herself and doesn't have much of an answer to Dawn saying "You know you have to let me." Buffy seems to slump into despair before Dawn brings up her blood. And I don't think Buffy could fight Dawn to prevent her from jumping, emotionally. So I don't think the world would have ended, anyway -- Dawn would have died, and Buffy would have probably been permanently emotionally broken. That still marks a difference between willing and unwilling sacrifices -- if Dawn insisted on living, Buffy would have died protecting her. But I think that Buffy's steadfast need to protect Dawn at all costs wouldn't have withstood Dawn's insistence on jumping, if Buffy couldn't come up with a world-saving alternative. So at the very end, I think the big threat was still not the world ending but Buffy losing Dawn and becoming just a killer / person who can't stop death.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

I went and read the essay, and I too found it rather disturbing.

[cjlasky.livejournal.com]

We need to make distinctions when arguing the finale of The Gift.

First, there is the matter of simple plot mechanics: are the events of this episode logical in the context of all previous events in this particular work of fiction? IMO, the naysayers might have a point here. Despite all the hints indicating a primal, blood bond between the Slayer and the Key, there is absolutely no supporting evidence from previous episodes guaranteeing that Buffy's sacrifice will work. Does Buffy feel, with metaphysical certainty, that it will work? Yes. And that should be good enough. But for this viewer, it seemed like a bit of a stretch then... and it kind of still does now.

Which brings us to the second part of the equation--whether Joss punked out on the audience by not allowing Buffy to a) kill Dawn or b) watch Dawn make the sacrifice herself.

This one is easy: no, no, and HELL no.

As you and others stated above, the entire run of BtVS was about Buffy rejecting binary options and finding a new way. The "kill Dawn or the universe dies" argument is given straight up by Giles--which is a dead giveaway, storywise. Even though we love our man in tweed, he's a Watcher, and they're not known for their flexibility. Giles kills Ben because he knows Buffy won't. She's a hero. Heroes find a way to protect life, no matter how impossible it may seem at the time. The logistics of Buffy's sacrifice may be dubious in my eyes, but the act itself is entirely consistent with everything Joss has told us about Buffy Anne Summers as a person.

And, given that, the whole argument over Joss' "obligation" to his fandom in this case is rendered absurd, if it wasn't absurd already. If the artist makes the point he wants to make, then it's up to the reader/viewer to agree or disagree with the statement... period. If I may be blunt? He don't owe anyone shit.

I've been reading more and more incidents of angry nerds outright telling creators what they can or can't do: the outcry against the Ghostbusters reboot (which I actually enjoyed); and just recently, a group of Steven Universe fans chased one of the series writers off Twitter because their particular 'ship hadn't materialized (yet).

What the hell?

I realize that with the internet, it's possible to interact with the creators of your favorite shows in ways you never could have dreamed of before. But this kind of cyberbullying is destructive to the creativity we supposedly admire in our artists.

You can have your opinions. You can bitch about storylines. Hell, write fanfic if you can't get what you want in the actual series. (God knows, there's probably a billion Ghostbusters fanfics with the original crew and enough Peridot/Amethyst shipper fics to fill a galaxy.)

But let the storytellers work, people.

Come on.