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

[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.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

The difficulty I have with fandoms is that whenever the story doesn't go the way a particular fan wants it to, they act as if the writer did them a personal injury. But here's the thing? The writer can't please everyone. A portion of the fandom is always going to be disgruntled with the direction the story is going. As Spikejojo points out below, if Dawn had died in Chosen, a portion of the fandom would have been unhappy and thought it didn't work and the writer had failed them.

This is generally speaking, true of all works of art, or so I've noticed. Go pick any best-selling or popular book, tv series or movie, google reviews, and for every good review, you'll find one that blasts the book or movie or television series for epic fail. Some people will love what you wrote and it will work perfectly for them, others will think it unbelievable, and that it doesn't work at all.

This happened to me when I wrote and self-published my novel. While the two book clubs that read it, enjoyed it, and various others did, I did get two very nasty and disgruntled reviewers who claimed it was unbelievable and didn't work, etc, etc. What I found reassuring in a way, is that I noticed this also happened to Donna Tartt with the Goldfinch, Joss Whedon, JK Rowling (yes, there are people who think Harry Potter sucks), etc.

It's just impossible to please everyone. People just think too differently, I guess.