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shadowkatWas thinking tonight while watching Torchwood - after having read two completely opposite responses to the same episode (one person on my flist adored it, and one thought it was horribly written), that maybe people respond to that which speaks to them? That hits a nerve? Or echoes an experience? Or in some way, sometimes an indescrible one, touches upon a or relates to deeply personal experience, value, belief or emotion? Be it a person, place, piece of artwork, tv show, song, pair of shoes, food, book or film - we will either embrace, reject or be merely ambivalent? I'm not even sure we always know why we've reacted to it in this manner. And in some cases, cover the reaction with all sorts of objective criticisms or accolades of the work or person. I don't know. It's just a theory.
Speaking for myself, I know that this often true. Issue 11 of Buffy S8, much like issue 10 before it, and if I were really honest, most of the tv series did, spoke to me on an emotional and deeply personal level. And I think that when we view art - whether it be a painting, a song, a clay pot, a comic book or a tv show - our emotional response to that piece of art, our ability to identify with the feelings the artist appears to be conveying whether they realize it or not - has a lot to do with how we embrace it.
Review and Personal Analysis of A Beautiful Sunset - Issue 11 of BTVS S8
Whedon's comics are not filled with action - he is deliberately building up to the action over a long period of time. They are not episodic short stories, as I first suspected, but rather chapters in a lenghthy novel. Each episode linking to the next. Revealing a bit more of the characters, plots and themes. And since the novel is titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer - the focus is on her - in somewhat the same way that the focus is on say Lymond in Dorothy Dunnett's The Chronicles of Lymond. We get other points of view, and are often in points of view that are commenting on the heroine - but not necessarily in a complimentary way - reminding me a great deal of Dunnet's Lymond novels. (Whedon plots his novels and creates characterizations that are suprisingly similar to Dunnett's which explains why there was a fan discussion group that focused on Dunnett and Buffy.) At any rate, I would not be the least bit surprised if the slow build is frustrating a few comic book fans who are used to the more episodic and action packed super-hero comics. While losing the tv fans, who miss the romantic entanglements and screen chemistry of the actors - unused to this format, not to mention the extraordinarly long wait between issues. (Not as bad by the way as the wait between X-Men issues - Whedon may be many things, but a fast writer is not amongst them. I've waited up to six months between X-men issues.) As far as the art goes, it is getting better with each issue. This issue, Jeanty actually managed to put the recognizable dent in Buffy's nose. And I could tell the women apart. While I prefer Cliff Richards, Jeanty did a good job with this issue. Best so far.
Anywho..there is a speech in the middle of the issue, which by itself isn't all that meaningful or fantastic, but if you read it within the context of the whole series and well, if you have experienced something similar on some level (most of us have, I suspect - those who haven't are incredibly lucky) - it will speak to you much as it did me. Differently most likely, but it will. And if you are anything like me, you may feel a little less lonely when you read it. A little less like a freak.
The speech occurs during a battle with a bunch of vampires. Buffy has taken Satsu, one of her slayers, to fight vamps. During the fight, Buffy reveals to Satsu that she knows the girl is in love with her and that this okay. Granted Buffy isn't gay, but as she notes - there's really no way anyone would know that at the moment. "Not that you would know," she says.
No, the problem isn't just that she doesn't return Satsu's romantic love. She actually appreciates it even if she can't return it. And has learned enough by now to know that you can love someone without the necessity of it being returned. Plus knowing someone as cool as Satsu loves her, makes her feel a little less lonely. No...the problem is that people who love her, and more importantly she allows herself to care about and love back, even count on - have a funky way of either dying or just plain leaving - disappearing even.
Here's the speech: People who love me tend to...oh, die[Joyce, Kendra]." She looks at her scythe. "Maybe go to a hell dimension[Angel], or burn up[Spike],or they start letting vamps suck on 'em and they leave[Riley], they all leave, even my friends [Anya, Tara, Willow, Giles, Wood (okay maybe he wasn't a friend), her father], sooner or later everybody realizes there's something wrong...something wrong with me, or around me, or...Wow. Did not mean to end up there.
Of course when I read this speech - I thought, wait what about Xander or Dawn. They are still there. Or even the slayers. Willow is too, sort of, as is Giles - even though she rarely sees them or speaks to them and feels incredibly disconnected from them both - the two people she counted on most once upon a time. But...the thing of it is, when you have one or two steady folks in your life, who have always been there, you fear depending on them too much - you need/want more. You fear not having more. And you worry about the multitudes or at least it appears to be mulititudes that have left. You focus on the people who are gone, not the one's who have stayed. It's silly, I know. But...there it is.
Sometimes you think just because you aren't in contact, aren't talking, haven't seen the person - that they are gone. They don't love you anymore. They won't come back. They aren't connected. And most likely don't think of you. That you don't register. Or worse, you do, and they hate you.
It's human nature I think to think these thoughts. To feel these things. To fear being disconnected. Or maybe it is only me that feels this way - it's hard to know sometimes for certain until that is, you read a comic book and discover the lead character feels much the same way you do, a lead character who sprouts from the brain of a relative stranger.
At any rate - this has been playing on my mind a lot lately, which explains why I reacted to it so strongly. Plagued with nightmares of losing the people currently in my life. And plagued by nightmares of those who left it ages ago. Most recently people I knew and loved in college. A boy, blond haired, tall, and thin who wrote poetry and sang country folk songs similar to Johnny Cash. A friend not a lover. Who understood me. And I haven't heard from or seen since 1989.
Back to Buffy. At the end of the issue after fighting someone named Twighlight (who I'm guessing may be the big reveal that is rumored to happen in next month's issue - a rather big reveal that will sell out the next issue - stores have been told to get extra copies)), she has been somewhat demoralized and is beginning to question her mission. She turns to Xander and states: "Are we doing any good? We've been fighting more demons, but...But it just seems like there's more demons to fight, and what, is that because of us?"
A speech that reminds me a great deal of one in the film I saw this afternoon. Where a bone weary sheriff, policing a wasteland, asks another bone weary sheriff - after seeing what amounts to a massacre - if there is a point. They fight the demons. But more keep coming.
The answer...is well much the same in both the film and this issue, and it spoke to me in both because we live in odd times. Although as the decripet deputy in the film, I saw, No Country for Old Men, puts it - these times are no stranger than the past. We just think they are. After the primaries this week - I thought does it matter who becomes President of the US?
Does it matter if the earth's climate is going nutty? I can't do anything. What I'm doing feels like little more than a drop in the bucket. And my life seems to be all about work right now...and that scares me. I, like Buffy, feel lonely and disconnected and frustrated by it. Too focused on making "my job" work to exert the energy or take the time to change that.
What Xander tells Buffy is this: "Maybe now we're only cleaning up messes, but we're just getting started. What you've created here is a lot more than just monster fighters. It's you know a.."
"Connection."
Her tragedy is she can't feel it. And he says maybe she isn't supposed to as leader. But I wonder...it echoes too closely to what I remember an old man telling a bone weary sheriff at the end of the movie I just saw - to think you can change everything is vanity. We can only do small things. We feel connected sure, but it comes and goes. This country is hard on people.
When you spend a lot of time inside your own head, you lose perspective of the world around you. Lose the connection. As Xander puts it - "Buff, seriously, you spend too much time alone."
Struggling for a balance is constant, I think.
What I also identified with is a sense that Buffy keeps looking backwards. It is hard not to. Reliving her fight with Caleb, the evil minister, or her glory days. And her boyfriends, the ones who died, the ones who left...as well as her friends.
I read recently a piece of great advice in the oddest place - a newspaper or TV guide horoscope, it said:
"You will find life is a lot easier if you stop looking at the past and focus solely on the future."
I think this may be true for us all. While it is helpful to learn from history, dwelling on it, only holds us back. Letting go of the past...is I think sometimes the only way to move foreward. People leave us in life - they either die, move away or we do, dump us or we dumb them, get too busy or we just for whatever reason lose contact with them - that does not make us losers, it just is, it is inevitable and it happens to us all, in that respect at least we are not alone.
The tough thing is to learn how to let go of them, to hold onto the pleasant memories, but not the regrets. To not blame ourselves for the parting. To not...worry too much about it. Or dwell on the pain of it, the hurt.
Easier said than done. It works best, I think, when you focus on what you are currently doing and what lies ahead of you. The people you will meet. The people who are still in your life right now. Present. And try not to look backwards too much. Not think too much about the ones that are gone.
This is what I got from the issue and why I liked it. Not sure it makes much sense though to anyone outside my brain...would like to think it did. Either way, here it is, make of it what you will.
Speaking for myself, I know that this often true. Issue 11 of Buffy S8, much like issue 10 before it, and if I were really honest, most of the tv series did, spoke to me on an emotional and deeply personal level. And I think that when we view art - whether it be a painting, a song, a clay pot, a comic book or a tv show - our emotional response to that piece of art, our ability to identify with the feelings the artist appears to be conveying whether they realize it or not - has a lot to do with how we embrace it.
Review and Personal Analysis of A Beautiful Sunset - Issue 11 of BTVS S8
Whedon's comics are not filled with action - he is deliberately building up to the action over a long period of time. They are not episodic short stories, as I first suspected, but rather chapters in a lenghthy novel. Each episode linking to the next. Revealing a bit more of the characters, plots and themes. And since the novel is titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer - the focus is on her - in somewhat the same way that the focus is on say Lymond in Dorothy Dunnett's The Chronicles of Lymond. We get other points of view, and are often in points of view that are commenting on the heroine - but not necessarily in a complimentary way - reminding me a great deal of Dunnet's Lymond novels. (Whedon plots his novels and creates characterizations that are suprisingly similar to Dunnett's which explains why there was a fan discussion group that focused on Dunnett and Buffy.) At any rate, I would not be the least bit surprised if the slow build is frustrating a few comic book fans who are used to the more episodic and action packed super-hero comics. While losing the tv fans, who miss the romantic entanglements and screen chemistry of the actors - unused to this format, not to mention the extraordinarly long wait between issues. (Not as bad by the way as the wait between X-Men issues - Whedon may be many things, but a fast writer is not amongst them. I've waited up to six months between X-men issues.) As far as the art goes, it is getting better with each issue. This issue, Jeanty actually managed to put the recognizable dent in Buffy's nose. And I could tell the women apart. While I prefer Cliff Richards, Jeanty did a good job with this issue. Best so far.
Anywho..there is a speech in the middle of the issue, which by itself isn't all that meaningful or fantastic, but if you read it within the context of the whole series and well, if you have experienced something similar on some level (most of us have, I suspect - those who haven't are incredibly lucky) - it will speak to you much as it did me. Differently most likely, but it will. And if you are anything like me, you may feel a little less lonely when you read it. A little less like a freak.
The speech occurs during a battle with a bunch of vampires. Buffy has taken Satsu, one of her slayers, to fight vamps. During the fight, Buffy reveals to Satsu that she knows the girl is in love with her and that this okay. Granted Buffy isn't gay, but as she notes - there's really no way anyone would know that at the moment. "Not that you would know," she says.
No, the problem isn't just that she doesn't return Satsu's romantic love. She actually appreciates it even if she can't return it. And has learned enough by now to know that you can love someone without the necessity of it being returned. Plus knowing someone as cool as Satsu loves her, makes her feel a little less lonely. No...the problem is that people who love her, and more importantly she allows herself to care about and love back, even count on - have a funky way of either dying or just plain leaving - disappearing even.
Here's the speech: People who love me tend to...oh, die[Joyce, Kendra]." She looks at her scythe. "Maybe go to a hell dimension[Angel], or burn up[Spike],or they start letting vamps suck on 'em and they leave[Riley], they all leave, even my friends [Anya, Tara, Willow, Giles, Wood (okay maybe he wasn't a friend), her father], sooner or later everybody realizes there's something wrong...something wrong with me, or around me, or...Wow. Did not mean to end up there.
Of course when I read this speech - I thought, wait what about Xander or Dawn. They are still there. Or even the slayers. Willow is too, sort of, as is Giles - even though she rarely sees them or speaks to them and feels incredibly disconnected from them both - the two people she counted on most once upon a time. But...the thing of it is, when you have one or two steady folks in your life, who have always been there, you fear depending on them too much - you need/want more. You fear not having more. And you worry about the multitudes or at least it appears to be mulititudes that have left. You focus on the people who are gone, not the one's who have stayed. It's silly, I know. But...there it is.
Sometimes you think just because you aren't in contact, aren't talking, haven't seen the person - that they are gone. They don't love you anymore. They won't come back. They aren't connected. And most likely don't think of you. That you don't register. Or worse, you do, and they hate you.
It's human nature I think to think these thoughts. To feel these things. To fear being disconnected. Or maybe it is only me that feels this way - it's hard to know sometimes for certain until that is, you read a comic book and discover the lead character feels much the same way you do, a lead character who sprouts from the brain of a relative stranger.
At any rate - this has been playing on my mind a lot lately, which explains why I reacted to it so strongly. Plagued with nightmares of losing the people currently in my life. And plagued by nightmares of those who left it ages ago. Most recently people I knew and loved in college. A boy, blond haired, tall, and thin who wrote poetry and sang country folk songs similar to Johnny Cash. A friend not a lover. Who understood me. And I haven't heard from or seen since 1989.
Back to Buffy. At the end of the issue after fighting someone named Twighlight (who I'm guessing may be the big reveal that is rumored to happen in next month's issue - a rather big reveal that will sell out the next issue - stores have been told to get extra copies)), she has been somewhat demoralized and is beginning to question her mission. She turns to Xander and states: "Are we doing any good? We've been fighting more demons, but...But it just seems like there's more demons to fight, and what, is that because of us?"
A speech that reminds me a great deal of one in the film I saw this afternoon. Where a bone weary sheriff, policing a wasteland, asks another bone weary sheriff - after seeing what amounts to a massacre - if there is a point. They fight the demons. But more keep coming.
The answer...is well much the same in both the film and this issue, and it spoke to me in both because we live in odd times. Although as the decripet deputy in the film, I saw, No Country for Old Men, puts it - these times are no stranger than the past. We just think they are. After the primaries this week - I thought does it matter who becomes President of the US?
Does it matter if the earth's climate is going nutty? I can't do anything. What I'm doing feels like little more than a drop in the bucket. And my life seems to be all about work right now...and that scares me. I, like Buffy, feel lonely and disconnected and frustrated by it. Too focused on making "my job" work to exert the energy or take the time to change that.
What Xander tells Buffy is this: "Maybe now we're only cleaning up messes, but we're just getting started. What you've created here is a lot more than just monster fighters. It's you know a.."
"Connection."
Her tragedy is she can't feel it. And he says maybe she isn't supposed to as leader. But I wonder...it echoes too closely to what I remember an old man telling a bone weary sheriff at the end of the movie I just saw - to think you can change everything is vanity. We can only do small things. We feel connected sure, but it comes and goes. This country is hard on people.
When you spend a lot of time inside your own head, you lose perspective of the world around you. Lose the connection. As Xander puts it - "Buff, seriously, you spend too much time alone."
Struggling for a balance is constant, I think.
What I also identified with is a sense that Buffy keeps looking backwards. It is hard not to. Reliving her fight with Caleb, the evil minister, or her glory days. And her boyfriends, the ones who died, the ones who left...as well as her friends.
I read recently a piece of great advice in the oddest place - a newspaper or TV guide horoscope, it said:
"You will find life is a lot easier if you stop looking at the past and focus solely on the future."
I think this may be true for us all. While it is helpful to learn from history, dwelling on it, only holds us back. Letting go of the past...is I think sometimes the only way to move foreward. People leave us in life - they either die, move away or we do, dump us or we dumb them, get too busy or we just for whatever reason lose contact with them - that does not make us losers, it just is, it is inevitable and it happens to us all, in that respect at least we are not alone.
The tough thing is to learn how to let go of them, to hold onto the pleasant memories, but not the regrets. To not blame ourselves for the parting. To not...worry too much about it. Or dwell on the pain of it, the hurt.
Easier said than done. It works best, I think, when you focus on what you are currently doing and what lies ahead of you. The people you will meet. The people who are still in your life right now. Present. And try not to look backwards too much. Not think too much about the ones that are gone.
This is what I got from the issue and why I liked it. Not sure it makes much sense though to anyone outside my brain...would like to think it did. Either way, here it is, make of it what you will.
