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[shadowkat]

We're having what one of my cubicle neighbors likes to call "air conditioning/air circulation wars" at work. It is freezing in the morning and hot in the afternoon. Yesterday, I was boiling at 79 degrees and in a sweater shirt (couldn't take it off, nothing under it except the bra) and today I'm freezing with the air on full blast.

Currently eating soup, which I made over the weekend and is quite tasty.
While I'm getting better - didn't feel like braving the cold to go out to lunch with my colleagues who were taking one of the secretaries out for her birthday. I did contribute two bucks to her lunch though.

Everyone at work has the dreaded it. They either have a sinus infection they can't get rid of or bronchitis...which has lingered and become a sinus infection. We're all taking some brand of antibotic. Never knew there were so many brands...

Oh, in regards to Buffy - there are six characters I despised on that show, luckily for me they were all peripherial characters or guest characters, and rarely on it. Unfortunately for me, about four of them have popped up in the comic regardless of whether or not they were killed.
They are in no particular order - Harmony, Andrew, Warren, Amy, Robin Wood, and Sam Finn (Riley's wife). Of the six, the only actor I liked was the one who played Warren - he was great in it and in everything else he's been in. I don't expect I was supposed to like him in Buffy, much.

Comments

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about the temperature war at work... I've been in so many offices over the years with that problem (it often comes down to a power struggle between an office manager and someone else, each torturing everyone in the office while they try to show supremacy over the temperate settings). I've always tried to stay out of it by wearing a very thin light weight blouse or shell with a sweater or jacket than can be put on or removed throughout the day as the war rages on.... I just hope it doesn't bring your flu back on worse, because 79° is WAY too hot, and air-conditioning is just insane!

Re Buffy: Oh dear, this is something we really disagree on... well, except, I get why Harmony is annoying, but 'Disharmony' is one of my all time favorite episodes on Angel, and Andrew always worked for me right from the beginning....
I found Warren to be interesting but too creepy until I became a huge Common Rotation fan, and now I love to rewatch all his scenes.... And Amy got so twisted on Buffy that I was interested in seeing her in S8, just to see where Joss is going with that.

But I actually agree w/Robin Wood and Sam Finn, they were dull. Of course I also found Riley himself to be deadly dull (and I haven't liked the actor in other roles either).

I've been rewatching all of Buffy & Angel w/a friend who has never seen them before... we just got through 'The Body'. These shows just do not get old for me.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Ah, you probably aren't alone. A lot of Buffy fans don't get why Andrew and Harm get on my nerves.

I should probably qualify the above statement, or clarify it by stating - that I actually liked both characters on Angel or rather the episodes featuring them on Angel - Damage, Harms Way, Disharmony - partly because they were used sparringly and not in a way that tends to push my buttons. For some reason - the Angel writers developed the characters better and provided them with a depth that you don't see in Buffy. That said Espenson dealt with both rather well.

Harmony annoys me because she represents the girly girls that so many people stereotype women or believe women should be like. Pretty. Petite. Girly. With unicorns. And tiny fuffy doggies. And makeup. And skirts. She's such, if you will excuse the term, a bimbo. I don't mind male bimbos - because we see them in tv so rarely. Spike in some respects was depicted as a male bimbo on Buffy or sex object. So that felt different and rare. But women as bimbos are on every tv show out there - particularly sci-fi and comics.
Girls who exist for another reason but to titilate the male viewer and make him feel all manly and protective.
Like I said, the character just pushed my buttons - particularly on Buffy, not so much on Angel - where she was oddly enough depicted as a bit less girly. There were exceptions - Fool For Love was one. But mostly, she felt like the stereotypical bimbo.

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Harmony annoys me because she represents the girly girls that so many people stereotype women or believe women should be like. ... She's such, if you will excuse the term, a bimbo.

Girls who exist for another reason but to titilate the male viewer and make him feel all manly and protective.

Harmony didn't exist to "titilate the male viewer". She existed for viewers to feel superior to. She's the trope the show was attacking, and a strawman to beat down.

The problem for me, though, is that she's an actual character within the show with some genuine depth and the strawman treatment eventually stops looking justified and starts looking like elitism.

Our Heroic storyline could have been better than keeping her as a punchline when her existence raises genuine questions about the vampires you try to help and those you just have to stake, or the free pass given to people just because we know them.

Beyond the fact that plenty of "girly girls" grow up, something Harm isn't allowed to do. You may not like her, which is fine, because characters don't exist to be liked. But I do think there are some problematic elements raised by her role in the story.

Hmmm...interesting, didn't really think of it that way.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. This is actually an interesting point - that I must confess I haven't thought much about, although it may explain in part my own difficulty with how the character is written in the show. I admit that I'm not entirely sure why Harmony bugs me so much. Or for that matter why Andrew does. Or Warren. Or Amy. Or even Jonathan.

I'm thinking your comment here may be hitting the nail on the head:

She existed for viewers to feel superior to. She's the trope the show was attacking, and a strawman to beat down.

The problem for me, though, is that she's an actual character within the show with some genuine depth and the strawman treatment eventually stops looking justified and starts looking like elitism.

I think that may be what is causing dissonance for me. And may be why I have so much difficulty with the character and in particular this issue.
Coupled with a few other things.

Our Heroic storyline could have been better than keeping her as a punchline when her existence raises genuine questions about the vampires you try to help and those you just have to stake, or the free pass given to people just because we know them.

Hmmm, I agree. While I understand why Buffy did not stake Spike in S5-S7, I did not understand why she didn't do it in S4 or up until Intervention in S5. Neither did Spike for that matter. But why she never killed Harmony - that has never made much sense.

And..

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

You may not like her, which is fine, because characters don't exist to be liked. But I do think there are some problematic elements raised by her role in the story.

Quite a few problematic elements actually. If you analyze the series from a social-political pov, it is disturbing and leaves a decidedly bad taste in your mouth. But then, I'd argue about 85% of the tv shows on right now do - specifically the science-fiction/fantasy adventure ones. I'm not completely certain the writers are responsible for this - well not until I started reading the comics. Now, I'm just wondering if they may think they are conveying one set of messages while in actuality conveying another? Or perhaps I'm reading things into it based on my own experiences and "buttons"??

It is hard to know how someone else will interpret what you write or create, after all. And we aren't always aware of the extent that we project our own issues on that which we are watching or reading.

It is more than possible that the reason Harmony bugs me, particularly in this issue, is not for the reasons I suggest in my post above but rather your point - that I sense there are some problematic elements raised by her role in the story, which are creating a dissonance. Particularly as seen in this comic - where once again, a young minority slayer is cruelly slain - in front of Buffy and the world. This time by Harmony, and on reality tv, to humongous ratings and applause - and she, the minority woman slayer, is portrayed by the media as the villian. It bugged me. Or created dissonance - making me feel guilty for reading and even enjoying the story. This may or may not have been Espenson's intent -I'm guessing Espenson sees Harmony as a metaphor for the vampiric nature of celebrity and fame here? (Not sure if you read the comic or not. But in it Harmony is the star of a reality tv series entitled Reality Bites on MTV - where she is followed about and bites and eats people in front of the camera.)

But that doesn't excuse the fact that in a hero story about female empowerment, a white, blond, blue-eyed, pretty girl, with a lot of money - Harmony - appears to constantly get away with murder in the series. Much like Paris Hilton - she even looks and sounds like Paris, just with a better figure. She never pays for her sins. She always gets away intact. Even in Angel this was the case. They never staked her - or punished her. Sure you can say the same thing about Angel and Spike - but we actually see both suffer - Spike in his quest for the soul and burning alive at the mouth of the hellmouth, plus his months in hellLA etc. Same deal with Angel. But Harmony - considered a joke - well - the worst thing that appears to happen to her is Spike slaps her around a bit and breaks up with her?? (Which brings up a separate problem - the male vampires are able to seek redemption or be redeemed or live to seek it, while the female, not so much. Darla, you could argue does - but only because she has a male child that she stakes herself to give birth to and it is his soul, not her own that redeems her. And Harmony appears to seek it in Disharmony, but it is dismissed as a joke.)

Meanwhile in this issue - we see a Hispanic slayer, lower class, street girl, struggling to find her own way, do the right thing - get killed by Harmony in her rich spread, to much fanfair. This would be fine, if it weren't so repetitive of earlier killings of minority slayers - we have Renee, Nikki, and Kendra, just to name three. Here - it is told in the framework of a joke - but the joke isn't funny. It leaves a bitter after-taste. And once again Buffy is looking on, unable to help or even offer comfort. Buffy - the petite, pretty, privileged blond girl - who survives no matter what.

I'm not sure if this was intentional on the writer's parts or not? And I'm not entirely sure if I'm reading more into that than there is.

Nor am I sure if that is what you are getting at, or something else entirely? It's late and I'm trying to write this while listening to the new Beriut CD that I got for Xmas from my brother - so hopefully it is coherent.

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Not sure if you read the comic or not.

I don't.

But that doesn't excuse the fact that in a hero story about female empowerment, a white, blond, blue-eyed, pretty girl, with a lot of money - Harmony - appears to constantly get away with murder in the series. (snip) They never staked her - or punished her. Sure you can say the same thing about Angel and Spike - but we actually see both suffer (snip) But Harmony - considered a joke - well - the worst thing that appears to happen to her is Spike slaps her around a bit and breaks up with her?? (Which brings up a separate problem - the male vampires are able to seek redemption or be redeemed or live to seek it, while the female, not so much.

*Let us note, for a moment, the parallels between Harmony/Spike and Spike/Buffy for a moment. (and Harmony/Cordettes, Spike/Fanged Four) Soulless Spike's suffering relative to the suffering he caused is probably in proportion to Harmony's suffering, though in total I suspect Spike was actually the beneficiary of far more privilege than Harmony over his career.

But back to it - These are not seperate problems. They are one in the same. We do not see Harmony punished because we're not going to see her get Redemption. (She's a bimbo. She's not going to get redemption. Bimbos don't get redemption. Buffy and Cordy are special - they didn't grow out of bimbos - they we're never really bimbos all along and now they get to show us all.)

We don't want to see Harmony go after redemption. We want to keep her in the Paris Hilton box, where we can safely look down upon her as a bimbo and not expend any effort upon her. It allows us to hate the pretty privileged white girl and feel like special members of the elite club who are worthy of that investment. We can go back to that point on BtVS when Cordelia became a member of the circle and started moving toward heroism, and she became someone Willow couldn't hate anymore. But Harmony was safe to hate. And maybe Harmony is hate-able, but needing to have someone to hate isn't a sign of actualization...

We look at Spike. He's the one who said "I'm a soulless monster, but I can be a man" - were we allowing for that because we generally believed in the principle or just because he's special and we're indulging? If we generally believe in the principle, then we have to actually go beyond just doing it for Spike. Anybody can do favors for the people they actually like - commitment is extending that chance to someone they don't have a personal stake in. And within the context of BtVS/AtS, Harmony is the only case study we have.

And my general experience with fandom and the show has been that, whatever people said they believed about Redemption when the issue was Spike, they didn't believe in it when it came to Harmony.

Extending the privilege to people we aren't already predisposed to help is very, very hard. But it's sometimes the difference between a moral stance and an indulgence. That's one of the major problems "Disharmony" raised, particularly for people who saw themselves as Redemptionistas.

On the one hand, if we didn't know her, if she wasn't a part of the stock characters for the writers to re-use - Harmony wouldn't be allowed to live. On the other hand, if we liked her, if we let ourselves know her as a person (let alone part of the inner circle/inteligentsia) would we allow her to grow up and seek redemption.