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shadowkatThe first thing I ever wrote regarding Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on the Buffy Cross & Stake spoiler discussion board in Feburary of 2002, and it was entitled "Giles:the Reluctant Father". It's also the only essay that I lost. I don't have it any more. It's not saved anywhere. It was only posted once - then gone. I think I sent it to a few people or they copied it, before it went into computer hell.
Giles has always been amongst my favorite characters - mostly because of Anthony Stewart Head. I started watching Buffy because of Anthony Stewart Head, who had been tapped to play Rupert Giles. The character interests me, for the same reason most of the Buffy characters do, their contradictions. Giles is a mess of contradictions. He's an educated somewhat prudish, and controlled upper class man on the surface - the epitomy of the British Libraian stereotype, but peel back the layers and you get an urban street tough, capable of breaking your fingers, and getting into a brawl. He's principaled and ethical, yet also ruthless and willing to bend the rules. Also, Giles has spent his life atoning for the stream of ugly mistakes he made as a youth, he is filled to the brim with regrets. Think of him, if you will, as a human version of Spike and Angel. A psuedo Alex from a Clockwork Orange. And I can't help but wonder if Rupert "Ripper" Giles may not have been based on that.
Giles like all of the characters in Buffy, is deeply flawed. And his relationships with the other characters are at times messy, not neat. His own personal baggage often gets in his way.
Buffy, issue 24, focuses mostly on Giles, with bits of Faith and another slayer thrown in.
Unlike the Andrew issue, and No Future for You arc, there isn't much character development in this issue, it is largely plot driven. But I would not say it is devoid of it.
There are about four or five episodes of Buffy the TV Series that provide insight into Giles.
The first group happen during Season 2 and 3 - there's two episodes each, possibly three, that tell reveal the contradictions within this character, and show us a man who is at times, literally, at war with himself and at with the roles he has been chosen and forced to play, mainly by others.
He tells Buffy on at least two occassions that he did not ask to be a Watcher. The first time is in Season One, when he tells her that he wanted to be a fighter pilot, but his father was insistent, this was his "destiny". The second time, in Season 2, during the Dark Age, he tells her more of the story, explaining how he rebelled and what occurred as a result. Instead of using his arcane knowledge as a Watcher, he and a group of friends summoned a demon, who later, ends up killing them, one by one. Giles keeps the secret to himself, until Buffy is put in danger and he is forced to reveal it. Later in this same season, Giles' love, Jenny Calendar, who is perhaps his soul mate or the closest he'll come if you believe in such things, is brutally murdered by Angelus while she attempts to return his soul to him. This forever changes Gile's attitude towards Angel and vampires in general. Not that he was particularly fond of them to begin with. In a rage, he attempts to kill Angelus, almost killing himself in the process. Buffy saves him. In the third season, we meet Ripper or young Giles - and he is the aforementioned street tough, smoking, cursing, flirtatous, and sort of hot. A lot like Spike, actually, except human. As does Buffy, during a spell that makes the adults act like teens. We also see, in the episode Helpless, that Ripper is still inside Giles, Giles is still a little on the ruthless, manipulative side. It's in this episode that he strips Buffy of her powers, without her knowledge, then sets her up to fight a nasty vampire. He is still willing to be cruel to get the job done. But, the cruelity is in a way a symptom of the role he's been forced to take on - that of Watcher. In Helpless, he turns against the council and attempts to save Buffy and her mother. The Council fires him as a result and Buffy eventually forgives him for his betrayal. We learn repeatedly, in Helpless and others, why he hates being a Watcher - in Nightmares, Season 1, he tells us that his worst nightmare is Buffy's death. We get more information in Prophecy Girl and Fool for Love, where he states that all Watcher's sooner or latter have to watch the girl they taught die. When it finally happens in The Gift, Giles stays for a while, then finally leaves. Unable to handle it much longer.
The episode Restless - perhaps, gets across Giles' mixed feelings regarding Buffy and his role as Watcher the best. In Restless, Giles sees Buffy as both a child and a weapon. He doesn't really understand her. She's his child, but then she's not. Is he needed? He's not sure. He'd rather be elsewhere - in London perhaps, with a family, living another life.
But leaving, he discovers, has consequences. When he returns, drifting into the cave of his own subconscious fears, he encounters a heartless Xander, and a spiritless Willow, drifting up on stage to do his thing, he's scalped by the first slayer...who he states, upon reflection: never needed a watcher or rather never had one. All of this is foreshadowing for what lies ahead in seasons 6 and 7, when Giles has to battle Willow, and loses, and breaks with Buffy...in a failed attempt to control her. He is still attempting to be her Watcher, but Buffy, as Spike wisely notes in Touched, has long surpassed such needs. She has died twice. And outlived his services. She's no longer the adolescent girl that requires a fatherly mentor, but a grown woman who has had to fight for a job, make ends meet, raise a sister, and form an army. She's fought too many battles both alone and by his side, but mostly alone, to require his guidance or fatherly advice. And Buffy, has abandonment issues of her own, many of which have little to do with Giles, and many Giles has inadvertently made worse via his own reluctance to take on the role of father, if only in an adoptive capacity.
Enter Faith, first in Empty Spaces, later in No Future for You - an attempt for Giles at least for a second chance, a way to atone. As he states in No Future, albeit vaguely.
Faith, unlike Buffy, lacks the confidence and self-worth to push him aside or so he thinks.
She needs him.
There's an interesting bit of dialogue in the middle of Safe. It is between Giles, and former Watcher Duncan Fillworth.
Duncan: "You see children do not have the coping mechanisms of internalizing their problems and smiling through pain. Children are pure need not unlike vampires. Have you ever thought, Rupert, about what it must be like to be a vampire?"
Rupert: I don't think I quite understand you.
Duncan: The vampire is regret personified. A hunger for life that's been damned to never be satisfied. "
So Duncan is using slayers to feed a demon that feeds off of regret. The vampires stay away because vampires, like slayers and children are filled with unsatisfied hunger, with regret.
Duncan gets the slayers to his town, by letting word get out of a sanctuary for slayers who don't want to be chosen, who want to be just normal girls living a normal life. Girls filled with regret.
Rupert: This is vegeance for you, isn't it Duncan?
Duncan: Remember who you were Rupert. A Watcher you've alwasy sent slayers to their deaths. I've saved the lives of everyone in this town. You're welcome to stay Rupert.
Rupert: This is madness.
Duncan: You weren't here. The vampires slaughtered us! Every one! And for what? For giving counsel to the girls that rejected us. Your Buffy! Think of what she's done to you! I remember when the teacher died. The one you loved. She died because Buffy ignored you and loved a vampire. Jenny Calendar? Do you remember her, Rupert?
Giles runs to save Faith and Courtney who he realizes are fighting the demon.
Duncan continues: "The creature will feed on him as well. Thoughts of Calendar and having let the girls go to the beast on their own...rupert giles may die of regret before the demon even gets to feed."
Regret. Does Giles regret what happened with Jenny? We know he regrets allowing Angel that close, not killing him when he had the chance. And possibly Spike as well, who bears far too close a resemblance to Ripper.
But he may also to a degree resent Buffy for moving on without him, beyond him.
Or at least part of him does. And it may well be that part that he is now fighting against, and has become aware of?
Giles' war like all the characters and most of us, is not with others, but mostly with himself. We are as the saying goes our own worst enemies. Duncan represents the world Giles left behind, the world that Caleb and the First destroyed, although the Watcher Council had lost it's power long before that day, as far back as Season Five, when Buffy realized they could not exist without her. That she'd pushed past them. She was anomaly, the girl who cheated death, not once, but now twice. She knew more than they did about fighting the vampires. And instead of the Watcher's playing general in their isolated and safe homes, Buffy did...in the field.
Their way of life, as the way of life of the old German town, is antiquated and out of date.
Something out of an old dusty Dracula novel. Vampires no longer lurk on the fringes, are no longer considered something in books, but rather, the current novelty or thing of the moment. (Potentially a commentary by the writers of our own society's increasingly odd romantic flirtation with the fictional monsters. ) And the Watchers...now, much like the slayers they created and taught are being pushed into hiding. Making one wonder if the Watchers were entirely wrong regarding their warning about keeping one's identity secret and not muttering too loudly about vampires?
The metaphors ...about power, and it's slow deterioation, are apparent. The Watcher council is relegated to a small quaint and somewhat stereotypical town, reminding me of something out of a storybook. As Faith states - "why does the sanctuary look a town out of a Dracula novel?"
Everyone in the town is old. The children are gone. And the vampires at the beginning of the book tell Faith that they are the in-thing now. It's cool to be a vamp. Faith, always the outsider, is unimpressed. Less so, when she's called her frenemy and rival's name, Buffy.
She's playing slayer to Giles' Watcher. Yet, not really. They appear to be more comrades than teacher/student. In a relationship Buffy may have wanted but could never quite have. And both are chock full of regret.
The demon itself is a metaphor, an octopus with arms, sucking the life from its prey, devoring them as it plagues them with items of regret, monsters and loved ones from past and present. For Courteny - her fighting parents who she left behind to become a slayer, for Faith- the vamp who got away. The Octupus like regret, strangles us with it's tentacles, and sucks our passion away. Suck. Like the vampire, feeding, to fill a hole that can never be filled. Spike and Angel forever searching and never satisfied, with or without their souls, simply because they are vampires. And Buffy...finding comfort in their company, because like them she has more regret than she can bear, and no end in sight.
Giles regrets bringing her into this life, yet knows he had no other choice. Both were chosen.
As Faith states at the end, you people wanna live? Then you fight. And only one lesson, kid, aim for the heart. Where regret lives.
Overall, not a bad issue. I probably found more inside it than was there, but then again, maybe not. I've only seen the editor interviewed and editors aren't necessarily the best of storytellers...they are too busy nipping and tucking and critiquing. Just as writers aren't necessarily the best editors. Although there are exceptions. I just don't see Scott Allie as amongst them, let's face it the guy comes across as a prick. Although less of one in the interview, I'd read.
Giles has always been amongst my favorite characters - mostly because of Anthony Stewart Head. I started watching Buffy because of Anthony Stewart Head, who had been tapped to play Rupert Giles. The character interests me, for the same reason most of the Buffy characters do, their contradictions. Giles is a mess of contradictions. He's an educated somewhat prudish, and controlled upper class man on the surface - the epitomy of the British Libraian stereotype, but peel back the layers and you get an urban street tough, capable of breaking your fingers, and getting into a brawl. He's principaled and ethical, yet also ruthless and willing to bend the rules. Also, Giles has spent his life atoning for the stream of ugly mistakes he made as a youth, he is filled to the brim with regrets. Think of him, if you will, as a human version of Spike and Angel. A psuedo Alex from a Clockwork Orange. And I can't help but wonder if Rupert "Ripper" Giles may not have been based on that.
Giles like all of the characters in Buffy, is deeply flawed. And his relationships with the other characters are at times messy, not neat. His own personal baggage often gets in his way.
Buffy, issue 24, focuses mostly on Giles, with bits of Faith and another slayer thrown in.
Unlike the Andrew issue, and No Future for You arc, there isn't much character development in this issue, it is largely plot driven. But I would not say it is devoid of it.
There are about four or five episodes of Buffy the TV Series that provide insight into Giles.
The first group happen during Season 2 and 3 - there's two episodes each, possibly three, that tell reveal the contradictions within this character, and show us a man who is at times, literally, at war with himself and at with the roles he has been chosen and forced to play, mainly by others.
He tells Buffy on at least two occassions that he did not ask to be a Watcher. The first time is in Season One, when he tells her that he wanted to be a fighter pilot, but his father was insistent, this was his "destiny". The second time, in Season 2, during the Dark Age, he tells her more of the story, explaining how he rebelled and what occurred as a result. Instead of using his arcane knowledge as a Watcher, he and a group of friends summoned a demon, who later, ends up killing them, one by one. Giles keeps the secret to himself, until Buffy is put in danger and he is forced to reveal it. Later in this same season, Giles' love, Jenny Calendar, who is perhaps his soul mate or the closest he'll come if you believe in such things, is brutally murdered by Angelus while she attempts to return his soul to him. This forever changes Gile's attitude towards Angel and vampires in general. Not that he was particularly fond of them to begin with. In a rage, he attempts to kill Angelus, almost killing himself in the process. Buffy saves him. In the third season, we meet Ripper or young Giles - and he is the aforementioned street tough, smoking, cursing, flirtatous, and sort of hot. A lot like Spike, actually, except human. As does Buffy, during a spell that makes the adults act like teens. We also see, in the episode Helpless, that Ripper is still inside Giles, Giles is still a little on the ruthless, manipulative side. It's in this episode that he strips Buffy of her powers, without her knowledge, then sets her up to fight a nasty vampire. He is still willing to be cruel to get the job done. But, the cruelity is in a way a symptom of the role he's been forced to take on - that of Watcher. In Helpless, he turns against the council and attempts to save Buffy and her mother. The Council fires him as a result and Buffy eventually forgives him for his betrayal. We learn repeatedly, in Helpless and others, why he hates being a Watcher - in Nightmares, Season 1, he tells us that his worst nightmare is Buffy's death. We get more information in Prophecy Girl and Fool for Love, where he states that all Watcher's sooner or latter have to watch the girl they taught die. When it finally happens in The Gift, Giles stays for a while, then finally leaves. Unable to handle it much longer.
The episode Restless - perhaps, gets across Giles' mixed feelings regarding Buffy and his role as Watcher the best. In Restless, Giles sees Buffy as both a child and a weapon. He doesn't really understand her. She's his child, but then she's not. Is he needed? He's not sure. He'd rather be elsewhere - in London perhaps, with a family, living another life.
But leaving, he discovers, has consequences. When he returns, drifting into the cave of his own subconscious fears, he encounters a heartless Xander, and a spiritless Willow, drifting up on stage to do his thing, he's scalped by the first slayer...who he states, upon reflection: never needed a watcher or rather never had one. All of this is foreshadowing for what lies ahead in seasons 6 and 7, when Giles has to battle Willow, and loses, and breaks with Buffy...in a failed attempt to control her. He is still attempting to be her Watcher, but Buffy, as Spike wisely notes in Touched, has long surpassed such needs. She has died twice. And outlived his services. She's no longer the adolescent girl that requires a fatherly mentor, but a grown woman who has had to fight for a job, make ends meet, raise a sister, and form an army. She's fought too many battles both alone and by his side, but mostly alone, to require his guidance or fatherly advice. And Buffy, has abandonment issues of her own, many of which have little to do with Giles, and many Giles has inadvertently made worse via his own reluctance to take on the role of father, if only in an adoptive capacity.
Enter Faith, first in Empty Spaces, later in No Future for You - an attempt for Giles at least for a second chance, a way to atone. As he states in No Future, albeit vaguely.
Faith, unlike Buffy, lacks the confidence and self-worth to push him aside or so he thinks.
She needs him.
There's an interesting bit of dialogue in the middle of Safe. It is between Giles, and former Watcher Duncan Fillworth.
Duncan: "You see children do not have the coping mechanisms of internalizing their problems and smiling through pain. Children are pure need not unlike vampires. Have you ever thought, Rupert, about what it must be like to be a vampire?"
Rupert: I don't think I quite understand you.
Duncan: The vampire is regret personified. A hunger for life that's been damned to never be satisfied. "
So Duncan is using slayers to feed a demon that feeds off of regret. The vampires stay away because vampires, like slayers and children are filled with unsatisfied hunger, with regret.
Duncan gets the slayers to his town, by letting word get out of a sanctuary for slayers who don't want to be chosen, who want to be just normal girls living a normal life. Girls filled with regret.
Rupert: This is vegeance for you, isn't it Duncan?
Duncan: Remember who you were Rupert. A Watcher you've alwasy sent slayers to their deaths. I've saved the lives of everyone in this town. You're welcome to stay Rupert.
Rupert: This is madness.
Duncan: You weren't here. The vampires slaughtered us! Every one! And for what? For giving counsel to the girls that rejected us. Your Buffy! Think of what she's done to you! I remember when the teacher died. The one you loved. She died because Buffy ignored you and loved a vampire. Jenny Calendar? Do you remember her, Rupert?
Giles runs to save Faith and Courtney who he realizes are fighting the demon.
Duncan continues: "The creature will feed on him as well. Thoughts of Calendar and having let the girls go to the beast on their own...rupert giles may die of regret before the demon even gets to feed."
Regret. Does Giles regret what happened with Jenny? We know he regrets allowing Angel that close, not killing him when he had the chance. And possibly Spike as well, who bears far too close a resemblance to Ripper.
But he may also to a degree resent Buffy for moving on without him, beyond him.
Or at least part of him does. And it may well be that part that he is now fighting against, and has become aware of?
Giles' war like all the characters and most of us, is not with others, but mostly with himself. We are as the saying goes our own worst enemies. Duncan represents the world Giles left behind, the world that Caleb and the First destroyed, although the Watcher Council had lost it's power long before that day, as far back as Season Five, when Buffy realized they could not exist without her. That she'd pushed past them. She was anomaly, the girl who cheated death, not once, but now twice. She knew more than they did about fighting the vampires. And instead of the Watcher's playing general in their isolated and safe homes, Buffy did...in the field.
Their way of life, as the way of life of the old German town, is antiquated and out of date.
Something out of an old dusty Dracula novel. Vampires no longer lurk on the fringes, are no longer considered something in books, but rather, the current novelty or thing of the moment. (Potentially a commentary by the writers of our own society's increasingly odd romantic flirtation with the fictional monsters. ) And the Watchers...now, much like the slayers they created and taught are being pushed into hiding. Making one wonder if the Watchers were entirely wrong regarding their warning about keeping one's identity secret and not muttering too loudly about vampires?
The metaphors ...about power, and it's slow deterioation, are apparent. The Watcher council is relegated to a small quaint and somewhat stereotypical town, reminding me of something out of a storybook. As Faith states - "why does the sanctuary look a town out of a Dracula novel?"
Everyone in the town is old. The children are gone. And the vampires at the beginning of the book tell Faith that they are the in-thing now. It's cool to be a vamp. Faith, always the outsider, is unimpressed. Less so, when she's called her frenemy and rival's name, Buffy.
She's playing slayer to Giles' Watcher. Yet, not really. They appear to be more comrades than teacher/student. In a relationship Buffy may have wanted but could never quite have. And both are chock full of regret.
The demon itself is a metaphor, an octopus with arms, sucking the life from its prey, devoring them as it plagues them with items of regret, monsters and loved ones from past and present. For Courteny - her fighting parents who she left behind to become a slayer, for Faith- the vamp who got away. The Octupus like regret, strangles us with it's tentacles, and sucks our passion away. Suck. Like the vampire, feeding, to fill a hole that can never be filled. Spike and Angel forever searching and never satisfied, with or without their souls, simply because they are vampires. And Buffy...finding comfort in their company, because like them she has more regret than she can bear, and no end in sight.
Giles regrets bringing her into this life, yet knows he had no other choice. Both were chosen.
As Faith states at the end, you people wanna live? Then you fight. And only one lesson, kid, aim for the heart. Where regret lives.
Overall, not a bad issue. I probably found more inside it than was there, but then again, maybe not. I've only seen the editor interviewed and editors aren't necessarily the best of storytellers...they are too busy nipping and tucking and critiquing. Just as writers aren't necessarily the best editors. Although there are exceptions. I just don't see Scott Allie as amongst them, let's face it the guy comes across as a prick. Although less of one in the interview, I'd read.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 07:26 pm (UTC)Good point regarding jealousy/envy here. I've been wondering if perhaps "regret" for vampires is supposed to encompass the definition that is more about mourning or missing something. That vampires in this "pure need" are always hungry for life, forced to feed on the life forces of humans, because they are empty inside. And it's interesting to note that the issues of the vampires as they are turned continue to define their existence like you point at with Angelus and Spike.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-08 01:45 am (UTC)I think, in regards to Vampires and the issues that define their existence - Tim Minear wrote the defining episode on that one - Dear Boy - which explains why Angel and Angelus do what they do what they do. In that episode, we meet young Liam who has rebelled against his overbearing and authoritative father that he can never please. He falls under the spell of Darla who turns him into a vampire. The first thing he does is return home and kill his family, leaving his father last.
He takes his name, Angelus or Angel from his little sister who calls him that. When Darla finds him and he reveals what he has done, she tells him that now he will never resolve his problems with his father, they will define him for eternity, he is doomed to forever repeat them. That which defined us when we were living, defines us when we are dead.
Later, they echo the same tale, with Spike in Lies my Parents Told Me and Fool for Love - where it is clear that what defined Spike was his unrequited love for both Cecily and his mother. Except, once ensouled, he realizes that his mother did love him, it was the demon who did not or rather twisted the concept. Angel comes close to getting similar closure with Connor, but not quite - he has in many ways become his father's son - attempting to mold the boy into his own image, manipulate him, and obtain the boy's approval via it. Then again, we can't really say Spike's reached true closure either, he's still a ladies man, he will still fall over backwards to help a woman or go nuts when she spurns him. Just as Buffy continues in her own way to struggle with her parental issues - she echoes Spike with the mother, and Angel with the father...which is why those two relationships continue in some respects to define her, they reflect her own regrets.