shadowkat | (Reply)

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I agree that it's possible (and sometimes necessary) to leave things up in the air when you're writing a series. But I also agree that when you do resolve one of those things, it's usually important to do so in a way that makes what the reader already knows make more sense rather than less. The trick is making your writing and worldbuilding deep and rich enough that when you do resolve something, you can go back to Chapter One and pick out things that will support that resolution and look like deliberate foreshadowing, even though at the time you wrote them, they were nothing of the sort. There are many examples of this on the show, like Spike's "What rhymes with 'lungs?'" line, when Angelus is talking about the lack of poetry in something. I'm positive that in S2 they had no conception of Spike having been a poet in life, but that line supports the idea that he was perfectly.