Buffy S8 Review and a bit on writing...
Nov. 5th, 2009 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatPicked up the Buffy comic today and distracted self with it, along with General Hospital - which I'm adoring right now, it's a great story, with wonderful music and operatic overtones, makeing me think that I should see more Opera, something tells me that I have an affinity for it. The Buffy comic...was a bit on the disappointing side, but it has been for quite some time now so am sort of getting used to it. I think I've figured out where Whedon is going with it and why. And over all, I still love and identify with his themes and major two female characters, Buffy and Willow, even if the others have sort of fallen by the wayside.
When I picked up the comic, the store owner asked if it was written by one of the tv show writers. I responded - yes, Jane Espenson wrote for the tv show, she also wrote for BSG, and Star Trek or rather one of the Star Trek's and the fact that I know all of that..yeah, I'm not a geek. Sigh. Definitely a geek.;-) I added that this, meaning the comic, was unfortunately not Jane's best work.
The most interesting thing about the comic though was the letters page - there's a rather fascinating discourse between a fan and Scott Allie that made me sort of respect Allie's pov for a change or at least understand it. The fan was discussing how important it was for fans of a story to know that it was pre-planned, that the plot and world were built and outlined in advance, not completely but enough that things made sense, and something wouldn't pop out of nowhere or cause the world to fall into chaos.
The fan said this: I do think fans tend to prefer things to be specified ahead of time. There could be a number of reasons why this is so, but I think the main one is that a fan finds a world (and its characters, plots, and relationships) more satisfying when they "make sense"/"feel real". In order to make sense and feel real, it's important that each new piece of information that is revealed about the world is consistent with what we already know. That is, each new thing we learn should make the world make more sense, not threaten to throw it into unpredictable chaos. That doesn't mean there can't be any surprises - it's more that surprises should (usually) make sense iin retrospect (think of the Xisth Sense - if the twist ending had been tacked on without incorporating it into the earlier story, it would have been horrible; people liked it because it suddenly made everything make sense). People general prefer to have the "damn, I should have realize!" feeling than the "where the heck did they pull that one from ?" feeling.
So the problem with leaving things to be decided later is that, since you didn't know what had happeneded when writing about the intervening time, there wouldn't have been any clues about it. Even if you didn't intend to leave any clues as such, simply knowing what happened in the back of your mind would have likely subtly shaped how you told the rest of the story, since even small events tend to get tangled up with the rest of reality you're trying to create. Therefore, when making delayed decisions, the reveal, if and when it occurs, may seem to have come out of nowhere, leaving the world making less sense and being less satsifying.
Also the other aspect is simply that sometimes it's rather transparent (at least in appearance) that something is being deliberately treated in the "hey we'll figure it out later" way ....This can be irritating because it can create the feeling rightly or wrongly, that the writer thinks they are smarter than the audience and that they can get away with making things up as they go along rather than carefully planning.
Allie's response: I don't think I've ever really approached stories from this fan point of view, so I thind this all real interesting. I disagree with some of what Ryan says - that you need to have these things worked out, carved in stone, in order to convince the reader. In Hellboy, there is a lot of stuff we leave vague so we can change or work it out later. ...Too much careful planning can kill a story dead [God, don't I know it!], and in my experience, the one thing that careful long-term planning really guarantees is that the plans will change....[I'm leaving out spoilers on the comics]
Being flexible on this sort of thing keeps the story alive. Writers will often tell you that they don't work from outlines because if the story isn't able to surprise them, they know it won't surprise the reader. [That and it is tedious as hell to write from an outline. Too much like work if you ask me.] Every writer and sometimes every story has a different balance between planning and improv, and we all want the feeling of solving a mystery.
I find myself, oddly enough, agreeing with Allie. Except with one caveat - the problem with writing a comic or serial tv series is you cannot go back and change the first chapter, like you can in a novel. I can write like Allie states above - as long as no one sees each chapter until it's done and I've rewritten, revised, and fixed the inconsistencies. There are always a couple. But if I were writing it as a TV series? I'd have to be certain that I kept track.
Now unlike most fans, who I'm guessing agree with the letter writer, or Ryan, I'm a bit more tolerant of the chaos not completely, I like it to make sense, but more tolerant than some. See I disagree with Ryan the fan on one particular bit - planned stories are NOT real. Life cannot be planned. We are thrown curve balls that screw up our plans every day of the week. We don't know what is going to happen next. We don't know what happened to the person halfway around the globe. We can't see all the variables or all the people or all the things that can screw us up. I think the reason fans like Ryan and even myself want a plan, want it to make sense is because it comforts us. Our lives feel so chaotic, so out of our control, so random, as if there is some joker upstairs pulling strings and throwing stuff at us out of nowhere, that we yearn for meaning, for planning, for order in stories. We want our stories to make sense at least in part. Because reality painfully does not.
I think the reason soap operas and tv shows like Buffy often feel more real to me than say a well planned affair such as Law & Order or CSI, is because the writer is to a degree making it up as he goes along. The characters much like we all are, are at the writer's whim. They are Pirandello's six characters in search of an author, in search of a plot, of something that makes sense. There's something oddly comforting to me to see characters at the whim of a capricious writer...but at the same time, I do, admittedly yearn for the order.
Allie states in his response to Ryan the fan - that most of the story is planned. The plot arc is. The reveal on Twilight is. The romantic relationships in the tale were. It was smaller bits that were not. And that I think to a degree is true of most tv shows and serials, except of course the ones that change writers so many times, the new ones have no clue what the old ones did.
In the Buffy Retreat Part 5 Comic - we end up with a super-buffy, or a buffy who can fly, who I'm guessing got all the goddesses' powers, although that is not clear in the final frame - just from the reviews I've read on it. The story itself is about a battle going badly for both sides - yet another allegory on why war does not work for anyone involved. I still think JRR Tolkien did this best in The Hobbit - as I was telling someone at work today, who is re-reading the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit in a way does what the LOTR tries, far better and in less pages - it discusses why war does not work. Why war destroys. Buffy is more or less making the same point. Neither Twilight nor Buffy really win here. Although it appears Twilight has...but that's the thing about victories in war, they all to a degree are false ones.
The issue is also about power - the giving it up, and the regaining of it. Buffy has a lot of power. She gave it up. Now she has it all back but to what end?
I'm not sure what Riley's role is here. He's supposed to be spying for Buffy, but he didn't appear to give her any useful information - including who Twilight is. Sort of liked his interaction with Buffy and his comment regarding Buffy - which echoed past comments. Not quite sure what his purpose was or why the writer bothered to include him. (shrugs). But had more or less figured out he was supposed to be Buffy's spy, what I haven't figured out is if he is also Twilight's spy? I'm guessing if Riley survived, there may be another twist in the works?
The Dawn/Xander romance is leaving me cold. Which is surprising, because I was sort of shipping them in Season 7 and a good portion of S8. Now that they are together? They are irritating me, particularly Dawn. Not sure why. It may be how they are being written?
But I do adore the Willow-Buffy story.
So who died? Anyone important? Or just random red shirts that we don't care all that much about? I hate it when shows and comics do this...they have huge wars, and convienently the only people who die are the ones we didn't know that well or otherwise known to Trekkies the "red shirt" syndrom or "random good guy syndrom". That's not how real life works.
Other than that? I liked the issue and adore the cover. On the art front? Am still having troubles telling characters apart. OZ looked like Andrew. Giles looked like Andrew. Riley looks like Andrew. Kennedy looked like Satsu. And Dawn looked like a random slayer. I think they felt the need to get rid of all of the random slayers, so we'd be less confused as to who was who. Going with that thematic they should also kill off Andrew - that would simplify things a bit. But also piss off fans. Andrew is admittedly growing on me. So maybe kill off Riley and Oz - they aren't doing all that much. Either that or put name tages or dialogue tags on them.
When I picked up the comic, the store owner asked if it was written by one of the tv show writers. I responded - yes, Jane Espenson wrote for the tv show, she also wrote for BSG, and Star Trek or rather one of the Star Trek's and the fact that I know all of that..yeah, I'm not a geek. Sigh. Definitely a geek.;-) I added that this, meaning the comic, was unfortunately not Jane's best work.
The most interesting thing about the comic though was the letters page - there's a rather fascinating discourse between a fan and Scott Allie that made me sort of respect Allie's pov for a change or at least understand it. The fan was discussing how important it was for fans of a story to know that it was pre-planned, that the plot and world were built and outlined in advance, not completely but enough that things made sense, and something wouldn't pop out of nowhere or cause the world to fall into chaos.
The fan said this: I do think fans tend to prefer things to be specified ahead of time. There could be a number of reasons why this is so, but I think the main one is that a fan finds a world (and its characters, plots, and relationships) more satisfying when they "make sense"/"feel real". In order to make sense and feel real, it's important that each new piece of information that is revealed about the world is consistent with what we already know. That is, each new thing we learn should make the world make more sense, not threaten to throw it into unpredictable chaos. That doesn't mean there can't be any surprises - it's more that surprises should (usually) make sense iin retrospect (think of the Xisth Sense - if the twist ending had been tacked on without incorporating it into the earlier story, it would have been horrible; people liked it because it suddenly made everything make sense). People general prefer to have the "damn, I should have realize!" feeling than the "where the heck did they pull that one from ?" feeling.
So the problem with leaving things to be decided later is that, since you didn't know what had happeneded when writing about the intervening time, there wouldn't have been any clues about it. Even if you didn't intend to leave any clues as such, simply knowing what happened in the back of your mind would have likely subtly shaped how you told the rest of the story, since even small events tend to get tangled up with the rest of reality you're trying to create. Therefore, when making delayed decisions, the reveal, if and when it occurs, may seem to have come out of nowhere, leaving the world making less sense and being less satsifying.
Also the other aspect is simply that sometimes it's rather transparent (at least in appearance) that something is being deliberately treated in the "hey we'll figure it out later" way ....This can be irritating because it can create the feeling rightly or wrongly, that the writer thinks they are smarter than the audience and that they can get away with making things up as they go along rather than carefully planning.
Allie's response: I don't think I've ever really approached stories from this fan point of view, so I thind this all real interesting. I disagree with some of what Ryan says - that you need to have these things worked out, carved in stone, in order to convince the reader. In Hellboy, there is a lot of stuff we leave vague so we can change or work it out later. ...Too much careful planning can kill a story dead [God, don't I know it!], and in my experience, the one thing that careful long-term planning really guarantees is that the plans will change....[I'm leaving out spoilers on the comics]
Being flexible on this sort of thing keeps the story alive. Writers will often tell you that they don't work from outlines because if the story isn't able to surprise them, they know it won't surprise the reader. [That and it is tedious as hell to write from an outline. Too much like work if you ask me.] Every writer and sometimes every story has a different balance between planning and improv, and we all want the feeling of solving a mystery.
I find myself, oddly enough, agreeing with Allie. Except with one caveat - the problem with writing a comic or serial tv series is you cannot go back and change the first chapter, like you can in a novel. I can write like Allie states above - as long as no one sees each chapter until it's done and I've rewritten, revised, and fixed the inconsistencies. There are always a couple. But if I were writing it as a TV series? I'd have to be certain that I kept track.
Now unlike most fans, who I'm guessing agree with the letter writer, or Ryan, I'm a bit more tolerant of the chaos not completely, I like it to make sense, but more tolerant than some. See I disagree with Ryan the fan on one particular bit - planned stories are NOT real. Life cannot be planned. We are thrown curve balls that screw up our plans every day of the week. We don't know what is going to happen next. We don't know what happened to the person halfway around the globe. We can't see all the variables or all the people or all the things that can screw us up. I think the reason fans like Ryan and even myself want a plan, want it to make sense is because it comforts us. Our lives feel so chaotic, so out of our control, so random, as if there is some joker upstairs pulling strings and throwing stuff at us out of nowhere, that we yearn for meaning, for planning, for order in stories. We want our stories to make sense at least in part. Because reality painfully does not.
I think the reason soap operas and tv shows like Buffy often feel more real to me than say a well planned affair such as Law & Order or CSI, is because the writer is to a degree making it up as he goes along. The characters much like we all are, are at the writer's whim. They are Pirandello's six characters in search of an author, in search of a plot, of something that makes sense. There's something oddly comforting to me to see characters at the whim of a capricious writer...but at the same time, I do, admittedly yearn for the order.
Allie states in his response to Ryan the fan - that most of the story is planned. The plot arc is. The reveal on Twilight is. The romantic relationships in the tale were. It was smaller bits that were not. And that I think to a degree is true of most tv shows and serials, except of course the ones that change writers so many times, the new ones have no clue what the old ones did.
In the Buffy Retreat Part 5 Comic - we end up with a super-buffy, or a buffy who can fly, who I'm guessing got all the goddesses' powers, although that is not clear in the final frame - just from the reviews I've read on it. The story itself is about a battle going badly for both sides - yet another allegory on why war does not work for anyone involved. I still think JRR Tolkien did this best in The Hobbit - as I was telling someone at work today, who is re-reading the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit in a way does what the LOTR tries, far better and in less pages - it discusses why war does not work. Why war destroys. Buffy is more or less making the same point. Neither Twilight nor Buffy really win here. Although it appears Twilight has...but that's the thing about victories in war, they all to a degree are false ones.
The issue is also about power - the giving it up, and the regaining of it. Buffy has a lot of power. She gave it up. Now she has it all back but to what end?
I'm not sure what Riley's role is here. He's supposed to be spying for Buffy, but he didn't appear to give her any useful information - including who Twilight is. Sort of liked his interaction with Buffy and his comment regarding Buffy - which echoed past comments. Not quite sure what his purpose was or why the writer bothered to include him. (shrugs). But had more or less figured out he was supposed to be Buffy's spy, what I haven't figured out is if he is also Twilight's spy? I'm guessing if Riley survived, there may be another twist in the works?
The Dawn/Xander romance is leaving me cold. Which is surprising, because I was sort of shipping them in Season 7 and a good portion of S8. Now that they are together? They are irritating me, particularly Dawn. Not sure why. It may be how they are being written?
But I do adore the Willow-Buffy story.
So who died? Anyone important? Or just random red shirts that we don't care all that much about? I hate it when shows and comics do this...they have huge wars, and convienently the only people who die are the ones we didn't know that well or otherwise known to Trekkies the "red shirt" syndrom or "random good guy syndrom". That's not how real life works.
Other than that? I liked the issue and adore the cover. On the art front? Am still having troubles telling characters apart. OZ looked like Andrew. Giles looked like Andrew. Riley looks like Andrew. Kennedy looked like Satsu. And Dawn looked like a random slayer. I think they felt the need to get rid of all of the random slayers, so we'd be less confused as to who was who. Going with that thematic they should also kill off Andrew - that would simplify things a bit. But also piss off fans. Andrew is admittedly growing on me. So maybe kill off Riley and Oz - they aren't doing all that much. Either that or put name tages or dialogue tags on them.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-16 05:39 pm (UTC)Oh there was extensive whining from Vincent K. and Sarah Michelle Gellar as well. Gellar was still put out about how they treated her during the auditions, and did not like where they were taking her character in S6 and was quite vocal about it. VK was upset that he had no say on his character and couldn't evolve the character.
Whedon stated at one point that his mistake - was becoming buddy-buddy with the actors in the early seasons and forgetting that he's their boss and they need to respect him and do what he tells them.
Actors, unless they are producing the show, have relatively little control over what happens on the set or on-screen. Imagine going to work each day and being told to make out with a co-worker, on-camera, half-nude, who you don't particularly like and annoys you?
Or one that you like but wouldn't particularly want to be nude around? It's hard to feel too sorry for them - because they did pick this profession knowing full well what it required and they get paid a lot of money to do it.
Remember a producer/director telling me once - hardest thing is directing actors. I'd buy that - I tried doing it at the high school level and hated it.;-)
Now I'm intrigued to know who this minority is, of course. I can guess, but maybe I'm wrong.
I'm trying really really hard to not to piss people off who may or may not be reading this and be diplomatic, because mileage varies. The minority is the folks who felt rightly or wrongly that the tv series was sending a negative moral message to impressionable minds. And were outraged that Whedon would put Buffy with Spike after Spike attempted to rape her in Seeing Red in any romantic capacity whatsoever, because according to their experiences and worldview doing such a thing promoted violence against women and promoted a message that men can rape women and get away with it. Also that it was obviously impossible in their worldview and to anyone with half a brain that a man who attempted to rape a woman would ever in a million years feel remorse for this or be trustworthy or try to atone, nor should he ever be allowed back in her life. They felt that her forgiving him in any way or letting herself love him or kissing him - was obviously an endorsement of rape, and anyone who thought otherwise was an apologist or hopeless romantic. Also they felt rightly or wrongly that obviously Spike could not be redeemed nor was redeemed because he still wore Nikki's jacket and dissed her memory to her son, the righteous Robin Wood. (shrugs)
And they do not listen or see any argument or view different from theirs as legitmate or unoffensive, were completely unaware that they were being offensive to anyone else, because you know they are right, you are wrong, and they are in the beleagured minority - and if you try to, you get shot down and well, called all sorts of nasty names.
Sigh. Aren't you glad you asked? ;-)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-17 07:02 pm (UTC)Well, at least I know which minority you were talking about now. It was the first I mentioned, not the second. I stay far, far away from them.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-18 02:38 am (UTC)Sigh. Wise move. If only I were able to. One of them I happen to be related to. ;-) (Brothers...sigh)
And..I've made friends with people like this. So try to be diplomatic. But it is a pet peeve and nothing gets me angrier than that type of reasoning.
Hence the ranty above.
I have nicknamed the faction in my head the holier-than-thous, which I know, I know, is hardly diplomatic.
But I can't help it! LOL!
no subject
Date: 2009-11-20 12:38 pm (UTC)