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shadowkatSupposed to have a snow-storm tonight into tomorrow, but no more than 2-4 inches in the city. Also supposed to be cold, but just below freezing. New York City is whining again about it. Seriously? Makes you want to ship them all to the Midwest, doesn't it?
Have been suffering all day with a head-ache inducingly painful cystic pimple on the bridge of my nose. Red and angry. And embarrassing. Wished I didn't have to be at work, tried everything to cover it up. Gave up. And I had to be in a meeting with 20 people. Also present at the meeting. I know, whine, whine, whine...but there it is.
Being a Buffy fan on the Internet.
A Long Rambling Muse. Inspired by Mark Watches Buffy of all things. 1998-2012. Sort of Stream of Consciousness. Lots of typos, because no time to edit, may do that later.
And includes an explanation of my posting name - how I came up with it, when I first came up with it, and why.
Been reading the Mark Watches bits here and there...and, okay, has the guy watched any serials, or soap operas? Or teen angst dramas? Did he completely miss "My So-Called Life", "Party of Five", "Eight is Enough", "Freaks & Geeks", "Square Pegs", "Popular", "Fame", or the supernatural daytime soap operas: Passions, Dark Shadows,
and Port Charles? Did he never watch 90210? Melrose Place? Skip over Dallas and Dynasty? Never see The Thorn Birds? Or watch St. Elsewhere and L A Law? Did he skip
"Dawson's Creek" which was on the WB at the same time Buffy aired and dealt with similar issues? I want to ask him this:
(Sigh, maybe my age is showing? He may be 25 and was just too young to have seen the good adult and teen serials in the 1980s and 1990s.) I restrain myself.
But seriously if he thinks S2 is out there, just wait until he watches some of the episodes in the later seasons - S3, S4, S5, S6, and S7 had some of the most ground-breaking, controversial and envelope pushing episodes in tv history. Here's a short list:
Where the writers played with narrative structure and jumped beyond the format and the rules, and bit their thumbs at network censors and tv standards. I mean once you've seen Smashed and Restless and HUSH - Innocence seems a bit...silly. So...I'm reading Mark, like everyone else, just to see...his head explode when he reaches the "really" good stuff. He's not there yet.
The best seasons are the latter ones - and I say that, after criticizing the plot of those seasons to death. Whedon's strength was never in his plotting, sorry to say. He plots like a daytime soap opera or marvel comics writer - by the seat of his pants, and centered on emotion or shock value, BUT he is quite good at character centric emotional/psychological writing. Most soap writers are. He reminds me a lot of a daytime soap writer...which I know people hate to hear because people have an odd view of soap operas they are a bit like my friend CW who..has no peripheral vision when it comes to cultural pursuits, for she likes Opera but hates musicals, not seeing the different strengths and attributes of both. But if you've watched as many daytime soaps and as for as long a period as I have - you know the secret, sometimes there's incredibly imaginative and excellent bits of writing hidden in there. Experiments with narrative form that would knock your socks off. It's like any art form, artists create a lot of crap, before they do the excellent thing. Law of averages. Marvel comics was the same way...for every bad comic or cliche story, occasionally you'd hit something that was so good, so amazing, it blew your socks off. Shakespeare's like that too...he wrote a lot of bad plays in there, or didn't you try to read Timon of Athens or Two Gentleman of Verona? And Dickens - sigh, okay I'm admittedly not a good judge of Dickens, considering I still hate the over-filmed Great Expectations. Even Austen (Northanger Abbey makes me cringe).
There used to be a meme that would go around - which episode would you rec for someone to get into Buffy? Impossible. Because Buffy was such a soap, a serial. Each episode built on the next. The plot was less important than the metaphors, the analogies, and the characters. It made no sense to pop into the middle of it. If you watched The Body, without seeing S1-4, you wouldn't understand or get the full emotional impact of that episode. It only worked in context. Soaps and Marvel Comics The X-men were like that. You had to read the whole thing, in order to appreciate that one truly marvelous episode or comic. There are tv shows that are brilliant all the way through more or less - like The Wire. I admit that. But even the Wire had its weak episodes and moments. All TV shows do.
As much as I may criticize Buffy or anything I love, I also see the contradiction in my criticism, the part of it that I do love. For example I may hate the Willow/Spike plot cliches in S6, but I also at the same time love them to pieces. It makes no sense, not even to me. There was just something there embedded deep within all of it that pulled at my gut, my heart, my emotion - screw the head. It wasn't what is appealing to Mark Watches or not the same thing at any rate - so there's a disconnect. But then I'm not male. I'm not in my 20s. I don't make money blogging. And I'm not gay or queer or lesbian. I'm straight. There was another guy who was watching the show for the first time a while back, more scholarly, less emotional, who I liked better. Never been much of a squee-er. Too frigging analytical. Sort of gets in the way. Which was why I joined the ATPO board and stayed away from Bronze Beta or the list-serves such as Yahoo.
Fandom was also different in the early 00s than it is today, in part because the internet was vastly different. We had less gadgets. Less rules. Less guidelines. It was newer. TV shows were on VHS, and we taped them. They were not on DVR or DVD, which didn't really show up until around 2004. Oh they were available, but a lot of people like myself couldn't afford them and stuck with VHS tapes - which wore out quickly. I broke the one with Innocence/Suprise that I taped way back in 1998, along with the Becoming episodes. Had to re-record them off of F/X which was re-running all the episodes on weekdays. Back then - F/X didn't have much original programming and just showed old episodes of shows like Buffy.
Buffy premiered on the wobbly WB, and I remember wanting cable so I'd get better reception. In 2002, S6, it was on the even wobblier UPN. Which didn't come in. And you worried on a weekly basis that you wouldn't get to see the show. Unlike now - if you missed it, you were screwed and had to beg people to either send tapes or wait for it to show up on F/X or in re-runs.
Spoilers ruled. IF you could find them, and Whedon's writers had a lot of fun setting up wild goose chases. The best and most legendary mislead was Spike getting his chip removed. We were all convinced. They even took bets on why he'd do it and if he'd turn evil after it happened. Of course, it was a complete mislead. They even fooled the actor, who thought that was what they planned on doing. No one knew he was going after a soul (although I guessed it, because that made more logical sense without the arc...but the show was so much like a soap in some ways, that you couldn't be certain. You never knew.).
And the online world...was made up of hard-core geeks. You had to work at finding this stuff. Voy was always crashing. Finding fan-sites, really good fan-sites, required detective work. Often it was by recommendation.
You'd start at:
There was an online radio show...that was done out of someone's basement, they'd interview the writers by phone online after episodes, and you'd listen to the podcasts.I can't remember the name of it. [Oh, The Succubus Club] People wrote transcripts for those of us who missed the cast.
If you were really scholarly inclined : You'd head over to slayage.com (a list of links) or Slayage - an online scholarly journal of nothing but Buffy essays. And of course there was Teaatheford.com for female scholarly types obsessed with Spike. You had to be invited. It was psuedo-private. Professors were teaching Buffy in colleges, and presenting papers, and getting paid for it. This blew my mind. Then Writercon popped up - a fic writing con devoted at first just to Buffy, it slowly expanded to other things. There were also sites devoted to each character, and ship. As well as actor on the series. Such as Marsters Mobsters, More than Spike, etc.
Now? It's gone. Oh there's still vestiges here and there. But..it feels a bit like looking at an old tv show that you loved as a child...and thinking, uhm. So much of the fun was due to rudimentary nature of the net. We were exploring it together.
This new territory, fanboards, vids. This was before YouTube. Where you downloaded fanvids and almost crashed your computer, but did it anyway. Sharing files on the sly.
It's hard to explain to people who weren't there. Sort of like, I suppose, trying to explain what it was like to ride in that first car or see the first cell phone, or get color tv for the first time. Now technology comes so fast and furious, people almost take it for granted.
When I first saw Innocence/Surprise back in 1998...I much like Mark Watches, went nuts, but I couldn't find the fandom boards. And blogs did not exist. You had to create a web site, which required knowledge of java code. There was no one to talk to about it and no where to discuss. I found a few sites, and spoilers. Used to go like clockwork to an Bangle fan site that I can't remember the name of and there was no way to discuss it with the person, you just read their site and the spoilers they posted, and ACIN NEWS - which at that time was the only source for tv and film spoilers, nothing else existed. There wasn't as much back then. The internet was smaller. Email listserves were more popular. As we moved forward, VOY popped up. And there was the somewhat busy chat rooms...where conversations flew by like bullets.
By the time I came back online to fandom in 2001, after I saw Once More with Feeling, Tabula Rasa and then Smashed - and once again went nuts, fanfic had exploded. I didn't know it existed until 2001. Fanfic.net and of course other character and ship related sites. There was spoilerslayer - the source for spoilers. Some guy I met at a party sent me to spoilerslayer, because he got annoyed with all the emails I kept sending to discuss the show and speculate about the spoilers. He wasn't really into discussing it by email. Buffy Cross and Stake was spoilerslayer's main source for spoilers and the board spoilerslayer sent me to because he also got sick of my long email speculations and in-depth analysis of all of the spoilers that he posted, along with the character arcs, etc. I desperately wanted to discuss the spoilers and the series. The themes. Etc. Spoilerslayer did not.
So off I went to BC&S, which required a username to join the board.
You have no idea how many different usernames I tried, including my own birth name, before shadowkat finally got accepted and went through. Which was a bit of a private joke that no one quite gets...I was an X-men comics fan before Buffy took over my soul and I ended up dumping the comics in favor of it (2001). The comics featured a cyber-geek who could phase through computers, and was wickedly smart and snarky, named shadowkat. I'm no cyber-geek, but shadowkat reminded me a little of the Buffy characters and fit my online persona. Hides in the shadows, not what it seems. And I deliberately spelled it with a "k" because shadowcat was already taken by a fanfic writer on the board. Also I liked the look of the "k" spelling better - it was sharper, had more of an edge.
Back then? You could post long, fifty page essays to fanboards. People ate them up. I don't think you can do it as easily now. Voy was nicer than the comic forums appear to be. And Whedonesque is annoyingly uninviting of posting your own stuff - you can only post someone else's stuff. Weird site, whedonesque. It took the place of Bronze Beta, but unlike Bronze Beta, was centered on a creator not the show a group of people were involved in. Very different dynamic. Bronze Beta in some respects was wilder and less censored. Never known what to make of Whedonesque, which Whedon himself...posts on occasionally - something else I'm not quite sure what to make of.
Whedon rarely posted on Bronze Beta, he left that to his minions.
The world has changed since I first came online in 2002. Mark Watches makes me aware of it. I remember fan boards without product placements. I remember people discussing whether it made sense to jump onto livejournal - was it too personal? Why would you want to post about well, yourself? While fanboards admittedly had a group therapy aspect to them...it was through the veil of a tv series. We could back away from the personal. LJ felt almost too intimate.
Yet, we got pulled in, or some of us did, one by one. Gifting each other passes. Then friending each other immediately. It did make sense - since many of our posts on the fanboards tended to jump off topic. ATPOBTVS is a good board to play around on - if you want to see how people reacted to the show as it aired. What were people's reactions to Seeing Red - when it came on the air for the first time? What was it like to post on the net and a fanboard in 2002 before DVR's and DVD's and file sharing was readily available?
Back then we didn't really have blogs. Those came about more in 2003. They were there, but not really noticeable. And there was no such thing as Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even on the net back then as far as I know. Aaron Sorkin was busy writing The West Wing. And Television Without Pity was just beginning to get up and running. There weren't as many ads or product placements. Fanboards didn't have products like Mark Watches blog does. Or most didn't. Some did.AngelFire AngelX (ETA:AngelFire was the name of the hosting agent for many of the fan sites, sort of like GeoCities - both defunct now) who ran Buffy Cross and Stake - tried to sell things, until she got worried about copyright infringement.
I find myself waxing nostalgic...tonight for some reason. It's like I want to revisit a former self that no longer exists. She's there, hidden amongst old journal posts and essays on an archived fanboard - if you want to find here. But not here, here, now in the present. I'm no longer in love with Buffy. Whedon no longer seems to entertain. And the fandom...has dispersed. Few remain. Of the ones I was online with back in the day...they merely grouse at the comics, or wax nostalgic while reading Mark Watches...hunting perhaps in Mark's blogs some remnant of themselves? Or perhaps not. Hard to know what another person thinks or feels.
I do know there were a lot of wildly brilliant and creative people on the internet who watched Buffy. And posted on those boards. Everyone from a Tibetian Monk to
scholars, geneticists, scientists, physicists, Supreme Court attorneys, actors, professional writers, agents, and people like myself - blundering fools hunting others similarly inclined.
I think tv shows like Buffy or Doctor Who or what have you...are ways to bring people together over a shared interest. A way of breaking the ice. Of finding a sort of
pseudo-intimacy through cultural work that is safe. That resonates on a level difficult to explain except to those who just get it. You either got Buffy or you didn't. You either loved it or you didn't. And for many of us who did? The internet was the only place we could discuss it - so here we fled. Discussing under fake names, but revealing multitudes that few outside of our fellow geeks would know.
I see that in Mark Watches posts...that desire to share a piece of himself, that inner self through the guise of tv analysis or tv reviews. A way to explain, that is safe but not.
Well, make of this what you will. It's late time for bed. While the snow quietly blankets the earth.
Have been suffering all day with a head-ache inducingly painful cystic pimple on the bridge of my nose. Red and angry. And embarrassing. Wished I didn't have to be at work, tried everything to cover it up. Gave up. And I had to be in a meeting with 20 people. Also present at the meeting. I know, whine, whine, whine...but there it is.
Being a Buffy fan on the Internet.
A Long Rambling Muse. Inspired by Mark Watches Buffy of all things. 1998-2012. Sort of Stream of Consciousness. Lots of typos, because no time to edit, may do that later.
And includes an explanation of my posting name - how I came up with it, when I first came up with it, and why.
Been reading the Mark Watches bits here and there...and, okay, has the guy watched any serials, or soap operas? Or teen angst dramas? Did he completely miss "My So-Called Life", "Party of Five", "Eight is Enough", "Freaks & Geeks", "Square Pegs", "Popular", "Fame", or the supernatural daytime soap operas: Passions, Dark Shadows,
and Port Charles? Did he never watch 90210? Melrose Place? Skip over Dallas and Dynasty? Never see The Thorn Birds? Or watch St. Elsewhere and L A Law? Did he skip
"Dawson's Creek" which was on the WB at the same time Buffy aired and dealt with similar issues? I want to ask him this:
"Dude? Have you never seen a soap opera or an afterschool special in your life???"
(Sigh, maybe my age is showing? He may be 25 and was just too young to have seen the good adult and teen serials in the 1980s and 1990s.) I restrain myself.
But seriously if he thinks S2 is out there, just wait until he watches some of the episodes in the later seasons - S3, S4, S5, S6, and S7 had some of the most ground-breaking, controversial and envelope pushing episodes in tv history. Here's a short list:
Restless, HUSH, Conversations with Dead People (forget the plot - look at the narrative structure), Once More with Feeling, Beneath You, The Body (which I still think is the best and most honest piece of writing that Joss Whedon has done in his entire life and will never top), The Wish, Dopplegangland, Selfless, Villains, Smashed, Bargaining, Lies My Parents Told Me, Storyteller (which I hated but that's just me), The Zeppo (ditto), Superstar (ditto).
Where the writers played with narrative structure and jumped beyond the format and the rules, and bit their thumbs at network censors and tv standards. I mean once you've seen Smashed and Restless and HUSH - Innocence seems a bit...silly. So...I'm reading Mark, like everyone else, just to see...his head explode when he reaches the "really" good stuff. He's not there yet.
The best seasons are the latter ones - and I say that, after criticizing the plot of those seasons to death. Whedon's strength was never in his plotting, sorry to say. He plots like a daytime soap opera or marvel comics writer - by the seat of his pants, and centered on emotion or shock value, BUT he is quite good at character centric emotional/psychological writing. Most soap writers are. He reminds me a lot of a daytime soap writer...which I know people hate to hear because people have an odd view of soap operas they are a bit like my friend CW who..has no peripheral vision when it comes to cultural pursuits, for she likes Opera but hates musicals, not seeing the different strengths and attributes of both. But if you've watched as many daytime soaps and as for as long a period as I have - you know the secret, sometimes there's incredibly imaginative and excellent bits of writing hidden in there. Experiments with narrative form that would knock your socks off. It's like any art form, artists create a lot of crap, before they do the excellent thing. Law of averages. Marvel comics was the same way...for every bad comic or cliche story, occasionally you'd hit something that was so good, so amazing, it blew your socks off. Shakespeare's like that too...he wrote a lot of bad plays in there, or didn't you try to read Timon of Athens or Two Gentleman of Verona? And Dickens - sigh, okay I'm admittedly not a good judge of Dickens, considering I still hate the over-filmed Great Expectations. Even Austen (Northanger Abbey makes me cringe).
There used to be a meme that would go around - which episode would you rec for someone to get into Buffy? Impossible. Because Buffy was such a soap, a serial. Each episode built on the next. The plot was less important than the metaphors, the analogies, and the characters. It made no sense to pop into the middle of it. If you watched The Body, without seeing S1-4, you wouldn't understand or get the full emotional impact of that episode. It only worked in context. Soaps and Marvel Comics The X-men were like that. You had to read the whole thing, in order to appreciate that one truly marvelous episode or comic. There are tv shows that are brilliant all the way through more or less - like The Wire. I admit that. But even the Wire had its weak episodes and moments. All TV shows do.
As much as I may criticize Buffy or anything I love, I also see the contradiction in my criticism, the part of it that I do love. For example I may hate the Willow/Spike plot cliches in S6, but I also at the same time love them to pieces. It makes no sense, not even to me. There was just something there embedded deep within all of it that pulled at my gut, my heart, my emotion - screw the head. It wasn't what is appealing to Mark Watches or not the same thing at any rate - so there's a disconnect. But then I'm not male. I'm not in my 20s. I don't make money blogging. And I'm not gay or queer or lesbian. I'm straight. There was another guy who was watching the show for the first time a while back, more scholarly, less emotional, who I liked better. Never been much of a squee-er. Too frigging analytical. Sort of gets in the way. Which was why I joined the ATPO board and stayed away from Bronze Beta or the list-serves such as Yahoo.
Fandom was also different in the early 00s than it is today, in part because the internet was vastly different. We had less gadgets. Less rules. Less guidelines. It was newer. TV shows were on VHS, and we taped them. They were not on DVR or DVD, which didn't really show up until around 2004. Oh they were available, but a lot of people like myself couldn't afford them and stuck with VHS tapes - which wore out quickly. I broke the one with Innocence/Suprise that I taped way back in 1998, along with the Becoming episodes. Had to re-record them off of F/X which was re-running all the episodes on weekdays. Back then - F/X didn't have much original programming and just showed old episodes of shows like Buffy.
Buffy premiered on the wobbly WB, and I remember wanting cable so I'd get better reception. In 2002, S6, it was on the even wobblier UPN. Which didn't come in. And you worried on a weekly basis that you wouldn't get to see the show. Unlike now - if you missed it, you were screwed and had to beg people to either send tapes or wait for it to show up on F/X or in re-runs.
Spoilers ruled. IF you could find them, and Whedon's writers had a lot of fun setting up wild goose chases. The best and most legendary mislead was Spike getting his chip removed. We were all convinced. They even took bets on why he'd do it and if he'd turn evil after it happened. Of course, it was a complete mislead. They even fooled the actor, who thought that was what they planned on doing. No one knew he was going after a soul (although I guessed it, because that made more logical sense without the arc...but the show was so much like a soap in some ways, that you couldn't be certain. You never knew.).
And the online world...was made up of hard-core geeks. You had to work at finding this stuff. Voy was always crashing. Finding fan-sites, really good fan-sites, required detective work. Often it was by recommendation.
You'd start at:
1) Spoilerslayer (a site devoted to slaying bad rumors and spoilers, confirming real ones - it also had all the transcripts to the series available, plus transcripts that hadn't aired. Fox kept trying to shut it down, but didn't succeed until the show was long over.), which took you to -
2)Buffy Cross and Stake and Angel's Soul Board, and in turn to BAPS (Bloody Awful Poet Society) (if you were a Spike fan and a sucker for redemption stories), and if you were lucky to write a really cool meta -to
3) ATPOBTVS &ATS (All Things Philosphical About Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series) - if you liked to write long meta analysis and reviews...if you had a thing for Dorothy Dunnette and the Chronicles Lymond, plus an invite, you ended up on Sunnydale U listserve, but first you had to take a test proving you had read Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles and were worthy. If you wrote good or popular essays, you might find yourself rec'd on whedonesque (which didn't pop up until the Bronze Beta disappeared and sort of took its place [ETA: Apparently that's not true, Bronze Beta is still in existence, and it took the place of Metafilter.]).
There was an online radio show...that was done out of someone's basement, they'd interview the writers by phone online after episodes, and you'd listen to the podcasts.
If you were really scholarly inclined : You'd head over to slayage.com (a list of links) or Slayage - an online scholarly journal of nothing but Buffy essays. And of course there was Teaatheford.com for female scholarly types obsessed with Spike. You had to be invited. It was psuedo-private. Professors were teaching Buffy in colleges, and presenting papers, and getting paid for it. This blew my mind. Then Writercon popped up - a fic writing con devoted at first just to Buffy, it slowly expanded to other things. There were also sites devoted to each character, and ship. As well as actor on the series. Such as Marsters Mobsters, More than Spike, etc.
Now? It's gone. Oh there's still vestiges here and there. But..it feels a bit like looking at an old tv show that you loved as a child...and thinking, uhm. So much of the fun was due to rudimentary nature of the net. We were exploring it together.
This new territory, fanboards, vids. This was before YouTube. Where you downloaded fanvids and almost crashed your computer, but did it anyway. Sharing files on the sly.
It's hard to explain to people who weren't there. Sort of like, I suppose, trying to explain what it was like to ride in that first car or see the first cell phone, or get color tv for the first time. Now technology comes so fast and furious, people almost take it for granted.
When I first saw Innocence/Surprise back in 1998...I much like Mark Watches, went nuts, but I couldn't find the fandom boards. And blogs did not exist. You had to create a web site, which required knowledge of java code. There was no one to talk to about it and no where to discuss. I found a few sites, and spoilers. Used to go like clockwork to an Bangle fan site that I can't remember the name of and there was no way to discuss it with the person, you just read their site and the spoilers they posted, and ACIN NEWS - which at that time was the only source for tv and film spoilers, nothing else existed. There wasn't as much back then. The internet was smaller. Email listserves were more popular. As we moved forward, VOY popped up. And there was the somewhat busy chat rooms...where conversations flew by like bullets.
By the time I came back online to fandom in 2001, after I saw Once More with Feeling, Tabula Rasa and then Smashed - and once again went nuts, fanfic had exploded. I didn't know it existed until 2001. Fanfic.net and of course other character and ship related sites. There was spoilerslayer - the source for spoilers. Some guy I met at a party sent me to spoilerslayer, because he got annoyed with all the emails I kept sending to discuss the show and speculate about the spoilers. He wasn't really into discussing it by email. Buffy Cross and Stake was spoilerslayer's main source for spoilers and the board spoilerslayer sent me to because he also got sick of my long email speculations and in-depth analysis of all of the spoilers that he posted, along with the character arcs, etc. I desperately wanted to discuss the spoilers and the series. The themes. Etc. Spoilerslayer did not.
Go here - they like to discuss it. They'll love you. Leave me alone, so I can go back to watching NASCAR in peace.
So off I went to BC&S, which required a username to join the board.
You have no idea how many different usernames I tried, including my own birth name, before shadowkat finally got accepted and went through. Which was a bit of a private joke that no one quite gets...I was an X-men comics fan before Buffy took over my soul and I ended up dumping the comics in favor of it (2001). The comics featured a cyber-geek who could phase through computers, and was wickedly smart and snarky, named shadowkat. I'm no cyber-geek, but shadowkat reminded me a little of the Buffy characters and fit my online persona. Hides in the shadows, not what it seems. And I deliberately spelled it with a "k" because shadowcat was already taken by a fanfic writer on the board. Also I liked the look of the "k" spelling better - it was sharper, had more of an edge.
Back then? You could post long, fifty page essays to fanboards. People ate them up. I don't think you can do it as easily now. Voy was nicer than the comic forums appear to be. And Whedonesque is annoyingly uninviting of posting your own stuff - you can only post someone else's stuff. Weird site, whedonesque. It took the place of Bronze Beta, but unlike Bronze Beta, was centered on a creator not the show a group of people were involved in. Very different dynamic. Bronze Beta in some respects was wilder and less censored. Never known what to make of Whedonesque, which Whedon himself...posts on occasionally - something else I'm not quite sure what to make of.
Whedon rarely posted on Bronze Beta, he left that to his minions.
The world has changed since I first came online in 2002. Mark Watches makes me aware of it. I remember fan boards without product placements. I remember people discussing whether it made sense to jump onto livejournal - was it too personal? Why would you want to post about well, yourself? While fanboards admittedly had a group therapy aspect to them...it was through the veil of a tv series. We could back away from the personal. LJ felt almost too intimate.
Yet, we got pulled in, or some of us did, one by one. Gifting each other passes. Then friending each other immediately. It did make sense - since many of our posts on the fanboards tended to jump off topic. ATPOBTVS is a good board to play around on - if you want to see how people reacted to the show as it aired. What were people's reactions to Seeing Red - when it came on the air for the first time? What was it like to post on the net and a fanboard in 2002 before DVR's and DVD's and file sharing was readily available?
Back then we didn't really have blogs. Those came about more in 2003. They were there, but not really noticeable. And there was no such thing as Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even on the net back then as far as I know. Aaron Sorkin was busy writing The West Wing. And Television Without Pity was just beginning to get up and running. There weren't as many ads or product placements. Fanboards didn't have products like Mark Watches blog does. Or most didn't. Some did.
I find myself waxing nostalgic...tonight for some reason. It's like I want to revisit a former self that no longer exists. She's there, hidden amongst old journal posts and essays on an archived fanboard - if you want to find here. But not here, here, now in the present. I'm no longer in love with Buffy. Whedon no longer seems to entertain. And the fandom...has dispersed. Few remain. Of the ones I was online with back in the day...they merely grouse at the comics, or wax nostalgic while reading Mark Watches...hunting perhaps in Mark's blogs some remnant of themselves? Or perhaps not. Hard to know what another person thinks or feels.
I do know there were a lot of wildly brilliant and creative people on the internet who watched Buffy. And posted on those boards. Everyone from a Tibetian Monk to
scholars, geneticists, scientists, physicists, Supreme Court attorneys, actors, professional writers, agents, and people like myself - blundering fools hunting others similarly inclined.
I think tv shows like Buffy or Doctor Who or what have you...are ways to bring people together over a shared interest. A way of breaking the ice. Of finding a sort of
pseudo-intimacy through cultural work that is safe. That resonates on a level difficult to explain except to those who just get it. You either got Buffy or you didn't. You either loved it or you didn't. And for many of us who did? The internet was the only place we could discuss it - so here we fled. Discussing under fake names, but revealing multitudes that few outside of our fellow geeks would know.
I see that in Mark Watches posts...that desire to share a piece of himself, that inner self through the guise of tv analysis or tv reviews. A way to explain, that is safe but not.
Well, make of this what you will. It's late time for bed. While the snow quietly blankets the earth.
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Date: 2012-01-23 08:04 pm (UTC)I live outside US (someone has to really), BtVS was airing here a couple of season behind US, and I quickly found out that there were an interesting discussion on analysis on US based boards. But to read them and few time participate in them. I had to download the new episodes, and it was so slow sometimes it took days and / or the quality was bad. And I too have also stumbled over Mark posts, find them fun/nostalgic/fluffy, but I don't think I keep reading them, if there don't come some analytic meat on them.
You probably don't remember, but I wrote post at the voy Atops board, I think it was something, about not understanding some Spike fans views on some of Spikes actions. Which resulted in a post, where you asked, for the my post to be deleted, which came as little shock for, as I hadn't found it so strong my self. But I wrote an under post, that Masq was welcome to delete it. Passion,
good times
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 10:42 pm (UTC)Can you point it out to me? It's in the ATPO archives.
If I did, my apologies. What a rude thing to do. Of course now, I get to delete whatever posts I damn well please. Because my journal, my rules. Lovely thing that. ;-)
The only thing I remember is you sending me that really horrible article about " how Spike ruined Buffy like Fonzie ruined Happy Days". And I wanted to kick you for it. And the writer for writing it. Ugh. Nasty article. So I think I wrote a really nasty email in response. But..what a lot of people don't realize when interacting with each other on the net - is we are going through crap, unrelated crap. (At the time I was posting on ATPO and BC&S - I was unemployed, depressed, and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. So a lot of that crap infected my posts at the time. )
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 11:57 pm (UTC)http://www.atpobtvs.com/existentialscoobies/archives/mar03_p33.html
I had forgotten it was about lmptm
I can't even remember that article, or even a reply from you. But I think I was rather disappointed, of the last half of season seven. And probably wanted to share my misery/disappointment, by pointing out others who shared my disappointment, misery really love company. I probably built my expectations to high up for season, but I remember after seen Selfless "that this is going to be an excellent last season".
Fanish discussion has educated me, in rather graphic way. That people judge situations and characters, from wildly different places, out from the same text/situation. And I have then tried, not to be judgmental (and failed), when those obviously smart people clearly are wrong... and-why-can't-they-see-that-too?!
;)
A depression is terrible place to be, I know.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 01:20 am (UTC)Anyhow, for the record? I NEVER asked you to delete your post. You did that and we told you that you were okay and not to worry. But your English was sooo bad that you misunderstood what I said.
A bit of back story? Lunasea and I were at war. We hated each other. And had been fighting on the board and on livejournal for months. She attacked me whenever I posted. She hated Spike, was a huge B/A shipper because she'd married her much older hubby when she was a teen. And was bi-polar, and had this horrible back story. And Spike pushed her buttons. She pushed mine. She accused me of being an Alpha female and attacked me constantly. I ended up leaving for a bit, because I got fed up. And I was suffering my own nervous breakdown at the time - this was around 2003-2004. A horrible period. You jumped into the middle of the lunanasea fight, where I was restraining myself.. (nickname lunacy in that she drove me crazy. No one else made me see red like that woman could, I unfortunately had to meet her in person and was stuck in a face to face conversation with her for 30 minutes in a huge crowded stuffy hotel suite for an hour. )
There were a handful of people on the posting boards that I could not stand. We had a personality conflict. LOL!
Add to that, one of the beloved people on the board over-identified with Nikki Wood and took the episode as personal affront and my essay made her want to leave the board.
So there was a lot going on. And your post was basically the last straw. I said to you what I wanted to say to the other people, but couldn't. But I never said delete. Just that your response was insulting and made me feel awful. (Not quite the same thing.)
Then when you threatened to delete. I apologized and said I should have just asked for my post to be deleted.
I would NEVER have asked Masq to delete another's post (even lunasea) because that's Masq's decision. It's her board. That's like going into someone's journal and asking them to delete posts you don't like. Eww.
Would never do that. I would and often did ask her to delete my posts and Masq always ignored me, because I was being incredibly neurotic and she knew it. ;-) (We've known each other, Masq and I since 2002 and met in person.)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 01:52 am (UTC)Late thought: you didn't mention the Kitten Board in your original post, but it's worth a note just because of the sociology (euphemism) of the Seeing Red debates.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 02:35 am (UTC)Thank you about lunasea. I felt sorry for her, when I heard that she'd literally been kicked off every board in fandom. Both BC&S and Angel's Soul and BuffyWorld had kicked her off their boards. Which is painful.
But we just could not get along. Silver Agent was the other one, and
RichardIX - who I kept pissing off. Dochawk and Mal - I actually got along with okay - even though we completely disagreed on Spike. Doc - I met in person, he was a sweetie. I loved your arguments with Mal on Spike and Angel - they were classic.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 03:32 am (UTC)Oh yeah, I do remember those debates. I actually got very pissed off at d'H at one point. I took the position (which I still hold) that there was a cliche, they did violate it, it was unintentional, and it doesn't affect my view of the episode or the relationship.
I found Doc and Mal very easy to get along with. Doc was a great guy; gave me technical advice when I needed a Region 2 DVD player, organized a meetup in LA, and supported me whenever I defended Willow. :)
Thanks for the compliment. I always read your posts eagerly because you always thought of stuff that I never would have. And you alerted me to things like POV that I had completely overlooked until you raised it.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 04:09 am (UTC)Then of course, poor Sdeleve (can't remember her name) - where we argued that women could be firemen too. And I think Areustha or Ruthus - told Sdeve...."you do realize you are fighting with two lawyers, right?" LOL!!!
The most heated debates oddly were not about the attempted rape on the ATPO board. They were about things like - was Spike, Buffy or Angel the Buddhista ( a Tibetan Monk jumped on the board at one point and said it was Spike. Made me laugh really hard) or the Lesbian Cliche in Film, or the whole Nikkie Wood and Spike bit. Lies My Parents Told Me was a far more controversial episode than Seeing Red for some people.
I remember being really pissed at Caroline, scroll and londonkds over that episode for completely different reasons. (Doc had spoiled me on it months in advance as had CJL - so I knew exactly what the episode was about, knew exactly what to expect. And knew the board would go nuts over it. I knew that Rah shouldn't watch it because it would push all of her buttons in a really really bad way. And that it would make a whole group of people hate Spike. I actually dreaded it more than Seeing Red. In part because I hated the character of Robin Wood more than people on that board hated Spike. DB Woodside is a lot like Dylan McDermott - he comes across as self-righteously smug in every role he plays. I just want to kick that smug smile off his face. It was actually effective on Buffy - because Spike literally does kick it off his face. LOL! But telling people I depised Wood never went over well, on gal, Rhona?, who Masq finally banned because she kept spoiling everyone with her subject lines, decided to send me an email accusing me of being racist for hating Wood. No. He could have been white, and I'd still want to kick the smug guy.)
I took the position (which I still hold) that there was a cliche, they did violate it, it was unintentional, and it doesn't affect my view of the episode or the relationship.
I actually agree with that. I knew Whedon was going to kill off whomever Willow got romantically involved with as early as S4 and Something Blue. Or even further back - with Dopplegangland. He was in love with the idea of dark Willow and he's a Marvel comics fan - specifically the Dark Phoenix story - about a character who reminds me a lot of Willow - addicted to power, she takes it on to save people or to seek vengeance, and it overtakes her. So I knew he was going in that direction for a while. Unfortunately, he wanted his cake and eat it too. He wanted to do the controversial homosexual storyline and the Dark Willow storyline. But you can't do both. Thus the unintentional violation. It did not help that the Willow and Tara are shown happy in bed at the beginning of the episode, and that Tara is literally killed in the same room through a window no less. I remember Darby breaking it down bit by bit. And Doc supporting it. I struggled with it - because I knew Whedon whomever was involved with Willow - so it wasn't intentional. But, it was at the same time a violation and provided a very negative message.
If you think ATPO got upset? The BC&S board exploded. There were people who were sending hate mail to Mutant Enemy. And I remember Whedon releasing an apology. They actually apologized - they did not expect that reaction. So it was an example of a writer being completely ignorant of the metaphors in his story. And proof that Whedon tends to plot by the seat of his pants. But to be fair, I don't think any of the writers on that show saw it. They saw the AR scene as being problematic, but not Tara's shooting. Which disappointed many fans, and justifiably so, since Buffy was up to that point - quite groundbreaking in how it handled homosexuality on screen.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 05:23 am (UTC)I do remember, though, going on line after Seeing Red and thinking the internet had exploded. I can't think of a comparable (fictional) event since. It's hard to even explain to people.
Sdev is the one you're thinking of. And yeah, Rhona (I think that's right) was tough to deal with.
One trick I realized was that I would read a post that pissed me off, but I wouldn't respond to it. No, I waited until someone *else* responded, and then I would respond to *that* post. That both gave me time to think and let me go after the original post second hand, so to speak.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 05:37 pm (UTC)Well it probably didn't help that KdS watched the episode live with a friend and beloved fellow board member whose activist mother was brutally murdered when she was Robin Wood's age, by a hitman in a civil war..
Oh, I understood it, unfortunately. Not only did I understand it, I predicted it - when Doc and CJL laid out the spoilers (separately) to me - they had separate sources. (*Doc had a friend who was a production assistant to Greenwalt, so he knew all this inside information - which I took with a grain of salt, until the information popped up in writer interviews. CJL was on BC&S and Angel's Soul Spoilerboards.) That's why - if you read that thread which lakrids linked to? You'll see me making all sorts of weird disclaimers, apologies, etc. Doc had already prepared me for the reactions, because that was Doc's reaction to the spoilers.
I'll give the ATPO people credit though, even the one's I got annoyed with...at least we didn't do this:
poster1: you suck you rapist sympathiser, you.
poster2: no you suck, you domestic abuse sympathizer.
poster1: you $*%**&** suck! You motherkilling supporter.
poster 2: f*&&king...*&^()##@...and Spike thinks you suck too. And Angel is lame.
poster 1: How exactly is that an insult? I think Spike sucks.
poster 2: Then Nikki thinks you suck.
Poster 1: Nikki is a fictional character.
poster 2: EXACTLY! So how can I be a motherkilling sympathizer?
Poster 1: You just suck.
poster 2: No you suck.
It was quite hilarious at times. BC&S and Angel's Soul did this all the frigging time.
The whole board would get taken up by ...well
the above. Highly annoying when you were attempting to post an essay and wanted comments, even if the comments mainly consisted of: "Cool!", "Best thing EVER!", "You are AMAZING!" "THank you, thank you!" (They weren't exactly the most...coherent or analytical boards in the world.)
ATPO on the other hand...would just tear apart each other's logical arguments. Often supplying dictionary definitions to prove their points.
Poster 1: While I see what you are saying about the kid and all, don't you think it is a bit illogical to state that Nikki is fragile, when she was a super-powered vampire slayer?
Poster 2: She had a kid that made her vulnerable and..wait, where exactly did I say she was fragile?
Poster 1: (reprints the comment)
Poster 2: Nowhere in there does it say "fragile".
Poster 1: It's a synonyme for fragile.
Poster 2: Really? How so?
Poster 1: (reprints a dictionary definition complete with link and just to be sure does more than one.)
LOL!! I can see why people were afraid to post on ATPO or argue at times...it often felt like we were posting on a graduate school debating board made up of frustrated and somewhat pedantic English Lit and History majors.
I do remember, though, going on line after Seeing Red and thinking the internet had exploded. I can't think of a comparable (fictional) event since. It's hard to even explain to people.
Oh, I can. The big LJ RACEFAIL, followed by FEMFAIL ...a few years back. That took out four professional writers and almost outted one big time reviewer and blogger on lj's psuedonyme.
Now that was the fight to end all fights. Professional sci-fi writers attacked each other on their blogs. Nasty.
But it is admittedly different than Seeing Red's explosion was. That deciminated fan boards and fan sites across the net. People were furious. It makes what happened with the Buffy comics and the Twilight Reveal (another huge internet explosion) pale in comparison.
The comics...were never as popular as the tv series nor did they gain as big a following.
No, I waited until someone *else* responded, and then I would respond to *that* post. That both gave me time to think and let me go after the original post second hand, so to speak.
Hee. I did that with a lot of posts on ATPO, it was actually easier to do that on the Voy boards. You can't do it on lj that well...because people don't always see the offending post...while you, the journal owner often do.