This, that, and the Buffy Character Wars Poll Results

[shadowkat]

1. Hot day. Stayed in during most of it. That time of month, which explains the headaches and crankiness. Although not as hot a day...as summer in the midwest or Kansas. OR for that matter Manhattan. Brooklyn is always about 10 degrees cooler than Manhattan.

2. Still reading Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale - which is the best non-literary/non-classic romance novel that I've read. (Literary/classic romance novels were written over 100 years ago and are still being read today, examples include Wuthering Heights (yes, it is a romance novel), Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca, and Anna Karina. I don't know if Thomas Hardy's novels count. But I daresay Baroness Orzy's The Scarlette Pimpernell does.

Kinsale can actually do dialect well. If you want to read a romance novel who does it correctly and consistently? Read Kinsale - she demonstrates why Kleypas' sucks at it.
Read enough books and broad enough a variety, you begin to see why some writers are better than others.

3. Buffy fandom character wars poll...

Hmmm, so far 92 people have taken my poll. Of the 92, roughly 50% have friended me (as far as I can tell...after about 92 - you get a headache reading the lj names of all of the participants and just throw up your hands and give up. Will state there are some creative lj names out there...far more creative than mine, where were you when I was coming up with my name people? Most I can't spell. Or pronounce. But that's nothing new, I can't pronounce the last names or first names of half the people I work with, which is probably a bigger problem.).

Anyhow...of the 92 to date?

[Behind the cut is my analysis of the poll results. I explain my choices. I speculate about others...(most likely I'm wrong), and do a hap-hazard and meaningless analysis.
Please don't take anything I write personally. I can't read your minds. And like I told you when you took the poll - you could change your mind tomorrow. The poll is hardly definitive. Polls never are. That's why marketing isn't a science. ]


* Over 80% prefer Buffy and/or Spike to Willow.

This is hardly surprising if you think about the characters arcs. Willow's arc was - shall we say - a wee bit controversial, and that's putting it mildly. Spike and Buffy's arcs on the other hand were a bit clearer, far more straightforward and far more heroic.

I think the writers wrote themselves into a corner with Willow, much like they did with Angel and Cordelia, and took the same lame superhero comic book way out. (They were possessed and not in their right mind at the time so can't be held accountable, wait no they are accountable because we have to redeem them, no wait they aren't. I know we'll write it both ways and let the fans argue themselves sick over it. Fans to writers? Make up your bloody minds!) *Note - if you want proof that Whedon was a shameless pulp action-hero comic book and daytime soap opera fan...there it is. That excuse is used all the time on those shows. Not sure it's used on anything else. I think it's purely a pulp genre phenomenon. Of the three, Angel, Cordy, and Willow - Angel came out of it the best, partly because Angelus always lurked under the surface and it was never quite clear how deeply he lurked. So they kept Angel delightfully dark. Willow also came out a bit better, in that she too had some agency..she chose dark magic to take vengeance and kill a human being, granted a slime-ball human being, but in a show where Andrew, Spike and Angel can be redeemed... Cordy on the other hand - arc made no sense. God made me do it? Alrighty then. I guess that sort of works. More like your own vanity. But what a way to drop-kick an interesting character. And they never really redeem her.

The other reason? Subjective, not that the above isn't, it is. Everything or most everything in fandom tends to be, which is why fandom arguments are frustratingly un-winnable and tend to derail into name-calling shouting matches. Mostly it's just that for some undefinable reason today, you prefer this guy over that one. Or rather this gal over that guy.

* Willow did moderately better against Faith...51% prefer Willow. Okay, that's hardly moderate, more like slightly. They keep getting tied.

Faith's arc is slightly better written, I suppose. But Faith's barely in either series.
Which may be why it's better written? At any rate Faith's plot line is pretty much the "traditional" approach or the one we are taught from the age of 1 to see as the way you get redeemed. Anyone who knows anything about how prisons actually work in this society knows that Faith's arc is pure fantasy, and Angel and Spike's in some respects make more sense. You don't redeem yourself in prison. Prison isn't about redemption or rehabilitation in the US. It's about vengeance, punishment, and protecting society from people who like to commit crimes. I remember a guy in prison for a bank robbery telling me that prison wasn't about rehab it was about punishment, and the punishment wasn't the cage, it was who was put in the cage with you. But that only explains why Faith's arc did little for me. Does not explain why it didn't work for anyone else. See? Subjective.
The only objective point is that it was straight-forward, consistent (well up to the episode Empty Places at any rate, but that wasn't Faith's arc that went off kilter, that was everyone else's - you can hardly blame Faith for that - well you can, but.), and
satisfying. And there it is folks, it was satisfying. I can't say Willow's arc was satisfying...if anything it was bloody unsatisfying. Too many missteps, missed opportunities, rushed writing, and muddled metaphors. So, maybe the Faith fans make more sense? I don't know, from an objective point of few - Faith had the more satisfying and tighter arc. From a subjective point of view? It was boring. Again this is all speculation, for all I know people may have picked Willow over Faith because they like Alyson Hannigan better than Eliza Dusku. OR they just think Willow was hotter.

* Anya gets 67% of the vote over Cordelia...

This from the comments was a hard one for most people. Odd. I'd have thought Spike vs. Willow or Willow vs. Faith would be the hardest choices. But admittedly I struggled with Anya vs. Cordy.

I can tell you why I picked Anya, for pretty much the same reasons I made my other choices, she had the better arc. Or more satisfying arc - is a better term for it.
Cordy's arc was fine up to the episode Birthday, when it went off the rails. I really hate that episode. That was the second time I stopped watching the show during that season.
I kept leaving Angel and being coaxed back. Because I hated the PTB/Shanshu Prophecy/Champion bit. In retrospect - I think they were trying for satire and we weren't supposed to take it seriously, much like we aren't supposed to take most of the stories on Glee seriously. Anya on the other hand, was used more sparingly in the series, much like Faith was, which may be the reason her story was more satisfying and tighter. The writers got less carried away. Sometimes minor characters get better story arcs on long-running serials because they are minor characters.

I have no idea why others did. For all I know, they just happen to like one actress better than the other, or identify with one more than the other...or any number of reasons.
Most we probably don't want to know about. Some characters just push your buttons. Cordy often pushed mine. So I get that. But so did Buffy. And Willow. And well everyone at one point or another. I'm cranky. It happens.

* 86% preferred Spike over Faith. (men and women answered this poll and both genders voted. How do I know? I looked at the user names. And most of the people responding have told me at different points their sexual orientation and gender.).

I'm guessing the reason is the same as mine. Spike's arc was more entertaining and less predictable. Note - I didn't necessarily state satisfying. He was on the show more.
Spike was all over the place, he was the villain, the comic villain, the nasty neighbor, the opportunistic informant, the hooker with the heart of gold, the tragic hero, the anti-hero, the failed romantic. Also he had a great back story - completely unpredictable.
From an objective perspective - he just had the better arc and the better dialogue.

I can only speculate as to why people did it though. Or why they chose Faith. Some people I already know - why they chose Faith. And would have been shocked if they haven't. I've read their meta on the topic. The main reason seems to be her arc was more satisfying to them from a moral perspective, much the same way many people including myself prefer Mitchell in Being Human's arc to Angel.

* 60% prefer Dawn over Connor...

Again, I'm guessing this has a lot to do with character arcs, and which was a)more satisfying and b) less controversial. Dawn admittedly had the least controversial arc (she didn't sleep with Spike or Xander (well not until the comic books at any rate - which is worth it just for NB's rant about it at a comic-con panel, with a bewildered JM who has never read the comics sitting next to him and slowly sinking below the table blushing.), and she ends up doing pretty well. Not so sure I'd call it the most satisfying. For many people it may have been the lesser than two evils, for all that I know.

I honestly don't know why people chose Dawn, I'm speculating. The choice was hard for me.
I actually like both characters. But I prefer Connor. I know, I know, people think the whole thing with Cordy was creepy. And found him to a whiny teen. But I didn't. He interested me. His arc was unpredictable, he was unpredictable. And Vincent Karthezier did the same thing with Connor, he is doing with Pete Campbell now...making this character complex, this something interesting going on behind the actor's eyes. Karthezier acts with his eyes. He reminds me a little of Jonathan Jackson - who is supposed to be on Nashville next year. I won't say Connor's arc was satisfying - it wasn't. I was as disappointed and frustrated by it as I was by Willow's. The writer's took the easy way out or the short-cut.
Even when he finds out who he is...he's alarmingly okay with it. Lazy writing. Pulp writing. It disappointed me. But everything that came before that...worked. I try to ignore the episode Origin in much the same way I'm lukewarm about Willow's episodes in S7...I felt the writer's wrote themselves into a corner and didn't know how to write themselves out of it. They took both characters too far and couldn't quite figure out how to bring them back again. Which is probably why people chose Dawn. I chose Connor, for the same reasons I chose Willow over Faith - his arc is simply more entertaining and interesting to me than Dawn's. And years later...I find I remember it and appreciate it more.

* Gunn is beating Xander by a narrow margin...he has 50.6% of the vote to Xander's 44.9%, with Riley far behind.

I know why most people didn't pick Riley.

Not quite sure about Xander and Gunn. I thought this was an easy one. I went for Xander, he had the best character arc and the most satisfying one...but that's possibly subjective.
In the latter seasons, Xander's arc sort of took a nose-dive, which is why Xander fans often don't like S5-7 all that much. After the Replacement, the writers sort of tread water with the character until Hell's Bells. He does have things to do in S5. And I actually really liked the character's arc in S5. Some great moments in there. S6 and S7 however...

Gunn's character arc...wasn't much better. Although it is the opposite of Xander's. Gunn starts out sort of a stereotype then changes and becomes darker and more interesting over time. His best seasons are 4 and 5 in my opinion. The actor was given the most to do in those seasons.

But still doesn't quite explain why. Speculation..leads me to believe people who voted for Gunn, are thinking of the latter seasons and people who voted for Xander are thinking overall or earlier seasons?

* Giles is outdoing Wes by a huge margin...67% of the vote goes to Giles.

While Wes admittedly had the more interesting arc, I voted for Giles. I just enjoyed watching Head more. Didn't matter what he did. I loved Giles. Sometimes it's as easy as that.

* Andrew and Jonathan are tied with 47% of the vote each. Warren lags behind with 5%.
People explained why they picked Warren - they can't stand the other two. So lesser of three evils approach. I picked Jonathan for the same reasons...I can't stand the other two.
I'm guessing this one may be which one you could tolerate the most. Although in retrospect, I actually did enjoy watching Jonathan and Jonathan in my opinion had the most satisfying arc...he goes from unknown outsider/damsel/victim, to wannabe villian, to wannabe redeemed hero who gets killed by his best friend...a victim in the end. A fairly realistic and unpredictable arc. Possibly one of the best of the series now that I think about it.

* Spike vs. Andrew...Spike predictably got 95.6% of the vote.

Spike from a purely objective point of view had the better arc - it was unpredictable, deep and fun. I don't know if it was satisfying for everyone?

I honestly will never in a million years be able to figure out the Andrew love. Andrew for me is like nails on a chalkboard. But I'm guessing some people may feel the same way about Spike? (If so, don't tell me.) I'm guessing people picked Andrew for the same reason they picked Faith over Spike or preferred Mitchell's arc over Angel's...and this has a lot to do with whether or not you bought Storyteller or believed in Andrew's arc in S7 or it worked for you.

* Finally, in regards to who reads Mark Watches, roughly 50% of the people taking the poll do, and 50% don't. Most of the people who read Mark appear to favor Spike over Willow, the ones who don't read Mark, favor Willow, and there's very few in that group.

Which is interesting...considering Mark loves Willow and avoids talking about Spike as much as possible. (Knowing Willow's arc and Spike's arc...I think Mark's in for a world of disappointment. I think Willow fans are less obsessed with the series and less into it now than Spike fans are. I could be wrong about that? Probably am. Never mind.)

Comments

[local-max.livejournal.com]

As an aside, I will say here: I don't actually agree that the Dark Willow episodes give the impression that Willow is possessed or "taken over" by magic. I think Willow is clearly Willow throughout. The magic has an effect on her, certainly -- but I interpret the dark magic as merely playing up elements already present in Willow. It's primarily Buffy and Xander who indicate that Willow can't be herself, but Xander comes around and in Grave identifies that Willow clearly IS still Willow, that both the crayon-breaky self and the scary veiny self are part of her. Willow's use of the third person to describe herself is a deliberate distancing device (and reminds me, actually, of Willow in Doppelgangland while in VampWillow outfit taking the opportunity to put herself down): in Two to Go, she identifies "Willow" as the construct of Willow's attempt to conform to who she thought everybody wanted her to be, and speaks about herself with disdain because she hates that version of herself. Willow's attempt to Become herself is fraught with complications because she is always CONSCIOUS of the fact that she is, partly, performing; Dark Willow is in part a grand performance, where she gets to act on impulses she's wanted to keep down for years, but doesn't really believe that they have any impact, which is part of why she sees her own actions with both joy and with cartoonish separation. "It's all nothing," as she says, and she is excited by the idea of playing the part of the Bad Witch ("Fly, my pretty, fly! See what I did there?") because, ultimately, in a world without Tara, her whole identity becomes meaningless, and she's invested in pushing away huge parts of herself in the process. It actually makes me very sad that many people think that she is not herself, or not recognizably herself, in these episodes, because it seems obvious to me that she is -- but not only do I think she is obviously herself, I find Villains/Two to Go/Grave quite touching and I identify with them a lot, of the feeling that nothing in life quite matters at all and so why shouldn't one perform as the worst version of oneself just for the nihilistic thrill of it? But these episodes are Willow going about self-actualization in the WRONG way, whereas Chosen suggests that she is starting on the path to do so in the right way. I guess I do understand people not liking them though, for many reasons articulated in this thread -- but while they are quite messy in terms of plot, I've always found Willow to be fantastically characterized and well performed by AH throughout, but especially in her confrontations with Warren, Buffy, Giles and Xander.

I also don't really mind the magic-as-drugs metaphor these days -- because I think it accomplishes a lot of different topics. I think its primary role is as a mislead -- but I think it also gets at, very well, the idea of how difficult identity construction is. I'd even say that THIS is the primary metaphor for Willow's story: that she uses magic to construct her identity, to transform herself as she wishes, and that this is not even entirely a bad thing. Certainly, we can analogize this to drugs, but more fruitfully to many other things, such as how we present ourselves to the outside world or -- especially given the imagery in Villains -- to books. Willow taking all that knowledge into herself reminds me of the image of someone furiously reading ideas, taking them into themselves, and being transformed as a result: rewriting oneself by taking in external ideas.

...I may have voted for Willow in the poll.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Lots of very good stuff here. The only thing I'd add, regarding the "Magic is a Drug" piss-take the writers toyed with, is that "drugs" were very clearly one of the show's fakeout meta-metaphors. The analog wasn't that magic is a drug and that Willow was therefore a metaphorical junkie (i.e. BTVS as After School Special). The true analog was that power can be addictive and corrupting, particularly to the powerless who have long been deprived of it. Knowledge is a certain kind of power -- Willow and Warren's kind of power, specifically -- and the arc of the sixth season is about exploring the ways in which their growing power affects the way they view others, the world and their place within it.

I've noticed that basically every season has a big surface level "fakeout" metaphor that maps to a certain stale pop cultural or TV trope (for instance, on the surface the Initiative seems to be your stereotypical Big Bad Secret Government Group and/or Military Industrial Complex stand-ins, when in reality they are structural academics/campus radicals). I think its annoying to some people, but I find it very sly and clever, and I love it.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

posted too soon, gr

Yes, agreed 100% (and love the Initiative comparison). What I will say is that the writers perhaps didn't do enough to clarify that it was a fakeout metaphor. Giles says as much in Lessons ("It's not a hobby or an addiction") but it's small enough that many fans miss it OR see it as merely an inconsistency in the text. For me, I'm okay with what we ended up with. Willow transforms herself with knowledge/power and that is like a drug. The same storyline in season six has Buffy screwing Spike, and thinking she's come back wrong, as if Buffy's problems are all about screwing the wrong guy, rather than the deeper problem of how to deal with her power and the way Spike embodies the aspects of that power she dislikes (among many other things). Rack and Spike actually fulfill similar functions in that sense, as gatekeepers of dark knowledge (whereas Giles and to a lesser extent Tara is/are the "light" version of both for both Buffy and Willow, as the reluctant gatekeeper to knowledge of responsibility). But I can see why people aren't happy with it.

ETA 2: I only recently hit upon the fact that the Initiative is really just about University (well, it's about a lot of things, but it's academia mostly) and I love how now I hear many people talking about it! In retrospect, it seems obvious: I mean, we first meet Riley as a T.A. who gets his head knocked in by Buffy, the person who will lead him out of the university's strict hegemony.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

I only recently hit upon the fact that the Initiative is really just about University (well, it's about a lot of things, but it's academia mostly) and I love how now I hear many people talking about it!

Well, heh, I guess as someone who attended an American University in the 90's, the fourth season satire was basically hammering me over the head the entire time I was watching it. The idea of taking the (often militant, inflexible) subculture of postmodern Academia and using it to retell the fiercely Romanticist Mary Shelly's tale of "soft" science gone wrong is so brilliant it ought to be illegal. And Maggie Walsh deconstructing dissecting social problems monsters in order to learn how to marshall them to purpose? And ultimately being destroyed by her own horrible theory creation? All while everyone spent almost every second of every episode lampooning Freud, Jung and Lacan. I thought I was gonna die of awesomeness.

Of course, I don't think the academics themselves found it very amusing. I've learned from a few sources that most of them avoid season four like a plague, probably because they're afraid they'll fall into one of its many traps, and wind up looking even more foolish :)

[local-max.livejournal.com]

You seriously need to write more about season four! (I guess you wrote about the chip-brothers arc). I loved your piece on Pangs. See, I went to a Canadian university in the 2000s and am still in one as a graduate student, but in physics, and so it's rather a different culture -- not to say that there are NOT similar problems, but they manifest differently enough that I didn't catch the satire or the Freudian slaps.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that the fourth was a specifically American critique; I don't believe it is. Based on what I've heard from international friends, I think the culture they were satirizing was fairly universal (and perhaps even far more pronounced on certain Canadian campuses, if I am to believe one friend's memoir).

I guess there was just something so cliched about the lockstep and increasingly fascistic approach to the humanities here in the 90's (campus speech codes, sensitivity training, rigidly enforced ideological censorship) that it felt like some of the show's American authors were personally venting, to a certain degree. Hell, "Hush" itself spoke volumes about it, while barely saying a word.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. I am only saying that my background is different than yours, but maybe it's also just that I wasn't attuned enough to see it. I definitely see what you mean about the control of speech. But I really just want to hear more!!! :) But at your leisure, of course....

[sophist.livejournal.com]

If you want to write this up, I'd be happy to post it on my blog: http://unpaidsophistry.blogspot.com/

I'm just finishing up S4 and I think your take on it would fit well with what I've posted (see especially the posts on The Freshman, The Initiative and Goodbye Iowa).

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Interesting... I might take you up on that.

I'm still digging into your (very nice) stuff, but one thing right off the bat that I thought was interesting was the comparison of Spike to Alex. I've made the same comparison many times in the past -- it's the obvious literary analog of Spike's chip, after all. But in light of Riley's chip, I think there is a base metaphor for it that is even more primal and searing than a reference to "Orange", considering what Maggie's endgame was: Spike was the behaviorist's rat who got the shock, in the hopes of learning how to train a human to behave.

[sophist.livejournal.com]

Cool. Let me know. I'll be posting on Primeval on Thursday and Restless on Monday. That's not to rush you, just to let you know the timing. I'll post yours anytime.

I agree with you on Riley's chip, though you've said it better than I have in my draft on Primeval. In my view, what she did to Riley was just as monstrous, in its own way, as what she did to Adam. And there definitely was a comparison to Spike going on there, though I missed the notion of Spike as the first rat.