One DW rec, one Buffy meme
Jan. 26th, 2011 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakDoctor Who:
Ages ago I said once or twice or 100 times that one story I'd love to read even though I couldn't write it beyond the drawing of just one short scene was an aged Jo Grant meeting Simm!Master during The Year That Wasn't. Yesterday I came across a fantastic version of that scenario, which uses the fact Jo was the companion most familiar with the Master (why, she met Delgado!Master basically every week) as well as both the shared traits and the differences between the two regenerations so very, very well: Boots.
Next, the 30 Days of Buffy The Vampire Slayer meme which I'm doing in one. Just a request ahead of time: please don't rant about the comics in my journal. I haven't read them beyond the first volume (which led me conclude they were not for me, and that's okay), your ire would be entirely wasted on me. I'm talking about the show and the show only.
Day 1: Favorite Season
Five, I think. The Buffy-Dawn storyarc has just a very personal resonance for me, ditto what happens with Joyce, Giles and Anya taking over the magic shop is of win, the friendship between the Scoobies is at its most un-angsty and supportive, and oh, yeah, that Spike fellow's flash back episode isn't half bad, either.
Day 2: Favorite Episode
Restless. I love all of Joss' experimental episodes (i.e. Hush, Restless, The Body and Once More, With Feeling), but this one not only pulls off the central concept of rendering what dreams are like in a visual narrative (better than certain movies, *cough*Inception*cough), but it manages to capture the development of the four main characters of the show up to that point, do some neat foreshadowing, be funny and surreal and poetic all at the same time, and oh, the score is gorgeous. "I'll be a fireman when the flood comes out." Oh, Restless, how I love thee.
Day 3: Favorite Song Used In An Episode: excepting the musical (and the relevant scene in Selfless), Blue, sung by Angie Hart, in Conversation with Dead People from season 7.
Day 4: Favorite Female Character:
During first time watching, it was Cordelia until she left and then became Buffy. Looking back on the show as a whole, it's definitely Buffy.
Day 5: Least Favorite Female Character: hm, Willow, I guess. Not that I don't feel any affection for her at all, just not as much as for the others (and no, this didn't start when she became more powerful; even all the way back in s1 and 2 when Willow was the strong identification figure for a lot of viewers she was the character I felt least for).
Day 6: Favorite Male Character: varies with the seasons. It started out Giles, and later became Xander (despite the urge to slap him on occasion, but then I am a Londo Mollari fan, so those two criteria are by no means mutually exclusive). I think I went through a brief period of favouring Spike as well (early s6), but alas, the Spike Wars happened (still do, for all I know), and that made me go off the character again. (Not Spike's fault, I know. Incidentally, I do like him. Just not in a favourite kind of way.)
Day 7: Least Favorite Male Character: Caleb, not for being a vile misogynist but for being an incredibly lazily written vile misogynist and paper thin plot device. (As opposed to, say, Warren, who was always three dimensional and interesting to me.)
Day 8: Favorite Friendship: Tricky. I have a huge soft spot for the dark horses: Buffy and Tara, starting from The Body. There's always a slight awkwardness around your friends' significant others (or your significant others' friends), but in that episode, when Tara spoke about the death of her mother, they started to develop their own bond, and the final scene with the two of them in Dead Things is one of my favourites. At different points of the show Spike and Dawn (i.e. s5), and Xander and Dawn (s7). Anya and Giles in s5 and s6 also come to mind, who make a perfect odd couple sort of friendship. Buffy and Giles is for me too much coded emotionally as father-daughter to read it as friendship, but it's definitely one of my favourite relationships of the show. Argh, can't decide!
Day 9: Favorite Romance: oh dear. You know, I like all three of Buffy's main romances for what they are at their point in time and won't choose between them. Willow/Oz was adorable and Willow/Tara almost too sweet (before Willow's fix-it issues turned truly sinister), but here the thing with Willow being my least favourite of the regulars strikes again, because to root for a pairing, I have to love both participants. Xander/Anya ultimately was heartbreaking for a whole lot of reasons, and there was always a sight unevenness in their relationship even at the good times. You know what, I'll go with Xander/Cordelia. They pushed my Beatrice and Benedick/bickering lovers button, both gave as good as they got, and while during first broadcast I hoped they'd reconcile in later s3, I was perfectly content with the lovely note of grace they eventually parted on, i.e. Xander secretly buying that prom dress for Cordelia and their exchange of smiles at the dance. (Yes, technically they met a couple of times after that since there was still a Mayor to fight, but you know what I mean.)
Day 10: Least Favorite Season: hm, tie between season 1 and season 7, for different reasons. Season 1, when it was still all fresh and in development, is fine, but it hasn't a lot of episodes I ever wanted to rewatch because by and large I don't think the show had really hit its stride yet. By contrast, I rewatched more s7 episodes than I did s1 episodes but I'd never deny the strains of narrative exhaustion are visible, and it's a weaker season than the ones preceding it.
Day 11: Least Favorite Romance: I felt really let down by the underdevelopment of Clem/Sophie, let me tell you. :) On a more serious note, I'm staying the hell away from this question due to my intense dislike of shipping wars.
Day 12: Least Favorite Episode: well, there were a couple I didn't care for (that junior Dr. Frankenstein one from early s2, Some Assembly Required, was terribly dull, I thought), but even the famous clunkers like Where the Wild Things Are or Doublemeat Palace have their individual good scenes (Spike and Anya reminiscing about the good old gory days in the former, for example, and the McDonald's satire in the later, plus Hallie). Then there are some where I can totally see why people are enraged (Lies my mother told me comes to mind), and I agree with some of the criticism but I don't share the rage myself, so I would be faking it if I named those. Hm. I think I'll settle for Wrecked, which also has individual good scenes but really made a major, major mistake in terms of overall storytelling by introducing the clumsy addiction metaphor which made Willow's s6 arc less than it could have been otherwise. So okay. Wrecked as least favourite.
Day 13: Favorite Potential Slayer: Vi, I think. Or Amanda, for that adorable Dungeons & Dragons scene.
Day 14: Favorite Female Villain: naming Darla would be cheating because I fell in love with Darla over at Angel where she got all the character development. So, in terms of BTVS only, Drusilla. I'm still fond of my Ophelia dressed up for murder description of her in a story.
Day 15: Favorite Male Villain: Richard Wilkins III., the Mayor. I maintain making a folksy, (presumably) Republican politician sincerely fond of family values an evil overlord was genius. I loved everything about the Mayor, form his saying "darn" to his relationship with Faith to the fact he really did his entire speech first before starting to consume students, which, as Buffy says, is pure evil.
Day 16: Episode You Like That Everyone Else Hates: there is no "everyone else" in any fandom. No matter how much you think you're the only one, when you give an answer to one of these phrasings someone is bound to come along and say "me too!". Bearing this in mind, I seem to recall Buffy versus Dracula was a (relatively) unpopular season opener whereas it's probably my favourite. Not just for the satire on Dracula movies, which if you're familiar with same is dead on, no pun intended, and hilarious (down to Dracula attempting to reassemble from dust when the heroes have seemingly left), but for such gems as Buffy's reaction to the "I am Dracula" announcement ("You're sure about that? 'Cause I fought plenty of pimply fanboys who called themselves Lestat") and Giles', err, misadventures with the brides.
Day 17: Character You Relate To The Most later season Buffy with her issues and difficulties to express her feelings, which probably says some things about me.
Day 18: Character Who Didn’t Get Enough Screen Time: good old Ethan Raynes comes to mind, though on the other hand, if they didn't have a good story for him, it's fine. (Random guest star just because he's popular never makes for good tv.) His and Giles' scenes in A New Man were the best anyway.
Day 19: Character You Like That Everyone Else Hates: see above, under "there is no "everyone" in fandom. Again, with that caveat, I seem to recall there is a sizable contingent of Andrew hate in the fandom, and I've always been fond of him. Still am.
Day 20: Best Spike-centric Episode: well, gosh darnit, as the Mayor would say, which one could it possibly be? Fool for Love of course.
Day 21: Best Willow-centric Episode: Doppelgangerland. Alyson Hannigan makes the most of the opportunity, it's really funny while also being insightful, one roots for both Willows, and the little moment where Buffy, in order to console Willow, says that vampires are nothing like their souled selves and Angel says "actually...", then abruptly falls silent as Buffy looks at him is one of the best about the whole wretched souled/unsouled question in both shows. (Also give me those two minutes of a scene over the lot of Orpheus as far as how-much-of-Angel-is-Angelus? is concerned, but that's another rant.)
Day 22: Best Xander-centric Episode: while a lot of my favourite Xander scenes are actually in episodes centred on other people (like his conversation with Dawn in Potential or his pep talk for Buffy in the s4 season opener, or his stand against Angel in Killed by Death, one Xander-centric episode for which this isn't true and which I really love is Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. It doesn't shy away from his darker side (the macguffin which sets the plot in motion is an incredibly immature and petty act of his), but also shows his best - not taking advantage of the situation with Buffy, and also, which is easy to forget in the light of later events, having the courage of being the one in the relationship with Cordelia to first have the courage to say out loud that maybe what they have is not just about sexual attraction.
Day 23: Two Characters You Wanted To Get Together That Never Did: Buffy and Faith. I'm mostly serious about this in that I loved the subtext and in my own very vague post-show ideas, they eventually do something about it.
Day 24: Favorite Example of 90s Special Effects: anything involving giant snakes.
Day 25: Favorite Buffyverse Saying: "Fire bad. Tree pretty." It came in handy often.
Day 26: Favorite Scooby Moment: tricky again, but one that made me go to fannish puddy is that last conversation in (new) Sunnydale High in Chosen before everyone departs to their respective fighting positions. The random shoe talk is perfect, and I love the detail that Giles, Willow and Xander leave in reverse order to how Buffy originally met them in Welcome to the Hellmouth.
Day 27: Cutest Moment:
Random, but Buffy putting her head on the table next to the Buffybot in Intervention makes me smile and think "cute" for some reason.
Day 28: Character You Love To Hate:
Don't really have one in this show, possibly because I don't hate that many characters. (It does, however, happen. *looks at Bill Adama from BSG*)
Day 29: Episode You Hate That Everyone Else Loves:
See above. There is no "everyone" in fandom. Even so, I unfortunately don't hate any of the very popular ones, so I don't have an answer here.
Day 30: What You Think Made Buffy So Great:
At its best, it was a wonderful combination between good writing and good acting, creating a lot of memorable characters who really captured one's emotions and imagination. It could do send-up and parody without destroying the belief in the fictional world it created, meaning both parody of established horror tropes - Buffy herself famously came to life as a twist on the blonde in the alley who dies first in a horror movie (i.e. making that blonde the person the monster runs away from) - and self send-up, as in The Zeppo when Xander interrupts a Buffy/Angel scene, which is the shown making fun of its own main 'ship (at that point, other shippers, at that point). It was on long enough that it could experiment with the form of tv storytelling (a show that doesn't get more than one or two seasons doesn't try something like Hush or Restless, unfortunately). It could do absolutely straight drama (Giles finding Jenny's dead body might happen in an operatic setting because Angel(us) is a sadist, but there is nothing remotely unreal about Giles' shock, grief and later rage; and The Body, oh, The Body), it could do open riffs on comic books (we don't need Andrew and Jonathan to spell out to us Willow is Dark Phoenix and Darth Vader combined in the last three s6 episodes), and of course musicals. And lastly, it was romantic in more than the sense the word is usually employed: the romance of friendship through adversity as much as anything else. In the Buffyverse, you could count on your lovelife breaking your heart sooner or later, one way or another, but you could also count on your friends still being there when the day was done.
Ages ago I said once or twice or 100 times that one story I'd love to read even though I couldn't write it beyond the drawing of just one short scene was an aged Jo Grant meeting Simm!Master during The Year That Wasn't. Yesterday I came across a fantastic version of that scenario, which uses the fact Jo was the companion most familiar with the Master (why, she met Delgado!Master basically every week) as well as both the shared traits and the differences between the two regenerations so very, very well: Boots.
Next, the 30 Days of Buffy The Vampire Slayer meme which I'm doing in one. Just a request ahead of time: please don't rant about the comics in my journal. I haven't read them beyond the first volume (which led me conclude they were not for me, and that's okay), your ire would be entirely wasted on me. I'm talking about the show and the show only.
Day 1: Favorite Season
Five, I think. The Buffy-Dawn storyarc has just a very personal resonance for me, ditto what happens with Joyce, Giles and Anya taking over the magic shop is of win, the friendship between the Scoobies is at its most un-angsty and supportive, and oh, yeah, that Spike fellow's flash back episode isn't half bad, either.
Day 2: Favorite Episode
Restless. I love all of Joss' experimental episodes (i.e. Hush, Restless, The Body and Once More, With Feeling), but this one not only pulls off the central concept of rendering what dreams are like in a visual narrative (better than certain movies, *cough*Inception*cough), but it manages to capture the development of the four main characters of the show up to that point, do some neat foreshadowing, be funny and surreal and poetic all at the same time, and oh, the score is gorgeous. "I'll be a fireman when the flood comes out." Oh, Restless, how I love thee.
Day 3: Favorite Song Used In An Episode: excepting the musical (and the relevant scene in Selfless), Blue, sung by Angie Hart, in Conversation with Dead People from season 7.
Day 4: Favorite Female Character:
During first time watching, it was Cordelia until she left and then became Buffy. Looking back on the show as a whole, it's definitely Buffy.
Day 5: Least Favorite Female Character: hm, Willow, I guess. Not that I don't feel any affection for her at all, just not as much as for the others (and no, this didn't start when she became more powerful; even all the way back in s1 and 2 when Willow was the strong identification figure for a lot of viewers she was the character I felt least for).
Day 6: Favorite Male Character: varies with the seasons. It started out Giles, and later became Xander (despite the urge to slap him on occasion, but then I am a Londo Mollari fan, so those two criteria are by no means mutually exclusive). I think I went through a brief period of favouring Spike as well (early s6), but alas, the Spike Wars happened (still do, for all I know), and that made me go off the character again. (Not Spike's fault, I know. Incidentally, I do like him. Just not in a favourite kind of way.)
Day 7: Least Favorite Male Character: Caleb, not for being a vile misogynist but for being an incredibly lazily written vile misogynist and paper thin plot device. (As opposed to, say, Warren, who was always three dimensional and interesting to me.)
Day 8: Favorite Friendship: Tricky. I have a huge soft spot for the dark horses: Buffy and Tara, starting from The Body. There's always a slight awkwardness around your friends' significant others (or your significant others' friends), but in that episode, when Tara spoke about the death of her mother, they started to develop their own bond, and the final scene with the two of them in Dead Things is one of my favourites. At different points of the show Spike and Dawn (i.e. s5), and Xander and Dawn (s7). Anya and Giles in s5 and s6 also come to mind, who make a perfect odd couple sort of friendship. Buffy and Giles is for me too much coded emotionally as father-daughter to read it as friendship, but it's definitely one of my favourite relationships of the show. Argh, can't decide!
Day 9: Favorite Romance: oh dear. You know, I like all three of Buffy's main romances for what they are at their point in time and won't choose between them. Willow/Oz was adorable and Willow/Tara almost too sweet (before Willow's fix-it issues turned truly sinister), but here the thing with Willow being my least favourite of the regulars strikes again, because to root for a pairing, I have to love both participants. Xander/Anya ultimately was heartbreaking for a whole lot of reasons, and there was always a sight unevenness in their relationship even at the good times. You know what, I'll go with Xander/Cordelia. They pushed my Beatrice and Benedick/bickering lovers button, both gave as good as they got, and while during first broadcast I hoped they'd reconcile in later s3, I was perfectly content with the lovely note of grace they eventually parted on, i.e. Xander secretly buying that prom dress for Cordelia and their exchange of smiles at the dance. (Yes, technically they met a couple of times after that since there was still a Mayor to fight, but you know what I mean.)
Day 10: Least Favorite Season: hm, tie between season 1 and season 7, for different reasons. Season 1, when it was still all fresh and in development, is fine, but it hasn't a lot of episodes I ever wanted to rewatch because by and large I don't think the show had really hit its stride yet. By contrast, I rewatched more s7 episodes than I did s1 episodes but I'd never deny the strains of narrative exhaustion are visible, and it's a weaker season than the ones preceding it.
Day 11: Least Favorite Romance: I felt really let down by the underdevelopment of Clem/Sophie, let me tell you. :) On a more serious note, I'm staying the hell away from this question due to my intense dislike of shipping wars.
Day 12: Least Favorite Episode: well, there were a couple I didn't care for (that junior Dr. Frankenstein one from early s2, Some Assembly Required, was terribly dull, I thought), but even the famous clunkers like Where the Wild Things Are or Doublemeat Palace have their individual good scenes (Spike and Anya reminiscing about the good old gory days in the former, for example, and the McDonald's satire in the later, plus Hallie). Then there are some where I can totally see why people are enraged (Lies my mother told me comes to mind), and I agree with some of the criticism but I don't share the rage myself, so I would be faking it if I named those. Hm. I think I'll settle for Wrecked, which also has individual good scenes but really made a major, major mistake in terms of overall storytelling by introducing the clumsy addiction metaphor which made Willow's s6 arc less than it could have been otherwise. So okay. Wrecked as least favourite.
Day 13: Favorite Potential Slayer: Vi, I think. Or Amanda, for that adorable Dungeons & Dragons scene.
Day 14: Favorite Female Villain: naming Darla would be cheating because I fell in love with Darla over at Angel where she got all the character development. So, in terms of BTVS only, Drusilla. I'm still fond of my Ophelia dressed up for murder description of her in a story.
Day 15: Favorite Male Villain: Richard Wilkins III., the Mayor. I maintain making a folksy, (presumably) Republican politician sincerely fond of family values an evil overlord was genius. I loved everything about the Mayor, form his saying "darn" to his relationship with Faith to the fact he really did his entire speech first before starting to consume students, which, as Buffy says, is pure evil.
Day 16: Episode You Like That Everyone Else Hates: there is no "everyone else" in any fandom. No matter how much you think you're the only one, when you give an answer to one of these phrasings someone is bound to come along and say "me too!". Bearing this in mind, I seem to recall Buffy versus Dracula was a (relatively) unpopular season opener whereas it's probably my favourite. Not just for the satire on Dracula movies, which if you're familiar with same is dead on, no pun intended, and hilarious (down to Dracula attempting to reassemble from dust when the heroes have seemingly left), but for such gems as Buffy's reaction to the "I am Dracula" announcement ("You're sure about that? 'Cause I fought plenty of pimply fanboys who called themselves Lestat") and Giles', err, misadventures with the brides.
Day 17: Character You Relate To The Most later season Buffy with her issues and difficulties to express her feelings, which probably says some things about me.
Day 18: Character Who Didn’t Get Enough Screen Time: good old Ethan Raynes comes to mind, though on the other hand, if they didn't have a good story for him, it's fine. (Random guest star just because he's popular never makes for good tv.) His and Giles' scenes in A New Man were the best anyway.
Day 19: Character You Like That Everyone Else Hates: see above, under "there is no "everyone" in fandom. Again, with that caveat, I seem to recall there is a sizable contingent of Andrew hate in the fandom, and I've always been fond of him. Still am.
Day 20: Best Spike-centric Episode: well, gosh darnit, as the Mayor would say, which one could it possibly be? Fool for Love of course.
Day 21: Best Willow-centric Episode: Doppelgangerland. Alyson Hannigan makes the most of the opportunity, it's really funny while also being insightful, one roots for both Willows, and the little moment where Buffy, in order to console Willow, says that vampires are nothing like their souled selves and Angel says "actually...", then abruptly falls silent as Buffy looks at him is one of the best about the whole wretched souled/unsouled question in both shows. (Also give me those two minutes of a scene over the lot of Orpheus as far as how-much-of-Angel-is-Angelus? is concerned, but that's another rant.)
Day 22: Best Xander-centric Episode: while a lot of my favourite Xander scenes are actually in episodes centred on other people (like his conversation with Dawn in Potential or his pep talk for Buffy in the s4 season opener, or his stand against Angel in Killed by Death, one Xander-centric episode for which this isn't true and which I really love is Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. It doesn't shy away from his darker side (the macguffin which sets the plot in motion is an incredibly immature and petty act of his), but also shows his best - not taking advantage of the situation with Buffy, and also, which is easy to forget in the light of later events, having the courage of being the one in the relationship with Cordelia to first have the courage to say out loud that maybe what they have is not just about sexual attraction.
Day 23: Two Characters You Wanted To Get Together That Never Did: Buffy and Faith. I'm mostly serious about this in that I loved the subtext and in my own very vague post-show ideas, they eventually do something about it.
Day 24: Favorite Example of 90s Special Effects: anything involving giant snakes.
Day 25: Favorite Buffyverse Saying: "Fire bad. Tree pretty." It came in handy often.
Day 26: Favorite Scooby Moment: tricky again, but one that made me go to fannish puddy is that last conversation in (new) Sunnydale High in Chosen before everyone departs to their respective fighting positions. The random shoe talk is perfect, and I love the detail that Giles, Willow and Xander leave in reverse order to how Buffy originally met them in Welcome to the Hellmouth.
Day 27: Cutest Moment:
Random, but Buffy putting her head on the table next to the Buffybot in Intervention makes me smile and think "cute" for some reason.
Day 28: Character You Love To Hate:
Don't really have one in this show, possibly because I don't hate that many characters. (It does, however, happen. *looks at Bill Adama from BSG*)
Day 29: Episode You Hate That Everyone Else Loves:
See above. There is no "everyone" in fandom. Even so, I unfortunately don't hate any of the very popular ones, so I don't have an answer here.
Day 30: What You Think Made Buffy So Great:
At its best, it was a wonderful combination between good writing and good acting, creating a lot of memorable characters who really captured one's emotions and imagination. It could do send-up and parody without destroying the belief in the fictional world it created, meaning both parody of established horror tropes - Buffy herself famously came to life as a twist on the blonde in the alley who dies first in a horror movie (i.e. making that blonde the person the monster runs away from) - and self send-up, as in The Zeppo when Xander interrupts a Buffy/Angel scene, which is the shown making fun of its own main 'ship (at that point, other shippers, at that point). It was on long enough that it could experiment with the form of tv storytelling (a show that doesn't get more than one or two seasons doesn't try something like Hush or Restless, unfortunately). It could do absolutely straight drama (Giles finding Jenny's dead body might happen in an operatic setting because Angel(us) is a sadist, but there is nothing remotely unreal about Giles' shock, grief and later rage; and The Body, oh, The Body), it could do open riffs on comic books (we don't need Andrew and Jonathan to spell out to us Willow is Dark Phoenix and Darth Vader combined in the last three s6 episodes), and of course musicals. And lastly, it was romantic in more than the sense the word is usually employed: the romance of friendship through adversity as much as anything else. In the Buffyverse, you could count on your lovelife breaking your heart sooner or later, one way or another, but you could also count on your friends still being there when the day was done.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 06:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-19 06:08 pm (UTC)Then something happened not all at once but gradually, and by S5 I felt WITH Buffy, rather than FOR her as I had in earlier seasons. SMG's performance and the depth of characterization had a lot to do with that, but also that I could identify with the issues Buffy was going through. S5-7 Buffy resonates with me on a very deep level.