![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Currently I've got two writing projects going simultaneously. It's an interesting endeavor to keep things progressing on both because sometimes I can't decide which one to work on because I have thoughts on both pieces. Oddly, What Not to Wear was cranked out on a slow day at work when I was bored. It is a one-off, unbeta'd, 500+ word flash fic about the maturation of Cordelia Chase.
It isn’t accidental that I wrote What Not to Wear because I've been thinking about physical bodies and spaces on BtVS and Angel for a while now. I’ve also been watching WAY too many episodes of What Not to Wear. I don't have a complete handle on my thoughts, so bear with me, please.
What I noticed was this:
1. Simplistically, Angel equals the adult world and, surprise, surprise, BtVS equals the adolescent world. The Scoobies spend seasons 1 through half of season 5 on campuses. Season 7 sees a return to the campus first through Dawn and later Buffy’s job as counselor. They move from high school to college and although college can be considered a primer for the "real world" (read adulthood), it is a relatively safe and contained nexus. If we equate adulthood with tragedy and gainful employment, Season 5 should mark the beginning of Buffy’s transition. However, it isn’t until season 7 shoves a very resistant Buffy into the leadership role (as a leader of the SIT’s), I would argue, that Buffy actually becomes, and is considered, an adult. The obvious moment of transition would be Lies My Parents Told Me, but I would say that as early as Bring on the Night, Buffy begins that movement.
2. Even S4 Xander, who has opted not to attend college, is drawn back to the school. Yes, he's one of the Scoobies and all of the other Scoobies are in school so where else would he be, but he, too, at least initially, fails to make the transition to adult. Perhaps his position is the most realistic, he lives in his parents basement and takes random jobs as he struggles to find a place for himself in the world. A search mimicked by Giles.
3. Locations in Angel, otoh, are always adult locations. They begin that way and the trajectory of the show insists that they remain that way. The world of Angel is a nighttime world; it's a vampire world, an adult world. The people populate bars, police stations, casinos, and evil law firms. Angel has an office and saving the world is a business.
4. Angel is where I began to think of the bodies on these two shows; specifically it was Cordelia’s body because it became apparent to me that the bodies in each series were appropriate and exclusive to the spaces on the show. Seeing Willow beside Cordelia in Orpheus punctuates how differently the shows perceive the physical form and what the condition of that form means to the tenor of the show. And I think that it’s much more than just Charisma Carpenter is pregnant and Alyson Hannigan isn’t. Even if Charisma Carpenter had shown up on BtVS in S7, newly slimmed and toned, I still think that she would have looked out of place among the bodies on the show. Cordelia looks like an adult, her demeanor reflects her maturation and it shows in the way the character walks, talks and handles herself. It’s more than Queen C bitchiness. By the end of S7 Buffy is the only character on BtVS who really gains that sort of self-confidence. I’m thinking of episodes like Get It Done and Empty Places, as well as that satisfied smile that closes Chosen. When she is forced into taking on responsibility for the SIT’s and actually being a leader to them, Buffy grows up. So, Angel’s adult bodies are physically larger and look older than BTVS’s androgynous, adolescent bodies. Of course because the adolescent world can't exist without an adult body present, BtVS has parents: Joyce, Giles and Professor Walsh.
5. To get back to Cordelia's body, it changes in a way that the bodies on BtVS never do. Charisma Carpenter was always much more endowed and as the actress aged, her body changed. It softens, rounds, and Cordelia looks like a grown woman, especially in constrast to Sarah Michelle Gellar who, as she loses her “baby fat” begins to look more and more emaciated. Perhaps it is BtVS’s insistence on the one ‘girl’ in the world and that girl never lives long enough to become a woman. I don’t know. But, if, to some extent, maturation is the mark of the end of innocence, then Cordelia’s sudden awareness at the end of To Shanshu in L.A. forces her into a space that takes Buffy seven seasons.
6. If maturation is marked by the end of innocence, then Wesley, too, "grows up" by the end of Sleep Tight. Those moments of intense betrayal or emotional upheaval don’t seem to work in quite the same way as they do on BtVS. Episodes like Seeing Red, Becoming II, Weight of the World, The Gift, do change the characters, but the character development doesn’t seem as readily apparent. For example, after Selfless I was expecting much more out of Anya’s character arc. I was expecting a range of recrimination and conflict on par with Angel and Spike re-gaining their souls, not that she had to go crazy, but that her recent humanity and the events in Selfless would have created moral tension that wouldn’t have been waved off after an ep or two.
7. Angel’s darker, more adult themes are the reflections of a “reality” that are not offered on BtVS, and that may not be accessible by the adolescent bodies. Whether it’s meant to be a moral lesson, teenagers shouldn’t get pregnant, or just something Whedon didn’t have the “space” to deal with, meditations on ‘the future’ are much more prevalent on Angel: Expecting, The Judgment, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Untouched, Connor, and Jasmine. As much as Buffy is about family, Angel seems to be much more concerned with ideas of lineage and heritage: Darla-Angel-Drusilla-Darla, Darla/Angel – Connor, Connor/Cordy – Jasmine, Illyria, the power struggle within Wolfram & Hart, AI, and I’m pushing it here, inheriting W&H. Slayers don’t have a future/family because they die young; vampires only achieve futures through a perversion of procreation (life in death), however, Angel manages to create a very real future family history.
To give a brief rundown of what I'm seeing when I look at BtVS and Angel, picture the characters (read bodies) on each show.
BtVS
Buffy - adolescent body
Willow - adolescent body
Xander - adolescent body (Until S5/6. Xander is an anomaly. He matures along with his body; by S7 he is obviously successful. Despite the hiccup in S4, he makes the transition into adulthood. He almost gets married, has his own apartment, etc.)
Cordelia - adolescent, albeit curvy, body
Giles - adult body (necessary figure to supervise the adolescent bodies)
Joyce - adult body (read female Giles)
Wesley - ? (Considering his later character arc on Angel, I think you could read Wesley as a transitional body. He is in the process of moving from an adolescent body into an adult body.)
Dawn - child/adolescent body
Spike - adult body (with the exception of Vampire!Willow, the vampire bodies are always adult bodies.)
Angel - adult body
Faith - adolescent body
Anya - adolescent body
Tara - adult body (Tara’s fuller figure and "mother" role, I think, marks her as an adult body. However, it is perhaps an unnecessary body. She is killed off in Seeing Red as all mother figures in the Jossverse are, re: Joyce, Tara, Darla, Cordelia, and Professor Walsh.)
Riley - adult body (vanished and when he does return to Sunnydale in As You Were, he returns married to another adult body)
Oz - adolescent body
Angel:
Angel - adult body
Doyle - adult body
Cordelia - adult body (initially an adolescent body, Cordelia transitions to an adult body by Guise Will Be Guise. Although her moral maturation occurs as of To Shanshu in L.A., the shorter, darker hair effectively age Cordelia’s appearance to match the rest of the “older” cast.)
Wesley - adult body
Lilah - adult body
Lindsey - adult body
Kate - adult body
Gunn - adult body
Fred - adolescent body (however, Fred is also a transitional character. I would like to suggest that she remains an adolescent body until she becomes Illyria. The shift in character and authority, similar to Buffy's acceptance of authority in S7, I believe, indicate her transition to an adult body. Illyria, as a character, reads very differently from Fred to the credit of Amy Acker.)
Spike - adult body
Connor - adolescent body (the only true adolescent body on the show.)
Lorne - adult body
The adult bodies on Angel engage in adult activities. BtVS instructs us that beer is bad and the characters pretty much stay away from it, however Angel shows us regularly that indulging isn’t always of the bad, it’s just something that adults do as part of a coping strategy. Wesley drinks copiously post-Sleep Tight, all the W&H lawyers drink (I think they all have mini bars or something) and there are the aforementioned bars: Caritas, where everyone is shown imbibing and Lorne always has a Seabreeze, Cordelia and Doyle spent time together in bars, Angel met Kate in a bar. Bars in Sunnydale, too, are the region for adults. Willie’s bar early in the series is usually checked out by Angel. The Bronze, for all that it is a bar, never seemed to include underage drinkers. You would think that someone, somewhere would be able to sneak a drink, but our gang is good and moral and right and besides, as we later learn, Beer Bad. Alcohol is then mostly restricted to college frat parties, Spike and Giles.
Okay, so that may or may not make any real sense. I think it’s such an interesting, visual reading of the show and I’d like to shape it and focus it more.
It isn’t accidental that I wrote What Not to Wear because I've been thinking about physical bodies and spaces on BtVS and Angel for a while now. I’ve also been watching WAY too many episodes of What Not to Wear. I don't have a complete handle on my thoughts, so bear with me, please.
What I noticed was this:
1. Simplistically, Angel equals the adult world and, surprise, surprise, BtVS equals the adolescent world. The Scoobies spend seasons 1 through half of season 5 on campuses. Season 7 sees a return to the campus first through Dawn and later Buffy’s job as counselor. They move from high school to college and although college can be considered a primer for the "real world" (read adulthood), it is a relatively safe and contained nexus. If we equate adulthood with tragedy and gainful employment, Season 5 should mark the beginning of Buffy’s transition. However, it isn’t until season 7 shoves a very resistant Buffy into the leadership role (as a leader of the SIT’s), I would argue, that Buffy actually becomes, and is considered, an adult. The obvious moment of transition would be Lies My Parents Told Me, but I would say that as early as Bring on the Night, Buffy begins that movement.
2. Even S4 Xander, who has opted not to attend college, is drawn back to the school. Yes, he's one of the Scoobies and all of the other Scoobies are in school so where else would he be, but he, too, at least initially, fails to make the transition to adult. Perhaps his position is the most realistic, he lives in his parents basement and takes random jobs as he struggles to find a place for himself in the world. A search mimicked by Giles.
3. Locations in Angel, otoh, are always adult locations. They begin that way and the trajectory of the show insists that they remain that way. The world of Angel is a nighttime world; it's a vampire world, an adult world. The people populate bars, police stations, casinos, and evil law firms. Angel has an office and saving the world is a business.
4. Angel is where I began to think of the bodies on these two shows; specifically it was Cordelia’s body because it became apparent to me that the bodies in each series were appropriate and exclusive to the spaces on the show. Seeing Willow beside Cordelia in Orpheus punctuates how differently the shows perceive the physical form and what the condition of that form means to the tenor of the show. And I think that it’s much more than just Charisma Carpenter is pregnant and Alyson Hannigan isn’t. Even if Charisma Carpenter had shown up on BtVS in S7, newly slimmed and toned, I still think that she would have looked out of place among the bodies on the show. Cordelia looks like an adult, her demeanor reflects her maturation and it shows in the way the character walks, talks and handles herself. It’s more than Queen C bitchiness. By the end of S7 Buffy is the only character on BtVS who really gains that sort of self-confidence. I’m thinking of episodes like Get It Done and Empty Places, as well as that satisfied smile that closes Chosen. When she is forced into taking on responsibility for the SIT’s and actually being a leader to them, Buffy grows up. So, Angel’s adult bodies are physically larger and look older than BTVS’s androgynous, adolescent bodies. Of course because the adolescent world can't exist without an adult body present, BtVS has parents: Joyce, Giles and Professor Walsh.
5. To get back to Cordelia's body, it changes in a way that the bodies on BtVS never do. Charisma Carpenter was always much more endowed and as the actress aged, her body changed. It softens, rounds, and Cordelia looks like a grown woman, especially in constrast to Sarah Michelle Gellar who, as she loses her “baby fat” begins to look more and more emaciated. Perhaps it is BtVS’s insistence on the one ‘girl’ in the world and that girl never lives long enough to become a woman. I don’t know. But, if, to some extent, maturation is the mark of the end of innocence, then Cordelia’s sudden awareness at the end of To Shanshu in L.A. forces her into a space that takes Buffy seven seasons.
6. If maturation is marked by the end of innocence, then Wesley, too, "grows up" by the end of Sleep Tight. Those moments of intense betrayal or emotional upheaval don’t seem to work in quite the same way as they do on BtVS. Episodes like Seeing Red, Becoming II, Weight of the World, The Gift, do change the characters, but the character development doesn’t seem as readily apparent. For example, after Selfless I was expecting much more out of Anya’s character arc. I was expecting a range of recrimination and conflict on par with Angel and Spike re-gaining their souls, not that she had to go crazy, but that her recent humanity and the events in Selfless would have created moral tension that wouldn’t have been waved off after an ep or two.
7. Angel’s darker, more adult themes are the reflections of a “reality” that are not offered on BtVS, and that may not be accessible by the adolescent bodies. Whether it’s meant to be a moral lesson, teenagers shouldn’t get pregnant, or just something Whedon didn’t have the “space” to deal with, meditations on ‘the future’ are much more prevalent on Angel: Expecting, The Judgment, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Untouched, Connor, and Jasmine. As much as Buffy is about family, Angel seems to be much more concerned with ideas of lineage and heritage: Darla-Angel-Drusilla-Darla, Darla/Angel – Connor, Connor/Cordy – Jasmine, Illyria, the power struggle within Wolfram & Hart, AI, and I’m pushing it here, inheriting W&H. Slayers don’t have a future/family because they die young; vampires only achieve futures through a perversion of procreation (life in death), however, Angel manages to create a very real future family history.
To give a brief rundown of what I'm seeing when I look at BtVS and Angel, picture the characters (read bodies) on each show.
BtVS
Buffy - adolescent body
Willow - adolescent body
Xander - adolescent body (Until S5/6. Xander is an anomaly. He matures along with his body; by S7 he is obviously successful. Despite the hiccup in S4, he makes the transition into adulthood. He almost gets married, has his own apartment, etc.)
Cordelia - adolescent, albeit curvy, body
Giles - adult body (necessary figure to supervise the adolescent bodies)
Joyce - adult body (read female Giles)
Wesley - ? (Considering his later character arc on Angel, I think you could read Wesley as a transitional body. He is in the process of moving from an adolescent body into an adult body.)
Dawn - child/adolescent body
Spike - adult body (with the exception of Vampire!Willow, the vampire bodies are always adult bodies.)
Angel - adult body
Faith - adolescent body
Anya - adolescent body
Tara - adult body (Tara’s fuller figure and "mother" role, I think, marks her as an adult body. However, it is perhaps an unnecessary body. She is killed off in Seeing Red as all mother figures in the Jossverse are, re: Joyce, Tara, Darla, Cordelia, and Professor Walsh.)
Riley - adult body (vanished and when he does return to Sunnydale in As You Were, he returns married to another adult body)
Oz - adolescent body
Angel:
Angel - adult body
Doyle - adult body
Cordelia - adult body (initially an adolescent body, Cordelia transitions to an adult body by Guise Will Be Guise. Although her moral maturation occurs as of To Shanshu in L.A., the shorter, darker hair effectively age Cordelia’s appearance to match the rest of the “older” cast.)
Wesley - adult body
Lilah - adult body
Lindsey - adult body
Kate - adult body
Gunn - adult body
Fred - adolescent body (however, Fred is also a transitional character. I would like to suggest that she remains an adolescent body until she becomes Illyria. The shift in character and authority, similar to Buffy's acceptance of authority in S7, I believe, indicate her transition to an adult body. Illyria, as a character, reads very differently from Fred to the credit of Amy Acker.)
Spike - adult body
Connor - adolescent body (the only true adolescent body on the show.)
Lorne - adult body
The adult bodies on Angel engage in adult activities. BtVS instructs us that beer is bad and the characters pretty much stay away from it, however Angel shows us regularly that indulging isn’t always of the bad, it’s just something that adults do as part of a coping strategy. Wesley drinks copiously post-Sleep Tight, all the W&H lawyers drink (I think they all have mini bars or something) and there are the aforementioned bars: Caritas, where everyone is shown imbibing and Lorne always has a Seabreeze, Cordelia and Doyle spent time together in bars, Angel met Kate in a bar. Bars in Sunnydale, too, are the region for adults. Willie’s bar early in the series is usually checked out by Angel. The Bronze, for all that it is a bar, never seemed to include underage drinkers. You would think that someone, somewhere would be able to sneak a drink, but our gang is good and moral and right and besides, as we later learn, Beer Bad. Alcohol is then mostly restricted to college frat parties, Spike and Giles.
Okay, so that may or may not make any real sense. I think it’s such an interesting, visual reading of the show and I’d like to shape it and focus it more.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-12 06:44 pm (UTC)From:That point gave me lots of trouble, but the reason that I leave off Willow and Buffy (until S7) is that the changes aren’t as dramatically presented or apparent. Buffy in S6 is more in line with what we see in Wesley, but I really don’t think before S6 there was as much noticable, on the surface of it. Willow still uses that annoying baby talk through S7 (and I love Willow and her very distinct speaking pattern). Maybe it’s because we do get glimpses of the changes in her, but that she’s trying so hard to present herself as non-threatening, and pretend to be who she was and not really embracing who she is.
Buffy still isn’t as dramatic, per se. But then maybe it’s the way the changes in Wesley, Cordelia (and Fred) happen sort of all at once, practically over night. Buffy growing up was like stone eroded by water, I didn’t notice it all at once.
AtS, being so much more about fate, has a focus on the people you get stuck with, and the situations you get stuck in--how you end up being just like your father, for instance.
Okay, that’s exactly what I was trying so very hard to say! Thank you! *whew*
no subject
Date: 2007-04-12 08:39 pm (UTC)From:Okay, I know what you mean! Yeah, Spin The Bottle really had a ball with all that.
*loves*
no subject
Date: 2007-04-12 09:23 pm (UTC)From: