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[seraphcelene]

Dead Man's Party continues to be one of my least favorite episode. Xander's talking head speech of self-righteousness is UBER annoying.

Comments

[seraphcelene]

Word! You've managed to capture pretty much everything I felt about the show, and that ep particularly, and then made it sound all academic and stuff. ;)

One of the eps, I think, that is better at demonstrating the dual perspectives is Two to Go, and by close association, Grave. I hated Willow in those eps because of the whiny, self-centered bent her uber tantrum is based in. I get that she's destroyed by Tara's death, but that doesn't mean you get to destroy the world. She tried to bring her back, it didn't work. Not to be so callous as to say, move on, but ... move on. (Well, okay, not really). The episode was better at showing how she was affected and how that gets twisted and released back out. It's interesting that I never sided with Willow, she was always out of bounds on that one, whereas Buffy was justified. Those exceptional rules, even if they're not in play in the show's 'verse, are in play in my mind. She gets a pass on running away because she killed her lover in order to save the world. AND she did it after he had regained his soul. Her self-sacrifice and her friends responses to it (or despite it) was what often killed me about the show. Willow's inferiority complex coming to light in Earshot, for example.

Okay, so, meanwhile, I am sure that I don't make sense, hopped up as I am on sugar. You know what's interesting. How sugar actually sounds like Shugar but is spelled sugar. Where did the "h" get off to?

[lettered]

hahhaha sugar. It's true! Words are weird.

I get what you mean about the S6 Willow thing, but then again, we're never deep inside Willow's POV. What's going on there seems a lot more traditional: we are looking at someone else's pain and empathizing, but at the same time standing a little back and seeing that she's taking it too far. What I'd like to see is something where we're so far entrenched in the person's POV that it seems right at first . . . and then we are forced to really see the others' perspectives and feel that they are right. I feel like Battlestar Galactica did that, actually, because I was totally on board with, "KILL THE ROBOTS KILL THEM KILL THEM THEY ARE EVIL!", but the show stubbornly and inexorably forced me to see the robots' pov, and I at last began to see that ROBOTS ARE PEOPLE, too!

But anyway, yeah. I think BtVS had the flaw of wanting us to be on Buffy's side while at the same time not wanting to espouse that idea of exceptional rules. Really, show, I could have still loved Buffy if you had been a little braver about exposing her flaws, and then I could have loved her friends more, too.

[seraphcelene]

That is a really good point: "I could have loved her friends more, too." From what we got to see of Firefly, Joss (aided mightily by Tim Minear) managed to finesse the idea of the ensemble and really make it an ensemble.

I want to say that there was another show that did the POV thing well, but I can't even remotely think of what it could be. Part of my brain is yelling Farscape at me, but I think that's wrong. It has been a really, really long time since I've seen Farscape.