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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33qmjDiCQHY So...what can you say about one of the most important bits of pop culture in America? A lot, apparently. For my own part, I'm no academic. I'm just lucky to have been part of history, having watched Buffy from its inception. My Buffy Viewing Timeline(as best as I can recall it): 1. An 8-year-old me somehow tuned in for the first episode and was promptly terrified by Darla vamping out and killing some rando. Even then I knew horror cliches enough to have expected a monster to pop out and get the boy and girl who were all alone. But then she was the monster and little me did not expect that. I watched Buffy up to Season 3 when a lot more sexy stuff started happening and it got bumped up to TV-14 all the time so my grandma said no more. 3. Skip to around 2001 or 2002 when FX aired reruns. I watched Season 3-6 this way. 4. Years later, probably around 2009, I got Season 7 on DVD to complete my viewing experience. 5. I did rewatch of Season 2-5 about ten years ago but haven't properly watched any Buffy since. I haven't seen Season 1 since 1997 or Season 6 since the early 2000s. I was holding out for a bluray set then forgot and now I come back to find the BRs finally exist but are the loving worst. Despite all this, I would say I'm pretty serious Buffy fan. It was an essential part of my childhood and teenage years. I think it's something almost every nerd from that era was exposed to whether they liked it or not. And its subsequent impact on pop and nerd culture can't be overstated. I'm a huge RPG fan and you can really see the influence when comparing old BioWare games vs. newer ones. (by "newer" I mean from a decade or so ago...) Season 1 does not have a very high reputation in the Buffy fandom from my experience. Oh it has its defenders but many folks will recommend skipping it, sorta like skipping season 1 of X-Files. Buffy Season 1 is super campy and short and, as I was recently informed, it was thrown in sort of last minute to fill a time slot. To think, something this important almost didn't happen. But I guess that's often how it goes. Season 2, 3, and 5 were my favorites. Thought they had the best drama and villains. 2001/2 Me absolutely hated Season 6. Buffy, unlike Angel, goes out in a pretty sad way with two stinker seasons in my view but I at least remember liking parts of 7. 6 was nothing but the most contrived and unpleasant drama due to characters being written poorly to create that drama. Granted, my favorite relationship on the show was Willow and Tara and Season 6 was all about "how can we utterly ruin this relationship?" Willow & Tara are of course incredibly important to LGBTQ fans gay representation. But they were also just really good, well-written, well-acted characters with incredibly believable chemistry. Destroying that for no reason does not sit well with me. But these are all the opinions of a much younger me. It's 2022, a lot has changed. We have all changed. I'm really interested in seeing just what I make of this important bit of my childhood now I'm in my 30s. Before starting this thread I figured I could at least rewatch the first two episodes. "Welcome to the Hellmouth" & "The Harvest" Thoughts: 1. “I know this guy Luke from somewhere… That voice is very recognizable… Wait, is he Shao Kahn from the godawful MK sequel?” The answer is yes. I did not remember that at all. 2 The acting is...passable but the action is dreadful. I can't wait for more of a budget or training or time or al of the above in the upcoming seasons. Or maybe it gets better even as time goes on in this season. It all feels very cheap and low effort right now. 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez1twvphJVc There's a petty great callback to this at the end of the series. Perhaps that's why i find it so charming. But that'll do it for me and my less than stellar OP. Dunno if anybody else is gonna be doing a rewatch or if there are even that many Buffy fans there are on this site. I'd love to hear from any of you. But for my part, with this thread going I'll be able to focus better and continue on to the end through all seven seasons. I might even do an Angel rewatch, I only ever watched AtS once about....gently caress, 15 years ago. P.S. Long, long after I became a Buffy fan, only about 2 or 3 years ago in fact, I got into the World of Darkness. I think it, Anne Rice, and Buffy itself are three of the most influential “newer” vampire media. Mrs. Rice (RIP) predates and influenced them both but I wonder if WoD had any influence on Buffy? If there is any, maybe I'll spot it now I actually know more about WoD. Nothing comes to mind, though. P.S.S. The opening narration with the basic premise of who the Slayer is and what this is all about reminds me of Highlander's opening, even moreso when Giles does it, a Watcher just like Joe the Watcher for Duncan. The 90s had so many awesome Fantasy TV shows. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 11:50
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Posted my reply to you in Couch Chat but hey, dedicated thread so I'll copy paste. Buffy was the first show I was a mega fan of. Well, maybe South Park, but Buffy was one that I started exploring internet message boards and web pages for, bought the books and just genuinely loved it. I taped the first episode and since I loved it so much I kept taping them, and actually had the whole series on VHS. I didn't get rid of the collection until the series finally came out on DVD. I actually kind of wish I'd kept them as a memento
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Mar 11, 2022 13:00
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Rewatching this show and noting how they treat women is a real head spinner. Some hosed up narratives buried there, or even just exposed
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Mar 11, 2022 14:44
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Chiming in to say that Buffy probably remains my favorite show of all time (though I do make a distinction between "favorite show of all time" and "best show of all time"). I used to watch the reruns on some cable channel, maybe FX or Logo, before school in the morning. The only season I was actually able to watch as it aired was 7, so at least I got to be there in real time for the series finale. It's definitely a show that was a product of its time, and there were some problematic elements and general clunkers in there, but man that run from Season 2-4 was great stuff.
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Mar 11, 2022 16:32
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Season 2-6 of Buffy is genuinely very good tv and is often great. And Both 1 and 7 have their good parts. It's still my favourite tv show of all time.
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Mar 11, 2022 16:42
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Awkward teen poo poo to follow: I think that it should be noted that Buffy splashed onto the stage about a year after The Craft had been in theatres and helped push the whole alt/goth/wiccan/Nu Age Mysticism thing into adolescent life. I was in High School when Buffy started and I definitely remember it being a Hip Cool thing the Hip Cool kids were into. Being the terrible person I was, I resolved not to touch it because it was probably shite. Same as with Dawson's Creek -- i.e. "oh when I saY something like that I'm a nerd but when Dawson's Creek does it..." Then Buffy fell out of fashion in my age group for some reason and I felt it was safe to look into it. I happened to tune into an episode where Buffy takes a rocket launcher to the prophesied heavy and thought well, that's interesting enough. I remained a regular viewer, though largely skipped the terrible Goes to College season. I laughed at how transparently Twilight copied the Buffy/Angel plot (probably itself a heteronormative echo of Anne Rice's work as Interview with a Vampire was fresh). Anyway, as a series the tone was much better than the film... and I wonder how much of that was like Marti Noxon and the Writers vs Joss I felt that overall the series should have ended with the Glory season. Everything after that was just kind of hollow.
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Mar 11, 2022 16:54
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Buffy and Angel are shows that I'll never rewatch because I'm afraid the toxicity will be glaring to my adult self.
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Mar 11, 2022 18:36
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FilthyImp posted:Awkward teen poo poo to follow: Season 5 ("the Glory season") was supposed to be the end and shows. "The Gift" (S5's season finale) was the best season finale the show ever had. I love everything about the season, really. People who look at only the dated parts overlook stuff like "The Body," the episode dealing with Buffy's mom dying. That episode is perennially relevant and painful. On a less dramatic note, I just love Glory as a villain. If you want my wild speculation about why Buffy maybe fell out of favor with some groups, it is my experience that a lot of folks "moved on" to Angel. Buffy and Angel are super different shows with different aims and themes. Buffy is a coming of age show with demons and poo poo. Angel the Series is about a group of adults dealing with adult problems...framed against demons and poo poo. This is not a value statement, adult here does not mean mature. It's just that the tone of the two shows is radically different and my favorite character in Angel, Lindsey, would not work at all in Buffy because he doesn't fit at all with the kinds of themes Buffy was interested in pursuing.
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Mar 11, 2022 21:01
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I've rewatched Buffy more than any other show. About 5 years ago I decided to do a rewatch for the first time since I was a teenager and it and Angel have been pretty constantly on my mind since. Not because I love them, really, but because they are both good and ways in which they are bad is really interesting to me. As the shows go on, some areas get better, and some get worse. It's got very centrist social attitudes in the rare times when it does brush up against real life and that probably dampens my enjoyment of the shows more than anything else, but it's also just a kind of artifact of how certain people think. As far a basic top level quality discussion on the two shows go I think buffy: s1 is not actually bad, it's just simpler and campier. s2 has episodes of the exact same style and quality, sometimes worse - it just also has the big angelus story and spike/drusilla. s3-5 are consistently good even with the botched initiative storyline, s6 is rocky but so weird and interesting to me, and s7 straight up stinks. angel: s1 is uneven but my favourite premise for the show, s2 is the best one even though they abandon the season arc for a 4 episode joke, s3 is fine, s4 is loving awful, and s5 is like...it's not really that good, despite what people say. it has some good episodes but the premise shift and memory reset is too much, the humour kind of becomes a bit annoying (probably because whedon was TRYING HARD in this season), and it doesn't develop it's main arc well at all, cramming things into a few scattered episodes mostly towards the end. the actual last moments of the show are the absolute best they could've done with the season they had though, and is a good note to leave the world on. overall i like buffy better now, although it was absolutely the opposite when i was 12-16 when i was watching these shows on DVD and as the last couple seasons aired. i thought angel was much cooler and i still think it is 'cooler', but the advantages of the toybox town setting of sunnydale and a more consistent focus on the strengths of the show make buffy just a more complete and enjoyable escapist comedic melodrama. angel as a series kept hitting on these cool things for the show and kept moving on from them to things which didn't actually work as well. i feel like they never had full confidence in the show. even in the main character himself. there is a specific episode (epiphany, 2x16) where angel's personality permanently changes to become just david boreanez, laughing and being petty way too much, and it makes angel a lot less compelling and cool as a character. he becomes a normal guy who has superpowers and enjoys hanging out with his buddies. NikkolasKing posted:my favorite character in Angel, Lindsey, would not work at all in Buffy because he doesn't fit at all with the kinds of themes Buffy was interested in pursuing. He's also one of my favourites on Angel and they shouldn't have written him out for anywhere near as long as they did. There's really an alternate verison of Angel where instead of adding Fred and some of the others to main cast, they elevate Lindsey, Lilah and Kate (who left to do a full time job on another show), which I would have much preferred. More adults with complex personalities, less Whedony archetypes. roomtone fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 21:17
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people say s1 and s6 are maybe the worst seasons of buffy (it's clearly s7 for me, but i guess it's more in-line with what people expect from the show), but in both of those seasons buffy is at her most likeable and relateable. i think that goes a long way to making them entertaining for me, because most of the time in the fan-favourite seasons for me, buffy is just kind of there being a stalwart hero, and it's characters around her i'm enjoying. in s1 and s6 she feels like an actual person with interesting internal conflicts. totally different conflicts, since in s1 she's basically a child and in s6 she's a depressed adult, but more vivid than what she is in other seasons. people say s6 is dark/depressing/etc but the storylines are so out there i never quite take it seriously. s5 is much more loving depressing, the back half of it is actually a drag to watch for me at times. roomtone fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 21:21
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roomtone posted:
The actor who played Lindsay turned out to be a serial sexual assaulter who terrorized the Portland filmmaking community while filming Leverage and the Librarians. It's prob good he didn't become a member of the cast
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Mar 11, 2022 21:40
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roomtone posted:I've rewatched Buffy more than any other show. About 5 years ago I decided to do a rewatch for the first time since I was a teenager and it and Angel have been pretty constantly on my mind since. Not because I love them, really, but because they are both good and ways in which they are bad is really interesting to me. As the shows go on, some areas get better, and some get worse. It's got very centrist social attitudes in the rare times when it does brush up against real life and that probably dampens my enjoyment of the shows more than anything else, but it's also just a kind of artifact of how certain people think. Interesting you have so little to say about AtS S3. My memory is that it was, along with Season 2, the best part of the show. Keith Szarabajka (Harbinger from Mass Effect 2, Graham from Fallout New Vegas Honest Hearts, and - nobody will know or care about this but me - Yuriev from Xenosaga) was perfect and the character of Holtz is another example of something only Angel could really pull off of these two shows. Dark and twisted and ambigious, somebody you both sympathize with and despise, like Lindsey. Evil people who still nevertheless have consciences and earn our sympathy.
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Mar 11, 2022 21:46
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i mean i have plenty of crap to say about any season once you get into it, but my eventual opinion of s3 of angel is that it's just fine. it feels like it's of a piece with s2 because it doesn't have a huge change in premise or tone, and it does have strong elements. i enjoy the darla stuff and it's a good ending for her, i think the concept of the holtz storyline is really good but executed poorly (bad side characters, he barely does anything for most of the season, and i think the actor is maybe just a bad fit despite having his own sort of charisma). lilah keeps the wolfram and hart stuff alive and is improved from her s2 charactisation. the real problems with S3 are in the main cast - angels' character has been stripped of his defining qualities (antisocial and categorically cutoff from normal life, ridden with complex guilt, searching for a way to be good) and is preoccipied with mundane things like a misconceived romance with cordelia and parenthood. fred and gunn were paired up purely because it was unexpected despite the fact those two characters do not gel at all. cordelia matures about 20 years between seasons to make her worthy of being the romantic lead heroine. everything centres around the relationship dynamics of the people who live and work in the hyperion. it's all very insular and focused on dysfunctional family dynamics which runs against the previous strengths of the show, and isn't as interesting to me. the only main character who does well in s3 is wesley. his stuff is very good in contrast, which becomes even more stark in season 4. roomtone fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 22:02
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Buffy and Angel are shows that I'll never rewatch because I'm afraid the toxicity will be glaring to my adult self. Haha, yeah, I feel this
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Mar 12, 2022 00:11
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I probably won't ever do a full rewatch of either show, but that's mostly because there's just so much of both, and I already have a hard time making space for new shows I'm interested in. I do find myself periodically going back and revisiting some of my favorite scenes though. And the Buffy musical has a few numbers that are in regular rotation on my Spotify for sure.
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Mar 12, 2022 00:50
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So I read this BBC article and I wanna comment on a part of it and connect it with Episode 3 of Season 1.quote:Those dark forces manifested in a way that also served as a metaphor for the things teens were dealing with, like when Buffy's vampire lover Angel (David Boreanaz) becomes a monster after Buffy loses her virginity to him: a demonic reflection of the first-time experience of some young women when confronted with the coldness of young men once they’ve had sex. My first question is, can the facts of a story undercut a metaphor? Because, to my mind, this interpretation doesn't work because Angel wasn't a bad person. The point of a metaphor like this would be to warn girls about being taken advantage of by a duplicitous scumbag. They were a bad person and used you for sex and then the sex revealed who they truly were. This is emphatically not the case with the character of Angel. This whole angle with Buffy and Angel is a Tragedy, something unjust happened to good people. Now to S01E03 "Witch." We all know the expression "live vicariously through another." We know the idea of a parent exploiting their child to relive their youth. Well, this episode takes it literally with Amy's mom hijacking her daughter's body through magic. At this point, is it even still a metaphor or is it something else? In any event, this would be a case of where the story aligns with its message. They just took a figurative real world problem and made it literal.
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Mar 12, 2022 02:18
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NikkolasKing posted:So I read this BBC article and I wanna comment on a part of it and connect it with Episode 3 of Season 1. I don't think undercutting a metaphor is necessarily a flaw. Angel's situation is a good example because it *feels* like a boyfriend turning bad, but actually it isn't - it's a boyfriend being replaced by an entirely different person in the same body. That doesn't happen. If 'boyfriend dumped me after he got sex' wasn't a cultural meme, the actual storytelling of Angel turning into Angelus would have still been effective, because it's all well written and acted. Academics and audiences can recognise broad strokes of metaphor and allegory in stories they're analysing, and then start labelling things in the story which don't fit their framing of it as flaws. They reduce the writing down to the thing they want it to be. I'm sure the boyfriend turned bad was the starting point for the story idea in the writers room, because the writers are pretty clear that the way they operated was to take real life experiences as the emotional starting point to tell supernatural stories. They do this so that there is some built in emotional resonance, not because they want to depict the initial experience realistically. If you followed the logical course of what a vampire slayer's life would actually be like, it would immediately veer off into territory the audience would have no personal experience with and reduce the audience appeal down to people who are in to heavy genre fiction. So they don't do that, they use these tropes which you'll see played straight in teen and young adult soap operas as a starting point and go from there. The end result isn't a 1:1 symbolic message delivery system, it's entertainment.
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Mar 12, 2022 02:39
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Season five of Angel is comparable to the best of Buffy, and I think season one is good because of Doyle, but I don’t think the rest of Angel is particularly good. Also, while season five of Buffy was definitely the best season, stopping there would have meant we never got Once More With Feeling, and that would have been a crime.
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Mar 12, 2022 05:29
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Buffy owns, Angel owns more. I'm slowly watching through the shows with a friend who's never seen them, and they're just great TV.
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Mar 12, 2022 05:49
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ok thanks to this thread I'm downloading Buffy to rewatch. Never got into Angel and this thread seems split on whether it's worth it?
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Mar 12, 2022 10:34
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With Angel I feel like people either like Season 1 and 2 then hate 3 and 4, or hate 1 and 2, then like 3 and 4. Season 5 seems more or less universally acknowledged as the best season; as good as or possibly better than Buffy's best. I'm a 1/2/5 guy myself. But yeah overall I'd say it was worth it.
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Mar 12, 2022 10:42
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boquiabierta posted:ok thanks to this thread I'm downloading Buffy to rewatch. Never got into Angel and this thread seems split on whether it's worth it? I think most Buffy fans are also Angel fans and vice versa. Thoughts on which is better varies but I've never met a serious fan of one who hated the other. They are very different shows but of comparable quality in acting, writing, etc.. The only thing I thought Angel was weak on compared to Buffy was romantic relationships. It has them but they're by and large pretty meh by my reckoning. As I said earlier, it's an adult show about adult problems. Consider the protagonist - a vampire with a dark past who fights other vampires. It's all about straddling lines, most importantly that line between good and evil. Buffy occasionally dipped into that but it remained from the start to the end about Good fighting Evil, even the metaphysical embodiment of Evil. There's a very powerful scene in Angel Season 2 which contrasts Angel strongly with Buffy on this front. Also it's just straight up more action-y. The fights are bigger and better if I'm honest. If you ever wondered why nobody used a gun in Buffy, Angel has you covered. There are familiar faces from Buffy who pop up in Angel...besides Angel himself I mean. One character in particular grows so much on Angel that it's startling. A total 180 doesn't even begin to describe how much they change and improve in terms of being a compelling character. EDIT: I'm an Angel Season 2, 3, and 5 stan myself. roomtone posted:I don't think undercutting a metaphor is necessarily a flaw. Angel's situation is a good example because it *feels* like a boyfriend turning bad, but actually it isn't - it's a boyfriend being replaced by an entirely different person in the same body. That doesn't happen. If 'boyfriend dumped me after he got sex' wasn't a cultural meme, the actual storytelling of Angel turning into Angelus would have still been effective, because it's all well written and acted. Fair enough. I was thinking of, like, if you know X-Men, you know they are a metaphor for being gay. But in these discussions somebody inevitably comes in with "but gay people can't blow up the world so mutants are a bad metaphor." They woul argue the facts of the story ruin the symbolism. It's just kindof tricky at times to balance what the story is about vs. what the story is saying, I guess. So Season 1 so far has involved a lot of Buffy trying to balance her personal life vs. her Slayer duties. Dunno if anybody here is an anime fan but My Hero Academia is a current hit and it's largely about what makes a good hero. The protagonist there is the total opposite of Buffy which is what occurred to me after watching Episode 5. Deku would have totally blown off the date even before it began. Buffy is not a bad person for wanting a personal life, and indeed, MHA seems to largely be saying people like Deku who give up everything about themselves to help others are actually doing it wrong. It's hard for Buffy to balance these two lives but that is still the "correct" choice I think both shows agree on. You can't sacrifice your own happiness for everyone else's. That's a bad way of being a hero in both Buffy and MHA. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 10:52
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Argue posted:With Angel I feel like people either like Season 1 and 2 then hate 3 and 4, or hate 1 and 2, then like 3 and 4. Season 5 seems more or less universally acknowledged as the best season; as good as or possibly better than Buffy's best. I'm a 1/2/5 guy myself. But yeah overall I'd say it was worth it. I'm not a big fan of Angel season 2-3-4, but season 5 only works if you know and like the characters and have seen their struggles, so I would recommend anyone who likes Buffy to check out Angel.
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Mar 12, 2022 10:56
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I also liked seeing how Buffy was something of a microcosm of the transition between the 90s and 00s; in the first season someone could be in danger because nobody was answering the phone at home, but by season 7 the gang had their own text message shorthand for "my date turned out to be a demon and is now trying to kill me". Also in season 4 they start going to trendy coffee shops.
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Mar 12, 2022 11:15
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NikkolasKing posted:There are familiar faces from Buffy who pop up in Angel...besides Angel himself I mean. One character in particular grows so much on Angel that it's startling. A total 180 doesn't even begin to describe how much they change and improve in terms of being a compelling character. I actually did a rewatch of Buffy and Angel quite a few years ago, and there are 'timelines' online showing what order you should alternate Buffy/Angel episodes to keep the continuity roughly similar. It was certainly pretty cool having someone temporarily disappear from one show and arrive in the other as a guest star for a few episodes, made the world seem more real and not something a lot of shows have been able to do. And yeah, I still think of Wesley when I want an example of good character development. It's almost impossible to pinpoint when he went from comically ineffective toff to one of the most badass characters in the show.
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Mar 12, 2022 12:27
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^^hi jabby! I’ve wondered what happened to you in the healthcare stories thread, nice to see you again!
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Mar 12, 2022 14:48
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Friend watched Doublemeat Palace for the first time. Episode has a poor reputation among the community, but he loved it and personally it's a fave. Very funny, and really great guest performances from the guest stars, particularly the drones. He's not a fan of Willow addiction plot, mostly because he -- correctly IMO -- sees the arc as initially about Willow using magic to manipulate and gaslight her girlfriend, while also giving over to the powertripping narcissism that was always lurking in her personality. (The show's characters are so well formed.) The addiction plot, he says, is a shift away from confronting the reality of the plot, and he speculated that perhaps the arc was pushed away from its original course. Honestly that seems like a fairly sensible read to me. He thought the season was going to position Willow as the big bad -- I know that's how she ends up, but like i said before he doesn't -- but now he's just expecting it to be a combination of the boys and Amy. Fun idea tbh. Oasx posted:I'm not a big fan of Angel season 2-3-4, but season 5 only works if you know and like the characters and have seen their struggles, so I would recommend anyone who likes Buffy to check out Angel. Yeah, nice. Season 4 in particular is very much a forefront on how serialised television developed over the next decade. Very epic in scope, a lot of narrative, big twists and enormous stakes. Very compelling television -- depending on how you feel about the twist.
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Mar 12, 2022 14:58
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Open Source Idiom posted:He's not a fan of Willow addiction plot, mostly because he -- correctly IMO -- sees the arc as initially about Willow using magic to manipulate and gaslight her girlfriend, while also giving over to the powertripping narcissism that was always lurking in her personality. (The show's characters are so well formed.) Willow's addiction plot is a good counter-example to the bungled metaphor idea brought up earlier. Where Angel going bad didn't line up with the bad boyfriend, they didn't try to force it to. It was still a basically absurd supernatural story with an emotionally relateable basis. With the Willow stuff in season 6, they go far too hard in making in a 1:1 'she's a junkie!' story. Willow even describes herself as an actual junkie. quote:Yeah, nice. Season 4 in particular is very much a forefront on how serialised television developed over the next decade. Very epic in scope, a lot of narrative, big twists and enormous stakes. Very compelling television -- depending on how you feel about the twist. It is pretty crazy how serialised season 4 became from the show that was 90% episodic in season 1. I don't think it works primarily because the writing in s4 of Angel and s7 of Buffy feels so tired to me. Like everybody was ready to move on - and although I don't like dwelling on behind the scenes stuff too much, I've got to assume that bad blood had started spilling over into the quality of the acting. It obviously did in the writing of Cordelia that season. S4 of Angel is completely serialised, but it's also clear they had no actual plan for the completed story and just keep throwing in curveballs that don't get handled well. Even Angelus's long awaited return is a disappointment, from an acting and writing perspective. Although I'm not a big fan of S5, I can see why they wanted to do a reset and it's impressive that it works as well as it does.
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Mar 13, 2022 04:14
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I've never done research on it but from what I've heard on Buffy forums and stuff over the years is Angel S4 had to go undergo serious rewrites. You'll remember the big thing they were developing was Cordelia's ascension. She was gonna be like a big deal, a Power That Be maybe. More importantly, she was gonna become a villain and all this build up was for that. Then her actress got pregnant and that all went out the window and we got Jasmine instead. This is just what I've heard. Learning S4 had to be redone is not surprising at all to me. That's how it felt. Also the Angel/Cordelia romance is a prime example of why I don't like romances on Angel. The only reason this became a thing was "he's the main male lead, she's the main female lead, how about they hook up." It did not work at all. roomtone posted:Even Angelus's long awaited return is a disappointment, from an acting and writing perspective. This was also a big problem for me. Considering how intimidating and cerebral he was on Buffy, they made him way too kooky and over-the-top. Also we might want to spoiler tag Angel stuff at least from now on, I dunno. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Mar 13, 2022 |
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Mar 13, 2022 04:44
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roomtone posted:S4 of Angel is completely serialised, but it's also clear they had no actual plan for the completed story and just keep throwing in curveballs that don't get handled well. Even Angelus's long awaited return is a disappointment, from an acting and writing perspective. Angelus worked exactly once, and that when he was introduced on Buffy, but they just kept going back to that well and it just got worse each time. The writing in that episode of season 4 was especially bad.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:14
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roomtone posted:Willow's addiction plot is a good counter-example to the bungled metaphor idea brought up earlier. Where Angel going bad didn't line up with the bad boyfriend, they didn't try to force it to. It was still a basically absurd supernatural story with an emotionally relateable basis. With the Willow stuff in season 6, they go far too hard in making in a 1:1 'she's a junkie!' story. Willow even describes herself as an actual junkie. Yeah, and it's something the show eventually backs off from too -- It's only consistently presented that way mid season 6, from Smashed onwards. Before then, Willow's struggles with magic are defined through the lenses of power and abuse, which is why I suspect that wasn't the original intention for the arc at all.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:32
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Ah, "I Robot, You Jane", a pretty infamous episode to my understanding. All about Willow finding love online...and it's a demon robot because of course it is. Maybe I'm being unfair and this isn't scaremongering but a legitimate call for caution. It's just, between this and X-Files' "2shy", the only episodes about online dating are all about deception and murder. Especially in the 90s when computers and the internet were such new things, it's very easy to freak people out about this kind of thing. Gotta watch Hackers to cleanse my system. On the bright side, it introduced Jenny Calendar who is a fun character in my memory. But, on the other hand, she's a character who exists now and....well, this ending "joke' sums up her fate, and the fate of our three main heroes   Also a personal note: I can't see very well so I miss things. Not terribly important things but still notable. Looking up other peoples' comment s on this episode for example, I learned Willow has a picture of herself and Giles in her locker. I never would have even thought to look for something like that. Relatedly, on the Buffy subreddit somebody said Faith gave Joyce a vibrator or dildo for a Christmas present and your main clue is to look at the shape of the package. I never would have noticed something like that Just kind of frustrating at times. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Mar 13, 2022 |
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Mar 13, 2022 11:33
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NikkolasKing posted:Also a personal note: I can't see very well so I miss things. Not terribly important things but still notable. Looking up other peoples' comment s on this episode for example, I learned Willow has a picture of herself and Giles in her locker. I never would have even thought to look for something like that. Relatedly, on the Buffy subreddit somebody said Faith gave Joyce a vibrator or dildo for a Christmas present and your main clue is to look at the shape of the package. I never would have noticed something like that Just kind of frustrating at times. I don't have any sight problems and despite having watched the show many times I have never noticed any of that.
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Mar 13, 2022 11:42
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NikkolasKing posted:I've never done research on it but from what I've heard on Buffy forums and stuff over the years is Angel S4 had to go undergo serious rewrites. I'm sorry but both shows are just poisoned for me now. Knowing how much people suffered during the production because of Whedon makes it difficult for me to revisit them again.
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Mar 13, 2022 11:48
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Christ and he kept writing for the comics, at least, the Dark Horse run. I've never read them, but from what I've read of the summaries, it's a good thing I haven't. Angel ends up with Illyria and Xander ends up with Dawn. Ugh. SUCH a crappy ending.
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Mar 14, 2022 06:34
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And Buffy and Faith end up cops lmao
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Mar 14, 2022 07:49
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Buffy & Angel Once Had Super-Powered Sex In Space I've never had much interest in the comics because of this. Not just that it's stupid and silly but the comics lose all sense of scale. The limitations of a TV budget kept things a bit "grounded" and that's important. Buffy is not Superman, nor should she be. Somebody on Reddit said "limitations breed creativity." They gave the example of Jaws, I'm thinking of Final Fantasy X. It was originally going to have an entirely different battle system but they couldn't make it work with their fledgling understanding of PS2 hardware. You know who's complaining? No one. FFX's gameplay is beloved and praised as one of its best features. Anyway, only one more episode to go in Season 1. After this, things will probably speed up a bit.... More interest on my part. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Mar 14, 2022 |
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Mar 14, 2022 09:19
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I like the silly "supernatural as metaphor for mundane" stuff in the show. Coach giving his team performance drugs that make them aggressive and fish monsters or frat boys who spike your drink to sacrifice you to demons and stuff like that. Often goofy but made the show relatable to teenagers. Speaking of relatable I feel obliged to bring up Xander because I feel a lot of people identified with him when they first watched the show. If you rewatch it as an adult he gives off an incredible amount of red flags and is generally terrible, even without bringing up the stuff with his actor
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Mar 14, 2022 10:40
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Xander was definitely written from a perspective of "Aww but he's so nice! why do girls always make such bad choices!"
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Mar 14, 2022 14:16
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FilthyImp posted:Xander was definitely written from a perspective of "Aww but he's so nice! why do girls always make such bad choices!" I don't think so tbh. I'm in the middle of the Anya/Xander divorce arc, and the show's made multiple decent points about why their relationship is a bit toxic -- largely because Xander's judgemental and controlling. Sure, he doesn't get dragged through the mud as much as Willow or Spike, but he's also fundamentally not as bad as either of them.
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Mar 14, 2022 15:01
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