sundries

[rm]

Brief, as it's Sunday, and you got a few links from me last night too. This included me jumping the gun on a thing. Sorry to get my over-excitedness on you. If you have any questions, please address it with me privately.

You do no want to know how many moths decided to come into our flat last night. Ugh ugh ugh ugh. Fuckers.

Yay, finished the edit for HackGender.

Hey, so a friend of mine is a CART provider, and has a cool blog about it, that's interesting from a few perspectives -- including disability access, being a sole proprietor in New York, and neat technology stuff. It occurs to me that with my readership, a large number of you may very well care about at least one of those three things. So hey, check it out.

Advocating for people with disabilities in Syria.

Black and (mostly Orthodox) Jewish.

Rounnd 1 of bidding in the help_pakistan auction ends today.

I still cannot find just a handful of links I find adequately discusses the many problems with the Beck rally: from intense racism to the apocalyptic delusions that rule of law has fled in the US and Marxist homosexuals are rampaging through the streets stealing everyone's guns.

Folks, voting for writerinadrawer Round 10 -- the round that decides the winner -- closes tonight. More votes are needed. Check it out. It's just three little stories and some opinions. You can do it!

So, the Buffy finale.... Really good. Satisfying. Calls back to things in the series without hitting you over the head with it, but also allowing you to remember the journey you've been on. Deeply, deeply aware of itself as a finale, and deeply deeply aware of its audience as knowing it is watching a finale. And, even still, when people die, there is still just a tiny moment of time to acknowledge and mourn that death (both Spike and Anya get that). It's also one of those finales that makes me stand up and cheer, because it has the right music, and the right vanquishing of the evil and all of that.

Which brings me to CoE and its reception. It wasn't written as a finale, although it was written as something that could exist as a finale if need be. And, I suspect, it was viewed by a lot of the audience, especially the American audience for who the structure of the way Torcwhood has aired is a much more radical departure than what they are used to, as something that was a finale. Which really, really, impacts reception. Because seriously? Our show is over and it ends in defeat? No wonder people are angry!

Of course, this also raises the question of how we place programs in time. I.e., did Joyce die when that episode first aired? Does she die every time that episode is watched? Is she dying, constantly, right now, over and over again? Extrapolate to Torchwood. See how that works?

I also felt, ultimately, that the finale of Buffy was more true to its aspirations of feminism than much of the series. All girls who are called arrive, and they skills are not just for survival, but for the perfectly ordinary, victorious living of their lives. Great power ultimately didn't turn Willow evil, but good and wise.

And the argument that "well, it was actually Spike who saved everyone and that's not feminist" doesn't hold for me; a man had to die to save people, but the girls saved people and got to keep on living. Ultimately, I think in a show like this, where you want all key characters involved in the end and to make sacrifices, you're sort of fucked in terms of reception -- at the end of the day, the women will always seem not enough, and rescued by men, no matter what you're trying to say (and you know I have serious problems in general with Whedon's feminist cred).

I almost don't want to read the comics, as I thought the ending was so cleanly and suitably executed, but I will eventually. In the, I have no time!!!! place that I'm in now, can someone just briefly tell me if there are any graveside/mourning type moments in there I need to find now as opposed to later for my D*C presentation?

Comments

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

"at the end of the day, the women will always seem not enough, and rescued by men, no matter what you're trying to say"


Can you expand on this, please? I don't follow Whedon fandoms or feminist posts about Whedon, but I'm curious why people think that. (I also didn't take that man-saves-woman idea away from the finale, so I'm doubly puzzled.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Spike sacrifices his life as part of the plan to defeat the first evil. This can be read as the Slayers not being able to save themselves and needing a man for the final rescue, despite the fact that I think it's actually about a vampire realizing and utilizing the ramifications of the soul he fought for. I think there is sexism in lots of places in Buffy, particularly in how everyone addresses Buffy's relationship history, but this is not one of the places where I find it present. However, as we live in a society filled with sexism and where, at the end of the day, most movies are about Boy Saves Girl whatever we were supposed to see about teamwork, cooperation, the girls living, Spike's soul is easily drowned in most lenses by the sense that the Boy Saved the Girl, Again.

It's like the problem of rape on the show. Yes, lots of the show actually talks about rape. Some of the show is an allegory for rape. But bad things happen to women on the show that aren't about rape or about gender, but are about the fact that Bad Things Happen to Heroes on TV, but it's hard to know what falls into what categories, so despite my feeling that Whedon is preoccupied with rape issues in a way that doesn't always serve the purpose I think he wants his discussion of them to serve, all violence that occurs against female characters on Buffy is not actually about rape. However, figuring out what is and isn't about rape, when society and experience and often the show itself tells us that everything comes down to sexual violence makes the analysis practically impossible to do and obscures whatever it is the show is trying to say about rape as much as it obscures whatever it is the show is trying to say about other types of violence/training/tragedy both in and outside gendered terms.

We come to shows with our culture. They can't be made, or watched, in a clean room. And that can be very frustrating when trying to look at something as unlike as Buffy (female-dominated cast, female heroes) is.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

I found that there are several points in the seventh season when they try to make the point that It's All About Spike After All and it really did come across as derailing to me. I was just really uncomfortable over the whole theme that it's okay to rape a woman if you decide that X, Y, and Z are part of your manly man quest for redemption.

And, be honest: did you really see Spike as a sacrifice there and not a crowning moment of awesome that would guarantee his quick reincarnation in the next season of Angel? This card has been played too often and never offered to the Kendras and Joyces and Taras and Anyas of the world.

On the plus side, there is the awesomeness of Faith and Robin bickering over which of them is prettier.

[sanginmychains.livejournal.com]

Although in the larger context, there Buffy/Angelverse repeatedly asks the question, when you've committed evil, when you've /been/ evil, and want to change, or actually do change, do you get to? Are you the accumulation of your sins, or is redemption possible? Can you be unforgiven and still be worthwhile as a hero? Does existence precede essence? Granted, that's more AtS then Buffy, but still. Anya, Faith, Angel, Faith, did I mention Faith? ANd of course, Spike. Spike isn't the only one who did the Evil to Good transition (with some bobbles along the way), and so reading his (limited) forgiveness as somehow a whitewash -- no, I don't really see it.

[crewgrrl.livejournal.com]

There was a big proposal of bringing Tara back. If Amber Benson had been available, it would have happened along the following lines....

Buffy was supposed to have gotten a wish (the good kind, not the vengeance demon sort). No catches, no hooks, no literal understanding issues. And the entire episode was supposed to have centered around What She Was Going to Wish For.

At the end of the episode, Willow was to walk upstairs to see Buffy holding a pair of shoes in the bedroom door. She was going to be dismayed that *that* was what Buffy had wished for. And then Buffy was to step away and there was Tara.

It's just that Amber Benson couldn't do it at the time.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I don't doubt that an overview of that story was written, but it doesn't make any sense on several levels. Heck, Buffy is the last person who would bring a good person back from the afterlife, and yet she doesn't choose Joyce who would be able to maintain a house filled with a dozen borders and keep Dawn out of foster care?

I think it's another Woman in Refrigerators thing. A woman dying showcases the grief and guilt of the remaining characters and you can't wipe out the death without erasing that character development. On the other hand, a man dying just prevents the progress of great justice, so the sooner he comes back the sooner evil will be at a disadvantage. The only thing that could be said for Joss Whedon's feminist cred is that he counts Buffy and Faith (but not Kendra) as worthy of resurrection.

It's also curious how James Marsters is always available when they want him back. Of course, he's an OPENING CREDITS character, not like Tara or Joyce, so maybe they let the phone ring more than twice before deciding whether he was able to do it.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This was a lovely comment to read. I have to agree with you on all points.


I do want to explain that when I was growing up, my quietly feminist parents raised me to look past gender and sex when reading stories and watching movies. This was literally my thought process as a small child: "Okay, that person with a penis has more testosterone, hormones, etc, that make him physically stronger, but he's not looking at the person with the vagina and thinking that she is weak because she has more estrogen, etc - he sees her as an equal as a person. Male people and female people have their various differences, but they're people, and people do things like people." Nobody told me that playing in the dirt and having short hair was "a boy thing." I loved to bury my Voltron toys and turn them into zombies and then have my Ninja Turtle action figures save the day. I would take half my Barbie dolls and chop off their hair and have them be the lovers of the other Barbies, although I may have been influenced by my neighbor Sue and her girlfriend, Susan. When I played with my She-Ra toys, the female figures always rescued the male figures, but I never "compartmentalized" genders. I was aware of how "boys and girls were different" but I never saw the big deal about it.
It wasn't until I got into middle school that I realized the weird gender/sex gaps that people place on each other. Girls do this, boys to that. Why are you doing boy things if you're a girl, and visa versa. I didn't tell anyone that I used to have lesbian neighbors and that one of my elementary school classmates was trans (born female, presented as male). Because I saw that a lot of the other kids didn't like knowing these things. My favorite creative writing teacher got teased by students for having a girlfriend. So my world got jolted for a bit.

When I watch Buffy, I am keenly aware of all these issues, but the little girl in me shrugs it off and says, "But they're all people. So what?" And when I read some blog posts by people who blasted Whedon and Spike, etc, that little girl in me thought, "Seriously why all the man hating? They're PEOPLE."

I think my childhood issues stemmed more from being disabled and shunned than being a disabled female and shunned.

I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I'll stop now. I hope I got some kind of point across.

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

I totally see what you're getting at. I was one of two girls and the eldest. Since there were no boys about, a lot of the jobs that our society likes to peg as "stuff guys do" my sister and I got to do, like take out the trash, haul firewood, help dad fix cars and build stuff, etc.

We lived with my grandmother for a time, who both was widowed early and grew up with just her mom (her dad died when she was 3). This meant that I saw women doing traditionally male tasks all the time and heard about women keeping jobs and raising a family all without the benefits of having a man about, doing things like heading the household.

So, I too, grew up with people being people first and everything else second, third, or irrelevant.

There is some interesting commentary in one (some) of the Buffy essay books I read a few years ago that discusses how Spike is Othered enough to come across as more female than male, in that he is kidnapped, tortured, and needs to be rescued as much as any "damsel in distress".

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

I giggled at the "Spike as damsel in distress" thing. I'll have to find that essay book.

And the child in me is confused again, asking "What does being feminine have to do with being rescued?" and I can no longer explain the world to Child Me without stumbling.
I grew up to live in a crazy world full of psychic separations that smack so hard of essentialism that it makes my head spin.