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

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the Buffy finale and CoE are really all that comparable regardless of whether or not one viewed CoE as the ultimate Torchwood finale, simply because the ensemble cast of Buffy was so much broader. Quite aside from the victory/defeat dichotomy, Buffy viewers has many different characters they could identify with, and all of them had been developed in interesting and complex ways. It's very unlikely that viewers watching the end of Buffy would be left with NO character they could identify with, even if their favourite had died, and also, if their favourite did die, there would still be a whole heap of episodes for them to look back on.

With CoE, on the other hand, with the team reduced to three people -- the audience doesn't have those sorts of options. If you're lucky enough to identify with Jack or Gwen, that's great, but for those of us who can't (which is not to fault Jack or Gwen as characters, but they are rather inaccessible to many of us), there isn't really anywhere to go -- the entire show shuts down. With the Buffy finale, I felt that we were left with a living world, with a living mythology that I could still inhabit. But after CoE I was left with a show that I couldn't inhabit any longer, at least not in the deeply personal way that I had done before. For me, there's no getting past the fact that Ianto's story ended in defeat, regardless of what comes after.

Having said that, in a structural sense, I think that in a structural sense, CoE is probably more comparable to the S3 finale of Buffy, insofar as it represents the destruction of the structured environment that had given shape to the early part of the show. But the S3 Buffy finale still had that broad range of characters to relate to (and from what I recall, it didn't kill off anyone major), so it didn't risk shutting people out of the show like CoE did.