Buffy : Season 8

In case you missed previous mentions, I was asked to write an essay about Season 8 for Whedonistas. Unfortunately it was in the end decided that my essay would not be included, since it didn’t match the overall tone of the book. Which is fair enough - it is a book celebrating Joss’ work, and an essay that says ‘There are good points to this, but overall it looks like he kinda dropped the ball on this one’ is obviously going to be problematic.

A few of notes:

 This essay was written during the summer, after #35 was published. I managed to read the Riley one-shot before my final edit, but that’s all. I have not altered the essay in any way since then, so it is untouched by any opinions I may have on #36-39.

 This is me at my most positive and diplomatic. I would ask any commenters to bear this in mind and be considerate of other people’s opinions.

 Many, many thanks to [info]shapinglight for lending me her comics so I could read them properly. And to my incredible editors who did magic things to my writing.

BtVS Season 8: Please Mind the Gaps

Where to start? Why not with the end... On Tuesday 20th of May 2003, ’Chosen’, the last ever episode of Buffy, aired. It left Buffy standing on the edge of the crater that had once been Sunnydale, her past destroyed but her future thrown wide open, a tentatively hopeful smile on her face.

“What are we gonna do now?” Dawn asked, a question echoed by fandom on a massive scale.

“Write fanfic,” Joss replied - and fandom complied with alacrity. The post-Chosen scenarios envisaged by fan authors are too numerous to count: Epic tales of Buffy and her new Slayer army that span continents and generations; tragic stories of loss and destruction; happily-ever-afters with Spike or Angel (or even Clem. No really!) and fat grandchildren; entertaining yarns about Buffy living the Dolce Vita in Rome with The Immortal (who, as many have pointed out, is a perfect fit for Captain Jack from Torchwood); intimate character studies of the Scoobies’ future lives etc. etc. Every possible avenue, and a few impossible ones, were explored, and although the show was over, it lived on very happily in fandom’s hive mind.

This is the backdrop against which the news of Season 8 - a ’canon’ comic book continuation of the Buffy verse, written by Joss himself - broke more than three years later. And although, to use a little understatement, people were obviously excited, fandom was also in the very odd situation of having the creator of their world intrude on what they now considered their territory.

Post-Chosen Buffy was ours. What could Joss possibly do with her that we hadn’t already?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.

From the moment the first preview pages were released, showing Buffy jumping out of a helicopter, kevlar-clad and with what looked suspiciously like a gun in her hand, fandom knew that this was going to be something very different to what anyone was expecting. On the whole, I think the initial reaction could be boiled down to: “...wait, what?”

To be honest, this reaction has been prevalent throughout the run.

Let me give you a quick recap - it might sound like nonsense afterwards, but at least you’ll have some context:

An unspecified amount of time has lapsed after the end of Chosen. Buffy and her friends have been busy organising the new Slayers in a Scottish castle. Funded by diamond heists, this is a high tech operation which explains the Kevlar and helicopters. Together with the Scoobies the Slayers are in force to fight the latest big bad, code name ’Twilight’, who has the support of some familiar faces.

Hijinks ensue including Dawn becoming a giant, a stolen Scythe, Faith killing a rogue slayer, Buffy exploring her inner Sappho, time travel, Xander becoming BFF’s with Dracula and Harmony getting a reality television show. Oz and his wife eventually join the narrative to help the Slayers to let go of their powers in order to hide from Twilight who, after a world-wide Slayer massacre, is unmasked as none other than Angel!

An entire issue of Buffy and Angel mid-air, cosmic, world destroying (literally) tantric sex gives birth to a new reality which Buffy rejects in the Summer 2010 cliffhanger in order to save the world (again) and meet up with steampunk Spike, the self-declared nemesis of Twilight.

Now I’ve skipped a ton of stuff, but I’m sure you can see this is... radically different to the show, not to put too fine a point on it. To me, the key to the whole thing were the very first lines of issue 1:

“The thing about changing the world... Once you do it, the world’s all different.” I think this was actually Joss talking to the audience: ’Listen up folks - everything’s different!’ Because Season 8 isn’t a simple continuation of the ’verse in comic book form - the changes run much deeper than the format. Or rather, there are... gaps.

There are huge unfilled gaps of time between Chosen and ’The Long Way’ home, which means that we don’t know how or why the characters are where they now are. (The obvious example here is Buffy’s decision to fund her Slayer Army through bank robbing. We are never shown why she chose this solution, so how are we supposed to react and relate to this rather astonishing revelation?)

There are gaps between show canon and comic canon. Whether continuity errors or retcons, they’re still awkward.

There are gaps in characterisation. Buffy and Faith’s showdown in ’No Future For You’ only really works if you discount their interactions during Season 7. As for Xander and Dracula... Despite the delightfulness of their interactions in the ’Wolves at the Gate’ arc, could they ever really be friends? I think it’s fair to say - no. Not a chance, never, no way, not in a million years, and also ’nuh-uh. And as for Angel... I don’t even know where to start. It’s like he was ripped out of his timeline straight after he left Sunnydale. What happened to ’If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do’? Not to mention Connor, his son, being the centre of his world? So until proven otherwise, I’m personally going with the theory that ’Twilight’ is overriding his free will. It’s not so much that the characters would never behave like this, since I’m not a fan of absolutes, it’s that considering their particular history on the show, they’d not behave the way they do in the comics.

There is a gap between expectations and actual story. As I’m sure you know, most, if not all, fans have an agenda of some sort - a favourite character, or relationship, or story line, or theme, or subject, and they all (oh so very eagerly) looked to Season 8 to settle long standing arguments, fine-combing every issue to see if they could find a line that suggested support for their character’s importance, their couple, their interpretation. In short, they wanted Joss to tell their story. This was never going to end well, because Joss has never given people what they want. Whether Season 8 is what we ’need’ - well that’s a completely different question.

There is a gap in our connection to Buffy. I’ve seen her described as a ‘blue collar’ hero, and this fits very well. Buffy wasn’t just a hero she was one of us, which was what made her such a powerful symbol - she started out as a schoolgirl, worrying about grades and exams and clothes, and then she grew up and had to work and worried about the bills – all things that we, the audience, could relate to. Buffy in Season 8 has none of this. She lives in castle, interacting only with her fellow Slayers and her old friends. ‘The world’ is something she watches on TV, not something she is a part of. This state of being cut off is a clearly a theme, but it is not one the average reader can identify with.

Most obviously there is a wide genre gap between the mediums of television and comic books.. In a comic book you have no actual movement, no sound or music, no actors to infuse a line with added meaning from just an inflection or a look. But comics have a rich language of their own, and should not be dismissed as somehow incapable of carrying a ’verse as complex and layered as Buffy’s. When trying to explain the strengths of comic books, people usually talk about how there’s a ’limitless budget’ to work withsince the writers and artists can create anything they like, but this slightly misses the point. It’s not a case of bigger is better, but about freedom. After all, how many times are TV shows forced to change a story because of impossible locations, time constraints, actor availability, or the demands of the network? On the other hand a comic book will only be as good as the writers and artists who are creating it and comic books, like any other medium, can range from pure drivel to the sublime.

However, for anyone not familiar with the genre it can prove surprisingly complex and not easy to immediately get the hang of. Not to mention the fact that the rhythm of comics is very different to a TV show: issues come out monthly and the pace can seem infuriatingly slow for those used to a weekly fix, especially since one issue is only equivalent to about 1/4 of a Buffy episode. On top of which Season 8 has had severe pacing issues, even for a comic. Plus there’s the artwork, which meant having to get used to ’new’ faces...

New readers, many of whom were on unfamiliar ground, were doubly at a disadvantage thanks to all these gaps since the one thing they thought they knew - Buffy’s world - had changed too. This proved deeply upsetting for large swathes of fandom. Of course Joss fans are used to being upset but the gaps did something worse: It made many fans feel profoundly disconnected.

Now I could easily fill a book complaining about the gaps, and although grumbling would be very satisfying, it wouldn’t be very productive. So the question is - why do we have gaps? What do they accomplish? The best way of looking at it, I think, is to see Season 8 as ’based on’ the show, the same way the show was based on the movie. Joss wanted to tell a new story, and retconned (or ’jossed’, as the term is so appropriately called in fannish circles) the parts of the Buffyverse that didn’t fit. As I’m sure everyone knows, Buffy the TV show was about growing up:

“It [Buffy] is about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult. And it mythologizes it in such a way, such a romantic way - it basically says, ’Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero.’” Contrast this with Buffy’s first words of ’Season 8’: “Everybody calls me Ma’am these days.” Buffy’s a big girl now, and adolescence is far behind her. In Season 8 the whole concept of the ’verse has been refigured, which means a new vision, new world, new aims, and, to a certain extent, new characters.

Now of course Joss is perfectly at liberty to do this. Buffy is his and he can do anything he likes with her. If he wanted he could have her marry Bob Dole and raise penguins in Guam. (He might still - never say never!) But as far as I can tell Season 8 is about what happens when all the rules change, when there is no longer One Girl In All The World, but hundreds....

Because there are always consequences, and I’m going to try to look at the upsides and downsides of this new story, and its format.

The Good

In one word: Excitement. In two: New Buffy. In lots more: We didn’t just get Joss writing for the ’verse again, but a whole slew of writers familiar to any Buffy fan: Jane Espenson, Stephen S. deKnight, Drew Goddard, Doug Petrie to name a few. Many of the stories did indeed do what fans hoped for, bring back many beloved characters and furthering many stories. We got to see Willow and Kennedy’s relationship evolve as well as Willow’s powers, and the price that came with that; Andrew growing up and maturing in his own Andrew-y way; Xander having lots to do, as well as gaining and, tragically losing a girlfriend before getting together with Dawn; Faith and Giles developing a friendship; a great new (non-white!) character in Satsu; Dracula and Xander’s relationship (it might not have made a blind bit of sense, but it worked like a dream, and it’s one of my favourite parts of S8, hands down); discovering what happened to Oz and meeting his lovely wife and son; a wonderful snapshot of Riley and Sam’s marriage - and so on. And whatever you might think of individual stories, or the overall arc, fandom was given a shot of adrenaline. This manifested itself in more ways that one.

A thousand old arguments were reignited, and new fans - mainly those who came to the show after it originally aired - leapt into the fray with great vigour, arguing their position for all they were worth. The veterans from the old days mostly sat on their virtual back porches, shaking their heads and muttering about how ’nothing ever changed’, telling tales filled with already-obsolete fannish jargon about Ducks and Kittens and BAPS from Back When The Show Was Still On, showing off their battle scars and traumas.

It also started a thousand new arguments. Because the thing about fans is that they never just like or dislike something, they analyse and dissect their reasons and motivations and reactions to subatomic level.

This, in my opinion, is a generally good thing, and something Season 8 has helped facilitate on a massive scale. People are talking about it, taking it apart piece by piece trying to see if they can work out what it’s doing and why. Comparing and contrasting it to the TV show, and Joss’ other works. Even as I write this, the problem of what exactly Season 8 is about is being tackled from yet another angle by some of the people in my own corner of fandom. Every new issue creates new discussions, sparking debates and meta-discussions and sometimes fierce arguments, all of them spreading outwards, like the waves from a stone thrown in a pond.

Actually that’s not a bad image. Season 8, continually, stirs things up, boldly going down paths where others would fear to tread. Unfortunately some of these paths are deeply problematic.

The Bad

Comic books are perceived as a boy thing. This is a cliché, but sometimes the clichés are unfortunately mostly true as any girl who has ventured into a comic book store can attest. And I know, cause I’m one of them. My own comic book history is a bit different to most people’s since I am nearly completely unfamiliar with Marvel and DC; instead I grew up with European, mostly French, comic books, such as Asterix, Lucky Luke, Spirou and Fantasio, Valérian and Laureline etc., before falling for Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini. Looking back, then I can see that Elfquest was the first thing I was ever fannish about, immersing myself in the world for most of my teenage years. Several fandoms later I was dragged back into the world of comic books by Brian Lynch’s Spike comics. When Season 8 was announced I could certainly see the potential in this continuation. As far as I could tell Spike had made the transition to comic books fairly unscathed, and I knew from Elfquest that it was possible to tell long, epic, and sometimes heartbreaking, tales with a wide cast in comic book form. So, despite some scepticism, I was fairly optimistic.

The preview was the first clue that something might be up. People joke about how in comic books all the women have large breasts and no waist, and it is true that the artwork on Season 8 generally avoids anything that crass. But. Comic books are generally written by boys for boys and Season 8 isn’t all that different. On the plus side, I guess we should be grateful that we didn’t get some kind of carefully tailored ’girl-friendly’ story, which would have been an insult all round. The fact is, however, that comic books have a whole host of inherent problems and Season 8 tackles very, very few. We have guns and uniforms and secret headquarters and lots of beautiful women in skimpy outfits plus approximately three million in-jokes. We even get some meta commentary by Andrew on this now and again, like in ’Wolves at the Gate, Part 4’: “My giant-sized teammate is fighting a mechanized version of herself on the streets of downtown Tokyo... I’ve been preparing for this day my entire life!”

To turn around and say ’Well this is just how comics are’ is disingenuous at best, and insulting at worst. Wasn’t the point of Buffy was that she always subverted the tropes? Surely she should do so even more in a male based environment like comics? And for female Buffy fans it is deeply disquieting to see Buffy, of all people, subjected to the male gaze in this way. If you’re unfamiliar with this term it’s the fact that, in the context of this comic, the women wear low-cut tops and exposed midriffs and short skirts not to mention indulging in things like bubble baths ’just because’, whereas the men only get undressed in any way if the plot calls for it. We can see how ingrained this view is by looking at the complaints about Spike’s shirtless status in S6. We’re not used to the tables being turned. Elfquest, incidentally, is a good example of equality in this matter. Both male and female elves are as dressed, or undressed as the case might be, as each other.

The Ugly

I really don’t want to talk about the sex, but since they named issue #34 Them F#©%ing (Plus the True History of the Universe) I feel that not doing so would be an omission. The reason I don’t want to talk about it is that I find myself caught between two unpleasant alternatives. Usually difficult storytelling is a good thing as characters facing impossible choices is something I enjoy. But here?

Is Buffy really choosing to willingly, and immediately, have sex with the man who is the embodiment of a movement which has fought her for more than a year, who has been instrumental in turning the Slayers into fugitives and helped facilitate the slaughter of 206 Slayers, and also taunted and severely beat up Buffy herself in ’A Beautiful Sunset’? The alternative is that her quite understandable fury is overridden by ’the glow’ which means that both she and Angel are merely pawns in a much bigger game, with very little agency and no control, an idea which is deeply disturbing. The text would seem to lean towards the second interpretation: “However much Buffy and Angel might love or miss each other- What Buffy’s experiencing right now-is the pull of something far more ancient-something far more powerful-and far more destructive than anyone on this omniverse has ever felt before.” (Giles, issue #34)

Whatever the case and despite this apparently looking like a great idea to Joss, I can’t help but feel that it’s all a huge misstep. And no, ’Why not?’ is not a good enough reason, sorry. This is partly made up for by Buffy’s refusal to stay in Twilight and instead going back to her friends, but Buffy still seems to see the sex, and Angel himself, as a good thing. The victimisation is only addressed in a flashback scene in the Riley one-shot where Angel voiced his concern: “She should be the most powerful player in the game. Not a piece on the board. This is wrong.” From an analytical perspective, however, it is a pertinent question: why did the writers go this route? Couldn’t they see the inherent problems in letting the female hero be misled and manipulated by powerful men?

Which brings me to another point. There is a lot of talk about ’balance’ in Season 8. The original balance of one Slayer versus all the demons was changed when Buffy activated all the Potentials. The results have been catastrophic. General Voll (The Long Way Home, Part 4) talks about how the Slayers were demons, would destroy the world, and that’s why he was fighting them. Angel (Twilight, Part 2) implies that Buffy’s creation of all the Slayers kick-started the apocalypse and future Willow (Time of Your Life, Part 2) says: “Vampires gain strength from each other. Slayers, ultimately, don’t.” Throughout there is a sentiment that strong women in large numbers are something untrustworthy, something dangerous. This sits very badly with the beautiful scenes from ’Chosen’, showing girls all over the world standing up, ready to be strong. Of course women can be as fallible and weak as men, and no one expected a world full of Slayers to be problem free, see the superb ’Angel’ episode ’Damage’ for proof of this, but when dealing with such beloved and strong symbols of female power as Joss’s Slayers are, I wish that the matter had been handled with more delicacy than has so far been evident.

But maybe things aren’t what they seem. We know Joss is quite the masterful Juggler and maybe he will catch many of the balls that appear to have been dropped. I’m guessing that the fallout, in story terms, will probably be quite spectacular. Season 9 is already being planned so this is not the end, far from it. We even have nicely cryptic foreshadowing like “The important thing is that you rescue the prince.” and “Betrayal. The closest. The most unexpected.” told to Buffy in Anywhere But Here (issue #10).

So, where do we go from here? Only Joss knows, and experience tells us that speculation is pretty pointless, since so far he’s surprised us again and again.

I was very happy with Chosen, and for that reason never had any specific expectations or hopes for Season 8, which despite occasional flashes of brilliance, never won my heart. And yet...

And yet I find myself rather fond of Season 8 Buffy, with her snub nose, Kevlar outfits and her whole wacky and rather ridiculous world. Trying to work out why this is I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because of the gaps... The same gaps that were such a problem initially have now very effectively turned Season 8 into its own entity, to be loved and criticised on its own merits. The comics tell their own story where everything is different, and that’s fine.

As to the question of what Season 8 is about and what Joss is trying to do, not to mention to how it will all end, then your guesses are as good as mine. One thing is for sure: Joss has written a truly unexpected story, huge in scope and imagination, and all bets are off as to how it’ll end. Where do we go from here? I can’t wait to find out.