Buffy or Cordelia, in terms of Angel

[crazysoulless]

I don't think I was getting defensive. I am honestly baffled on why so many see B/A as immature. I do not get it at all. And I don't get how C/A can be called mature when B/A is being called immature. I over analyze everything and have never been able to just watch or read something as pure entertainment. I can usually see all of the faults people would find with something and the reasons to love something but I'm apparently unable to get into the reasoning behind this claim.

How is it a teen romance when one of them has been alive since the 1700s? Is it really just that she was in high school? Lived with her mother? Romantically and sexually, she was inexperienced but I don't think innocence should be mistaken for immaturity. She saw and understood and contemplated the dangers of being with Angel. She was not foolish or reckless or blind to the reality of being with him. I can't even imagine what it must've been like to be psychologically tortured by Angelus, have the guilt and grief of sending him to Hell, nuse Angel back to sanity upon his return, etc. Or what Angel must've gone through knowing that he's constantly hurting the person he made it his mission to ease the hurt of.

I do think that they are capable of loving other people. Buffy was in love with Riley and is in love with Spike.

I just do not think it makes sense for Angel to start a relationship with another woman when he left Buffy when he was still in love with her and still wanted to be with her. And IWRY proved that if he felt he could be worthy of her and not hurt her, he would jump at the chance to be with her again. I think that the real reason Angel tried to "move on" with someone else on AtS was that the producers or whoever thought the lead of the series should have a romantic interest. With Buffy, one of the reasons Angel left her was so she could have the things he couldn't give her with someone else. He told her in his breakup speech that he wanted her to be able to be in the sun and make love with someone else. If he could suddenly do those things it doesn't make sense why he wouldn't go back to the only person he ever loved in hundreds of years.

And I still do not think Angel was in love with Cordy. I think he was confused and lonely and being egged on by his friends. They were trying to push him towards Cordelia. By the S3 finale, the last real episode that had Cordy in it (she was a corporeal ghost in YW) he is barely going to discuss with her that they may have feelings for each other. And then after that he believes the absurdity of Cordy being where she's needed as a Higher Being in another dimension when she was really dangling in the sky waiting for him to rescue her. He didn't know that she was possessed for months. He had intimate conversations with her and had no idea. It wasn't even Cordy he asked, "Were we in love?" It was Jasmine. And it says something that he was not telling her that he was in love with her and asking if she was too. He was asking if it was even true or if they had just gotten confused and tried to form something from nothing.

 

[white avenger]

How is it a teen romance when one of them has been alive since the 1700s?

I do think that they are capable of loving other people. Buffy was in love with Riley and is in love with Spike.

I just do not think it makes sense for Angel to start a relationship with another woman when he left Buffy when he was still in love with her and still wanted to be with her.

It's a teen romance not just because Buffy is a teen, but also because it is her first relationship that goes beyond a simple crush. And, as far as we know, it was the first time that Angel ever had any real romantic feelings for someone, so in a sense, it was basically the same thing for him as well. Substitute "first love" for "teen romance" if you feel more comfortable with that term. Since most people experience their first love during their teens, the relationship pretty much the same thing, regardless of actual age.

The fact that Buffy can fall in love with someone else, while Angel, at the same time and under basically the same circumstances can't seems like a classic double standard. The only real difference between Angel and Buffy after Season 3 is that Buffy knew that she could actually fall in love and have a physical relationship with the person with whom she was in love, whereas Angel felt that he couldn't

 

[crazysoulless]

I'm glad that you explained what you meant.

I definitely agree that Buffy was Angel's "first love" and that Angel was Buffy's "first love."

However, I've always believed first love and teen romance are completely different terms.

There are people who have never been in love or felt love for or by another living being. They might go decades or even their entire lives without experiencing something deep or meaningful, without having a real connection or true intimacy with another person.

There are plenty of teenagers who have known mature, real love. But there are also many who think they are in love when what they are feeling is just affection, infatuation, horniness, hormones, and lack of relativity. Life experience and perspective can change everything.

I think there is a huge difference between someone who has lived for so long, suffered, sinned, lost their faith in the world, felt as far from the innocence and idealism of youth as is possible---to finally experience that one thing that was missing from their empty but eventful life, to have hope replace misery, to have this new chapter open when they thought they were close to the end of their story---and the naivety of someone at the beginning of their life tasting and experimenting, wanting to see depth where there is just banality, being unable to realistically look into the future and make practical choices.

When I hear adults compare their own romance to being "in love like a couple of teenagers" I think they mean that they are no longer jaded. They are understanding what it means to be a hopeless romantic, filled with passion, able to seize the day and place the right amount of importance on emotions.

Someone can have a hundred lovers and never have been in love. They could be in their forties or eighties with a brilliant career and life but still searching for their soulmate. They might have grown up thinking that love didn't exist or that opening up and being vulnerable with another person would make them weak and idiotic.

---------- Post added at 10:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:33 PM ----------

Buffy’s side of things, it seems as if it was just teen romance---albeit a violent dark fairytale version of it---since she was at the beginning of her life and experiencing everything for the first time, but her occupation makes it impossible to see it as immature or a stereotypical teen romance. One of the things that is distinctive about teen love is that those teenagers have the luxury of growing into adults. Their teen years really weren’t the be all and end all of their life. They got to leave their childhoods behind and have messy and complicated lives in their twenties and thirties and so forth.

But a Slayer is a frontline soldier, a child whose future and chance at old age has been forfeited. Her lifespan a fraction of a normal human’s. Buffy’s life was proving it every week and the Watcher’s diaries chronicled it in every book. It was “if” a Slayer reached 18, not “when.” She tells Riley that she comes from a long line of fry cooks (Slayers) that don’t reach 25. Cordy taunted her with the reality of it when she said, “This conversation is reserved for people who have a future.” Buffy was living on borrowed time. It would always be miles to go before I sleep. By 16, she had been murdered. She would never forget that her time would be shorter than those around her, she’d fall in battle before she reached linear adulthood, every day brought her closer to some monster’s really good day. She was afraid to part with Angel in Surprise because they might not live long enough to be reunited. “If you hadn’t noticed, someone pretty much always wants us dead.” When Buffy fought to stay above water it was literal, thought she was going to die it was because people were actually trying to mutilate, eat, or kill her. When she thought something was the end of the world, it might very well be. And she was the first line of defense, the person that made it possible for other teens to think of the little things as life threatening and the end of the world.

The life the AI team led was the life Buffy has had since her freshman year of high school, her Slayer beginnings having even taken place in Los Angeles. Demons, prophecies, washing blood and guts out of clothes, saving the innocent, trying to maintain faith and order amidst misery and chaos.

Angel was Buffy’s respite. The intensity and freshness of her love for him helped stave off the emotional hardness of Slayerdom (an internal struggle she’ll always have). It was her light and not in the metaphorical hell of adolescence but the literal despair of being the Guardian of the Hellmouth. She couldn’t dare look into the future because she knew the truth, that she might not have one. Her concentration had to be on her immediate, physical survival. It wasn’t reckless passion or blind love she felt. She accepted consequences because it was worth it. She knew it was all that she might ever have. And even then she worried and tried to deny herself. “Want isn’t always the right thing to do. To act on want can be wrong.”

Now in S9, she is 24, almost 25. And shocked to still be alive. Unsure of how to plan for a life that she never truly thought she'd have.

 

[crazysoulless]

It added it to the previous post.