TW for suicide for the first section only.
We aren't going to agree on this. I do understand what you're saying, but I can't get away from, without psychiatric issues, that ultimately suicide is a choice. Obviously, anyone even contemplating killing themselves isn't in a great state of mind, but they do decided to do it, or not do it.
You do raise a good point about The First though. We don't know what it was telling Chloe, but chances are it was pretty horrible. Maybe it's just me, but I just can't wrap my head around reaching that place within yourself. And maybe, even if that makes it harder for me to truly understand, that's not a bad thing.
I read the review. I found the parts about the perceived racism of the Shadow Men really interesting (and that was a perspective I hadn't considered before). However, there were also parts of it I heavily disagreed with as well. The line that bothered me in particular was "sometimes you're just done". That annoys me. I'm not trying to demonize the writer in the slightest, and I just know this is going to come across as cold (and god, I really don't want it to, but I've been trying, and failing, to phrase it differently and still maintain the point), but that's crap. Everyone goes through things they shouldn't have too. Everyone. But guess what? You're never "just done" (god, I can't even describe how much that line pisses me off). Ever. I would prefer not to go into details (and I realize it detracts from my point without going into detail), but if I can get through the things I've gone through, then so can others. At times it's been, literally, as bad as it gets, and I'm still standing.
Well, Angel thought that he was on the brink of slaughtering Buffy and everyone else he cared about. He thought The First was going to trigger Angelus. That's pretty different (although granted, as you said, we don't know exactly what The First said to Chloe). But ultimately, Angel didn't end himself. You're right, without Buffy's intervention he would have, but he didn't. Chloe could have talked to people. There were 30 people in that house. It wasn't like her options were limited.
Well, the thing about suicide is that pretty much it is incredibly strong emotions that seriously interfere with your day to day life, and such emotions really do clog up your brain so you can’t even think straight. People who go through intense periods of feeling very suicidal can’t do things that most people take for granted: the ability to sit still for two hours and do an exam, concentrate, complete tasks within a certain time frame, constant tiredness, etc. It’s a bitch to describe, and honestly, I don’t even know if it’s a psychiatric condition. I just feel that society as a whole associates such feelings as being suicidal as like a craving for chocolate, yeah, it’s nagging, but if you ignore it, it’ll just go away, whereas it is incredibly a savage experience and you eventually reach a point where its all you can think about. I struggle to see how a suicidal person who went through those would even resemble such a ‘choice’.
With the line ‘sometimes you’re just done’ I think what Mark was referring to, was the feeling and thinking that you are done, as opposed to actually being done. I do partially agree with you on that, that you are never done, however, I’m willing for very exceptional and rare cases to allow that. And I’m talking 1 in 20 million cases. That rare. Mark was right- the minute you call a suicidal person a coward, weak, stupid, idiot- the way a person such as Mark and myself will see you, will completely change, and it’s impossible for it to reverse.
As for Chloe, I incredibly doubt there was anyone she could have talked to. There was Kennedy, who called her a ‘maggot’. There were the shy potentials such as Amanda and Vi. Xander? He’d give that incredibly hilarious and stupid speech he gave in Dirty Girls to her. Buffy, who was a school councillor (side note, also an appalling moment for the show) was far too detached and scary at that point. Dawn and Willow were suck ups to Buffy. Anya was far too cynical. Spike was too busy trying to impress Buffy. Can you say anyone would have given Chloe helpful advice, let alone the time to actually talk to her?
Btw, I don’t think what you said was harsh. Compared to a lot of the moronic people on that Chloe Was An Idiot thread, where people blatantly said Chloe was stupid, and said that ‘it was no time for coddling’- yeah, like being a human being for five minutes is ‘coddling’, or even said that seeing as Buffy experienced depression in S6 (which was conveniently resolved via a very contrived epiphany, realistic this is not) which means that hey, seeing as she went through it, she can just judge everyone else) really, what you said I didn’t find harsh.
About Angel in Amends, yeah, The First was planning to trigger Angelus or get Buffy out of the way, but Angel killing himself was good enough. Angel’s a ‘champion’ against evil, and there is a line in Amends where the First mutters something along the lines that it’s good enough for Angel to wait for the sun.
There seems to be a lot of feeling that Buffy handled Chloe's death badly, and the way that she told Spike that she needed "the old Spike, the one who almost killed me," back. and I think that Joss, himself, explained it best, whether intentionally or by accident, when Nick Fury did exactly the same thing in "The Avengers" by using Agent Coulson's (supposed) death to "give the Avengers a push."
Possibly Buffy's mistake was that the Potentials were a group of scared little girls, not experienced superheroes, but I still think that her actions were valid. A state of war existed. Buffy risked her life every day in order to protect those girls, and then to have one of them take her own life was bad enough, but if she had let the others sit around mourning, that would have been playing into the First Evil's master plan by demoralizing the only people who had any chance of defeating it.
First off, you can mourn for loss and still be a productive team member. Buffy could have instead, given a list of strategies to do when the First visits you. Like making sure that you are always with another person for most of the time, how to separate fact from fiction. Instead, Buffy insults everyone. Well, yeah the speech worked on Spike, but, that’s honestly not very credible at all, considering he spent all season making puppy eyes at Buffy and being a complete suck up. He would do anything for Buffy, no matter how she said it.
The First Evil’s masterplan was to kill all the potentials, hence, they used various tactics such as Caleb to the Turok Han, plus triggers. I don’t see how mourning, is a bad thing. In that 4 episode clog (The Killer In Me- Get It Done) wasn’t the First in remission, anyway? Plus, as we saw in Intervention, the scoobies managed to find where Glory resides in, two episodes after Joyce dies. Yet they were still in mourning, still compassionate.
Also, the potentials were also risking their lives. Take Dirty Girls for instance. After Buffy gets thrown by Caleb, after Spike gets thrown into a wine barrel, no one yells ‘get out of here now’. No, they bring more potentials in, and people, such as Xander, get attacked.
This.
When I first watched S7 I thought it was a pretty decent season, definitely a step up from S6 (which in all fairness wouldn't have been hard). Once the series ended I didn't watch a whole season for good long time, when I came back to S7 and watched it as a whole I was honestly horrified at big chunks of it. Buffy has never been further away from being a hero in my eyes than she was this season. The way she treats the Potentials is appalling, the way the Scoobies interact with each other once Spike comes back into the mix is constantly disappointing and frustrating. I'm not a Scooby fan, but the way they tear each other apart in this season is not something I enjoy. Everything from the previous season is ignored. My most hated moment in the entire verse is Buffy telling Wood she'd let Spike kill him. That's exactly the point she stopped being a hero for me and the fact that they try to pull it back with a masterful patriarchal stroke of genius dressed up in feminist clothing with the Slayer Spell just pisses me off. Buffy telling those girls they now had a choice when they had nothing of sort is almost laughable if it wasn't so delusional. She wasn't giving those girls a choice; she was in fact becoming the Shadow Men, but on a much larger, much more destructive scale.
This was a great post. Loved it. Season seven, on first watch, was rather engaging, in a horror movie way, I for one, am really affectionate for the character Jonathan, and his death shocked me, a lot, so that helped the suspense. But really- unlike season 1-5 where I can marathon watch it after a long week of exams or something like that, I can’t do that for seasons 6-7 at all. Like I rewatched season 7 a couple of months ago, and my god, I was so bored, disgusted by gigantic chunks of it. This is supposed to be my role model for female empowerment? Someone who makes a lot of speeches? Someone who wins based on luck, rather than merit? And urgh the Slayer Spell. What choice do they have? I don’t get it. Never have, never will. What if someone said no? What if one of these potentials had aspirations in fields of medicine or the arts? And have to deal with stupid slayer dreams? I think of my fifteen year old self getting slayer powers, and that frightens me. There’s this line in Bring On The Night (I think?) when Kennedy says, the younger the better. And she’s right. Being ‘chosen’ is completely degrading, perverted, etc.
And don’t get me started on Lies My Parents Told Me. Buffy, you are the slayer. If that means Robin is going to try to kill Spike next week, you are gonna save him. If he tries to kill him a thousand more times, you are going to save him a thousand more times. Buffy excuses her actions for being ‘the slayer’ and being a slayer, at its most simplistic is saving other humans from supernatural forces. To let Spike, kill a human, and not do anything, even when you have the power to stop them, is complete abuse of said powers. See, now on ATS, Angel says that he would save a piece of sh*t like Knox. I’m very certain that the Angel we saw in S3-5 on ATS would’ve saved the lawyers in Reunion. Really, Buffy, you have nothing on other people. And in the following episode, if I were Wood, and I was talked to like that, I would have made sure she never went anywhere near the high school again. (Buffy, there is a difference between having a mother being murdered and a mother dying naturally, as well as losing your mother when you are four and having to deal with her murderer around and having to accept it instantly). Buffy even has the nerve to call it a ‘little vendetta’. And in Dirty Girls, she acts so entitled to her job.
Okay so those two paragraphs probably made no sense whatsoever, but I agree with everything you said.
If you had seen the way that my Company Commander treated us in boot camp, you would think that Buffy positively coddled the Potentials, and she was attempting to prepare those girls for a far harsher future than I ever saw in the Navy, including Viet Nam. At least the VC's didn't try to eat us.
As for Buffy's statement to Robin Wood, he was an outsider, of questionable value to her cause, and he had threatened her most valuable fighter, whether he happens to be anyone's favorite character or not. Maybe after the battle was settled and the First Evil vanquished, she would have stood back and let the two men slug it out, but we'll never know. What we DO know, is that in the situation as it existed at that time, Spike was of far more value in the upcoming battle than Wood and a dozen more like him ever could be, if for no other reason than that he had proven to her, on more than one occasion, that he could be depended on to take orders and remain loyal when no one else did (okay, that last was actually after the fact, but Buffy knew that Spike was trustworthy, whereas Wood had just proven that he was more concerned with his own personal vendetta than winning a war in which the very fate of the world hung in the balance)
Like Spike, hate him, or just plain don't give a damn one way or the other, the fact remained that he was a more effective fighter by far than Robin Wood could ever be on his best day. We saw him ONCE stake a couple of vampires in an alley, and fhe never again even survived a fight without someone else rescuing him.
"The mission comes first," and Buffy felt that Spike was more valuable, trigger or no trigger, in accomplishing that mission than Wood was. Buffy was the commander, it was her choice to make, and, as things turned out, she was exactly right.
Wow… so much disagreement, where to start….
About ‘positive coddling’- no offence intended, but that’s kind of a weak argument. Anything can be made better by comparing it to something worse. The fact was that these were teenage girls, scared, and rightly so. Treating them like troops and soliders will only dehumanise them and build resentment, hence Empty Places. You can’t fight a someone’s psychology, you have to work with it. Buffy didn’t work with anyone, she just had that ‘my way only’ attitude.
Wood really did care about the mission. He cared about watchers and slayers, his mother was one. Yeah, he might of cared about the personal vendetta (for very good reasons) but he did really, really, care about the mission.
Even if Spike was the better fighter, that doesn’t mean his life was a more priority. Wood was also essential as he did have knowledge, and the more fighters, the better. Also, he was willing to fight, and a lot of the potentials weren’t (which is completely understandable. They are, after all, according to legal jargon, refugees)
No way...but only because this already happened back in S6. 🙂
True
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I struggle to find a moment post S5 that is empowering. Sure, Dawn holding a sword is pretty cool in Grave, however, 21 episodes later, Xander is knocking her unconscious for her ‘safety’. The amount of failed attempts at feminism in the last two seasons is just… baffling…
I'm actually writing a paper about this topic and one of the books I read on the topic makes an interesting argument about the themes in season 7. The author argues that the Shadowmen, the rape connotations of the demon that created the Slayer, and the Watcher's Council in general are there to act as symbols for patriarchy. The author argues that Buffy's rejection of the Council, of their rules regarding only a single Slayer at a time and by sharing her power with others as opposed to hoarding it, is a rejection of hierarchical power structures.
The whole chapter where he discusses the Council, the First, and patriarchy was really interesting and I can't do it justice on a forum, but if your local library has the book you should check it out. The book is called "Buffy Meets the Academy" the author is Kevin Durand. You don't have to agree, of course, but it's an interesting read.
I'll check it out, I'm going through a phase of reading all of these Buffy essays and critiques. That said, however, one of the biggest storytelling flaws in S7 is that everything is a metaphor for something, yet when translated and within the context of the story, it just gets lost. S7 is very pretentious, it makes me want to go to Whedon and scream 'you are not andrei tarkivosky.'
When I see that girl with a baseball bat in Chosen, who is like eleven, I see a berserk mini Faith Lehane. Or I see the angry, detached Buffy in When She Was Bad. I don't see Buffy with a rocket launcher in Innocence.
Eh, I think some people want Buffy to be some feminist icon and will come up with every imaginable ass backwards no basis in the canon whatsoever nonsense to justify their political agenda. I swear, they want to wash Buffy clean of everything that makes her interesting.
It’s gotten incredibly ridiculous, everything Buffy does will be justified by her herds of fans. The amount of times people say ‘but she’s a human’ and then go on to bashing the scoobies for their actions in Empty Places, so viciously, reeks of bias.
