Discussion of 8.21 "Harmonic Divergence" - Released 07/01/09 (Dark Horse)

You seem to be working on the assumption that vampires and Slayers have only just become public. With a year and a half between Chosen and The Long Way Home, it's possible that everything could have become public knowledge way before season 8 even started
 
Clem Rocks said:
You seem to be working on the assumption that vampires and Slayers have only just become public. With a year and a half between Chosen and The Long Way Home, it's possible that everything could have become public knowledge way before season 8 even started
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If people had known about vampires for two years before Harmony's show, she wouldn't have been able to pull this little PR stunt because she would have been staked or chased off the minute she revealed her nature. Vampires are killers, demons, terrorists, and nobody would believe that Harm is any different.

And society would be a lot more paranoid... knowing that a whole race of vicious killers exists in our very midst, almost impossible to tell apart from normal people after sunset... the paranoia would be extreme, and there would have been a full mobilization to hunt down and eradicate them (probably getting a lot of non-vampires along the way...that's how paranoia goes). This should still happen, when people see what all the non-Harmony vampires are like.

And if it doesn't, they'd better give a good reason why not that goes beyond "oh, look, isn't Harmony cute."
 
Maybe Twilight's using a Glamour to make everyone think that vamps are cool and that they shouldn't be paranoid
 
E
eunsoma
i'm hoping that this is true, because I'd hate to see the writers make a total screw up in trying to explain everything in any other way
Clem Rocks said:
Maybe Twilight's using a Glamour to make everyone think that vamps are cool and that they shouldn't be paranoid
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That would be one plausible way of explaining it. It wouldn't be that much different from Jonathan's Mr. Heartthrob spell, or making everyone think Dawn's always been there. But it might be a little harder to pull off considering the vampires are still out there actively killing our friends and loved ones...

It would have to be a powerful spell to make everyone in the world overlook that.
 
E
eunsoma
like say large scale mind control? It's happened before. In season 4 of Angel Jasmine was eating dozens of people a day and masses of people still loved her.. Perhaps something similar is happening here
Well if you go with Merrick's theory that Twilight is actually Angelus, he could have stolen magick from WR&H. I think they'd be able to do a spell that powerful 😉
 
The fat guy with the suit and the briefcase that Harm bites at the CAA building, and also appears in the room with her when she's pithcing the show idea to MTV--he's the same guy that's talking to Voll in issue 1. He seems to know a lot about magic in that first issue, considering Amy is one of his Ops.

Does that make the issue any better for haters?
 
S
Silum
wow, gonna have to go look at that...
Well, I've never been anything like a "hater"... all along I've been defending season 8 as if my kid wrote it.

But I've always been assuming Twilight was behind Harmony's show and that MTV was infiltrated with his people.

It's the story logic problems that concern me, not the plot issues.

There may be a perfectly good story reason for how the world can know about vampires and not be terrified of them. I just hope we get to find out what it is. I'm patient, but I'm also nervous that they're just going to wave their hands and say "because that's just how it is... Harmony is just that cute." And all Al-Qaeda ever really needed was a cute reality show to make us all fall in love with them, too.
 
Yeah, I'm not a hater either. I've loved every issue of Angel: After the Fall, Spike: After the Fall, and 19/21 issues of Buffy Season Eight.

As far as being out of character for the series, I posted my reasoning in another thread:

Buffyverse Fan said:
I hope the whole public vampire-thing is removed from continuity. It just seems to undermine the whole Buffyverse.

On Buffy: Buffy fought the demons around her to protect the world. It was all about her giving up her normal life to do what had to be done.

On Angel: He mainly secluded himself to the night because that's when the helpless fall prey to the unknown threat of vamps.

If vampires are public, then all Slayers & Champions are are stronger folks. It takes away the emotional depth & toll of being a Buffyverse hero.

These Quotes come to mind, and they're all but meaningless in the world "Harmonic Divergence" created:

"In the Dark"
Doyle: "So how long has it been between sunsets?"
Angel: "200 years, give or take."
Doyle: "Well you got to be feeling pretty damn good then, huh? I mean this ring "“ changes everything, don't it? - Yeah, it's spectacular, I know. But I do promise that there will be another one exactly like it tomorrow."
Angel: "Not for me."
Doyle: "What are you saying? That the city will be hit by a meteor before tomorrow night or"¦"
Angel: "No."
Doyle: "No. It's to horrible to say the other. I can't even bring myself to say the other."
Angel: "I'm not going to wear the ring."
Doyle: "That was the other. - You got a real addiction to the brooding part of life. Anyone ever tell you that?"
Angel: "Once or twice."
Doyle: "Care to explain? - I mean this ring is your redemption. It's what you've been waiting for."
Angel: "nah, it just looks like it.'
Doyle: "Angel, man, think what you're saying."
Angel: "I have. I've thought of it from every angle, and what I figure is I did a lot of damage in my day, more than you can imagine."
Doyle: "So what, you don't get the ring because your period of self-flagellation isn't over yet? I mean think of all the daytime people you could help between 9 and 5."
Angel: "They have help. The whole world is designed for them, so much that they have no idea what goes on around them after dark. They don't see the weak ones lost in the night, - or the things that prey on them. And if I join them, maybe I'd stop seeing, too."
Doyle: "And who'd look out for all the insomniacs?"
Angel: "I was brought back for a reason, Doyle, and as much as I would like to kid myself, I don't think it was for 18 holes at Rancho."
The sun sinks below the horizon. Angel takes off the ring, picks up a brick and smashes it. Big green flash of light.

"Chosen"
BUFFY: I hate this. I hate being here. I hate that you have to be here. I hate that there's evil and that I was chosen to fight
it. I wish a whole lot of the time that I hadn't been. I know
a lot of you wish I hadn't been, either. But this isn't about
wishes. This is about choices. I believe we can beat this evil.
Not when it comes. Not when its army is ready. Now.
Tomorrow morning I'm opening the Seal. I'm going down
into the Hellmouth and I'm finishing this once and for all.
Right now you're asking yourselves what makes this
different. "What makes us anything more than a bunch of
girls being picked off one by one?" It's true, none of you
have the power that Faith and I do. So here's the part
where you make a choice.

"You're Welcome"
CORDELIA
Do you ever wonder... Do you ever think about if we'd met up that night and had a chance to"”

ANGEL
All the time.

CORDELIA
(looks down)
Guess we missed our moment, huh?

ANGEL
Maybe we were meant to. Or maybe people like us just don't get to...have that.

CORDELIA
Angel, there are no people like us.
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i didn't realize my frivolous use of "hater" would turn so many heads. No hard feelings, guys. More of a joke than anything.

To be honest, I wasn't much a fan of this issue at all until I realized how eerily similar Harm's agent looked like that dude from the first arc, so i forgave the fact that it was kind of a bogus issue because I've got a feeling that the whole point of this one is to realize that that dude is involved with it.

As far as Twilight being behind the show, I don't know about that, but I could be wrong. I'm only doubting it because Voll kept calling him a "suit" who had no idea what was a stake, and the military woman who talks to twilight at the end of "wolves at the gate IV" talks about how she thought gigi and roden were on twilight's side. That kind of makes me feel like Voll would know whether or not the fat dude in question is on twilight's side.

Consider that, since the fat dude put so much trust into Amy's magicks, maybe he's a memeber of a faction opposite from twilight. It would make a lot of sense for him to put vampires and magic and whatnot into the public eye if twilight's plan is to end the age of magic. If everybody knows about it, and even sympathizes with it, it makes it all the more harder to end without lots of regular people asking questions.
 
They're all on Twilight's side... Voll just disrespects the suit because he's not military. Voll is the kind of guy who believes that the army should be running everything. He's a military dictator in the making.

MTV and reality television is something Twilight would be putting his "suits" on, not his soldiers.
 
I wouldn't say that we've got very much evidence to assume the suit is on twilight's side. He's working with the military, yeah, but the military's got perfectly legitimate reasons to track buffy and the slayers even if twilight never existed.
 
Don said:
I wouldn't say that we've got very much evidence to assume the suit is on twilight's side. He's working with the military, yeah, but the military's got perfectly legitimate reasons to track buffy and the slayers even if twilight never existed.
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That military unit is clearly working for Twilight, however. Gen. Voll and his top officers all wear his symbol.

Whether their loyalty to Twilight has the blessing of the U.S. government is as yet unrevealed. If we start seeing a program of rounding up Slayers and shipping them off to secret prison camps, we'll have our answer.
 
AndrewCrossett said:
That military unit is clearly working for Twilight, however. Gen. Voll and his top officers all wear his symbol.

Whether their loyalty to Twilight has the blessing of the U.S. government is as yet unrevealed. If we start seeing a program of rounding up Slayers and shipping them off to secret prison camps, we'll have our answer.
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Sounds reasonable, but even then they might not have the full blessings of the US. The Initiative under Dr. Walsh was conducting some things outside of the scope of their mandate.
 
While it's more than obvious that voll and his higher-ups are with twilight, we simply don't have that kind of evidence to put the fat guy in with them too.

The point I'm trying to make is that, while he IS working with the military, it's entirely possible that he only knows as much as the foot-soldiers know, which is probably just that buffy summers must be stopped because she blew up sunnydale, california, making her, and those in league with her, a terrorist.
 
I can't remember, but did we ever receive any confirmation that it is the actual Army backing Twilight? Or is it possible that it's a like a merc army or some free agent group almost akin to what Buffy has? A group completely unrelated to a government I mean.

Also, hey, what's been the fallout from Buffy's trek to the future? Has anyone referred to it or reacted besides Buffy vaguely in the two issues since?
 
Chase Summers said:
I can't remember, but did we ever receive any confirmation that it is the actual Army backing Twilight? Or is it possible that it's a like a merc army or some free agent group almost akin to what Buffy has? A group completely unrelated to a government I mean.

Also, hey, what's been the fallout from Buffy's trek to the future? Has anyone referred to it or reacted besides Buffy vaguely in the two issues since?
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It's the actual U.S. Army -- The pins on Voll's lapels are gold letters that say U.S. (Issue One is the only one I've checked for this, but I'd imagine it's in 2-4. Even if it's not, one's enough.)

As far as the future thing, nobody's mentioned it at all.
 
This issue kind of made me feel like I was watching the episode where Johnathan is like king of the world, in that the times we saw the scoobies...it seemed so...fake. I don't know, it was very weird how we saw their reactions, and it made me dislike the issue, because their reactions did not seem valid, almost like they weren't cannon. I guess it was Harmony centric issue. Anyways, overall it was an okay issue, but I would be interested to see how the scoobs rebound from this, and yea I trust Joss so I'm excited. Is there a preview for the next issue somewhere?
 
AndrewCrossett
AndrewCrossett
Not yet.
It was okay. For some reason, I didn't see Harmony in either the dialogue or the artwork. *shrug* But it wasn't bad. I like the Anderson Cooper part. That was hilarious.
 
I didn't love this issue. I have no idea what Espenson was thinking, but I definitely didn't see Harmony in there. And I'm confused about all the L.A. stuff when thinking about ATF.
 
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