What was Joss' endgame in the Buffyverse?

Buffy Summers

Buffy Summers

Yataro
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I've actually been thinking about this for a while, but after reading this Joss quotation in the other thread I decided to post about it 🙂

“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don’t like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.”

So, funny quotation, but when thinking about, in particular, the 7 tv seasons of Buffy (but I'm not precluding that Angel and the comics could fit in as well), sometimes it feels like Joss' goal in all this was to get us to hate all the characters by the end lol

Some Seinfeld-esque statement on how all people, even the best ones, are horrible. lol

Thoughts?
 
Whedon is the master of pain and grief, so I can't imagine any final ending for any of the characters is going to be what folks would like to see.
 
This is the reason I love Joss. I have the same view when it comes to TV/movies as Joss does. I more often then not do not want a happy ending.

As for Joss' endgame, it felt like it was always The Gift that was his true endgame. Come on, it's the perfect ending, he got to kill the main character. There is nothing more beautiful/depressing that he could have told. Yes, he loves to make us suffer, but he was also trying to portray a message on this show so I don't think he would have gone completely off the rails with his ending.
 
Buffy Summers said:
"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
Click to expand...

As much as I like Joss' work, this is one of the things that I really hate. I don't enjoy getting to know a character over the course of weeks or even months, only to have them killed by some whim of the writer. There is a certain shock effect in doing it once, or even a couple of times over the run of a series, but when it begins to happen so frequently that it almost becomes expected, and is followed immediately with the thought, "How's he going to resurrect them this time?" it loses all dramatic effect and only serves to frustrate and show disrespect for the viewers.

Plus, that bit about the puppy is disgusting in the extreme.
 
chasesummers
chasesummers
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danajsparks
I generally hate character deaths.
To be honest I think he was trying to be flippant there.

But I do agree Joss shock tactic school of writing does get you down after a while.

It's like with Xander and Anya, I mean couldn't he have given us one long lasting successful couple?
 
Silverspike said:
To be honest I think he was trying to be flippant there.

But I do agree Joss shock tactic school of writing does get you down after a while.

It's like with Xander and Anya, I mean couldn't he have given us one long lasting successful couple?
Click to expand...

We do have Riley and Sam. Or maybe one of them gets killed in a raid.
 
Oh lord I found them to be the original android couple. Very unappealing and dull to me, despite the writer trying to push them as otherwise. 😀
 
Hmm, I am actually mostly OK with pain and grief, if it is good pain and good grief ( pun intended 😀)

Being GRRM's SoI&F avid reader for the last 10+ years kind of makes you used to it. But. Death of a character has to mean something. Character going 'bad' has to mean something. Redemption and epiphany has to mean something, otherwise it is bullshit. Making audience experience pain for the sake of Grrr Argh! Pain! is not art, it is exploitation of yet another trope/s ( or tugging at the wrong receptors).

But going back to the B-verse possible end-game - we have already seen what it is : Fray, with possible variations of getting there. Which I have no problem with if Big W sticks with it and stops pretending sacrifice means nothing. Cause at some point pretending becomes the end game and then the message gets shortened to : nothing we do matters. Which is an ending in itself , but it sucks big time.

Oh, and it is virtually impossible make me hate a character once I love them. Same as it is very very hard to make me love a character once I've made my mind about them.
 
I think Joss is a realist. He knows that not every relationship is going to last, he knows that most people don't stay friends with the people they went to high school with - he's just the one in charge of this huge verse, with these lives at his fingertips, so everything comes out in one giant suckfest and everything is concentrated on this one character that he claims to love so much.

His realistic views on the world come out in a really negative way for Buffy, because I think that's always foremost in his mind. He's always thinking things like 'well, this is a high school relationship and those never really stand the test of time, so let's end that now in the most dramatic, painful way possible' or 'parents are supposed to die before their children, so let's do that in the most hurtful way possible'.

Joss has these pragmatic, simplistic thoughts in his mind, but they just end up causing us - the fans - massive amounts of pain, lol.
 
I wouldn't call joss a realist. I'd call him a pessimist actually. Life includes a large degree of pessimism and things and events that would lead one to that position, surely. So when I say that joss is a pessimist I'm not saying he is the opposite of a realist, but rather that it is a more fitting term to describe him.

I guess a lot of people have friendships that don't last from as far back as high school, but a lot of my friends and I do (in fact I have several friendships that go all the way back to elementary school). And the relationships and friendships that did not last (in my case and my friends' cases as well) usually ended on amicable terms. Maybe cruel/depressing endings to relationships was Joss' experience, but I have to say it has never been my experience, in the vast majority of cases.

I also have seen many romantic relationships in the lives of my friends stand the test of time too. It's the pessimist who is inclined to believe that love never lasts. And in a few of my friends' cases the passion has lasted too. And I know that will be the case for me too, when I meet the right person and I'm ready for it.

I don't know...on the one hand, I can see where the pessimist's point of view comes from. I do see a lot of ordinary, "human, all too human" people fail in relationships a lot (romantic ones or friendships) and I think it's partly because many people are lacking the kinds of qualities needed to succeed (and they are often, though not always, to blame for that, at least to some degree). I mean really, "know thyself" is a concept a lot of people are not aware of, and a lot of people deceive themselves about who they really are. So in terms of my appraisal of ordinary average people, I'm somewhat pessimistic about people too. I'm a critic of people in general also. But some people have their s*** together too, and if you observe their examples, they generally tend to do pretty well in life and suffer far less too. They redeem the rest of mankind. I feel like Joss sees the negative side a lot, and not the other half. Maybe he's one of those types himself, I don't know. As far as Joss himself, I can only speculate. But he seems like a pessimist to me (without knowing him personally).
 
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Silverspike
Silverspike
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People love a happy ending? Yeah, I don't know about that, it seems to me that people love good endings and happy or unhappy, I doesn't really matter. Anyway, I think that Buffyverse has no end game anymore because it's a comic book now. It will run for as long as it's profitable and then get another non-ending like "Chosen" just so there's a possibility to bring it back again in the future. Let's face it, artistically this franchise is dead.

And yeah, "The Gift" does look like an end game and it's more or less a happy ending but then there's "Normal Again", right? This is an end game material too, not to mention the whole Twilight thing. And as for hating the characters, well, as far as I'm concerned, they've always been horrible. It's all a matter of perspective, really.
 
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I don' think so.

I think the intent was to see the characters change and grow but yet stay true to their original concepts/selves, both personality-wise and morally.

And I think this is great up until S5, and then they do the 'growing up is painful/hard' arc, with some mixed results, and then the end Season was trying to be S1 again- nostagia, to remind us why we liked these people to begin with.

Overall, the attempt was mixed- I will always love some characters and will always root for them, even if they screw up (Buffy, Giles, Willow) becasue I like them and want them to thrive/have a happy-ish ending.

Others I liked more and more as the Seasons continued (Wesley, Dawn, Tara) and was interested to see how they changed as the world became darker- how they toughened up and survived.

But other characters...I just couldn't care about them anymore- their descisions/charactization was so incredibly poor/horrible that they didn't recover in my eyes.

So, given that the results were so mixed, for me, then no I don't see intent- just writers taking risks with the characters and sometimes those risks don't pay off.

But at least I can see what they're trying to do. 🙂
 
Honestly I think something akin to this will always be Joss' end game:
not-fade-away.jpg


It takes different forms of course.
E.g. "Chosen" was a kind of end game, albeit a bit more fluffy-puppy than "NFA" since the ending was a happy one. It was still about facing insurmountable odds and standing up to fight them.

"Dollhouse" too has that end where you stand up to fight for what you believe in, even when the chances of winning are incredibly slim.

So that's what I think his end game is. In some form or another it's standing up to fight even in the face of loss or certain defeat.
 
I think one of the major challenges of writing a t.v. show, at least in the U.S., is that you never know how much longer the show will be on the air. It's hard to plan an endgame when you have no idea when the story is going to end.
 
Yes, like from what I remember the final of season 5 was written as being the very end as they didn't know that they were going to be picked up by UPN until late in the day.

Same way that They didn't hear that AtS was cancelled until late in the season.
 
^ BtVS was never canceled by The WB, they wanted to do a Season 6 but were outbid by UPN, Buffy was never in danger of being canceled by The WB at that stage, so they weren't saved by UPN, just bought.

Kinda the same for Angel, Joss asked to know early if they were being renewed and cuz he pushed so early The WB opted to cancel, but he knew well enough in advance, it wasn't last minuet.



I think Whedons end game is for you to have to work to like the characters. They all do enough to warrant the dislike they get from some people as they've each done pretty bad things.
I think he wants you to like deeply flawed characters and wants you to have to understand them to justify liking them.


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brinkster130
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