Why Do They Do That?

white avenger

white avenger

white avenger
Joined
Sep 30, 2006
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rome, georgia
This could probably just as well go in The Bronze as here, since it's pretty much a universal image, but, just confining it to the Buffyverse for the moment, why do so many characters choose to gloat before they finish the job (i e kill their opponent)? If they would just go for the throat, make the kill, and THEN gloat, as they walk away grinning, it would be much more efficient and successful.

Okay, granted, that adds to the drama, but still, just once in awhile, I would like to see a repeat of Buffy's performance at the end of Season 1:

Buffy- Oh, look, a bad guy.

She never breaks stride as the dust of a former vampire crumbles to the ground.

Every time anyone stops to gloat, you can be pretty sure that they are going to get hit in the head by a fire axe, break the spell that the First Evil has over them, or something just as disastrous.

You would think that eventually someone would figure it out.
 
There's no real logical explanation for it. I know that despite all the Buffy I've watched and the comic books I've read, any time I've been in a real, live fight, there hasn't been much time for trash talking or gloating. You're so locked in and your adrenaline is pumping so hard that, for me at least, it never even enters the mind.

From a writing perspective, the only reason the villains stop to monologue their plans to the vulnerable hero and gloat is because it allows them to write the villain strongly, thus making the hero the underdog and his/her eventual victory all the sweeter, but at the same time give the hero an opportunity to escape or expose a weakness. Not many villains are written strongly and don't gloat because if they didn't, then they'd just destroy the hero.

The problem that a lot of shows and books run into is that over time, the effect is lessened because it's happened so many times. I mean, how many times does the bad guy have the hero pinned down and beaten, and then says "No! We aren't going to kill him...yet."? That happens ALL the time, and most of the time, it makes zero sense.
 
There ar a lot of conventions in screenwriting that I think are just plain stupid and you have described one of them. Gloating before you finish off an opponent shows self-confidence, but can also presage hubris - the fall of the overconfident.

The other one that bugs me is "movie time" as shown in "Him" 7ABB06 where the train is bearing down on Dawn at a speed that would make it hit Dawn in about 10 seconds. You then have about 20 seconds of Buffy hopping on another train, jumping off and pulling Dawn off the tracks when she should have been dead 10 seconds earlier. This kind of thing shows up everywhere in movies and TV and it is annoying.
 
Screen time sometimes gets confused with showing two presectives at once and this happens when you switch from Cam A to Cam B and then higten the tention in editing
 
And then there's the other thing, which is even worse, in my opinion, than the gloating. The inexplicable failure to finish the kill. In Season 7 alone, Buffy is basically dead meat on a slab twice, when the ubervamp caved a brick wall in on her, and when Caleb decked her at the school, and for no reason whatsoever they just walk away, leaving the major obstacle to their evil plans battered, bruised, but still quite alive.

The Master, Adam, Glory, both Spike and Angelus, and even Dark Willow, every one let either one or multiple opportunities to kill Buffy simply slip through their fingers with no explanation whatsoever.
 
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