BtVS/WT (Angry) Rant Thread

[Garner]

Sam I totally agree that having a very great fear that Tara would be killed off in season sux made the good moments between W/T bittersweet at best. Even all the cuteness in SR was ruined by the absolute realization that this was it and the manipulation of our emotions was so blatant that I was pissed and angry not sad or shocked. However, Hemiola is right that in season 5 we got a lot of decent W/T stuff, Family ruled, we did get a kiss, a nice supportive and loving scene rather than just B/R lust. And in later years some of the Season Sux W/T stuff can be fun to see if divorced from the inevitable end. I can watch the first couple eps, the birthday ep of season sux and some of Entropy and that's about it. Maybe the first half of SR. It really is so sad how distorted and twisted the characters got. It must have been very frustrating for the actors to film the show and in season severed it is no surprise Alyson seems a bit bored or off. Hell, at least in StarGate SG-1 now there is still a sense of fun and amusement even from the original cast left. That was never really present in Buffy in the last season or most of sux.

Garner

[sam7777]

Yeah it's sad how bad the show got.

And in later years some of the Season Sux W/T stuff can be fun to see if divorced from the inevitable end.

I'm glad that folks can still enjoy it but I prefer my Willow/Tara in Pens fanfic only. I really doubt I will be watching any part of the ME shows in future. I'm just really done with those guys.

[Sheridan]

I have to admit I love alternate history, the 'What ifs?...". That's the only reason I picked up the new Buffy/Angel magazine. I knew it would be a mistake but I couldn't help it. They had a whole slew of what ifs and two of them made me want to make a bonfire in the middle of the newsagents. 'What if Xander and Willow's relationship had worked out?', well of course all Willow needed was the right man then she wouldn't have been gay at all, silly us. Then just to top it off under 'What if Joyce had lived' they qiite reasonably stated that Tara and Willow wouldn't have been in the bedroom and missed the gunplay, then goes on to observe that Willow then wouldn't have met the coven in England so would never have reached her full potential as a witch, ah yes that Tara Maclay, always holding Willow back. In future I think I'll stick to the gardening magazines...

[jixer]

Hello Kittens-

Its things like this that make me so damn angry. Joss Whedon is a third generation Hollywood insider white boy (I don't care what age he is) with a worn out two dimensional video game and comic book view and frame of reference. He's as new and as hip as an edition of Newsweek from 1999. But he fits in perfectly with the dozens like him who are leaching off a golden past that never was (Dukes of Hazard and Bewitched the movies????), the work of a generation who actually had to think and had to sell in hard times, or their own horrible angst from their terrible experiences in high school, and this is the norm those who sell us our entertainment would have us buy over and over again. We in this place have been burned and learned. Sheridan will buy the gardening magazines, Sam will read Pens and I follow their path. But its just maddening to see those still locked into their blinkers bumping down the ugly path when we know there is a more beautiful one.

I think the old phrase is wrong. In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is the most frustrated poor bastard around.


Thank you all so much for your patience and this needful place.


Jixer

[aceivan]

Joss Whedon is a third generation Hollywood insider white boy (I don't care what age he is) with a worn out two dimensional video game and comic book view and frame of reference. He's as new and as hip as an edition of Newsweek from 1999.

That reminds me so much of the way the characters in Buffy speak. When I first heard it I thought it was really cute until I realised that that was how Whedon speaks. This uncool guy who wanted to be one of the cool kids when he was at school still desperately wants to be seen as one of the cool kids.

If Buffy had ended with the 5th season it would be remembered by the fans as a wonderful show, but seasons 6 and 7 changed all that. I know a few people, not all WT fans, that used to watch Buffy and Angel religeously, and then season 6 happened! They not only stop watching the sixth season, they stopped watching repeats of the earlier seasons. Whedon seems to have this talent for turning even some hardened fans against the TV shows that they used to love watching.

Although I only started watching when I heard how good WT were, and its not the type of show that would usually appeal to me, I thought it was pretty good. I still have seasons 1 to 5 on DVD although I haven't watched them since I decided to give the season 6 DVDs a miss, but I'll carry on watching the downloaded WT scenes, and reading some of the fic from Pens. I must read the Star Trek and Doctor Who crossovers.

Len

[Sheridan]

There does seem to be an utter lack of interest in injecting any sort of chemistry into anything. For a while there I did think JW might be a genius when he gave us a set of characters we could care about but then he proved he really didn't get it after all, more interested in shock value and whizz bang effects than characters. I've come to the realization that of the movies I've seen at the cinema this summer some did have have a gosh wow factor and they had thrills but I didn't really like any of them because I simply didn't care what happened to the characters, they weren't much more than props to flesh out the scenes. Revenge of the Sith cost god knows how much but to me it failed for the simple reason that I didn't really believe in the Amidala-Anakin relationship as shown on screen and without that the film has no resonance. Frankly the only movie I've seen lately that I've liked was DEBS, you can rip apart its plot and laugh at it s effects but the leads made me care about that characters and that is worth a lot. JW had that with the Buffy cast as well but in the end he showed he didn't understand it, preferring the souless dead space of Firefly instead.

[emma peel]

I got an email from Cinequest. They have 14 fricking items relating to that Serenityshit film.

Link

[aceivan]

I just got the latest Forbidden Planet catologue and in a reply to a letter they're basically telling their customers that Firefly will soon be dead.

"The movie is Joss Whedon's way of tying up all the loose ends and thanking devoted fans like you."


Len

[urnofosiris]

Clearly you need to throw away 50 million perfectly good dollars to tie up lose ends and thank a bunch of groupies.

[sam7777]

If Buffy had ended with the 5th season it would be remembered by the fans as a wonderful show

Or at least a good one.

Joss Whedon is a third generation Hollywood insider white boy (I don't care what age he is) with a worn out two dimensional video game and comic book view and frame of reference.

Jixer: Too True of Josswad andd many of the ugly pasty white boys that do genre stuff. I'm so utterly bored with this point of view that I have dropped most genre stuff.

I was a big fan comics fan (with over 4600 issues) but stopped in the mid-90's (the last comic I read regularily was Elfquest) because I just got tired of the mostly white guy POV. I now read Manga for the most part because many of them are by women and while not "better" in the strictest sense at least give another point of view. I still read the likes of Alan Mooore and Warren Ellis but even their stuff has the same kind of male view at times.

It is the same with SciFi. I've stopped reading most of it. Even Anne McCaffrey one of my favorites (ok I'm really more into Scifi fantasy) has gotten patriarchal. Recently read "Futureland by Walter Mosley and it was good but very much a male point of view.

TV is the same, I watched a couple of eps of Battlestar Galactica and found it poorly written but beyond that it really is a macho kind of thing. The Victoria Secrets model hanging all over Baltar is just boring. Starbuck is OK but they need more than her to thin out the testosterone. The president having breast cancer is just not working for me. It's not always fatal here and now so why is it such a problem for her? It's also somewhat mysoginistic to saddle her with such a female problem IMHO.

LOTR was an exception because Jackson could think outside that box and had two women collaborating with him on the script, and actually listened to his actors.

[jixer]

Hello Kittens-

Sam, as a male I would say that LOTR was the work of a man.

Jackson respected the original, accepted responsibility for the changes he made, was secure enough to listen and wise enough to accept truth in the form of suggestions that were more insightful.

Respect, responsibility, security, acceptance of wisdom.

LOTR and BtVS, the work of a man and the 'product'of a 'guy'.

Its so darn easy to choose.


Thanks Sam for getting me to think,


Jixer

[sam7777]

LOTR and BtVS, the work of a man and the 'product'of a 'guy'.

Jixer: That's the very important distinction. The problem is not male per se but the 'guy' or immature teen POV that we keep getting.

[Garner]

I definitely agree Sam. There is a difference between a man writing sometihng and an immature boy. Jixer made a great observation. The strange thing is that originally Josswad had a different type of show with Buffy as the heroine, doing important things, staying strong yet still being somewhat feminine too. It was a nice balancing act, and yet he threw that all away in the end. Probably for the cash or because he was out of ideas. And don't forget that Marti Noxon was intergral to a lot of the failure in season sux too. One of the reasons I like Gilmore Girls is that it is a different show, has that sort of different perspective, and yet has very likable characters portrayed by excellent actors. I think that JAG actually had some similarities there. For a basically silly show, it had good characters portrayed well that one could like and they never really cheated on that, though they came close.

Personally I am tired of the Hollywood bias in just about everything we see. They have specific formulas, the lesbian cliche, to be a good soldier means being an automaton, things like that, which they constantly reinforce. They think flash and FX are more important than plot, characters are often 2 dimensional, it is sad. It would be nice to see the whole lot fired and entirely new people brought in. Yeah, we might get some god-awful junk, but we get that now. Something new might result, something outside of the machine. And that would be a nice change.

Garner

Oh, and by the way, in this week's EW there is an article titled Femmes Fatal which notices and remarks on the increasing amount of violence to women being shown on TV and especially with the spate of new crime dramas coming this fall. It is a sad state of affairs and shows the crime drama wave is definitely going too far.

[sam7777]

Garner: Agreed on the Hollywood bias and increasing violence to women in crimes dramas with ME alumni produced "The Inside" being the worst of the lot and thankfully cancelled.

The strange thing is that originally Josswad had a different type of show with Buffy as the heroine, doing important things, staying strong yet still being somewhat feminine too.

I'll be honest I was never really much of a Buffy fan (really only a W/T fan and that from Pens fanfic). Buffy was way low on my list under Trek, Babylon 5, X-files and Xena to name four. The reason why is that I never saw Buffy as an empowering woman (she never grew past being a teen IMHO) or that feminine other than superficially (re. how she dressed). She kicked butt and solved problems with violence just like a man (frankly Xena showed more compassion IMHO). Buffy was defined very much by the men in her life like Angel, Riley and Spike and spent inordinate amounts of time mooning over them. Shows that I thought had real female heroes are "Cagney and Lacey", "Judging Amy" and X-files (before the last few seasons).

Josswad had one novel idea (as Sheridan has said) to have the blond victim in the horror movie fight back and that was it. Then he made her back into a victim and vamp layer. Uggghh!! It was a fun little show when it started but I never really saw all the philosphical stuff that others did or thought it was a particularily good show.

[jixer]

Hello Kittens-

Actually, girls kicking butt on the monsters goes back in the modern day to Jirel of Joiry. Yes, they were first put out in the 1930s pulps and they read like it, and no I didn't read them hot off the press. Secondly in comic book land I remember reading several one to two page 'monsters getting their comeuppance' with cute little thing victims that weren't in the 1970s (those I did read new).

Personally I think BtVS foundered once it was out of JW's safe little high school frame of reference. Now if Tara had come along in Season 3...


Jixer

[sam7777]

jixer: I stand corrected. Yep Josswad was stuck in High School and that is a sign of a very limited talent.

[Garner]

Sam, yeah, Buffy mooned over boyfriends and such, but she WAS a teenager and the shows you mention all feature mature women, which Buffy was never supposed to be. As Jixer pointed out, Josswad definitely faltered once his characters left High School. I acutally find a fair amount of season 4 reasonable for college, though Adam was pretty dull, and he couldn't sustain that as we saw in Season 5 and then especially sux. I have said for quite some time that Josswad can't write adults. I also was more into Babylon 5, which I still think had the best female characters, X-Files, and probably Highlander at the time. Trek was ok, but had its problems and the women in Trek were horrible. Xena was fun to watch but pretty damn silly and it got worse as it went along, mostly after what, season 3 and Dahak? I guess any show can run its course and degrade, it's a problem that is all too common. Maintaining a high quality is not easy.

I did find the EW article very interesting and the increasing violence to women on the crime shows seems to be getting so much more graphic. That women end up being victimns more then men is unfortunately the way it is and probably always will be (though trying to change that is worth doing) but the graphic nature seems less justifiable and more for shock, titillation or degradation than anything else and not necessary. I am glad the Inside was cancelled.

Garner

[sam7777]

Garner: Agreed that Buffy was a teenager but she reached an adult age during the series and never became an empowered adult let alone a woman which is why I give more props to shows like Judgine Amy. Trek women were certainly a mixed bag and Babylon 5 certainly had an edge there but I didn't think it was horrible (Kira and Dax weren't that bad for two). I certainly prefer Trek to Buffy and the other ME stuff but then I'm a trekker.

I guess any show can run its course and degrade, it's a problem that is all too common. Maintaining a high quality is not easy.

True. Some shows degrade and some shows like Buffy are willfully ruined by their creators. I certainly hated the ends of Xena and X-files and thought Voyager and Enterprise were steps down for Trek (I didn't watch the last two seasons of the latter). Still none of these got as bad as Buffy (making their characters completely unrecognizeable, horrible plots, bad writing, bad FX etc etc etc).

[urnofosiris]

I found the women the most enjoyable aspect of any and all of the Star Treks, I still don´t get why the men outnumbered them in the different crews. Guess there are more boys in the future and none of them gay, though of course we all know the truth about Kirk and Spock but I digress. Buffy sucks. Yeah it does.

[aceivan]

I've enjoyed all the Star Trek series, usually prefering the female characters, but one thing I really didn't like about ST was the inclusion of gay characters or storylines only when a particular episode is dealing with a 'gay' issue. The exception to this would be the Mirror Universe storyline on DS9 where every regular or semi-regular female character in the Mirror Universe ends up gay or bi, but not in the regular ST universe (and all the guys remain 100% heterosexual of course).

I've just been reading an interview with Connor Trinneer (Trip Tucker from Enterprise) in Ultimate DVD and he talks about having the freedom to discuss his character with the producers and also criticises the show. It was refreshing to hear from someone who feels he can tell the truth about a show he used to work on.

Len

[Garner]

I found the Trek women very unconvincing as anything but cliches:
Crusher: Stereotypical mother (Please don't kill Wesley)
Troi: cliched sensitive councilor female
Security officer butch: (I still can't get her name off the top of my head, that's how awful she was) Obvious stereotype

Kira: Same as SoB above.
Dax: She was just dull and uniteresting

Voyager sucked beyond the description of sucking and I stopped watching with the Amelia Earhart episode. I will admit to liking Janeway at the start but she digressed quickly into PC wishy washy hell.
I did like the half human half klingon woman (Balana) she never seemed that bad.
Neelix's girl was cringe-worthy

T'Pau seems ok but also seems like the token sexpot.

In contrast De'Lenn was both a woman and a strong leader of her people, able to make hard decisions, live with the consequences, and was both intelligent and strong willed without being a cliched butch female.
Ivanova: Another strong willed woman with a professional attitude and competency and a great sense of humor and duty. The consumate military female professional.
Lyta Alexander: The original and later returning telepath. She also had strong will, was willing to make hard decisions and act on her convictions and was not just a wishy-washy empath psionic which is what Trek would have done to her.
Talia Winters: The closest to a cliche, especially when she sleeps with Ivanova which I fault B5 for a lot as I still feel this undercuts a lot of Ivanova's character (you can't be a strong female without being gay) and came out of nowhere. Talia seemed more like a competent business woman than anything else. She played a good role and I liked how she fended off Garibaldi's boyish near stalking.

I will also admit that I like the way Dax developed on DS9, too bad she asked for more money and was booted. I also was impressed with Marina Sirtis when she got to pretend she was a Romulan in the one episode. I think that showed she had more ability than she was normally given and Troi could have been so much more. Though I like Jerri Ryan, Ms Bodacious Ta-Tas of Borg never impressed me as anything but a desperate attempt at eye candy to rescue a failed show.

At least on Buffy Willow was a true hero and developed nices, and Buffy did hold her own or direct her course in the first four years. Sure, she wasn't an adult, but she could stand up to them life choice wise through the first four, and in Checkpoint. Buffy will be forever stained and destroyed by what happened in season sux and severed. Willow was totally twisted and destroyed, Buffy became a charicature of herself, Dawn was worthless and whiney, and even Anya got the shaft. Only Tara grew and developed and that onely after mental violation by her lover. And of course she dies, too. I suppose to be fair I should separate the later DS9 from the earlier stuff as all the characters there improved rather than degraded. Trek also did well with many one shots, Worf's mate Kalar was interesting. But they did better with any Klingons. To Buffy's credit, Cordelia's growth, especially on Angel, was remarkable as well, though again in Season 4 of Angel her character is destroyed and undercut as well. I was never a big Fred fan, didn't dislike her, just didn't like her, and she ends up dead too.

I think in the end Buffy is worse as it had done well earlier and fell flat, destroying all the potential and advances it made. Trek by and large except DS9 was just more of the same. B5 never let us down character wise. True, the last season was unremarkable (and Byron's telepath stroyline bit), but he characters remained decent.

Sam, what do you think of Charmed? That is a show with three female leads who are pretty much empowered and in charge, save the world and all that, yet have had husbands or boyfriends and dealt with loss and some growth? Do you have an opinion there?

Garner

[sam7777]

Sam, what do you think of Charmed?

Garner: I haven't seen Charmed so no thoughts on that.

At least on Buffy Willow was a true hero and developed nices

Actually no. She was developing until the end of 5th season and then became really OOC like pretty much everyone else but Tara who was wearing a big target. Nothing like that happened to any character on Trek though It did happen to Talia Winters on B5. I never liked Lyta Alexander and thought she was a pale reflection of Talia Winters. I disagree with your SoB comments on Tasha Yar and Kira. I thought both characters were good (the latter was my favorite) but to each their own.

I think in the end Buffy is worse as it had done well earlier and fell flat, destroying all the potential and advances it made.

I think in the end Buffy is worse as it hadn't done as well earlier (never one of my favs) and got so shitty later. At least Trek and B5 had some good runs though I never cared for Enterprise.

Basically, I like Trek alot more than you do and I like Buffy alot less so I'm biased as you are. I don't believe that Trek ever ruined their characters like Buffy did. I agree that Buffy would have had some good characters but they never let it get to that point and in the end, we got alot of lousy writing and unfulfilled potential.

I started going to Pens during 5th season to get my W/T fix in season 5 (the show's portrayal always left me unsatisfied). For me W/T will always really exist on the Kitten board in Pens.

[Sheridan]

Well to get back to the angriness for which this thread is intended I can say as someone who has seen practically every US and UK sci-fi/fantasy show made in the last thirtty some years Ithat I have never known a show that went so out of its way to fuck over its viewers, and seemed to take such pleasure in doing it, as BTVS. They took a raft of popular characters and proceeded to stomp them into the ground, turning a potential franchise into dead end, all based on the fact that one man thought he could shove his vision down the viewers throats without any regard for what those viewers might want to see. Arguing about the foibles of other shows is like comparing firecrackers with a nuclear explosion.

[aceivan]

Arguing about the foibles of other shows is like comparing firecrackers with a nuclear explosion.

I couldn't agree more.

DVD Review has a top 20 listing of 'must have' DVDs and season 6 of Buffy is No 1. No other season of Buffy is included (although seasons 2 and 3 had no Willow and Tara so I wasn't particularly interested in the show I do recognise that these seasons were the best of Buffy), it is placed before Band of Brothers, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos and shows like The West Wing and The X-Files don't even make it onto their Top 20!

Season 6 of Buffy the best of any TV show ever released on DVD? Just when I think the Sci-fi/DVD mags can't go any further in their love for Joss Whedon they do this. Even for Whedon fans that is insane.

Len

[sam7777]

I can say as someone who has seen practically every US and UK sci-fi/fantasy show made in the last thirtty some years Ithat I have never known a show that went so out of its way to fuck over its viewers, and seemed to take such pleasure in doing it, as BTVS.

Sheridan: That is the difference between the foibles of other shows and ME's shit. I too as a sci-fi/fantasy fan for the last 30 years or so have also never seen such a fuck you to the fans.

Aceivan: Yeah there are no limits to how much the scifi rags want to suck at Josswad's cock. All their fawning has not generated any buzz for Sereneshit, however. I bet that the season sux DVD is no where near the top 20 in sales. Thankfully with the Buffyverse dead, the merchandise is also going away.

[Garner]

Sam, yeah, I am definitely a B5 fan first, and Trek much lower down. Like Sheridan, I have watched almost all SciFi shows in the last 30 years (I gave up on Galactica 80 pretty quick and never liked the Buck Rodgers show) and only one show comes even remotely close to screwing over its fandom like BtVS did. That's Beauty and the Beast, season 3 where Catherine dies, Vincent pursues Gabriel to get his son back, and a lot of the show was pretty much just run into the ground. At least by and large the characters weren't destroyed (if alive) and it wasn't quite the same F you to fans as season sux and severed were. The one difference Sam and I seem to have is I can separate and like Buffy season 1-4 more, while still despising the later stuff.

I am shocked and appallled that anyone could list Season sux as a must by DVD! That shows horrible lack of taste, and total sellout to Josswad or Fox in trying to pump him up for Firecrap to do well. What a crock! I know a few deluded fools who liked season sux, mostly ones who prefer the darkness or aren't W/T fans, but not many. Most SF people I know didn't like it. Ah well, money talks much louder than anything else.

Garner

[sam7777]

The one difference Sam and I seem to have is I can separate and like Buffy season 1-4 more, while still despising the later stuff.

Garner: I think that's because I wasn't really a fan of the show and frankly only really got into W/T when I discovered Pens so even if I were not mad about SR, I would prolly not be watching any of it by now. For me the show peaked 2nd season. I was disastified with W/T even in 4th season wanting to see their first kiss, for example. 5th season simply did not have enough of them till the end and we all know how 6th season sucked the big one. Frankly if not for W/T, I would prolly have stopped watching buffy during 4th season and even with W/T almost stopped during 5th. It was 5th season that I discovered the Kitten board while I was looking for a reason to keep watching and other fans that liked W/T.

Aceivan: DVD review may give Buffy high marks but the resale market does not. I recently helped a friend of mine trade in the buffy season 1-4 dvd sets in exchange for "Band Of Brothers". Quality wise BoB is way above buffy as far as I'm concerned so that was a good trade for him. As for top 20 in sales, Buffy doesn't make any list that I have seen:
http://www.planetdvd.com.au/top20.asp?cid=3
http://www.clrsoftware.com/top10dvds/

I'm happy to be a Kitten and really don't care anymore about the show that spawned it.

Pens is where are.

[aceivan]

Quality wise BoB is way above buffy as far as I'm concerned so that was a good trade for him.

I have the Band of Brothers DVDs myself and four seasons of Buffy for one of BoB sounds like a good deal to me. I stopped watching my Buffy DVDs some time ago and when I can figure out how to copy the W/T scenes I'll be getting rid of them too, although I can't imagine getting much for them.

Len

[aceivan]

This was said by Russell T Davies, Doctor Who producer, in the latest Doctor Who Magazine:

When it's time for Rose to leave, would you kill her off?

"I wouldn't actually. What would be the point? And, no, I'm not bluffing! I think there's something very savage and mad..."

He chuckles before finishing his thought. "It's a fundamentally optimistic series."

And that's coming from a hardcore Buffy fan! I can't imagine Whedon being interested in an optimistic TV series, never mind producing it.

Len

[Sheridan]

Well Buffy wasn't exactly optimisitic but it was generally positive for the first three seasons, more ambivalent in four and five, and downright negative in six and seven. Xander's heroics just get him crippled, Buffy's determination to fight the fight becomes fanaticism, and Willow's efforts to do the right thing have just created an opening for evil.