Hi, I've been delurking in various people's ljs (gabrielleabelle, shadowkat, angearia, 2maggie2). I don't use lj yet, though I might soon. I'm here because in her Angel-the-episode poll thread I mentioned being frustrated in a whedonesque conversation and she mentioned that you were frustrated by the same. So hi!, I'm the WilliamTheB from said thread and I guess you're Lirazel? I hope you don't mind me commenting on your thread without being a friend, I'm not sure what the etiquette is and hope/assume I'm not being creepy?
Anyway you have great comments there, both about W/T and especially about Spike. The "Spike is such a loser!" comment was brilliant. I also found the thread frustrating, because both the "Willow & Tara are perfect, everyone else was so much worse" and the "season six is awful and everyone is out of character, also Spike sucks" comments are both some of my personal pet peeves. The latter frustrates me more, because season six is my personal emotional touchstone—I have some objections to the handling of almost every character’s arc, but at the same time I feel more for almost every character that year than in most of the series, which I quite like. And so it’s hard to navigate between, “Yes, you’re right, X sucks” and “But X doesn’t ruin the season!” I think I kept my cool but wasn't particularly convincing, but that's okay.
The main anti-Spike commenter strikes me as smart and has justification for his views, but I disagree with him so often, and what he says usually gets my blood boiling so much, that I've taken to mostly skipping his comments for my own sanity. He's usually a mixture of, I think, reasonable criticism with (to me) completely unfounded ones, with everything in between. His Spike post was mostly unfounded criticism—as you pointed out, he is not actually cool. The odd thing is that he clearly loves Faith, as he’s gone on for a long time about how awesome she is in other threads, and she is as superficially cool as Spike is, and in some respects takes over the series even more dramatically when she’s on screen, on both shows. There’s a lot of Spike-haters who love Faith, when many of their Faith-criticisms apply to Spike, right down to the ostensibly unforgivable AR—Faith tries to rape Xander, and then steals Buffy’s body and has sex with her boyfriend, which is a major violation of both Buffy and Riley. Oh well.
An example of a mixture of accurate, inaccurate and everything in between is this: in one post he says that Xander summoning Sweet and not caring about people dying was stupid (I agree, though I think it was partly just an awkward attempt to play with musical dues ex machina conventions), says that this proves that Joss doesn’t care about his characters (don’t really agree—summoning the demon ties into Xander’s Anya fears, also explored in the episode, and I think Joss et al. just failed to think through the implications of people dying from it—an error in judgment and not of lack of caring), and that Joss had Xander do it entirely because he wanted to set up the happy ending of Buffy and Spike kissing (completely disagree—Joss isn’t even presenting it as a happy ending, with “where do we go from here” and Buffy saying, “This isn’t real”!). Anyway, hard to argue with, which is why I’m trying...not to.
Hi! (delurking various places)
Anyway you have great comments there, both about W/T and especially about Spike. The "Spike is such a loser!" comment was brilliant. I also found the thread frustrating, because both the "Willow & Tara are perfect, everyone else was so much worse" and the "season six is awful and everyone is out of character, also Spike sucks" comments are both some of my personal pet peeves. The latter frustrates me more, because season six is my personal emotional touchstone—I have some objections to the handling of almost every character’s arc, but at the same time I feel more for almost every character that year than in most of the series, which I quite like. And so it’s hard to navigate between, “Yes, you’re right, X sucks” and “But X doesn’t ruin the season!” I think I kept my cool but wasn't particularly convincing, but that's okay.
The main anti-Spike commenter strikes me as smart and has justification for his views, but I disagree with him so often, and what he says usually gets my blood boiling so much, that I've taken to mostly skipping his comments for my own sanity. He's usually a mixture of, I think, reasonable criticism with (to me) completely unfounded ones, with everything in between. His Spike post was mostly unfounded criticism—as you pointed out, he is not actually cool. The odd thing is that he clearly loves Faith, as he’s gone on for a long time about how awesome she is in other threads, and she is as superficially cool as Spike is, and in some respects takes over the series even more dramatically when she’s on screen, on both shows. There’s a lot of Spike-haters who love Faith, when many of their Faith-criticisms apply to Spike, right down to the ostensibly unforgivable AR—Faith tries to rape Xander, and then steals Buffy’s body and has sex with her boyfriend, which is a major violation of both Buffy and Riley. Oh well.
An example of a mixture of accurate, inaccurate and everything in between is this: in one post he says that Xander summoning Sweet and not caring about people dying was stupid (I agree, though I think it was partly just an awkward attempt to play with musical dues ex machina conventions), says that this proves that Joss doesn’t care about his characters (don’t really agree—summoning the demon ties into Xander’s Anya fears, also explored in the episode, and I think Joss et al. just failed to think through the implications of people dying from it—an error in judgment and not of lack of caring), and that Joss had Xander do it entirely because he wanted to set up the happy ending of Buffy and Spike kissing (completely disagree—Joss isn’t even presenting it as a happy ending, with “where do we go from here” and Buffy saying, “This isn’t real”!). Anyway, hard to argue with, which is why I’m trying...not to.