February 2003 posts


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Buffy says: Happy Valentine's Slay -- Katrina, 16:06:10 02/14/03 Fri

I am loving all the great analysis of the Fred/Gunn/Wes situation, very apropos for the day devoted to romantic love! Despite having no deep thoughts on any subject, (I'm at work, which may be why), I thought I'd share my Buffy Valentine funny. Every year my husband and I tend to give each other horror-themed valentines: anatomically correct heart toys, Addams Family valentines, Day of the Dead valentines, etc. I realized that neither of us has done a Buffy valentine yet, so I went online to see what I could find. Of course, there's a lot of cheesy merchandise out there, but I was nonetheless surprised to discover that they sell Buffy-themed packs of valentines for kids. They have photos of the characters, which, judging by hair, look like they're from last season, with cute little sayings (see subject heading). Since the show has definitely been going in a more mature direction, oh, at least since the kids started having sex, it's hard to imagine 4th-graders giving these to their classmates...But the funniest thing is that there's a card with a picture of Spike on it that reads "Friends Til the End."

Friends til the end? Spike? What kind of "end" might we talking about?

Sorry it this is too silly, but it cracked me up...
[> LOLOL -- Rahael, 16:15:25 02/14/03 Fri

[> Some other fun Buffy Valentine's -- zantique, 22:13:40 02/14/03 Fri

e-cards here

I particularly liked the Angelus one:

"I'm sorry I forgot to bring you roses for Valentine's Day...
But hey, at least I didn't leave a dead body in your bed."
[> [> LOL -- Celebaelin, 01:43:39 02/15/03 Sat

Particularly liked

"When you're down and troubled and feeling alone and like you might possibly do something like go out and get drunk and go shopping or, say, cast a spell to make yourself feel better, remember one thing:

If you make me fall in love with an evil vampire, I swear to God I will kick your ass.

Other than that I'm here for you."

Strangely enough there are people in the world who wouldn't find that funny, but taste is sooo personal.
BTVS, Pygmalion, and the Mentor/Protégé Relationship (vague spoilers to 17) -- Kathyu, 19:43:54 02/14/03 Fri

BTVS, Pygmalion, and the Mentor/Protégé Relationship (vague spoilers to 17)

I was inspired to write this post by spoilers I read in episode 17. It made me think of the Mentor/Protégé arc in Pygmalion, and how it relates to Buffy and Giles. If someone has already done this before, me=bad ;), sorry, I haven't read it.

At the beginning of the series, Giles is Henry Higgins to Buffy's Eliza Doolittle. He is the one teaching her to be the Slayer, as opposed to a proper English Lady, but same difference: Buffy is a bubbly cheerleader type and as unlike a Slayer as you would think anyone could be. (Although technically, he is not her first Watcher, so she is already many rungs up the Slayer learning curve). Eliza Doolittle is the cockney guttersnipe flower seller who wants to learn to act like a real lady.

This is the first part of the arc. The difficult/challenging/reluctant student needing to be "transformed", taught and guided by the older, more educated, Mentor.

Buffy/Eliza is forced to work hard to reach her goal, and her Watcher/Teacher pushes her hard. In the early seasons of Buffy Giles is always pushing Buffy to train, for her own good. Buffy resents it, she wants to go out on dates and other stuff like normal girls. Eliza (in the musical version) sings "just you wait 'enry 'iggins", biding her time when she can get the upper hand with her professor. I'll get back to this one upmanship a little later, because it doesn't come into play quite yet.

Buffy goes through a lot of training and hard work to become a better Slayer and achieves various breakthroughs. Sometimes she fails. But the idea of the arc is that she is pushed to get better, she does so, then she reaches a point where she has "made it" according to her mentor.

In Pygmalion, it is the high society party where Eliza dances with a prince and manages to fool Henry Higgins' other student, a so-called language expert. (You have to excuse me here, I'm going off the musical version, I don't remember this part of the play well enough). In BTVS, I would say "Checkpoint" was the episode where Buffy came into her own, and out-bluffed Giles' Watcher "experts". This is a penultimate Slayer episode where she really comes into her own.

The third part of the arc is when Buffy/Eliza comes to the realization that she isn't one thing or the other. In Pygmalion, Eliza realizes that she's not a flower girl, or a Lady, she falls between two very different worlds and doesn't fit in either. In Buffy's case, she is in-between being a girl (and a mother figure/breadwinner) with Dawn, and a Slayer of demons. She is straddling two worlds, she is neither in one or the other, and sometimes in trying to do both, she fails at both. Either she fails to look after Dawn (Season 6), or get ahead in her life (Doublemeat Palace), or else she fails to do her Slayer duty. The Weight of The World to Spiral, I think, show her dilemma at having to choose between Dawn, as her sister, or Dawn as the key that needs to be destroyed to save the world. (She actually never has to make this choice with Dawn.)

The fourth part of the Eliza Doolittle arc is when the Student actually surpasses, or goes against the Mentor. This hasn't actually happened to Buffy yet, I don't think. Sure, she has shown her independence, but most of Season 6 has shown her failing to get to grips with her life, and the beginning of Season 7, shows her struggling to get her life back again. But she hasn't actually gone against Giles, or surpassed Giles' teachings. (Unless you count Spiral, when she refused to kill Dawn. But she died straight after, so we never got to see the fallout of that). The spoilers I read for episode 7.17 indicate to me that maybe now she has reached that point. She is at the strongest that she has been for quite some time, and she has a profound philosophical difference of opinion with Giles.

If we take Giles snuffing Ben as a key moment of Giles canon, then the philosophical difference is this: Giles will do what he has to, to save the world, even if it's ethically wrong. He even says that Buffy is not like Ben or himself, she is a 'hero'. In First Date, Buffy says something like doing evil is not the way to fight evil. This was the whole point of the Initiative arc. The Initiative was intended to stop/harness evil, but they were the real Big Bad of the season.

In Pygmalion, Eliza goes to live with Henry's mother and refuses to go back to Henry, she is going to marry Freddy instead. She has some very telling lines. She says Henry Higgins treats her like a guttersnipe, because that is how he sees her, but Freddy treats her like a Lady, because that's how he sees her. Applying this to Buffy, there is a possibility that Giles still sees her as the little girl who needs his guidance and expertise to see her through her trials. He may not be ready to acknowledge that she has "made it".

There is a situation now (spoilery for First Date) where Giles thinks that Buffy made a mistake allowing Spike's chip to be removed. Many people online think that sparing Spike is a mistake she is making based upon an emotional response to Spike, and that point of view is represented by some characters on the show, particularly Giles. But she has given very valid reasons for all of her actions that are separate from those feelings, so it is highly possible that Giles is currently underestimating her Slayer instincts and reasoning, presuming to think that she is acting purely on "emotion" rather than her own reasoning and ethics. But really, perhaps Giles has just done his job too well and created what he set out to do: an independent thinking, fully-trained Slayer. Buffy may be "complete", having found some kind of way to accept both sides of her nature, a way to live in both worlds.

This is the Eliza/Henry Higgins showdown. In "My Fair Lady" (the musical version of "Pygmalion"), Eliza goes back to Henry and puts on his slippers(!!!), however, the play by George Bernard Shaw ends differently. Eliza becomes independent of her Mentor, and decides to marry Freddy the amiable gentleman who loves her (but really doesn't have much more to him than that). The feminist point here is that in the relationship she chooses, she becomes the brains of the partnership, the dominant partner. In My Fair Lady, she fetches and kneels down to put on Henry Higgins slippers. Although it may be nice that he loves her and needs her emotionally, we see that Eliza is going back to him on HIS TERMS, not on her own, which is what she was fighting for when she argued with him that she was going to marry Freddy and open up a flower shop.

I think that if Giles wants to continue as Buffy's watcher, it has to be on her terms, not his. I'm not saying that Giles hasn't been flexible in the past, I think he has. Possibly Season 6 has been a turning point regressing Buffy from the continual growth she showed in Season's 1 through 5. Now the other characters are more likely to question Buffy's authority and her judgment. They may even see her as flawed.

I find the whole group dynamic kind of fascinating. It is like the idea of a famous rock band. The members come together, each adding their own talent to the group. The group melds, they become a force as a unit, wildly successful. But gradually various members begin to want to move in different directions. They have different ideas about the kind of music they want to make, and rifts start to appear. Infighting happens, and eventually the group starts to dissolve. I think there is an element of that with the Scooby Gang. They may all have slightly different philosophical leanings, and now their varied points of view are beginning to show up and strain the group dynamic.

Here is a summarization of the Pygmalion arc:
1. Mentor takes on difficult/challenging student to "transform" them into something "better".
2. Student overcomes obstacles and is gradually, but quickly, transformed into something they originally weren't.
3. The Student is required to become independent, and the Mentor relationship is withdrawn. Student realizes they are not part of the world they are trying to get into, and can't go back to the one they came from. They are straddling two worlds. They want to go back, but can't. They may want to go forward, but Mentor tells them they are "complete" and doesn't understand why the Student is resentful.
4. Student surpasses/goes against Mentor, and Mentor doesn't like it. The Mentor at this point, would say they preferred the student the way they used to be. The Student at this point is Independent of the Mentor now, their potential is fully realized.
[> Re: BTVS, Pygmalion, and the Mentor/Protégé Relationship (vague spoilers to 17) -- grum, 02:36:04 02/15/03 Sat

I more or less agree with the arc you describe, but I think you might have missed its more important implication. Giles currently believes that Buffy herself is the cause of the First Evils reappearance. Spike will be the lesser of his concerns if he maintains his oath to protect the world at all costs. Because doing that this time will mean, in polite terms, reversing Buffy's resurrection.
Regarding Spike, Wood is the one who should be careful if he thinks about getting between Buffy and her man. It didn't turn out well for Faith, and if Him was any indication, he should start looking out for loose rockets headed his way. Someone better teach him the concept judge not lest ye be Judged, otherwise they'll need a new clean up crew at the mall.
[> [> Oops forgot to change header. (Spoilers thru First Date in above) nt -- grum, 02:38:47 02/15/03 Sat

[> Excellent Post! More on Shaw -- luna, 17:54:59 02/15/03 Sat

What a great idea! I like the comparison.

However, the Giles/Buffy comparison to Higgins/Eliza works really well for the beginning but does sort of unravel towards the end. The other transformation that happened in the play was Higgins: he moved from seeing Eliza as an object, a creature to experiment with, to seeing her as a person. I don't think Giles went through that. As early as Helpless, and maybe earlier, he was rejecting the classical Watcher/Slayer relationship dictated by the Council and becoming more of a father/friend. I think Buffy was always a person to him. Although he had little sympathy for some of her American teenagerisms, he also understood and indulged them at times (Lie to Me, etc.).

Of course, your reading also suggests that culture is one of the themes that goes on here: upper vs lower class culture in Pygmalion, academic British vs California teen in BtVS. In both cases the heroine moves from a culture that is given a low value in the play to one that's given a high value.

Glad you got to the comparison of the Shaw version (neat play) and the movie (well, it did have Audrey Hepburn and some good songs). I've also thought of Candida sometimes--who reminds me of Eliza at the end of Pygmalion, and like her chooses a weaker man "because he needs her." This is really OT for your Giles/Buffy thought, but sometimes it seems as though THAT could be Spike's attraction for Buffy--he needs her (of course, the whole world needs her, come to think of it, so maybe she's not Candida!). Man and Superman--not much really about the play fits at first thought, but we are sort of dealing with Superwoman here....
Slayer Lineage, part deux (maybe spoilers) -- RichardX1, 21:26:47 02/15/03 Sat

I know that we've all agreed that no one among the Scoobies, or even the "Scrappies" (folks like Andrew who have become part of the group but do nothing but annoy us) have realized that the Slayer Essence has moved on from Buffy to Kendra and on to Faith, and that Buffy's death won't awaken any more Slayers.

But what about the First Evil?

I mean, we're talking about the personification of all Evil in the universe; you'd think It would have been around long enough to have learned how the passing of the torch works.

Which means it can kill Buffy at any time and it wouldn't do a thing to the potentials, except eliminate their source of training, experience, and guidance.

Which begs the question: is the First Evil like totally stupid, or what? All It has to do is (a) get Its corporeal servants to axe the Buffster, and (b) make sure to encourage the California constabulary to do their jobs regarding Faith while keeping them talked out of killing her outright. Result: a bunch of unExalted girls, waiting to be picked off by the Eyeless Ones, thus ending the Slayer lineage and allowing Faith's all-but-inevitable death to deprive the world of any future protectors (unless Connor survives and the PTBs decide to try male or random-gender Slayers this time).

I could so do the "Evil Genius" thing.
[> Maybe it wants Buffy for something else. . . -- Finn Mac Cool, 21:53:28 02/15/03 Sat

The First Evil's ultimate goals are still very vague. We know it wants to destroy the Slayer line, but we don't know how that fits into Apocalypse style plans, or what it intends to do afterwards.
[> [> The First Evil may have a taste for cheese... (speculative) -- ZachsMind, 15:53:06 02/16/03 Sun

The First Evil may not be The first evil, technically speaking. It's allegedly summoned by The Bringers, but they must have had help, unless they found magic spell books in Braille. Now that Whedon has re-introduced Amy into the mix, I'm thinking we're gonna find she had a hand in it.

The First Evil first made an appearance in season three's episode "Amends." Immediately after that episode was "Gingerbread" in which Amy turned into a rat. Now, I don't KNOW if this means Amy had a hand in The First Evil's previous incarnation, but I find it very coincidentally strange that the First Evil never made another appearance until AFTER Willow turned Amy back into Amy, by undoing the rat spell late in season six. Also, although Willow was having trouble with magic prior to Amy's arrival, she didn't go completely over the edge and turn evil until after Amy was de-ratted. Amy has admitted to vexing Willow, but she didn't say it was recently. It's possible that Willow's going Dark was another manifestation of Amy's hex, as was her turning into Warren, and possibly the manifestation of The First's true form when she was doing that location spell. And any other craziness that's happened to Willow since Amy's de-ratting could also be suspect - Amy may have screwed Willow up a long time ago.

IF my suspicions are correct, we'll find that "The First Evil" is really just an illusion concocted by the magical powers of Amy, who is being assisted by The Bringers. If this is true, it's much easier to take down The First than previously thought. Just take down Amy, who has been doing this whole "pay no attention to the one behind the curtain" bit since season three.

I think it would explain The First's behavior, and why most recently it didn't know Andrew was wired. I mean if The First Evil was really The First Evil, you'd think it'd be a bit more omniscient than that having been around forever. Although The First has been appearing as all these other dead characters, it has had consistent characteristics. It has a personality. A rather stunted personality that is rather anti-social, tends to enjoy flirting with men while it tortures them, and it enjoys manipulation of power. The more I think about it, the more I think The First has been acting like Amy all along. If that's true, it only knows what Amy knows.

So the next question would be: How would Amy know everything The First appears to know? Good question. The only answer to that is in answering whether or not Amy was consciously sentient the entire time she was a rat. If that's true, that means she heard EVERY conversation that has gone on in Willow's bedroom from late season three until early in season six. Over two whole years. I think Willow had the rat with her during season four, didn't she? Perhaps the rat was present when Spike tried to bite Willow and couldn't do it because of the chip. When Willow and Buffy moved back in to Buffy's house from the college dorm in late season five, chances are Dawn would have begun assisting Willow in general upkeep of the rat, and so it's possible Dawn befriended AmyRat too. Given Dawn's personality, she may have even talked to AmyRat directly, the way she's prone to talking to herself when no one's in the room.

The AmyRat would also have been present during Willow & Tara's conversations and snuggles in the sack. This could further explain why Amy chose not to appear before Willow as Tara but Cassie instead, because being heterosexual, that probably woulda freaked Amy out if she's controlling The First. Willow probably told Tara all the stories about everything that happened to she and Buffy since season one, with Amy overhearing the lot of it in her rat form. This means Amy would know everything that Willow knows. Which again, would explain why The First is more focused on Willow and Dawn than it is Buffy. It knows more about Willow & Dawn cuz they were probably playing with Amy as a rat, and feeding her and whatnot, moreso than Buffy was.

What I can't figure out is: First, where did The Bringers come from, and why would they follow the lead of a saucy little high school dropout with delusions of grandeur who spent three years as a rodent? Secondly, how would Amy know what all these dead creatures look like, if she wasn't able to see them and could only work off Willow's descriptions? Finally, this also doesn't explain how The First appears to know so much about Spike. I doubt Spike spent any time in Willow's room talking to the rat about his favorite songs from his childhood, y'know?

I do admit there are holes in my speculation.
[> Re: Slayer Lineage, part deux (maybe spoilers) -- WickedBuffy, 22:14:36 02/15/03 Sat

I don't think The First Evil wants to kill Buffy. I think it wants to "turn" her... to complete evil. Buffy is the hero - take down the hero and think how it would demoralize everyone else? If the hero can't resist her inner and outer demons, how could regular people think they could possibly have a chance?

It would create despair and loss of hope, If Buffy falls, they all fall. Killing her would create anger and determination and all kinds of fight in the rest. They would unite and be stronger. Faith would come in and the Scoobies would team up to avenge Buffy's death.

But seeing their hero fall?

The First works thru psyching people out - weakening the confidence of the people around Buffy is a great way to chip away at her. Buffy's stress would increase trying to hold them together while fighting FE. Stress and responsibility and fighting would wear Buffy down emotionally, physically and psychologically an easier mark for FE to control.

imho
[> [> The time Buffy got closest to going evil. . . -- Dariel, 18:40:12 02/16/03 Sun

was when she tried to feed Faith to Angel. Perhaps the First thinks it can manipulate Buffy into killing Faith. It may know that there's still a lot of bad blood there. Two birds, one stone.

I doubt the Bringers are capable of bringing down a Slayer. But Buffy is.
My analysis of "Calvary" is up -- Masq, 21:55:43 02/15/03 Sat

Here.

Includes all the theories I know of on

(1) why the Beast's spell didn't erase Angelus' memory (including a much-mangled version of Rufus' theory of vampirism and Dissociative Identity Disorder) and

(2) what the heck is going on with Cordelia.

The answers are left for you to decide. Well, actually, they're for ME to know and for us to find out.

"First Date" coming soon!
[> Ooh, and the first February archives are up now, too. -- Masq, 09:42:16 02/16/03 Sun

Here.

Thanks, Lady Starlight!
[> Woah! I was JUST thinking about this! (speccy spoilery. please exercise caution) -- ZachsMind, 15:05:29 02/16/03 Sun

I JUST said something very similar to Masq's sentiments about Cordelia over at Whedonesque.com. This is what I said. I'm gettin' goosebumps! Maybe I'm actually RIGHT about something. I speculate and try to extrapolate the future of both Buffy & Angel. It's one of the ways I personally enjoy watching the show, but I'm not often quite this accurate.

"Since it says "spoiler" up above, I hope it's safe to mention this speculation. I'm gambling at the moment that what we'll discover before season's end is that the Cordy we've been seeing since Angel came back from Las Vegas is not Cordy at all. I think Cordy's still trapped by Skip's superiors up in that glowing gilded cage place where she's been since last season's cliffhanger. The recent rumors that Gina Torres is swinging by in a few episodes to make an appearance as The Beast's employer kinda clinches that for me. Especially given last episode when the "Cordy" we've been seeing is finally showing her true colors by letting Angelus free and killing Wesley's girltoy. I've been wondering about the Cordy we've been seeing almost ever since she allegedly came back. Then when she slept with Connor I felt pretty sure that wasn't "our" Cordy, y'know whut ah mean?

I mean let's face it. The REAL Cordy woulda bugged out at the thought of having sex with Connor. She was practically breastfeeding the guy not one year ago. I mean she's just NOT that kinky and sexually deviant. She probably votes conservative republican, y'know whut ah'm sayin'? Cordy also freaks out at any guy who doesn't have fashion sense, and Connor definitely has no clue in that department. Connor would NOT turn the head of the real Cordy.

So I'm hoping with upcoming events I'll be proven right. This is just speculation though based loosely on spoilage. I could be way off base, here."

*shiver* Okay maybe I am full of it but seeing Masq's thoughts on the subject make me feel I'm not like, going crazy or somethin'. I mean Cordy's just been way too weird this season. Even for HER.
[> [> I have many thoughts on subject... (spoilery AtS spec) -- Masq, 15:47:59 02/16/03 Sun

I try to remain neutral, though, and report all theories until we have some facts.

Personally speaking, I've rewatched all the Season 4 AtS episodes like, a zillion times, and I think Cordy is our real Cordy. I think she's got a "sleeper" deal going on like Spike did.

When she's acting anti-Cordy, she's pretty anti-Cordy. But when she's herself, she's pretty herself. She's said and done too much for me to think she's not the real Cordy. She's just being manipulated by something big and eeeevil....
[> [> [> I agree. Especially because... (LDJ and Calvary spoiler) -- Rob, 18:22:05 02/16/03 Sun

...rewatching LDJ, I noticed again that we keep seeing Cordy's visions of the Beast. If she were evil and totally cognizant of what's going on, I don't think we would see her visions. She would just say she had one...kind of like what she did re: the soul eater in "Calvary." So I don't think she was evil the whole time. But I am very ready to find out what's going on with her.

I actually found Lilah's "St. Cordelia" statement very reassuring, because it shows that the writers are aware of fans' concerns about Cordy. It kind of felt to me like an affirmation to me that all of this will be addressed.

Rob
[> [> [> [> That's it, exactly -- Masq, 19:14:40 02/16/03 Sun

There's been many times Cordelia has been alone, or we've been in her point of view and we see no evidence of her "evil". We see her ignorance and fear of the Beast dreams she has in "Apocalypse Nowish" in a dream. We see her total consternation at having slept with Connor in her face in "Habeas Corpses".

There are lots of other examples as well. I see no evidence that she is aware and cognizant of being evil in any scene except the last one in "Calvary". I think she's being manipulated.
[> [> [> [> [> or it could be... -- Tess, 22:36:49 02/16/03 Sun

""There are lots of other examples as well. I see no evidence that she is aware and cognizant of being evil in any scene except the last one in "Calvary". I think she's being manipulated.""

Cordy might not be aware that she's evil but I think something evil has control of her at all times. Otherwise in one of those moments when the real Cordy is in charge she would have moved out of Conner's, or have done something that would have made it seem like the old Cordy was back. In fact, it seems like everything Cordy has done since returning has been geared to create strife between Angel and those he cares about.

I wish I had last season on tape so I could rewatch her arc from 'Birthday' till now. My theory is that the demon they put in her is in control. But it would seem a bit obvious that last season they put a demon in her and this year she's evil, so maybe not.

It could be a totally fake Cordy. Hmmmm, didn't Xmen do that story arc once?
[> [> [> [> [> [> Re: or it could be... -- Angela, 08:17:39 02/17/03 Mon

"My theory is that the demon they put in her is in control."

I agree Tess. That's how the pattern of events reads. I think the parallel is with Angel and that the key event was in Tomorrow. JMO, though.
[> [> Not-so-well-known AtS casting spoiler in ZM post above! -- Masq, 19:16:58 02/16/03 Sun

First Date Revisited (Spoilers) -- Darby, 22:01:37 02/15/03 Sat

The first sequence wrapped up more hanging threads in two minutes than the typical 4 Season 7 episodes. Yay! A change of rhythm is always good.

Commercials have an African-American principal (headache) followed by an African American super-villain, but we can't accuse ME of laying messages in the ads...can we?

"You can't beat Evil by doing Evil." Why do I think that there's more than a throwaway line there?

Xander really is a demon magnet since he was drawn to the demon looking to buy bondage / seal opening wares. They should really make use of this - Xander gets sweaty, Buffy kills.

Are SMG's arms exceptionally short? - Why always the sleeves past the thumbtips? I'm starting to see why Honorificus' reviews are so fashioncentric...

Wouldn't a demon-and-vampire-hunter-type have more weapons that one could effectively use on a vampire? Most of that stuff would be useful only to a Hobbit! Set dressers went for quantity over quality.

More ads. Now that Spike's dechipped, can we sic him on that annoying "Zoom zoom!" kid??

Interaction between core characters, actual discussions with responses and everything! Yay squared!

Now that Non-Touchy Giles is gone, we get Driving, Bag-Carrying Giles. I guess there was no way no explain why he wasn't touching things without revealing that the Buffyverse is scripted.

How did Giles extract an adolescent girl from Mainland China (at her age, she'd be an only child, right-?) if he barely speaks Chinese and she (and her family) had no idea that she was a Proto? I guess they really don't want to deal with the "what about these girls' Watchers?" question.

There's an interesting human-evolution story about lactose intolerance, but I'll spare you.

The First is looking like Jonathan but not trying at all to be like Jonathan - or has Danny Strong decided Jonathan got all suave in Mexico?

Here's a point - the First can appear to just one person at a time and not be seen by others, but it must be seen by someone to be present (we've seen that from how it gains intelligence); that suggests that it manifests itself from a person's inner Evil but can't do it without them being aware of it. But given that we've seen how it gathers intelligence, how did it know that Willow had brought a gun to the house? It didn't know where the gun was in the house.

What exactly is Souled!Spike now seeing when he looks at Buffy, now that his "eyes are clear?" She has done more evil to him than to anyone else, does that figure into the First's eventual plans?

The weird thing is, if you actually Google for a Robin Wood, there are Principals that show up and have nothing to do with the show. And he reasonably might not have been a Principal before he took the Sunnydale job.

The flash cards are funny, but couldn't they have matched the style from Hush, which I suspect were Joss'? I also wonder if it wasn't a way to show viewers how "Turok-Han" (Son of Stone / Solo?) is spelled.

Interesting that they've given Wood a different martial arts style than the regulars - I don't know enough to recognize it, but it's definitely different.

If we've met Wood's mother, have we met his Watcher / surrogate father? Could it have been Merrick, who seemed kind of old to be a first-timer?

Another conundrum - if the First wasn't aware of Andrew and Willow's scheme, how'd it know what had gone on with Buffy and Wood? I guess from the dead Lissa...or does it continue to know what Spike knows because he's technically dead?

Time is still wonky - how did strung-up Xander send Willow a text message? Was it from Xander, or is Xander important enough to the First to get it to use its talent for communicating through electronics? Were we supposed to notice this?

The "In my mouth" line breaks the tradition of meta-commenting on such lines, but continues the tradition of innuendo-laden early conversations with potential Buffy beaus.

So where are the Turok-Han, anyway? Is the seal a gateway, a one-at-a-time withdrawal slot to a very crowded crypt, or a vampy Xerox machine? And can we never see another of these boring things again, please?

Well, the look in the rearview mirror is not accidental - it's a specific shot, edited in, for sure. And at that point, it could very well be Wood looking at an empty seat. But the later line is, "He's a vampire," a revelation, not "He is a vampire," a confirmation. Maybe Wood thought there were other things that cast no reflection, but that's more of a reach than it's a boo-boo.

Someone suggested that the Turok-Han arm should have dusted, but if the vamp lived, I can't see why its arm wouldn't remain intact.

I guess when you do stunt casting, the guests can nix the demony prosthetics - but the showing that Lissa was really an icky demon type after her decapitation was a nice adaptation.

I don't get the gay gag - it seemed both insensitive and way more out-of-character for Xander than Giles' "touching" joke last episode. And it went on too long.

Love the "This isn't a joke" with the flash cards. Labelled in English. Which Chao-Ahn can't read.

Why would The First sic Wood on Spike? Is it maneuvering Buffy to becoming the next-to-last Scooby to be responsible for a human's death? Will we see a parade of victims in the finale? Can we see Kendra? Any other requests?

Previews (unspoiled beyond the images) - Dawn's doing spells, someone hanging in the living room that Kennedy knows, Willow maybe disappearing, the First...Slayer? Buffy in Bondage...again? At least a dozen Protos? Time to weed that herd!

- Darby, with the minute-to-minute minutiae.
[> Nitpick on a nitpick: -- HonorH, 22:22:59 02/15/03 Sat

And yes, I know this has been done to death, but--Buffy doing more evil to Spike than anyone? Yeah, she wasn't too good to him last season (nor he to her), but this strikes me as a bit too much of an assumption. How about Drusilla killing and vamping him? Or Angelus and Darla doing who-knows-what to him for 20 years? Or Angelus, during S2, doing Drusilla right under his nose and taunting him about it? I know it's popular to believe Buffy's worse than anyone as concerns Spike, but personally, I think you could find another suspect in Spike's long and twisted life.
[> [> True, true -- Darby, 05:39:03 02/16/03 Sun

The "anyone" was aimed at people Buffy has wronged, not those who have wronged Spike - on the latter, I absolutely agree with you. But if part of taking on the First Evil means addressing your own Evil, Buffy has more amends to make up with Spike than with anyone else I could think of. Buffy's not much of an evil-doer, and it hardly really qualifies as evil (I think Spike recognizes what she did and has totally forgiven - but not forgotten - it), but I'm just trying to think down the road toward a confrontation that seems like it will have to be more internal than external. Multi-episode dream sequences, anyone-? Just a guess...
[> Re: First Date Revisited (Spoilers) -- parakeet, 22:28:38 02/15/03 Sat

Here are my questions (I haven't been checking up on the board much, so please excuse me if these have already been covered):

1. Since Buffy and Spike were on their chip mission to the Initiative when the rest of the gang got Robson's call and then the gang went right to Giles to see if he was or was not the First, when did Anya tell Spike that Giles was suspect? She had already touched him by the time she would have had a chance to talk to Spike, surely?

3. About Amanda (that is the name of the potential played by the girl from Freaks and Geeks, right?). Is she still living at home? If not, how has this been explained to her folks? If she's still living at home, then how is she being protected? OK, the other potentials probably have parents extant, too, but they have either been being trained as slayers already, or, like the Chinese girl, are from different cultures where it is easier, from a dramatic standpoint, to fudge over this issue. How do you tell a Californian mother that her daughter needs to live at Buffy's house? Or, how does the First not know to attack that potential at 4 AM at her own, presumably unprotected, house?

3. Why doesn't the First influence some mentally unstable people in Sunnydale to take out the potentials? Mentally unstable people not already in the plot, that is. I know why not, in terms of the show, but why not, logically? Somebody already writing poems to their neighbor's dog (Sunnydale's a good-sized town, there must be other nutjobs there), who could just sneak up on them and shoot. OK, this is a plot thing, but still...
[> [> Re: First Date Revisited (Spoilers) -- Darby, 05:44:15 02/16/03 Sun

Total assumption - Spike's dechipping keeps him in the Initiative past sunrise (or days, even, during which Spike gets no Giles news). When he went, Anya had told him about their Giles suspicions but wasn't back with the update. Buffy set up to meet Spike in the cemetery. He sees Giles with Buffy - but none of the crew who were going to "check him out" - assumes the worse, and attacks. Not completely sensible, but funny.

We've had too many of these "funny bits before logic" scenes this season, I think.
[> [> [> I've got a theory. . . -- Finn Mac Cool, 10:36:45 02/16/03 Sun

Spike and Buffy came home from the Initiative, and maybe they found a note Anya had left about their Giles suspicions. They leave, then, to be on patrol in case this means the First is up to something new and run into Giles.
[> Re: First Date Revisited (Spoilers) -- parakeet, 22:37:37 02/15/03 Sat

Here's my questions (I haven't really been keeping up with the board, so please excuse me if these have been covered).

1. Spike tackling Giles. OK, Buffy and Spike were off on their chip mission to the Initiative when the rest of the gang got the call from Robson. The gang then went right off and tackled Giles to see if he was the First. Spike couldn't have talked to Anya until after this, so what's up?

2. Amanda (that is the name of the potential played by the girl from Freaks and Geeks, right?). Is she still living at home? If not, how is this explained to her folks? If she is, then how is she being protected? Yes, the other potentials must have some parents extant, but they have either been already accepted into the Watcher fold or, like the Chinese girl, are from cultures where, from a dramatic standpoint, this issue can be fudged. How do you explain to an American mother that her daughter needs to live at Buffy's house or she might be killed?

3. Why isn't the First influencing some mentally unbalanced person in Sunnydale not in the fold? Surely there must be somebody it could be tempting in the town who would attack the girls with a gun? I mean, it's a good sized town, and there must be other potential killers than Andrew and Spike? Ok, this makes sense from a dramatic sense with where we are in the story, but still...
[> [> sorry -- parakeet, 22:41:10 02/15/03 Sat

I thought that the first post didn't take, so I posted again. Sorry!
Also, I do want to say that I loved the episode.
[> [> [> I really enjoyed the episode, too -- Darby, picking nits (ewwww) but not disliking, 05:47:45 02/16/03 Sun

[> Martial Arts (Spoilers) -- KKC, 03:12:21 02/16/03 Sun

About Wood's martial art style? I'm no expert, but I believe that his fighting method has more in common with Hapkido than the other characters'. His style looks like it's all about ending a fight quickly, and had some pretty distinctive holds and throws. Of course, Buffy's kick-heavy style is reflective of SMG's real life Tae Kwon Do training. And most of the Vampire thugs we see appear to be generic Karate fighters, although a few of the actors look like they may have picked up some bouncy, spartan Jeet Kune Do from somewhere. I remember now also that when the Watcher's council visited Sunnydale, they expected Buffy to be familiar with Aikido terminology, which suggests that they have some kind of training standardization.

Of course, an actor's fighting style and training can be completely obscured by choreography. And an actor's LACK of fighting training can be made up for with a well chosen stunt double and some swishy close-ups. So there's no good way to determine the fighting style of Wood or the actor playing him unless we get some dialogue that states otherwise.

-KKC, who would describe himself as a martial arts geek if there were such a thing. :)
[> But.... (FD spoilers) -- pellenaka, 03:48:48 02/16/03 Sun

The First is looking like Jonathan but not trying at all to be like Jonathan - or has Danny Strong decided Jonathan got all suave in Mexico?

But this time the FE didn't try at all to tempt Andrew into killing people. It knew that Andrew had realized that when he sees dead people, they are the First and not who they claim to be. Instead, FE tried use the fact that Andrew felt really guilty about killing Jonathan. "I'll stay here and remind you of what you did".

Jonathan!FE was the FE all along and may I say that I loved seeing Danny Strong play that way. More of that, please.
[> Re: First Date Revisited (Spoilers) -- Peggin, 05:41:40 02/16/03 Sun

Here's a point - the First can appear to just one person at a time and not be seen by others, but it must be seen by someone to be present (we've seen that from how it gains intelligence); that suggests that it manifests itself from a person's inner Evil but can't do it without them being aware of it.

I'm not sure about that. Maybe The First is present at any time when someone is actively engaged in doing something evil, regardless of whether or not that person is aware that The First is there.

Time is still wonky - how did strung-up Xander send Willow a text message?

I don't think he did send the message while strung up. Remember, Willow wasn't sure what the message was -- she said it could be "my date's a demon" or it could be "I got lucky." I think, before he realized Lissa was a demon, Xander sent Willow a message telling her "I got lucky, don't call me for a while." Luckily for Xander, his history of bad luck with women worked in his favor and everyone assumed he must have sent the other message.

Also, I've got to agree with HonorH about the "evil" that Buffy did to Spike. The one and only time I think Buffy's treatment of Spike crossed the line was when she beat him up in Dead Things, and he *encouraged* her to do it. (I saw Spike in that scene as a lot like Angel in the scene at the end of Five by Five, when Angel let Faith take her frustrations out on him in the hopes that it would help him get through to her.) Spike never once saw the way Buffy treated him as "evil", he just mistook pain and violence for a sign of affection because, in his unsouled state, they were the same things. How was he going to make Dru like him again? Torture. What did he like about Buffy? The way she made it hurt in all the wrong places. He didn't see her treatment of him as "evil"; he saw it as *foreplay*.
[> [> Cell phones -- Darby, Sunday morning respondo-guy, 05:58:27 02/16/03 Sun

The thing is, Willow received the message (which I'm assuming that, unlike some e-mails, don't hang around some electronic ether for a while) after we'd seen Xander strung up. Maybe she had just turned her cell on - do they beep with voice mails? - but Amanda reacted like someone was calling her at that moment.

Although the show's being very circumspect about it, it seems obvious that Spike-with-a-soul has a very different perspective on the B/S shenanigans than he did last year. Anyway, it's still not very nice to use, belittle, and mistreat someone because that's what they expect.

I like your suggestion about the First, although it requires a definition of what "doing evil" is, and I think we're seeing here that Buffy-Spike might look evil to some and not others. I think that at some point the show's going to have to get metaphysical and do a bit better definitionwise than "Evil - I know it when I see it" to succeed here.
[> Re: First Date Revisited (Spoilers) -- Malandanza, 07:29:34 02/16/03 Sun

"'You can't beat Evil by doing Evil.' Why do I think that there's more than a throwaway line there?"


I think it's setting up either a repudiation of the way the Watchers' Council did business or setting Principal Wood up for a fall.

"Wouldn't a demon-and-vampire-hunter-type have more weapons that one could effectively use on a vampire? Most of that stuff would be useful only to a Hobbit! Set dressers went for quantity over quality"

But small weapons are easier to conceal -- and vampires can still be cut and do bleed and feel pain (established early with Angel). He could slice a vampire to ribbons with a small, portable knife where a huge sword, while more effective, would draw unwanted notice in a crowd. He probably should have had some stakes, but I got the impression that these were his fancy weapons and wooden stakes wouldn't fit in with the cutlery. Anyway, small knives would be more effective than no weapons and we've seen gang fighting vamps weaponless before (or with impromptu, cartoonish weapons, like lamps or vases). Crosses and crucifixes might not have been included in the arsenal because they would have established Wood as a good guy before the plot twist.

"Here's a point - the First can appear to just one person at a time and not be seen by others, but it must be seen by someone to be present (we've seen that from how it gains intelligence); that suggests that it manifests itself from a person's inner Evil but can't do it without them being aware of it. But given that we've seen how it gathers intelligence, how did it know that Willow had brought a gun to the house? It didn't know where the gun was in the house."

We've seen that the First has a link to Willow, when it possessed her during a ritual. Perhaps it has Willow's information -- so knew that Willow brought a gun home and gave it to Buffy but didn't know where Buffy had hidden it. So why didn't it know that Willow was planning on tape recording an insubstantial being that appears only in the minds of its targets? Maybe it didn't look into Willow's mind until after her sting operation began -- when Andrew began acting suspiciously, it started looking for answers, found out immediately what was going on and who was responsible.

"Well, the look in the rearview mirror is not accidental -- it's a specific shot, edited in, for sure. And at that point, it could very well be Wood looking at an empty seat. But the later line is, "He's a vampire," a revelation, not "He is a vampire," a confirmation. Maybe Wood thought there were other things that cast no reflection, but that's more of a reach than it's a boo-boo."

I saw Wood's non-comment earlier as caution (ok, paranoia) -- he suspects everyone, including Buffy and wonders why she wouldn't provide him with relevant information (like "Spike is a vampire" or "Spike probably was the vamp who killed your mother, since he's killed two slayers" or even "You know that coat Spike sometimes wears? It's a trophy taken from your dead mother"). so he plays along, to see what she will reveal and when she will reveal it. The revelation was art.

"Why would The First sic Wood on Spike? Is it maneuvering Buffy to becoming the next-to-last Scooby to be responsible for a human's death? Will we see a parade of victims in the finale? Can we see Kendra? Any other requests?"

I think the First is using Spike to corrupt Wood, not Wood to kill Spike. It doesn't care whether Spike lives or dies, what it wants is Wood. It'd be a nice irony if the First could get the avenging son of a slayer to help end the slayer line. It's not about Spike.

"The First is looking like Jonathan but not trying at all to be like Jonathan - or has Danny Strong decided Jonathan got all suave in Mexico?"

The First changed tactics -- a little. We still see the First trying to make things easier for Andrew -- when Andrew couldn't kill another person, it offered a pig sacrifice, when he couldn't kill the pig, he was sent to the butcher shop. Here, the First wants the potentials killed, but when Andrew balks, the First tells Andrew that he doesn't have to kill his friends -- Dawn, for instance, just the potentials, who, after all, he barely even knows.

There's an interesting human-evolution story about lactose intolerance, but I'll spare you.

But I want to hear the story!
[> [> Okay, you asked for it -- Darby, 10:16:57 02/16/03 Sun

Lactose tolerance is one of those rare cases of a human evolutionary development that can be tied to semi-recent history.

Lactose is a small sugar found in milk but not much else. Humans, like many animals, have an enzyme to break it down but the production of the enzyme is on a timer - sometime soon after being weaned, the typical response is to stop making it (it passes through undigested and interferes with later water absorption, kind of a laxative effect). But in several cultures that have domesticated dairy livestock (which themselves have been in existence at most maybe 1000 years, for basic domestic cattle, and probably much less for dairy use), a change in the timer has allowed digestion of lactose to last into adulthood. Lactose intolerant (the "normal" or ancestral condition) ethnic groups are generally from non-dairy cultures.

There are few concrete human traits that one can point at to show that we are as much prone to evolve as any other critter. Skin color and some genetic diseases are about the only other good ones, but the first seems ancient (it probably isn't) and the others involve things "going wrong," so they aren't as good.
[> [> [> Uh, Darb -- CW, 18:51:38 02/16/03 Sun

Did you leave out a zero?

Maybe, I'm way off base, but I seem to remember a passage in the Old Testament in which Moses was to lead the Hebrews to a "land flowing with milk and honey." That doesn't exactly sound like a people who have never heard of tolerance to dairy to me. Keeping cattle as opposed to sheep or goats is referred to in the first few books of the Old Testament. I'd give better examples, but I'm afraid my history-of-animal-husbandry expertise is already running on fumes. Still, I'm thinking your date needs to be pushed back at least a couple thousand years.
[> [> [> [> Oops. -- Darby, 19:24:40 02/16/03 Sun

And I actually went back to the Natural History article I'm reading about cattle, checked the number, and wrote it wrong. Should have been 10,000 - if I'd put a comma in it like I should have, it would have stood out more to the proofread. Thanks.

And if I'd finished the article instead of spending the weekend watching Season 1 of Angel, I might have a better date on the dairy...
[> [> [> asking for more! 'cause i have a theory -- anom, 21:44:31 02/16/03 Sun

Any idea whether lactose tolerance might have developed to allow humans to take advantage of an additional calcium source when they moved away from the sunny latitudes where the species developed to areas w/less sunlight, so their skin produced less vitamin D?

"There are few concrete human traits that one can point at to show that we are as much prone to evolve as any other critter. Skin color and some genetic diseases are about the only other good ones, but the first seems ancient (it probably isn't) and the others involve things "going wrong," so they aren't as good."

There was an article on the evolution of skin color in a recent issue of Scientific American (yo, cjl! I'm pluggin' your mag!). I'm not gonna look it up now (couldn't find it on their website), but if I remember right, it said variation in skin color had to do mostly w/production of folic acid, which is also dependent on penetration of the skin by sunlight & is necessary to prevent neural tube birth defects like spina bifida. Can't remember how "ancient" it said this trait is, though.

As for genetic diseases, some did come about as a result of something that "went right," in smaller doses. I'm thinking about diseases like sickle cell anemia and thalassemia, caused when someone is born w/2 copies of a gene for resistance to malaria instead of just 1.
[> [> [> [> Re: asking for more! 'cause i have a theory -- Darby, 05:57:59 02/17/03 Mon

The accepted wisdom (this week), as you say, is that skin color is related to our ancestors' sun exposure, a balance between UV penetration and damage (dark colors prevent this) and enough light penetration to let the body process Vitamin D, which is part of the calcium-use train. I've heard of the folic acid connection, but I'm behind on my Scientific Americans (they take way longer to read through than Natural History) and so don't really know what the connection there is supposed to be. Calcium use is a very complicated dance of vitamins, hormones, and, well, calcium.

The dairy connection makes some sense, except that a lot of light-skinned peoples (across Eurasia from the Huns' stomping grounds east) did just fine without it. Our recent ancestry is very much the progress of becoming omnivores, but there are no true omnivores - it's just a matter of how wide a range of foods your digestion can handle, added a gene or two at a time. I would suspect that dairy may have been more useful for its fat content (meats and fish would be fine alternate sources of calcium, protein, and whatnot), but it obviously wasn't a critical adaptation. Some places developed it, some didn't, but it didn't speed us up or slow us down much either way, that anybody can tell.

I'm dying to say that it's an example of a meme (domestication of dairy cattle) having an effect on a gene's evolution. Never mind.

The thing about genetic diseases that amazes me is that, before the serendipity of finding the malaria / sickle-cell connection, no one realized that, in order to spread through the population, disease genes had to convey some sort of advantages (although close linkage to really advantageous genes is slightly possible if unlikely in most cases). And initially, there was great resistance to the idea. Still is, in things like the genetic roots of homosexuality. I was going to say that this last was more of a cultural resistance than scientific, but I'm not sure the distinction between the two holds up here.
[> [> [> [> [> Re: asking for more! 'cause i have a theory -- Sophist, 08:21:16 02/17/03 Mon

I'm dying to say that it's an example of a meme (domestication of dairy cattle) having an effect on a gene's evolution.

You and Lamarck. Snerk.

Biting my tongue now.
[> [> [> [> [> [> Stop causing trouble! -- Darby, 10:44:45 02/17/03 Mon

Question and comments for FD and season 7 -- Ferthepoet, 00:31:43 02/16/03 Sun

Sorry if this has already been addressed

My questions

Money?... There are only 2 people with a payroll in the summers household (Buffy and Xander) and none has a very big one I think..... how the hell is that enough to feed and dress 7 adults plus a lot of teen girls and for the other expenses (Can anyone imagine their water bill?)?

Space?... As far as I know the Summer´s house only have 3 bedrooms (The one that was Joyce´s and then was Willow´s/Tara´s and now is presumably Willow´s/Keneddy´s, Buffy´s, which I thing is still only Buffy´s, and Dawns that seemed me to be still only Dawn's last time we had a look on it) plus the living room plus the basement.... Assuming nobody else wants to sleep with Spike chained as he may be, that means The living room must be big enough for the furniture and Anya, Xander, Giles, Andrew and the SIT´s... and the SIT´s when not on Screen are always conveniently where the others aren't like on FD they were upstairs.. but upstairs where??

The things that seem important to me about FD?

The First Evil/electronic stuff relationship I'm starting to believe technology would play an important role down the end

Choosing sides...... if it's truth that people are helping the FE just because they have to choose a side we may soon be seeing evil people helping the scoobies just because they choose to be against the FE (like souless vampires and evil who're just mad at the evil for stealing their spotlight) ...

Giles .... very strange for to ask the scoobies to forget about their social lives when he knows better than anyone that what have kept Buffy alive all this time is her ability to keep a social live even being a slayer... now for the first time I believe there are high chances of Evil Giles
[> Re: Question and comments for FD and season 7 -- Valheru, 02:20:10 02/16/03 Sun

I agree that money and living space is probably a big issue for everyone, but maybe not as big as it appears on the surface.

Money - As you say, only Xander and Buffy are still pulling in income. Buffy's income probably just barely covers her and Dawn. Xander is in construction, which in Sunnydale, Destruction Capital of the World, might be a pretty comfortable paycheck. Also, some of the other Scoobies have savings they can chip in with. There's no telling how much money the active Watcher is paid, and over 5+ years of duty (he got retroactive pay for his "fired" period in "Checkpoint"), that can build up, especially since he appeared only to live off his librarian salary for 3 years. And don't forget that he and Anya ran the lucrative Magic Box for 2 years, then got the insurance payment after Random Act of Dark Willow.

All that's just from what we know. Unknown income? Maybe Giles is selling some of his private library on eBay. Maybe Angel is sending Buffy a pity check every month. Maybe Willow has a side-job as a hacker. Maybe the government is sending Buffy hush money to keep silent about the Initiative. Maybe they decided to loot Glory's apartment. There's no telling.

Back to reality, though. The SiTs have only been in Sunnydale for a few weeks. I'd guess that, even though it would dig into his savings, Giles could support them all for two or three months in the service of Good Deed Doing.

As for living space...there should be room for everyone, though it might be cramped. Buffy, Spike, Dawn, Willow, and (assumedly) Kennedy are all accounted for in the bedrooms. The living room can fit at least four SiTs, Xander, and Andrew-in-a-chair (as seen in "Showtime"). The kitchen/dining room can probably take two. There's also the hallway where Buffy vomited in "The Body," which looks big enough for one more (I would clean the carpet first, though, before agreeing to sleep there). And if they get really cramped, Buffy can stuff some girls into the upstairs hallway.

But another thing to remember is that the Scoobies are a 24-hour-a-day operation. Buffy, Spike, and the SiTs do all their work at night, presumably while Xander, Dawn, Willow, Giles, Anya, and Andrew catch a few winks. They're probably all sleeping in shifts.

Still, I'm with you. If this lasts for very long and the SiT ranks continue to grow, the practical aspects of raising a Slayer army is going to finally catch up with them. If I were a financial-savvy Scooby (Anya!), it would have occurred to me that Angel has an echo-in-every-room mansion in Sunnydale and that Warren has an ungodly amount of stolen money hidden somewhere (unless he gave it all to Rack, in which case, it's all hidden at Rack's place). Then again, maybe Anya herself is the answer to all the money woes: just how exactly was she surviving during all those months after "The Wish?" She's got a Money Demon somewhere, I know it!!
[> [> Re: Question and comments for FD and season 7 -- Alvin, 04:54:25 02/16/03 Sun

Don't forget in Him Anya robbed a bank and that money should still be around somewhere.
[> [> [> Re: Question and comments for FD and season 7 -- skpe, 07:07:42 02/16/03 Sun

What I wonder is where are the social services. Granted the previous caseworker is on 'extended leave' but what would the new one make of Casa Summers now. A whole house filled with under age girls most of them illegal aliens?
[> [> [> [> Re: Question and comments for FD and season 7 -- masio, 07:28:58 02/16/03 Sun

I assume that a social services caseworker showed up sometime in the summer when nothing big was going down. It would be odd for the caseworker to wait this long to follow up right? So lets assume that whoever already met up with miss summers. Besides, with all the other continuity flops this season, does this really matter? A more pressing question---how come nothing big ever happens in June, July and august? I guess its just break time for the Scoobs
[> [> [> [> [> Because it's a Buffy Summer? (sorry) -- Celebaelin, 08:48:03 02/16/03 Sun

[> [> [> [> Not to mention. . . -- Finn Mac Cool, 16:06:26 02/16/03 Sun

An older woman in a relationship with one of said girls, as well as a fugitive and a British man who's chained up in the basement.
[> [> [> [> [> Re: Not to mention. . . -- Tess, 22:47:39 02/16/03 Sun

""An older woman in a relationship with one of said girls, as well as a fugitive ""

Kennedy is supposed to be 19 and Willow 21 or so. I don't see a problem in the age difference. And who is the fugitive? Andrew? Was he ever charged in Jonathon's death? And that brings up an interesting question...once this thing with the first evil is over should Buffy turn Andrew over to the police?
[> [> [> [> [> [> Re: Not to mention. . . -- Utopia, 00:53:47 02/17/03 Mon

Andrew wasn't charged with Jonathan's death, but he was arrested in connection with an armored truck robbery last spring. And he escaped from jail. I was wondering about that myself, if the police were still on the lookout for him. The scoobies could get in a lot of trouble for harboring him, if they're caught.
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> I doubt Buffy will hand Andrew over to the cops. . . -- Finn Mac Cool, 09:15:24 02/17/03 Mon

Because then they'd face arrest for concealing a known fugitive, failure to report a murder, and kidnapping.
[> [> Re: Question and comments for FD and season 7 -- Dariel, 15:15:36 02/16/03 Sun

Also, there's been no indication that Anya and Giles are staying at Buffy's. We never see/hear them mention sleeping arrangements or showers, which is not the case with everyone else. As for Xander, he may have gone back home during the recent "FE break."
Someone nervous got engaged! -- Someone still on a high, 07:10:43 02/16/03 Sun

And thanks for all your kind wishes on Friday. I have to admit, though, that I didn't ask him - he asked me!! And my heart was beating so loud at the thought of asking him, that I almost missed it!

Thanks especially to Rah - who guessed right! And all those who wished me luck when I mentioned I was going out on my first date with him, must be about a year ago now, and I was just as nervous then. I'll have to check the archives and print them out!

And thanks, Mask, for not deleting me!
[> Congratulations and many years of happiness for you both! -- Lilac, 07:14:32 02/16/03 Sun

[> Re: Someone nervous got engaged! -- Masq, 07:23:55 02/16/03 Sun

Delete you? Never. I like to think of this board as a circle of friends, and we like to hear each other's happy news (yeah!) and nervous plans!

Congratulations!

Now... as to your.... name? ; )
[> [> Oh, oh, I think I know, I think I know!! -- dub ;o), 08:06:08 02/16/03 Sun

Is that someone previously nervous and now very happy also Welsh?

Bright blessings for a brilliant future together!

;o) dub
[> [> [> That's who I think it is, too! -- Masq, 09:26:05 02/16/03 Sun

[> [> [> That was my first guess... congratulations, though, no matter who it is! :D :D :D -- Solitude1056, 11:56:37 02/16/03 Sun

[> [> [> i think i know too! -- anom, 20:51:15 02/16/03 Sun

But would we know who the someone's fiancé is? Or will this be a mixed marriage? @>)

Mazel tov to both of you, whether you're both ATPosters or not!
[> Congratulations - a long and happy life together. -- Caroline, 08:05:44 02/16/03 Sun

[> Re: Someone nervous got engaged! -- Angela, 08:35:22 02/16/03 Sun

Congrats. We don't know each other but I wanted to wish you all the best anywhoo. Much joy and happiness and blessings to you both. :-)
[> Congratulations -- Tchaikovsky, 09:30:45 02/16/03 Sun

Always great to hear of good news on the board, and what a great moment you described!

Best wishes

TCH
[> Big congratulations!! And hugs for you both , 'cause I think I know who this is! -- LadyStarlight, 11:51:30 02/16/03 Sun

[> Someone nervous got engaged! -- Rahael, 12:59:16 02/16/03 Sun

Sonnet XXIII.

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharg'd with burden of mine own love's might.
O! let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.

O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit

William Shakespeare


Congratulations, someone!!!
[> Mazel tov!! -- ponygirl, 06:51:54 02/17/03 Mon

[> Adding my congratulations! -- Scroll, 12:49:40 02/17/03 Mon

I hope that you and your fiancé have a wonderful, joy-filled life together. I haven't guessed who you are, and I'm not going to try, but I really wanted to add my voice to everybody else's here. We're all so pleased that one of our group has been blessed with such happiness.

Best wishes for you both!
THE LAST outPOST; A PLEA FOR ACCEPTANCE OF APOLOGY - PLEASE READ!!!! -- Aquaman, one final time..., 07:31:30 02/16/03 Sun

Before I begin, I plead with you to read this thru, though it may at first seem OT. It absolutely is not, but my attempts to be direct have proven failures. For example, A few days ago, under an evil alias, I posted the "jelly jars" bit. Please grant, for now, that I did indeed have a point, which I admittedly failed to explicate, both for lack of writing skill and a stupid attempt to be funny. That's fine, though it pains me to admit that I was such a poor writer that the basic fact that I had a point seems to have been lost:

"And now it seems you're being both abstruse and obscure in the hope of being thought inscrutable."

Actually, I wanted to be scruted, very much. I also was trying to be jocular, and I apparently screwed both intents up. But worse, for me, was:

"I see this board as an attempt to communicate and define our experiences to each other about these shows and OT even. We *want* to communicate or we wouldn't post here. It must have some value to us. We argue ideas and theories and interpretations and also battle semantics....
Looking at us thru your post...Why?"

I have no intention of becoming defensive or feeling victimized because somehow the intended effect of my writing was absolutely zero achieved, or maybe negatively. Although, I could see such a statement as an "us and them" attack, a criticism of my personal motives, as opposed to my content, and such a criticism has no place in philosophy, in my opinion. But this reaction is so completely opposite and extreme from the jovial intent I had that I cannot see it as simply an exclusion of me by you, but rather as an extreme failure on my part. It would be fun if you disagreed. It is an admonition of my writing that you didn't comprehend it. But I feel horrified that you seem to have gleaned that I didn't even attempt to communicate, didn't want to, am doing something so alien you don't know why I bothered.

Horrified. More than you could know. And I apologize for failing in such a way that I seem to have engendered ill feelings. I apologize, unconditionally; however, I BEG the privilege - and I do consider it a privilege! - of your attention just for a bit, that the depth and the sincerity of my apology might become more clear. I promise that I will try to be concise and concrete, and I promise I will never darken this board again if you give me this last chance to at least show my intent was friendly and communicative...

I do *want* to communicate, or I wouldn't post here.

I am attempting to communicate my experience of BtVS.

I am arguing ideas and battling semantics, explicitly.

That is why.

Another person said:

"You realize you are talking about a show that designs demons and big bads by taking abstract concepts and turning them into physical forms?"

Here I will begin, then, by saying, yes, of course I realize that. But I have had an experience of the show this season that profoundly effected me, both as a watcher of BtVS, and in the real world.

I am a linguist. Not a hobby - a vocation. University trained, did research, worked as teacher, etc. Learned functional/applied linguistics at U of Oregon, the main scope being the analysis of syntax/semantics of 'exotic' languages (generally, unwritten, therefore non-standardized languages, aboriginal, etc.). Purpose was to create a translation matrix. The analytical method dealt with extracting semantics of not only the lexicon - i.e., word to word translation - but also of less transparent codes found in syntax and morphology - i.e., agency being attributed, in English, generally to the noun placed just before a transitive verb (word order AND verb typology coding for semantic causal relation), or the 'past tense,' or temporal precession of the proposition relative to the speech act, coded for by appending '-ed,' generally, to the verb. These coding strategies, unlike most lexical items, are not at all universal. Or transparent.

My research over the past decade has been focused on the development of a methodology by which we might extract the semantics of those pesky lexical items we refer to as 'abstracts' or 'ideas.' Current linguistics washes its hands of this mess by saying 'they're lexicon, they're nouns, translate word to word.' I think that is a cop out. First, it is apparent to me that these words denote concepts which were experienced, or extrapolated, and labeled, and we should, therefore, be able to comprehend them concretely. To call them relative is a cop out. ***Even insofar as they are relatively conceptualized by various peoples, we should, as scientists, be able to explicate precisely to what extent, in what manner, and by what means they are relative!!** But I couldn't do it, then. It took me ten years to find the flaw in my theoretical base that made my methodology a miserable failure.

I discovered the key I needed to unlock this mystery just a couple of months ago; it came to me like a revelation, unlooked for, unrecognized, at first. This epiphany occurred while I was watching BtVS. Perhaps not the most auspicious of sources, in the big picture of academia, but true, and wonderful, to me at least.

This is why I sought out BtVS web sites, and why I gravitated towards this one. Because I am trying to write a book, and if I cannot get my point across to BtVS fans who love philosophizing, if I cannot even engender civil discourse concerning the conclusions of my analyses with you all, then I am the biggest failure of a scientist - The linguist who cannot communicate. This is why I say that the privilege of your reading this is more valuable to me than you would know. And now that I have, hopefully, given enough background to make my point at least appear to be a point, I will begin, again...

Words that code complex, abstract concepts (i.e. good, evil, knowledge, communication, language, etc. etc.,) are definable and classifiable. They are not all the same 'type' of concepts, nor is the 'level' of abstraction the same in all. I.e., the concept of 'education,' as it seems to be dependent, semantically, on a conception of 'learning,' can be said to be more abstract than learning. And, the concept of 'knowledge' would seem to be of a different type than learning, as knowledge seems to indicate acquired data, as a semi-discreet quantity, while learning indicates a process, the process by which knowledge is acquired. This seems to me to indicate that these two abstractions are as different in their 'essences' as nouns and verbs, though they both appear in English syntax as nouns.

It is my contention that these words denote actual phenomena, of greater or lesser complexity. But, like all denotations, are codes only for actuality as experienced by the speaker. A rock, i.e., can be assumed to be more or less experienced about the same by all, so our ability to communicate this concept precisely is high, depending on our desired level of specificity (you know what a rock is, but we may encounter problems if I ask you to picture, say, a piece of tourmalinated lepidolite, unless you happen to have had an experience of such.)

So it is with abstractions. They aren't simply relative, in my view. They are relatively conceived precisely to the extent that our experience of them is different. And they are concretely definable, if you look at all the variations you can possibly gather, as the sum of all the shared attributes that all the views seem to encompass, with contingencies explicitly stated not as relative conceptions, but as relative experiences, similarly conceptualized, which can be delineated as to prevalence, typology, etc.

So, then, it seems a good thing that philosophers have such disagreements about the nature of evil, as this seems to be an indication that we have little or no experience of such a nature. But perhaps it means that we simply don't want to admit such intimacy to ourselves, so we seek a conception of evil that is falsified, divorced from our experience, separate from what we are and what we know. Either is equally possible, it seems.

I will stop this game, personally, now. I freely admit that I have known evil. Not just as victim, but as perpetrator. I was violently raised, and I did violence, and I consciously set out to understand this impulse in myself and cease. That was at 17, 20 years ago.

I have achieved my goal, to my satisfaction. Violence is more alien to me than Buffyverse, as far as me feeling like one or the other is a reflection of my being is concerned.

But this season, I had a new experience of evil, on BtVS. And - please understand!!!! - it was an experience, albeit of a fictional show. But that does not fictionalize my experience!! My experience was shocking, and had significant RW effects, at least for me - I had been watching a show that, for all its ambiguities, had the overall theme, as lunasea so bluntly stated, of creating baddies out of physicalized abstract concepts. It was the perfect show for me, given my research, and I enjoyed it and found meaning in it and loved watching...

Then, suddenly, and without explanation, they (ME, et al)threw a curveball at me. Or, rather, didn't throw a ball at all. Because, despite the fact that the series has done what lunasea said UP TIL NOW, my experience of this new baddie, the FE, was quite the opposite. FE explicitly, and the writers have gone to great pains, it seems, to make this clear, is non-physical, unable to be physical, has no power to directly engender any action, cannot be said to be the 'agent' of any actual causation, and has a very strangely thought-provoking name. It occurred to me that these brilliant people who provided me with so much joy would not be doing this arbitrarily; it seemed to me that they were intentionally changing the rules, as it were, by making this last big baddie of the last season something entirely different from anything they've done, which, I feel, is representing a whole new manner of conceptualization, not just a new concept. I thought of the implications - to the analysis of 'evil' in the RW -that such a conceptualization as I felt ME was representing with this character might have. That is, I experienced something on BtVS which engendered an idea of some new concept which I speculate ME is trying to represent metaphorically. Then I applied this concept to my RW research, on a whim. And the results were, seriously, no less than miraculous. This will remain true even if my speculation turns out to have been wrong, please understand.

In my analysis:

1. Whether evil is a noun or a verb, an entity or an act, we only know evil through experiencing acts - that is, if an object be evil, we can't really be aware of this, I don't think, until it is demonstrated by an action that we can experience. A non-active object might have potential evil, or pre-defined evil, but this is just saying we might experience evil sometime, or we have experienced evil already, respectively. So my feeling is that we only know evil as action, and if we say an entity is evil, we are extrapolating a state - whether true or not! - from our experience, such that if we experience an entity doing evil constantly (evil1, evil2, evil3...) we deduce that the entity is evil. Or we label it as evil, or whatever. This is fine, until we experience other-than-evil from the entity, at which time our classification seems not so concrete.

But what is the essence of evil, the nature of evil?? Have any of us experienced such a thing? It is my understanding that the nature of evil is, to be as explicit as possible:

***The 'essence' of evil is what we label a non-actual, deduced semantic field, comprised of what our experience or analysis (of evil1, etc...evil 'n'...) concludes is the 'critical attributes' experienced in any and all evil acts***

That is, in the real world, the 'essence' of evil is not an object or entity, though coded as a noun, and it is not capable of any human attributes such as agency, causality, motive, intent, patience (as in direct objecthood), joy, suffering, etc. ad inf.). In BtVS, it always seemed that evil could be so anthropormorphized, to wonderful effects. But then the FE came along, and suddenly Buffyverse evil seems to be representing, in the context of the narrative, something closer to this real-world essential evil.

So I wondered - is that the point?? That we are expecting something, because it has always been that way, to the point that, if someone suggests otherwise, he is told "You realize you are talking about a show that...." As though, even though it is an invented fiction we are discussing, it is not conceivable that they might actually do something completely different for the finale, if only to mess with our comfortable conceptions of what is being represented?

I think they are making a very profound, and disturbing point. Consider:

In RW, given the conception of essential evil above, what is being perpetrated if we do an evil act, or experience evil, and attribute it to evil-as-entity? People, all the time, say things like, "I was overcome by the impulse," or "The devil got into that boy," etc. This is fine until we confuse the actual events with our labels, and in RW, there are a multitude of people who BELIEVE that, i.e., they WANT to quit smoking, but their addiction is too strong, or they want to go to a dance, but duty requires they fight the master, or whatever. But what is duty or addiction, if not the intention of the person? If you believe your addiction overwhelms your desire to quit you are saying, at bottom line, that the REAL you is something you are not doing, and what you actually do is something separate from you that acts upon you. This is called a MYSTIFICATION of experience. We do it to ourselves and others all the time. Frankly, to be told that the FE *is* an entity because, dammit, that's what the show is about, is an intentional mystification of my experience of the FE as never being portrayed as an entity, and as actually being portrayed explicitly as being non-corporeal, non-able to directly enact transitive events, and non-able, even, to coerce others with any certainty - he can be ignored as easily as obeyed, believed as easily as dismissed as a liar.

"If it's not definable, why does 'it' refer to itself as if it is??" I was asked...

Because evil is not bound by any duty to truth, whether it is external to us, or internal and projected.

OK. Given all this, I mentioned Aquinas not to be obtuse, but because the entire first section of the Summa Theologica deals with the concept of God as being "the first agent" or "the first cause." Someone said they couldn't find my quote, which is bizarre, as that phrase is repeated about a thousand times in my copy, and the explication of it is the seeming intent of the entire first part of the treatise. I won't explain, it's available free, on line, just google it if interested. To summarize, he concludes that god is the first agent, that, since all of creation emanates from this first cause - even all the wills and intents and causes and agencies of man and beast -then God is not only the first cause in time, but the first cause of all creation, therefore the only true cause, on which all other agencies are the patient of. Further, he states that the essential motive of all these sub-agencies, whether in tune with this essence or not, is the transformation of creation into the perfection of God. Therefore, he says, God is the first cause, the only cause, and, also, the only and final effect of His causing.

This is what I was trying to apply to the FE. Aquinas proposes that evil's first cause was accidental, but, once that accident occurred, the agency of evil became isomorphic to God, being the first evil, the only (ongoing) evil, and the only motive and effect of its agency. I dismiss Aquinas' objectifications, however, because I explicitly conceive of God and evil as extrapolated non-entities, while Thomas explicitly believed God was an objective, external-to-self entity.

It is my feeling that ME is playing with these conceptions - the difference between our conceptions and their projections, and the assumptions we make that such concepts must or cannot have objective existence. If the show, at its onset, made us say, 'OK, I guess fear can be seen as an entity,' now, it seems, that some have decided that in BtVS ALL these baddies MUST have physicality, they (ME) are, I think, trying (and apparently failing) to make us say, OK, I guess evil can be abstract in Buffyverse. And what are the implications of this? In BtVS, we shall see. In the real world, I cannot begin, if you don't already know, to convey the massive destruction and violence that has been perpetrated in the name of, and attributed to, shadows such as evil, duty, addiction, truth, wrongness, good intentions, etc. etc. And, yes, we do it to ourselves, to an absurd extent. We internalize fear and morality and cut ourselves down the middle so that we can say 'that evil was not me, that addiction is not me...' And we coerce ourselves to do unspeakable acts by internalizing duty, the other, etc.

This is why I conclude that the FE is no entity, no agent, no patient, no propostitional event of any kind. FE is simply - IN MY EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR!!! - as I tried to say before ***doing evil***. Not someone or it or whatever doing evil. Just the verb, no agent or patient, no cause or effect, no sentence, just a disembodied verb frame. This is not meaningless. Nor is it ungrammatical. The label affixed, "THE FIRST EVIL" is not of necessity a nominal language event, much less does it necessarily denote an objective entity-event. As I tried to explain, this syntax is parsable grammatically in English as a verb, as in "the first fight" of a multi-fight bill, or "the first kick" of a combination technique.

And, yes, a transitive event, in reality and BtVS, can occur without an agent or a patient, and certainly without DISCERNABLE participants. Saying such a proposition is absolutely meaningless will not negate my experience of them as meaningful. It is only the grammar of the language that requires these qualities in propositions - the grammar of actuality, if there be such a pattern, does not seem to have such requirements. Or, at least, if we take Aquinas' view of God, i.e., actuality does not seem to require that transitive events be temporally discreet, complete as of now, or causal of any effects that have yet manifest.

Either we are growing, developing, mystifying, personalitying, repressing, and deceiving ourselves, and transforming ourselves, or we are just experiencing a complex process that we hope to understand by reducing it to discreet events that can be cognated in terms of a causality and temporality and essentiality that were not given, but which are taken as given. The problem, it seems, is that we don't always seem to retain awareness of this reductionism that we are doing, much less awareness of the nature of the operation. That is, We seem, me, you, Buffyverse, everyone, to more often than not be completely unaware that most of what we call 'data' (given, in Latin) is actually 'capta' (taken out of).

***It is not a given that baddies ARE physical or entities or independent wills, or such, in BtVS. It is a conception taken from our experience of the show, up til now, that every baddy seems to have been such, therefore we abstract an 'essential' quality of physicality for BtVS baddies. UP TIL NOW!!!!! So we predict... When we forget, or mystify this fact, it can seem to be some kind of TRUTH, or law, and our predictions become prophesy, and our prophesies become laws, and in the real world - including this web site - such laws can have the effect of the intentional or accidental destruction of a potential, the potential that might have manifest had it not been prejudicially dis-allowed or even declared impossible.

I realize that I am attributing cosmic significance to a small event. But, on some level, all these small events are the cosmos, and, though we speak of a fiction, we all apparently find profound personal fulfillment of some kind in this fiction we discuss. TO STOP A POTENTIAL SELF-EXPRESSION IN ANOTHER, AND/OR A POTENTIAL UNDERSTANDING IN ANOTHER BY SAYING "YOU REALIZE, THIS IS THE WAY IT IS, THEREFORE IF YOU SAY ANYTHING DIFFERENT YOU ARE NOT JUST WRONG, YOU ARE NOT EVEN IN THE SAME REALITY AS US, OR DOING THE SAME THING AS US, AND WE DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, OR WHY" IS A MYSTIFICATION OF THE EXPERIENCE BEING POTENTIALLY EXPRESSED - IT IS THE ENDING OF DEBATE AND COMMUNICATION OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE BY DEFINING THE PARAMETERS OF EXPERIENCE ALLOWABLE, THEN DECLARING ANY CONTRARY EXPERIENCE TO BE 1. TRIVIAL 2. WRONG, AT ANY RATE, AND 3. NOT JUST WRONG, BUT PROBABLY FANTASY OR DELUSION, OR IN PURSUIT OF SOME QUESTIONABLE MOTIVE.

This is not an indictment of anyone, or even their actions. It is an attempt to communicate my experience, and demonstrate the application of my analysis to words I heard during BtVS and related experiences.

But what if it is important, what if it is important to me, or what if it is terribly, cosmically important and the ATPoBtVS web site is where the transformation might have occurred, or what if it's wrong, and we would never know this particular expression or wrongness, and wrongness can sometimes be so informative, and beautiful, and benign...

And what if I really did experience, am experiencing, a schism of grand importance to myself, and the Buffyverse, in that I have had no perceptions of the FE as having actual agency or physicality, up til now!! I am experiencing this, and someone declaring that it *is* a physical entity type of phenomenon doesn't change the fact that I have had no experience while watching the show that would lead me to such a belief or even such a hypothesis. Any such experience I have had was conceptual, an experience I had while thinking about my conclusions drawn from past episodes, in which I projected such conclusions into the future as what I call a 'prediction,' or 'educated guess.'

And that is all I was trying to do, was communicate this experience of BtVS. I tried to be funny. I didn't explain a quote that seemed out of place to those who didn't know the material or connect the allusion. I made an obtuse joke about Aquinas and feces that even I couldn't figure out the connection I made the next day, until reminded. I suggested a conception of certain experiences of actuality that might not fit in with the prescribed standard syntax of English, and screwed up trying to find a way to represent this conception.

But why wasn't it data - 'given,' from me to you, by my very act, that I was indeed trying to communicate, to share an experience of BtVS?

If you don't understand what I'm saying, I am disappointed. If you cannot grasp why I am saying it, I am defeated, truly. If you are thinking of replying that I am still not seeing the truth, of that I'm imagining things, or that this is trivial and I'm taking it too seriously, or it's just a show, or I must be paranoid, don't bother - these are all just mystifications of my experience, and I would prefer not to be insulted again - but if your desire to insult me comes first and foremost to you, I respect that, and honor your right to insult away, as you will..

But I will not be obliged to not see the reality of my experience.

None of this was meant defensively or to assess value or blame or speculate as to intent or causality of anyone except myself, and my own experience of language, thought, BtVS, and ATPoBtVS, etc.

And it is terribly important.

ps, whoever quoted Thomas back at me, got the quote wrong. It goes on to say that even unjust laws still have the semblance of law, and are therefore derived from universal law. It says, in translation, "it has the nature, not of law, but of violence." Not 'it is no law at all, but...'

which reminds me, the scat joke, Thomas Aquinas...If you don't get the connection, look up this mis-quote, translate it into Latin, and don't blame me for the results. (OK, I'll just tell you
...'right,' 'reasonable,' 'justice,' 'law,' are all denoted, in one sense or another, by the Latin 'rectus,' of which the past participle is, of course, 'rectum.' Therefore, the first law, or first reason, or first rightness, is 'rectum imprimis' - the prime rectum. Sorry, but you must admit, it is funny, and indicative of the nature of conceptual territorialism among domesticated primates (humans). )
[> KABOOM!! (Note to others: Do NOT ignore this post.) -- Wisewoman, 08:34:29 02/16/03 Sun

Aquaman: Thank you for finally "coming out of the closet." Let me admit that I have not read any of your most recent posts owing to the manner in which you introduced yourself to this board, which was, IIRC, as a diving instructor using a public computer in a place (nothing wrong with either of those things) where your co-workers were able to post "prank" messages in order to embarrass you (looked suspiciously like someone shifting the blame for his/her own "pranks"). Personally, I suspected that you were also represented by the 16-year-old "Jenni," but I may be totally off-base on that. I am so glad I overcame my initial aversion and ventured to read this latest post, even though the ALL CAPS SUBJECT LINE made me suspect another "prank." (Hey, I'm just a hella suspicious person, I guess!)

Let me hasten to advise you that KABOOM is the highest compliment this board can bestow on a post/poster. (Just in case you suspected it was an insult, or that I wanted to blow you up!) It means "the above post is so full of philosophical goodness it just might make your head explode," or words to that effect.

You said:
Then, suddenly, and without explanation, they (ME, et al)threw a curveball at me. Or, rather, didn't throw a ball at all. Because, despite the fact that the series has done what lunasea said UP TIL NOW, my experience of this new baddie, the FE, was quite the opposite. FE explicitly, and the writers have gone to great pains, it seems, to make this clear, is non-physical, unable to be physical, has no power to directly engender any action, cannot be said to be the 'agent' of any actual causation, and has a very strangely thought-provoking name. It occurred to me that these brilliant people who provided me with so much joy would not be doing this arbitrarily; it seemed to me that they were intentionally changing the rules, as it were, by making this last big baddie of the last season something entirely different from anything they've done, which, I feel, is representing a whole new manner of conceptualization, not just a new concept.

That sums up exactly how I've been feeling about this season and the FE. I kept coming up against the idea that the FE can't DO anything, and it just didn't compute. Your lengthy and articulate post has given me so much more to ponder, it should keep me going until the end of the season!

Again, thank you.

dub ;o)
[> [> Re: a small clarification of ontological status -- aquaman, 16:18:46 02/16/03 Sun

Not to nitpick about the actual existence of people I love, but I NEVER misrepresented myself, I was misrepresented by someone, by which I mean:

There really is a Steven, and a John, who used the name Prometheus. They both refuse to come back here, because they became paranoid in response to the paranoia here. We (that is, you - I have their company still) will never know how funny and smart these boys are.

I really am a dive instructor (PADI # 471522, OWSI, MFAI, which means open water scuba instructor, medic first aid instructor), I really am using a shared computer at my shop. Further, while it is clever of you to see a similarity in the writing of my daughter and myself, it is a weird little kind of paranoia that would lead you not to a conclusion of benign family participation, but of secret espionage of some sort. I came to this sight hoping to find a place to discuss things. I quickly concluded that such novel and complex thoughts might not be appropriate here, for while many posters are quite intelligent and educated, it struck me that this was not an academically-oriented site, but more like a coffeehouse, like when me and my hippy friends used to smoke pot and b.s., but tried not to get too complex. But I did believe it a benign environment, and OKed my daughter to chat here, and also continued to monitor and post less-serious, more attemptedly jocular postings.


Yes, I'm paranoid when others are obviously looking for ways to find misrepresentation, and perhaps that is not the fault of I or thee, but of others who have abused this site. However, given that I have no clue as to when I might have insulted any part of BtVS, and given that I was so concerned with the belief by some here that I was trolling that I wrote personal emails to Masq, because I wanted to be certain my daughter would not meet with such dismissal or accusations (I even had her get her own net access, which , if you really want to be paranoid, you can check aol and find that Jennifer Calef has an account, paid for on her own credit card. So unless you think I fabricated a credit card just to fool you all, please get real!!) given this, please read the note below from rufus, and tell me, what would be the reason for this little diatribe, and what is the philosophical significance of 'jerking someone off.' What a rude little person this rufus is!!! I am not at all motivated, at this point, to try to be diplomatic with such a small mind. I only beg that when Jenni returns from her travels next week that you all refrain from being idiotically rude to her...if you are, I'll give her permission to use any necessary force to defend herself, and she is capable of far more biting criticism than I; being a teenage girl and all, she sees to the heart of matters instantly. Would you really want to be told the truth about yourself?? Is anyone ready to start walking thru the dark night of the soul, and quit just talking?? THAT was what I was asking in all of my posts. Are we finding consensus here, or are we evolving into higher planes of understanding. To understand God, or even ourselves, we must first empty our selves of all those preconceptions about what and who and how good and true we are......And I ain't just saying this. I have lived it. If you have not, I can only offer to take your hand and hold it firm if you ask for me to care for you on the journey. I will do so unhesitatingly, and joyously. But I cannot guide you and I will not placate your fears by agreeing with your beliefs held as a false security, nor will I agree with your rudeness if you lash out, like rufus. We are all seeking the perfection of eternal wisdom. If I knew the way, I would take you there, but I am just a traveller, too...
[> [> [> Re: a small clarification of ontological status -- Rufus, 16:38:17 02/16/03 Sun

So unless you think I fabricated a credit card just to fool you all, please get real!!) given this, please read the note below from rufus, and tell me, what would be the reason for this little diatribe, and what is the philosophical significance of 'jerking someone off.' What a rude little person this rufus is!!! I am not at all motivated, at this point, to try to be diplomatic with such a small mind.


Yes, I can be rude when someone "jerks me off" which is slang for a few things only one of them sexual. If you want people to give you a chance I suggest doing away with any game-playing and storytelling. You had the option of asking me what I meant and I would have been happy to tell you.
[> [> [> [> Re: game playing and storytelling -- aqua, 17:02:36 02/16/03 Sun

Of course, it is obvious that I will be a storyteller until I tell you what you already know is true, and then you will, of course, believe me, as my story, then, will support your own view, which is, of course, the truth. Frankly, I don't want you to give me a chance. You can take your little genital outbursts and...you know what I mean, don't you??

If you would have been happy to tell me what you meant, then why didn't you?? Why phrase it in a rude, obscene, undecipherable euphemism?? Unless your intent was separate from the semantics, and involved belittling, hostility, etc.......?
[> [> [> [> [> Re: game playing and storytelling -- Rufus, 17:30:06 02/16/03 Sun

I would have thought a linguist would have known the meaning of a common slang term. You also took a general comment about what I don't like in a poster and ran with it not even bothering to ask if I meant you specifically. When people answer posts they will frequently make general comments about different issues, if I wanted to insult you directly I would have said "I think you are jerking me off....." What I have to wonder about is why you are doing so much explaining when you could just be up front and honest with everyone, no games, no insults because you don't like what a poster has said.
[> [> [> [> [> [> Re: physician, heal thyself -- a, 02:17:54 02/17/03 Mon

Funny you should lecture me about taking a general comment personally. If YOU would read MY posts, you would see that it doesn't matter whether you were addressing me directly, or in general: I still think/experience your 'jerking me off' outburst as rude, meaningless in any way that pertains to the goals of this board (which is what I was suspected of perpetrating, and got scolded for it), and, frankly, seems to be simply a way to voice personal feelings of hostility in such a way that they cannot be debated, only responded to in kind. Then, when I respond by calling you on such a game, you become the victim: "I would have been happy..." Yes, yes, but now that I was a bad dog, you won't tell me.....only problem is, YOU are the one who responded (or spoke in the direct context of for some arbitrary reason, as you would seem to be claiming) anyway, you responded rudely to my post, which was undeniably an attempt to do exactly what you say you want from a poster. I was pouring out as much of my heart and soul as i do with all but family, and checked the responses, and found yours. I do not feel victimized by you. And I find it very ironic that you seem to feel so by me. It is a common American habit...I don't mean that in a belittling way, what I mean is, if you leave America for a good, long period of time, a lot of these 'games' we play habitually become apparent.

One such game is accusing/suggesting that the person you are debating/trying to shut up/trying to coerce compliance from is not being sincere, but is, rather, "playing a game."

Of course, such a game only works if you mystify it by 1. never mentioning it and, 2. denying that you are playing such a game yourself.

Then you can accuse someone of being paranoid for thinking such a game was being played, or suggest that they are schizophrenic and imagining the games, etc. etc.

If you read that and don't believe you've ever done this/had it done to you, I implore you to contemplate ... You will be disgusted, and so much closer to sane, if you see the truth of this little 'game' game.
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: physician, heal thyself -- Rufus, 05:28:02 02/17/03 Mon

I still think/experience your 'jerking me off' outburst as rude, meaningless in any way that pertains to the goals of this board (which is what I was suspected of perpetrating, and got scolded for it), and, frankly, seems to be simply a way to voice personal feelings of hostility in such a way that they cannot be debated, only responded to in kind.

Now you're just jerking me off.
[> [> [> [> [> Had we but world enough, and time... -- Random, 18:28:12 02/16/03 Sun

Eh, Aqua, you don't need to respond to everything personally. Trust me, if somebody got vicious and ad hominem with you too persistently or unfairly, he or she would probably be utterly ignored by the rest of the board. Rufus, I've noticed, can be blunt, but he (she? I'm guessing "he" from his choice of euphemism) is almost always worth reading (sorry Rufus, I say 'almost' because there's no-one -- especially not me -- who bats a thousand, even in cricket.) Anyhoo, my tip: just keep posting your thoughts on BtVS and AtS and let the chips fall. It's a lot less stressful, especially considering that your interaction with these people is limited to times when you consciously choose to interact, i.e. log on and visit this web site. Just do what I do (or would do, if it weren't for the fact that everybody has been just darling to me) and assume that anything insulting that's not obviously an attack is merely the result of an imperfect medium for conveying certain emotional/humorous/nuanced sentiments. Writing (as you should know quite well) is a marvelous means of communication, and has several virtues that speech or physical motion could never aspire to -- but it does have its own problems, not the least of which is the fact that some people are better than others at utilizing it to achieve exactly what they want. Just assume that the spirit was worthy, even if the execution falls short.

How's this: check out my cursory offerings on the nature of evil below and see if you can modify/improve on them. I won't theorize about your RL -- promise.

(oh, and I want to keep adding to my list of posters. Dammit, I knew better than to start it! I hate leaving people out. I've only had three hours of sleep in the last fifty some-odd hours. That's my excuse for even starting the list in the first place. Slain (how could I miss slain?!?!) ZachsMind (ditto?!?!?) Frisby. Celebaelin (spelling?) Ponygirl. CW. Maeve. Apophis. KdS. neaux. d'Herb. Heac. Cleanthes. Rochefort...oh god, somebody help me here. I'm gonna have to enter therapy for my guilt! Okay, I don't think I'm coming back here for quite a while...at least until I can stop feeling like I've insulted a few dozen posters that I really like reading. Ciao, ya'll. ~Random, who desperately needs some sleep. And a shower, but that's none of your business. Off to take care of them both.)
[> [> [> [> [> [> If you look at "Meet the Posters" you'd see I'm a cat....a "she" cat....;) -- Rufus, 20:28:30 02/16/03 Sun

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Ah...didn't occur to me to look. Being a cat person (my cat's incurably spoiled!) I can appreciate. -- Random, 05:28:28 02/17/03 Mon

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Ahhh a person of good taste....... -- Rufus, 06:12:06 02/17/03 Mon

I have to write a slight disclaimer for the dog owners...I'd have a dog but my husband is more allergic to dogs than cats...plus he put a pesky limit to how many pets we could have....like I ever listen..

I have two very spoiled (now on diets) cats...Rufus being one....and she is a girl too.
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> You make even your cats read spoilers?! -- slain, 16:35:12 02/17/03 Mon

Is no one safe from the Trollups?
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> I like to think of myself as a guide to the better, earlier, understanding of both BTVS and ATS..;) -- Rufus, 16:55:47 02/17/03 Mon

The kitties only pose for my front page at Christmas....which we have to be quiet about cause beast916 keeps threatening me with the ASPCA...:):):):):)
[> [> [> Re: a small clarification of ontological status -- slain, 17:50:10 02/16/03 Sun

I've been here for just over a year, posting on and off, and in the off stages I haven't been that keen on the internet. I'm come to the conclusion that the internet is the nearest thing humankind has to solipsism, with the possible exception of the computer game 'The Sims'. Most people, when they get involved with the internet on a personal level, have so kind of solipsistic crisis - I had mine when I first got internet access in 1999. Sometimes it's because you don't consider other people, sometimes it's because they don't consider you. Feeling you've been insulted, and insulting others (inadvertently or otherwise) is all part and parcel of this.

But it's a big leap for a society to change from relating to people face to face, to being expected to relate to people in the same way when all we have of them is a name and some text - and often that name isn't even real (my parents didn't christen me Slain; Urusei Yatsura did, indirectly). We've got the telephone, the camcorder, the VCR, and writing itself. But until recently, people didn't really communicate by these methods with people they hadn't already met, or if they did they didn't do so on the same level. We have the idea of pen pals (which no doubt is called something else like 'ink buddies' in the US), but I've yet to meet anyone who got into a fierce debate with the French student from school their own school was 'twinned' with. But on the internet we're expected to exercise the same type of interaction, without having met these people. It's difficult. Not just because of the oft-used statement about the lack of tone of voice and body language, etc etc, but more importantly because we're less sure these people are real.

Solipsism, most people would agree, is a kind of madness. We can stave off these thoughts because, interacting with people, they don't occur to us. On the internet, people are reduced to usernames and opinions, arguments and positions. It's hard to access restraint - to think in terms to how what we say relates to other people - because other people are, in a way, 'less real'. I see what you want to do with this - to somehow get beyond everyday discussion, to some place where we aren't held back by existence and we can get to the essence and talk ontology.

This is where I differ. I'm a postmodern person, and I don't believe there exists any philosophical concept in the universe that can't be addressed by an episode of 'The Simpsons'. I like pointless conversations in coffee shops, and I come here for interaction on this level as well as all the other philosophy stuff. I come here because there are intelligent people here who like to discuss Buffy the Vampire Slayer on all levels; mostly on the higher planes, granted, as I can argue about whether or not James Marsters is totally hot or not pretty much anywhere. I think if you look through the archives you'll find plenty of complex posts which deal with just about any concept you could care to find, with as much complexity as is humanly possible without being abstruse. There's more to depth than making sure other people don't understand you. People post here for many reasons, but, to be honest, eternal wisdom isn't high on my list. If think everyone finds their own path in life, whether they like it or not, and that no amount of evangelism is going to make a blind bit of difference. Thinking about stuff, and being engaged in discussion, does; but discussion for me is a very broad concept, and covers just about anything. As far as discussing BtVS goes, I'm comfortable in this environment, which I personally find to be friendly and relaxed.
[> [> [> Re: a small clarification of ontological status -- Traveler, 18:22:12 02/16/03 Sun

" Is anyone ready to start walking thru the dark night of the soul, and quit just talking??"

I missed earlier posts on the subject, but I'm curious what you mean by this.

"I can only offer to take your hand and hold it firm if you ask for me to care for you on the journey."

It is a bit arrogant to assume that you know where someone (Rufus, everybody?) is going, let alone that you are equipped to take them there. People have different paths to match their varying experiences; I seriously doubt that everybody in the world is seeking "the perfection of eternal wisdom."

Also, I'm not sure what purpose your continued jibes at Rufus serve. You've already eloquently defended yourself from the criticisms of others. Hurling insults back and forth with one particular detractor is rather counterproductive, don't you think?

Furthermore, don't confuse axe-grinders with personal assailants. No matter how benign this message board is, there will always be people with instinctive, gut reactions to some of your arguments. Any time you air one of these arguments, you should expect them to attack it, deserved or no. Don't take it so personally. Rebut their conclusions or don't, but it isn't a reflection on you. By the same token, feel free to attack other people's arguments any way you like, but please don't attack them. When Rufus accused you of jerking her off, she was talking about your manner of expressing yourself, not your character.
[> Re: Fascinating -- Alison, 08:47:02 02/16/03 Sun

Great post!
just to add, though you may have said this and I just missed it..but if the FE is "to do evil", it corresponds with God's original name, Yahweh, meaning "I am", also a verb.
[> [> Hmmm...darn it now I have to go back -- fresne, 12:22:33 02/17/03 Mon

and read all the sub-posts on the FE thread.

Mainly I was trying to avoid posting something like, "See, see...it all comes back to Dante and primal love and the love gone awry. Mwhahahahaha." And with the painful aheming and erring...

Because, well, I am a person of my obsessions. I ponder briefly the difference between Dante's Lucifer (who is quite boring) and Milton's (who is fairly well acknowledged to be the reverse.) In Dante, pure evil sits at the center of hell and flaps it evil wings, with six evil eyes weeping and chews. It is the human residents of hell and upward and on who engage. They are the ones who love and hate and revenge and like Dante who leans dangerous forward as he listens to Ulysses' story, the reader leans forward in fascination. The Devil. He has as much personality as the batpole, and serves a similar function. But Milton's Devil. Well, he's practically human, except, of course, more devilish.

In as much as you're all discriminating viewers, I'm sure many of you caught Brimstone. John Glover in a lusciously delish devilish turn a delight to watch.

Anyway, evil as a verb. God as a verb. God as breath and vibration, this ephemeral that fades in a moment when the word is spoken and yet is the eternal word. Immortal vs. eternal. The Master is immortal. The First Evil eternal. The first and the last. Last and the first.

God as a noun. That medieval image of God as this eternal book. Concrete. Shape. Curving black script. Referencing the poetry thread above does that make evil's script white? The visible invisible. Perhaps, it's white script on a black background like those tiresome webpages that want me to go blind. See evil. Is the evil the action or the intention? Or is it that I don't have a flat screen monitor which translates the intention and the action into evil.

Ah, yes, another fresne post that resembles the plot of Tristram Shandy.

Anyway, back to the originary post at the top o' the thread, I wouldn't worry about anyone understanding you. My own writing style is that I seek to understand my own meaning through the writing of it. Only to discover that that isn't quite what I meant after all.

Is this an academic environment? Thank God no. Know. Understand. Mis-understand. Interpret. Fret at ideas trailed through the ether like threads and cats and look pretty, shiny.

Too many threads. Too little time.
[> [> [> Resembling the plot of Tristram Shandy? -- Rahael, 15:25:06 02/17/03 Mon

That explains why I like them so much!
[> [> [> [> All resemblance to the plot of Tristram Shandy are purely OT -- fresne, 16:58:07 02/17/03 Mon

Thanks.

And you know in one of those odd the internet is a small space moments, I did a quick search to see if the relevant plot squiggle is on-line and linked to a review of Ross Lockridge Jr.'s Raintree County, which apparently involves similar typographical choices. Startled to see a Tristram Shandy reference in a random book review, I glanced in the upper right hand corner and realized that the review was written by my boyfriend from college, with whom I took the English Novel in which we both read dear Tristram. He (my ex, not Sterne), of course, if you knew him, took the madness inducing methodology of reading the entire book in one sitting the night before he had to write a paper on it. I do believe he gibbered for several days following, although my/his reading Jane Eyre the night before the test is a much funnier story, both involving insane laughter (mine), literary paranoia (his) and a full moon, but I digress

Anyway, all of sudden it occurs to me that the pictures on the meet the posters page function remarkably similarly to the blank page in Tristram Shandy where Shandy/Sterne invites the reader to draw a picture of the most beautiful woman that they have ever seen and that is what the Widow (i.e./e.g./ibid/etc. and I pause briefly to utterly refuse to look up the good Widow's name. My housemate and I were joking just this last week that whenever we write anything we end up with a pile reference materials next to the computer. Although, there is something oddly satisfying about a short story that requires a stack of Harlequin romances, a book of John Donne poetry, and Orality in Literature.) looks like.

I was about to deny (re: the aforementioned poster's page pictures) looking like Cordelia in real life, but on second thought, I won't.

And tangentially, another former boyfriend's license plate, GRR ARGH.
[> [> [> I want that bumper sticker! -- WickedBuffy, 16:27:58 02/17/03 Mon

"Too many threads. Too little time" fresne
[> [> [> OT as always, read The Dante Club -- luna, 18:39:19 02/17/03 Mon

It has some excellent meditations on Milton's vs. Dante's Satan. And the author just also edited Divine Comedy, so he's fairly accurate!
[> [> [> [> Re: Dante (gets very OT, and not in a vastly interesting way) -- Celebaelin, 21:13:10 02/17/03 Mon

Strange co-incidence, I was asked recently to provide some framework role-playing rules for an Anti-Paladin (unholy warrior) of Geryon. All I knew about Geryon was his entry in the standard AD&D(TM) Monster Manual so I had a quick shuftie and found the ancient Greek three bodied (!?!) giant slain by Herakles (re-worked as a three headed giant usually so as to make some sense in English I assume) and the Dante reference (Canto XVII) which is the basis of the MM entry.

Whilst I'm posting I'm going to take the opportunity of saying that I've also been shunned by Voy this evening (like Sol 1056 whose message about bloopers was at the top of the board). It was a reply to Drizzt (presumably derived from Drizzt Do'Urden - a powerful drow elf ranger in the AD&D(TM) Forgotten Realms campaign setting and featured in the Baldurs Gate, BG2 and NeverWinter Nights computer games). Drizzt's posts were new to me, I think they must usually appear with/in amongst spoiler warnings but...well...aquaman again do you think? I don't know obviously but to complicate matters yesterday was my mothers birthday and she too is rather nervous about the occult connotations, she liked the poetry thread though when she looked at the board for the first time. Anyway, it's all getting frightfully holistic and whacky, which I suppose is the opposite of disjointed and directionless, which is what this post is.

Or was.
[> [> [> LOL! Well said as always. -- s'kat, 20:28:57 02/17/03 Mon

Ahhh fresne, people may not always grok what you say, but I for one love the way you blend words together and how it sounds.

Actually most of the time I totally understand - but then I wrote my undergraduate thesis on James Joyce Ulysses and
Faulkner's Sound and The Fury and they write in pretty much the same poetic stream of consciousness manner as you do.

Agree very much with this:

I wouldn't worry about anyone understanding you. My own writing style is that I seek to understand my own meaning through the writing of it. Only to discover that that isn't quite what I meant after all.

Is this an academic environment? Thank God no. Know. Understand. Mis-understand. Interpret. Fret at ideas trailed through the ether like threads and cats and look pretty, shiny.

Something I should keep in mind while posting myself - often worried I won't be understood. What seems clear in my head is not always so clear on the screen.

Also on Brimstone? YES!! I saw that. Liked it. Then John Glover stopped appearing - arrrgh. And the show got cancelled too soon. Sort of followed other dark risky shows into the sci-fi oblivion: Vr5, Millenium (which I missed a good portion of). Let's face it sci-fi, the nice twisty brand with all it's dark convolutions, mystifies advertisers and network execs alike. ;-)

Hmmm...methinks someday I must read Tristram Shandy.

SK
[> Reply -- Darby, 09:01:56 02/16/03 Sun

First, if you want to tweak the board, pick a pseudonym that does not suggest a trollish drive-by. The original post itself did not seem trollish, but I was wondering why it seemed to appear from an apparent non-participant who didn't continue in the discussion (or at least not right away). Maybe it's just me, but I would cut more "slack" to someone I "know," look for the humor. There was no reason to think it anything but legitimate commentary from a new voice.

I suspect that you and I have a similar writing weakness - once we get rolling, we can get obtuse. It's why I have my son currently proofreading my book for clarity. And when I've read your long posts, the pattern for me is, "Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, I'm lost...uh huh, uh huh, Huh?...okay, maybe I don't really understand the first part, because this doesn't seem to connect." That's also why my longer posts are of the scattershot variety - my long cohesive posts are not as cohesive as they seemed to be in my brain, so I avoid length on one concept if I can. There are plenty of capable folks here to leave that to.

I have to admit that I bailed on the earlier post before too long, and just scanned through some of the more interesting replies (even jumped in when some more limited stuff got discussed in a subthread). The problem with using jargon jokingly is that the jargon is too close to being a joke in and of itself - it was impossible for me to tell that the post wasn't serious. Even Cactus Watcher, resident linguist, seemed to be treating it seriously.

This time, this post, I read everything (I should have gone back and reread the original thread, but I'm too lazy), and I think I understand the premise but I'm not catching the point. The First Evil isn't an entity, per se, but a concept, that's simple enough, and evil itself is a slippery idea (I have a problem with Evil predating existence - it seems very Charmedlike, which is not good). On and off, again, I followed, and there are some good and some controversial points in there. It's the overall theme I'm not quite getting.

I also get the feeling that this post is less about your ideas and more about the board's reactions to your earlier post - could you clarify what you thought happened with that post?

- Darby, who has generated some controversy and odd reactions here in his day but tries to take them...philosophically.
[> Here we go again -- Caroline, 09:26:27 02/16/03 Sun

Aquaman, believe me, this will not be the last time that you will be misunderstood, misinterpreted etc. It happens to us all. Either it's a failure to communicate on our own part or perhaps our readers don't necessarily have the same understanding of certain concepts that we do.

There are people on this board with widely differing backgrounds. I do not pretend to have an understanding of the evolutionary biology stuff or the physics stuff and as for linguistics - we're talking 101 here. The perspective I use to view the show comes from mythology, psychology etc. So I'm going to try to understand the metaphors of the show through this prism. You have another prism and that's great. I read your initial post with real interest. I could see that you were trying to make a serious point in a humorous way and even though I didn't 'get' the scatological humour, I could see that you were attempting to be funny. I puzzled over the serious points in your post for a while through the prism that I view the show in and tried to communicate my views to you. I'm not a linguist and can't communicate with you in that way.

Since I view the show through a psychological lens, it makes sense for me to couch my views in these sorts of terms. I think that I agreed with a lot of what you are saying about the nature of the FE but I couched it in different jargon. I disagreed with you on the notion of agency of evil because in my view something has to connect the 'beingness' of evil to events that we can see and experience.

It is my contention (as I believe it is yours) that while many of the characters on the show have committed morally reprehensible and evil acts, they are not evil. So far, this corresponds to my views in the real world. This view comes from my study of psychology, which has taught me that all potentials are within us (and in fact, we should own them, not project them out onto an Other or blame it on evil impulses - so far we agree). Where the buffyverse and the real world part ways for me is that they have physically incarnated big bads - forces of evil. As we all know, they are metaphors for potentials within us that the show uses to explore certain themes. I personally feel that the first evil as a big bad or as a non-corporeal entity in the buffyverse cannot exist without the potentials within each of the characters for evil (we are subject and object). That is certainly something particular to the buffyverse, which I would argue has different rules to the real world. Therefore, I think that it is legitimate to remind ourselves that Joss Whedon has created a world that we inhabit and it's logical for us to discuss the nature of whatever phenomena in both his world and ours.

You may disagree but that's okay. We are allowed to have different views. I just hope that you don't think that I responded to you in a disrespectful way and that I did not hurt your feelings through my response. I've looked back over my post and can't see where I did but if I did, I sincerely apologize. I personally do not believe that all of the responses you received to your initial post were meant to insult or offend you but were rather 'taking the piss'. The reason I think that occurred is that your initial post appeared to have the same spirit about it and thus people felt comfortable doing so. I think that we all need to remember (yet again) the limitations of this form of communication, which does not allow for non-written-word cues to make communication clear. We don't have tone of voice, intonation, facial expression or hand gestures or even the familiarity of opinions or views because many of us are strangers to each other. I think it behooves us to be very careful about the way we couch our views here but I think there will still be misunderstanding in the future. I just hope that we have the goodwill to accept apologies, not hold grudges and move on.

Having said that, I know that there are times when people seem confrontational and dismissive of the views of others and merely assert their own views. As far as I can see, we either try to engage them in discussion or ignore them. I think that I would vote for ignoring those posters - there are some people who cannot get past the 'I'm right, you're wrong' style of interaction and I don't see how anything you or I write will effect a change. Unlike you, I do not honour anyone's right to insult anyone else - Masq has created a wonderful space here for us and I think we should honour her and our fellow posters with courteous and civil discussion.
[> Hurry on back -- Celebaelin, 10:56:16 02/16/03 Sun

OK, so, introductions are in order I think. I'm a Biologist, my bachelors degree is in Biotechnology (Birmingham University), my MSc is in Biochemical Engineering (University College London) and my M.Phil. is, broadly, in the area of Genetic Engineering and Protein Science (University of East Anglia), I'm about a year older than you are. Given that, and the implied perspective of a Life Scientist, I imagine that you will understand to what technical depth I appreciate your work but I promise you that I have given it my full attention.

Whilst what follows could not in all honesty be described as deferential, I hope that it communicates my regard for your efforts with respect to your last two posts (actually I thought I was being rather conciliatory last time, and not undeservedly so) I consider it necessary to 'take the mick' out of myself from time to time in order to maintain some sort of balance and perspective.

Your posts, up to this latest lucid and informative contribution, have borne the mark of someone sniggering up his sleeve. This is the post I strongly suspected you could write and was irritated that you would not. As for your various aliases, your posts had a characteristic writing style which I found transparent, as I suspect did many other readers, or did you think at that point that the posters to the board weren't clever enough to notice?

The St. Thomas Aquinas thing, 'twas I, as was the inscrutable 'crack' - first things first, I found that quotation and reproduced it in good faith, I accept no responsibility for any perceived mis-translation from the Latin, it seemed appropriate. My point really was that you could make everybody's life a little bit easier by including an illustrative quote, which I, and I'm sure many others, would enjoy reading. On the subject of quotes, being a lexicographer-type I'm surprised that you're not familiar with this gem

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instruments might be permanent, like the things which they denote."

Samuel Johnson 1709-1784 Dictionary of the English Language

or this one

"Words are mens' daughters, but God's sons are things."

Samuel Madden 1686-1785 Boulters Monument

or even this one

"I refute it thus."

Samuel Johnson 1709-1784
Replying to Boswell's contention that they were unable to refute Bishop Berkeley's theory of matter by kicking a large stone with his foot.

And thus 'Berkeley' gets mentioned twice on the board in a day (rest assured I am not calling you a...skip the oratory trick).

I do indeed suspect you of putting on a show however, for precisely the reasons hinted at above.

Hmmm

"AND 3 NOT JUST WRONG BUT PROBABLY FANTASY OR DELUSION, OR IN PURSUIT OF SOME QUESTIONABLE MOTIVE"

You may hold whatever opinions you so choose, I might even fight (via posts) to defend your right to freedom of expression, but that does not mean that you are necessarily unassailable in holding those opinions. Just as you are entitled to your viewpoint so others are entitled to theirs and if you are made to feel uncomfortable by being exposed to counter arguments then perhaps this is because you are coming to question your original beliefs, and perhaps not!

Right, so, that was a bit of a rant (will this be a five minute argument or the full half hour?) which I hope will not deter you from, well, doing what you see fit to do basically. I enjoy your posts enormously, I get wound up, I respond, I go and have a beer, everybody's happy (hopefully).

Briefly now

Yes, I think the FE is clearly a dramaticisation of the nasty side of human nature. My reaction when it 'went away' earlier was 'Yeah, right, I don't think'
------------

'process of' learning = education
'acquired' learning = knowledge

------------

The context of the specific language that a given word derives from, and the nuance of that language, give the word, in most cases, a fairly specific meaning within that language that will not be carried over when that word is used outside the context of the language from which it derives. English borrows from many other languages but I'm going to chance my arm with my rather dodgy linguistic skills and suggest this (originally in Hebrew I imagine).

One cannot serve both God and Mammon

But in French wouldn't Mammon be pronounced like 'maman' ie mother

One cannot serve both God and mother?

French RC priests and/or French speakers in the house?

For given-->forgiven

Off for a pint and a quiet smirk (just like yesterday)

C

Net connection playing up again, apologies in advance if this turns into a double post
[> As Wisewoman said, read above post, ya'll. You may have to re-read it (I did) to grok, but still... -- Random, 11:36:05 02/16/03 Sun

I apparently missed the post in question (I've been up in the mountains without access to TV or newspaper, much less the Internet) and -- sorry -- am too lazy to look it up. But I do recall a couple earlier posts (I liked the deconstruction of Robin Wood, ya know.) But I wouldn't worry too much about people accepting you here. Them posters in this here forum, they is smart people. Make a couple mistakes -- it happens. I've seen some longtime, well-respected posters here raise some powerful hackles, take the hits, and keep posting. In the end -- and this is what keeps me coming back despite my disinclination to spend too much time on-line (knock on wood...Robin Wood, that is) -- is the fact that this is about as satisfying a cross-section of intelligent discourse I've ever encountered. From Finn Mac Cool, who is -- if he's really 16 -- far more lucid and intelligent than I could have ever hoped to be at 16, to Rob, cheerleader extraordinaire who actually has insightful analyses of his cheers (plus his spelling's improved *smirk*) to HonorH and OnM with their wonderful post-ep wrapups, to Sophist who's both snarky and dead-on insightful, to Rah, who strikes me as one helluva good person to discuss philosophy with over a pint at the pub, to Wisewoman, who lives up to her name, to TCH and Dead Soul and manwitch who can always be counted on for brilliant and thoughtprovoking essays, to the wonderful shadowkat, who often manages to say exactly what I'm trying to grasp (and has some kick-ass essays on her web site), to luna and Dochawk and Scroll and Rhys and dream of the consortium and WickedBuffy and pr10n (whose moniker is still a complete mystery to me) to Deb and Darby and Briar Rose and Sol and...I'm quitting now because I can't name them all from memory. My point is, you're gonna find a lot of intelligent, contrary people here. They respond to intelligent posts -- and if you're not obviously trolling, contrary ones as well. Or especially.

So...(having gotten that out of my system) I think your analysis of the FE and the nature of evil is dead-on...to a degree. Okay: granted that the previous BBs have been physical representations of abstract concepts, the FE seems to be an abstract representation of an abstract concept. However, it has always been shown as a personalized creature. When it takes on the appearance of other beings, it may possess superficial personality parallels (memories, etc) but there has never been much doubt that some other intelligence is in control. FE/Jenny may have tormented Angel with recriminations appropriate to the real Jenny, but there was clearly another rational consciousness behind the character's speech.

The great danger in creating a villain is the danger that the audience cannot sufficiently rationalize or identify with it. A malicious or benevolent god is far easier to relate to than an impersonal Great Spirit without volition or individuality. What Aquinas was doing was really a form of neo-Platonism (he was kinda a throwback, seeing as everybody else had discovered Aristotle by then). The prime mover, the original evil: they were both original agents of, and the results of, causation (dunno why someone couldn't find the "First Cause" argument -- it's extremely famous.) Six centuries later, we've managed to thoroughly dissect such theology, and have concluded that the precepts are fallacious and circular...in terms of deductive logic. Which doesn't invalidate them, just proscribes verifiability within that particular realm of thought.

So that leaves us in the linguistic realm. Verbing language -- to quote Calvin (the comic strip character, not the theologian) -- is a lot of fun. But what makes you distinguish between the actions of the explicitly corporeal characters and those of the FE? Can't anything be described as the sum of its actions, if you really want to? Does the fact that the FE cannot touch make it any less "real" than something that can? How do you approach, say, ghost stories then? It's an interesting idea, to be sure. If Evil is an impulse, a motive force rather than an idea...well, actually, I'm not certain which approach you'd argue for. Does Evil only become real in manifestation or is it the causative idea, the precepts which lead to said actions? Either way, the FE seems to qualify. We tend to personalize the FE because it must have a personality to be accessible to the viewer. It's one of the dictates of art that what is truly alien to the audience cannot be understood as communication...hence, the art fails. So ME has quite a task on its hands. It must convey the idea of a near-divine, almost perfectly primal force for evil without descending into uber-existentialism. Aquanis' arguments are, after all, predicated upon a God and a Devil that are intimately involved with humanity -- all loving, all hating, prideful, compassionate, et cetera.

Anyway, that's just my cursory reply. I'll be honest (don't ya love honesty?!?) and say that I find your arguments to be difficult to follow sometimes -- not on an intellectual level but in terms of diction and narrative flow. Might be something to consider when writing that book :-) Keep writing, though. Any provocative and startling ideas that make me think -- I'm willing to make the effort. Most of the people here are, I think. I've only been posting for a relatively short time, and I've gotten some great replies to my often-longwinded and parenthetical writing.

~Random, who seriously needs to get a life on Sunday afternoons and has just started thinking about a nice long post to grace this board in the near future. Like, say, 2008.
[> [> Oh, what a lovely post! -- Wisewoman, 12:32:22 02/16/03 Sun

I'm glad to see that people like yourself have taken the time to read Aquaman's post above. I hope the thread survives until Monday, when some posters get back to work and back to the Board (he-he-he!).

One funny (as in comical) observation that I think I've got straight...you compliment WickedBuffy (along with many others, and thank you so much for the inclusion) and I think Aquaman's just admitted, by some of his comments above, that he is WickedBuffy! So there you go...some of his stuff has made an impression already!

Y'know, I'm havin' a real good day...

;o) dub
[> [> [> Reallly, there's only me! -- WickedBuffy, 14:50:52 02/17/03 Mon

I'm starting to feel welcome here. :>

I never posted I was a newbie, I just slipped in and read for awhile, then started posting when I saw something I liked. (And, when it was less than 4 posts long!) Just been here about 3 weeks... two? anyway, a fetal size.

I'm a woman, 5 times a Leo, BS in Sociology and Psych from the U of Oregon. Workaholic with three thriving businesses going (financial investing, advertising & marketing agency, business consultant). Got hit with some unnamed bug on a trip to Hong Kong and had to give all that up. Now I live the opposite life, practically a hermit. ..shermit? Before that happened I was a children's book author. Wrote articles for business magazines and published satirical corporate newsletters, too. So much fun! I lived to work!

::pondering if mentioning I'm Five times a Leo would be helpful, too::

Which all explains why I don't use big words much (my writing role model was Ray Bradbury - his early stuff) and the prism I post though is heavily hued in sociological/psychological lights. ummm, that and my environment has always been eclectic, sort of Lutheran/pagan, traditional/New Age, redneck/hippie, yuppie/liberal background. (The entire list is about 600 words long.)

I'm not a historian, I 'm a visionary or maybe an idealist - see, I'm not a linguist, either. Sometimes I can write flawlessly and other times my grammar sucks. It depends what my pet tropical bug is wreaking havoc with at the moment. It's quite undependable, patternwise. ::swat::

I'll always post as WickedBuffy - unless I don't. But I'll always START the name with "Wicked" and sometimes end it with something apropos to the topic.

I usually don't use these many "I"s in one place. And now I begin rambling, the signal to hit "send" quickly!

Thanks for reading this far in the post. I won't do it again - just thought I'd throw it all out there since I was one of the posters originally involved in this and quoted several times.

namaste

ps and I'm very glad you are having a good day, Wisewoman/dub! Me, too!
[> [> [> [> Please see apology below! **grinning shamefacedly** -- dub ;o), 16:25:34 02/17/03 Mon

I think I've got it straight now...just consider, WickedLeoTimesFive, I'm an Aquarian born during a full moon eclipse meaning that my Moon is in Leo, directly opposed to my Aquarius Sun! (I'm a Leo on the inside, screaming to get out from the Aquarius on the outside, lol.) It's no wonder I get confused easily!!

;o) dub
[> [> [> [> [> A secret about Leo's -- Rufus, 16:51:08 02/17/03 Mon

Remember not to tell anyone else cause it would hurt their feelings..but I've been told Leo's are pretty near perfect....(of course I'm so Leo that I don't even mind that touch of Scorpio)......;)
[> [> [> [> [> [> Re: A secret about Leo's -- WickedBuffy, 16:59:33 02/17/03 Mon

LOL

and yes, it takes a very Leo Leo to touch a Scorpio! on purpose. heh

::ducking any Scorps out there::


Rufus said it first!! Rufus said it first!!!
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> <----------Rufus attempting to pass the buck...<g>..;)--------> -- Rufus, 17:26:51 02/17/03 Mon

Now, now, Scorpio's make nice pets........Wicked Buffy made me say that.....
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> "passing the buck"!! I demand to see your birth certificate, Rufus! -- WickedBuffy, 17:51:31 02/17/03 Mon

[> [> [> [> [> It's good to be Leo, eh? :> -- WickedBuffy, 16:52:49 02/17/03 Mon

[> [> [> [> [> [> Re: It's good to be Leo, eh? -- Celebaelin, 17:22:26 02/17/03 Mon

It's a fair cop guv. What did your "friend" mean "pretty near perfect" if she can't keep a polite tongue in her head tell her to at least have the decency not to stick it out at me unless she's going to use it properly. Half-hearted praise is no praise at all - hear us purr!

Celebaelin is an Aries, I'm the Leo APR
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> "We Are Leo's Hear Us Purr!" lol! -- WickedBuffy, 17:47:45 02/17/03 Mon

psst.... but we are diplomats too, being kings and all, if it were just us Leos talking amongst our royal selves, well... you know... but, all these other signs are listening in and ..... don't want to hurt their feelings, y'know - that's reserved for, for ....
oops!

HA ... not gonna me say THAT one and getting caught in the crossfire! ;>
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: "We Are Leo's Hear Us Purr!" lol! -- Caroline, 18:27:18 02/17/03 Mon

I guess I'd better come out of the closet - I'm a Leo rising - I have the thick head of hair and the 'feline expectation of being served' as my husband used to say. (He was an Aquarian - how more stereotypical can you get that I would hook up with someone whose Sun fell on my 7th house? Projection much?). Anyway, I'm interested in your 5 times a Leo - Is that sun, moon, ascendant, Mercury and Venus? That's an amazingly powerful stellium.

PS - I'm having a fabulous day too - 2 feet of snow and a snow day tomorrow - yay!
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: "We Are Leo's Hear Us Purr!" lol! -- WickedBuffy, 19:07:49 02/17/03 Mon

Your guess sounds better than what it is! No one ever explained to me about it though, just said it was 5 times a Leo. Y'know how Leos love to be special, though, even if we don't understand it at all.

It's Sun, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Pluto. Cancer rising and Moon in Virgo.
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Oh. Well. Aren't ya'll Leos gettin' a bit, um, regal. -- Random, 19:22:40 02/17/03 Mon

Pure Gemini here. So pure that -- excepting a couple miscalculations amongst the stars -- I've been accurately and thoroughly psychoanalyzed by near-strangers in the middle of crowded bars. And let me tell ya'll something -- the last Leo I dated had the damndest time figuring me out. She wanted answers, I gave her questions, and we finally established that Leos are strong-willed and dominant (she was), but Geminis are utterly immune to Leos because we make difficult targets. Then we had dinner and watched a movie. (I also told her that astrology was the theory that our lives are controlled by a bunch of hot gas. Which made an unsettling amount of sense, so... Anyway, I've grown more accepting of astrology since someone informed me that, astrologically speaking, we were meant to be together. She was right. For about nine months, anyway, which was good enough for me.)
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> And the Geminis are getting all...umm.. communicative -- Caroline, 20:13:28 02/17/03 Mon

which is what Gemini does very well. As for your airy elusiveness - your must have driven your poor Lioness mad! I'm pondering the phrase 'astrologically meant to be together' - I've looked at many synastries and composite charts and I don't really know what that means. Traditionally, sun/moon compatibility (esp. a conjunction) between 2 people, with some 7th house involvement was considered indicative of a harmonious marriage - maybe that's why you were told that you were meant to be together? But my sister and mother complement my chart in a particularly close way, so did my husband - which one of them am I meant to be with? Maybe there's lots of people I'm meant to be with, not just a 'love interest who completes me'. As for the causality issue - I don't agree that hot gas controls my life. But I can't explain why a picture of the stars at the time of my birth or subsequent transits of planets to my chart is consistent with a certain personality and certain events and has so much predictive power.

PS - planets in Gemini here too.
[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Re: "We Are Leo's Hear Us Purr!" lol! -- Caroline, 19:55:04 02/17/03 Mon

Even more of a powerhouse with all those Leo planets in the 2nd house - esp. the possibility and potential for transformation with Pluto there. I don't want to say anymore on a public board but you do indeed sound very special.
[> [> Well said. -- s'kat, 20:59:09 02/16/03 Sun

And I appreciate the compliment. Flattery will get you everywhere...;-)

I liked how you phrased the whole FE conundrum - it's basically how I feel about it and why I didn't want the Big Bad this year to be the FE, but some other morphy demon entity. FE seemed somewhat lame to me. Too...all encompassing and religious - like the Powers that Be, I suppose. Yet on the other hand - what a fascinating concept, a way to explore the evil inside us all. This year in a way is an extension of last year's them - the SG's worst enemy lies inside themselves and each other. It's discovering what the source of your own personal power is I think. Is the source of you - the First Evil? God? Soul?
Etc. I keep thinking back to Buffy's dream in Restless where she manages to break everyone else out of their dreams and they all wake up. "You are not the source of me," she tells the FIRST slayer, and by extension - you are not the source of us. I don't need your hands. I choose the card with my friends. I am not a killer or a counselor.
I am both. I live in the world. And when the floods roll back I'll be a fireman, I don't need you to define me.
And in BoTN this sentiment is oddly echoed by Joyce asking Buffy to wake up.

I think evil is a difficult concept to grasp because language and art is so limited in regards to it. It's like trying to grab hold of a ghost. We all have different definitions, different views, different ways of analyzing it but when it comes done to it - there's the societal view of what evil is and the personal view.

But what makes you distinguish between the actions of the explicitly corporeal characters and those of the FE? Can't anything be described as the sum of its actions, if you really want to? Does the fact that the FE cannot touch make it any less "real" than something that can? How do you approach, say, ghost stories then? It's an interesting idea, to be sure. If Evil is an impulse, a motive force rather than an idea...well, actually, I'm not certain which approach you'd argue for. Does Evil only become real in manifestation or is it the causative idea, the precepts which lead to said actions? Either way, the FE seems to qualify. We tend to personalize the FE because it must have a personality to be accessible to the viewer. It's one of the dictates of art that what is truly alien to the audience cannot be understood as communication...hence, the art fails. So ME has quite a task on its hands. It must convey the idea of a near-divine, almost perfectly primal force for evil without descending into uber-existentialism.

Agree, I think that's it exactly and why it's so hard for us to grasp. I also think it's why some of us are somewhat thrilled with Seasons 7 and 6 (which I see as a two part arc - extended from Season 5, like a long prosthetic nose) - because we want to see if ME can pull it off. Sort of like watching a complex acrobatic act working without a net.


SK

PS: Great post.
[> [> [> ok, now i've got this *really* weird visual... -- anom, 20:31:25 02/17/03 Mon

"...(which I see as a two part arc - extended from Season 5, like a long prosthetic nose) - because we want to see if ME can pull it off."

...of the little Mutant Enemy figure pulling at a long prosthesis attached to the middle of its face as it crosses the screen going "grrrr! arrrgghh!" @>)

(what? this thread needed some comic relief!)
[> [> Wow, what a great post, Random. :o) -- Rob, 01:57:07 02/17/03 Mon

[> Re: THE LAST outPOST; A PLEA FOR ACCEPTANCE OF APOLOGY - PLEASE READ!!!! -- Rufus, 13:27:43 02/16/03 Sun

I'm gonna tell you what will get my attention.....good manners and no game playing. Anyone who posts with an insult to the characters, actors, writers, while trying to tell me they are unbiased is just jerking me off, and I don't like that. I also like someone getting to the point, and making that point clear. If you are clear and don't try to jerk me off with game playing I might start to pay attention to what you are trying to say.

Now to the FE, Andrew said something rather important in "First Date".......

Andrew: ARE YOU MADE OUT OF THE EVIL IMPULSES OF HUMANS?
SO, LIKE, IF EVERYONE WAS UNCONSCIOUS AT THE SAME TIME,
YOU WOULD FADE AWAY?
[> Very Grant Morrison-esque... -- Apophis, 13:47:07 02/16/03 Sun

... assuming I understood you (a verb as a bad guy, right?). As someone who's made many failed attempts at humor on this site, thanks for coming back.
[> Agree with Wisewoman, and most importantly Aqua! -- Briar Rose, 16:04:26 02/16/03 Sun

Yes - I (and most everyone) are guilty of one thing most of the time: We bring our own experiences and information to a topic that catches our interest.

However, this has the potential to create two unbalanced reactions to our actions in the Out Post that is cyber space:

We may inadvertently cause another poster to feel that we denigrated their opinion.

We may actually be unsuccessful at conveying what we, ourselves, were trying to say.

In many cases, it's the nature of this type of communication playing havoc with what otherwise would be understood and simply conveyed between persons in physical proximity. Since these are all monologues translated as WORDS based on abstract ideas that relate to differences in how we respond to BtVS/Angel and the metaphorical ideas presented, we post in WORDS that try to explain our own ideas and concepts about those, in a very limited way.

It is limited because there is no HUMAN interaction of looks, facial expressions, gestures or even the vibration of the person talking. There are no obvious ways to tell someone when we are being sarcastic, joking, befuddled or any other human reaction/emotion to another's posts. I have seen it on EVERY board I have ever posted on, no matter what the topic. We all have, I'm sure... Even our style of linguistic WRITING can cause chaos when we didn't intend to. Sometimes people take a dislike to "too big words" or "too little words" or even (ACK!) spelling mistakes as a literal focus to misread intentions of posters.

As for the topic within the topic; ME and the "FE!"....

This is partly why there is no way to philosophize this season without getting into metaphysical and theological themes. The FE of this season (It's been there before and underlying the entire storyline all along....) is the nature of the Universe and what makes the Universe tick!

Now in different branches of theology this is seen in different ways. One way is that ALL Universal Energy is in fact nothing more than Neutral! That only by giving it INTENT (Spiritual in the Buffy-verse) is it taken beyond neutral and given focused direction/type.

IMO - ME has been saying all along that INTENT is what makes the distinction between "Good" and "Evil" and that the manifested "Evil" of a demon/vampire/God/etc. is just an obvious container for what lies at the heart of the entire Universe. It is the "Thing" that is clothing the underlying principle. But that "Thing" is not the only evil that exists. That to truly define and understand evil, we must first KNOW it and EXPERIENCE it without relying on outward/physical/identifiable imagery to make our decisions for us.

This was greatly portrayed in the "Willow/Dark Willow" and "Troika" storylines as well as "Spuffy".... WHAT we do is not as important as the INTENT we do it with.

We are getting into the HEART of the Slayer's Story right here and now. Maybe that's why some people are so disappointed by this season thus far? It has moved way beyond "tree pretty" and "Fire Bad" to make us look at all our perceptions (Through the Scoobies Eyes) of what is evil, what is good, what is right, what is wrong and challenges each of us to look INSIDE instead of to the screen to see where it all relates within us and without us, just as it is doing with the SG.
[> [> Re: again, a clarification -- aquaman, 16:50:50 02/16/03 Sun

PLEASE don't see this as any kind of put-down, just a scientific observation, and a communication of my experience!!! The above post (Briar Rose) is very friendly, very diplomatic, very nice and conciliatory, but, frankly, while I appreciate that this person is also sharing an experience, within the context of this thread this post is rather condescending: This person seems here not to be talking about BtVS, but to be telling me in the first two large paragraphs what the nature of communication in this medium is.

Now, I just said that I am a linguist, etc.etc., and here is someone, very nicely of course, telling me, implicitly, that I am experiencing what I am experiencing not because it is valid, but because I am not understanding the nature of communication. Which is the exact sentiment I was responding to in the first place.

And she is telling me that to define evil, we have to know it. And that is what my point was. So I ask, Do you know it, Briar Rose?? I do. Not proudly, but not ashamed. And certainly not ignorant....neither about communication, evil, nor condescension. Communication is expressing your thoughts and opinions. It becomes condescension when you seem to be explaining to me something as transparent as

"We post in WORDS that try to express our ideas...."

Seriously, I know I am twisted, but was that really purely self-expression, or was it, as it seems to be, a lecture to me, to me of all people, on the basic childlike premise of semantics!!?? It really does read, in this context, like you suspect I do not understand these things, and if I only did, I would see the true nature of this interaction...Of course, being such a crap writer myself, I will suspend belief that this was the actual meaning, but it IS the APPARENT meaning....
[> [> [> Re: again, a clarification -- Celebaelin, 17:51:28 02/16/03 Sun

"telling me, implicitly, that I am experiencing what I am experiencing not because it is valid, but because I am not understanding the nature of communication."

Briar Rose was doing no such thing IMO, as I suspect you are aware, must you always tend towards the contentious and provocative when you are not yourself on the defensive? I do not wish to 'leap down your throat' as I thought we were making some progress and I for one am interested in your ideas if not as yet convinced by them but surely you will admit to a certain amount of hypocrisy when you accuse others of condescension? For myself I thought her post a model of reasoned good manners containing an 'in a nutshell' summing up of the state of play at this early stage in the game.

Regarding the question of Jenni - person or construct? I rather thought the latter, but she did receive a warm welcome from the board and if she doesn't exist she probably ought to exist, so no problem (when you see her next tell her I doubted her existence, it should give her a good laugh).
[> Wow... -- Traveler, 17:41:41 02/16/03 Sun

I've been looking for years to find the words to express what you just said. Don't take criticisms so close to heart, though. Over time, I've come to realize that it is impossible to always make ourselves understood on the first attempt. The failure doesn't lie solely with the author, but also with the readers who incorrectly assume they know his motivations. In the future, when you are making jokes, be sure to keep in mind the distance that the written word puts between your intent and what your audience sees. Others have less data to get accurate capta from :-p
[> one thing before i go into the background -- anom, 20:24:20 02/16/03 Sun

I realized once I typed that subject line that it could be read (at least) 2 ways, but I left it that way, partly because both ways could be considered correct (I want to go into the earlier thread to see the background to Aquaman's post, & once I've sent this I may fade back into the background because I won't have time to get into it any further) & partly because the idea that there's more than 1 way to understand the same thing seems relevant to what Aquaman is saying.

"'If it's not definable, why does "it" refer to itself as if it is??' I was asked...

Because evil is not bound by any duty to truth, whether it is external to us, or internal and projected."

There may be another reason as well, more related to the linguistic considerations with which Aquaman began his post: because humans tend to need definitions, & those are the terms in which it can make itself understood, at least partially, by the humans it's speaking to (& apparently some of those watching). And of course, it needs to do this in order to lie to them!

Aquaman, you're fairly new here, so you may not have seen this happen before, but it has. No one poster, no matter how prominent (& as I mentioned above, I haven't checked far enough down in the previous thread to see which poster[s] challenged your perception) speaks for the board as a whole or represents "the" one accepted/acceptable point of view. Me, I find what you're saying very interesting; BtVS is all about challenging the way things are "supposed" to be, whether that's dictated by dichotomy or prophecy or what we've seen on the show up till now.

If you're right & this is where ME is going w/the show, seems to me it fits in w/manwitch's wonderful recent post paralleling the show's 7 seasons w/the way transformation proceeds through the 7 chakras, including, w/regard to the current season: "I will say only that the seventh chakra is located at the top of the head, sometimes pictured as above the head, to indicate that it is not part of the body. The rapture of the seventh chakra is not conditioned by any form, not even that of the yogi. It represents the overcoming of the world of forms, and all its accompanying binary oppositions, in the complete extinguishing of the self into undifferentiated consciousness." A First Evil w/no physical form would be consistent w/this, & if the "binary opposition" of Good & Evil, or of Love & Evil, as Caroline suggests, turns out to be an illusion, that sounds like a pretty good challenge to supposed-to-be. It would be like ME saying to all of us: Welcome to the next level!

I hope this isn't redundant by now--I haven't refreshed the screen for some time, so I don't know what else has been written in this thread. I'm trying to get a start on doing my taxes (got 2 discrepancies already!), & I may not have time to read all the background that led up to it & the new stuff that it leads to, or to post further on it, much as I'd like to (esp. the linguistics part!). But for once I have a feeling the thread won't have disappeared by the time I send my post!
[> [> why I started this thread, and argued with rufus -- nicely, of course -- aq, in conclusion... trust me, it is nice!, 03:31:20 02/17/03 Mon

There was simply no way to say outright what I wanted to say, it really needs to HAPPEN.

First, I never thought that there was any problem with this board, with any of the people on it, with the styles of posting, etc.

I never meant to be hypocritical by 'dogging,' as it were, someone else's style while seeming to repeat it (or playing a game with someone talking about games, etc etc) : I was, really, and with deep affection, giving what I was getting, acting as I saw others acting, using their tactics against them - yes, in the context of this thread, it was a debate, as I was trying to introduce an exotic concept, about the FE, that got roundly dismissed as invalid, so 'against' is a valid philosophical, not personal, description here - if you read what Jenni wrote, then you will remember that I am her aikido teacher. Yes, I am a linguist, a dive instructor, an aikido instructor, and a jewelry designer...I can also finish concrete, repair vws, cook an awesome salmon steak, speak Thai, and I attended over 200 grateful dead shows, back in the day. I also have done things I am not so proud of as these accomplishments.

And I really was enjoying the coffeehouse banter, and I know I was a pain, but who cares, I enjoyed, you mostly enjoyed, right on.

The ONLY reason I started this thread was because lunasea - and I love you for it, I don't criticize you!!! - made the statement she did, "you realize that this..." and she dismissed my theory by defining it as unvalid a priori.

Which is a faux paus, in any event, in a debate, and i am wiggling my finger at you, in a smirking, winking kind of way!! But it was also exactly the behavior, given the context of this medium, that I was talking about, so I pursued it as an example. Again: I realize that most of the responses to this have been, 'chill out, it's jus the limits of the medium,' and i get that, i always did, and i was, unskillfully, maybe, trying to say,

"within the limits of this medium, in which we are all disembodied voices, and within the context of it being a philosophical debate, one voice telling another voice that what it is expressing is not logically possible a priori, or another voice asking the voice why it is bothering to speak at all, is an instance of the very thing I'm taking about - the essence of evil"

You might say I was alleging, within the very small confines of THIS SINGLE THREAD, and the context of debate, being just voices, etc., that the FE had passed through this board, and we can plainly see how ***doing evil*** can, indeed, both figuratively, and actually, have no body, no direct power but to affect people's minds with self loathing, or paranoia, or anger, be no patient, no agent, never had ended and, of course, never will, as there will always be ...well, you all said it best, concerning this.

Seriously, I have no intention of proselytizing, evangelizing, changing a darn thing about what goes on here - I, for one, am enjoying the hell out of it! That not the deal here. I just wanted to do this one thread, because I really think ME is trying to say something with the FE that goes with how I'm viewing the situation. And the nature of this medium just happens to be the perfect metaphor for the FEs modis operandi, and I don't give a darn if anyone thinks like me about language or evil, but for this thread, for this debate, for this web site about BtVS, I wanted to play the slayer and kick some philosophical ass because I KNOW I'm right about the FE, and I really want you all to eat crow about your a priori dismissal when you discover this to be true. Or, you can recant now, admit I am right about everything, and save the embarrassment.

Remember, I am the guy who described you as "going in punching, coming out kicking.." which you felt was a compliment, and it was. The fact is, things like a priori dismissal, euphemisms that are off-putting, accusations of game playing, telling someone they take things too personal, that they aren't seeing the big picture, they imagined what they experienced, etc., really are meaningful debate tools, but the meaning really is usually to end the debate by mystifying the others' data, questioning its validity in total, in essence. I don't take it personally, so much as I note that it is GENERATED personally, that is, a specific individual voice always does each instance of it, including my own instances. But what is the essence of this mystification?? Where does it live?? If I were just a troll with no love of BtVS, we could all say it lived in me and banish me, and I'd vote yes, too...but it would peak out again, wouldn't it??? Where does it live, this little troll who isn't a troll, who lives in potential, nowhere and everywhere, and maybe we see it in another - wrongly or rightly. And maybe we do it ourselves, because we're tired, or we wrongly saw it and are 'responding' to a mistake. But whatever the situation, where, really, did the essential agency that engendered the human agency to act in such a way come from - where does it exist? It is everywhere, elsewhere. It is nowhere. It ain't an it. ***doing mystification*** Does anyone want to a priori dismiss that this concept has meaning at this point?? If not, I have accomplished my only goal...

This is exactly what I think, in a different metaphorical way, that ME is trying to say to us with FE. I tried to say it several ways, and met with incomprehension. So I had to try a different way.

If contemplating such 'issues' changes your life, don't blame or thank me. I just want to win the debate about the FE, and I think I have made my point quite strongly - at least so's that I don't think anyone will now dismiss it a priori!!

I love you all, really - esp. luna and rufus - don't be pissed, if you can say jerk off, I can say you have a small mind - you're the one that took it to that level of language!!!
[> [> [> I have problems with your arguments -- Tchaikovsky, 04:38:44 02/17/03 Mon

Now I'm trying very carefully here not to be dismissive of any argument you give, or any argument you implied using a writing style which at times is wonderfully adept at taking interesting slants on subjects, and which is at other times very terse, and, even to many very intelligent members of this board, often incomprehensible.

I also understand that there is a style of thread in this board which is all about alleging that someone's opinion is more valid than someone else's. It's not claiming that whoever wrote the thread which is being replied to is inferior. It is not claiming that you should immediately refute your own views. It is just trying to explain from one writer to another their own views, and why they reject another person's. It is constructive in being deconstructionalist, and has often made me change my opinion to at least compromise my original stance to one closer to the protagonist.

In this regard, consider your lines here:
'I just wanted to do this one thread, because I really think ME is trying to say something with the FE that goes with how I'm viewing the situation. And the nature of this medium just happens to be the perfect metaphor for the FEs modis operandi, and I don't give a darn if anyone thinks like me about language or evil, but for this thread, for this debate, for this web site about BtVS, I wanted to play the slayer and kick some philosophical ass because I KNOW I'm right about the FE, and I really want you all to eat crow about your a priori dismissal when you discover this to be true. Or, you can recant now, admit I am right about everything, and save the embarrassment.'

I can't find any instance of anyone dismissing your view. Many people have responded to it, moderated it, let it filter through their own thoughts, come back with praise or constructive criticism. No-one needs to eat crow about their response to your post. And I don't think that anyone is denying that it is a good point that the First Evil may not be a noun but a verb- that the essence of the word itself is that it 'does' evil, and that in that sense, it can come from ourselves, and happen to ourselves in powerful ways. I thought that your linguistic analogue was a useful way of mediating my own thoughts.

However, if you start a thread with an apology, and then apparently genuinely say that it was your intention not to hurt anyone but to put an argument forward, and claim that if anyone has a point on how to make posts less controversial to please put it forward, then you can not blame Rufus for responding about what he finds annoying in certain posts, (which were NOT your posts, but posts in general).

You now appear to have done one of two things:
1) Somehow combined your First Evil argument with your comments about the medium, so that anyone explaining how posts can be made less hurtful seems to you to be partly attacking your, (largely unrelated), argument about Buffy)
OR
2) You are playing an extremely dangerous, hurtful and unpleasant game with posters who write what they REALLY think and feel, and trying to engender a feeling of paranoia and distrust into the board in general.
In other words, in claiming that the First Evil is somehow active on the board, you are either deliberately trying to break up friendships and bonds of communication through other posters, (acting as Iago!Spike, or the First Evil yourself), or you are just very confused, in which case I would say again: everyone who has posted is interested by your view of the First Evil, but is reacting to your debate about how to post genuinely and emotionally honestly.

My advice; (not to be taken as prescriptive or condescending, please ignore if you wish)

1) If you are genuinely trying to make more than one unrelated point in a post, delineate them VERY carefully. Otherwise, you can confuse yourself and others as to exactly which point they/you are arguing.

2) Complex intellectual arguments are more likely to be understood here than virtually anywhere else on the Internet. This allows you to make complicated subtle arguments. But it does not allow you to write abstrusely and expect a coherent response. The most complex ideas are the ones which must be expressed in the most simple language possible, with examples and restatements, in order that a respondent can grasp them. For an example, see Shadowkat's posts. Long, often complex and insightful, but expressed in such a way that the leaps of logic taken are transparent and clear. And it is always related back to the overall structure of the piece.

3) If you do not have the best of intentions, I would suggest that it is worth discontinuing your posting. This board, like the Scooby Gang, is stronger than any attempts to break us down by insidious arguments about intrinsic evil. If this is not your intention, ignore this paragraph.

We all suffer from being unclear in writing at times, but it helps not to complicate it further by complex if funny allusions to Thomas Aquinas that it is clear that noone will comprehend. It is very rarely useful to be unclear or ambiguous in your writing, unless you are hoping for a confused or misconstrued response.

I have enjoyed parts of your posts- others I merely find impossible to follow- and at other times I wonder whether the whole board isn't to you just some grand delusion going on inside your head. Posting is necessarily solipsistic, but the board as a whole is a community.

TCH- hoping not to offend the good-intentioned, but to clarify his confusions and difficulties, and thus lead to more enlightening posts for all.
(Now I have given my gender away!)
[> [> [> [> Thank you. -- Wisewoman, 09:09:48 02/17/03 Mon

[> [> [> [> Ohmygod! You're a male!?!? Now I gotta modify my daydreams.. -- I.M. Shocked (and a tad confused about my orientation now), 12:28:23 02/17/03 Mon

[> [> [> [> Wonderful deconstruction! -- Caroline, 13:02:36 02/17/03 Mon

[> [> [> [> Re: I have problems with your arguments -- aqua, 15:59:08 02/17/03 Mon

"I wonder whether the whole board isn't to you just some grand delusion going on inside your head."

Funny, because I wonder whether I am to you just some grand delusion going on inside your head. I assure you you are a person to me, whose actions I take at face value. I am still not sure why I am not this to you entirely, as it seems, to me, quite unlikely that a grown-up, intelligent person would spent this much time here posting ideas that obviously imply a deep philosophical analysis of BtVS if he (I, that is ) didn't see the members of this board as human beings worth communicating with.

PLEASE quit reading what I'm not writing!!!!!

I never said the FE was loose on this board!!!!

I never did EITHER of the two choices of interpretations in the above post by TCH. How the heck did you arrive at giving me a choice of having either intentionally set myself up as a victim, or am deliberately victimizing you, trying to break up bonds of friendship, etc. OH MY GOD!!!! I will say it all one more time, please:

IN A PREVIOUS THREAD someone said, because the name "*is* 'the first evil' " it must be an entity. I wrote a responding (rather poorly worded) post where I suggested that the FE was a transitive verb, alone, with no agent or patient connected. I received, among a few others, the following three replies, in paraphrase:

1. Someone said, this is meaningless, a priori, because you cannot have a vt without a patient.

2. I was asked if I realized that the whole theme/essence of BtVS was to physicalize abstract concepts of big baddies.

3. Someone explained the communicative nature of this board, then asked me "why" I bothered.


I have seen and experienced replies like this before, and even the regulars have told me in posts , in paraphrase, 'hey, sometimes people say weird things, or get rude, but they don't mean anything personal.' Yes, I know, and I am cool with that. I am the same. It does seem strange to me that though I was told to chill, that somehow my words are being taken very personally, and mistakenly.

Anyway, it occurred to me that there is a word we could give the type of posting/reply, like the three above, where someone's theory is dismissed a priori without reason or proof, or someone questions the motives of the theorizer (or, as in this post, when someone takes something personally, or uses sexual euphemisms that put people off, or calls someone small minded (me), or accuses someone of playing games, or calls someone confused, or dishonest, etc. etc, ad nauseum). This is a certain type of debate device that seeks not to disprove content, but question the speaker's trustworthiness, thereby disproving content in whole, without debate.

No, I don't think it is evil, much less that the folks, self included, who have done it are evil. Yikes!!! I said this is ANALOGOUS to the FE in BtVS, as well as to MY CONCEPTION of evil in RW. ANALOGOUS!!!! ISOMORPHIC!!!! SAME PATTERN!!!! METAPHORICALLY!!!!! Can I say it any other way to be clearer?????

I called this type of argument 'mystification,' after the theories of R.D. Laing. I noted that it happens. I noted that it often ruffles feathers, scares away new people, etc. I noted that it is sometimes an outsider (troll), but sometimes a nice person who is long-time regular, or someone in between. I pointed out that, like the FE, these are only language acts, disembodied words, because we are on the net. But they still spark emotions, maybe even actions. Sometimes the reactions are even based on misunderstandings, misreadings, totally accidental misquotings, oversensitivities, bad past experiences, etc. Very benign in origin, yet perhaps causing...

What is the most it could cause The least it might cause, I suggested, is scaring off a new point of view, and thereby taking that potential from us all.

But my point was: If this little thread of rudeness, misunderstanding, trolling, accusations of game playing, dismissal a priori, etc., has always existed in this site, is often randomly and innocently perpetrated by even nice people, and probably won't ever completely disappear, but we still keep going, and it usually is nowhere to be found, then haven't we got a perfect metaphor for the FE, which explains my theory of a transitive verb sans agent/patient? Because the "essence of mystification" doesn't agent the instances of the phenomenon that rear their head here - the person who does it is the agent. And the essence doesn't, therefore, have a patient. But it always seems to be there, in potential, and that is what I think ME is saying with the FE. The internet is just a perfect metaphor FOR THIS THEORY because we are, indeed, disembodied voices, who can only be seen through the imagination of the rest, but not touched or touched by. I will ask you a question, similar to lunasea of me, but in jest "You realize I'm telling you about a theory about a tv show, right??" My god, the last thing I would ever want, and would ever accept the blame for, is the breaking up of human bonds. That is plain freaking sick, and I can't even get my mind around how you generated that thought concerning me.

I said again and again I don't want to change you, that it was just for this thread, because I wanted to counter those a priori dismissals. I said I was comparing, that I was debating a single theory, that I was answering a negation of my ideas that I thought was rash and illogical.

I am not offended at you, or taking it personally, but I am very very curious at how you went from what I wrote to thinking I might likely be some kind of agent provocateur, trying to tear down friendships and destroy a forum I take part in just for the sake of destruction. WoW!!! I really want to understand this. I am perplexed beyond my scope of comprehension. And that is an indictment of me, not you.
[> [> [> [> [> That was me you misquoted just now -- WickedArghhhhh, 16:19:02 02/17/03 Mon

... and rewrote to support your post.

"3. Someone explained the communicative nature of this board, then asked me "why" I bothered."

I don't like my words being taken totally out of context to support someone else's argument. Anyone's. Anytime. (or was it accidental? then never mind) Anyway, I'm neutral about the issue you included that in just now, but I do object to being misused. I'm not attacking you personally at all - just want this to be clear - I just draw the line at having things put in my mouth I didn't originally put there. ::koff::

I'm just asking you nicely not to do that anymore. I appreciate your help in this. Thanks! :>
[> [> [> luna and lunasea are two different people -- luna (wish I could take credit for her great posts!), 12:27:58 02/17/03 Mon

[> Re: THE LAST outPOST; A PLEA FOR ACCEPTANCE OF APOLOGY - PLEASE READ!!!! -- MsGiles, 03:29:38 02/17/03 Mon

As a new poster, lurking and occasionally launching a little bubble of incomprehensibility into the void, (and working my way through season6 courtesy of the BBC) I was interested and strangely comforted to read this discussion. Going on a message board ought to be easier than going up to a strange group in a bar and getting into the conversation (given the anonymity and all) but somehow it feels just as hard. Just posting is cathartic, but the point is to communicate, so lack of response or misunderstanding of the motives behind the post induce deep gloom. Hearing that is isn't all straightforward, even for the experienced, informed and articulate, is heartening, quite apart from the interesting content of the post, so thanks for this.
[> [> MsGiles: I love you!! - (a catharsis) -- aq, 03:34:53 02/17/03 Mon

[> [> It is difficult -- Rahael, 04:08:46 02/17/03 Mon

I myself am constantly negotiating how one goes about expressing and communicating as well as one can here. If you look back into the archives, it is obvious that even the most regular of posters will trip up.

See, I know quite a few people here on a personal level now. And it still doesn't ever get 'easy'. Sometimes there almost is the expectation that this should be easier than real life. But to get something really worthwhile nearly always takes thought and effort.

I post at another board where I worry less about what I say or what others say to me in return. The level of discourse is intelligent and funny and frequently insightful, but much less courteous. This board is quite different from any other I have passed by or visited. This requires more effort from me, but also greater rewards.

Slain made a striking point about solipsism. It can be difficult to imagine real people behind text and opinion.

Lack of response can induce gloom, but remember, nearly 90% of my posts go unanswered, even if I'm replying directly to someone, asking a question or making the effort to appreciate their efforts. But the 10% that are responded to nearly always make up for it - so be brave! contribute, and respond to other people here. A lack of response does not indicate a lack of appreciation. I mean, my favourite post by miles this year is Random's "Numfar" post a couple of weeks ago. I didn't respond to it, but it feeds into my view of his/her posting. It didn't get any responses from anyone, in fact, and yet I'm pretty sure that it was much appreciated.

As for the misunderstanding of motive, that's bound to happen. It is however, made easier to misunderstand someone if they are impolite, ungracious and uncharitable. When posters go out of their way to compliment and welcome, and are paid back with insults, it is really rather extraordinary and a rare occasion here. At our best, we aim to meet rare moments of incivility (displayed by us all at times) with civility. I find this board both welcoming and tolerant and forgiving. I hope you will stay around long enough to discover this for yourself. We put a lot of time, effort and thought into being open and inclusive. There are many of us who will always stand up for those who suddenly find themselves unpopular for whatever reason. There is no group think here. We are independent minded, and I've found some of the kindest, most gracious people I know right here.
[> [> [> Chiming in on the it's difficult theme -- Sara, who says nothing is easy except doing the dishes, 18:51:00 02/17/03 Mon

I think one of the biggest dangers in human interaction is the concept that it should be easy. People aren't easy and therefore communication isn't. I haven't understood much of what's going around in this thread, so I won't comment on it directly.

My main reason for posting is just to tell you Rah, that I'm totally addicted to your posts and writing, and even if I'm too much of a coward to respond to them most of the time and I'm part of the 90%, I'm soaking up your words.

- Sara, wading back out really quickly back to the safety of lurking
[> [> [> [> Hear, hear! Or is it, Here, here? -- Random, 19:42:43 02/17/03 Mon

Always thought it was the first, but some people keep insisting on the second. Oh well. Anyway, love Rah's posts as well. Even do a "find on page" to make certain I catch them all (don't tell anybody that...it'll destroy my reputation as a magisterial "scroll and open" type who only blesses a select few subject lines with my benevolent scrutiny and even more benevolent responses. That is my reputation, right?) And I'm truly gratified you (Rah) liked my Numfar post so much. It's the sort of praise that makes me keep posting, even when a post garners no replies. Plus the gratifying instances where I do receive a reply, as above. Of course, I've posted like crazy these last few days, so perhaps I should rediscover shame.

(Incidentally, Rah, where's d'Herb lately? He doesn't seem to be posting very often -- I've seen a couple on Angel, but not as many as I seem to remember him doing ages and ages past.)
[> [> [> [> Ditto on all of the above...especially -- s'kat, 20:14:14 02/17/03 Mon

I think one of the biggest dangers in human interaction is the concept that it should be easy. People aren't easy and therefore communication isn't. I haven't understood much of what's going around in this thread, so I won't comment on it directly.

Yep. Me too. Nice to know I wasn't the only one bewildered by it all.
[> [> What a great HAT! Welcome MsGiles. -- Briar Rose, 15:41:58 02/17/03 Mon

[> This *IS* the actual Wicked Buffy -- WickedBuffy, 14:05:13 02/17/03 Mon

ayiiiii! ::making note to never leave home without my laptop again::

Wow, I come back, head straight for the website I've come to adore and start reading threads where I'm mentioned (yahh!), quoted (yahhhh), misquoted (wahh) and even misidentified (heh, that cracked me up, y'know).

First, the entire thread about the original post is back on page one of the archives. "empty jar" is Aquaman about halfway thru the threads.

Second, there's only just me, WickedBuffy. If I ever fool with another name, it will always (now and forever) begin with "Wicked" and have some pertinent word replacing "Buffy". (I am flattered for almost being misidentified as Aquaman - but I can't write the way he does.)

Third - I'm sorry to empty jar aka Aquaman that you thought my post had anything whatsoever to do with you personally. Umm, I don't even know you. I've only been around for a few weeks, at most. I tried to understand what your post said, and while incorporating it into my own ideas, came up with questions that I asked you. Since only you would have the answers. If I was dismissing your post or thought it was worthless, I wouldn't have put any thought into my replies or maybe not even answered. (Not answering doesn't always mean dismissing, though, as we know from experience)

the us vs you thing I don't get either - We'd been discussing the nature of FE for awhile, exchanging ideas, debating concepts, sharing new thoughts - and no one had felt insulted or had insulted anyone. At the end of my post, I asked a specific question for the very reason TO understand what you were saying more clearly. That's why I ask questions - to get the answers I don't have yet.

Someone had mentioned earlier about how we all read and post through our own individual prisms. I believe that. In fact, part of the challenge and enjoyment I get out of this forum is reading other peoples posts and trying to stand in their shoes for a moment to see how they came up with that idea. How they saw that particular concept that way. I asked you if you would tell me what WE (including you, since you post like we do. I didn't say "excluding this and emptyjar and ".)

I simply wanted to understand what you were saying and thought if you could explain it in the light of your post (your post as a prism), I would be able to get what you were talking about. That's why it specifically said "Looking at us thru your post".

I don't want to go through your posts about this point by point. But if you want me to, I will. If that will help.

I read your post as serious and took alot of time trying to understand what you had said and how it fit into the discussion. No one before had been joking, so it was the furthest from my mind. I told you at the very first of my response to you that I didn't understand what you meant -- even after you had stated at the first of your post that "things become less confusing when" and so on. I read and pondered what you had said very diligently.

I don't feel ashamed or stupid to admit when I'm not understanding something. And asking questions to clarify things. It was important to me to understand what you had taken so much time and effort to write about what we were discussing. Learning is such a curve for me and I love the ride. Sometimes it's just a Ferris Wheel and other times it can be a Roller Coaster. I insulted Rahael the other day and didn't even know it. It hadn't been my intention at all - it was my unfortunate choice of words. We kept posting to each other and explaining why we said what we said until we were satisfied. (I hope?) and I learned alot that day. (Including what a trope is.)

But, no one knows me here - don't know my character, my history, nuttin'. So I hope if I irk someone, they would peaceably ask about it. Not jump to the conclusion I meant harm. Not attach their entire history to it to make it "bad". Just ask neutrally, if possible. I take a step back and breathe deep if I get angry at something - for however long it takes, and then ask directly what's going on. I also assume people mean well until they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they do NOT mean well. I'd rather err on that side. Now, telling people that doesn't mean I'm saying "and you suck if you don't do it my way!" I'm just telling you something about me in the hopes that it might help you understand me better, and therefore my posts better.

I really love this place (platonically, it's not a fetish yet) BECAUSE there are so many diverse opinions and backgrounds and ideas and personalities here. It's not an "I love Buffy when she kicks high!" answered by "Me too!" kindof place. I'm starting to recognize some of the different posters styles and "prisms" and really enjoying it.

Aquaman - anyone else who quoted my post (even without knowing it) and took it as anything less than a sincere effort to understand empty jars theory - I'm sorry you ended up feeling hurt or degraded. It wasn't my intention. It will NEVER be my intention. It never IS my intention.

... and you can trust me on that one, or you can call my mom about it. I have excellent character references. :>
[> [> Oh, you didn't at all -- Rahael, 15:17:12 02/17/03 Mon

I mean you didn't insult me at all. I think you may have underestimated Gunn though ;)

How could you have? You were discussing a character on a TV show. But I'm never afraid to question or challenge or debate. In fact I rather enjoy it. I'll admit my jaw dropped a little, but insulted? No. I really did not think that you meant what it appeared you were saying. However, I wanted to check.
[> [> [> yah :> & about Gunn (tiny spoiler for Calvary) -- WickedBuffy, 17:13:04 02/17/03 Mon

I'm glad you checked! I sure learned alot. And VERY happy to hear I didn't insult you!

About Gunn, though - I've been thinking about it, and thinking maybe you and I have a different POV about the same qualities? did that make sense? Because I like him and the things I have said about him (that were clarified) are qualities I hold with more esteem than the ones I gave of Wes.
Yes. I may be odd, but still - there are qualities most my friends feel are more attractive than I do, and vice versa.

Really briefly, what did you think of Gunn when he shot the firethrower at Angelus? I want to compare your impression with mine.
[> [> My humble apologies! -- dub ;o), 15:25:29 02/17/03 Mon

Both to you, WickedDifferentlyNamedPerson (LOL!), and to Aquaman. I got confused in trying to sort out the thread that had led to Aquaman's post at the start of this thread and I thought I had sorted out that what had offended him was something that had been written in response to WickedBuffy. Okay, so I've had brain surgery...I have an excuse!!

Sorry ***blushing painfully***

dub ;o)
[> [> [> no apology needed to me! :> -- WickedBuffy, 16:51:20 02/17/03 Mon

LOL!

No worries! I'm getting confused, now, too, and I was one of the original posters that Aquaman aka empty cup was upset with.

::pointing to the archives, where the all words are nonchalantly sitting around thinking they had long been forgotten::
[> [> Re: This *IS* the actual Wicked Buffy -- aqua, 16:23:19 02/17/03 Mon

WB - I know you didn't mean anything bad, and frankly, if you had, I'm obviously not easily overpowered! You did nothing wrong to me, or anyone as far as I've ever seen. But the way you worded your argument could easily have been construed - and I asked several independent friends to read and assess, as I am a scientist, and they ALL came up with the same interpretation - as having been a questioning of whether or not I had the same motives of communication and sharing that you do. I did not necessarily take it that way, but I must make the context clear, so you'll see:

I am not like you here. I don't have the same basis for trust. This is because, for reasons you can believe or not, it doesn't matter, either me and some friends shared a computer, and they acted a bit boyish, or I pretended to be several pseudonyms, and acted a bit boyish, either way; what happened next was , instead of being told no boyishness allowed, or getting a private, or public note asking if i was multiple people, finding the answer or telling me don't do that, or whatever, this happened:

Someone checked the ISP numbers, found they came from the same computer, and publicly published an announcement of this, accusing me of being a single "troll," and comparing me to an event last year that ended in a guy being cut off from access to this site. The response was, of course, general revulsion and paranoia, and I knew right then that everything I ever said would be questionable - and here we are, would you please read the indictment by TCH, above. Granted, TCH gives me that he may be wrong. But also very much may be right.

In my opinion, whether me and friends or just me, there was never any behavior on the part of those first posts to justify an investigation and a public pillorying. I wrote to Masq, asking if they could please help me find a way to deal, they said just plug away. And yet, even the person who KABOOMED me above, and thank you for that, but they still have doubts about me even being a person, all still dating back to that original event, i must imagine, and these doubts affect the way they read everything I say. I am aware of this, and it has been a part of my editing when i post here, and that is cool...

But can you see why, considering what you (WB) wrote, I might want to point out to you that it could be easily construed that you were questioning my motives for participation here??

And, beyond that, I was mostly just saying that, had I taken that as a slap, even though you were innocent of slapping, isn't that an instance of how bad feelings can arise just by disembodied voices giving or engendering misunderstandings? And that was the point I was trying to make about the FE, which I know you asked me to clarify, and I am still trying to, right now...I hope I am getting closer, without offending you???
[> For what it's worth - I agree on the FE (Spoilers up to First Date) -- shadowkat, 16:22:11 02/17/03 Mon

Interesting post, aquaman. I finally read it all the way through.

There were parts of it towards the end that uh sort of confused me. But then I missed the whole thread you were referring to. Also I tend to steer clear of interpersonal battles between posters - they seem well somewhat circular and fruitless to me. I'm far more interested in the exchange of ideas - not who's right or wrong. Being human?
It's in our very nature to disagree. And we all watch Buffy for various reasons. Some people to see if B and A reunite, some for ships, some for a specific character, and some for the reasons you mention in your post above. I don't think our reasons define us any more than our actions necessarily do, but they do in a way present to the world outside a picture of who we are and how we relate to that world.

As a side note - I've enjoyed your personal posts, I don't always respond because I don't really have anything good to add. But I did gain something from both your post on Spike's chip and your post on your background.

Enuff on that topic. On to the more interesting stuff.
**************************************************

Your point about the FE being more representative of "evil as act" as opposed to "evil as entity" I've always sort of grokked or believed as true.
Rah several months back mentioned how s/he believed "people aren't evil" so much as "their acts are". There are no evil actors, just evil acts.

But what is the essence of evil, the nature of evil?? Have any of us experienced such a thing? It is my understanding that the nature of evil is, to be as explicit as possible:

***The 'essence' of evil is what we label a non-actual, deduced semantic field, comprised of what our experience or analysis (of evil1, etc...evil 'n'...) concludes is the 'critical attributes' experienced in any and all evil acts***

That is, in the real world, the 'essence' of evil is not an object or entity, though coded as a noun, and it is not capable of any human attributes such as agency, causality, motive, intent, patience (as in direct objecthood), joy, suffering, etc. ad inf.). In BtVS, it always seemed that evil could be so anthropormorphized, to wonderful effects. But then the FE came along, and suddenly Buffyverse evil seems to be representing, in the context of the narrative, something closer to this real-world essential evil.

In RW (Real World), given the conception of essential evil above, what is being perpetrated if we do an evil act or experience evil, and attribute it to evil as entity? People, all the time, say things like, "I was overcome by the impulse", or "The devil got into that boy," etc..[]

Okay this is what I think you are trying to say and what I believe Me is trying to explore this year. Evil and good are conveyed not by who we are but what we do. Evil as an act. (This is assuming of course that I read you correctly.)

In Restless - we get this in Buffy's dream - the First Slayer defines herself by her "acts" - "the lone kill"
"the death cry". Buffy counters - "I am not a killer. I do not sleep on a bed of bones. I live in the world. I breath. I sneeze. And I'll be a fireman when the floods roll back."
My acts as a slayer aren't all that defines me.

This lies at the root of the series. ME is exploring what makes an act evil - what is it about the act that makes it evil and how does that act change or affect the actor.
ME is showing this on both Ats and Btvs actually.
It is also examining how we justify what we do, how we justify our evil acts or another possibly better way of putting this is how we justify acts of violence and deconstruction. Are any violent acts justifiable? What makes a violent or destructive act not evil?

I thought in First Date - Jonathan was an excellent embodiment of an evil act. Andrew's evil act against Jonathan. That's why Jonathan is suave and different than the actual character - he is representative not of Jonathan the character we knew and loved, but rather Andrew's murder of Jonathan and the reasons for that murder. The FE's manifestation as Jonathan - represents Andrews feelings for him and act towards him. The FE can only manifest as the act or emotional response to the act - if the act does not exist - it cannot manifest as the act.

Think about it? In Amends the FE comes to Angel as each of the people Angelus has killed. IT manifests as the act. Not as Jenny - but as Angelus' act against Jenny and the feelings Angelus still has. Also FE does not manifest as Jenny for Giles just for Angel.

In First Date - the FE manifests as Wood's mother - complete in the custom she wore when Spike killed her. Not as Wood's mother but as Spike's act against her and Wood's residual feelings regarding it. FE manifests as Wood's desire to kill whomever killed his mother. It did not manifest to Wood until Wood met a vampire and thought about the act which motivated Wood to embrace a life or a violent hobby. Wood's justification for violent/destructive acts is vengeance for his mother's death. The FE manifests as the
symbol of those acts and justification behind them = Wood's mother and tells Wood what Wood wants to hear - that the vampire reminding him of this - killed his mother. The FE
in First Date represents the evil acts inside Wood. Whether these acts define Wood is up to Wood, but they don't have to be all he's about. They aren't now.

(An aside: Methinks I just stumbled on to your problem communicating this idea. It's such a difficult concept to understand and as Age mentioned a while ago - language is limiting - we can only say so much with words. And what We are trying to describe is almost indescribable. I'm not sure I'm helping or merely confusing people.)

The same thing with FE's manifestations to Spike which are: mostly himself, Buffy, and Dru. When the FE manifests to Spike it manifests as a representation of Spike's evil acts or the justification of those acts. Bitchy Buffy or Wrong Slayer Buffy of Season 6, Evil Spike the Vampire/Slayer Killer of Season 2, Drusilla - his sire who he did evil acts for.

Willow's meeting with FE was supposed to be Tara - because that would be the best manifestation of her evil acts or rather her justification for them. Cassie was a rather weak substitute and may just be used as a representation of Willow's own suicidal wishes?

At any rate - I think as we watch the show this season, if we keep in mind that the FE represents the evil acts of the characters and will from time to time manifest as either the evil act or the justification behind it (Eve in Showtime manifests because she is the justification behind Buffy killing the bringers and being Field Marshall Von Buffy - they are killing potentials, so buffy must kill them, hence FE can manifest as potential EVE, once she is dead.), some things may become clearer. In fact if we follow this formula we may successfully be able to predict what other manifestations the FE will take and why it has not taken some of the forms we wished. Another Example of past manifestations: Warren - represents Andrew's reasons for doing evil. And of course one evil act justifies another one and so on - evil acts tend to by their very nature propagate more acts - sort of like rabbits, no wonder Anya has a fear of rabbits.

****************
FE's power comes from the actions of the people in it's universe. If it weren't for violent and destructive acts - FE wouldn't exist. FE came in being the moment someone hurt someone else. Actually the moment someone thought about hurting someone else and came up with a justification for it. It will exist as long as we do, or rather as long as we can justify violence against others. (Or do violence against others without justification.)

Hence the ultimate catch-22, you can't eradicate "evil" by fighting it on it's terms, ie with acts of violence or destruction. You can only eradicate it by doing the opposite. In the Bible - Jesus tried to get this across with his whole "turn the other cheek" and "kiss your enemy" rhetoric, but no one understood him. It's the whole ends justify the means debate turned on it's ear and considering what is currently going on in the world? What better time to delve into it.

Well, I hope I added to all this and didn't just confuse people further.

SK (whose sick and tired of the snow but enjoying the posts)

PS: a word of advice - I think the concept you are trying to convey is a very difficult one and in your eagerness to get it across you go for overkill. Unfortunately, instead of restating and clarifying your point - you tend to confuse and frustrate your reader. Bad idea. Readers tend to be impatient people who don't want to work too hard to figure stuff out and are easily confused. Confusion leads to buttons being pushed and all sorts of bizarre chaos.
(It takes a long time to finesse this. If it makes you feel any better, I've been writing essays and posting since roughly feb 2002 and I still don't have it down. I've gotten my ego shredded quite a few times - believe me. The last time was this summer. It's never pleasant, but being a writer requires a tough ego, you grin and bear it and move on.)

I sort of lost you somewhere between pages 5-6 of your analysis. I don't understand most of the responses to it above...but then that's just me. I tend to take most things at face value and not read too much into it. I do tend to agree with Darby, TCH and Random on how you can finesse your technique and avoid these type of responses in the future.
[> [> Re: For what it's worth - I agree on the FE (Spoilers up to First Date) -- aqua, 16:38:08 02/17/03 Mon

THANK YOU!!! I LOVE YOU!!!

What you said in the aside above: Yes yes yes!!! It is so very difficult, because we are trying to describe such a high level of abstraction, that deals with the nature of abstractions themselves, and uses so many abstractions...!!

This is why I decided, for one post thread, to take the chance that I might be able to try real hard not to piss anyone off - UGH I failed miserably on a couple accounts, methinks, and that was my original hope, was to make it clear that I had never had ill intent here, and I am sorry if I have given that impression ever - but I thought that if I could use an EXAMPLE, instead of just explaining, and if the example was one we were all sharing, here on a disembodies-voices medium, that either I would find a way to explain the unexplainable, and thereby make my friendly, communicative motives apparent, or else piss everyone off because they think I'm being a troll and attacking them, in which case, as promised, I will apologize and bid you adieu, as a complete failure in my attempt to describe the indescribable.
[> [> [> Re: For what it's worth - I agree on the FE (Spoilers up to First Date) -- Dariel, 18:39:24 02/17/03 Mon

Now, see, I don't think this is that difficult to understand, or all that abstract. From reading your original post, I pretty much got what shadowkat did. (Although some of your formulations were in a language I don't understand. Some tongue known only to linguists, perhaps?) It helps immensely when, as shadowkat did, you support your theory by referring to actual people and events in the Buffyverse. That is the only way you can prove your point, after all.

That said, I think the theory works pretty well as SK describes it, but then breaks down when we get to Eve and Cassie. It's a stretch to say that Eve is a manifestation of some evil of Buffy's, in this case the killing of Bringers and an overmilitaristic stance. Buffy has killed Bringers in self-defense only--how can that be considered evil? I'm a big believer in negotiation, but when nasty people come at you with nasty curved knives--letting them kill you would be an evil. (OT: This by no means implies an endorsement of US policy towards Iraq!)

Also: Willow committed some truly evil acts--the torture/murder of Warren and the attempted murder of 5 or 6 people, most of whom were her friends. Why wasn't Willow's murderous rampage the object of her FE manifestation, rather than her supposed suicidal feelings?
[> [> [> [> Re: For what it's worth - I agree on the FE (Spoilers up to First Date) -- s'kat, 19:07:36 02/17/03 Mon

I think the theory works pretty well as SK describes it, but then breaks down when we get to Eve and Cassie. It's a stretch to say that Eve is a manifestation of some evil of Buffy's, in this case the killing of Bringers and an overmilitaristic stance. Buffy has killed Bringers in self-defense only--how can that be considered evil? I'm a big believer in negotiation, but when nasty people come at you with nasty curved knives--letting them kill you would be an evil.

Yes - so do I. When I hit Eve and Cassie, I had to do backflips with the spackaling and explanation, which means it's possible that we are slightly off or ME is getting a tad too abstract for their own good and risks losing their audience.

EVE - I think represents a manifestation of the Potential Slayer's fears and evil doubts rather than Buffy per se.
EVE may also be interpreted as a representation of well the original sin - doubt in the "all father" idea and quest for knowledge beyond what is being said a la Adam and Eve. (But I sincerely doubt this for many reasons - first ME tells us via Andrew that that analysis is way off, go back to Star Wars. Andrew says how slayers go back to Eve etc and Xander says I'll pay you to talk about Star Wars. So I think it's the whole dark force view of FE manifesting violent acts or negative emotions leading to or justifying violent acts.) Eve crystallizes the potentials doubts, gives voice to them, manifests them. Examples: What's Buffy doing saving a vampire, one who killed people no less? (Eve says to the Potentials) What happens to us if we get chosen?
We die? Why should we stand for this? etc. These lead the potentials to question Buffy...possibly rebel, but FE isn't putting ideas into their heads - all it is doing is drawing them out. It manifests as their worst fear - a dead potential.

Also: Willow committed some truly evil acts--the torture/murder of Warren and the attempted murder of 5 or 6 people, most of whom were her friends. Why wasn't Willow's murderous rampage the object of her FE manifestation, rather than her supposed suicidal feelings?


Cassie similarly manifests as a bundle of Willow's fears.
The emotions that motivate Willow - how she'll never have love, she's a loser, not an amazon, misunderstood. They use Cassie - b/c Cassie like Willow wrote poems on the internet, had a website, was into books, and felt doomed.
Still a stretch. I honestly don't think Cassie was a good choice on ME's part, but hey...maybe I'm missing something.
I agree - I think Tara or Warren would have worked better for Willow than Cassie, but they also would have been more obvious.
[> [> [> [> [> Re: For what it's worth - I agree on the FE (Spoilers up to First Date) -- Dariel, 21:07:07 02/17/03 Mon

Yes--I suppose it works if you see the FE as manifesting evil in its broadest sense. As all of the things that divide us-murderous acts being the worst and most evil, with lack of trust, self-loathing, petty jealousies, etc. being lower on the spectrum of "badness."

Another question I have, though, is how do the Bringers fit into this? They clearly have physical form. I don't think there's anything to indicate that they are a physical manifestation of some other evil. Are they killing Potentials (and Watchers) because, as with the Scoobies and hangers-on, the FE is manifesting their evil thoughts/desires and reflecting them back? Hmm.

On the other hand, maybe the Bringers aren't really the minions here. I believe they were responsible for calling forth the First back in "Amends."

More questions: If the FE has no agency and is just undifferentiated evil, then why are so many different people seeing "it" now? Are they all inside some waking dream together, a dream that was triggered by some imbalance, such as Buffy's resurrection? (Would fit in with Joyce's exhortation to Buffy to "Wake up.") Have they unwittingly turned on the Buffyverse's "self-destruct" sequence (didn't they have one of those in a "Firefly" episode?)


Also, am I making any sense, or is it just past my bedtime?
[> [> [> Re: For what it's worth - I agree on the FE (Spoilers up to First Date) -- s'kat, 19:18:18 02/17/03 Mon

You're welcome.

A bit of advice for what it's worth - if I were you, I'd stop harping on apologies and fears of offending people and just post your philosophical or other ideas on Btvs and Ats. If people don't like them? They'll ignore you. Or debate the topic with you. If they like them and have something to say they'll respond or give you a Kaboom, a wow, or some other wonderful compliment. (Watch out by the way, compliments can become addictive and go to your head)

This is why I decided, for one post thread, to take the chance that I might be able to try real hard not to piss anyone off - UGH I failed miserably on a couple accounts, methinks, and that was my original hope, was to make it clear that I had never had ill intent here, and I am sorry if I have given that impression ever - but I thought that if I could use an EXAMPLE, instead of just explaining, and if the example was one we were all sharing, here on a disembodies-voices medium, that either I would find a way to explain the unexplainable, and thereby make my friendly, communicative motives apparent, or else piss everyone off because they think I'm being a troll and attacking them, in which case, as promised, I will apologize and bid you adieu, as a complete failure in my attempt to describe the indescribable.

For what it's worth - I still have no idea what you said that offended or pissed anyone off, whatever it was went clear over my head. So I read these statements and scratch my head in utter and complete bewilderment. Whatever it was, it didn't offend me - of course that could be because I have no clue what your talking about or anyone else is for that matter. So Stop harping on it, okay?
And instead, start discussing the cool idea you had about the FE - that's what I'm really interested in. ;-)
[> [> On to the more interesting stuff. -- V, 18:05:15 02/17/03 Mon

I write from the perspective of someone with a bit of theater and television production experience, and my thinking on the philosophical aspects of the show is colored by knowledge of some of the limitations of the medium (TV, that is).

I love the idea of evil as a verb, and would like to post a reply with agree agree agree all over it, but my instinct is that Mutant Enemy is unlikely to be pursuing this line because of the limitations of television as a storytelling and philosophical medium. If with all the words at our disposal we still find the concept indescribable (shadowkat: It's such a difficult concept to understand and as Age mentioned a while ago - language is limiting - we can only say so much with words. And what We are trying to describe is almost indescribable. and Aquaman: attempt to describe the indescribable) my mind boggles at how much more difficult it is to present the ideas visually, within the framework of the series.

Well, I should step back a moment. Of course it's possible. But it is not likely to be comprehensible without lots of exposition (or worse! here's-what-they're-thinking voiceovers). And I desperately hope for sheer value of entertainment that it doesn't come to that.

The limitation of TV and stage that constantly frustrates me is the process of translating inner dialog into facial expressions. It's behind much of the "How Does She Really Feel About Him" debate that I enjoy reading here. Facial expressions are terribly subjective, and one actor's sympathy is another's constipated. (Should I label my jokes?)

That limitation is the primary reason that I enjoy reading a book after seeing it's movie adaptation. I get to see "under the covers" and understand so much more about a character's motivations. And, on a side note, that reminds me of one of the very frustrating things about Robert Jordan's recent work - he writes with all the motivational insight that I would get from seeing the story as a film (and I want MORE).

So, if I think about how I would get the idea of evil as verb across to an audience visually, the closest I can get is the idea: evil is within us and is evident in the things we do. And that concept is close to evil-as-verb (not the same, I think) and in line with a few aspects of the Buffyverse as presented so far (discussed in far more insightful posts elsewhere on this board) such as penance, or lack thereof, and forgiveness.

-V is for Veronica


PS: I felt and failed to understand in myself the anxiety that MsGiles describes so well in the post earlier in the thread. My poor attempts at putting my toe in the water with very short posts backfired because, of course, there was no context in which to place me or my words. I hope this helps. :-)
[> [> [> Re: On to the more interesting stuff. -- Sophist, 18:59:47 02/17/03 Mon

Just a thought: the characters to whom the FE has appeared -- Spike, Willow, Andrew -- all have done very serious evil. This makes sense in terms of your theory. Evil manifests itself through evil acts.

The manifestation serves two purposes: it identifies those who have done evil, and it tempts them to further evil:

Angel: I know what's goin' on with you.

Faith: Join the club. Everybody seems to have a theory.

Angel: Hmm. (faces her) But I know what it's like to take a life. To feel a future, a world of possibilities, snuffed out by your own hand. I know the power in it. The exhilaration. It was like a drug for me.

By this theory, the apparition of Joyce to Buffy and Dawn is not the FE. OTOH, we can expect a possible manifestation of the FE to Anya.
[> [> [> [> Re: On to the more interesting stuff. -- s'kat, 19:28:53 02/17/03 Mon

Hmmm - this is my theory as well. I'm thinking that maybe the best way of testing it is to see how the FE manifests next and whether Joyce is a manifestation.

Personally I'm thinking Joyce wasn't. And that your statements on this are correct:

The manifestation serves two purposes: it identifies those who have done evil, and it tempts them to further evil

By this theory, the apparition of Joyce to Buffy and Dawn is not the FE. OTOH, we can expect a possible manifestation of the FE to Anya.

If this is the case - can we expect a reappearance of Hallie for Anya?? Hallie was the one tempting Anya in Doublemeat Palace to distrust Xander (not that she was completely wrong - but hey...) And possibly Ben for Giles.
Buffy really hasn't done anything I would describe as evil per se - so maybe that's why she hasn't really been visited? Same with Xander?

I don't know - I tend to agree with V that this is close to impossible to pull off without confusing the heck out of the audience. But unlike V - I don't put it past Whedon and Company to attempt it. Look at what they attempted to do last year.
[> [> [> [> Re: On to the more interesting stuff. -- John, 21:21:34 02/17/03 Mon

Sophist wrote: Just a thought: the characters to whom the FE has appeared -- Spike, Willow, Andrew -- all have done very serious evil. This makes sense in terms of your theory. Evil manifests itself through evil acts.

But FE, which can choose to appear to some but not all in a scene, such as when Spike was being visited by Spike, but Buffy could not see the FE/spike, did appear to Buffy, first in Amends when it not only appeared as Jenny (it was messing with Angel when Buffy came on the scene) but morphed into a more monstrous appearance. Secondly, it appeared as Eve to Buffy and the potentials. So I don't necessarily think that FE simply appears to those who have done very serious evil.
[> [> Something I understand! -- Sara, 19:20:25 02/17/03 Mon

Ok s'kat you've done it again, in a universe of confusing words and incomprehensible concepts - you come up with the really cool explanation. I love the idea that the First Evil manifestation is of the acts, not the victims. Clarity in this desert of confusion, and since it's shadowkat, definitely not a mirage!

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