Dlgood has been posting about the pessimism of ME in his livejournal, so I've already been thinking about this stuff. And I think that the pessimism of BtVS and AtS comes from an essential bind that Joss has got himself into between his gut moral feelings and his established universe.

It's not just a case of increasing isolation. There's a pattern in both BtVS and AtS where the characters actually reach a maximum level of equilibrium and functionality in themselves, and together as a group, at a certain point, and then spiral down into depression and anomie. In BtVS the point of maximal happiness is roughly the first third of S5, prior to Joyce's illness, before Buffy collapses in the latter two thirds of S5 and everyone else does in S6. In AtS it's probably the first half of S3, before the growing attraction between Gunn and Fred starts splitting the group and Wes makes his disastrous betrayal. In the case of BtVS, it got to the point that a lot of fans simply couldn't buy the attempts at optimism at the end of S6 and again at the end of S7, so bleak had been the majority of the material. In the case of AtS, I sincerely doubt that this season is going to end up with any kind of Norman Rockwell ending, short of some total retcon.

I think that the problem is that Joss is essentially a liberal pacifist who believes that fighting is a bad thing which can only have a corrosive effect on those involved, even if it's entirely necessary. Unfortunately, he set up a worldview on BtVS where demons represent inner psychological demons and the problems of the world, so there can be no clear end to the fight, which he reifies in the series as total and bloody warfare. So his characters are trapped in an eternal violent struggle, which he believes can only have a destructive effect on them.

The ironic thing is that AtS1-3 actually adopted a more optimistic worldview where demons weren't necessarily a symbol of everything that was bad in life, and became rational beings in their own right that didn't necessarily have to be fixed symbols of everything. (And the high point of the AtS characters' functionality in mid-AtS3 actually coincided with the high point of demons as people in their own right.) But that set of ideas in AtS caused too much of a moral problem when fans started applying it to BtVS and arguing that the Scoobies were murderous speciesists, and when Greenwalt left and Joss took over more control in AtS4-5, he gradually shifted the attitude in AtS back to demons as symbols of evil. (Unless the last three eps contradict this theory in a big way, I'll do an essay justifying this reading after 5:22.)

So this is the problem. Joss believes that warfare is a bad thing and can only destroy people unless they move to make peace. But the metaphorical structure of the shows insists that there is no chance to make peace. So the characters are doomed to be consumed by the struggle so that humanity in general can live in peace.

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