Where Does It Go From Here
Jan. 16th, 2012 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperx"Are you serious?"
That was the response I got to a post asking where do people honestly expect Joss to take his current 'plot twist'.
Well, yes, I was serious. I don't think this person quite understood the question that I was asking, but I was serious.
Just to get it out of the way, I don't have some outsized hatred of baby plots. Heck, looking back, I realize that one of the first fanfics I ever wrote was about a baby plot. (It was a X-Files Post-Requiem fanfic, Requiem being the episode where Scully announced that she was pregnant. Since Mulder was kidnapped by 'aliens' at the time and/or presumed dead, I created a plot where Scully investigated a case that had to do with alternate universes, and then she ended up in one... or rather her consciousness did. She found herself in a Scully-life where she had made different choices. Mulder was alive and around in that AU. And he needed her. The tension in the story was that Scully could have Mulder or she could have herbaby pregnancy in the regular verse, but she couldn't have both. {She chose the baby.}) And one of my favorite shows is "Raising Hope".
There's nothing wrong with babies or mothers. But where this plot is concerned, I've got concerns (and not just because of the 'blackout drunk knockup'. Oh, I still have my concerns there as well, but that's not what I'm speaking about in this post.) The question I ponder is about the plot
Pregnancy works relatively easily as a plot. Heck, the trimesters are an arc on their own - a beginning, middle, and end. And there's an obvious visible finish point... or rather a due date. You have a character become pregnant (I'm not going into the nature of this conception in this post, but I think Joss could've done better). You have natural conflict in that she clearly is going to have concerns, confusion, and conflicting desires. Can she even do this, becomes an obstacle. And at some point she will have to make some sort of decision. And we have a natural climax in birth.
But my question was... and then what?
Yeah, yeah, I've heard the answer of "it's about motherhood!" "It's about Buffy accepting motherhood!" "It's about Buffy growing up and being a mother!"
Okay, fine. That's a theme. That's not a plot. I'm asking what is the plot here?
You see the problem with a pregnancy plot is that when it's over, you've got a baby that the story has to deal with. And the problem with infants in stories is that they aren't great plot generators. An infant sleeps a lot, they eat, they smell like baby powder, but they're too young, too helpless, and too dependent (and non-verbal) to actually be a character. And unlike "Raising Hope" you can't even get good reaction shots in an illustrated comic (and it not look rather hopelessly manipulative.)
Infants are not by nature an easy fit for an action/adventure/gothic/horror/genre plot.
Now, excuse me as I digress a bit into observations gleaned from decades of experience in various soap fandoms. It's just...if any medium has more experience with baby plots, I can't think of one.
First off, if one thing is to be noted from soap fandoms, it's that people have very, very short fuses where baby endangerment is concerned. Maybe it's because soaps have a predominantly female audience. And Joss and Dark Horse can hope that comics have a different audience or that it won't be as visceral in cartoon form. But on soaps, there are many things that characters can overcome doing -- rape and murder among them -- the thing that has consistently generated the. most. ire. in every soap fandom I've ever observed, is child endangerment. That shit isn't forgiven. Ever. And it doesn't even have to be deliberate. And sexist and/or gender imbalanced as it may be, fans react worse to a female involved.
Heck, it doesn't even have to be a soap. I've seen some horrendous bashing of Game of Thrones Catelyn Stark for her not having returned immediately to her sons Bran and Rickon at Winterfell...even though her own father was dying (in the books), she was in the middle of a war, and (she believed) both her underage daughters were hostages of the enemy (only one actually was, though both were/are in danger), while on the other hand she quite rationally believed that her sons were safe at their holdfast with a ton of 100% loyal knights and servants caring for the boys at the fortress. So saying "hire daycare' doesn't actually work as great cover for some of the audience. Even less if the mother is single and knowingly placing herself in mortal danger on a regular basis. I'm not saying it's 'fair.' I'm just noting what reactions have tended to pop up over time. And if the infant is endangered in the process... whoo-boy. Fandom can get very upset (and angry).
Maybe it's hardwired into the human race, but babies in danger doesn't play well with an audience for long before generating fan resentment of both the storyteller and the characters. If Buffy is stuck with a baby and it's regularly endangered (as of course it would be) it's very small hop, skip, and jump to people pointing fingers about reckless endangerment and neglect.
There's actually a reason the soap trope "SORAS" (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome ) exists. It's because if any medium has discovered that there aren't many places to go with a very small child, it's soap operas. You've got the standard kidnapping, dangerous illness, and custody case plot and... well....once those have been cycled through it's off to the attic until they're a sullen teen, because, again, audiences don't tolerate the repeated endangerment of small children. It's repulsive.
There's a reason why most small children in plots are in comedies or romances. People don't like to contemplate tiny tots in danger. It's short fuse then boom.
So where do you go?
I find myself thinking of the Requiem situation with Dana Scully and the short sad story of little William Mulder.
The poor tyke was conceived because Chris Carter thought Requiem was the final episode of the series. Only it wasn't. So then he had to deal with an actual kid in the story, and... he tried. But it became untenable, and little William Mulder was eventually shipped off to an adoptive home (which I still resent on Scully's* behalf to this day!) But from an action/adventure/mystery/aliens format... I sort of understood how they reached that point. {*And Dr. Dana Scully was about a bazillion times more prepared for single motherhood than Buffy Summers is. She had her own home, a savings account, a good job as an instructor at the FBI Academy... and health insurance.}
Chris Carter tried to handle Scully's situation somewhat logically. He had Scully take a job as an instructor at the FBI academy. Problem was... it effectively sidelined Scully. And unlike the baby, Scully was a freaking star of the show. Something had to be done to place her back in the action. The tension of "you can't repeatedly endanger the baby" without pissing off the audience combined with the necessity of having Scully in the action and thus regularly endangered, ended up arriving at the truly tragic (for SCULLY!) outcome of her having to allow someone else to raise her child. (My heart still breaks for her. Oh Scully...)
Is this the fate we would wish on Buffy? Really? I still don't like it.
And I know people like to trot out Sarah Connor as poster child for action-adventure mom, but can we at least note that what we got was a single shot of Sarah while pregnant. Then we got John Connor as a sullen teen... in every incarnation! Have you ever seen a fill-in-the-gap reboot? Not even in a franchise that's been rebooted several times? Do we think that the failure to fill-in that gap is just 'one of those things' or because it presents significant story challenges? Because, again, there isn't much to be done storywise (or much that an audience will tolerate being done) to an infant and/or toddler.
So, I'm back to the question, where exactly are people expecting this plot to go? Especially those who are insisting that all will be perfectly 'normal' (Really? In a genre comic called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"?). That the purpose of this is some amorphous "it's about motherhood!" "it's about growing up by becoming a mother!"
Okay, again, that's the theme. But realistically, what plot are we talking about here? What plot can we reasonably expect Joss "love the pain" Whedon to pursue?
An infant is not in fact a plot.
In fact the reality of infants -- what they need -- is quite inconvenient to the requirements of a genre/action/gothic/horror plot. This is why I think Joss Whedon opted for Baby Plot #1 - "Kidnapping!" and Baby Plot #4 - "SORAS!" with Connor, because Mutant Enemy recognized very quickly that it's darn difficult to tell a genre/action/horror plot with an infant. It's not impossible. It takes a lot of effort. It's a challenge, and an even greater challenge in a serial format where it's not simply one plot but a constant cycle of them.
And, no, the little darlings really don't store on the back in a rucksack while the hero dashes into fight after fight. And no, a single parent can't continue dashing straight into the jaws of mortal danger into fight after fight after fight, when they are the sole parent of. an. infant and when there is any available alternative (such as a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 10th alternative Slayer... or the odd vampire with a soul). It would begin to appear to be feckless if it happens too regularly. Again the serial nature of the format begins to be a hurdle.
And it's not going to change much because small children need stability and security and... these are antithetical to the needs of plot...which are conflict and movement. It's not impossible but it's not easy. And it's particularly challenging in serials. This is why after cycling through the kidnapping/illness/ custody fight tropes, soap kids get stuffed in the attic and SORASed.
Babies work fine in something like a situation comedy. Situation comedies have a certain stability. It's a situation comedy after all. And you don't have that pesky "serial endangerment of the infant."
On Modern Family, a big deal would be baby Lily with gum in her hair. And on "Raising Hope" the conflicts are things as tiny as "Hope has a cold!" or "Hope bit a kid at daycare!" There's the security of "well, the Chances (or the Pritchetts) are wacky... but not a damn thing will happen to that baby. It's safe."
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" cannot exist storywise as 'safe' and, honestly, does anyone anywhere think that Joss wants it to?!
So what's he going to do with a 'normal' baby (if it even is a 'normal' baby)? How will Joss Whedon -- of all people -- handle a story of motherhood?
Is this not the guy who had Darla stake herself to give birth?
Who had Cordelia possessed and rendered brain dead?
Who had Buffy jump off a tower for her sister/daughter Dawn?
Is this or is this not the guy who takes every happy moment, rips it bleeding from your chest and stomps on it right before your eyes?
So saying 'it's about motherhood' or 'growing up' isn't an answer. Every Buffy story is supposedly about growing up. I'm asking what's that plot, under Whedon, going to look like.
Possibilities? If it's a negative, expect yet one more refrain of the song of Cordelia "body is hijacked and it destroys mom!" Or remember Darla "It's about sacrifice" or Buffy off a tower "It's about sacrifice" or even the line used in this issue about loving something means letting it go.
What are the odds of Joss going the long haul with a perfectly ordinary child, and with Buffy trying to raise an ordinary infant. How does he do that without sidelining Buffy from the action, because he cannot permanently sideline Buffy from the action because the series is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
So how does he keep her in the action and not court the 'reckless endangerment" and/or neglected baby in the attic syndrome (because the Xander/Dawn or nanny situation actually won't cover a single parent going out and endangering herself nightly.) How many times is the superhero story about the villain seeking to hurt the superhero through who they love. A Buffy baby is begging for a hostage of fortune. So how does Joss do that and not incur backlash. People tend to take baby endangerment seriously... even in soap operas where diamonds freeze the world and people's brains are erased with curling irons.
So yeah, Buffy may be learning about 'motherhood' through this plot, but that hardly rules out the possibility of mystical pregnancy (good or ill, it would get the baby out of the way. Who knows, maybe she's carrying River Song). Or we could see Connor Part II (which now that I think about it... is an earlier incarnation of River Song). Or it could be the woeful sad tale of little William Mulder. What I don't think is that this will end with an single mom struggling to raise an ordinary 'normal' baby so that everyone has their warm, squishy bright spot of normal in the story.
Because while it may be possible to write a baby story in an action plot (and it not be the ending point of the story See: D'Argo Crichton for 'baby as happy ending' to an action story) , do I honestly have a great deal of faith that something that delicate can be told by the crew that cannot even manage to stage a conception without raising tasteless questions (I mean, say what you will about babies in action, but I'm looking around and while Farscape left paternity in question for a while, they managed to do so without a hint of even the possibility of dubcon. And while William Mulder was conceived off screen, again it came without blowing enough smoke that it left fans debating dubcon.) Dark Horse and Joss didn't manage to even do that. Because it had to be more angsty (as if a surprise pregnancy for an unmarried, broke, overwhelmed, soon to be homeless woman who is running from the police and hated by many of her former associates wasn't enough to make it angsty.)
With Joss being Joss, why do people think this is going to end in Buffy attending 'Mommy and me' classes and constructing cribs and mobiles? 'Cause if we're giving odds on outcomes, that one is far, far lower on the list of Joss-likely outcomes than other more tragic, more angsty, more mystical, more supernatural, or more twisted than that.
That was the response I got to a post asking where do people honestly expect Joss to take his current 'plot twist'.
Well, yes, I was serious. I don't think this person quite understood the question that I was asking, but I was serious.
Just to get it out of the way, I don't have some outsized hatred of baby plots. Heck, looking back, I realize that one of the first fanfics I ever wrote was about a baby plot. (It was a X-Files Post-Requiem fanfic, Requiem being the episode where Scully announced that she was pregnant. Since Mulder was kidnapped by 'aliens' at the time and/or presumed dead, I created a plot where Scully investigated a case that had to do with alternate universes, and then she ended up in one... or rather her consciousness did. She found herself in a Scully-life where she had made different choices. Mulder was alive and around in that AU. And he needed her. The tension in the story was that Scully could have Mulder or she could have her
There's nothing wrong with babies or mothers. But where this plot is concerned, I've got concerns (and not just because of the 'blackout drunk knockup'. Oh, I still have my concerns there as well, but that's not what I'm speaking about in this post.) The question I ponder is about the plot
Every story is about a character pursuing some compelling desire. TV, movies, and visual media must do this on a visible level -- a visible desire with visible obstacles. A character in film must pursue some visible objective that has a finish point that we can imagine... ~ Michael Hague
Pregnancy works relatively easily as a plot. Heck, the trimesters are an arc on their own - a beginning, middle, and end. And there's an obvious visible finish point... or rather a due date. You have a character become pregnant (I'm not going into the nature of this conception in this post, but I think Joss could've done better). You have natural conflict in that she clearly is going to have concerns, confusion, and conflicting desires. Can she even do this, becomes an obstacle. And at some point she will have to make some sort of decision. And we have a natural climax in birth.
But my question was... and then what?
Yeah, yeah, I've heard the answer of "it's about motherhood!" "It's about Buffy accepting motherhood!" "It's about Buffy growing up and being a mother!"
Okay, fine. That's a theme. That's not a plot. I'm asking what is the plot here?
You see the problem with a pregnancy plot is that when it's over, you've got a baby that the story has to deal with. And the problem with infants in stories is that they aren't great plot generators. An infant sleeps a lot, they eat, they smell like baby powder, but they're too young, too helpless, and too dependent (and non-verbal) to actually be a character. And unlike "Raising Hope" you can't even get good reaction shots in an illustrated comic (and it not look rather hopelessly manipulative.)
Infants are not by nature an easy fit for an action/adventure/gothic/horror/genre plot.
Now, excuse me as I digress a bit into observations gleaned from decades of experience in various soap fandoms. It's just...if any medium has more experience with baby plots, I can't think of one.
First off, if one thing is to be noted from soap fandoms, it's that people have very, very short fuses where baby endangerment is concerned. Maybe it's because soaps have a predominantly female audience. And Joss and Dark Horse can hope that comics have a different audience or that it won't be as visceral in cartoon form. But on soaps, there are many things that characters can overcome doing -- rape and murder among them -- the thing that has consistently generated the. most. ire. in every soap fandom I've ever observed, is child endangerment. That shit isn't forgiven. Ever. And it doesn't even have to be deliberate. And sexist and/or gender imbalanced as it may be, fans react worse to a female involved.
Heck, it doesn't even have to be a soap. I've seen some horrendous bashing of Game of Thrones Catelyn Stark for her not having returned immediately to her sons Bran and Rickon at Winterfell...even though her own father was dying (in the books), she was in the middle of a war, and (she believed) both her underage daughters were hostages of the enemy (only one actually was, though both were/are in danger), while on the other hand she quite rationally believed that her sons were safe at their holdfast with a ton of 100% loyal knights and servants caring for the boys at the fortress. So saying "hire daycare' doesn't actually work as great cover for some of the audience. Even less if the mother is single and knowingly placing herself in mortal danger on a regular basis. I'm not saying it's 'fair.' I'm just noting what reactions have tended to pop up over time. And if the infant is endangered in the process... whoo-boy. Fandom can get very upset (and angry).
Maybe it's hardwired into the human race, but babies in danger doesn't play well with an audience for long before generating fan resentment of both the storyteller and the characters. If Buffy is stuck with a baby and it's regularly endangered (as of course it would be) it's very small hop, skip, and jump to people pointing fingers about reckless endangerment and neglect.
There's actually a reason the soap trope "SORAS" (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome ) exists. It's because if any medium has discovered that there aren't many places to go with a very small child, it's soap operas. You've got the standard kidnapping, dangerous illness, and custody case plot and... well....once those have been cycled through it's off to the attic until they're a sullen teen, because, again, audiences don't tolerate the repeated endangerment of small children. It's repulsive.
There's a reason why most small children in plots are in comedies or romances. People don't like to contemplate tiny tots in danger. It's short fuse then boom.
So where do you go?
I find myself thinking of the Requiem situation with Dana Scully and the short sad story of little William Mulder.
The poor tyke was conceived because Chris Carter thought Requiem was the final episode of the series. Only it wasn't. So then he had to deal with an actual kid in the story, and... he tried. But it became untenable, and little William Mulder was eventually shipped off to an adoptive home (which I still resent on Scully's* behalf to this day!) But from an action/adventure/mystery/aliens format... I sort of understood how they reached that point. {*And Dr. Dana Scully was about a bazillion times more prepared for single motherhood than Buffy Summers is. She had her own home, a savings account, a good job as an instructor at the FBI Academy... and health insurance.}
Chris Carter tried to handle Scully's situation somewhat logically. He had Scully take a job as an instructor at the FBI academy. Problem was... it effectively sidelined Scully. And unlike the baby, Scully was a freaking star of the show. Something had to be done to place her back in the action. The tension of "you can't repeatedly endanger the baby" without pissing off the audience combined with the necessity of having Scully in the action and thus regularly endangered, ended up arriving at the truly tragic (for SCULLY!) outcome of her having to allow someone else to raise her child. (My heart still breaks for her. Oh Scully...)
Is this the fate we would wish on Buffy? Really? I still don't like it.
And I know people like to trot out Sarah Connor as poster child for action-adventure mom, but can we at least note that what we got was a single shot of Sarah while pregnant. Then we got John Connor as a sullen teen... in every incarnation! Have you ever seen a fill-in-the-gap reboot? Not even in a franchise that's been rebooted several times? Do we think that the failure to fill-in that gap is just 'one of those things' or because it presents significant story challenges? Because, again, there isn't much to be done storywise (or much that an audience will tolerate being done) to an infant and/or toddler.
"Your hero must pursue some outer motivation. In other words, your hero must pursue some visible goal that has a clearly implied end point. It cannot be just a desire to be in a certain situation. It cannot be a desire for some inner quality like love or revenge or success or acceptance. It must be something we can see on screen that the hero actively pursues. In Raiders of the Lost Arc we see him pursue the arc and when he discovers it. And we see the serial killer she's trying to stop in Silence of the Lambs. It's visible to the viewer. It's not the only or the most important aspect of a script, but it is the one most likely to be missing in unsuccessful screenplays. This is the number one reason why most scripts are rejected. ~ Michael Hauge
So, I'm back to the question, where exactly are people expecting this plot to go? Especially those who are insisting that all will be perfectly 'normal' (Really? In a genre comic called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"?). That the purpose of this is some amorphous "it's about motherhood!" "it's about growing up by becoming a mother!"
Okay, again, that's the theme. But realistically, what plot are we talking about here? What plot can we reasonably expect Joss "love the pain" Whedon to pursue?
An infant is not in fact a plot.
In fact the reality of infants -- what they need -- is quite inconvenient to the requirements of a genre/action/gothic/horror plot. This is why I think Joss Whedon opted for Baby Plot #1 - "Kidnapping!" and Baby Plot #4 - "SORAS!" with Connor, because Mutant Enemy recognized very quickly that it's darn difficult to tell a genre/action/horror plot with an infant. It's not impossible. It takes a lot of effort. It's a challenge, and an even greater challenge in a serial format where it's not simply one plot but a constant cycle of them.
And, no, the little darlings really don't store on the back in a rucksack while the hero dashes into fight after fight. And no, a single parent can't continue dashing straight into the jaws of mortal danger into fight after fight after fight, when they are the sole parent of. an. infant and when there is any available alternative (such as a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 10th alternative Slayer... or the odd vampire with a soul). It would begin to appear to be feckless if it happens too regularly. Again the serial nature of the format begins to be a hurdle.
And it's not going to change much because small children need stability and security and... these are antithetical to the needs of plot...which are conflict and movement. It's not impossible but it's not easy. And it's particularly challenging in serials. This is why after cycling through the kidnapping/illness/ custody fight tropes, soap kids get stuffed in the attic and SORASed.
Babies work fine in something like a situation comedy. Situation comedies have a certain stability. It's a situation comedy after all. And you don't have that pesky "serial endangerment of the infant."
On Modern Family, a big deal would be baby Lily with gum in her hair. And on "Raising Hope" the conflicts are things as tiny as "Hope has a cold!" or "Hope bit a kid at daycare!" There's the security of "well, the Chances (or the Pritchetts) are wacky... but not a damn thing will happen to that baby. It's safe."
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" cannot exist storywise as 'safe' and, honestly, does anyone anywhere think that Joss wants it to?!
So what's he going to do with a 'normal' baby (if it even is a 'normal' baby)? How will Joss Whedon -- of all people -- handle a story of motherhood?
Is this not the guy who had Darla stake herself to give birth?
Who had Cordelia possessed and rendered brain dead?
Who had Buffy jump off a tower for her sister/daughter Dawn?
Is this or is this not the guy who takes every happy moment, rips it bleeding from your chest and stomps on it right before your eyes?
There is an absolute critical rule when it comes to developing growth for your character, when it comes to developing theme in your script, and that is that you can never let the deeper levels of meaning interfere with the story. That is the mistake many writers make. You want so desperately to say something deep, meaningful, symbolic, and universal that you lose sight of your job. And that job is storyteller. The deeper meaning grows out of the plot, it does not supplant it. It does not substitute for it.
I know you're thinking 'That Michael Hauge. He's an anal retentive structuralist and I don't want that.' But let me give a really strong admonition. Stories exist first and foremost on the level of plot. Yes, we go deeper. Yes, we develop character, theme, and meaning. But none of that can happen without the visible journey taking place. The deeper levels grow out of that visible plot. The plot is first and foremost what is going to generate interest and emotion in the reader.
This is a very difficult thing to internalize and accept.
The reason it's difficult is because it's not why we go to the movies, watch TV shows, or read a book. And, most of the time, it's not why we write. You see, I know what you want. You want to write stories that not only touch people but touch them deeply, say something about the human condition, reveal something important to you (...) when you finish a movie or book you talk about the characters, you talk about the originality, you talk about the depth. And since that's what we talk about and that's what we strive for, the difficulty is to avoid going there first, meaning thinking that you can skip over the level of plot and structure and just get into character. It does not work. (I say that as an absolute, but certainly there are exceptions. However, they are rare.) By and large you have to make something happen before you change the reader's lives. Once you have your plot, then you can go deeper. And that is what we strive to do...~Michael Hauge
So saying 'it's about motherhood' or 'growing up' isn't an answer. Every Buffy story is supposedly about growing up. I'm asking what's that plot, under Whedon, going to look like.
Possibilities? If it's a negative, expect yet one more refrain of the song of Cordelia "body is hijacked and it destroys mom!" Or remember Darla "It's about sacrifice" or Buffy off a tower "It's about sacrifice" or even the line used in this issue about loving something means letting it go.
What are the odds of Joss going the long haul with a perfectly ordinary child, and with Buffy trying to raise an ordinary infant. How does he do that without sidelining Buffy from the action, because he cannot permanently sideline Buffy from the action because the series is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
So how does he keep her in the action and not court the 'reckless endangerment" and/or neglected baby in the attic syndrome (because the Xander/Dawn or nanny situation actually won't cover a single parent going out and endangering herself nightly.) How many times is the superhero story about the villain seeking to hurt the superhero through who they love. A Buffy baby is begging for a hostage of fortune. So how does Joss do that and not incur backlash. People tend to take baby endangerment seriously... even in soap operas where diamonds freeze the world and people's brains are erased with curling irons.
So yeah, Buffy may be learning about 'motherhood' through this plot, but that hardly rules out the possibility of mystical pregnancy (good or ill, it would get the baby out of the way. Who knows, maybe she's carrying River Song). Or we could see Connor Part II (which now that I think about it... is an earlier incarnation of River Song). Or it could be the woeful sad tale of little William Mulder. What I don't think is that this will end with an single mom struggling to raise an ordinary 'normal' baby so that everyone has their warm, squishy bright spot of normal in the story.
Because while it may be possible to write a baby story in an action plot (and it not be the ending point of the story See: D'Argo Crichton for 'baby as happy ending' to an action story) , do I honestly have a great deal of faith that something that delicate can be told by the crew that cannot even manage to stage a conception without raising tasteless questions (I mean, say what you will about babies in action, but I'm looking around and while Farscape left paternity in question for a while, they managed to do so without a hint of even the possibility of dubcon. And while William Mulder was conceived off screen, again it came without blowing enough smoke that it left fans debating dubcon.) Dark Horse and Joss didn't manage to even do that. Because it had to be more angsty (as if a surprise pregnancy for an unmarried, broke, overwhelmed, soon to be homeless woman who is running from the police and hated by many of her former associates wasn't enough to make it angsty.)
With Joss being Joss, why do people think this is going to end in Buffy attending 'Mommy and me' classes and constructing cribs and mobiles? 'Cause if we're giving odds on outcomes, that one is far, far lower on the list of Joss-likely outcomes than other more tragic, more angsty, more mystical, more supernatural, or more twisted than that.
