Thoughts on Buffy and Other Heroines
May. 21st, 2010 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxI find Buffy to be an interesting character. I find her quite interesting to write. She's interesting because she's flawed. She's got her fair share of strengths, she has a shit-load of events to deal with, and... she's got her blind spots and weaknesses. Negotiating all of those facets is what makes her interesting and it's what makes her fun to dig into. However, Buffy within the show and Buffy within the comics isn't generally the character I most identify with (which often makes it curious that when I write, I most often write from her POV. Go figure. Maybe it's my urge to figure her out that causes this.)
One of the things I think inescapably effects my view of Buffy is the age difference. I was older than Buffy when the show was on. Had I been closer to her age, I think it would have made it easier to identify with her. As it was, when Buffy was in High School I was finishing my senior (univeristy)thesis and starting my internship. When she was in college, I was studying to pass my registration exams.
In some ways, being older than the character probably softened my response to certain incidents in the story. I remember when Buffy slept with Parker. I had sort of a big sister-ish "Oh, Buffy..." moment. It was possible to see the mistake she was making from a mile away, but so real and common a mistake that I only had sympathy for her. I wasn't in the Buffy online fandom in thoe days but I'm willing to bet she took a fandom beating over that, especially from Bangels which, at that time I kind of was (I liked the Bangel pairing and there really hadn't been a viable alternative presented by that point in the story.) But the prototypical college mistake was so sadly familiar that I only had sorrow for what happened to Buffy.
However, I think being older than Buffy also made me have slightly different reactions to other things than I would have had I been her own age. I remember in Becoming feeling quite sorry... for Joyce. I know we were supposed to feel terrible about Buffy and Joyce not "understanding", but I was also feeling quite sorry for Joyce and the fact that her daughter was keeping her out of her life. Had I been in Buffy's age bracket, I don't know that I would have thought much about Joyce's end of that equation. And that continued the next season when knowing that Buffy had run away. I felt really bad... for Joyce.
One thing that I think is a result of being in a different age bracket from the character is that I have never had a "What Would Buffy Do?" moment. I actually have a hard time wrapping my mind around having a "What would Buffy do?" moment. Age, I think factors rather heavily into that.
When I think of the heroines that inspire me in "I wish I could be more like that..." way, they tend to be the ones whose competence and maturity I only wished that I possessed. I'm mumbledy-mumble years old and I still want to be Dana Scully when I grow up.
Here was Scully, in a male-dominated field, calmly telling Mulder that she'd majored in physics and that her thesis had been analyzing Einstein's Twin Paradox.
I thought, damn girl! That's impressive! It made me feel like a wuss for my own thesis being the far more mundane and less taxing thesis that pre-WWII housing/city planning presented a more livable model for 21st Century urban planning than the Utopian principles in 20th Century Modernism.
I loved Scully for not being intimidated by her bosses. I wanted to be her. I wanted to be that accomplished and that composed. I wanted to be that commanding.
On the other hand when Season 2 BtVS had Buffy say "Waaah! Math Hard." I was thinking' "Way to go, writers" [/sarcasm] (I didn't know who Joss Whedon was then. I was quite the casual fan of the show at that point in time). "Way to reinforce the stereotype for young girls that women aren't good at math and science... or at least shouldn't be" Because, Buffy was the hot girl with guys drooling over her and Willow was the stammering nerd. Had I been in high school myself, I don't know that I would have had those thoughts. But, coming from someone who had just spent years of study in a highly male-dominated major that involved many engineering/building science classes (in which quite often I was the only female), I was actually bothered by the scene -- perhaps irrationally so. And, honestly, it's a scene that continues to stick out in my memory as an irritation. (It's also probably part of the reason why, in those days, I preferred Willow.)
Similarly, one of the things that made me an Aeryn Sun fangirl was a scene way back in Season 1, Farscape. Aeryn was a soldier and a pilot. Heck, let's face it. Aeryn was kind of a jock in many senses. But there was this scene early in Season 1 where she was going over engineering manuals or something. Crichton questioned her, and she protested that she might be a soldier, but she could learn and wanted to learn more. I loved her for that intellectual curiosity, and for embracing the idea that her job wasn't all that she was. And that though she was a grown woman, she could still learn. Of course, I loved that she was an action hero too. I rather love the scene in P.K. Tech Girl where Crichton and Galina (? sadly I've forgotten the P.K. Tech Girl's name after all these years) anyway Crichton and girl who was heroic in her own right but was never 1/10th as awesome as Aeryn were trapped by the weird fire-breathing alien, and Aeryn swung in like some Schwarzenegger-like action hero saving the day. That was awesome.
But I really loved her for her insistence that she could change and learn. She could become someone more expansive.
I think I may have loved her best in her flashback episode The Way We Weren't when she flashbacked to the lover she betrayed to the Peacekeepsers so that she'd get her promotion in rank, followed by the "present" where she went to Pilot -- after he had realized she was one of the ones who had enslaved him. He flipped, saying "You want a chance to tell me how non-violent you are now? Or what? You’ll blast me into pieces like you did the Pilot who used to sit here?"
And she countered with, "Based on my actions back then, I deserve to die. And if you wish to kill me, I’m not going to stop you. But please, spare the others... and yourself."
With her confessing that back in the day when she'd been in the group that had enslaved him she hadn't understood why her then-lover had shown compassion for the captured Pilot.
She admitted, "Velorek stroked your cheek like this to calm you. Back then, I couldn’t fathom why he would do a thing like that. Now, I couldn’t fathom not doing it. We’ve come a long way since then. And we’ve still got a long way to go." Asking him to not kill himself or...well... her. She said, "Take the journey with me."
I loved Aeryn's ability to grow and change. Her ability to recognize and rise above the prejudices she'd been taught by her upbringing. Her world had been upended. She's lost everything -- her home, her career, her privileged role in that fascist galaxy. Her entire world view. She opened her eyes and saw the wrongs of not only her own past but that of her entire culture -- and she learned to embrace change. Changing herself and the wholesale change of her life.
That's bravery.
Conversely, I always had some problems with Buffy's post-high school career (can it be called that?)
Buffy's dropping out of college didn't bother me. It was rather necessary (what with dying after having been on the run and all). But I remember there came a point in Season 6 where it was mentioned that she'd missed the deadline to sign up for the winter/spring semester of classes. That bothered me. It wasn't that she couldn't pay for it because, money problems aside, she'd never so much as tried. She'd never explored student loans, scholarships, Pell Grants, or deadlines for turning in...well... anything. But, okay, she was pretty suicidally depressed in Season 6. But she didn't try in Season 7 either. She somehow landed a job that she wasn't actually qualified for and never thought about returning to school. And, if we're to take the comics as any sort of continuation, she never has at any point since... and it looks like she never will.
And... okay.
So Buffy isn't interested in a degree. She doesn't want to return to school. I guess I can understand that, except that sometimes if feels like Whedon likes to push Buffy backwards. I remember the heart-sinking moment in Season 7's "Selfless" where Buffy pulls the Angel card and said, "I loved him more than I will ever love anything in this life." (Bolded to highlight). I remember thinking, oh dear god, that's sad. Not sad as in "Oh, what a tragic romance," but sad as in OMG, this is a 22 year old woman who believes that her life peeked when she was seventeen years old! She honestly thinks that nothing in her future can match what she had when she was seventeen!!.
It's why I balk in Buffy turning hyper-girlie when talking to Angel in "Chosen." It's like she's suddenly seventeen again. It's why the comics annoy me. It's as though Joss wants all the characters emotionally at some teenaged point in their development -- permanently.
It's partly why the fetishizing the core four motif is problematic for me sometimes. Bonding with their peers, having peers become very important is a normal part of development for an adolescent. It's part of growing up, to stop being our parent's child. But... but... cliched as it is to say, high school friends do tend grow apart. There's a transition from teens to adulthood where the adult life differs from the teen social circle.
When I talk about age difference perhaps being an obstacle in my identifying really strongly with Buffy this is part of it. In college, most of us see how many, many friendships change with time. I had friends I'd had from kindergarten into college... and I'm still friends. But it's different. It's, let's face it, distant. We all got lives, jobs, families, careers, homes -- lives change and they all change differently. And my best friend from kindergarten through college (for two years, she was my roomate) is on my Christmas call list... but the truth is, we don't have much in common any more except the past. That is also a natural process of growing up and becoming a full-fledged adult. It's allowing our friends to have their lives and ourselves to have ours and not trying to force it into some mould in order to preserve an outgrown paradigm.
...but by the end of the series, the core 4-ing was becoming almost a way for the core 4 to wall out any newcomers (even if they weren't so new). No one can be as important to them as they are to each other (or if they are... they're gonna have to die... as all the love interests did... except Kennedy, I suppose. But then, Kennedy hardly matters. She wasn't much developed as a character and thus in no way a threat to the essential Buffy/Xander/Willow unbreakable bond). It's almost a version of "bros before hos" which... well... there does come a day where buddies don't outweigh life partners. If Xander was marrying Anya, Anya should come before 'bros'. But in the Whedonverse, it really all has to return to the core friends (heck, at this point Giles has been half-ousted) It sometimes feels like Joss et al are trying to maintain the paradigm no matter what.
I tend to have the feeling that Whedon has Buffy in running in circles, if not in stasis. There's some developmental hold-up. It may be because that's when Whendon feels that he had the best feel for Buffy. It may be that there's something in that stage of life that he really, really likes to explore or hold onto. But for myself, as a viewer/reader, I find this storytelling cycle of always returning to a default state somewhat vaguely like when she was seventeen to be an obstacle for my connecting to canonical Buffy as she's supposed to move into adulthood. Rather than going forward, it often feels like she's looking back and trying to recapture. Trying to recapture the doomed teen romance, trying to recapture the way they were friends when they were kids, trying to maintain the relationships as mostly being exactly that way. Maybe it's part and parcel of Joss's love of the girl-woman-waif (frequently with superpowers). That motif shows up again and again in his work even outside Buffy/Angel. He likes that girl-woman-waif.
It's just... the Buffy I wanted was one who's allowed to grow up, one who pushes beyond high school, one who realizes that life didn't reach its zenith when she was seventeen.
It's one of the reasons I don't think "What would Buffy do?" It's why Buffy is a really, really interesting character to write, to ponder, to wrangle-with, and to analyze but it's why, for all of that-- for all her good points, her strengths, her flaws, for all that makes her a complex, interesting character to deal with--it's why she's not an aspirational figure for me. Buffy is a character I love to explore, but she's always a character I want to push forward.
I loved Scully for having nothing but her training and her competence to bravely walk into dark tunnels to confront monsters, carrying only her gun and/or flashlight. True, it took her a damn long time to embrace some truths (but I always sympathized with her insistence on logic. I tend to like to force things into logic as well, so for all that she had to embrace some crazy stuff and many were frustrated by her reluctance to embrace the crazy, in this regard the characters recalcitrance matched my own. I kept wishing Scully would be allowed to right more often. I loved her belligerence in insisting that things should make sense. I'm not saying it's fair. It's just that sometimes we share characters' biases, and I tended to share Scully's bias that things should make sense. :)
I loved Aeryn for accepting the total loss of all that she had known and choosing to build a better life -- a more humane one -- and not mourn the life she lost, or at least try not to. To try not to paint over the dark spots with nostalgia.
And Buffy in fanfic can also go forward and grow... but at some point, I got the feeling that Joss's Buffy would never really push through to the other side of adolescence. Part of his Buffy will forever young and forever trapped dealing with things that happened rather early on in the run of the show. I suspect he prefers it that way. But it's often why she's a heroine that I've never identified with (pitied, sympathized with, frustrated by -- yes. But I still find myself always rooting for her to grow.)
One of the things I think inescapably effects my view of Buffy is the age difference. I was older than Buffy when the show was on. Had I been closer to her age, I think it would have made it easier to identify with her. As it was, when Buffy was in High School I was finishing my senior (univeristy)thesis and starting my internship. When she was in college, I was studying to pass my registration exams.
In some ways, being older than the character probably softened my response to certain incidents in the story. I remember when Buffy slept with Parker. I had sort of a big sister-ish "Oh, Buffy..." moment. It was possible to see the mistake she was making from a mile away, but so real and common a mistake that I only had sympathy for her. I wasn't in the Buffy online fandom in thoe days but I'm willing to bet she took a fandom beating over that, especially from Bangels which, at that time I kind of was (I liked the Bangel pairing and there really hadn't been a viable alternative presented by that point in the story.) But the prototypical college mistake was so sadly familiar that I only had sorrow for what happened to Buffy.
However, I think being older than Buffy also made me have slightly different reactions to other things than I would have had I been her own age. I remember in Becoming feeling quite sorry... for Joyce. I know we were supposed to feel terrible about Buffy and Joyce not "understanding", but I was also feeling quite sorry for Joyce and the fact that her daughter was keeping her out of her life. Had I been in Buffy's age bracket, I don't know that I would have thought much about Joyce's end of that equation. And that continued the next season when knowing that Buffy had run away. I felt really bad... for Joyce.
One thing that I think is a result of being in a different age bracket from the character is that I have never had a "What Would Buffy Do?" moment. I actually have a hard time wrapping my mind around having a "What would Buffy do?" moment. Age, I think factors rather heavily into that.
When I think of the heroines that inspire me in "I wish I could be more like that..." way, they tend to be the ones whose competence and maturity I only wished that I possessed. I'm mumbledy-mumble years old and I still want to be Dana Scully when I grow up.
Here was Scully, in a male-dominated field, calmly telling Mulder that she'd majored in physics and that her thesis had been analyzing Einstein's Twin Paradox.
I thought, damn girl! That's impressive! It made me feel like a wuss for my own thesis being the far more mundane and less taxing thesis that pre-WWII housing/city planning presented a more livable model for 21st Century urban planning than the Utopian principles in 20th Century Modernism.
I loved Scully for not being intimidated by her bosses. I wanted to be her. I wanted to be that accomplished and that composed. I wanted to be that commanding.
On the other hand when Season 2 BtVS had Buffy say "Waaah! Math Hard." I was thinking' "Way to go, writers" [/sarcasm] (I didn't know who Joss Whedon was then. I was quite the casual fan of the show at that point in time). "Way to reinforce the stereotype for young girls that women aren't good at math and science... or at least shouldn't be" Because, Buffy was the hot girl with guys drooling over her and Willow was the stammering nerd. Had I been in high school myself, I don't know that I would have had those thoughts. But, coming from someone who had just spent years of study in a highly male-dominated major that involved many engineering/building science classes (in which quite often I was the only female), I was actually bothered by the scene -- perhaps irrationally so. And, honestly, it's a scene that continues to stick out in my memory as an irritation. (It's also probably part of the reason why, in those days, I preferred Willow.)
Similarly, one of the things that made me an Aeryn Sun fangirl was a scene way back in Season 1, Farscape. Aeryn was a soldier and a pilot. Heck, let's face it. Aeryn was kind of a jock in many senses. But there was this scene early in Season 1 where she was going over engineering manuals or something. Crichton questioned her, and she protested that she might be a soldier, but she could learn and wanted to learn more. I loved her for that intellectual curiosity, and for embracing the idea that her job wasn't all that she was. And that though she was a grown woman, she could still learn. Of course, I loved that she was an action hero too. I rather love the scene in P.K. Tech Girl where Crichton and Galina (? sadly I've forgotten the P.K. Tech Girl's name after all these years) anyway Crichton and girl who was heroic in her own right but was never 1/10th as awesome as Aeryn were trapped by the weird fire-breathing alien, and Aeryn swung in like some Schwarzenegger-like action hero saving the day. That was awesome.
But I really loved her for her insistence that she could change and learn. She could become someone more expansive.
I think I may have loved her best in her flashback episode The Way We Weren't when she flashbacked to the lover she betrayed to the Peacekeepsers so that she'd get her promotion in rank, followed by the "present" where she went to Pilot -- after he had realized she was one of the ones who had enslaved him. He flipped, saying "You want a chance to tell me how non-violent you are now? Or what? You’ll blast me into pieces like you did the Pilot who used to sit here?"
And she countered with, "Based on my actions back then, I deserve to die. And if you wish to kill me, I’m not going to stop you. But please, spare the others... and yourself."
With her confessing that back in the day when she'd been in the group that had enslaved him she hadn't understood why her then-lover had shown compassion for the captured Pilot.
She admitted, "Velorek stroked your cheek like this to calm you. Back then, I couldn’t fathom why he would do a thing like that. Now, I couldn’t fathom not doing it. We’ve come a long way since then. And we’ve still got a long way to go." Asking him to not kill himself or...well... her. She said, "Take the journey with me."
I loved Aeryn's ability to grow and change. Her ability to recognize and rise above the prejudices she'd been taught by her upbringing. Her world had been upended. She's lost everything -- her home, her career, her privileged role in that fascist galaxy. Her entire world view. She opened her eyes and saw the wrongs of not only her own past but that of her entire culture -- and she learned to embrace change. Changing herself and the wholesale change of her life.
That's bravery.
Conversely, I always had some problems with Buffy's post-high school career (can it be called that?)
Buffy's dropping out of college didn't bother me. It was rather necessary (what with dying after having been on the run and all). But I remember there came a point in Season 6 where it was mentioned that she'd missed the deadline to sign up for the winter/spring semester of classes. That bothered me. It wasn't that she couldn't pay for it because, money problems aside, she'd never so much as tried. She'd never explored student loans, scholarships, Pell Grants, or deadlines for turning in...well... anything. But, okay, she was pretty suicidally depressed in Season 6. But she didn't try in Season 7 either. She somehow landed a job that she wasn't actually qualified for and never thought about returning to school. And, if we're to take the comics as any sort of continuation, she never has at any point since... and it looks like she never will.
And... okay.
So Buffy isn't interested in a degree. She doesn't want to return to school. I guess I can understand that, except that sometimes if feels like Whedon likes to push Buffy backwards. I remember the heart-sinking moment in Season 7's "Selfless" where Buffy pulls the Angel card and said, "I loved him more than I will ever love anything in this life." (Bolded to highlight). I remember thinking, oh dear god, that's sad. Not sad as in "Oh, what a tragic romance," but sad as in OMG, this is a 22 year old woman who believes that her life peeked when she was seventeen years old! She honestly thinks that nothing in her future can match what she had when she was seventeen!!.
It's why I balk in Buffy turning hyper-girlie when talking to Angel in "Chosen." It's like she's suddenly seventeen again. It's why the comics annoy me. It's as though Joss wants all the characters emotionally at some teenaged point in their development -- permanently.
It's partly why the fetishizing the core four motif is problematic for me sometimes. Bonding with their peers, having peers become very important is a normal part of development for an adolescent. It's part of growing up, to stop being our parent's child. But... but... cliched as it is to say, high school friends do tend grow apart. There's a transition from teens to adulthood where the adult life differs from the teen social circle.
When I talk about age difference perhaps being an obstacle in my identifying really strongly with Buffy this is part of it. In college, most of us see how many, many friendships change with time. I had friends I'd had from kindergarten into college... and I'm still friends. But it's different. It's, let's face it, distant. We all got lives, jobs, families, careers, homes -- lives change and they all change differently. And my best friend from kindergarten through college (for two years, she was my roomate) is on my Christmas call list... but the truth is, we don't have much in common any more except the past. That is also a natural process of growing up and becoming a full-fledged adult. It's allowing our friends to have their lives and ourselves to have ours and not trying to force it into some mould in order to preserve an outgrown paradigm.
...but by the end of the series, the core 4-ing was becoming almost a way for the core 4 to wall out any newcomers (even if they weren't so new). No one can be as important to them as they are to each other (or if they are... they're gonna have to die... as all the love interests did... except Kennedy, I suppose. But then, Kennedy hardly matters. She wasn't much developed as a character and thus in no way a threat to the essential Buffy/Xander/Willow unbreakable bond). It's almost a version of "bros before hos" which... well... there does come a day where buddies don't outweigh life partners. If Xander was marrying Anya, Anya should come before 'bros'. But in the Whedonverse, it really all has to return to the core friends (heck, at this point Giles has been half-ousted) It sometimes feels like Joss et al are trying to maintain the paradigm no matter what.
I tend to have the feeling that Whedon has Buffy in running in circles, if not in stasis. There's some developmental hold-up. It may be because that's when Whendon feels that he had the best feel for Buffy. It may be that there's something in that stage of life that he really, really likes to explore or hold onto. But for myself, as a viewer/reader, I find this storytelling cycle of always returning to a default state somewhat vaguely like when she was seventeen to be an obstacle for my connecting to canonical Buffy as she's supposed to move into adulthood. Rather than going forward, it often feels like she's looking back and trying to recapture. Trying to recapture the doomed teen romance, trying to recapture the way they were friends when they were kids, trying to maintain the relationships as mostly being exactly that way. Maybe it's part and parcel of Joss's love of the girl-woman-waif (frequently with superpowers). That motif shows up again and again in his work even outside Buffy/Angel. He likes that girl-woman-waif.
It's just... the Buffy I wanted was one who's allowed to grow up, one who pushes beyond high school, one who realizes that life didn't reach its zenith when she was seventeen.
It's one of the reasons I don't think "What would Buffy do?" It's why Buffy is a really, really interesting character to write, to ponder, to wrangle-with, and to analyze but it's why, for all of that-- for all her good points, her strengths, her flaws, for all that makes her a complex, interesting character to deal with--it's why she's not an aspirational figure for me. Buffy is a character I love to explore, but she's always a character I want to push forward.
I loved Scully for having nothing but her training and her competence to bravely walk into dark tunnels to confront monsters, carrying only her gun and/or flashlight. True, it took her a damn long time to embrace some truths (but I always sympathized with her insistence on logic. I tend to like to force things into logic as well, so for all that she had to embrace some crazy stuff and many were frustrated by her reluctance to embrace the crazy, in this regard the characters recalcitrance matched my own. I kept wishing Scully would be allowed to right more often. I loved her belligerence in insisting that things should make sense. I'm not saying it's fair. It's just that sometimes we share characters' biases, and I tended to share Scully's bias that things should make sense. :)
I loved Aeryn for accepting the total loss of all that she had known and choosing to build a better life -- a more humane one -- and not mourn the life she lost, or at least try not to. To try not to paint over the dark spots with nostalgia.
And Buffy in fanfic can also go forward and grow... but at some point, I got the feeling that Joss's Buffy would never really push through to the other side of adolescence. Part of his Buffy will forever young and forever trapped dealing with things that happened rather early on in the run of the show. I suspect he prefers it that way. But it's often why she's a heroine that I've never identified with (pitied, sympathized with, frustrated by -- yes. But I still find myself always rooting for her to grow.)
