Tag Archives: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Boyfriend Slayer

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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 The most jaw-dropping moment in the lastest installment of the Avengers franchise, The Age of Ultron, was not a fight sequence or a CGI robot or even the relvelation about those creeepy twins. It was the discovery that Hawkeye/Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner) had a family. While the other Avengers made clumsy romantic overtures toward each other—particularly The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson)—Hawkeye had been presiding over an ubertraditional domestic scenario in his other secret life, complete with two towheaded kids and a pregnant wife, Laura Barton, her countenance alternately radiating farmfed good health and requisite worry (the longsuffering Linda Cardellini).
 

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Though the scenes at the Barton homestead are certainly meant to provide peaceful and occasionally comic intervals between the Avengers lengthy and elaborate battles to save the world, they feel tacked on, inauthentic. What I suspect Whedon was attempting with the deepening of Hawkeye’s character was to make him more interesting (since, let’s face it, his powers are sort of underwhelming) and to add another dimension to the franchise. It’s an age old saw that superheroes can’t have so-called normal relationships; the friction between their everyday lives and their secret identities simply do not allow for it. Getting involved with normals—usually women, since most superheroes are men—can compromise their vocation and make them vulnerable on too many fronts. Thus Hawkeye’s family had been kept secret from the Avengers, so that neither friend nor enemy could put them in danger.

This vision of radical solitude, of permanent singlehood, could be seen as progressive: the hero, fighting always for the greater good, is unencumbered by the domestic relationships and mundane activities that traditionally bind people together. Yet even in his early days, Whedon never took that stance. The Avengers, after all, are a mock family of sorts, and in that they are a natural progression from the Scooby gang of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Though the gang coalesced around Buffy and her superpowers, by the end of the series nearly every member of the group had some sort of power, an identity he or she had to hide from the world at large (though Xander’s occasional military knowledge, a residue left in his brain after a Halloween episode where he transformed into a mercenary, was always a little suspect).

Over the seven seasons of Buffy, we watched her struggle with The Big Bad, with her powers, with her vocation, and with her family and friends. We also watched Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles take on and lose several romantic relationships. Though the first few seasons of the series relied on Buffy’s ill-fated romance with the vampire Angel as an analogy of adolescent relationships, the transformation of Angel into a good vampire eliminated much of the tension that fueled their attraction. Buffy’s subsequent relationships, with the buff-but-boring Riley (who turned out to be involved in a nefarious proto-military project), and then with the reluctantly reformed vampire Spike never quite reached the intensity of feeling of that first time with Angel. When the Spike attraction began it was clearly for a bad boy, and definitely had Buffy dealing with the complications of sexual attraction for someone she really didn’t like or trust. It dovetailed quite nicely with her feelings of alienation upon being brought back to life by her friends; exiled, as it turned out, from a place more like heaven than hell.

The other romances we watched play out on Buffy ranged from poignant to the stuff of romantic comedy. Willow’s high school boyfriend Oz, who conveniently turned out to be a werewolf, joined the group without too much hazing. It was rougher when she fell in love with Tara, not only because Tara was a woman but because she was a witch, and the couple’s dabbling in dark magic went from a hobby to a dangerous obsession. Xander’s only real girlfriend after years of an unrequited crush on Buffy, the former vengeance demon Anya, had a harder time assimilating into the Gang, in part because of her rather abrasive personality. And after his girlfriend, a computer teacher at Sunnydale High with gypsy roots, is killed fairly early in the series, we don’t see token adult/sometime watcher/school librarian Giles do very much socializing. In fact, when he leaves to return to his native England it feels appropriate, like he should really stop being an old guy hanging around with a bunch of college kids.

The solidification of the Scooby Gang as a proto-family reached its apotheosis with the arrival of Dawn, Buffy’s younger sister, who suddenly appeared on the show several seasons into its run. What began as a WTF moment slowly unfolded into one of the most complicated relationships on the show, as everyone became protective of Dawn but Buffy retained the resentment that older siblings generally have for younger ones. Don’t touch my stuff. Stop hanging out with my friends. GO AWAY!

Among Buffy stalwarts it’s generally agreed that the scariest episode of the show has nothing to do with the supernatural, and everything to do with domestic life. In “The Body,” Buffy comes home to find her mother, Joyce, is dead. Her death, sudden but of natural causes, cannot be undone by any spells. No magic, no books, no wishes will bring back her mother. In facing the abyss of grief, Buffy, who has already seen so much death, is forced to deal with the most mundane aspects of life: taking care of her sister, getting a job, housekeeping, and muddling through without the person who had always quietly been there for her, even when they had the usual (and unusual, since she is a Slayer) mother-daughter disagreements.
 

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In the final season of Buffy, for reasons too complicated to get into, the Scooby Gang has to mobilize once again to save the world but this time they have another agenda: they must protect all of the potential slayers (the brief backstory here is that when the Slayer dies, a new one is called). Thus Buffy and the Scoobys end up running a kind of a training camp for adolescent girls, many of whom resemble Buffy was before she was annointed: bratty, selfish, mopey, whiny, and scared. It would be an overstatement to claim that in raising up her army Buffy takes on a maternal role, but she does take on the persona of mentor and leader.

And it’s this final incarnation of the Gang, which is a family bound by something stronger than blood and far less sentimental than traditional domesticity, which fights the ultimate battle of Buffy. It is much more satisfying, and progressive than anything Whedon has come up with since: an army of adolescent girls, led by an extraordinary young woman and her friends, who have gradually grown up together and discovered their own distinct powers, bestowed on them in part by fickle gods, but mastered largely through their own maturation and machinations. It is more thrilling, dangerous, and emotionally charged than any Avengers battle could ever be.

Weaponizing Everything

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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One of the main strengths I’ve recognized throughout Joss Whedon’s work is his careful crafting of deep, multifaceted characters. He puts enough care and attention into them to ensure they aren’t simple cardboard cut-outs that drive the story along, but persons whose reasoning we can understand. In addition to his complex characters, Whedon focuses on the concept of the family. It’s a recurring theme that, however alienated the characters are when introduced, they’ll inevitably will be drawn into a tight familial group. Case in point, the Scooby gang in Buffy, the crew of the Serenity in Firefly, Angel investigations crew in Angel, the Los Angeles Dollhouse or even, to a lesser extent, the Avengers.

A striking point in Whedon’s work is that these familial groups eventually confront militaristic organizations in one form or another. Some of these organization appear as a benevolent force at first and turn into a tyrannical opponent afterwards, such as the Initiative in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some are conventional “villains” from the onset, such as the Alliance in Firefly or the facility operators in Cabin in the Woods. All military industrial organizations we see in Whedon’s work have a clear path: self-destruction. This trajectory is present throughout Whedon’s work; as the military acquires knowledge of powerful artifacts (or powerful persons depending on the genre) they try to weaponize it. Despite the best of intentions at times, the moment the military tries to harness these “powers, they’re propelled onto a collision course with our protagonists. It’s a matter of arrogance; the military sees the potential for power in something and assumes that they are strong and righteous enough to control it, but are ultimately consumed by it. The characters we follow are no less tempted by this thirst for power, but aren’t as misguided by hubris and only resort to wield the artifacts in question as a last resort to avert disaster. In the rare cases where our protagonists yield to those temptations, their punishment is swift and their remorse keeps them from following the military down an ethical slippery slope. This recurring narrative shows a distaste for the hubris of the military organizations and sows the seeds of anti-authoritarian thoughts, but there may be more to it than this.
 

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I wonder if this relationship between his characters and the organizations around them is a reflection of a long running theme of anti-authoritarianism or perhaps, a reflection of Whedon’s troubled relationship with the studios he has worked for. For decades, his battles with studio executives have become well-known and documented. Angel was cancelled over posturing, Firefly was doomed from the start, the networks backed out of the Dollhouse premise and his recent comments about the Marvel Studios fiasco seems to only hint at the contentions between them. As the subtext seeps into the plot, his complicated and tense relationship with his employers is difficult for the audience to ignore. It’s hard to know which came first: is the underlying anti-authoritarian theme the result of studio conflict, or do the studios rush to stifle Whedon’s creativity when it starts to veer towards difficult themes? Whatever the case, this theme is growing more pronounced with every new piece that Whedon produces.

Buffy developed a huge fan following due to the care and attention Whedon put into building an intricate world and multifaceted characters. The studios want to capitalize on this success and rake in the profits, but balk at the time it takes to build the story. They jump at the idea of working with Whedon, giving him some freedom at first, but become increasingly intrusive and controlling, as they have a very strict idea of where and how the story should be told. They call a halt when Whedon veers off the “acceptable” course or takes too long to get somewhere, and this window is getting narrower the longer their partnership lasts. The studios, much like the military organizations, don’t understand what they have and try to exploit it. They try to capitalize on Whedon’s strengths without understanding them for their own purposes (profit, brand recognition) but it is not what Whedon seems to want to do, which is art.

Is Whedon’s negative relationship with the studios the only thing that affects his writing?
Whedon also seems to enjoy working with regular artists and contributors over time and, although this interaction is normal, it reinforces the subtext. Close friends and the family you create are better and stronger than the organizations you associate with, (corporations and the military industrial complex included). Those entities are bound to destroy themselves through their own misdoings and hubris.

These musings bring the slaughter of the white collar drones and the military organization in Cabin in the Woods into a new light. The military may want to do well, but trampling the civilians and treating them as expendable causes their downfall. The small group of survivors, whether considering this movie or Whedon and his close creative partners, band together and fight back, no matter the cost. They lose their life for their freedom in the former; Whedon loses his job for his freedom in the latter.

 

The Death of the Cartoonist: Simplistic Comics Econs Version

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A fellow comic art collector sent me a link to an auction for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer cover a few days ago.

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Cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Oz #1 (without title overlay)

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Autograph covered by title overlay

The drawing is by John Totleben and is, I presume, the image of a transformed Daniel “Oz” Osbourne who is played by Seth Green in the TV series.

Let me first state that I have very little interest in Buffy as a character though I have watched a sizable number (if not all) of the episodes of the TV series. I have never bought a Buffy comic nor do I have any intention of doing so. As for John Totleben, he was certainly one of the most skillful artists to have worked in comics during the 80s and 90s (when his output was at its height). It is clear that he lavishes a considerable amount of time on the projects that are bestowed on him by the movers and shakers of the industry, even those as slight and forgettable as Vermillion.

The first question we should ask of this object is if the autograph which reads “Joss Whedon” is genuine. If it is in fact a fake, all recriminations should fall to the forger.

If we assume the autograph is genuine, I think the best that can be said for this situation is that it is the result of ignorance (or perhaps genius?)  on the part of the owner (if the autograph was done to his specifications) or Joss Whedon.

If we assume it was the owner’s choice to have Whedon scrawl his signature in the middle of the art work, one can only conclude that the decision was made on the basis of increasing the value of the art. The signature occupies an area comprising 1/8 of the image area and acts almost like a title in the absence of the acetate overlay. So what would seem like just another werewolf image (in the absence of the overlay) by a skilled but under appreciated comics artist is now brought firmly into the Buffy universe—thus improving its value considerably. Whether the art has been disturbed or even defaced is probably secondary to concerns about monetization. Such is the nature of the business of art in all its forms.

There are important examples of this in art history but few with as detailed a narrative as Chinese brush painting. Those viewing a Chinese painting for the first time might be surprised by the numerous red seals placed discretely or sometimes prominently within the area of the image.

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Admonitions Scroll (attributed to Gu Kaizhi, probably a Tang Dynasty copy).

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Seals on the Admonition Scroll. Orchid by the Qianlong emperor.

These were often placed by the artists themselves or collectors to denote ownership. As Yang Xin writes in Three Thousand years of Chinese Painting:

“Using seals, however practical, added aesthetic appeal to the paintings, as literati-painters realized. The scarlet stamp could enliven a picture otherwise dull in color, and the choice of seal indicated certain interests and values of the painter, often with subtle cultural, personal , or political implications….A painting is often the joint product of a painter, a poet, a calligrapher, and a seal maker.”

Later in the same book, James Cahill writes:

“…by identifying them [the seals] the knowledgeable viewer can ascertain which collections the painting has passed through. If these are well known and distinguished…the value of the work is correspondingly enhanced….Collectors of good taste kept their seals small and confined their use to the corners; arrogant collectors and emperors impressed large, showy seals in all the available spaces.”

How this applies to the considerably more humble art being discussed here is I think self-explanatory. There is every reason to believe that a tasteful autograph by Joss Whedon (like that placed by Totleben at the right bottom edge of the image; did you miss it?) would increase the value of this Buffy cover. Whether the more florid (almost titular) inscription would have a similar effect is anyone’s guess.  I wouldn’t buy the art either way.

If the decision on the placement and size of the autograph was entirely Whedon’s, it might even speak to where he sees himself in relation to these comics interlopers—the artists and writers not only being completely interchangeable (if not irrelevant) but possibly beyond his control.  He seems to have little say regarding all future film iterations of his creation as captured in this Guardian article from 2010:

“I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER. I don’t love the idea of my creation in other hands, but I’m also well aware that many more hands than mine went into making that show what it was. And there is no legal grounds for doing anything other than sighing audibly. I can’t wish people who are passionate about my little myth ill.”

This seems like a healthy attitude and no one doubts that this is the reality of working on a Buffy film (or comic; one should note that it appears that Whedon had nothing to do with writing these “Oz” comics beyond the creation of the original concepts).

This image presents itself as an adequate metaphor for the role of the hired hand in the comics business—even outside the remit of the larger comics companies among which Dark Horse (who published the Buffy comics) could certainly be counted. Even in this instance where Totleben did almost all of the work (I suppose a cover concept might have been communicated to him), Whedon’s signature is still five times larger than Totleben’s. Technique and Totleben’s “secondary”  imagination (he didn’t create the character) has become superfluous. The idea that Totleben drew this or that it could be a piece of art doesn’t even enter into the equation (or the mind).  An online image search suggests that the trade paperback edition dispenses almost entirely with drawn art and chooses to put images of Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green on the cover; the better to sell it one presumes.

Now some might see in this (and many other examples) an occasion for a small fit of pique quickly stifled. One might even interpret that large Whedon scrawl as just that—a moment of pique—because Whedon doesn’t actually own the rights to Buffy (they’re with Warner apparently). And who can begrudge them (and hired hands everywhere) those simple emotions? That quick stifling is probably of the essence—a necessary survival mechanism— for such stratifications and losses are as certain as getting wet in the rain. Parasols don’t seem particularly popular in the land of comics.

 

Xander Harris: Hyena Boy

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As soon as Buffy hit television on March 10, 1997, Joss Whedon became the poster boy for geek feminism. Raised by a radical feminist, he always merged his creativity with gender studies, which he called his “unofficial minor.” Buffy was created to defy stereotypical expectations, a blonde superhero whose adolescent growing pains were the blueprint for the supernatural evil she vanquished. This balance struck a chord in viewers, inspiring theoretical interpretations running as rampant as fanfic. But it was never the feminist dream that we thought it was. It couldn’t be, as long as Buffy was friends with Xander Harris, the thorn destroying any so-called feminism in Sunnydale.

Ironically, Alexander LaVelle Harris is based on Joss himself. As he told NPR in 2000, “Xander is obviously based on me, the sort of guy that all the girls want to be best friends with in high school, and who’s, you know, kind of a loser, but is more or less articulate and someone you can trust.” But instead of the radical feminist upbringing, Xander is the product of a highly dysfunctional family. He has no healthy male role models or friendships. (His only male friend, Jesse, is turned into a vampire he accidentally kills, and the act barely fazes him.) Xander only has Willow, the awkward girl who is in love with him, who he romantically ignores.

When Buffy Summers arrives, Xander immediately wants her. His first words to her: “Can I have you?” He lusts over her power, sexiness, and defiance of school politics and adult authority. His willingness to accept her position of power has often been seen as an example of his feminism; moreover, it’s been used to frame him as a “subversive image of masculinity,” because “confronted with the feminist reality that women are at least equal to him … he doesn’t try to dominate it, he doesn’t try to deny it, and he doesn’t try to ignore it.” But that is precisely what he does.

Xander sexualizes power, instead of maintaining a respectful attitude towards strong women. He lusts for most of the powerful women he meets, good or bad – Buffy, preying mantis lady, Incan mummy, Willow (as she begins to mature), Cordelia, Faith, and Anya. At the same time, he finds himself at odds with this attraction, which manifests into this strange almost self-loathing that drives him to assert dominance. Since he’s a rather awkward boy without strength, he uses his tongue, throwing insults and off-the-mark opinions as “Xander, the Chronicler of Buffy’s Failures.”

It begins rather benignly. Xander complains about Owen’s “shifty” eyes and rants that Angel is a “girly name.” But it becomes a real problem after “The Pack.” When Xander is possessed by a hyena, he becomes the misogynist alpha male. Though he acts like an animal, he also reveals observations he wouldn’t dare to as human. He acknowledges that Willow likes him, and he challenges Buffy: “We both know what you want… You like your men dangerous.” Hyena juju might make him sniff things and eat piglets, but hyenas aren’t cognizant of high school politics. Possession merely removes Xander’s filter.

Though he is quickly freed of hyena (which he never apologizes for, claiming amnesia), the possession seems to spark an egocentric attitude deep within – Xander’s questionable moments increase in a flurry of sexism and hypocritical commentary that sometimes wanes, but never disappears. In “Angel,” he begins calling Cordelia a hooker. There is no provocation for the term, he’s merely trying to neutralize Cordelia’s power by slut-shaming her, and sadly, the show backs these opinions by drawing a line between acceptable and over-the-top Cordelia-centric insults in “When She Was Bad.” “Hooker” is okay, but Buffy calling Cordelia a “moron” is framed as highly questionable.

“Angel” also marks the beginning of Xander’s war against the souled vampire. When Buffy learns that Angel isn’t human, Xander fails to think of anyone but himself. Though it isn’t wrong for him to note that Buffy should slay Angel (they don’t yet know about his soul), it is not for her benefit or Sunnydale’s. Xander wants Buffy to remove his competition, and urges her to kill him without thinking of her feelings.

Even Willow suffers Xander’s egocentrism. As she develops feelings for someone else (“I Robot, You Jane”), he is immediately critical: “I don’t like it; it’s not healthy.” For these women to be his friend, each must tolerate jealousy and/or insults. Xander is loyal and will help in any deadly fight, but if there is even the slightest question or challenge to his “territory” or masculinity, Xander’s sexual interests and ego come first. He even makes boundaries for Buffy’s strength – it’s okay for her to be an unstoppable Slayer, but she should not protect him from the class bully. Female strength is okay in their private, vampire night, not in the public halls of high school.

Sadly, Xander is continually rwwarded for his worst moments. Increasing, sexualized insults towards the most popular girl in school lead Xander to win over Cordelia, creating one of his two highly problematic relationships. When Cordelia momentarily dumps Xander because of her waning popularity, he wants to control her by blackmailing Amy into performing a love spell. He yearns to remove Cordelia’s free will and gain the power, and he’s rewarded for the action. Though Giles chastises him, Buffy praises him for being a gentleman when the spell goes wrong and she hits on him. Likewise, Cordelia is charmed by what Xander has done, and is willing to lose her friends and social standing to be with him.

Dating Cordelia, however, doesn’t stop Xander’s Angel hatred. Yes, Angel killed Ms. Calendar and Xander has a right to be mad. But while the rest of the team hope for the best outcome in “Becoming,” and are concerned for Buffy’s feelings, he just wants Angel dead and couldn’t care less about its effect on Buffy. “The way I see it, you want to forget all about Ms. Calendar’s murder so you can get your boyfriend back.” One might forgive his reductive anger in this particular situation, but it’s not a one-time event. Xander again refuses to acknowledge Buffy’s feelings, or provide comfort that could possibly make her job easier. Instead, he lies, giving her a false message from Willow to “kick his ass.”

Buffy kills a freshly re-souled Angel and runs away. When she returns, Xander quickly condemns her in “Dead Man’s Party” as “incredibly selfish and stupid.” As he sees it: “I’m sorry your honey was a demon, but most girls don’t hop a Greyhound over boy troubles.” Xander is so wrapped up in his own ego-driven world that Buffy’s wildly complicated and emotionally scarring situation is framed as “boy troubles.” Again, no one questions him for his actions. Zombies descend, fighting begins, and everyone forgives each other. Xander begins to be framed as the voice of reason who tells her how it is.

Cordelia, meanwhile, is treated terribly. Xander, with his overt weakness for Slayers, openly gushes over a newly arrived Faith in “Faith, Hope, and Trick,” until Cordelia tersely asks him to “find a new theme.” He’s in love with Buffy, lusting for Faith, and dating Cordy. Two episodes later, he’s cheating on her with Willow, having become increasingly attracted to his rapidly maturing friend. And this fictional incarnation of Joss isn’t done. When Cordelia discovers the affair and nearly dies, Xander can only feel anger over his loss. He repeatedly gripes about his own unhappiness, blaming his actions on other people, and is desperate to make Cordelia feel even worse. He is completely unable to atone for his actions: “You want to do a guilt-a-palooza? Fine. But I’m done with that.” As Xander later states about his incessant, mean-spirited ranting: “I can’t help it; it’s my nature.”

If the show ever decided to question Xander for his sexist, problematic nature, these moments would serve a purpose and help the character evolve into a more worthwhile person and true “heart” of the group. Instead, the Powers That Be continue to reward him for his bad behavior: he loses his virginity to Faith. She’s not Buffy, but she is a powerful Slayer.

When the girls head off to college and Xander becomes the townie, the series gets a break from the sexism. This does not mean Xander is silent; he’s just the marginalized menace. He continues to joke about his lust for Buffy; he never lets her forget that he wants her, marking her as his ideal prey. He might stubbornly accept that they won’t be together, but he lets it fuel his every action as a friend, and the show never questions it or lets him evolve beyond it.

Meanwhile, Xander begins a rather combative relationship with Anya, chastising her every comment and story – whether they’re demon memories or normal interpersonal communications. When she tells him he isn’t showing an interest in her life in “Hush,” he retorts: “You really did turn into a real girl, didn’t ya?” No man comfortable with female equality equates real concern with nagging, though we can’t be surprised that Xander does – not only because of his many previous and problematic actions, but also because of his attitude towards Anya. He clearly believes he is the better person, the moral center who will teach Anya to be human. Luckily, as he grows into his relationship with Anya, he seems to mellow, becoming a regular Scooby member and friend until Buffy’s relationship implodes in “Into the Woods.”

Riley and Buffy are a good-on-paper couple. He’s the strong and heroic human offering the security Angel never could. But he’s also a deeply flawed man who cannot stomach Buffy’s strength, especially when she’s in crisis. When Joyce becomes ill and Buffy refuses to fall apart and cry on his shoulder, Riley’s inferiority complex leads him into the arms of blood-hungry vampires he willingly feeds. When she discovers his infidelity, he issues an ultimatum: immediately give him a reason to stay, or he’s going to run off with the Army and leave her forever.

It’s a ridiculous, callous ultimatum, and Xander supports it. Once again, instead of comforting her, he ridicules her. He chastises her for wanting to hide, though she’s barely had a second to process what’s happened. (Riley, meanwhile, had tons of time to process the back story Xander told him about Angel and Buffy.) Xander castigates her for not seeing the problems earlier, though she’s been dealing with her mother’s very serious illness and the arrival of a sister-shaped key. Buffy asks: “What am I supposed to do? Beg him to stay?” Xander looks downright shocked at her hesitation and asks: “Why wouldn’t you?” He continues: “you’ve been treating Riley like the rebound guy, when he’s the one that comes around once in a lifetime. He’s never held back with you. He’s risked everything, and you’re about to let him fly because you don’t like ultimatums? … Think what you’re about to lose.” It’s not much of a jump to wonder if Xander is pro-Riley not because Finn is perfect for Buffy, but because he’s the safe, human choice – the almost-Xander. He continues to be the voice of faulty reason, setting the stage for his utter hypocrisy in season 6 and 7.

Xander is relatively normal for the next year, until his wedding to Anya. He disappears when he’s presented with an obviously fake ‘50s version of his so-called marital future; he flees just like Buffy did, but for much less. (And of course, Buffy and Willow don’t ever condemn him for fleeing, they only support him.) Xander leaves Anya at the altar, telling her “I don’t want to hurt you. Not that way. I’m so sorry.” He lets fear guide him to publically humiliate her and break her heart as if it’s some sort of moral, heroic choice.

Astonishingly, he destroys her, yet still expects to be with her. Everything surrounding Xander’s cancelled wedding speaks to his egocentrism and hypocrisy. He’s so used to Anya being head over heels in love with him that he expects their relationship to go back to normal. And though he finds it simple to ignore Riley’s infidelity, he prepares to kill when he discovers that his ex is having sex with Spike. Xander questions Anya’s maturity and insults her: “I’m not joking now. You let that evil, soul-less thing touch you. You wanted me to feel something? Congratulations, it worked. I look at you, and I feel sick, cuz you had sex with that.” Though he left her at the altar, he still believes he is the moral center with a right to judge her choices.

Yet it’s Buffy’s sex with Spike that really breaks him. Again, it’s up to Buffy to explain herself in “Seeing Red,” as if she needs to apologize for her own personal life. Ever the egomaniac, when Buffy says: “You don’t know how hard it’s been,” he thinks she’s talking about lying to him about Spike, not about struggling with her newly revived life. Xander even stretches to condemn her choice based on Spike’s previous violence: “I didn’t say I haven’t made mistakes, but last I checked, slaughtering half of Europe wasn’t one of them. He doesn’t have a soul, Buffy.” Though he’s never believed that having a soul makes a vampire an okay bedfellow, he uses that qualifier to denounce Buffy and absolve his own choice of Anya — who was was much more dangerous than Spike, and killed and tortured men for over a thousand years.
Anya rightly tries to temper Xander’s egocentrism in “Two to Go,” but it doesn’t work. She explains that sex with Spike “wasn’t vengeance. It was solace,” and she refuses to let him “play the martyr,” but Xander is still too wrapped up in his own ego. In the next episode he carelessly removes Buffy’s agency and tells Dawn about Spike’s attempted rape. Not only that, but he continually and persistently brings it up through the rest of the series. He takes that power and repeatedly uses it against her.

Xander’s hypocrisy is finally center-stage in “Selfless,” yet he still manages a hypocritical attack. Though he fiercely fought for Angel’s death, he now insists that “when our friends go all crazy and start killing people, we help them.” When his feelings aren’t enough to change Buffy’s mind, he chooses to once again attack her sexual choices: “You know, if there’s a mass-murdering demon that you’re oh, say boning, then it’s all grey area.” He refuses to acknowledge that Anya consciously chose to become a demon both times, and tries to frame Buffy’s responsibility as another example of her capriciousness: “You think we haven’t all seen this before? The part where you just cut us all out? Just step away from everything human and act like you’re the law?”

But it’s the next words that really sum up his complete and utter refusal to acknowledge or consider Buffy’s feelings and power: “If you knew what I felt,” Xander says. He can’t see the similarities between killing Anya and killing Angel, or notice what Buffy went through when she sent Angel to hell. This is our moment to finally call Xander out for his hypocrisy and chastise him for lying about Willow’s message those years ago, and his attitude since. Yet only one line is tossed in, and Willow’s reaction to the “kick his ass” quote is buried in the heated argument. As much as Xander’s hypocrisy is displayed for those eager to see it acknowledged, it’s all words of anger – Xander never learns a damn thing from the exchange; he never gets punished, or feels remorse for his actions.

The series continually, passively, upholds Xander’s skewed viewpoint, never forcing him to repent and never allowing him to change. Instead, they give him the ultimate gift – Buffy’s strength. In the series’ penultimate episode “End of Days,” Buffy says: “You’re my strength, Xander. You’re the reason I made it this far.” By this point, the idea of the Slayer is already problematic – she’s the result of a vicious supernatural rape on the first Slayer, a lineage controlled by a white, patriarchal council. And now she attributes her strength and survival to the man who constantly sexualized her, belittled her, and condemned her. Not only that, but he’s given more power in the comics, having dominion over all the slayers as the “unofficial Watcher.”

Upon reflection, it’s hard to link Buffy the Vampire Slayer to feminism because Xander, the self-proclaimed “perspective guy,” continually nullifies the agency of the women around him. His respect for powerful women is qualified. No woman enjoys her power without Xander trying to exert some form of control (judgment) over it. As one fan once described it, “he hurts people with an uncanny casualness of a true bully.” Through casual banter, his egocentric power struggle is framed as comedy. We’re supposed to laugh at this superficially witty and charismatic everyman, and ultimately listen to him as the group’s moral compass, which undermines the show’s push for female empowerment.

This isn’t mere oversight or writer missteps, these moments come again and again and they cannot be excused. The minute Joss and his team embraced the feminist label and strove to create a feminist heroine, they accepted the responsibility of upholding those ideals, or at the very least, not continually undermining them. Buffy cannot be a feminist heroine if her strength comes from a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do man, especially one happy to remove her agency and morally judge her.

Twilight vs. Buffy — Battle to the Death?

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Inspired by Joy DeLyria’s post about Evil in Speculative Fiction, Charles Reece and I have been engaged in a knock-down/drag-out about the relative morality of Buffy’s vision of vampires and Twilight’s vision of vampires. It’s been pretty enjoyable, so I thought I’d highlight it in a post. My comments are in italics; Charles is in plain text.
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Noah: This is a way in which Twilight is much superior to Buffy, I think. Twilight vampires can choose good or evil just like the rest of us. Most of them choose evil because they need to drink blood and they’re very powerful, but it doesn’t have to be that way, as Carlisle and his family show.

This complicates the criticism that Bella should kill vampires the way Buffy does too. Vampires have souls in Twilight; killing them is as morally repugnant as killing people. Of course, they’re mass murderers too, many of them…but extrajudicial killing even of murderers is not morally neutral.
 
Charles:I think the veggie vampire idea is pretty dumb, too, certainly worse than Buffy’s problems. They’re a master race who are expected to treat us as equals. Yeah, bullshit. They might argue over whether they should breed us without legs and keep us in cages, though. If we were lucky, a Peter Singer would be turned. True Blood, as dumb as it is, is probably a more realistic depiction. They don’t eat us for pragmatic reasons, as a matter of realpolitik. We outnumber them and move about in the daylight (a problem that makes Twilight even dumber for getting rid of it).
 
Noah: I don’t really get your objection, Charles. You argue that they’re stupid because they’re not acting like a master race…but it’s you who is arguing that they’re a master race. That’s really not Meyer. She sees them as having souls. To the extent that the veggie vampires are better than us, it’s because they’re vegetarian. Suffering and renunciation makes you superior, not strength. I guess lots of people think that’s inherently stupider than realpolitik, but I strongly, strongly disagree.

Buffy raises theological issues (why are vampires hurt by crosses?) that it is completely unwilling to answer. Twilight is much more ready to confront them — by, for example, getting rid of the cross nonsense and talking explicitly about theology. Where Twilight’s world falls apart is not in the logic of the vampires per se, but with its secret world conceit. Vampires kill way too many people; either they would have been discovered, or else all of humanity would have been dead a long time ago. The mechanics just don’t work. (Buffy has this problem too…but it tends to get around it by just treating the whole thing as a joke. People just conveniently forget after they meet vampires, which is treated as a goof. This points to one of Buffy’s big strengths over Twilight, which is that the writing is much wittier and smarter on the microlevel, even if a lot of the big issue plotting is less thought through.)
 
Charles: By “soul”, I assume you mean a “conscience,” which we have, too, but if something’s deemed a lower form of life, we apply different rules. That’s why I think vegetarian vampirism is an inherently dumb idea, not necessarily the characters themselves for not eating humans. Basically, it’s a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. That’s pure bullshit.

I don’t see why masochism makes you more superior than strength. The former perfectly supports the latter.
 
Noah: No; by soul, Meyer means “soul”, not conscience. She’s a Christian. The two concepts aren’t reducible to each other. Buffy uses the former too; it just isn’t willing to think about what that means.

As for your comments on power — that’s just more realpolitik bullshit. Cynicism sneering at ideology by erasing its own deep commitment to its own ideology. If you think that’s sophisticated thinking, good on you I guess.

Meyer’s vision of renunciation and suffering is explicitly tied to love. Strength comes out of caring for others and for your family rather than from having super strength. Bella saves everyone she loves through nonviolence. Reducing that to masochism seems fairly myopic…but consistent with cynical realpolitik nonsense, sure.

It’s not a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. It’s a fantasy that human choices matter, and that power alone is not determinative of actions. For many of the vampires, power makes them cruel killers. Carlyle’s power, on the other hand, makes him a better man. It absolutely affects him; it just doesn’t have to make him a monster. If you reject that, you reject free will, and good and evil become meaningless. In that world, owning a gun means you’re inevitably going to start shooting your enemies in the head. I just don’t understand why that’s a complex or even remotely interesting moral vision.
 
Charles: Yes, of course Meyer believes in a soul, but who cares? Many power-mad people believe in a soul. My point to you was that you were setting it up as if it mattered to a godlike species with clearly superior power that they had a soul when it comes to how they’d treat us. What effect, if it’s not as a conscience, does having a soul have on them in that scenario? It would otherwise seem completely useless. Now, granting that (which you do with your talk of a free will), what’s the chance that a master species who needs us as food would treat us better than we treat chickens and cows or even indigenous populations of the past? It’s a fantasy about power, essentially worshipping it — submission, or what you seem to favorably call suffering and renunciation. I’d suggest that the only way the rights of humans would be recognized is through resistance. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to be turned. Even better if you’re turned by the good vampires, who keep their good old fashioned humanistic values, so none of this matters much to the silly narrative.
 
Noah: Human beings’ relationships with each other are often horrible, but it simply is not universally true that human cultures always in every instance treat neighboring cultures with less power as chickens. It’s not true that everyone with a gun always in every case shoots everyone who doesn’t have one. Suggesting that they do is knee-jerk cynicism. It just further justifies me in my long-held belief that at its heart realpolitik is deeply naive.

Maybe this confusion is because you haven’t read the books, but…it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed. Bella’s triumph is in forcing the vampires to resolve their problems peacefully. That’s fairly unusual by the standards of pop narrative, and I think meaningful (though not exactly logical.)

Part of your problem is that you want the vampires to be treated as a strictly materialist other race. Meyer doesn’t do that. The vampires are, among other things, angels; being transformed is a utopian dream of becoming perfected, where perfected means not just more powerful, but also more good, and less willing to use that power (also, and not coincidentally, it means becoming more egalitarian in terms of gender roles.)

Oh, and having a soul. Soul is really not a concept that can be reduced to material or psychological explanations; if it were, you wouldn’t need or use the concept at all. Lots of people with souls don’t have consciences; whether you can have a conscience without a soul is an interesting theological issue that I’m not up to parsing. Anyway, the point is that the soul is as much about your moral standing as it is about your actions, and as much about your relationship with god as with other people. You comment that lots of people who believe in souls act badly doesn’t actually have anything to do with the conversation, as far as I can tell. As Joy says, the point is that in the moral universe of Buffy, the vampires have no standing. In Twilight they do. That creates a very different ethical world.

That ethical world is not always thought through very clearly, and as John notes the banal wish fulfillment and the spiritual vision (not to mention sheer cluelessness) get in each other’s way to no small extent. But getting mad at it because it doesn’t embrace pragmatism seems really misguided. There are a lot of things that are silly about Twilight, but its failure to adopt the ethics and outlook of Richard Nixon is simply not one of them.
 
Charles:

it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed.

I’m not mad at it for being a fantasy like the unrealistic ones Joy is calling for. I’m not mad at all, in fact. I just don’t see it as any more plausible than the Buffyverse. It is, if anything, a step backwards. The only reason the humans don’t have to make the choice between resistance (as in Buffy to some degree) or submission is precisely because the good Twilight vampires choose to renounce their superiority. Basically, your defense is that it’s moral for the good guys to have power. How is that different from a Nixonian worldview? We avoid war because of a show of power against others who have power. Everyone is afraid of too many casualties on their respective sides. There’s your peace. Where we differ is that I find it highly implausible to draw any moral lesson from the narrative, since it relies on the assumption/hope/wish fulfillment that in the case of asymmetrical power, there will be a significant enough resistance against the biological and cultural order of things, “renunciation” of their status, from the haves to save the have-nots. Sure, there were admirable and highly moral people who recognized the rights of the redskins back before America was a country, but look how that turned out. If you insist on drawing a realworld moral analogy, then it fails miserably.

Regarding the soul, no, we don’t need the concept at all, but since we’re granting the supernatural worlds of these fantasies: Buffy and Twilight don’t much differ on their views. It’s the soul that functions to give an agent the ability to care about humans. Since Buffy’s vamps don’t have souls, it makes the human response more obvious: resist. With Twilight, since the vamps have souls, we have reason to question whether they might share some of our values. Okay, then deal with that. How should we react to them? Trust that enough of them are decent folk who’ll resist their biological urge and their superior power, or prepare for the possibility that they might just give in. Would angels, demons and vampires really be held to same morality as humans? More importantly, would such beings think that the same moral obligations obtain to their status? Meyer just assumes this to be case. I don’t, but I’m not a Christian.

What’s better about Buffy’s supernaturalism is that it doesn’t much trust in its inherent potential for goodness (I agree that all of these stories are inconsistent). It’s more skeptical of beings with great power. Angel was even more explicit regarding this, but essentially the powers-that-be weren’t obviously humanistic, like the good vampires of Twilight. And look at the guilt experienced by Angel, living off of rats, hiding from everyone for years, feeling remorse for what he did without a soul versus Edward who only fed on bad guys. Meyer really wants to believe in the goodness of power, so much so that she stacks the deck. That way, we don’t have to feel so bad about identifying with a vampire. Why would nonhumans be humanistic? That’s all fanciful nonsense. Fine by me, as long as you treat it as pure fantasy without drawing any realworld morality from it.
 
Noah: Charles, Twilight isn’t about a balance of power being the only way to create peace. Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

The difference between Buffy and Twilight is that Buffy arbitrarily decides that it’s bad guys are outside the moral order. It says that our enemies don’t have souls. I think that’s pretty profoundly different from saying that yes, your enemies are also people, even if they look and act very differently from you.

Both Buffy and Twilight are pretty into power. It’s a hard thing to escape in pulp narratives. I mean, can you think of any adventure narratives that unequivocally separate power and goodness? Twilight doesn’t do it entirely, but Carlyle is the book’s moral center, and the reason he is the moral center is not because he’s the best fighter or the most powerful (like Superman or Buffy) but because he chooses to go against his nature and not kill. He makes treaties with the wolves when he can; he doesn’t kill humans; he makes treaties with other vampires when he can.

You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices. Again, I find those contentions entirely reasonable ethical descriptions, much more so than a naive mapping of Darwinism onto social interactions. You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by. Much more so than Hunger Games, though not more than Buffy, largely because Buffy’s desouling of the vampires isn’t grounded in any particular ideology — it’s just a convenient plot point. The show doesn’t really believe in it, so it doesn’t ever really work through the genocidal ethical implications consistently.
 
Charles:

Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

The balance of power is their acting on the behalf of humans against the bad vampires. They behave with human morality. That’s why they’re good, which brings me to:

Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by.

This is like those Christian de-queering camps, right? Love the gay as long as he behaves like you do. That’s not a celebration of difference. Good vampires are the humanistic ones who act against their kind.

You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices.

Vampires are genetically different. I’m not sure why possessing a soul makes them the same as us. They’re beings of a different order, just like angels. They don’t have to face their mortality for one and need us as food for another. It’s simpleminded to assume they wouldn’t come up with a different morality. While it’s true that I’m not very trusting of power, my objection here has more to do with your belief that a carnivore is being moral only by not being a carnivore. Rather than address this potential conflict of moral systems, Twilight circumvents it with the fantasy of good vampires who’ll save us. Again, True Blood thinks this through a lot better than Twilight.

You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

Quite the opposite.

Noah: The werewolves can’t act like us; they change into werewolves. Twilight is happy with people acting very differently as long as they don’t kill each other. It’s quite queer friendly, and not in a Christian gays-must-be-like-us-way. It’s less so than Buffy, which has actual gay characters and is definitely pro-queer, but much more so than Hunger Games, which peddles gay stereotypes with enthusiasm and equates gayness with decadence and evil.

Vampires aren’t genetically different. They don’t exist; they’re magic. They’re not carnivores unless they want to be, much like humans. It just seems silly to me to insist that any fantasy that doesn’t ascribe to materialist fantasies about the universal applicability of Darwinism to social situations is necessarily simplistic.

Also, relativism is not necessarily a more complex or thoughtful moral stand. Murder is wrong; I’m willing to go with that cross-culturally, thanks, even if it means that Aztec culture was really kind of fucked up.

C.S. Lewis has some really thoughtful things to say about why creatures who are intelligent and have souls are all much more alike than they are different in the first book of his space trilogy. And I believe that applies to angels for him too; angels aren’t different than us in the sense that we have nothing to do with them, so much as they’re different from us because they’re what we could be, or can aspire to. In any case, angels, humans, non-humans — we’re all part of the same moral world.

Which I really like about Twilight. There are just a lot of fantasy series, from LOTR to Buffy to Priest and on and on, where villains are denied moral status. Body count films can be really fun, but they really do play into the logic of war and genocide in a way that makes their prevalence a little disturbing. I’m happy to have a major megasuccessful series that explicitly rejects that, and says instead that killing is killing, even when the enemy is terrifying and seems so different that you are tempted not to call them human.

I don’t really get where you see the good vampires fighting on behalf of the humans in Twilight? That’s not the plot at all. The good vampires and the bad vampires are at each other’s throats (as it were) for reason having to do with their own internal politics. They defend Bella, but that’s because she’s family, not because she’s a human. Carlyle doesn’t kill humans, and works as a doctor to help humans, but he doesn’t set himself up as a superhero running around defending random humans from vampires. It’s not a fantasy about superpowered people saving everyone, as in most superhero comics — and, indeed, at the end, all the vampires haven’t been killed, and humans aren’t all “saved”. At least, the books aren’t like that, and the movies I”ve seen don’t seem to be either…I’m not sure where you’re getting that?
 
Charles: As with the vampires, the most moral werewolf is the one obsessed with a human. Jacob is moral for deserting his pack. The good vamps and the good werewolves are brought together over protecting a human. There’s no more of a notion that vampire or werewolves might have moral status outside of being just like humans than there is in Buffy. The essential difference is that Buffy uses her powers to combat evil rather than compromise with it.

If vampires aren’t genetically different, then why does it matter if Bella is a human or vampire when giving birth? Why do vampires need human blood? Why do vampires sparkle in the sunlight? Etc.. The magic has genetic effects.

And I’m not really talking about moral relativism, but the new universal biological order that would occur with the introduction of a new species superior to us on the food chain. Is it relativistic to suggest some animals eat other animals and some eat plants, and that affects how they see the world? Is that an excuse for murder? ‘Murder’ would get redefined universally in such a situation. At least, a new definition would have to negotiated.

And isn’t a major part of the internal conflict of vampires over how they relate to humans? Regardless, the main characters and their story has a lot to do with the vampires that the audience is supposed to sympathize with helping/saving/protecting the main human the audience is supposed to identify with. The more you defend Carlyle, the more he sounds just like the majority of the people on the planet. The family is most important, and he’ll do what he has to protect them, but not much else. Yeah, he’s a decent fellow (from a human perspective, at least), but that’s a pretty average moral center.
 
Noah: Wait…I think there is some nonsense in Twilight where she babbles about genetic difference. I had repressed it because it was idiotic….

It’s supposed to be really difficult for vampires to give up blood. Carlisle was the only one who did it, and he’s attempting to prosletyze other vampires to do it as well, by persuasion rather than by fighting them. Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

It’s certainly true that the plot revolves around Bella to a ridiculous degree. But I don’t think it’s right to say that Jacob is more moral because he’s more focused on humans. He isn’t more focused on humans; he’s only focused on Bella. And I don’t know that the book really presents him as a moral paragon; he’s pretty clearly a horny teenager, not a moral paragon. The book certainly believes that peace is good and prejudice against others who are different is bad, but again, I’m not really seeing what’s wrong with that or why it’s particularly unrealistic. Again, I just don’t believe that pragmatism is either more moral or more realistic than other philosophical systems, and applying pragmatism to vampires and werewolves seems kind of ridiculous on its face.
 
Charles:

Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

I’ll give this one more go: Renunciation, sacrifice, etc. aren’t inherently good acts. They’re good if done for a good cause (cf., a gay renouncing his desire to be more like — and thereby more accepted by — his conservative Christian family). The vampires are evil unless they act like humans. That’s no different from the Buffyverse. Buffy uses her power to vanquish evil. If your enemies are really absolutely evil, then fighting them is a good act. Instead, Carlyle is attempting to make compromises with those who want to devour us humans. I’d suggest that extremism in defense of not being eaten is no vice.

And what is Carlyle if he’s not pragmatic? That’s the position your defending, not me.
 
Noah: Are you on crack? The pragmatic choice for Carlyle is to accept that he’s a vampire and eat people. He needs blood; he’s a different species (as you’ve said) — surely the Obama solution is to just try to eat as few people as possible and maybe not torture them before finishing them off. Instead, Carlisle renounces his power out of love and decides to suffer so that others won’t be killed. Again, I fail to see why that’s a compromised renunciation.

And one more time…the vampires don’t act like humans. I mean, there are superficial similarities, but they still do stuff like go hunting with their bare hands and play vampire baseball and have sex for weeks at a time and so on and so forth. They are not unqueer, in various ways. They are seen as good not as long as they act like humans, but as long as they don’t kill people. Which really seems reasonable to me.

An eye for an eye is still pragmatism. Even so, the claim that genocidal warfare is necessarily safer and less destructive than moderate efforts at peace is neither self-evident nor, as far as I can tell from human history, accurate. Buffy makes genocidal warfare the easy choice by making the enemy utterly inhuman and outside moral strictures. Meyer isn’t willing to do that in the same way. In the Buffyverse, vampires really can’t choose good. In Twilight, they could all potentially stop killing people if they wished. That doesn’t excuse them at all; on the contrary. But it means that killing them isn’t different than killing a human murderer. As I said, I think that that’s a significant, and welcome, difference.