[ SECRET POST #5798 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5798 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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03.
[Jeeves and Wooster]


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04.
[Devil May Cry V]


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06.
[Vanderpump Rules]


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07.
[Arcane]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 40 secrets from Secret Submission Post #830.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Angel IMO definitely had more issues than Buffy and I've never seen Firefly, but there seems to be a huge focus (and not just around Joss) of viewing things with a current progressive lense and then finding them lacking and calling them 'bad' because of it.

I love Buffy. It definitely had issues even for the 90s, but people look at it from a 2020+ view and it bugs me.

You can acknowledge a thing has issues from a current perspective while also acknowledging that it was definitely progressive for its time.

But if your ex-friend is not someone you'd associate with because of political views anyway, why even bring fandom into it as a gotcha?

[(Anonymous)]

The irony of Angel having more issues than Buffy is that he spent a lot less time on the Angel set. Angel started with its own showrunner and Joss only came in to write the really big scripts most of the time. Season 4 of Buffy and beyond, Marti Noxton was doing most of the showrunning work over there as well. Ironically, at the time fans were blaming her for everything they didn't like about the show.

It's easy to keep loving the Buffyverse because tv is collaborative, and so much of the work post Buffy S3 wasn't Joss' anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

So was the move from cautious optimism to "life is unceasing misery so let's see how many ways we can make the characters suffer relentlessly" a Marni thing then? Sounds like there was a "You must have this many issues to ride" clause to be a Buffy writer.

[(Anonymous)]

the main thing marti gets blamed for is s6, when joss was viewed as an absentee landlord who went off to play with his shiny new firefly toy and left someone else in charge who had their own less good ideas of how things should go (joss only wrote one episode of s6 - omwf - and it's the only season where he didn't write the finale)

for all their own faults i always thought s4 and 5 were still viewed as joss's baby

[(Anonymous)]

NA but if I ever knew any of this I totally forgot it all. Seasons 1-3 were always my fave and for the last ten years they’re all I watch. I guess I’m a big fan of Joss’ Buffy and not the others.

[(Anonymous)]

Me too. I have very little motivation to move past season 3. Usually when I get to the end of season 3 I just want to rewind back to the start of the first season and watch from there again.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, this is absolutely how I've always viewed it, and also how I've always seen other people in fandom frame it as well.

Personally I actually like S6. In some ways not specific to BTVS, I even prefer Marti's narrative vibe to Joss's. But S6 absolutely did feel like it took a weird, dark, twisty detour off the path, and I can't really blame the fans who weren't feeling it.

[(Anonymous)]

s6 has its moments but it has to take a gigantic dump on every single character to get anywhere (fundamentally, for the whole buffy/spike thing to work it requires buffy to be abandoned by everyone else she's ever cared about - and that's before looking at the implications of the magical crack addiction business, a plot whedon hated so much he retconned it the first chance he got) and the evil willow "arc" is nonsensically rushed

[(Anonymous)]

All valid points, IMO. For me, a lot of S6 works on its own, but it isn't a good continuation of what the show had been up until that point. "Magic as drug" works for me as a concept, but doesn't jive with how magic was previously established within the BtVS narrative. Giles leaving is a brutal emotional thread that plays very potently into the thematic thrust of the season...but the reasoning behind why he leaves is flimsy bullshit.

As for Willow's turn to the dark side, I don't necessarily think it was rushed per se, so much as that it fundamentally relies on certain very comic-book-inspired tropes that I don't personally vibe with. Like, even if Willow had never had her "rock bottom" moment at the end of Wrecked, and had just kept down that path for the rest of the season, I still don't think it would make her attempt to end the world feel adequately explained. Because fundamentally I just don't really accept the core trope at play, which is that Good Person + Grief & Despair + Power = World-Ending Megalomaniac.

But I do think there are other ways they could have gotten to the same end-point (Willow nearly ending the world) with most of the same elements in play. Like--just spitballing--if Tara had died as an indirect/semi-direct consequence of Willow's spiraling behavior, and then the process Willow was going to use to bring her back was actually going to cause an apocalypse, but Willow was too off her head on grief, magic, and shame to recognize or accept that her desperate plan to "fix everything" was actually going to destroy everything. Like, obviously it's entirely down to personal preference, but for me something like this would've worked better because it's not relying on the fundamental trope of a "good guy" with power "snapping" and becoming temporarily "evil".