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BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER | 2.05 "Reptile Boy"

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big thank you to the person who created waistcoats

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3x14 ★ Bad Girls

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old tara sketch

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Rare awkward BTVS promo pictures that just speak to me

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5.04 | "Out Of My Mind"

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this deleted part of the scene is rly cute ….

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Amazing Buffy portraits by Kath Lobo!

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what do you think of buffys behavior in sanctuary? i've seen her get a lot of criticism in regards of how she treated faith and angel, and that angel was right in kicking her out of la and i just wanted to know what your opinion is on it. and do you think that ats was unfair to her?

so, for record i’ve only seen “five by five” and “sanctuary” once, and it was like a year ago at this point. and i didn’t watch them in the context of the season. which is to say, any of my opinions on “sanctuary” should probably be taken with a massive grain of salt.

with that said. i don’t know if fair/unfair is really the right framing, but i do remember being somewhat frustrated, because while everyone’s side made sense, angel being in the right felt like a foregone conclusion, in a way that undermined the potential for juicier complexity. of course people criticize buffy in “sanctuary”--the writing is setting her up to be criticized. but how to deal with serious wrongdoing is a fiendishly complicated question, and it makes the episode less interesting and true to have such an undeniable bias. which isn’t to say that it’s bad for writing to have a clear position, or that buffy isn’t biased towards buffy’s perspective either. but i do think this was one of those cases where the writing would have been stronger if it had been more sympathetic to buffy. 

a good point of comparison might be buffy and angel’s fight on the bluff in “amends”, or even their breakup in “the prom.” in “amends” we get a whole episode of angel being tormented by his past, and in “the prom” we get multiple scenes that show us why angel is feeling so anxious about the future of his relationship with buffy. and of course, we have the context of the rest of the show to understand buffy’s perspective. so that when buffy confronts angel on that bluff, or they argue in the sewer, the audience has some reason to understand why both of them feel their sides so intensely. and it’s not that “amends” doesn’t have a strong position—buffy talking to angel sometimes feels like the writing talking directly to the audience—but the episode is careful to put you in angel’s shoes before it gets to that scene. which makes the scene feel less like a lesson and more like an attempt to get at an emotional truth. you have the context to understand why what buffy is saying might be something that angel needs to hear, or can’t listen to, or what have you, even if the episode doesn’t think that angel is in the right.

so the thing about “sanctuary” is that the buffy episode that informs it is “who are you?”, which isn’t really from buffy’s perspective. it’s mostly from faith’s. similarly, “five by five” is full of flashbacks to angel’s past. which means that you have a buffy in “sanctuary” who has been profoundly violated by faith, and is speaking from that, yet neither the episode nor the episodes around it provide much opportunity for the audience to really feel that violation. you just have her flinging barbs at angel and making lots of bitter pronouncements about how faith did really bad things. and i think without giving credit to why people feel a need for vengeance, choosing a more compassionate or forgiving alternative loses its impact. contrast the handling of wesley and buffy in that episode, for example. wesley’s anger and later acceptance feel satisfying because we have the emotional context to understand his anger, and be accordingly moved by his change of heart. one of the reasons that the forgiveness themes in season two of buffy hit so hard is that you really feel the weight of the things that buffy is trying to forgive herself for. angel losing his soul, jenny being killed, all of these things are devastating. and i mean, say what you will about the whole attempted-rape storyline, and the writing perhaps giving too much attention to spike’s feelings about it, but it at least doesn’t pretend it was anything other than what it was. and spike’s presence feels very very heavy during much of season seven as a result. and i don’t get that same heaviness around faith. i think it’s especially necessary in this case to understand where buffy is coming from, because buffy advocating for the less forgiving option is actually very uncharacteristic for her. i don’t think it’s out of character, but it’s not the typical behavior for her either. which means that her motivation was especially in need of explaining.

and i get it, buffy isn’t the point of the episode. it’s angel’s show. i get that i’m potentially biased because i adore buffy and btvs, and am indifferent to both angel and ats. but it nonetheless makes me unhappy and uncomfortable to see buffy flattened into a symbol of the vengeance mindset, when she’s normally a figure of forgiveness. it makes it feel like the episode is cheating in order to make angel sympathetic. when i think there are many versions where angel could have been right, and buffy could have been very wrong, without that being necessary. and it would have been a better episode for it.

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Season 4 promo pictures where Spike is in a white void my beloved

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BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER // 7.03 “Same Time, Same Place”

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Jenny Calendar + text post memes pt III

✦ BTVS text post memes ✦

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I see why I'm everyone's issue (why everybody's got an issue with me)