#but she deliberately flattens herself to a caricature

[kiyomitakada]

it's abouttttttttt how misa defines herself as someone who is in love with light and how the narrative goes out of its way to superficially agree with her (htr describes her as "the second kira who loves light" like it's her defining personality trait other than the mass murder) but also she definitely does not love him. she has like two panels max "justifying" why she likes light and both of them are the most weak "he's cute and perfect" justifications i've ever seen. misa amane i love you i love that there is a hole where your heart should be after your parents' deaths ripped it out of you. you can try to refill it all you like but you're never getting it back

[coraniaid]

top five buffy characters?

In order (today, anyway):

Buffy

Willow

Faith

Giles

Anya

Can't really put my thoughts on Buffy Summers better than I did last year. As I said then, she's one of my favorite fictional characters in any medium. I just think she's neat.

Big fan of Willow, too, although a little bit less so than I was when I first watched the show as a teenager. As well as the slight derailing of her arc with the whole magic-addiction stuff in Season 6 and the show struggling to find anything for her to do in Season 7, I think on reflection, despite the whole "occasionally I'm callous and strange" line, the Buffy writers sometimes don't actually realize when they've made Willow do something interesting and a little fucked-up. They're just a bit too sympathetic to her. So we never get the pay-off those moments deserved, and maybe we were never going to, because -- like Willow herself -- the writers simply don't think Willow did anything wrong.

Faith is the other character who is an easy fit into my top three. (Yes, not shocking, I know.) It seems a bit silly to claim that a character who appears in less than one full season's worth of episodes is one of my favorite characters, but ... I guess I'm a bit silly. She's a main character in my heart (and in my fanfiction), even if the show writers never quite realized it.

A bit below those three, but above anyone else, is Rupert Giles. I think Giles is a fascinating character, but -- more than almost anyone else in the fandom -- he tends to get flattened into this role of "Buffy's good dad" which simply doesn't reflect his role in the narrative at all. (I think it's telling that the fandom's big take-away from Helpless is "Giles has a father's love for Buffy, which we know for a fact because an evil British man said it", combined with a general indifference about ... the objectively awful things we literally just saw him do.) But canon!Giles is (mostly) much better than the fandom caricature. He kind of sucks. I like him.

That fifth spot is the tricky one and the one that's most liable to change. I don't think there's any character in the show who is consistently as sympathetic and interesting and multi-layered as those other four. Tara is nice and has a surprisingly deep relationship with Buffy, but doesn't really get much in the way of an arc. Dawn only appears in three seasons (and the writers seem to just run out of ideas for things for her to do in the third of them). While I will defend the importance of Joyce to Buffy forever -- I think Buffy's relationship with her mother is one of the key things that makes her who she is, and I think the show would be far less interesting without Joyce Summers in -- Joyce herself isn't ever given enough to do and basically doesn't exist outside of her relationship with Buffy. Xander is kind of like Giles in some ways - a deliberately flawed image of (a certain kind of) masculinity who cares about Buffy enormously but isn't always able to act accordingly because of his own self-loathing and because he has a slightly idealized image of her in his mind -- but he's also a little less interesting and a lot more irritating (and, like Willow, sometimes the writers just don't seem to realize when he's in the wrong). I think most of the Xander detractors on this site are misreading the text, but I don't really want to be a Xander defender either.

There are a whole host of other minor characters I wish the show had done more with or cared about at all: Amy, Jenny, Drusilla, Oz, Kendra, Robin are some names that come to mind. But the truth is that, as they appear on screen, I just can't pretend they were ever more than cyphers. (Even if Oz appeared in far more episodes than Faith ever did; at least Faith had some sort of agency and was central to most of the episodes she appeared in.)

So, who's left?

I think Anya is badly underused in the show throughout her time on it (she's just almost never taken seriously at all, either by the writing or the characters), her backstory has all the consistency of wet papier-mâché and to be honest I don't like Selfless quite as much as most people either. But, well, at least she's reliably funny, and there's definitely the idea of an intriguing character in there. Her death makes me furious too, more so than any other character on the show. So, almost by process of elimation, there she is.

[aanok]

100%. The description of their conflict in S3 got completely flattened by the YOU STOLE MY MOM hammer, to the point that Cass got reduced to a caricature of herself as a cheap villain twirling her mustache from her tower of evil.

I understand the obvious symbolic role Gothel plays as a stand-in for all the love, success and actualization Cass desperately needs and feels Rapunzel stole from under her feet but as a literal item it makes very little sense. The best you can say for it is that she latches onto the fake hope that if only she’d been allowed the chance for longer, she may have managed to get Gothel to actually love her. Confound the accursed Rapunzel!

But if this is the only thing you leave in the narrative without acknowledging everything else anymore you’re cutting out 90% of the character’s motives.

(this last offense is particularly foul because Once a Handmaiden and Plus Est En Vous all of a sudden rub in your face that the writers did remember everything they set up in the first two seasons, they just decided to throw it out the window for most of S3 because lmao black spandex suit)

The Gothel reveal as such is fun and opened some very interesting scenarios, but it was played terribly once it was allowed to completely dominate everything else. What is very good about it is that it establishes Cassandra’s understanding of love as a mercenary act and her view of self worth as a function of her accomplishments only. This is absolute golden characterization but it didn’t necessitate Gothel specifically as just any generically abusive parent (or other scenarios entirely but let’s run with the premise).

While we’re on the topic of writing fouls played against Cass, I want to point fingers at another capital offender, though you’ll likely disagree on this one.

Zhan Tiri absolutely nullifies Cassandra’s agency and takes the punch away from both her betrayal and her actions throughout S3 in general.

I don’t want some external influence to bring Cassandra to take action, I want her to make the conscious, deliberate choice to be a selfish bastard. I want her ego to finally explode after having been compressed so hard by two decades of putting everybody else before herself (not something exclusive to her relationship with Punzie, see Great Expotations). I want her to finally snap after seeing all results of her immense efforts being overtaken with a dance and a song by a magical princess blessed with supernatural powers just by right of birth.

Once again, it’s clear the ghost girl is supposed to be an allegory for Cass’ own intrusive thoughts and worst impulses and you can make the argument she’s only bringing out the worst of what is already there in her mind.

But that’s not at all how it’s framed in the literal narrative we see with our eyes. Cass is completely prone to Zhan Tiri, never questions her till the last five seconds and reverts to being an affection-starved puddle of insecurities the very instant the puppeteer’s strings are cut.

Why would you want to make her a passive victim when you’ve built up so much to make her into a real tragic hero? It’s such a waste.

i have a lot of half formed thoughts about how the series plays with rapunzel’s guilt complex + people unfairly blaming her for things that are emphatically not her fault, vs cassandra whose numerous legitimate grievances against rapunzel (lack of professional boundaries, lack of respect for cass’s personal boundaries, complete disregard for cass’s advice and feelings, maiming cass in the great tree [that was an accident but rapunzel made Two conscious decisions that led directly to it happening, she chose to stay in the tree, she chose to use an incantation she knew was uncontrollable and dangerous, it is in fact her fault that cass was injured that night]) are all swept under the rug in favor of cass being angry about the one thing that isn’t rapunzel’s fault (gothel leaving cass)

like it feels like there’s something here or like a punch was pulled but i can’t... quite articulate it; raps spends two seasons learning not to blame herself for every little thing people accuse herself but then is never forced to truly examine her genuine culpability in hurting cass because it all just gets masked by the gothel nonsense. and i’m just like. why? why make this writing choice when it does so much to undercut not only cassandra’s character development but rapunzel’s too?

and like cass being gothel’s daughter was the plan from the beginning but that in and of itself isn’t the problem; the problem is how it was ultimately written in such a way that it devoured everything else that was broken in the cass-raps friendship with the result that none of that got resolved or even really mentioned again

[oatmealcrisp-freak]

#im going through drafts this was good. i like her a lot . okay#misa amane#death note#it's so fucking fascinating to me the whole definition of her self thing#like when L and rem go 'oh you like light' shes like CONGRATULATIONS#YOU HAVE PERCEIVED THE ENTIRE EXTENT OF MY CHARACTER#she actually HAS personality traits other than being in love with light! shes impulsive! she has 0 regard for human life inc. her own!#she's extremely good at improv and acting! she's competitive! she's petty as fuck!#but she deliberately flattens herself to a caricature#and in the second arc that comes back to bite her because she loses all her memories#and all thats left is a shell of whoever she was trying to be#and she's not HAPPY! because she never WAS happy!#but now she doesn't even remember why she wanted to be this way in the first place!#MISAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

OP dont you dare hide these

it's abouttttttttt how misa defines herself as someone who is in love with light and how the narrative goes out of its way to superficially agree with her (htr describes her as "the second kira who loves light" like it's her defining personality trait other than the mass murder) but also she definitely does not love him. she has like two panels max "justifying" why she likes light and both of them are the most weak "he's cute and perfect" justifications i've ever seen. misa amane i love you i love that there is a hole where your heart should be after your parents' deaths ripped it out of you. you can try to refill it all you like but you're never getting it back