#it was always weird they never brought up her s7 shit again almost like they were embarrassed? lmao

[macbethz]

even tho clara is possibly my favorite companion of all time i really did not care for her s7 arc or how they characterized her. that being said dalek echo clara has lived in my brain for 10 years

[blodreina-noumou]

3, 10, 11, 19, 23 for the salt ask thing! you don't have to answer every single number if you dont want to.

Ahhh, thank you so much! I love being salty about this show, almost as much as I just love the show in general, so I will absolutely answer all of them!

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?

100% yes. The whole point of tumblr is to curate your dashboard so you get to see lots of cool shit that you personally enjoy, that you want to share with people who have followed you because they, presumably, also enjoy that cool shit. So I’m not following a ton of Be//arke shippers (though there are exceptions, they know who they are 💛), I don’t follow people who don’t like Octavia, etc. Every so often, I’ll follow a blog for a bit, not realize that they’re super into something I’m not into, or hate something I love, and then I unfollow them. Easy peasy.

It’s not a big deal. Follow and unfollow at will. The less attention to you pay to the number of followers you have, the better you will feel. Focus instead on finding your people, and then you won’t end up unfollowing anyone at all!

10. Most disliked arc? Why?

I already answered this one, but I’ve got more.

Another arc I didn’t love was the s6 “rescue Clarke” arc. At the end of the day, that shit was filler. And while I loved so much about the mindscape episode, a lot of the “science” behind how Clarke controlled Josephine’s finger, how they accessed each other’s memories, mind drives in general, etc, really just pushed me out of my suspension of disbelief.

This show is guilty of that a lot - I guess this was just the first time I actually knew about the subject at hand to notice enough to care.

I did love Josephine, though. I know they never would’ve done it, but on some level, I was kinda hoping she’d stick around, and Clarke would stay gone, and everybody would have to adapt to the new reality. I think that would’ve been more interesting than what we got, as much as I loved certain highlights.

11. Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?

Ontari, while a monster, was fun. Sometimes I don’t want a morally gray antagonist - sometimes I want a straight-up heinous bitch; a selfish, cruel villain. There was really nothing she wouldn’t do to become Heda, and that made her really interesting, and gave her very specific, singular goals, that complicated s3 in a fun way. I think they really squandered that by having her take the Chip, but that’s another rant for another day. I wouldn’t want to hang out with Ontari, but she provided so much potential for a love-to-hate type of character. 

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

I already answered this one, but yet again, I’m a well of salt. (A salt well?) Anyways...

I think we all, myself included, have a tendency to make snap judgments about shippers we don’t agree with, or character stans we don’t agree with. When we find out someone doesn’t like a character, we tend to lump them in with everyone else who feels that way, and I think that can be really limiting. Wanting to only follow people who ship what you ship is fine, to an extent, that’s a part of curating your dashboard. But there’s this weird exclusionary, Us vs. Them, Clexas vs. Bellarkes thing that happens a lot, and it’s not a good look for any of us.

23. Unpopular character you love?

I think Echo still unfortunately qualifies, which I will never understand.

(I do understand, it’s because she cockblocked Be//arke. Oh, wait, I’m doing that judgemental thing, shit.)

I was always intrigued by Echo, being a full sucker for anything related to the grounders and especially grounder women. I was so excited when they brought her back for 3, and then 4, and then finally gave her a full cast member status at 5. I think she’s totally deserving of it. Echo represents a lot of aspects of grounder culture that were key to seasons 2 and 3 - stoicism, loyalty to your people, and immediate retribution for threats or deaths against you and yours.

Echo’s mercilessness in battle is only matched by the passion in her heart. I love how calm, patient, and cunning she is. I only hope we’ll get to see her find a very happy ending in s7 - ideally with Bellamy, but if she survives and is able to thrive at all, I’ll be happy.

Thank you again, anon!

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 6x04 Flooded

aka doubling down and not paying rent

Welcome to this dailyish text post series where I will rewatch an episode of Buffy and go on an impromptu rant about it for an hour. Is it about one hyperspecific thing or twenty observations? 10 or 3k words? You don’t know! I don’t know!!! In this house we don’t know things.

And today’s lukewarm take is that Willow and Tara should be paying rent, and Anya has a point. About everything.

(Okay, so I think that the Save draft button is actually broken on this website? Luckily I only got into a few paragraphs this time around, but I can’t believe that I’ll need to write out these posts in Word now. What’s next? Spellchecking? Proofreading? Planning and thought? Give me a break.)

Flooded among many other things is the first appearance of the Trio, our supposed Big Bad of the season, and… can I just say… I hate them so fucking much. Like, they truly and honestly make my skin crawl.

Of course, Warren is the worst of them, as we see even now, but they all joke about rape at least three times in this episode alone? And I’m calling those “jokes”, because the show is playing it for a comedic effect, as part of their ridiculous supervillain fantasy, which only makes it all worse.

On the other hand, I also kind of appreciate that these guys are our villains. Villains, who we will actually see put these words to action later on, and it’ll be sufficiently horrifying and repulsing. Which would be especially effective for an audience member who laughed at those earlier scenes before.

Now, while I feel like in today’s society, most of us don’t need that reminder, as we already know all too well what these groups of entitled young men insecure in their own masculinity are capable of, and how easy it is to radicalize them… I can see the argument that this might still come as a shocking revelation to some and a chance at self-evaluation. For me though, seeing the Trio’s plans of hypnotizing Buffy and making her their “sex bunny” played as some ridiculous gag is almost worse than their attempted rape and ensuing murder of Katrina in Dead Things.

Almost.

Speaking of Big Bads, villains and uncomfortable rape analogies… Willow is really out there, waving a red flag in Giles’ face now, huh. Giles blows off at her, sure. (And with good reason if we’re being honest.) But Willow threatens him. Giles’ face is a mix of a lot of things, but one of them is caution, and maybe even a bit of fear. He knows all too well where Willow could be headed.

(And then he just fucks right off to England without even leaving a note like “PS: Keep an eye on Willow, and don’t let her murder anyone. Unless it’s Warren. That bloke had it coming.”)

It’s not all bad though. Willow tries to support Buffy after her failed loan, and makes some terrible attempts to piss her off, just to make her feel something. Except that part of Willow’s concern for Buffy also comes from her unexamined guilt, and it only puts more pressure on Buffy to try and pretend that she’s fine in front of her friends.

Buffy is exhausted, and she tells Spike as much. She also asks why he’s always there when she’s miserable, which… girl… that’s called stalking. That’s why he’s always there when you’re alone and miserable. He’s been stalking you for a season now, and hasn’t even been subtle about it.

But for better or worse, it’s what Buffy needs right now. Not the stalking, but someone who she doesn’t feel any pressure with to pretend like she’s okay. Like she’s the old Buffy from before.

Previously with After Life, Buffy was asking for Giles and talked about missing him. Then, I commented that she might be thinking of him as someone that she could confide in. I think that that may still hold up, although it appears that once Giles is actually there, Buffy quickly assumes the same pretend position with him as the rest of the gang.

(Plus she already relieved that burden off her chest with Spike.)

It’s hard to explain Buffy’s logic here, because it’s something that I feel with her, rather than have the words to describe it. Part of it is surely that Buffy wants to protect her friends from the truth, but it’s also part of a larger narrative that she surrounded herself with. She also knows that she’s not the same, and that her friends noticed it. But if she doesn’t talk to them about it, that leaves her space to ignore it, ignore her trauma, her detachment, just as she’s trying to ignore her financial issues.

It’s classic self-sabotage and depression. At that stage where you don’t even want to admit that you have depression, because that implies that something’s wrong with you. And we are just not going to deal with that. Quick, let’s self-depreciate and make a joke about burning down the house for insurance.

Of course those financial issues would be better if someone paid rent for living there for potentially over 4 months now. Or at the very least had a discussion with Buffy about whether or not they should still live there.

Yes, we circled back to Willow again, but also Tara. This is certainly not a new hot take, but it is sort of baffling that these two don’t seem to contribute anything to Buffy’s financial situation despite living in her damn house. I get that most of Joyce’s insurance money just about covered the medical bills, but they also comment about the cost of living and… Those costs should have been covered by the adults living in the house, not by a finite and apparently very little amount of money Joyce left her daughters??

You definitely get the idea that the gang, and specifically Willow and Tara in this case, had absolutely no plans whatsoever beyond bringing Buffy back. They apparently expected Buffy to magically solve those finance issues when she was brought back, instead of… you know… thinking ahead about the teenager in the house, whose well-being they moved in for, I assume.

I initially was also just somewhat confused by the fact that they thought that pretending that Buffy was still alive was better than sending Dawn to live with her dad… But this rewatch reminded me that Hank Summers absolutely can’t be trusted to actually take in his own daughter, and Buffy even says so in an episode in season 5. They actually worry about how Dawn might be put into foster care if Buffy’s deemed unreliable as a guardian.

So, alright, I get it, they hoped that they could bring Buffy back anyway, but I can’t believe that apparently they didn’t even pay the bills out of their own pockets? They’re college students, sure, and that Tara obviously won’t get support from her family… But maybe, you know, take on a part-time job? And what about Willow’s family? Weird as a relationship she has with her parents, it’s still a relationship, so she could probably explain that she needs money to pay rent.

It’s just baffling. Even more so the fact that none of this is ever addressed, and Buffy keeps making increasingly sarcastic remarks about how everyone’s living in her house. Which points to her, Willow and Tara never having a discussion about whether or not they should move out or stay, now that she’s back.

On the other hand, there’s Dawn, and having three adults parenting her is probably better for now. Especially when she wants to do the research with them. Tara’s face is entirely too smug when Dawn opens a book despite her mom efforts, and is immediately greeted with some weird demon horn penis shit, or whatever.

(Which also reminds me of a s7 scene, where Dawn is having a slow epiphany of what Willow’s TMI involving tongue piercings imply, and Buffy’s like “Dawn needs to do a research thing!” How the turntables.)

Arguably the most reasonable person in this whole bunch is Anya though. When she proposes that Buffy should be charging for saving lives, everyone boos her. But you know what, that’s just a load of crap. And not just because that’s the entire premise of Angel the series.

Maybe there’s an idea here about how altruism can’t be done for profit, but if that’s the intention, then I’m once again calling bullshit. Apparently you either have a 9 to 5 job in order to pay the bills, and have food to eat – after which you’re happy to watch one (1) episode of television and write a nonsense text post about it, and definitely not go out to save the world if you also want to sleep. OR you can do the whole saving the world thing but also starve and lose your house to debt, I guess.

(The Spider-man comparison is also just weak, man. Peter Parker is a high school student for most of his stories. He has an aunt to take care of his finances, just like Buffy didn’t have to worry about finances in high school either.)

This also comes right back to the whole idea of how the Watcher’s Council is paying Watchers but not Slayers. Like, you know what, Giles. You could actually take care of this.

After all, you’re the one getting paid for Buffy’s work.

Oh, and bless Anya too for calling out Xander’s stalling and bullshit about their engagement. She’s right and she should say it.