#liveblogging btvs

[caricature-of-a-witch]

bloody fucking hell I was expecting some. funny lil song and dance episode with some dangerous but ultimately easily resolved guy responsible for the shenanigans. instead now I want to cry about mediocre songs and my heart is breaking for just about every single character

[hmslusitania]

Lore in Buffy is of course extremely loosey goosey but I will never not love that a number 2 pencil counts for the purpose of a wooden stake to the heart for vampire slayage

[morrithal]

Sorry but this is Angel to me. Like this is the only pose and expression he does when he's trying to be cute

[herinsectreflection]

I love it when the the show doesn't even try to make the Girl/Slayer Dichotomy discussion subtle.

[forcebookish]

i'm sure the writers didn't plan "are you now or have you ever been" and angel was just meant to apparently be in this state of homeless rat-eater for one hundred years... but still working with canon, i wonder how we got from 1952 angel to 1996 angel. like, i guess the guilt of leaving everyone to be fed on by that demon would've caught up to him and made him have to think pretty hard about what it means that he could do something so heartless and vengeful even with a soul - that there's something wrong with him inherently or that the demon inside him is still there lurking. and i get that it was a span of 44 years but, like, where did he go after that?

and did he have a phase right after he tried to be evil again with darla where he was destitute and pathetic, and what stabilized him? how long did either of those phases last?

(if this is covered in the comics or i'm forgetting an episode please let me know)

[perilegs]

[the-golden-dragoness]

Crazy that I was able to catch a Buffy guest star as being from another 90s supernatural show that I only watched three episodes of

[granny-weatherwax]

They pULLED A "THE BODY" ON TORI?????

[francesderwent]

I forgot how fun the Buffyspeak is. it's so fun. guys remember when television used to be fun

[chasingfictions]

doublemeat palace as about bodies and autonomy and systems!!!!! buffy moving as a body within the minimum wage service economy with the things that allow her full personhood being stripped away systemically by her employer ("in it for life. like me. you wanna get something out of this, Buffy? you'll do the same." / " yeah. they all start to look the same to me too." / "do you think they'll mind if I take another break? "we're not allowed. downtime robs us all."). and then anya within the system of marriage and heterosexuality and there's something about that being questioned by halfrek that's like. okay what would it mean for you NOT to put your body through this system. the simple question of : "so, um … you're marrying that man with the large upper arms?" "yes" "why?" . and then Willow in the process of renegotiating what it is to live in her body in this world then having her bodily autonomy violated by Amy ("You don't get it. What you did to me was wrong. Do you have any idea how much harder that makes, just, everything?") but in a way that nonetheless doesn't recognize that that's just what she did to Tara.

meanwhile dawn is processing the reality of what it means to have to live in a world run by money ("but that means she's gonna have like crap jobs her entire life, right? Minimum wage stuff. I mean, I could still grow up to be anything. But for her … this is it.") . in a way that is also about buffy and dawn's different roles in life and buffy's bodily autonomy being violated at 15 and in another way being violated in time immemorial when sineya's autonomy was violated, and how "i could still grow up to be anything. but for her, this is it" is about buffy's slayerhood. but also it's dawn in a moment of contending with her own powerlessness -- as a minor who sustained an injury a few weeks prior because of one of her caregivers wasn't in control of their body either, and trying to figure out a way out of this system. is there a way for her to have power. and there isn't yet, not like this -- like, the next two episodes again in the dawn pov are about her having no power over what her caregivers decide to do or how that affects her life. and then the macrocosm of that extending to the spuffy conversation in the dmp which a) is so funny bc it's just like wow ok two upper middle class guys say what. please youre embarrassing yourselves. and b) is like.

this could just be any conversation about buffy's general attitude towards life as a whole in this season. in the last season. like, don't make this harder and the throughline of hardness throughout this season --

and like, this season being so much about the way buffy's life is not in her control and you can see it with all the time-fucky and identity-bending plots of the season, and this episode is engaging with that in such an interesting way bc the dmp does feel like this liminal time-stuck space where you lose your personhood but that's also not through magical means like in life serial or tabula rasa or dead things it's just baked in societally, economically, structurally. and maybe im getting away from myself but like, the way buffy's entire life has been this timefuck and this identity bending, personhood-denying experiment. what does it do to your perception of time to know you're going to die before you reach 25. that you just have less time than everyone else. buffy's managers pointing to their 5-year, 10-year badges, and buffy knowing that she's currently 7 years into slayerhood and her number's been up twice already. the identity-bending and autonomy-denying of all of that being forced upon her at age 15, simply being told that this is her life now, forever.

and like, all of that is so highlighted in this specific episode because i do think like, buffy is vampirecoded all series yeah but all season in particular, she is undead, she crawls from her grave, she came back wrong, "sun sets and she appears" "every single night the same arrangement," all of that. but in this episode in particular there's something about the almost cryptlike sunlessness of the employee area of the doublemeat palace. the insistence that they need to eat the food the dmp produces mirroring the like, closed cycle of vampires feeding on blood, it's just blood in and blood out. doublemeat in and doublemeat out. the way they're also slowly being fed on by wig lady, and by the system, and the way all vampires are also victims of vampires, and vampires also are about autonomy and denial of personhood. we're told it seven episodes into the series. "a vampire isn't a person at all" and the way especially the first vampires we meet in the series are so invested in hierarchy, in system, that that's seemingly a tremendous part of vampiric culture and just like!! also buffy affirming some piece of her identity by taking a break she's not supposed to take to go have sex with a vampire in the alley and engage in this very bodily and human act with someone whose body is not human and instead is meant to be abject, and it's this tiny and sad little moment of trying to assert her personhood in the middle of endless systems that deny it .

anyway something something capitalism and the alienation of the worker from the body something something how patriarchy and capitalism are threaded together through the explicit villains of the doublemeat palace but the implicit villains of the watchers council and straight marriage and the american family structure. something something willow saving buffy and herself at the end of this episode and her doing that in the process of telling buffy about what happened with amy and processing her feelings about it and something about these two friends who love each other and have known each other since they were sixteen and didnt know fully how badly the world was going to try to mangle them standing there still alive and still themselves after an entire episode of feeling like they are the last people in control of themselves. willow being the one to save buffy for once, and then affirming a boundary to amy and she doesnt get it yet but maybe she will some day and buffy returning to the doublemeat palace but on her own terms and i dont know that i have a conclusion because i think there isnt one, it's just the whole thing, the whole season about what does it mean to really try to live in the world . can we find a way to survive. i dont know. can we? let's keep trying anyway. ill throw this monster that's about to eat you into the meat grinder to prove it.

[justyncase]

ok robin’s room of crosses is so insane

[caricature-of-a-witch]

why do I feel like this show wants me to think riley finn is actually a good catch or sth. why do I have to keeping watching Buffy run back to the most annoying love interest I've ever had on my goddamn screen he has not been in a single episode without going on my fucking nerves

[reallyreal-madeingold]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Rupert Giles/Maggie Walsh Characters: Rupert Giles, Maggie Walsh Additional Tags: giles gets knocked out again, Pre-Relationship, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Developing Relationship, Double Drabble Series: Part 26 of MadeInGold's MedWhump May 2024 Summary:

Giles gets knocked out (again), but this time it's Maggie who finds him.

@medwhumpmay day 26, alt prompt 8 “unconscious”

[morrithal]

Angel's pussy can't have been that good

[debbthelesbianbountyhunter]

And just like that I fell in love.

I could write a whole dissertation on Cordelia “says faiths hair is obviously fake even though it is brown” chase. But the thing that I love specifically in this line, and why it’s so iconic, is because Cordelia isnt scared of Buffy, she’s ANGEY, and she doesn’t just ask Buffy what her issue is, she asks her what her childhood trauma is. She says the cattiest, funniest thing and then immediately goes and tells everyone that the weird new girl threatened her w a stick.

I adore you ms. chase.

[forcebookish]

YEAH IN FACT THIS WHOLE SUBPLOT IS PETTY AND A COMPLETE WASTE OF MY TIME. LITERALLY WHO CARES!! GET OFF MY SCREEN OMG