buffy at pylduck.com

(Spoilers inevitable in posts. Be warned.)

Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Posted by shadowy duck.
From PopPolitics's roundtable discussion of Buffy:

On where we are headed: Did anyone else find this dream dialogue (in “Bring on the Night”) intriguing?
 
Buffy: Something evil is coming.
 
Joyce: Buffy, evil isn't coming, it's already here. Evil is always here. Don't you know? It's everywhere.
 
Buffy: And I have to stop it.
 
Joyce: How are you gonna do that?
 
Buffy: I -- I don't know yet, but?
 
Joyce: Buffy, no matter what your friends expect of you, evil is a part of us. All of us. It's natural. And no one can stop that. No one can stop nature, not even?
 
Now we don’t know yet (unless I missed something) whether the Joyce apparition is a manifestation of The First or not, but if she is not, I think she is pointing Buffy (and the show) in an all important direction here: The First will be defeated not by thinking of its as an other but recognizing (in true Jungian fashion) that it lies within, that it is natural. The Buffyverse is not Manichean.

Amen to that. I really hope the show follows through with this moment. I mean, not simply to say, "Evil is within us all," but really to use that realization to understand everything that has happened in the show.

Watching Angel tonight -- against my will, I assure you, but Faith has returned there -- I noticed again something my roommate in New York pointed out: there is sure is a lot of bondage and torture in this show. But it's also particularly evident that the logic of the show condones beating up and torturing demons (not just ridding the earth of them, perhaps "euthanizing" them for the sake of humanity). There is a lot of beating demons because they are evil. Now really, isn't one of the major realizations that Buffy and Co. missing repeatedly that the distinction between good and evil is just not a fixed, sure thing? Demons can be good. Humans can be bad. Your friends can be bad. In some ways, it's about a shift from thinking about the inherent goodness and badness of people and demons to acts. Angel, of course, is the paradigm for this idea. His acts of goodness lead him to the path of redemption. (Though of course, there are always complications, and god knows what's been going on in his show.)

Oh, and yay! Willow will be on Angel next week to kick some ass as a witch. I'm glad they're letting her get back into the witchcraft.

o0o


 
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