#anyanka
A few of my favorite couples from BTVS/Angel
of all the random things to wish season 7 had included (and i actually like season 7, for the record), i wish that they had managed to include, if not cordelia herself since she was off having some apparently terrible storyline, at least some sort of avatar of the southern california mean girl.
i say that because i read season 7 as buffy making peace with her shadow selves. and cordelia was buffy’s very first shadow. in season 3, her shadow-self was faith. faith was, more or less, the temptation to use power selfishly or irresponsibly. so the fact that buffy entrusts faith with power by the end of season 7 (handing over the scythe, etc) is a sign that she has resolved much of her own fear of power.
in season 6, her shadow-self was spike. spike was something like her yearning for escape and self-destruction. the temptation to check out of life. the isolation of keeping your problems secret. i see the fact that buffy forgives and speaks up for spike in season 7 as her forgiving herself by proxy, the exact flip-side of the way she used spike to punish herself the season before.
i don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first so often appears in buffy’s image. in some sense, she is fighting herself. and buffy isn’t the only one resolving issues with her shadow, all of the other characters are too. willow most obviously, as she tries to re-integrate magic into her life, and confronts the image of warren in the killer in me. spike of course as well. it makes a lot of thematic sense for him to spend the season afraid of spontaneously becoming a mindlessly violent demon.
i wish we’d gotten even more of that with all of the other characters. i wish that we’d gotten to see xander confront, say, his fears of uselessness or becoming like his family. an update on the zeppo. though there’s a bit of that in potential. same deal with giles. i wish he’d had some character focus prior to lies my parents told me, so him wrestling with ineffectuality or ruthless consequentialism would have hit harder.
but given that this is buffy’s show, i’m most interested in her arc. because of that, i can’t help but think it would have been cool to see explicit resolution with the parts of herself that are cliquish or self-oriented. obviously, buffy is a very selfless character. but she wasn’t always that way. in season 1, cordelia represented the temptation to only care about oneself and one’s problems, and the way that sort of self-obsession means that you don’t take the way you hurt other people seriously. given that buffy has struggled the whole show with when she should selfishly care about her own pain versus when she shouldn’t, it would have been really nice for buffy to have a moment of triumphant selfishness. as funny as that might sound. or at least for her to make peace with the idea of caring about her own personal well-being.
the season almostgets there. i think it would be fair to read the chosenspell as a moment of triumphant selfishness on buffy’s part, given that more slayers in the world means that she won’t be suffering in isolation anymore. and the season does remind us a lotabout how much buffy’s isolation hurts her. but it would have been cool for example, if her realizing that the chosenspell was an option was related to her realizing that it was not just possible, but okay to not suffer. because for all that she tells giles she hates suffering in season 6, and for all that she tells spike she’s moved beyond hating, ie punishing, herself in season 7, and for all that she is clearly not lying about either, the tension about how much she’s really allowed to suffer or put herself first is still central to the season. cf, her conversations with dead people scenes,and all the talk of the mission mattering more than anything else.
(i would have liked, for example, if buffy’s get it done cruelty or the empty places blow-up had been more clearly about how buffy has learned the lesson of selflessness too well. ironically, because she’s too preoccupied with her own personal experience. she tries to demand that others use her emotional toolkit, because she’s freaked that everyone is going to die, but doesn’t have the perspective to see that that toolkit is a product of a fucked up situation. that she’s perpetuating isolation instead of looking for something else. i think this isbasically what the show was going for. it’s actually one of the reasons i like the season. but again, not clear.)
anya would probably have been the best character to play this symbolic role, and the season does sort of use her that way. she has a whole episode called selfless, after all. but she pretty much just finishes the show as yet another reformed villain. her honesty and frank interest in things like sex and money never get a chance to be framed as something valuable. i can’t help but think the season would have been much thematically stronger if that had happened. similar to the way that andrew’s flaw (narrativization) gets to be used in a positive way at the very end, when he describes anya’s death as heroic.
Selfless, 7.05
