Buffy Review. Spoilers.

[agoodwinsmith]

On New Year's Eve, my SOGP and I drank mimosa champagne cocktails [1] and watched some of my new copy of the first season of Buffy.

We watched Welcome to the Hellmouth, The Harvest, and skipped right to the end for Prophecy Girl.

We decided that Xander is the Summer King, Angel is the Winter King (which is why they are so unsatisfactory as single characters - they are halves of the whole God), and Buffy is the Goddess.  Naturally, that means that Willow, Buffy, and Cordelia form the triple goddess, with Willow as the maiden, Cordelia as the mother, and Buffy as the crone.  Buffy has to be the crone because her dominion is night and the earth and the underworld.

We weren't quite sure what to do with the Giles character, since he seems to be a Merlin figure, which isn't really a role in Wicca - or at least not in any of the traditions I am familiar with.

Maybe Giles and Joyce are the priest and priestess - drawing down the god and goddess.  Hah - this is jumping ahead a few seasons, but we do get them performing the Great Rite eventually, so maybe.  They are forces of conservatism, though, which you always get with the ordination of interpreters of the divine, so maybe again.

Anyways.  This is one of the reasons that Buffy "works" in ways that the Angel series didn't for me.  There is deliberate use of archtypes, and sometimes what I suspect are serendipitous use of the old stories we want to be told (we want to see the Winter King and the Summer King fight over the Goddess and hate each other's guts, and we want them each to win and each to be defeated, which they are in the cycle).  I think a strength of the series is that the creators did not allow themselves to be bound by what might be common expectations regarding the story cycles, but were perfectly happy to use them.

[1] - Champagne Cocktail - sugar cube soaked with brandy and drowned in champagne (the sugar cube bubbles extra - pretty).  Mimosa - champagne and orange juice.  April's Happy Champagne Mimosa Cocktail - demerara sugar cubes soaked in grand marnier, drowned in champagne, and topped up with orange juice.  Nom nom nom.

Comments

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

You must write this down in 8 pages and come present it at ICFA. You know you want to...

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness. How much I want to. Secret and well-tamped down ambitions, don't you know. I can has shiny new washer dryer, and contract that goes to 01 Feb 08. It used to be I can has trapped at International Corner Store with debts and drunks and graveyard shifts, so it is pretty damned spiffy in comparison, but you know: a girl has dreams. :)

Thanks.

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

Oh, that works. I had not realised it before.

Also, what esmeraldus said. :) (I never know *how* people stretch one page of an idea to eight pages without waffling and repeating themselves, though).

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh, well. I don't know about *eight* pages, but one does the citing of the sources, and the explaining why the sources are citable, and the exploration of each character in light of the sources, and the summing up, and the judicious selection of interesting asides.

And then you will have discovered other things to say; such as Miss Calendar being a Nimue figure to Giles' Merlin (but how does that fit the Wicca pattern? - dunno); or The Master not fitting the pattern either and needing to be explained or brushed aside convincingly.

I mean: the thinking it up and writing it is not hard (although my conclusions tend to suck because I always figure: "isn't that *interesting*?" to be sufficient and others (people with marks) generally have a different opinion.

Presenting it to others sounds scary, though.

Again: thanks. :)