'My Eye! My Burning, Beautiful Eye!'

SPOILER WARNING (If you have not read Buffy Season 8 #12 - Ben - DO NOT READ)

So. Wow. Where to start. Um, how about with the begining:

I picked up my issue of Buffy Season 8 #12 today, expecting no less than my monthly dose of amazing and this month doubled down.




No shit wow.

So that's Buffy there on the right. And that's another girl on the left. So this is a big deal. So I'm saying so a lot. First off, the New York Times has a big article on the event. Joss Whedon talks there and also at Newsarama which is a much longer and interesting interview.

I believe Whedon when he says it's not a stunt. Buffy has never been about stunts, or 'this week, on very special episode of Blossom...'. And this series has moved the landscape enough through its sheer existence to not require any gimmick to draw readers to it (any Buffy die-hards put off by the comic, and there are some, will certainly not come back for this). Joss says its an evolution of the character, except she's not gay. So why is she..?

ABC News wonders aloud if it's a stunt/gimmick/etc. and let me explain why it's not and why I think this has been coming for a long time. First off, Buffy is not gay. She will not become gay. This is clearly history repeating itself: Buffy voids her loneliness with the nearest available option, good or bad, and apparently now, male or female. It stands to reason Buffy would entertain such thoughts - she's young, 24 at the most I think - and surrounded by dozens of hot young women. She's hopelessly lonely. Her isolation deepens with age. And it's been a while - Great Muppety Odin, it's been a while - so I'm not surprised by this at all. Especially since this has been coming more or less since Season 3.

Buffy's relationship with Faith - prior to the break-up - was coded at various times as romantic. Buffy and Faith were not lovers, but there was a gay reading there (if you were so inclined). A season later Willow reveals she's gay. Faith's closeness with Buffy clearly left Willow sore (to this day) and in retrospect, it seems more than Willow simply being left out. She's jealous. There's nothing to suggest Willow ever felt for Buffy that way, but in issue #12, it's Willow's reaction that answers the question of why do this now. Willow has the same sore reaction to Buffy/Satsu that she did Buffy/Faith and I think Willow can handle Buffy with someone else so long as they're not a woman. That's too much of a threat. Willow loves Buffy (she risked everything - and lost it - to bring Buffy back from the dead) and now with this incident, the earth is going to open up big. I think a lot of buried things are going to come to the surface. Just a few issues ago, Willow explained she couldn't share her self with Buffy because everything Buffy touches comes apart. With Willow, Buffy can only ever be destructive; Willow can never reconcile her feelings.

Damn. It's a whole month before the next issue...

Comments

Benjamin said…
I came to this about an hour ago, and after I read the warning I ran to The Core to get my fix.

Wow.

I don't for a second believe that this is a stunt (if so, it'd have been done in the first ish) nor do I believe Buffy is gay. Buffy is surrounded by a cadre of impossibly beautiful girls and one cyclopean guy that she made clear she would not sleep with years ago. What other options are there for her, alone at the top?

I do think this will serve to push Willow further out of the fold, into a role like Giles has. Maybe a Willow spin-off book?

It's great to see all the press for this book, but it's a shame it's only about the gay-or-not thing.
8:15 PM
Darby said…
I agree, I think it will push Willow even further from Buffy. But on the other hand, it may give them an opportunity to get closer. Not in a romantic sense - I think Willow's feelings, if they exist, are so subconscious to expose them to air would probably destroy them - but maybe it ca bridge the gap that's been there really since Faith.
8:54 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles, accumulating tension
Read more

Get Lost Writing

Image
Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearing fruit.  This
Read more

Diamonds In The Rough

Happy to announce that my brother and I won the Main St. Waterloo 10th Anniversary Poster Contest, co-sponsored by the Metro Arts Guild . Our piece, entitled "Metamorphisis", is on display at the gallery -- unless it's somewhere else now. I'll try and get a scan of it to put up on the blog (why didn't you think of that before, Darby?) There's a new literary journal out there called A Public Space that could not have started off better. The contributors and bredth of the material really has me excited not just to pick this up, but submit there as well. The coolest thing is they have a new story by Kelly Link. Check out the excerpt . My own zine, Other Than , continues on pace toward completion. It seems like I may be hosting a joint reading at the gallery to launch it along side Osie's Murmur , which would be very cool and exciting. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made it safely into orbit .
Read more