Polemical still?

[chani]

I joined a new community lateseasonlove for the BTVS fans who actually liked season 6 and season 7. Season 6 is one of my favourite seasons, and I don't think that season 7 sucks as much as some fans said...I've just made my first post over there, about my theory concerning the First Evil and how I read the writing of season 7.

Some of you, from the C&S, already know my theory. Others may not. If you don't care about essays on BTVS, skip this post, but if you are curious, click on the link and join the fun!

I'm getting ready to go to the restaurant now.

 

Comments

[pjzallday.livejournal.com]

I think you're giving ME too much credit (again *wink*)

but the FE-as-inner-struggle idea an excellent explanation for what was up in season 7!

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I didn't like season 7 much, except for a few episodes like "Sleeper" or "Dirty Girls", until I found that way to be reconciled with it!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. Am also one of the few people online who loved these seasons. I'm odd, I know this, I prefer the later seasons to the early ones at the moment, when most people I know are the opposite. To me BTVS and ATS were better when they aged a bit. Hee.

I think what I loved most about them may be what others hated. The experiments with narrative style, the lack of structure, the fact that the monsters in some cases were deliberately shown to be less romanticized or horrendous, yet were in another sense more disturbing.
For me the last three seasons were like an adult looking at the first three without the child's romantic/melodramatic vision. The peel away.

Season 7 is a fascinating season. It won't leave my mind. I keep flipping it over and keep seeing new angles. New views. I think I like that it wasn't too tightly written, that the writers left things unanswered in places, while were didactic in others...

There's a great post by manwitch on ATPO board regarding season 7, why it worked for him and didn't. And why the series had to have seven seasons and could not have stopped at five. And was always meant to have seven. He says there's a pararelle to the 7 chakras, and that it has more to do with Eastern than Western philosophy. Buffy is moving past binary oppositions. That the First Evil and Caleb and Giles and Wood and Watcher's Council represent binary oppositions. The patriarchial structure we currently live within.
This is good on one side and this is evil on the other. And Buffy tries to go by that - following Wood and Giles, until she breaks with them finally in Empty Places and is comforted by Spike, who is neither evil nor good but both. She gets strength from him and meets the Guardian who gives her the Scythe and tells her to share. In the end, Spike and Buffy close the hellmouth together - he dissovles, becoming neither good nor evil and Buffy moves upward, surrounded by past friends and past enemies (Faith, Wood, Andrew), neither good nor evil. Interesting concept. And tracks through Whedon's work. I see a few flaws in the idea, and can see how someone can interpret it the opposite way, but then that's why I love those latter seasons, you can interpret them more than one way.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I agree the series improved with time. I still think that season 4 was a kind of artistic zenith though.

Between you and me, season 7 is good to analyze and I liked its metaphors, especially the final one, with Buffy getting rid of the Calling and sharing the female power, allowing inner potential to be achieved, but the whole season might have been a bit too conceptual, too abstract to be very good, or rather the concepts were good, but the creation had flaws. The ideas were intriguing but the writers/directors weren't careful enough about the "flesh" . For me "Dirty Girl" is the only very good episode of the second half of the season, and the finale (TEoD and cHosen) was botched-up.