chani | Entries tagged with btvs

A post by

jamalov29 made me ponder what evil Spike did and the sort of vampire he was.

I do think that we can't "understand" vampires in BTVS without keeping in mind that they worked as metaphors, and that the special vampires' journeys told us things about mankind, hence my comments on Caroline's journal. I've always seen Angel as the metaphor of every man.

Because in the Jossverse if girls have the potential to become strong women and must achieve it like "Chosen" showed us, every man has the potential for both good and evil, hence the two personas of the Angel character on screen: Angel the Champion who did remarkable things and Angelus the evil bastard. That personality split was nothing but an allegory. BTW I really liked season 5 because then Angel became really human, a complex human being with shining moments and horrible flaws, and no longer the vessel for two different personalities.

So yes vampires were convenient to tell a story about relationships, about living in a violent world, leaving teenage and accepting adulthood (Spike in BTVS). But that doesn't mean that all vampires are alike or even equal (ok this sounds a bit Orwellian!).

( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

In Autumn 2004 I read a friend's thesis before the viva voce in Lyon, helping her to correct a few things. Her thesis was about exorcism in Middle Ages, a topic I didn't master but that was close enough to my special field, medieval inquisition.

I do miss the academic work.

Just found an essay I wrote then, about alienation and possession in the Buffyverse.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Damien Rice- I remember

I've been on a low-Internet diet this week. Too much work, too little time...and to be honest I kind of suffered from an indigestion of all things Internet. It happens.

So instead I actually worked and in the evenings I started reading the new Mankell's crime novel I had bought. As I'm downloading Lost, I think it's time for a meme.

Nicked from both

mary5958 and

alwaysjbj.

( The 'ship meme )

Current Mood: tired

( Hey Lynn, two C words at once!)

Just saw a post by

st_salieri and it made me wonder if I had celebrity crushes...

Does the fact I'd watch almost any movie if either Sean Connery or Richard Gere or John Malkovich is in it mean I have a crush on them? BTW it used to be true for Harrison Ford a long time ago, but too many bad films broke the rule in regard to him. And yes I may go to see Slither just for Nathan Fillion !

Do I have a crush on Tom McRae? His music, the way he sings, his poetry move me a lot and I've been known to behave like a fangirl once or twice on LJ...

Honestly I don't know. It's hard to have a crush on someone who isn't really a real person for you, you know.

I definitely have celebrity fantasies though. Because let's be honest, their talent aside, the actors whom I mentioned do have sex-appeal or are just so pretty and charming like James Marsters! They are meant to make us fantasize, they are the stuff dreams are made on...

But I think that to have a crush on someone that person somehow must have become a familiar while a fantasy is something that is merely based on an image you have and on your own projection. So yes those celebrities took my fancy.
Knowing a lot of personal stuff about a celeb can destroy a fantasy, but I guess it also can create an illusion of familiarity that would make someone develop a crush on them.

As for me, I guess that I rather have crushes on real people living around me (which includes Internet people) or on fictional characters.

I've had crushes on characters from novels, from comic books, from cartoons, from movies, and mostly from tv shows...Those are the ones who usually become the most familiar for they stay with us for a while, so they are big on the crushometer !

7 seasons of BTVS and 1 season of Ats turned my crush on Spike into a huge infatuation, but I still have crushes on Giles, Ethan and, to a certain extent, on Wesley.

Perhaps we I read fanfictions because of those crushes...

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Tom McRae- Border Song

I love our French cable because they show reruns of BTVS all the time so I often come across an episode. It was "Spiral" this time, and since they also showed "The Weight of the World" and "The Gift" in a row, I got to re-watch them as well.

And I still find new stuff to ponder!

( Random thoughts )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Damian Rice - I remember

Listening To Fear:

Xander: I still don't get why we had to come here to get info about a killer snot monster.

Giles: Because it's a killer snot monster from outer space. (Pauses) I did not say that.

I sooooooo love Giles!

Current Mood: giddy

I found this through

whedonesque so you may have seen it already. It's from HERE

Here are some funny entries:

( read and laugh )

Current Mood: geeky

A fandom is a strange thing. I would have never believed I could be part of one 5 years ago...Yet here am I.

I remember it well. I got hooked on BTVS as they showed season 5 in its original language on the French cable

Until then I had only watched it from time to time (mostly because Giles first and Spike afterwards caught my interest) but I wasn't an avid fan and hadn't realized how good the writing was (it was dubbed in French ! ). I was already supporting Spuffy and hoped it would happen so I went to look for spoilers on the Internet while watching reruns of season 4 (a season I hadn't fully seen at the time!). I found the Slayer Spoiler site that led me to the Buffy Cross and Stake Spoiler Board. Season 6 was running in the States then. I started downloading episodes, and when I couldn't get one, fortunately we had Leoff's wildfeed !

So basically I came to the fandom in the middle of a 'shippers war. I lurked for a couple of month and in February 2002 I dared to post for the first time...coming out as a Love's Bitch during a bet on whether Spike was evil or not. The Spike haters thought they had won when Seeing Red aired, but Grave and Spike winning his soul back ended the bet...

Despite showing up at the worst time (a lot of posters were Spike fans so the anti-Spike were very virulent), I found that board very exciting because everyone was speculating on what would happen or parsing the previous episodes. And

shadowkat67 used to post her essays over there then. Somehow, probably because of the time zones, I managed to miss all the nasty stuff, and even became friends with people who weren't necessarily Spuffies. Then the Daily 'Shipping News thread was created and we could have fun while supporting various 'ships, without fighting each other. Those were silly days and we played a lot on Spike Mountain...

In June 2002, Jane from

thehappyblog made me read fanfictions and porn in English for the first time in my life! On her list of links, you could find Laure Alexander, sabershadowkat and nautibitz... I learnt a lot of new vocabulary during that summer! Then I became a member of a fanfic reading club and I found it was very cool...Do you remember,

pjzallday, how you and I used to give the lowest marks to the fanfictions we were supposed to grade? I found

herself_nyc 's stories and

kantayra's "Double Spiked" then!

I can't believe it has been 4 years.!

( On how things change and remain the same )

ETA: I posted in a hurry and left for the movies...so now I'm fixing typos....

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Queen of the Stone Age- Burn the Witch

I used to think that "Buffy vs Dracula" was poor and mattered only for its final scene and the nice twist of Dawn's entrance but the episode may have had some qualities after all...It echoed a lot of stuff from "Restless".

Among them, the Willow/Giles scene that pointed out the special bond the two of them had, something thta Giles' dream already showed in "Restless". And I liked this line:

Willow: Just call me the computer whisperer.

Later Willow and Xander are chatting and Willow mentions a secret, and we get again an echo of "Restless" about Willow's fears and Xander's fantasies:

Xander: News flash, Will. Everybody knows.
Willow: No, thi-this isn't about me and Tara.
Xander: Oh. Well, not that I wouldn't be all ears if you wanted to tell me a secret about you two. Even if it was very, very naughty.

Also Xander's behaviour as Dracula's butt-monkey reminds me less of Reinfield and more of Glory's minions!

Speaking of foreshadowing stuff, I think that Buffy reading a book on the crusades at the beginning of "The Replacement" (that I'm currently watching) was kinda a clue.....announcing the Knights of Byzantium !

BTW some lines are priceless :

Buffy: If Xander kills himself, he's dead.

And I still love "Real Me", Harmony is just so funny. And Spike blowing a kiss to Mort cracks me up every time and at the same time sexy rowrrrrrrrrr !!!!

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Martin Rappeneau- Julien

I'm doing it again because I screwed up with the colours and the lj-cut is driving me mad!

After reading

rahirah 's entry I went to dig in my archives and found that essay on William/Spike I wrote for the Buffy Cross and Stake Spoiler Board...Some people from my flist may already know it (so sorry to bother you with old rambling of mine), but many don't. So here's my thoughts on Sweet William.

First off here is a background…which is quite normal concerning William but there is more…Once upon a time, I got involved in an email "war" (ok I may have started it actually….) with/against some friends, about William, during summer 2002, so I gathered here some stuff from that “debate”. Rosalind, Hansel, Emma, ARN and AnInstant from the C&S were the other protagonists in the conflit mostly based on my favourite episode, Fool For Love, and on the William/Cecily scene. We actually fought over the line "They are not like you and I" and what it meant about William. Basically it was a friendly war on grammar and interpretation!

My "Ode to William" was nothing but a summary of my points...Here I've just added some stuff about the season 5 of Ats to my old post.

( Remembering William )

Current Mood: annoyed by bloody html
Current Music: Tom McRae - Still Lost

I watched Battlestar Galactica 2x 19, kinda anti-climatic after Downloaded, but it was to expect and now there's one week to wait until the finale...By the way does anyone remember how Baltar called Six on Caprica before the attack in the miniseries? I'm pretty sure we heard her name then but I can't recall it.

Secret/hidden names is an old plot device in literature and of course it was used in the Jossverse, obviously in Ats with the Jasmine arc and a bit more subtly in BTVS with Anne and with Dawn and the Key arc, which was foreshadowed in Buffy's dream in Restless but also, according to me, in Willow's deam when Tara and Willow wondered about the kitty and her name, a name she hadn't told them yet!

Weeks ago I read a thriller by John Katzenbach, The Analyst, that besides being a good mystery novel, made me remember AT LAST a fairy tale from my childhood I'd been trying to recall for months. I think I even asked

syderia about it once, although in such a confusing way that she couldn't help me.

The Analyst is about Dr. Frederick Starks , a psychoanalyst who receives an anonymous letter one day from a villain who calls himself Rumplestiltskin. Starks is given 30 days in which to guess the villain's identity. If he can’t guess it, Rumplestiltskin will begin killing off people close to Dr. Starks, and he’ll keep killing, unless Starks kills himself.

The fairytale was written down by the Grimm Brothers. Because I'm lazy, here's a summary from Wikipedia:

In order to make himself appear more important, a miller lied to the king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king called for the girl, shut her in a tower room with straw and a spinning wheel, and demanded that she spin the straw into gold by morning or be executed. She had given up all hope, when a dwarf (or mannikin) appeared in the room and spun straw into gold for her in return for her necklace; then again the following night for her ring. But on the third night, with nothing left, the strange creature spun straw into gold for a promise that the girl's first-born child would become his.

The greedy king was so impressed that he married the miller's beautiful daughter, but when their first child was born, the dwarf returned to claim his payment: "Now give me what you promised". The queen was frightened and offered him all the wealth she had if she could keep the child. The dwarf refused but finally agreed to give up his claim to the child if the queen could guess his name in three days. At first she failed, but before the second night, her messenger overheard the dwarf hopping about his fire and singing:

"Today I bake, tomorrow brew,

The next I'll have the young Queen's child.

Ha! glad am I that no one knew

That Rumpelstiltskin I am styled."

In case you wonder to where I was leading you...I wrote this whole entry just to ~~justify~~ post something I nicked from

beanbeans, a meme about what your name means !

Find there

( My Result )

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Peer Gynt - Grieg

First off, I found an interesting article about Brokeback Mountain fitting in the pattern of tragic loves in literature: Cowboys in love.
The author mentioned Denis de Rougemont's famous analysis of romantic love in L'Amour et L'Occident which was a book I had to study a long time ago when I was in Highschool!

Because of

jamalov29 's last entry, I kept on thinking of romantic love and Spuffy today...finding out the article was a sign that I had to write something about it! This is an answer to your post, Caroline, well kind of...

( Love in the Western World...the basics you need to know )

( Spuffy as THE ultimate romantic love in BTVS )

Current Music: Tom mCRae- Mermaid Blues

I posted this on lateseasonlove.

The world might be a stage, but life has stages too, and BTVS has always been about a journey, about growing-up, female empowerment and resilience. The two last seasons showed us the last stages of Buffy's journey.

I remember that when season 7 opened, we got some spoilers telling that the BB was to come, and that what we called then the shapeshifter wasn't our Big Bad. I think it was pretty accurate (and yes it suits my theory about the First Evil! ;- )). Caleb was to come. And he was really the anti-Buffy, the ultimate Big Bad.

( Caleb vs Buffy, the extremes of the scale )

( other stages... )

Current Music: pigeons

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.

Current Mood: geeky

I've been thinking of season 4 because of a discussion about Ethan Rayne being trustworthy or not on rayne_n_chaos , and I realized that the theme of the labyrinth was there from the first episode to the finale. It is the leitmotiv of season 4.

( This is where you get lost )

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Puccini- Madame Butterfly

Get your mind out off the gutter! I'm simply avoiding the papers I should have marked during the holidays so I decided to do what nobody asked me to...Answer the fandom meme for BTVS and Ats, since it's actually the only fandom I know and belong to (I watch other shows but I don't know the fandoms).

( BTVS )

( Ats )

What would be your answers?

Current Mood: procrastinating

"The form of art most suited to an age will produce both its best work and its most work-so by statistical likelihood, many bad works will be produced in that form."

Rhonda Wilcox, Why Buffy matters, the Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yes I've started reading my first Buffy book, a Christmas gift from "my little calisson", Jane from thehappyblog (thank you again, Cheron, not sure you'll see this since you never post on your blog, but thanks nonetheless).

Rhonda Wilcox is right, television can produce the worst and the best...many bad "works" (bad soaps, horrible reality crap, stupid tv games) but also a few extraordinary works such as OZ, Farscape (the series, not the finale mini series that was too mainstream for my taste), Firefly, Nip/Tuck (yes despite the disappointing ending of s3),...and entertaining/suspenseful quality shows like Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Lost, The Shield, Rescue Me, etc (I won't make the list of all the shows I've loved in the 80's and the 90's). I haven't seen Veronica Mars so I can't express an opinion.

But for me BTVS reached a level that is beyond anything else. Besides being moving, it's so rich, so inspirant, thoughts-provoking, refreshing and so well done in regard to cinematic method (given to the money they had) . Hush or Restless are mere masterpieces.

I've been discussing Buffy/Ats online for nearly 4 years, thus meeting my own Scooby Gang through the Internet, and I still find out new stuff when re-watching my DVDs! Buffy led me to read fanfictions, something I has never done for any other work.

Oh yes Buffy matters...and will matter still in 2006.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Jack The Ripper- The apemen, the bride & the butterfly

Should heroes age?

Can we picture an old Superman, an old Batman...an old Buffy?

Today was definitely a DVDS day. Tonight I decided to watch Richard Lester's Robin and Marian starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (and the talented Nicol Williamson as Little John and Robert Shaw as the Sheriff of Nottingham). It's a beautiful love story between two middle-aged people (Sean and Audrey are both terrific) but it also asked the question of the aging hero...in this case, Robin Hood.

Goldman, who wrote the scenario, explained that he based much of the story on actual medieval ballads concerning the death of Robin...

( Robin and Marian )

But back to Buffy...Could, should The Slayer age? Maybe there was something about The Cruciamentum ritual I didn't see at the time...

Current Mood: nostalgic

I've just made it. I'm feeling daring...and I'm fed up of the best-fav-thingy Polls!

Come on, gimme it good!

( The Least Fav Thingy Poll )

Current Mood: mischievous

I rewatched The Wish during lunch time before going to do some shopping. I think

I hadn't seen it for a long time...I don't watch season 3 very often.

Is it me or the feeding machine scene was a wink at "Modern Times" ? Except this time, men (a woman in this case) aren't fed but food! I'm sure Chaplin would have smiled...

The Wish was a case of "the biter being bit"...if Anya hadn't granted Cordelia's wished she wouldn't have lost her powers...

I have a problem with the amulet though (that Anya said her dad gave her! D'Hoffryn is indeed her surrogate father). I know that she had to put it around Cordy's neck for the plot's sake, because without seeing it on Cordy's corpse, Giles wouldn't have figured it out, summoned Anyanka and invalidated the wish...but how does it come that she still had it when she was choking Giles?

I guess that the one she gave Cordy was only an avatar of her real amulet as a demon (just like Anya in Sunnydale High would be an avatar of Anyanka), allowing Cordy to remember the pre-wish-world, and a symbol, not the centre of Anyanka's power, but I can't help thinking there's a plot hole in there.

Based on this, I now think that D'Hoffryn and his Vengeance Demons don't belong to any time nor any dimension, unlike basic demons like Clem, but can be embodied in a human body whenever and wherever they want in order to grant a wish. They are off limits, off time and off life. They can switch alternate realities, move through dimensions (with or without shrimps!) while to be human is being stuck in one time-line. This explains why Anya couldn't understand Joyce's death in The Body. As a VD she was unbound and didn't know the taste of ending no matter how many people she killed.

By the way the fact that Anyanka and Halfrek were doing stuff during the Crimean War doesn't necessarily mean that Cecily was already a VD in FFL, even though Crimean War is prior to 1880!

Any thoughts dear flist of mine?

Current Mood: calm and sipping her tea
Current Music: Jack The Ripper- From My Veins To The Sea

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Entries tagged with btvs

Spike the monster

Old stuff

Peeking a boo

Do you have a Celebrity Crush ?

Buffy is still the best !

Obviously in fangirl mode !

giggles

Memory lane

Re-watching season 5

A William post inspired by Barb's effulgent entry!

The power of names and secret names

L'amour toujours l'amour

Seasons 6 and 7 through stages models

Polemical still?

Into the Labyrinth

Playing with myself

Television

On aging heroes

Here is a Poll about the Buffyverse

Since it's wish time