This was good, yes, but I found myself getting increasingly irritated by the number of assumptions and assertions that were being made as if they were true. I am unfortunately too tied up right now to comment at length, but while I understand the idea of what the author says, I think he is too direct in his claims. Plus, I have a real bias, well known here: I really get upset at the "give you what you need, not what you want" trope, though I'd prefer to not bring up my old arguments about authorial intent and reader response theory (to which some are saying, thank God!). :-)

But I suspect this thread will generate a lot of comments. Have at it! :-)

Dana5140 | March 20, 16:00 CET

Nice article, which does raise a lot of thoughts. I agree with him for much of it but have problems with one of his closing lines. "We don't actually need to know 'what happened' - nothing happened. We weren't there; there's no there to begin with"
The magic of storytelling is that there is a there. Inside us as well as on the screen. It is the difference between something being true and something being fact.

Lioness | March 20, 16:12 CET

Dana5140 I felt the same way (w/the irritation). Just because 'Not Fade Away' was brilliant, doesn't mean that nothing could ever follow. BtVS Season 5 ended with Buffy's great sacrifice, and a lot of fans felt that Season 6 shouldn't have happened, but I wouldn't have given up Seasons 6 and 7 for anything (and I am THRILLED with S8!). So similarly the brilliance of 'Not Fade Away' doesn't mean, to me, that nothing can ever be added. My need to learn more is not some childish dissatisfaction with 'Not Fade Away', it is based on knowing that Joss has more stories in head and I want to hear them. I want to be able to enjoy every single story inside Joss Whedon's head, and I don't care if he tells them to me on TV, in film, or with comics (but for the record, I prefer TV). If he says that there is more to say about Angel, then that is what I need.

embers | March 20, 16:39 CET

Actually, Lioness, I completely disagree with you. There isn't a there - but we have been trained to crave it by the ongoing television narrative. Particularly in the case of a TV show that was cancelled early or not allowed to wrap its narrative up as cleanly as we might like. I don't necessarily think either of those things describes Angel, though. If the show was indeed cancelled because Whedon asked for an early answer, the very least that gave him was a chance to wrap things up. Remember, the show wasn't renewed for a fifth season until after Season Four had finished airing; if "Home" were the final episode of the show, viewers would have had more right to decry a lack of closure.

It is more true that reality continues whereas fiction ends. Not every story is about a character's entire life; in fact, very few are. Whereas in reality, the fascinating stories of some people's lives do not often begin with their birth and end with their death - but they do all indeed get born and die.

If we look at film in comparison, its narrative can more easily be criticised for wrapping up too early or without satisfying resolution. It only has a limited time to tell its story, whereas a television series - by necessity - is about delaying gratification. But you don't generally find viewers or critics coming out of great films saying - "wow, I want to know what happened next" or "I hope they make a sequel"! Well, sometimes you might.

Just because something could happen next, it doesn't necessarily follow that it should. See: The Matrix trilogy, for one example. Or, at the other end of the scale, the Star Wars prequels which aren't necessary to enjoy the original films, but are constructed from back story; obviously there was always a there there - but we didn't necessarily need to see it.

Ongoing television narratives feed the audience desire to see what happens next. If you were dissatisfied with the ending to "Angel," you might want to know what happens next - but that doesn't make it an invalid ending. Thematically, "Let's Go to Work" - cut to black - is clear. As clear as Buffy's smile, fade out, was.

Personally, I think the writer has a very well thought-out approach to what the viewer desires as opposed to what the narrative needs: which is what Joss' quote was always about. "What you want, what you need" is a contentious quote because it is taken out of context. You might want to know what happens next, but you don't need to know. You might want Wesley to still be alive, but you don't need him to be; the narrative needs him to be dead. Or maybe the writer just wants him dead to tell him the story (he thinks) you "need" to hear.

I am having an easier time with reading the continuation of Buffy than I will ever have with the idea of seeing what comes after "Not Fade Away" - because the endings of both shows serve different functions. "Chosen" asks the question of what they will do now - and Season 8 is one answer to that question. "Not Fade Away" is not about what happens next at all.

crossoverman | March 20, 16:55 CET

I liked the article, very perceptive. I agree with the author about 'need'. I was perfectly happy with the end of Buffy and Angel (note, not the fact they ended - though for Buffy it felt like time, just the way) and it's only really because the continuations are in Joss' hands (or at least partly his hands) that I want to see them at all (he's earned some trust).

Stories, like lives, end. And, also like lives, it's partly this fact that bestows meaning upon them. Any narrative is about imposing order on the world but how much order can or should we impose before that narrative ceases to comment on the world ?

Must confess it sometimes still surprises me that people feel Angel to be incomplete as is. It's true it was cancelled and could easily have continued but the story ended almost exactly as it had to IMO.

Crossoverman basically sums up how I feel. 'Chosen' was about entering a new phase of life, there's a very natural 'What next ?' hook. 'Not Fade Away' was about how you lead an adult life once you're there and, ultimately, the things that are worth ending that life for, the things in a sense that are bigger than your life. The 'What next ?' feels a bit more contrived and a bit less thematically coherent (it's more like, 'Cool, more events in the Angel story' than a natural continuation of that story - not saying it can't be done, and done well, but it's a tougher task IMO. Sleep well Joss and Brian ;).

It's on my mind because I watched it last night but, to me, 'Stranger Than Fiction' talks about exactly this tension between what we want to happen and what would actually make the narrative most true (in the 'truth from the lie' fictional sense, not the factual sense). Well worth watching IMO.

Saje | March 20, 17:09 CET

"And it means this: there might be more stories to tell in the Angel universe, and maybe Joss Whedon really does have more to say with and about those characters, but the narrative of Angel is done. Angel himself might have done more, but the story entitled Angel ends in an alley. The events afterward weren't really supposed to exist, not even in fictional representation; they were supposed to be implied, and that's all. They exist in the viewers' minds for a purpose, and that purpose is only to heighten the drama of the final moments of 'Not Fade Away'."

Am I the only one who found myself saying, "not if Joss disagrees with you"? I never had a problem with NFA as the ending of Angel, but if Joss says it is not really the end, who is anyone else to say, "Yes it is." In a way, the money men of Hollywood tried by not funding the continuation in movie form that Joss had planned while writing the end of the series. Joss is saying very clearly by going forward in comic books that it is not the end. If the author of the article were to say that NFA was the end of that portion of the narrative, fine. That was how BtVS and Ats were constantly structured. They told individual parts within a continuing story.

"When the story's done, the reader is owed absolutely nothing,"

I agree. But the "whining" that the author mentions fans doing is not usually pointed at the author in the case of BtVS/Angel fans. (Ok. Some fans seem to think that Joss does not really love and will always short change the story of their particular favorite character, but I don't get the impression that is most fans.) Whedon fans have been assured multiple times by Joss that he wants the stories to continue...all of them. The whining is directed towards the people who can give Joss the means to tell the stories about these characters that he has said all along are clamoring inside his head to be told.

"But you don't generally find viewers or critics coming out of great films saying - "wow, I want to know what happened next" or "I hope they make a sequel"! Well, sometimes you might."

I always think of Whedon shows more like books then movies. Since I was a kid I would always continue the book in my head. I would draw a narrative line for the characters off into the distance to see where they go and what they do. That is why I don't read fanfic. Until the original author continues the story, I have my own story that I don't want ot be distracted from. I always back off for the original author's vision, however.

I am glad to see this take on the need/want statement. It always seemed like such a simple statement of what art was about. The anger and interpretation of it as a dictitorial and paternalistic statement always totally perplexed me.

newcj | March 20, 18:25 CET

Simon - Thanks for the kind words.

Um, hi everyone, I wrote the post in question.

embers sez:

My need to learn more is not some childish dissatisfaction with 'Not Fade Away', it is based on knowing that Joss has more stories in head and I want to hear them.

To clarify, I agree with you and Dana5140 that the show can go on, and that it may as well, in some as-long-as-we're-making-money sense. As long as Joss has stories to tell, I'll run out to read them, no question. If he feels the story's not done, that's his prerogative, and I'm happy to be the recipient of a genius's largesse.

But your comment is illustrating my claim, not countervailing: 'My need...is...I want to hear [new stories].' Part of my criticism of the standard 'fan position' w/r/t cult narratives (the same argument applies to professional sports, etc.) is that for a whole constellation of reasons, fans choose to suspend certain critical faculties in order to enable certain social interactions; one effect of this is a growing partial or complete inability to recognize the distinction between the desires they feel within the narrative (I want Buffy and Angel back together at the Prom because Buffy wants that) and their own status as readers of a text (if Buffy and Angel get back together at the Prom the emotional/characterological integrity I love about this show will be at some level undercut). That's why I started the center of the post with Hansel and Gretel: no one actually wants to see kids suffer, not that they would admit to. Not in real life. But we desire injustice in our drama insofar as it sets up redemption or heroic counterpoint or at least the birth of hope. As kids we're different - we suffer right alongside the Good Guys, 100%. But later on I think a new kind of imagination takes over. So that one's conscious analytical mind, rather than the reptilian stuff, is in the cockpit.

This isn't to call any particular fan 'childish' - but no matter how it makes fans (makes us!) feel, I think it's important and helpful that we acknowledge the willful naivete at work in such a social reading practice. I've ranted at embarrassing length on my blog about the screwed up attitudes that many (most?) NaNoWriMo participants have toward inspiration and authorship (and by extension fandom); the crux of that argument is that if you're writing only for yourself, rather than from a desire to give away a story and produce a set of feelings in an abstract imagined reader, then you're not serving dispassionate story-logic at all, you're masturbating. Joss Whedon is (with a few exceptions) as dispassionate as they come when it comes to story construction. Examples of the other thing include, for instance, Lost and Grey's Anatomy and etc. etc. etc.

I think those general categories - selfish pleasure vs. generous communicatory pleasure - could reflect a (hopefully!) more mature, actionable attitude toward art: an attitude that can lead a fan to turn around and produce more original art rather than burying the self in escapist texts.

('Original' on a sliding scale, of course. Derivative art might be a letdown but it's necessary, everyone presumably knows that.)

Dana5140: Where would I go to hear this theory-wanking? :) I'm happy to admit that I'm aiming at a theory of fan consumption and socialization that can be generalized - wouldn't be much of a theory if it couldn't - and that we as individual fans perceive our own reactions to the text in a very different way from the one outlined in my post. Which is (again) in part the point of the post. That fannish self-perception is wrong in some ways that I take to be inauthentic. It's like talking about a romantic relationship. There are some things that lovers are incapable of recognizing about one another until they're no longer in love; indeed such recognition often prompts falling out of love in the first place. So I figure one sign of emotional maturity is knowing how to distance yourself from your own romantic feelings enough that you can do what's sustainably good for yourself. Which is to say, that maturity is knowing that you-in-love are not the only you, and are necessarily limited in what you can know.

Does that make sense? I'd love to hear your take on the post in any case (indeed I'd love to hear everyone's). I know the tone is in some places combative but that's 'fandom' I suppose.

As for the 'what you want, not what you need' quote, I talked about it at sufficient length in the article, but I'll happily respond to a specific complaint. It seems to me merely a blunt acknowledgment of the storyteller's responsibility, and I sure as hell don't mind bluntness. Willow and Tara were having real trouble at the beginning of Season Six, totally justified by the tone and events of the story and the evolution of both characters; it was good that the writers dealt with the ramifications of Willow's (um) fall from grace at such length, even if that made Willow/Tara getting back together an impossibility. (It would've been inauthentic, by analogy, to turn Andy Sipowicz into a saint overnight because he got sober. Or to refuse to show him falling off the wagon a couple times. It makes sense that Whedon et al. would stick with it.)

As for Tara's death (which prompted the infamous quote, if I remember correctly) - if we start from the premise that the characters don't exist outside of the story, the overheated protestations of comic book geek/apologists notwithstanding, then the main question for the author is, what has the biggest impact on the reader? What will make the reader most desperate to turn the page, to tune in next week, to know what comes next in the story? I have mixed feelings on the end of Season Six, but there's no question it was a shattering period on the show, one that defined much of Season Seven's tone and progress. What would Tara have done while Willow went insane, do you think? The decision to kill Tara was no more arbitrary than the decision to kill Buffy, and was made no more lightly - we can assume that safely, I think. Joss's responsibility is to the story and the story's audience, not to 'the characters' or the small group that identifies with them even beyond the scope of the narrative, and again, that's the distinction at the center of my long post. I'm not certain it amounts to an argument, exactly, but to the extent that it does, that's its heart.

waxbanks | March 20, 18:27 CET

Dude. People who comment here are like, really smart. To read you all makes my speaking English good.

Saje: Stories, like lives, end. And, also like lives, it's partly this fact that bestows meaning upon them. Any narrative is about imposing order on the world but how much order can or should we impose before that narrative ceases to comment on the world?

My word, Saje, are you actually Yoda? *is impressed*

I enjoyed that read. Personally, I've always hated the whole 'giving you what you need' argument. Because I'm like, 'Shut UP! I just need the people to be happy, WHY CAN'T THE PEOPLE JUST BE HAPPY?' I mean, if I need to be happy myself, and I need my friends and family to be, why would I *need* anything else for my favorite characters?

However, I can obviously see that this would leave a series going straight to Big Fat Nowhereland, so I guess to a certain extent they are right.

BUT - I do think that some people - viewers - enjoy an endless cycle of tension and trauma more than others. For example, people who really enjoy soaps. I can't watch soaps because I hate the fact that bad things keep happening to everyone, unrelentingly, all the time. I'm the kind of person who stops watching a beloved series halfway through, when all the original relationships and characterisations start to alter, because it depresses me.

I feel this comment of mine is, as usual, going to ramble along pointlessly, so perhaps best to stop now. Oh, but I must say:

Reading the story Hansel and Gretel, we want the kids to make it home safely... But frankly, we also want to see the little motherfuckers get hurt.

Best. Fairytale Analysis. Ever.

Mythtaken | March 20, 18:32 CET

waxbanks- I will comment at length later, because I have to go teach class (scientific writing), but I do have one quick comment for you. You say this: "the overheated protestations of comic book geek/apologists notwithstanding, then the main question for the author is, what has the biggest impact on the reader? What will make the reader most desperate to turn the page, to tune in next week, to know what comes next in the story?" And this is made with regard specifically to Willow and Tara and S6. I can definitively state that once the decision was made to kill Tara, in my case (and speaking only for myself) I stopped caring what came next, was no longer desperate to "turn the page," and found that my pleasure (a word I use very specifically here) disappeared. Buffy lost resonance for me at that point. Now, I will comment more when I've the time, which may be in a couple of hours or so, by which time I think there may be many more posts, but I hope to come back to yours. Hang tight. And though I felt you were indeed combative and bit too assured in your pronouncements, I did enjoy the read. But hey, I'm an academic, so arguing papers is, like, my lifestyle. :-)

Dana5140 | March 20, 19:03 CET

NFA was a great series finale. I had no need to know if or how Angel, Spike, or Illyria survived the alley. But if we're getting canon post-NFA stories, I for one, will feel jerked-around if they don't tell us what happened.

batmarlowe | March 20, 19:31 CET

When I commented in the Angel Season 6 comics thread, which prompted this debate, I said I would be excited to see new canon Angel stories. I also said though, that I'd be sad to have to let go of my story of what happened after the end of Not Fade Away. (And for me it's not just a narrative but a visual understanding down to camera angles of the first twenty minutes of episode one of my season six!)

I agree that NFA was a superb piece of story telling and I don't *need* to know what happened in the alley. As Saje says NFA was about 'how you lead an adult life once you're there'. It is fundamentaly different from the finality of the pardigm shift in Chosen. However, if there is going to be a canon contiuation of the Angel story then I want to know what that is. Why? Because in the final analysis I'm a Joss Whedon fan before I'm a fan of his characters. It's his voice that I want to hear more of. It's why I'm reading Astonishing X-Men even though I have no concept of the backstory and consequently must miss so many nuances. Joss' writing has great moments of humour, but it always makes you care. It's that opinion that makes me excited about an Angel contiuation, not either a need or a desire to know what happened.

I suppose my point is that a fan's response to a 'text' is surely coloured by what he/she perceives to be the object of his/her fandom. If his/her object is the characters and their story (or even just a particular character) then maybe he/she cannot get the necessary distance to understand the narrative requirements of the story in question, but if it's the author then doesn't that make a difference? Yes I may have spent four hours unable to say much beyond 'They killed Wash' after first seeing Serenity, but I now think I can appreciate the narrative drive for Joss to write that event into his film.

I don't want to sound too ranty so may I just say that I totally agreed with the comment in the article that, 'our feelings at the story's end are the storyteller's gift'.

[ edited by ArielWillow on 2007-03-20 16:35 ]

ArielWillow | March 20, 19:34 CET

Dana5140:

I can definitively state that once the decision was made to kill Tara, in my case (and speaking only for myself) I stopped caring what came next, was no longer desperate to "turn the page," and found that my pleasure (a word I use very specifically here) disappeared. Buffy lost resonance for me at that point.

I don't want to jump off from particular wording choices too much, but I'd like to respond to this talk of 'resonance' a bit.

First of all, I should lay out a core assumption here, and it's maybe a bit mean, but there it is. If you consider yourself a 'shipper,' you're probably gonna reject most or all of this comment, and I've just got no chance of convincing you otherwise. The particular social phenomenon known as 'shipping' is to me a distillation of the tendencies I'm criticizing in my post. I can well understand daydreaming about an alternate world in which Willow and Tara live on; that's what happens when people die, even fictional ones. Indeed such imaginings can take on new power precisely because we know they're impossible, because they're defiant, because we feel we're confronting death by denying its claim on us. We can imagine that there's something heroic about carrying the torch, because reality (even textual reality) has abdicated what we narcissistically take to be its responsibility. Hell, I even think writing diary entries and stories in such a universe, and even sharing them, can make sense. I'm not sure this kind of clinging-to-the-past is helpful in the long term, but it's necessary in the short term, at certain times of life. I get that.

(I use the word 'narcissistic' in this case not as a pejorative. I mean it's bad but it's not bad bad, just kind of depressingly normal.)

But.

I said only this:

overheated protestations of comic book geek/apologists notwithstanding, then the main question for the author is, what has the biggest impact on the reader? What will make the reader most desperate to turn the page, to tune in next week, to know what comes next in the story?

...and from your reaction to Tara's death it sounds like Joss's story had a pretty serious impact. Like it or hate it, the narrative put you in a certain place, and the writers moved on from there knowing that they were going to get a broad range of reactions.

Did you go on watching the show? If so, why? Couldn't be hope, could it? That hope is what Joss was trying to get you to feel, along with grief, loss, betrayal, anger, all those things and more. From inside the story it's impossible to know in analytical terms whether the story is doing its job; the minute you start wondering, the answer starts becoming a little bit 'no.'

The contract between writer and reader (or showrunner and viewer) doesn't say 'Thou shalt be reassured at all times' - quite the contrary. Drama requires that other thing. Maybe the question for you is whether the 'punishment' of the characters was out of proportion with the norms of the Buffyverse, or maybe you disagree with and reject the decision to kill Tara, not the final shape of the story; the former is an aesthetic question and to my mind a worthwhile one; the latter is a presumption, inserting the reader into the author's decision-making process to satisfy an emotional logic rather than story logic. It presumes a kind of contract between Joss and the Jossholes that is, unreasonable. Or more specifically: bad for the art. If Joss worried about preserving the happiness of his shippers (who make up a miniscule fraction of the millions-strong audience for his show), he'd never have sent Angel to L.A. (or hell), never have brought Oz into the picture (because Xander would've realized how perfect Willow is for him). Indeed, Tara would never have arrived in the first place.

Narrative is movement and change, and change hurts. (I know, typically wannabe-butch male sentiment, but hopefully you can take the point.) You can argue that it hurts more than it's supposed to, more than is merited; I'd wonder how you'd arrive at that calculation. Indeed you can argue that Joss Whedon has a social responsibility to portray happy lesbian relationships, even say it to his face, and I'm sure he'd point out with justifiable pride that four two years he gave fans one of the richest lesbian partnerships in American popular culture, that he did justice to the characters he portrayed. But pity is cheap. Without the death of Tara there's no whitehaired goddess Willow in 'Chosen', and that (for me) was one of the most empowering and uplifting images the show ever offered. It had to be earned. Did I bloody hate Kennedy? Oh God yes. But then how often is the plight of the Rebound Gal taken seriously in pop culture?

Which brings me back to your mention of 'resonance': I don't think that's the high purpose of storytelling. It's part of the mechanism, sure, but 'I relate to this' and 'I recognize the accuracy of this observation' aren't strong aesthetic metrics, they're preliminary observations. I sure as hell don't know what it is to be betrayed by a son while casting out his loving sibling, but King Lear moves me to tears. I know what it's like to lose a beloved friend, though, and the 'death of Tara' storyline did justice to those feelings. I didn't turn all super-villain-y when my roommate killed himself, but Willow's grief made sense to me. (Then again I have problems with the finale of Season Six, to do with certain directorial/writerly choices about portraying Willow's humanity. But I've forgiven greater lapses by Joss and company.)

All of which boils down to this: Of course you have a right to react as you'd like to Tara's death. You don't owe Joss your viewership. But then Joss doesn't owe anyone anything. And the perception that in some way he does - that somehow the creator of a fiction has done wrong by his long-suffering fans if he doesn't make the 'right' choices in his narrative construction, if he places too many obstacles in the path of a desire generated by the narrative rather than constitutive of it - is (to my mind) the misperception that I was talking about in my post.

I know I'm waving at a particular ethical stance toward narrative, and I don't expect everyone to share it. But it seems to me the most provocative outlook for me as a writer, and the most forward-thinking for me as a reader. I still cry my guts out watching Buffy, still wish Willow and Tara coulda made it. But while my pain at Tara's death is real, Tara's death is not. The fantasy of a benevolent writer-god doesn't comfort me, and I don't get puffed up when the television relationships I'm rooting for turn out fine. Which is why I'm not a shipper, and why (in all honesty) I find it hard to meet in the middle on so many questions of fan-investment and imaginative projection. It strikes me as bad, ungenerous reading, and that just...bugs me.

waxbanks | March 20, 19:54 CET

As much as I loved how season 5 of Buffy ended with her sacraficing herself, I absolutly loved "Chosen" as the series final. Joss brought Buffy's character full circle; she always wanted to be just a normal girl, and after Willow's spell she and the other potientals were normal so to speak. Buffy was no longer one of a kind. She could enjoy life without the weight of the world on her shoulders; not because she doesn't care about the world, but because it's not only her responsiblity anymore. She shares it with many other females out there in the wide world. Angel on the other had a slow start, not telling us where his story would end up, until the last episode of that season. That epi revealed that Angel was not only helping the helpless because of redemption and it being the right thing to do, but that his character had a journey to go through. It's more than just a reward, it's like: you go to school, study, do homework, and you know somewhere down the road you'll graduate. Angel's character arch is not complete.
Yes, I understand the message of "Not Fade Away"- to never stop fighting, but do you think just because Buffy isn't the only slayer that she stopped fighting evil? Do you think Giles stopped being a watcher? Title or not these people fight because they know its right, just as Angel does. Human or souled vampire, he'll still fight; but to give us a fully developed character, Joss might have to make Angel more than human.

Ama-40000 | March 20, 19:54 CET

Sometimes I read an analysis and it takes me twenty-four hours to even absorb its premise, because I'm so annoyed that the writer expressed his theories as fact. Maybe I'm just particularly sensitive, but I feel as though I've be yelled at and my first instinct is to yell back that I disagree with everything yelled. Is an 'in my opinion,' or 'I think,' or 'my theory is,' so very hard to inject? If Joss is God, can so many other writers be dieties as well?

cmbackshane | March 20, 19:58 CET

...which is to say, I realize perhaps a bit too late, that the original post wasn't really about the end of Angel, nor (strictly speaking) about Jossholes as such. It's about a particular stance toward fiction, and the particular social forms that exist in part to rationalize that stance (and further enable it). I don't mean to get mired too much in talking Jossverse specifics, but it's hard not to. And I dwell on the death of Tara (really Willow's whole S6 arc starting with the less-than-great 'Smashed'/'Wrecked') because it's such a sticking point for fans, and for shippers in particular, and as such has illustrative value. Hell, if Joss writes a new Angel ongoing comic I'll probably subscribe. But even the mighty Joss isn't be-all or end-all of storytellers (OK maybe), and the broader point about story speaks to other cultural/psychological matters. Which, in frankness, I may well not have any idea about. But then only a fool goes to a Josshole fan board to learn about such things. ;v)

waxbanks | March 20, 20:03 CET

I have to agree with Dana5140, in that after Tara's death, I did lose pleasure watching the show. I continued to watch, but I no longer relished it. Why?

Because I'm basically a softie.

Kennedy wasn't right for Willow and never could be, and Oz ruined his chance. Tara was Willow's true love, her soulmate, and they deserved to be together at the show's end. I really hope Joss agrees with me and brings Tara back in Season 8. I also hope Amber Benson gets to write dialog for Tara, because she really does understand the character and is a talented writer herself.

Personally, I "need" stories where after all the pain, conflict, and disasters are finally resolved, true love wins. No, it's not like real life, but we're talking about a show with a female vampire slayer and two lesbian witches. I don't exactly watch the show to have reality slapped in my face. The show is escapism, and escapism is necessary because the world we live in is far from perfect.

In real life, we're constantly embattled by trajedy. We have real human monsters (i.e. terrorists) who lack any empathy at all and make the demons in Buffy look symathetic by comparison. Escapism helps us unwind, and get involved in a world far from our own troubles. We realize there are troubles in that world, too, but we want a satisfactory resolve at the end.

Tara's death just didn't do that for me. It never will. Maybe some viewers really didn't care about Tara, but I did. I still do. Her death still hurts. I related to the character so much (i.e. shy, intelligent, moral and loyal). She was the show's moral center, and after she died, the show lost so much.

quantumac | March 20, 20:09 CET

cmbackshane: You haven't been yelled at. I've absorbed a whole lot of the forceful-yet-windy-declarative style of grand literary criticism/theory, I suspect, and for readers not accustomed to the 'My word is my identity' style of academic textual analysis that can seem more dismissive than it is, or than it's intended to be in any case. But there's a lot of backtracking and parenthetical softening/clarification in the post - starting with the initial thesis statement, which begins, 'I propose the following for the sake of argument...'

If I just wanted to piss on you it would look more like this.

waxbanks | March 20, 20:11 CET

quantumac (and everyone else actually): Thanks for your emotional comment. I find the notion of 'soulmates' a little sickening but I think you're right that Tara was the best match for Willow; personally I've found that that means basically nothing in determining who ends up with whom, in life. But I do want to point out that, like an earlier commenter, you made the following little slip of the keyboard:

Personally, I "need" stories where after all the pain, conflict, and disasters are finally resolved, true love wins. [...] The show is escapism, and escapism is necessary because the world we live in is far from perfect. [...] We realize there are troubles in that world, too, but we want a satisfactory resolve at the end.

...which is to say, you're eliding the difference between desire-engendered-by-the-narrative (what you provisionally want because that's how the story is set up, because of the kind of story, etc.) and the demands of narrative coherence and characterological integrity (i.e. pretending the world is good and 'escapable' cuts hard against the lesson of Buffy, which is in part about surviving in a world that's relentlessly and boundlessly shitty). What we all need we have a heck of a hard time even knowing, much less knowing in-the-moment. What we want is only selfish. Sometimes that selfishness is nothing (I want chocolate); sometimes it's mixed. Sometimes it makes our lives harder or poorer when we give in to it. As (in my mind) in this case.

All of this raises a separate question, namely whether Tara is actually anywhere near as complex a character as the others on the show. No question, I loved her 'til the day she died, but this is a supporting character who in her two years on the show never did a damn thing wrong (even her 'See no more demons' spell was explained away as a totally justifiable mistake by contrasting her with her somewhat-hackneyed family of rubes). I'm inclined to say that one thing about Willow/Tara shipping in particular that bugs me is that it's so easy; Willow is a complex and powerful character and Tara is something like an ideal type. Even their fights are totally one-sided, morally speaking (cf. Willow flying off the handle about 'lesbo street cred' when Tara was presciently talking about her power in the brain-sucking Season Five ep).

That aside, though...:)

waxbanks | March 20, 20:23 CET

Ama-40000:

Angel's character arc is not complete.

Not to geek out too much here (ahem), but I thought Angel's willingness to sign away the Shanshu prophecy was the ultimate statement about his character, and runs strictly counter to your sense of him; it was the literalization of his motivation throughout the series (I can regain my 'humanity' through service to mankind - perhaps that's the only way it can be achieved by anyone) and by the end of 'Not Fade Away' he'd obviously arrived at quite a different notion of what moral reward is and what level of compromise is allowable in order to get it. As a number of commenters have said, Angel was a more 'adult' show than Buffy in that sense; there's no self-serving nobility in Angel's sacrifice anymore, only something like revenge-on-behalf-of-the-concept-of-freedom, which might be slightly crazy zealotry but definitely wouldn't make sense coming from the Scooby Gang.

But then perhaps my own ever-encroaching lack of faith in any afterlife is why I'm enamored of Buffy's pragmatic let's-win-it-on-earth attitude in 'Chosen' - and why Angel's cosmic reward talk left and leaves me ever so slightly cold.

waxbanks | March 20, 20:30 CET

waxbanks,

True, Tara was a supporting character, but I disagree with the assertion she wasn't a complex character. Perhaps her character wasn't allowed to develop as fully as it should have, partially because she was so shy to begin with, but also because there were so many other forceful characters competing for screen time.

As a shy person, I know I'm rather complex inside, but an outgoing person who interacted with me might never know. That's what I got from Tara's lines and Amber Benson's performance.

I'm not alone in this observation. Check out "thekittenboard.com" if you want to see a seemingly endless supply of W&T stories, some of them are quite excellent. Many people saw a lot in Tara even though Amber Benson wasn't given much to work with.

Should Tara have been allowed to confront Dark Willow, I think we would've seen Tara's true mettle. Can you imagine having to go up against your soulmate (I, bein' the softy, like the term)? I would have rather seen that.

As for pretending the world is good and escapable, if Joss had really been true to our "boundlessly shitty" reality, the First and his Caleb boy would've won, Buffy would've been crushed under their jackboots and that would've been that. One could even argue that was the most probable end, and that ending would be more in line with the events of the story.

Only, that's not the way it went down. Buffy won.

quantumac | March 20, 20:53 CET

Waxbanks, thank you for giving us all a LOT to think about. I must say, I agree with you from start to finish, even though I wasn't always entirely sure what you were saying :)

My reaction to the Buffy comic coincides with yours. Liked it -- my 3-year-old son is already quoting lines from it ("still got my demons, still got my watcher"), he's read it so many times! -- but I didn't need a new story because the previous story (S7) was resolved. I'm grateful for the new story, but the old story didn't need it. The same could be said for every season finale of Buffy and Angel, except for Angel S1 and S3, which were clearly cliffhangers and therefore intended as momentary suspensions of one story, told in two parts -- the finale and the beginning of the next season.

1starbuckstown | March 20, 21:03 CET

waxbanks: I really enjoyed your post, though I think you came down a bit hard on the idea that there is an "ideal readerly position" I know that I for one wouldn't fall into that category... I tend to be more aware of the narrative underpinnings than the intended emotional core. That's why, for example, "A Hole In The World" don't really work for me. Certainly, there was plenty of precedent for the Wesley/Fred relationship, which was why the Wesley/Illyria storyline culminating in Wesley's death DID work. But story-wise, we had the hints of mutual attraction/full-blown love/Fred's tragic death crammed into one episode and the B or C storyline of the episode that proceeded it. I just couldn't buy the narrative at that point, which ruined any chance of me buying the emotion, though it was exceedingly clear what I was supposed to be feeling. If I hadn't been so aware of the narrative, perhaps I would have felt the same way that more fans did.

The truth is that there are very few readers/viewers who can surrender themselves completely to a story (and honestly, those who do scare me just a little bit.) Frankly, I think what viewers bring with them, both their biases and desires, is what makes writing so worthwhile (reader-response theory, hooray!) Would an episode like "The Body" have had such an impact otherwise? A writer like Joss is able to play on the want vs. need brilliantly. When it's obvious what needs to happen but we are so blinded by what we want to happen that the obvious surprises us, that is effective storytelling.

(This was probably mostly incoherent due to a bad case of melty brain... sorry!)

Lady Brick | March 20, 21:21 CET

I wish I could write as well as others here. As it is I will stick with a "hear, hear" to what quantumac says.

[ edited by moley75 on 2007-03-20 18:27 ]

moley75 | March 20, 21:23 CET

re Dana5140 and quantumac:

I think you're saying that a character's death taking away your enjoyment of the show disproves the waxbanks' theory that a writer is constantly looking for inventive plot happenings to keep an audience involved, right?

That may be true in some cases, but I think that very fact speaks to his general point in the entire essay. That is to say (and this is what I took from it), fans placing more importance on their own emotional needs being fulfilled by a story than on actual good storytelling are going to miss out.

Season 5's "The Body" wrecked me. WRECKED. I've seen it probably 4 times and it gets worse every time. I'm a blubbering idiot by the end of it and swear I will never inflict that on myself again. I do not like feeling like that. I do not WANT to feel like that. But I don't watch the episode and say "That made me sad. I don't want to be sad. Therefore, this was a bad piece of fiction." I say "I cannot believe a piece of fiction made feel this strongly. That was amazing."

It reminds me of the big reaction to Wash's death in Serenity. You had a bunch of fans on the Browncoats board calling for Joss Whedon's head on a platter after the preview screenings, threatening to boycott the movie and make it their personal mission to make sure that no one else will go to see the movie. Simply because something bad happened to a fictional character that they liked. That, frankly, is an unhealthy response to fiction.

Being depressed over Tara's death and not wanting to watch the show afterwards is not as bad as that, but I think it's similar, just to a lesser degree. No one can really control how they respond to things. If it makes you sad, be sad. It's supposed to. But I think sitting back and letting the authors (especially ones you've grown to trust) take you for a ride will ultimately lead to much more satisfaction with a story than turning off after the first bump and wishing things were different.

dingoes8 | March 20, 21:29 CET

quantumac

Only, that's not the way it went down. Buffy won.

Yes. That's the fiction.

There's another Hellmouth in Cleveland, you know. Only took them seven years to close the one in Sunnydale, using an army of Slayers...I've more to say - as a former reader of the depressing Kitten Board, for instance - and hope to respond shortly, specifically to this:

Perhaps her character wasn't allowed to develop as fully as it should have, partially because she was so shy to begin with, but also because there were so many other forceful characters competing for screen time.

'Her character' exists only insofar as she was portrayed on the show; sure Tara was shy, and over a couple of years got over a lot of that owing to Willow's support and fellowship, but she was developed even less than Oz (who had a complex and justifiable defense of his questionable liaison w/Veruca). Tara didn't really act much on the show, and when she did, it was as a kind of Force of Good rather than a fallible moral agent. Her appearance at the end of 'Normal Again' sent me over the moon with happiness - but a tough-minded shy damsel in occasional distress is still a damsel. All of which speaks to the point of the article but I gotta head out for a bit. I appreciate the comments and look forward to more, though. :)

waxbanks | March 20, 21:37 CET

Hokey dokey, class is over, lunch is eaten and it's time for some combat. :-)

Waxy, first, the easy stuff. I think you have too simplistic a reading of Tara. And beyond that, why does it matter whether or not she is complex? If she is not, to you, cool. I don't see her that way. Did she do wrong? Sure; she was complicit with Willow in bringing Buffy back, for example, despite her fears for what they were doing. She ruined the demon finding spell wiht Willow out of an understandable fear that WIllow would think the less of her did Willow know she was part demon. But none of this matters. It is all in how each of us approach those characters we have come to care for, right? Am I a shipper? I suppose that's a code for me caring for the W/T relation, but for the period of time it was on the show, that's what I watched and drew enjoyment from, much more than from anything else on the show. But I'm a nearly 54-yo guy, and so perhaps not typical of the average shipper, not that I know what one looks like. But to me it is all in how each of us experiences the show- some via Buffy, some via Xander, and I have argued in teh past the most via Willow.

AS to theory wanking, let me wank here on reader response, as postulated by Stanley Fish:

<<< This aspect of Fish's theory is one of the most radical and controversial. He posits that meaning inheres not in the text but in the reader, or rather the reading community. "In the procedures I would urge," he writes, "the reader's activities are at the center of attention, where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning."Footnote33 He can hold this because he believes that there is no stable basis for meaning. There is no correct interpretation that will always hold true. Meaning does not exist "out there" somewhere. It exists, rather, within the reader.

In his earlier work he made a claim, not wholly disavowed in his later material, that what a text means is the experience that it produces in the reader. To define meaning he says, "It is an experience; it occurs; it does something; it makes us do something. Indeed, I would go so far as to say, in direct contradiction of Wimsatt and Beardsley, that what it does is what it means."Footnote34 Here Fish stakes out the territory of his critical enterprise which is to set himself against the formalist principles of the past with its supposed scientific agenda. This project he admits took some time from which to effect a complete liberation. But this is the principle that will eventually lead his theory from (what his critics would call) an "objective" to a fully blown "subjective" interpretive theory. Indeed, his early theory appears to be completely vulnerable to the criticism of subjectivity as he posits an experiential dimension to meaning which inheres in "the active and activating consciousness of the reader," a charge he will later attempt to counter.Footnote35

Fish's next move in his anti-formalist agenda is to deny the text as object, which was so important to Wimsatt and Beardsley and the New Critics. "The objectivity of the text is an illusion and, moreover, a dangerous illusion, because it is so physically convincing."Footnote36 What exactly Fish means by this statement is somewhat unclear. He does not, as it may appear, deny the ontological reality or the existence of the palpable object, although one could argue that that is exactly what this sentence by itself means because he apparently pairs the word "objective" with "physical."Footnote37 It is the context that illuminates what he is driving at. But he does deny the text's independence as a repository of meaning.Footnote38 The text does not contain meaning: despite being written upon, it is a tabula rasa, a blank slate onto which the reader, in reading, actually writes the text.

Fish takes the idea of the hermeneutical circle seriously. The reader is always reading her preunderstanding back into the text with no possibility of achieving an "objective" or author-centered interpretation. Fish claims that an interpretive theory is itself circular, that the interpreter will always find what he is looking for in the text, that formal patterns "are themselves constituted by an interpretive act."Footnote39 He claims at one point that:

Theories always work and they will always produce exactly the results they predict, results that will be immediately compelling to those for whom the theory's assumptions and enabling principles are self-evident. Indeed, the trick would be to find a theory that didn't work.Footnote40

Because the assumptions one begins with will determine the outcome of the study, for Fish, "success is inevitable."Footnote41 The methods with which one approaches the text have already determined the outcome, one's presuppositions actuate the product.Footnote42

For Fish a text is only a RorschachFootnote43 blot onto which the reader projects her self-understanding or, as we shall see, her culturally determined assumptions. The text contains nothing in itself, rather the content is supplied by the reader. It is the reader that determines the shape of text, its form, and its content. This is how Fish can claim that reader's write texts. Worthen's comment is apt. He says, "as far as Fish is concerned, reading can only repeat reality, in that it necessarily consists of nothing but replications of independently existing collective interpretive strategies."Footnote44 This is exactly what reading does and this is one of the difficulties of his theory. It fails to account for the text being able to expand the readers' understanding or Weltanshung by introducing her to a different way of perceiving. For Fish the text can only function as a mirror that provides a reflection of its reader.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Authorial Intent
It is in this same manner that Fish dismisses the idea of authorial intent as the guiding principle in interpretation. In analyzing one of his previous critical works he declares,

I did what critics always do: I "saw" what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I turned around and attributed what I had 'seen' to a text and an intention. . . . What I am suggesting is that formal units are always a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear; they are not "in" the text, and I would make the same argument for intentions.Footnote45

To claim that the author intended to say or do such and such is really a declaration regarding the interpreter, in Fish's theory. Thus different interpreters will see different intentions because they are a creation of the reader and not the author. As with New Critical theory, the author fails to live past the creation of the text, indeed, for Fish the author as well is a creation of the reader.Footnote46

Fish can make this move because of his epistemic beliefs that nothing we see, perceive, or think is uninterpreted. He considers the attempt to access the author's intention as naive; for how would one ever access an intention as it does not exist in any objective or uninterpreted realm that can be mediated to our consciousness without itself being interpreted? We could have access to documents regarding the author's true intention, "but the documents . . . that would give us that intention are no more available to a literal reading (are no more uninterpreted) than the literal reading it would yield." Thus when John writes, "These things have been written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God; and that believing you may have eternal life in his name," we are no closer to his intentions than were he to have said and written nothing.Footnote47

Fish is following after the New Critical school, which as we have seen, disregarded authorial intent as well as historical interpretation. For Fish it is not important to access the original context in order to access meaning. He says, "to consult dictionaries, grammars, and histories is to assume that meanings can be specified independently of the activity of reading."Footnote48 But as we have seen it is the activity of reading which takes center stage in the making of meaning. Fish posits this because he believes that we as interpreters are cut off from past worlds or cultures. In other words, he believes that we are without commonality with past cultures and that, therefore, a complete disjuncture exists. The interpreter belongs to a different world from the author.>>>>

The idea is, of course, that the reader constructs meaning in his or her reading based on culture, expectation, etc. I see this as fitting in with Barthes' theory on the death of the author. There is a text. But it exists in a vacuum until it is read and interpreted by the reader, who often sees meanings that the author never intended or even considered. Joss Whedon often complimented his audience for their interpretations of his work, for showing him things he had never considered. It may explain in part why the outcry over Tara's death was so severe; certainly, Joss could not have planned that or wanted what happened as a result of his authorial decision. He admitted as much- leading, of course, to the statement that I find so troubling and which you defend; I argue that the hardcore GLBT community that loved the relation did not "need" what happened, and I do not want authors deciding for me what I need- but this is all in how we interpret what he meant by that comment. I'd like to think he might state it differently now, since it has been somewhat of a nettlesome comment over the past 4 years. It is, for certain, not understood; it may be that even now, I do not properly understand. But I did not "need" that death, nor did I want it, nor did I like it.

You've asked what makes a story enjoyable. I'm not sure this can be answered with any authority. I like what I like, for whatever reason I like it. Why do I like Willow and Tara but not, say, Cordy and Xander? I dunno, I just don't. You say "the structure with the greatest integrity, is precisely the ideal readerly position." But I don't see why you say this, nor do I see what you mean by this. Now do I see how you define integrity here, or what you mean by a "readerly position." I am not being obstreperous, but I am trying to understand the foundation from which you are working. Partly, this is because I am working in a different field; I'm a clinical researcher, not an expert in critical theory.Why do Love Willow and Tara and not, say Fred and Wesley? I don't know. I just don't. Why does Angel not speak to me? It has no resonance for me, like Buffy did and does. ANd resonance is important in my viewing pleasure; it's why I turn in to see how Grissom and Sara are developing in their hidden romance on CSI, and why I no longer care at all about Lost, which has utterly no resonance at all for me any more. It does not speak to me. But CSI does, and Buffy does.

We had a lengthy canon argument, which I am afraid I helped to instigage. We tried to understand what comprised canon, given the comic book and what it meant to the future of the Buffyverse. I plan on reading the books. Whether or not they appeal to me or resonate will depend on what they do, and whether it involves the characters I experience the show through.

I know you take issue with my use of the term "resonance." But that is what matters to me. I invest in shows when they resonate with me. Buffy does, CSI does, Angel does not. ANd I do not know what the "right" choices are, since there is no way to define them. But, I know what I like, and in the end, that is the only thing that matters, right? Joss does notwe me a thing, but neither do I owe Joss a thing, to simply take your point. And this is beside the issue of the commodity called Buffy- Joss still has to sell the show in order to keep it on TV. But that is a different issue for a different day.

Finally, as to white Willow. I have a hard time with it. Willow killed two people, one horribly. Are we to take from that that the cosmic slate has been wiped clean because she did nothing more than cast a spell? That she has atoned for what she did? I could argue this issue at length, but I felt it was a copout for her crimes, designed to try and bring closure to a series that was ending. WIllow in S7 was a pale shadow of herself- but again, this is an argument for a different day.

This is very interesting, this debate, and I enjoy your perspective a great deal. Thanks. :-)

Dana5140 | March 20, 21:39 CET

Dana5140: Some very good points. I think for me, the term "need" refers not so much to what the readers need (because really, they don't NEED anything from a writer--they CHOOSE to accept what the writer offers) but what the STORY needs in order to work. Like you pointed out, intention depends on interpretation and the writer can't hold our hand along the way (although in this day and age, that's becoming less and less true as technology allows more and more creator/consumer interaction. Not that "I'll explain it in my podcast" is an excuse for lazy writing.) So a writer can't really assume that all readers will have the same need. Or even if they do, that the writer is the one who has the right to meet that need.

First and foremost, the goal has to be to craft the best story that you can. Of course, that requires predicting the reader or viewer response to some extent, but more to the effect that the story itself works rather than making sure everyone will be happy and fluffy and kittenish over the outcome of every single occurrence. There are many times, the story works best when you establish a viewer want (we want Buffy to be with her mommy) and then forcibly subvert it (Joyce dies, we weep, we declare it one of the best episodes of the series despite/because of our agony). And there are times that the attachments viewers (or the creators themselves) develop that end up turning the story in a completely different direction than originally intended, especially in ongoing series where fan input does have an actual impact on the narrative. But again, all of this can't always be predicted in the earliest stages of the creative process. So the needs of the story HAVE to come first.

Lady Brick | March 20, 22:14 CET

"All of which boils down to this: Of course you have a right to react as you'd like to Tara's death. You don't owe Joss your viewership. But then Joss doesn't owe anyone anything. And the perception that in some way he does - that somehow the creator of a fiction has done wrong by his long-suffering fans if he doesn't make the 'right' choices in his narrative construction, if he places too many obstacles in the path of a desire generated by the narrative rather than constitutive of it - is (to my mind) the misperception that I was talking about in my post."

waxbanks, I agree with this completely, but it makes it that much more difficult to understand how you can come down so clearly on the side of the writer being in charge of his own creation and having an obligation to good writing rather than to the fans demands, and then say that you, in your capacity as analyst or fan, know better than the writer when the end of the story has been reached. There are many places a story can end. The writer decides when he will actually end it, when he has come to the end of the story he is telling. IMO only after the consumer has gotten to the end of the story the writer has chosen to tell, can he/she decide when they *think* the story *should* have ended. It becomes a matter of whether you agree with the writer once you actually have experienced the full story. A fan deciding that the story is over when the writer is continuing to write it, is no different to my mind than a fan demanding more or something different from a writer who has said this is the story, and this is the end of the story.

Admittedly we are all aware of the stories that have been continued for money rather than the author having a story to tell, but my point is that that can only be determined after the finished product has been produced. I am truly doubtful that Joss will fall into that trap anytime soon.

newcj | March 20, 22:14 CET

Simon, once again, thanks for finding such an interesting topic! Several in fact.

Dana, kinda' agree with you about Willow in season seven. Her story really went in the wrong direction there and, lets be frank, you know the reason why. In truth, she was a broken person within and I truly wanted to see her find herself with Giles and Buffy towards the end. Never happened.

Still, quite a story from season one-to-six with Willow. Willing to give Joss the benefit of the doubt.

Now, if only we can get him to write a cool story for HBO.

Madhatter | March 20, 22:18 CET

"All of which boils down to this: Of course you have a right to react as you'd like to Tara's death. You don't owe Joss your viewership. But then Joss doesn't owe anyone anything. And the perception that in some way he does - that somehow the creator of a fiction has done wrong by his long-suffering fans if he doesn't make the 'right' choices in his narrative construction, if he places too many obstacles in the path of a desire generated by the narrative rather than constitutive of it - is (to my mind) the misperception that I was talking about in my post."

Really? Can you really accept the toaster and then kill Tara like you did? I mean sure we talk about artist freedom all the time, but at some point social responsibility should take precedent shouldnt it? I mean at some point, shouldnt we ask ourselves NOT whether we CAN do something, but whether we SHOULD do something? I have no problem with Tara's death, I really dont, and I believe that Joss Whedon can do whatever he wants with everything that he creates, which means that he can pretty much do whatever he wants for his story. But its like Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum says "you were in such a hurry to find out whether you could, that you never stopped to think about whether you should!"

To me, it seems there is a moral imperative here, not with the death of Tara, but with the nature of the narrative itself, one built around the notion that social responsibility can truly take hold. I dont believe for a second that Joss Whedon killed Tara because she was a lesbian, not one second do I believe that, but I also believe that he failed to take into account the social responsibility his story took on when he does things like accepts toasters, says thats awesome, and makes political statements about guns in his shows. And to me, you cannot hide beyond the idea that the story was more important, that you gave me what I needed and not what I wanted, and still accept credit for doing things that are socially responsible because its either the story or its you. You cant have it both ways, you cant be held as someone socially responsible and then hide behind the story and need, when it appears that you werent anymore because then I am going to ask whether I should send the story a toaster.

Its the old story of dichotomy, the social responsibility that seriously gave people what they wanted and then the social irresponsibility that gave people what they needed, and yet, all I can think is that there were some people who WANTED those things all along. Its when people dont like a part of the story that it really does become what you want, instead of just something that we dont like, and I think thats the real distinction of the want/need debate. If you liked it then you needed that, if you didnt like it then you wanted something else, but thats just a cover IMO. Artistic freedom is something wholly great, but viewer and consumer freedom is even better.

ETA: Oh and Dana? Well done sir, well done...

[ edited by jerryst3161 on 2007-03-20 19:39 ]

jerryst3161 | March 20, 22:31 CET

Thanks for the discussion of Fish Dana5140, it was a good review. I also was struck in the OP by the seeming assumption of a fixed authorial intent and its partner the fixed audience response, or as it was phrased the "ideal reader", leaving me wondering ideal to who?

Another thing I had trouble following was that there seemed to be no acknowledgment that different reading strategies are employed in different mediums. There's talk of written text, of television and film, of comics, all as if there was no difference among the mediums in terms of the depth of cues to the reader/viewer or even the composition of the likely audience, all of which affects reader positoning. Given that different narrative formats even within the same medium, such as a written text, produce different reader positions to that text, and thus interpretations of its content, this blending of discussions is a real stumbling block for me.

Also, Jossholes? Whatever happened to Whedonites or Buffistas?

yourlibrarian | March 20, 22:33 CET

Quick answer, yourlibrarian. I think "text" here encompasses anything in which reader interpretation occurs- text, graphic, TV media, film, etc. All have to be interpreted by the reader/viewer, no matter the cues each uniquely may give.

However, I also think your question would be an interesting one to investigate. :-) I do not have the knowledge to offer many thoughts on this, though.

newcj: Even though an author may end a story, as Joss did with Buffy Chosen, that does not necessarily imply that the story has ended, not with fanfic. I find much to enjoy in jetwolf and her S8 and 9, for example. It is not "canon," but it brings me pleasure and resonates for me. :-)

[ edited by Dana5140 on 2007-03-20 19:41 ]

Dana5140 | March 20, 22:37 CET

Lady Brick, I think you miss a point that I'd like to make: the audience isn't always, to borrow Shel Silverstein's poignant imagery, composed of "Big O's". Many have pieces missing, some are themselves missing pieces--we don't need to recount the heartaches involved, but they are varied and deep. Some of these folks see Joss' work as a meaningful anesthetic for the pain in their lives. For them, it's not merely entertainment, but a crutch (and I use the pejorative term intentionally) to help them cope with an unsatisfying life.

Tara, for instance, becomes a type of someone they want to be--a happy lesbian, a powerful witch, a stutterer who's overcome her limitations, a fat[1] girl who's loved, a woman who finds true love after her family rejects her, or some other facet of her character. Or Willow represents their own journey, and their hope for happiness. Whatever is missing from their lives, is satisfied in fiction. For a while, it makes them forget their rejection, their powerlessness, their pain.

Then, when the *story* needs it, Joss kicks the crutch out and sends them sprawling to the ground. Maybe they started watching after Angel snapped Jenny's neck. Maybe they discounted the possibility--after all, Oz and Riley had both left and come back, right? No one died there. But for whatever reason, some fans have needs unmet in real life, are getting those needs met through fiction, and the needs of the story and their needs diverge.

Here is the real issue--not those who enjoyed a particular period in a show's history, but those whose unmet needs are masked by the show. It's folks in this situation who may be able to intellectually understand the story, but never forgive Joss on an emotional level for the hurt they endured watching him shred their security blanket before their eyes.

That is the context in which I think 'need' makes more sense. Need is a fan perception, based on the utilitarian value of the fiction in masking their real life pain.

[1] Only in comparison to the rest of the female cast.

jclemens | March 20, 22:50 CET

Dana5140:

Aah, Stanley Fish. Is There a Text in This Class? was one of the first Theory books I bought for pleasure - though I justified it to myself and my pocketbook as a thesis-related buy - but his recent writing is so hermetic and pompous as to make me look like goddamn Stephen King. Still, I go back to his stylistics-takedown with pleasure once in an increasingly long while, and even stroll through Surprised by Sin when I'm in an I-wish-I-had-an-easier-time-reading-Milton kind of mood.

But OK let's start with White Willow (to the tune of a certain Billy Idol song):

Willow killed two people, one horribly. Are we to take from that that the cosmic slate has been wiped clean because she did nothing more than cast a spell? That she has atoned for what she did? I could argue this issue at length, but I felt it was a copout for her crimes, designed to try and bring closure to a series that was ending.

I don't see that extraordinary image as redemption; notwithstanding its usefulness as a dramatic marker (we're satisfied/comforted by someone being redeemed on the brink of death), 'redemption' is largely an unattainable goal in the Jossverse, sensibly so. I don't think she transcended at that point, I think she was offered a vision of transcendence - which is to say in simple terms, total acceptance, of her lot and her crimes - and to the extent that she's 'redeemed' by show's end, it's by her resolve to continue acting out of motivations other than revenge. She's Angel, now: paying for her deeds, endlessly. That strikes me as a bit of a cheat (she probably should be in jail) but an understandable one: she has superpowers, and people with superpowers are, as Spike sensibly pointed out to Buffy in 'Dead Things', somewhat beyond the ken of the Sunnydale PD. I don't buy the 'It wasn't her fault' argument but it's an argument.

(Speaking of which: I think the tribunal should find Gaius Baltar not guilty. How's that for moral slip-n-slide?!)

OK, working back toward Fish:

You say "the structure with the greatest integrity, is precisely the ideal readerly position." But I don't see why you say this, nor do I see what you mean by this. Now do I see how you define integrity here, or what you mean by a "readerly position." I am not being obstreperous, but I am trying to understand the foundation from which you are working. Partly, this is because I am working in a different field; I'm a clinical researcher, not an expert in critical theory.

I think some of the quotation got clipped, here. Snipping out some flowery excess in the middle, my sentence is:

an inability to admit the structural requirements of the story [...] is precisely the ideal readerly position

...which is to say, the author wants you lost in the story and not thinking about extrinsic motivations or structural logic. This isn't true with someone like Joyce or Pynchon, writers who foreground structural logic and formal distancing devices. (Though both would presumably want you to blast through their novels the first go-round, laughing at the jokes, crying about the lost loves, cheering on Roger and Jessica and Molly and Leo, etc.) But Whedon is unabashedly a pulp writer, so suspension of disbelief is assumed in his readership/viewership to entail suspension of critical/analytic faculties, if only temporarily. (See TV-writer definitions of 'fridge logic' for a dodgy negative application of this principle.)

By 'integrity' I mean a combination of coherence, consistency of character and world (i.e. no lazy retconning, only freaky-smart Dawnie-has-always-been-there retconning!), and the justifiability of formal gestures.

I get a lot out of Wolfgang Iser's account of reader/writer games in The Fictive and the Imaginary, and though Norman Holland gets pissed on all the time I admire his project in 5 Readers Reading and elsewhere. Both lead me toward a notion of what I call 'imaginative stances' - a position about halfway between purely formal analysis and purely reader-response/social-conditioning criticism, the idea of which is that formal and generic features prompt us think in certain constrained/circumscribed ways about the stories we're encountering, limiting our ability to think 'outside the (story) box' as it were. So that gamers, for instance, achieve a kind of emptied-out fullness because they rejigger their own sensorium, in a way, so that it's limited to the relatively simple, quantized sensory output of a video game. So they're seeing and hearing a lot less than elsewhere in life, but experience it as abundance, excess. For gaming that's kind of ideal - but it makes criticism impossible, by definition (because criticism is going outside the text to see it in the context of a reader/author/text/society/etc. exchange). Fandom is a kind of deliberate social extrapolation of this altered mindset - a way of continuing our reader-of-fantasy imaginative stance within a social formation. That's why it's Oh So Supportive to be around fans - it's like attending a Cancer Survivors group, or a Young Republicans meeting. Part of what we like is that we're not the only ones with this particular semi-conscious rewiring of head and heart.

It's my own individual wiring, I know, that leads me to react to statements like this, from Fish -

I did what critics always do: I "saw" what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I turned around and attributed what I had 'seen' to a text and an intention

- with disdain, and confusion that Fish is denying the knowability of pretty self-evident formal choices by authors. Enough with the self-hating critic routine, Stan! Obviously writers are situated within interpretive communities and work within systems of generic and formal expectation (presumably Fish talks about this, it's been a long time since I cared enough to look up the specifics of his theory, my late-nite browsing notwithstanding). OK but let's leave him aside. To Tara for a moment:

I think you have too simplistic a reading of Tara. And beyond that, why does it matter whether or not she is complex? If she is not, to you, cool. I don't see her that way. Did she do wrong? Sure; she was complicit with Willow in bringing Buffy back, for example, despite her fears for what they were doing. She ruined the demon finding spell wiht Willow out of an understandable fear that WIllow would think the less of her did Willow know she was part demon. But none of this matters.

So Tara does occasionally get up to mischief, but the show always lets her get away with everything. That's fine. It certainly doesn't bother me; everyone in my household last year used to watch Buffy and Angel together (we all watched every episode of each in a row over a few months, at my urging), and everyone was in love with Tara. No question. But let's be frank: Tara's main quality is that she elicits sympathy, but there's not really enough depth to her character to earn empathy. She's almost solely acted upon; sometimes people act on her behalf. She's obviously smart and perceptive, but at a step back from the narrative she's substantive mainly as an aspect of Willow's character. The genius of the Buffy writers is to incorporate that quality into the character of Tara herself, so that in late Season Four and the beginning of Season Five one of the character's defining traits is her touching concern that she's...a supporting character. I love it, I love her! But Romeo and Juliet (or even, more appropriately, Hamlet and Ophelia) they're not.

There is a lesson to be learned from Tara's character about story-construction, which requires a dispassionate attitude toward the fannish identity-projection and sympathy that's unavoidable from readers/viewers caught up in the narrative. Which is part of the reason people are always surprised - but shouldn't be - when the best TV showrunners talk about how little contemporary television they watch. (The best, like David Simon and David Milch, appear to watch next to none. Whedon's a bigger geek than them, and something of a storytelling savant, so he's got more disposable free time, in spite of his shocking work ethic.)

[Joss's 'what you need, not what you want' comment] is, for certain, not understood; it may be that even now, I do not properly understand. But I did not "need" that death, nor did I want it, nor did I like it.

This raises the point, more interesting to me probably than any of this formalist gobbledygook (ha!), of what the experience of watching the death of Tara at age 50 would be like. I'm out of my depth here but will ride the Poetry Train anyhow: I imagine that there's something callous and unbearable about the death of kids - and the Scoobies were that, even through Season Seven, though they played older at the end - for older viewers. I wouldn't presume to tell you what death is like or how humans deal with it, but I can say what the nearness of death has felt like to me. Joss Whedon killed Tara. I used to think God killed (for instance) my mom. But I don't have the luxury of deciding (realizing, whatever) that Joss Whedon doesn't exist. Indeed as time has passed (I'm just 28 now) I've found my own reactions to death molded by my experience of death in beloved stories, particularly on the honest and often pitiless Buffy: it happens, someone is responsible or no one is, but the responsibility of living doesn't lessen because of someone else's departure, and wishing doesn't unmake tragedy. Given the moral framework of Buffy, Tara's death was as 'justified' as it needed to be - because no justification was needed at all. When John Lennon died, Lester Bangs wrote this:

So in this time of gut-curdling sanctimonies about ultimate icons, I hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that the Beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The Beatles were most of all a moment. But their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutted lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Lennon's lyrics into poetry. It is for that moment - not for John Lennon the man - that you are mourning, if you are mourning. Ultimately you are mourning for yourself.

He didn't live to watch Buffy, but he would've understood.

More geeky now for a second: People piss and moan about Kennedy, but what in Christ's name should Willow have done? 'Too soon, too soon!' That's not for the audience to decide. (It's also not for Kennedy to decide, grumble, but let's leave that to the side for a moment, particularly since she genuinely helped Willow a number of times. Spoiled little brat, but she was right about Tara.) There's a difference between critical analysis and a cry of the heart for the dead, and 'shippers' forget it. They have to. Forgetting is what enables them to be shippers in the first place. Pretending is what we do as fans, and though we shouldn't be ashamed - it lets us enter fully into an emotional exchange with author and text and story, and grow through that exchange - I'd like to think we can take our fannish pleasure without holding onto more harmful delusions. Joss Whedon's work wouldn't have existed without fans; it wouldn't have been seen without fans. But without fans, it would still have been a great achievement. Which is sort of a goofy extrapolation of the argument in the original post, and hopefully one that heartens us - as fans - rather than bringing us down.

waxbanks | March 20, 22:50 CET

Whoa, a lot of comments while I was stringing 2,000 more words together. I'd definitely like to respond if it seems worthwhile.

waxbanks | March 20, 22:52 CET

Lady Brick:

(Joyce dies, we weep, we declare it one of the best episodes of the series despite/because of our agony)

No! Or rather: I disagree. :)

Briefly, our agony is only supporting evidence for our claim that 'The Body' is one of the best episodes of Buffy. To badly mix metaphors, it's like an amicus brief: it's not the case. Again, these are my biases, but I say the case for its greatness is made by stepping back: to look not at what the episode gives you, but by inquiring more deeply into the mechanisms by which it satisfies (and crushes, and defies, and teaches, etc.) us. You're outlining a traditional fan position, one that makes a lot of sense in the immediate wake of the initial experience of an episode. But if art is part of a conversation - and we talk back, in part, through more art (even if that art is criticism) - then that initial reaction says nothing to us that can further the conversation. That's not to discount our agony/ecstasy, quite the contrary. Why else make art in the first place? But the aesthetic worth of the art doesn't originate there.

Wow: two cents and about that size. A nice change for me, I imagine. :)

waxbanks | March 20, 22:59 CET

jerryst3161:

Artistic freedom is something wholly great, but viewer and consumer freedom is even better.

You don't live off your art, I take it.

OK I was gonna say more here but I'm totally confused: What toaster? Did a group of fans actually send Joss Whedon a toaster for some reason?

waxbanks | March 20, 23:03 CET

newcj:

A fan deciding that the story is over when the writer is continuing to write it, is no different to my mind than a fan demanding more or something different from a writer who has said this is the story, and this is the end of the story.

Aah, this is a good point. But this is a style weakness of mine: I seem to have made it insufficiently clear that I'm definitely gonna run out and buy Angel Season Six if it comes out, and will happily wonder what happens next, what became of the Fang Gang, what Joss's apocalypse actually looks like. No question. I'm not in any way quibbling with his decision to go on; I'm interested in the fan reaction(s), and the implied attitude toward the fandom-object, the cult text. That's the object of criticism in this article - but it's not meant to imply any strong attitude toward Joss continuing the story, on my part.

waxbanks | March 20, 23:12 CET

"You don't live off your art, I take it."

LOL, do you consider philosophy to be art? If so, then yeah I live off my art...

And my bad about the toaster, thats just the easiest way to make my point waxbanks, some fans of the Willow and Tara relationship sent Joss a pink toaster thanking him for the relationship.

jerryst3161 | March 20, 23:15 CET

jclemens: You're saying that a writer has a responsibility to fill an emotional need an audience has. Dana5140 says that a writer isn't in a position to decide what emotional needs an audience has that need filling. It can't work both ways.

waxbanks: That's what I meant by "despite"... the ability to step back from our initial visceral reaction and judge art for art's sake. Some people see "The Body" as great because of the structure of the episode, the effective use of one-shots, the stellar acting, the directing choices, etc. Some see the episode as great simply because it makes them sob every time they watch it. I think both are valid responses and both are unlikely to come from people who went "Woohoo! Joyce finally bought the farm!" Hence, despite/because :)

Lady Brick | March 20, 23:16 CET

Not quite. Rather, I'm implying that compelling presentations of fiction, especially in a serial form like TV, will attract those with unmet needs who can identify with the characters. By virtue of being good, compelling writing, shows attract such folks, and thus, Joss shows more than most.

Does that create an obligation on the part of Joss to continue meeting those needs? I don't see why or how that could be the case--there are so many problems with that interpretation of obligation that I'm not even going to start naming them. I have nothing to say to folks who claim otherwise: an author's control over his or her creative output should be absolute.

Still, it would be shortsighted to deny that people really do develop attachments to fictional characters who are subject to death, or, worse, cancellation.

jclemens | March 20, 23:27 CET

I don't see Tara as a cypher upon which other project goodness. I have a very different reading of her. I see her as a moral compass, the one person who would do right regardless of the consequences, regardless of what it meant to her herself. But then I posit Tara as a representation of the Buddhist boddhisattva Tara, compassionate savioress of the world, protector of women. Which is why Tara loved the most powerful woman in the world- Willow (and was willing to leave her- self sacrifice- in order to save her); was confessor to the savior of the world- Buffy; was mother to the power of universal chaos- Dawn, and even gave solace to the woman who wrought vengeance on evil men- Anya. And still had time to tweak Spike! :-) I read Tara in this light, as the person on Buffy who provided a moral direction for the Scoobys at a time when it became increasingly lost.

I also viewed the relation in light of queer representations in media. There were virtually none. Ellen had come and gone, and was played as comedy. Willow and Tara were the first time that Other got to see themselves portrayed in media. Lesbian relations is now a game- look at The OC, for example. It's used as a ratings ploy. But not W/T. That was different and may never be repeated, L Word notwithstanding. And L Word is soap, so is hyper-real, not real. And let us not argue that Buffy is not real; I think everyone knows what I mean here. We will not see that kind of relation on TV ever again. And we are the poorer for it.

As to death. In truth, I just returned two days ago from my grandmother's funeral. For real. Not many 53yos have grandmothers, but mine was 98 when she died last Friday. That was really real. And it hurt, in lots of ways, but was not unexpected. The week I spent with my family was rough, really rough. I hold no beliefs that the death of a fictional character is the same; it patently is not. But we still can be moved when it occurs, and a good writer can manipulate an audience in many ways. I just think Joss miscalculated the impact of his authorial choice. And I think we will never know if he harbors any misgivings about that choice. It is on threads and discussions such as this that I wish he would post a comment; I would love to hear his thoughts when we get into issues this deeply.

I have not read the other authors you note, and once again I do not have the training to truly respond with any authority to your comments. I am at a disadvantage as a result. My own thinking is that despite the best intentions of authors, they cannot predict how people will respond to what they write. Tara's death being a case in point.

I don't like Kennedy because she was written as the anti-Tara at a time when there was still a huge well of pain out there. It was a further slap in the face, a sop to say that Willow was still gay (though Joss and Marti Noxon both have stated that they had lengthy discussions about this issue- an indication to me that they still did not get it. I can only imagine the outcry that would have occurred had they returned Willow to guyville, no matter how much they have always argued it was about who you love and nothing more- and Joss is just not that dumb, so had to realize that he could not make that move, not at that point. I still think, though, the TKIM was a bit of a slap at the shippers, bringing Warren back as Willow- what could be worse than thatto the Tillow shippers, at that point, aside from making Willow hetero again? But I digress.).

But I am not sure I understand this comment: "There's a difference between critical analysis and a cry of the heart for the dead, and 'shippers' forget it. They have to. Forgetting is what enables them to be shippers in the first place." Help me out here.

Dana5140 | March 20, 23:31 CET

And my bad about the toaster, thats just the easiest way to make my point waxbanks, some fans of the Willow and Tara relationship sent Joss a pink toaster thanking him for the relationship.

Gotcha. Oh I've got a whole mess of thoughts about that kind of pleasure/guilt complex but that's for another time. Lunchtime!

waxbanks | March 20, 23:33 CET

an author's control over his or her creative output should be absolute.

Gotcha, gotcha. I completely agree. Of course, there is also the occasional writer who seems to delight in purposefully pissing on the audience's emotions to the point where that control appears to be the focus instead of the story. As with all things, moderation usually works best.

But I am not sure I understand this comment: "There's a difference between critical analysis and a cry of the heart for the dead, and 'shippers' forget it. They have to. Forgetting is what enables them to be shippers in the first place." Help me out here.

I believe that's intended to mean that shippers by necessity view the entirety of the series through the filter of what THEY want the story to be, rather than what the story IS. And when you're at that point, objective critical analysis isn't really possible.

[ edited by Lady Brick on 2007-03-20 20:43 ]

Lady Brick | March 20, 23:37 CET

I'm afraid I don't have sufficient experience (or memory of coursework at the moment) to explore the issue either, Dana5140, but when the OP raised the issue of people reacting differently to a film than a television show it seemed to me to be highlighting the fact that a given text is interepreted differently based on the audience's positioning, not least of which is the knowledge they are expected to bring to a text (which may be their own life experience, their prior experience with the medium, their previous experience with elements of the narrative or all of the above). For example, supposing we took a 2 episode arc of Buffy and translated it directly to film, comic, or text. How would we expect consumers of those new texts to react to the story assuming they had no other knowledge of the series? And would those all be the same reactions regardless of which medium they were given? Also, what if all the readers were from different cultures as well? How would that affect their positioning to a given story?

I'm wondering in part if the OP's discussion of the "ideal reader" is not in fact a discussion of the "imagined reader" or "intended reader" since the determination of reading competency is different in different mediums, and also is something determined by the text not the author. I'm afraid it's been some years since I was that conversant with different parts of reception theory, but I'm assuming the OP is using its elements since the theory is broad enough for interpretation of diverse mediums.

I don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion of Tara specifically as I have no particular connection to her character. This statement, however, struck me.

"there's not really enough depth to her character to earn empathy. She's almost solely acted upon"

By you, I assume you mean. Because there are many people who are largely reactive in their lives and I imagine they empathize quite strongly with her. Are you suggesting people can only identify with characters who are active and strong?

I think most TV showrunners watch little television because they are simply too busy. It's a very demanding job with long hours and keeping up with a television series is time consuming.

Also, the term "self-evident" is a bit of an oxymoron. Anyone who has ever devised a syllabus or given out an assignment with lengthy, explicit instructions would tell you that all we can hope for is "mostly evident."

yourlibrarian | March 20, 23:38 CET

I can only imagine the outcry that would have occurred had they returned Willow to guyville, no matter how much they have always argued it was about who you love and nothing more

To me this says more about the marginalization of bisexuality among queer interest groups than anything else - I find it obvious that the important thing, in terms of authenticity of identity, is whom you love rather than what direction their genitals are turned in - but to each his or her own, I suppose. Still, this politicization of aesthetic judgment, this transparently self-satisfying socialization of it, is definitely the sort of thing I was talking about in my original post.

I just think Joss miscalculated the impact of his authorial choice [to kill Tara].

I hear stuff like this all the time from W/T shippers, and it never fails to disappoint me. C'mon, level with me: do you really think Joss Whedon, famously one of the more conscientious storytellers in Hollywood when it comes to feminist viewpoints and sexual empowerment, didn't think people would lose their shit when Tara died? This is a man whose writing staff was very much in touch with the fandom, and more importantly, in touch with currents in American popular culture. You really think he and they couldn't have imagined that people would be upset? For God's sake, that's why they killed Tara. Because the structure of the story demanded it, and they wanted to provoke emotional turmoil. Why do bad things happen in drama? To upset us, safely. Whether everything comes out OK or not is a generic question more than an individual-psychological one, I think.

But the protestations of W/T shippers - 'No, they couldn't know how much we're hurting! If only they could have known, they would never have done this!' - fly in the face of the message of the show. Death happens, even in drama. Even to lesbians in love, even outside of the context of the 'lesbian cliché.' Those tiresome self-justifications from (e.g.) post-'Seeing Red' Buffy boycotters went a long way to excuse what amounts to fans forgetting why they watched the show in the first place - or acknowledging, perhaps more nervewrackingly, that their reasons for watching the show stemmed from a simplistic grasp of the show's morals, the belief that Joss (the writer-god) was really looking out for them and just wanted to make them happy, astonishing overwhelming episode-after-episode evidence to the contrary.

Besides which, the bigger deal is this: Tara died, and only a miniscule fraction of viewers stopped watching, and only a slightly larger miniscule fraction hated the show because Tara had been killed. That's the real blow to the collective ego of fandom, here: we're a tiny group, and our perceived importance to the show is out of proportion with our actual role in the audience. Some episodes of Buffy were watched by five million people, as I recall. Thus far nearly 1,800 people have found my blog post on Whedonesque. The math should be humbling - but fandom is a defense against humility. Whedon has had some things to say about that, as you probably know, in the context of the 'holy emotion' of surprise and spoiler-whores.

Oh well.

waxbanks | March 20, 23:55 CET

So...many...words. I just can't seem to get past "Jossholes". Call me petty/picky. .(Please not literally as I am terribly sensitive).

Editied to clarify not being bitchy. Just flip. I love to read these posts when they get very academic like this and I am not at all trying to diminish what anyone is saying here by being flip. But honestly, I have a child's love for all things Joss. And as entertaining as all this is, my thoughts eventually boil down to, (badly paraphrased Xander), Me Love Buffy, Buffy not Dead, Me Happy.

[ edited by skeezycheeses on 2007-03-20 21:20 ]

skeezycheeses | March 21, 00:06 CET

yourlibrarian:

Also, the term "self-evident" is a bit of an oxymoron. Anyone who has ever devised a syllabus or given out an assignment with lengthy, explicit instructions would tell you that all we can hope for is "mostly evident."

LOL. :) Perhaps my bias stems from my habit of being very explicit in my syllabi and assignments, and very generous - perhaps too much so - in accepting the students' work itself.

"there's not really enough depth to her character to earn empathy. She's almost solely acted upon"


By you, I assume you mean. Because there are many people who are largely reactive in their lives and I imagine they empathize quite strongly with her. Are you suggesting people can only identify with characters who are active and strong?

This is a good point, and illuminates another bias of mine - though this no doubt sounds mean, it's not meant that way: I find shyness wearying, a problem to be overcome as quickly and safely as possible rather than encouraged, indeed an evolutionary disadvantage but one that can definitely be left behind by most people with enough support and honest feedback. But we'll stick to the text: tell me, what exactly does Tara do? In general, I mean. She just doesn't actually do much. As Dana points out, she's a 'moral compass' - which is very important, formally - but as a person, what are her traits? She's good, kind, deeply in love with Willow, forgiving, sexually progresive (never moreso than in 'Dead Things'). What does she like? What has she done? How does she spend her time when Willow's not around? We don't have to see such things to know them; the show could characterize her in passing, so to speak, and that's what's happened in part. But her identity was never a focus.

I think that's part of what people love so damn much about Tara Maclay. Her relationship with Willow was beautiful, in part because until Season Six it wasn't in any way messy (except for Willow's own questions about her sexual identity, about which Tara was boundlessly supportive).

jclemens:

I think your observations about Tara and fan identification are spot-on. But as I'm getting grouchier I don't know that I could get away with making them in quite the same terms without being called out. So danke schoen. :)

waxbanks | March 21, 00:07 CET

So...many...words. I just can't seem to get past "Jossholes". Call me petty/picky.

You're being petty and/or picky.

waxbanks | March 21, 00:07 CET

WB: It is certain that Joss knew people would "lose their shit" when he killed Tara. He wrote this for maximum impact. I still hold that the result of that decision was far greater than he anticipated. And he has admitted as much, as has Marti Noxon. Don't allow your apparent kittenboard hatred to color your comments here. I'm not a kitten, nor am I stupid. I don't agree with his decision, but that's my right. As is the decision to then lose interest in the show. It does not matter that it was in the context of a fictional relation. It could be for any reason; I don't owe Joss or JJ Abrams or Tim Kring or anyone any allegiance whatsoever, and when they upset me, for whatever reason (ie, failure to answer anything on Lost) then they lose me. But this is banal, right? you have much to offer in your comments but you are veering a bit too close to the personal here. I have no ego, and fandom is not monolithic. You attribute entirely too much power to them (or perhaps it is that you attribute utterly no power to them; it is not entirely clear to me).

But if you think that our role as fans is out of proportion to our impact as audience, I would refer you to Serenity.

Dana5140 | March 21, 00:09 CET

I've loved this discussion and find myself pretty much on Waxbank's side the whole way. Wish I could articulate things so forcefully, but, since it can't be me (sniff), it's wonderful to see someone else doing it. Great stuff!

shambleau | March 21, 00:09 CET

Perhaps my bias stems from my habit of being very explicit in my syllabi and assignments

Well, I was trying to use a bit of humor to get the point across, but let me put it another way. Saying that something is "self-evident," particularly in a discussion is usually a shorthand way of not proving a point but merely asserting it. One's belief in the truth of something is not equal to it actually being so.

As I said before, I don't want to get sidetracked into discussing Tara or any other particular character. I am assuming from your response that you do, in fact believe, that only certain characters can be a point of identification for a given audience.

yourlibrarian | March 21, 00:19 CET

My word, Saje, are you actually Yoda?

Clouded, of most of these posts the meaning is. I've never seen myself and Yoda in the same room so it's at least possible ;).

Very interesting discussion which I can barely follow. I reckon that Fish guy may exemplify pretty much everything I have trouble accepting about po-mo lit-crit though. Does he literally mean that in his view every reading of a text is a separate interpretation and every separate interpretation is equally valid ? I.e there are no empirical 'facts' one can claim for a text (e.g. Buffy is female) ?

Cos that, in my considered though uninformed estimation, is bollocks ;).

If all meaning is individually interpreted then there's basically no such thing as meaning and even discussing it is, well, meaningless. If art is partly about communication (and I think it is) then there must be a common framework in which to communicate (e.g. language, a common culture etc.). If everyone's interpretation is individual and distinct then there is no culture which seems to contradict the state of the world (or there sure are a whole lot of coincidences happening every day ;).

Artistic freedom is something wholly great, but viewer and consumer freedom is even better.

Err, can you have one without the other ? Artists are viewers and consumers too. To me, as soon as an artist mediates his or her intentions for another's then their art is adulterated (obviously in the real world this happens to a greater or lesser extent all the time, doesn't make it the ideal). Great art happens when despite that lack of attention to 'receiver' wants the artist still touches something inside their audience.

I see her as a moral compass, the one person who would do right regardless of the consequences, regardless of what it meant to her herself.

Surely a 'person' that would always follow a certain path regardless of consequences is a kind of cypher (in the sense of being a mystery with little apparent internal life) ? Certainly not a fully realised rendition of a human being. I loved Tara but waxbanks is spot-on IMO. She was more an archetype than a person (compared to someone like Xander with his pettiness and jealousy as well as his bravery and insight).

I just can't seem to get past "Jossholes".

I agree. We Josshitheads deeply resent those fucking splitters being given the oxygen of publicity that we have long striven for. And if one particular Josshole is reading this, I want my Marillion CD back you bastard !

Saje | March 21, 00:19 CET

Marillion! Way cool. I love that band. But Magma is way damned better. Oh, and remember, Stanley Fish is not Fish!

Wax Banks has a few more Buffy posts on his site than just the one here. And I do have one majorly agreement with him- Anya and Xander's breakup was out of character for Xander and not earned. Just sayin.'

I don't think the idea of reader response criticism is that there is no meaning, and that words themselves have no meaning. I think the idea is that the meaning we glean from our reading of a text is based on our own learning, expectations, cultural assumptions, etc. It is not deconstruction, for example. So it is not the worst of pomo analysis.

Hey, saje: "Great art happens when despite that