Inconsistentlywrittensoul - Hey, I Could Be Lots Of Things - Tumblr Blog

one of the weirdest moments for me is when Buffy and Willow raid the Watcher Diaries in Halloween. Because at best, they're just flipping past all the descriptions of torture and murder to get to pics of girls Angel might've fucked. But at worst (and frankly, more likely, considering just what types of things watchers would chronicle), they're looking at pics of girls Angel ATE and being like "I think you could pull off that look, Buffy."

I have a redemptive reading of S7, which is that it's all about Buffy backsliding in what she's learned over the years, and repeating the mistakes of her failed mentors. Buffy is in the wrong for most of S7, and I think that's the point.

In Selfless, she parrot's Faith's words in Consequences about how they, as Slayers, are the law. Faith isn't entirely wrong in what she's saying, but she's also saying it from the midst of a suicidal spiral and desperately trying to find reasons to repress her own grief - it's not meant to be good advice. And the events of Selfless show that Buffy's solution is objectively less useful than the third option that Willow finds (the one that saves the dead boys). Buffy is falling into the blind spots of her failed mentor and therefore losing her ability to find alternative solutions like she used to.

In Potential, she recreates the Cruciatmentum that she suffered in Helpless, this time by locking the un-powered potentials in with a dangerous vampire, buying into the Watchers Council propaganda about it making them stronger. Throughout the season, she repeats the mistakes of early-S1 Giles - refusing to connect emotionally to her mentees and not allowing them to have fun and a life outside of the war against darkness. She falls into the hyper-militarised mindset of the Initiative, and the disaster of Empty Places occurs at least in part because Buffy, just like the Initiative, insists that the people around her should just follow orders and not ask questions, because she knows best.

It is entirely understandable that Buffy falls into these mindsets. She has gone through so much and made so many tough decisions that it's no surprise that she feels she knows best. The whole first third of S7 is all about Buffy being haunted by the people she couldn't save, and so it makes sense that she goes back on her previously learned lessons.

And the tragic thing is, this is inevitable. She is forced into this role of hard general, forced to make these life-and-death decisions, forced to depersonalise everyone around her, because the role of the Slayer demands it. The structure of the Chosen One demands loneliness, and demands these misguided mindsets that Faith, the Watchers, and the Initiative already showed to be flawed. She doesn't really have a choice but to repeat them. This is why Faith immediately falls into similar mistakes when she takes on the mantle. They are trapped by the system.

That's why the structure needs to be from destroyed. That's why she needs to rip up the rules and empower all the Potentials. It's the only way to break this cycle, to not repeat these mistakes again.

I'm not 100% sure this is the intended story, and to be honest I'd like another watch of S7 before I totally nail myself to this pole. The execution is muddled enough that it does become unclear, and that's why opinions tend to be very polarised on Buffy in S7. On balance though I do think this is the intended takeaway.. I think there are so many moments where Buffy repeats the words of a failed mentor, and where that leads to an objectively worse outcome, that I think this is meant to be the takeaway. I think that the most interesting read - and the only read that isn't thematically incongruent with the rest of the show - is that Buffy is consistently in the wrong in S7, and that she's meant to be, and that that is was allows her to break out of the system in the end.

I'm enjoying it but I'm not happy about it

watching Hazbin Hotel as a tumblr user like "shit. whoever made this has really got our number, huh?"

watching Hazbin Hotel as a tumblr user like "shit. whoever made this has really got our number, huh?"

I posted my first ever fanfic!

Title: Haircut, Home & Heaven

Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Faith Lehane/Buffy Summers)

Summary: Truthfully, it’s impossible to know. Buffy can’t remember if they had felt like this before they jumped from Glory’s tower. Maybe that’s when it started. Or maybe their body hadn’t felt like it was truly Buffy’s since they were fifteen years old on the steps of Hemery High, getting called as a slayer. Being told that you’re being imbued with supernatural abilities is bound to irrevocably change your relationship with your own body.   - - -

In which Buffy explores their relationship to their own identity, gives themself a haircut, and then comes out to Faith.

You can read it on AO3!

it's always bad for adults to interact with minors, which is why when I was born my mother was positioned at the window and I was birthed down a giant slip n slide that safely transported me to the hospital grounds, where I was quickly accepted and raised by a gang of feral babies who were born under similar circumstances. and that's why my posts are so bad

my biggest btvs pet peeve is when people act as if willow doing questionable stuff is out of character... besties, one of the first things we learn about her is that she "accidentally" decripted the city council's security system before she even met buffy, girly will do anything as long as she has built a good enough excuse in her head and thinks she won't get caught!

shark: the ultimate gender

People voting for 'clone' is my Walrus Fairy.

Like, finding out you're a clone is just finding out you've got an older identical twin somewhere. Finding out you're a robot throws everything you know about the very nature of your existence into question.

And, like, I get wanting to be a cool robot. I wouldn't necessarily mind finding out I was a robot, depending on the circumstances. But it's definitely way more fucked up than just being a clone.

With his relentless, manipulative cruelty, his obsessive tendency make people live out the tragic narratives he's imagined for them, his ableism towards a wheelchair-bound Spike, plus all the murders...

... is Angelus a Vriska?

number one hottest thing a girl can be is funny. number two hottest thing a girl can be is lame as hell

Honestly, deciding the fan-made pornography is the only true canon is a power move I would respect.

The constant rolling disaster that is Overwatch's game development aside, what really perplexes me about how Blizzard is handing the broader franchise is their continual insistence that a canon narrative exists in spite of their equally continual refusal to tell anyone what it is.

Like, okay, the events of the games aren't canon. Fair enough: the games are multiplayer-only, and you can't account for player actions.

Oh, and the animated short films aren't canon either – they're properly understood as in-universe propaganda, not depictions of actual events. That's a little high concept for you guys, but fine.

But surely the comics are canon, right? Well, no; some of the comics (we're not telling you which ones) were canon at one point, but the writing team has decided to go in a different direction.

My dudes, what is left? The weird Source Filmmaker porn? Is that canon? Well, apparently it's at least as canon as anything else!

we can fix him. we had the technology.

the decision for adam to call maggie "mother" but forrest to call her "mommy" haunts me. if they both called her one or the other it would just be normal weird but the choice is what pushes it over the line into utterly haunting

Character asks:

Xander, 1 and 21.

1 Why do you like or dislike this character?

Going to focus on the why part and avoid coming to a firm conclusion about the implicit binary choice.

Season 5's The Replacement posits that there are two Xanders -- one suave and self-confident, one a bumbling walking punchline -- before revealing that both of these Xanders are equally real and exist as aspects of the true and singular Xander, with neither having primacy over the other. However, while there are indeed two diametrically opposed versions of Xander Harris, real fans of the show know that they don't exactly correspond to what the show suggests here. The true distinction is between, on the one hand, the Xander who grows up miserable and alone in an abusive household and is determined not to become his father and who loves and supports his friends unconditionally and is maybe/probably/definitely bi but doesn't seem to realize it yet and, on the other hand, the Xander who makes frequent gross sexual comments about all the women he knows and visibly and bitterly resents the ways they outshine him and who considers it his moral duty to give them terrible, patronising, unsolicitied advice about their personal lives whenever he can.

As in The Replacement, both versions of the character have equal claim to be the 'real' Xander. The much more irritating one is perhaps more present in the early seasons (especially when the writers genuinely seem to be trying to set him up in an actual love triangle with Buffy herself, but also throughout much of his 'romance' with Cordelia) but he never really goes away, even after the writers started trying to find new things to do with his character from The Zeppo onwards. He shows up in Season 5 to explain to Buffy how it's all her fault that her boyfriend metaphorically cheated on her while she was selfishly worrying about her sick mother and he's actually a really great guy Buffy never properly appreciated (he doesn't say "can I have sex with Riley too?" in this episode, but he might as well have done); he shows up in Season 6 to sulk about the fact that the woman he left at the altar dared to sleep with somebody who wasn't him and how much she "disgusts" him as a result; he shows up in Season 7 to help kick Buffy out of her own house.

But, equally, the sympathetic, loyal and, yes, even heroic Xander isn't just some post hoc fandom creation either. There are hints even earlier, but Season 3 and especially Season 4 really do make it clear that Xander's home life is horrific. He does risk his life to save Buffy's in Prophecy Girl, even when Angel wouldn't, even after Buffy had been clear she didn't reciprocate his feelings toward her. He does eventually admit to some of his worst behaviour (his jealousy about Angel, his betrayal of Cordelia). His treatment of Anya, while horrible, really does make sense as an attempt to do the right thing for somebody he cares about by somebody almost utterly consumed by self-loathing.

His speech to Buffy in the second half of The Freshman ("when it's dark and I'm all alone and I'm scared [...] I always ask: what would Buffy do? You're my hero.") is, despite what he says immediately afterwards, genuinely touching. The way that, in The Replacement, even the cowardly incompetent side of Xander is willing to risk his life to protect Anya from what he thinks is a demon is honestly kind of sweet. His speech to Willow at the end of Season 6's Grave ("I'm not joking [...] I can't imagine the pain you're in [...] You're Willow [...] I love you") and to his speech to Dawn in Season 7's Potential ("You gave her your power [...] You're not special. You're extraordinary") both feel like genuinely well-earned moments in light of everything we've seen of Xander so far.

The fundamental tension inherent to Xander is that he doesn't smoothly and effortlessly develop from one version of the character to the other. It's not as simple as the grating Xander from the early seasons "getting better". Both sides of his character are present -- and either side can be dominant -- from the very beginning of the show and right until the end.

21 If you're a fic writer and have written for this character, what's your favorite thing to do when you're writing for this character? What's something you don't like?

Well, I am a fic writer and I have, technically, written for this character (he is the POV character for one fairly short chapter of Coexist.) I think he is a very hard character to write well (especially in the high school seasons) and I'm not at all sure I managed.

Honestly, I think well-written fanfic takes on Xander that actually treat him seriously as a character are incredibly rare. (Off the top of my head I can think of exactly one example. I'm sure there are others -- and I'm sure part of the issue is that I only really read a particular subset of Buffy fanfic -- but I doubt there are many others.)

I think a lot of fanfic writers really just don't like Xander at all (and so only write the horrible Xander, if that, and only so they can have the characters they like call him out on his worst behaviour), whereas other writers lean too heavily into the sympathetic Xander (and either have him explicitly realize and denounce his own poor behaviour early on or just write a meek and mild 'Xander' who just needs a hug and who has never even thought about saying anything inappropriate to any woman ever, which ... well, that's not the character that appears on screen, is it?).

I think the trick to writing Xander well, such as it is -- and the approach I tried to take myself -- is to try to treat him as sympathetically as possible without pretending he isn't often prone to jealousy and making mean-spirited comments, that he isn't a bit of a massive hypocrite at times and that he doesn't often say "funny" things that aren't when he shouldn't. That's harder than just playing up the angle that Xander's parents are awful and he's trying his best and suggesting he'd be much happier if he just followed Anya's advice to Buffy and found a "nice, boring, boyfriend", but I think if you don't try you're not writing a sympathetic version of Xander Harris so much as you're creating a whole new character.

Yes, Xander (mostly) is trying his best, and his parents (especially his father) are awful, but very often Xander's best is far from good enough. He will say awful things sometimes and he probably won't apologize for it, even if he does secretly feel ashamed by it. You have to try to write both versions of Xander -- both the one that makes sense as one of Buffy and Willow's best friends and the one who really doesn't seem to have anything in common with them at all -- if you're going to write the Xander.

That being said, the absolute worst thing you can do to Xander is give him magical powers or superhuman fighting skills so he can Help Buffy Patrol. That's not who he is! That's not true to either version of the character!

(... sorry, I lied. That's the second worst thing you can do to Xander. The actual worst thing is what the comics do with him and Dawn. No super-powered fantasy fanfic could be more horrible and ill-advised than that.)

We rewatch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, each time hoping that this time, it might be different; this time, maybe Xander will just fuck a dude and stop being so insufferable.

Man, people complain about Joyce, but this lady has absolutely no hesitation about covering up a murder for Buffy.

I feel like Angel is the least close with Gunn of his teammates bc he's not used to hanging out with people who don't find him attractive and doesn't know how to deal with it

I'm sure this won't go anywhere.

Vamp Neil AU: After he gets sired, his IT skills make him a sought after henchman, who goes on to work for for every Big Bad - so in every villain scene, he's around somewhere, saying things like "Mondays, am I right?" and "Working hard or hardly working?"

Eventually, due to a series of unlikely coincidences, his soul is restored and he moves to LA to work for Wolfram and Hart. S5 of Angel is about the deep rivalry between Angel, Spike, and Neil.

I have a weird amount of affection for this random one-scene character. He's like the living embodient of the phrase "hump day".

I love Neil the Generic 90s Office Guy!

I've decided he should have becomes a major character for the rest of the series, and am now inventing AUs to that effect

I have a weird amount of affection for this random one-scene character. He's like the living embodient of the phrase "hump day".

I just had a horrifying thought:

Gideon the Vampire Slayer.

This thought is horrifying specifically for her Watcher, Sex Pal, who is desperately trying to keep her alive despite her astonishing lack of regard for her own safety, her persistent belief that a big sword is an acceptable substitute for a plan - something she's right about often enough to be annoying and wrong about often enough to almost die on a regular basis - and her secondary belief that being severely injured just makes her even hotter.

Oz is such a slight presence in his first couple of appearances, I was worrying I might not like him this time around - then 'What's My Line' hits, and... Oz is here. He's fully here - not the deepest character, sure, but just being a vaguely enjoyable presence all over the place. Buffy needs that - the character who isn't fully a part of the big dramatic plots, but is just generally fun to have around; it's one of the roles Anya will fill when Oz leaves.

(I'm also realising that the reason I was surprised to see Oz earlier in 'Inca Mummy Girl' is that I always remembered this episode as his real introduction. I'd just forgotten in the more-than-a-decade since my last rewatch.)

I'd like to take a moment to sexualise shirtless David Boreanez in 'What's My Line pt. 2'.

*ahem* Awooga