Vamp Neil AU: After He Gets Sired, His IT Skills Make Him A Sought After Henchman, Who Goes On To Work

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 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.

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.

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?

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

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