![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
salineaI've been iconing like crazy for the last 3 days. Strange mood, I suppose it's because I'm starting to begin to almost like the result I get >_> Anyway, except an icon post tomorrow !
And I got blamed ! I got blamed by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
generalblossom for starting to like Buffy/Spike ! Go Teresa ! You're right, S6 is awesome, and this ship is very amusing ^_~. I got blamed by stanayitnuh for a wonderful masturbationnary Tokyo Babylon fic *plug*goreadit*unplug*; and I might yet get blamed by ariss_tenoh for threesome involving Seishirou, Subaru and Kamui with Seishirou being Kamui's father -_-;; (well, Link didn't want that bunny, so...)
I feel so proud and Pod-esque. (and one person on my flist will understand what I mean there), I like getting blamed ^_^
And I got blamed ! I got blamed by
generalblossom for starting to like Buffy/Spike ! Go Teresa ! You're right, S6 is awesome, and this ship is very amusing ^_~. I got blamed by stanayitnuh for a wonderful masturbationnary Tokyo Babylon fic *plug*goreadit*unplug*; and I might yet get blamed by ariss_tenoh for threesome involving Seishirou, Subaru and Kamui with Seishirou being Kamui's father -_-;; (well, Link didn't want that bunny, so...)I feel so proud and Pod-esque. (and one person on my flist will understand what I mean there), I like getting blamed ^_^
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Very Pod-esque..
Date: 21 November 2004 11:46 am (UTC)Re: Very Pod-esque..
Date: 21 November 2004 01:44 pm (UTC)But I still don't ride bunnies as good as he does B)
Re: Very Pod-esque..
Date: 21 November 2004 02:17 pm (UTC)well, pod got the whole bunny thing covered , you just need a different act, but you will be as good as him no time.
And I am blaming you some more, just saw four more Buffy episodes - from "As you Were" with Mrs Riley, to "Entropy" ( yay for Spike and Anya, came on, they got DUMPED, they can do as they bloody want), am all buffy-fied, not sure if I am gonna see that one more final episode on the disc, or you know, talk to people, write LJ, answer emails...
Re: Very Pod-esque..
Date: 21 November 2004 02:27 pm (UTC)Yay !
As You Were was the lowest point of S6 as far as I was concerned. Just a bit too WTF for me ^_^ but yay for Alien ref - whatever.
Tell me what did you think of Dead Things ? It's another one of my favourite among s6's episode.
I caught Entropy on TV yesterday night, and was all happy watching it. The SpikexAnya thing was indeed very nice - perfect consensual comfort sex between over hundred years old adults... that the Geeks caused to screw *ahem* Then I turned off the TV before Seeing Red started because I couldn't bear to watch it again
Re: Very Pod-esque..
Date: 21 November 2004 02:51 pm (UTC)I did not like it much, it felt a bit like torturing Buffy, it felt a bit fake, Sam was perfectly nice and all, but much too too nice. And Buffy having sex with Spike in the hunt for the eggs Ok, I might believe it, but then going to snuggle up in bed afterwards? please, as if they would have used the bed anyway. Lame.
On the other hand, get ready for this, I liked "Normal Again" very much, like an alternate universe, and tragic on that we never get confirmation that other version is not the real one. Not fun, not light, but I thought it was good.
I liked it a lot, but not sure I got anything too particular to say about it! I wish they had followed through, the police really liking Warren to Katrina´s death.
I know! Precisely, who does Xander think he is, going all disgusted at Anya having sex with "dead evil thing" when Anya herself is a vengeance demon? hello, double standards, way major. But I never got that whole oh-what-will-the-geeks thing angst, nor does the whole Buffy-Spike relation seem all that consistent episode to episode. Great room for drama and all there, it just the balance seems to change every episode, plus the whole oh-what-if-they-find out thing is kinda lame. Maybe it makes more sense in America´s sexual rules or whatnot.
Considering myself warned. But still likely to go see it now ;)
Re: Very Pod-esque..
Date: 21 November 2004 03:06 pm (UTC)Ooooh Normal Again ! I simply loved Normal Again. A whole lot.
Wanna check my impressions on it I wrote a while back ? I also saved a couple of essays by other people about it. So interesting. Even better than Avalon about the whole virtual reality thing.
Consistancy wasn't S6's forte. As I said, I love it because it was the most /ambitious/ serie, but the execution was often lacking, and it's got quite a few flaws.
I think I started hating Xander in s6. He just was behaving too much like a jerk to Anya. But we still got GilesxAnya ;)
Well, a big deal of the season is about... when you're depressed and you hate yourself. I think that's why she's so anxious about her friends finding out. Xander otherwise, it wasn't such a big deal of course - but I think the biggest part of the deal is in Buffy's head and how ashamed she is of what she does. And of the way she treated Spike as well as actually fucking him.
Yeap, warned indeed, you know how much it needs to scare /me/ away from angst.
I still blame you...
oops, oh, wow, totally right, how did I not see that? I tend to expect Mary Sues as main characters, but for an established series, makes sense they would be a walkover part. Let us cheer for she get eaten by a Yeti on Nepal, ok?
Yes, yes, please! I checked very shallowly on the web and everybody seemed to hate Normal Again, while i thought it was brilliant, even if raises the bug that it is Normal Again which is the truth and the whole rest wrong - it would explain the inconsistencies at least ;)
specially angst with snappy dialogue and nude Spike :) I know, me too :)
Mine essay
Date: 21 November 2004 03:22 pm (UTC)Watching Normal Again after having read the wonderfull essay "Once More with Joss" by Cynesthecia (sp ?) makes it all the more interresting. Not only is this episode full of metanarration, but it seems the authors use the occasion to question the validity of their work (by threatening to destroy it, both as a fictionnal reality, and both by making buffy almost kill its main characters). The writers, attentive to their audience, aknowledge some of the coherence flaws of the Season, and even let the characters complain about their evolution, seemingly answering the puppet master claim that he controlls them. (Various comments from Buffy, Spike and Xander on the realism of what happens to them)
So, what is ME saying to us ? Yes, our Big Bads are lame ? Yes, thinking Buffy is a super-heros is stupid ? And yes, there is no coherence whatsoever to this show, because None of This is Real and it's all a big delusion, a hoax, haha, ain't we clever !
Don't think so :)
Here's my theory :
We all know here that the basis for BtVS was to create a metaphorical vision of the difficulties teenagers encounters in their daily life, where High School is litterally the Hell(mouth) and where it's gonna be the end of the world of you can't go out tonight.
But time has passed, and the characters are no longer teenagers, don't go anymore to High School, and demons & vampires seem very harmless indeed compared to the crude reality of job, educating children and unidealised love.
Does that mean that the show has no more basis ? Does it mean that it is now unvalidated ?
There's been critisms indeed that the show is "loosing it", that it's no more the same anymore, and, far from comptuously making fun to their fan, ME is answering their plea with an ambiguous nod.
And what they saying holds to how to interpret Buffy's choice.
You can choose to think that one of this two realities is the real reality (the only real Buffy is really Buffy... )
Either you think the Asylum reality is The Reality, and you reject the Sunnydale-world for its inconsistancy and his fantasy, because vampires and demons are stupid, and Buffy doesn't look like a heros anyway and you're too grown up now for this stupidities and it's time to go back to real life(tm) and slaughter happily all the delusions of your imagination.
Either you think the Sunnydale reality is The one Reality, because that would just spoil the show and you have to keep your dreams alive so just let us denying and fanwanking any crumb of incoherence that threatens its core.
Offcourse, there's a third way.
I've been waiting (and still am) to OnM's reaction to the parallelism of the end of Normal Again and the end of Brazil. Brazil's ending is very controversed, some thinking it's ultimate despair, others that Sam's true freedom and only chance of escape is through his imagination.
I'm not sure for Brazil, but in Buffy's case, choosing to go back to Sunnydale can hardly be described as an escape. Which world is the hardest ? Going back to a world where Mum and Dad can care for her, where she has no Slayer duty and no Dawn responsability ? Or going back to the place where life itself is painful ? Hell, you could even say she chose Sunnydale because she truely is addicted to misery !
Except that what makes Buffy choose is Joyce's speech on her inner strength that finished with "Believe in yourself"
And that's our answer, because here the question is (as is for Brazil, I guess), what worth is imagination ? In a world of dull jobs and endless routines, should we be allowed to dream ?
Was I the only one to be chocked, not only because I could guess what it meant, by the doctor's extreme directions to Buffy when he told her she must do everything, absolutly everything to destroy this inner world of her ?
Re: Mine essay 2/2
Date: 21 November 2004 03:23 pm (UTC)I don't think ME (and I don't either) wants to make the apology of self-delusion. But since we know that the Sunnydale reality is only a metaphore for the "real" reality, that demons are symboles for the difficulties of life we have to always fight, and that Buffy the girl and Buffy the Slayer are one and only (cf the Replacement), dull reality and imaginary reality do not have to be mutually exclusives. Actually, aseptisized and all rationnal reality is just as self-delusionnal as the metaphorical reality. Real world is much much richer. And believe in yourself means believe in your imaginary, believe in your dreams because they help you live in reality. And no, it's not because it's grown-up time, it's not because you have to work, and care for your children and face crude banality in all its horror that metaphores and symboles don't have a place anymore. They still do, more than ever in fact.
Believe in yourself, and believe in Buffy, and believe in Mutant Ennemy :)
Re: Mine essay 2/2
Date: 22 November 2004 09:29 am (UTC)Re: Mine essay 2/2
Date: 27 November 2004 06:46 am (UTC)I think choosing for Sunnydale-reality has a lot to do with her identity as a Slayer as well as choosing her friends, and her sister. (Because come on ! Dawn is a sweetie <3)
Well, i'm all for bashing Xander in the latter seasons too, anyway ^^
ponygirl's essay
Date: 21 November 2004 03:23 pm (UTC)Subject: Down in the basement
In reply to: Kevin 's message, "Buffy's Basement (Spoilers for NA)" on 15:01:07 03/14/02 Thu
Good catch, Kevin! I was trying to muddle through some thoughts on all the basement symbolism in this episode myself, but it was hard to concentrate on good old-fashioned symbolism with all the dimensional craziness whirling about.
If you want to have a mind-blowing experience check out Rowan's essay on the house metaphor in Smashed and Wrecked, it certainly has made me look differently at this episode. Here's my spin on the subterranean stuff.
The first basement we see in Normal Again is with the Troika. Significantly they have rented an entire house but choose (or in Jonathon's case is forced) to stay in the basement, creating a replica of the previous basement they had been forced to flee. They have all their toys but the once cool hideout has now become a place of confinement. By staying in childhood fantasies they are pushing themselves further from sanity.
When the demon is brought to Buffy's house it is left chained in the basement, symbol of all things unconscious, secret and icky. Xander and Willow immediately leave, heading back to the safety of the above, Spike volunteers to stay and guard the demon. Being a creature of darkness himself he has no difficulty staying in the darker parts of the psyche. As the basement represents Buffy's unconscious it makes sense to have Spike down there with the other monster-- he is Buffy's dirty little secret, representing all of the parts of herself she wants to hide. But Buffy has never been able to control Spike, so he leaves his post and goes to Buffy's room on the upper floor, which would symbolically represent her higher thought, her superego where the rules and restrictions of her psyche are maintained. He cannot come into the light yet, when he tries to approach Buffy in the sunlight he is burned, but he won't stay quiet, and he doesn't go back to the basement. He instead threatens to bring out everything into the light. His departure causes Buffy's decision to accept the asylum as reality and turn on her friends.
Significantly she decides to put them down in the basement, to repress them and ultimately destroy them as the doctor urges. He tells Buffy to make the destruction of her friends as easy on herself as possible so she uses the convenient demon. It is as though the darkness Buffy had always feared about herself is finally going to rise up and destroy those she loves.
When Tara arrives, she very definitely stays on the stairs, not descending fully into the underground, demonstrating her role as both a guide and a higher being than the other Scoobies. It is Buffy who sends Tara tumbling down into basement, where she is now unable to work her magic. It is finally only Buffy who has control over the situation she has created and she kills the demon, not with a weapon put by plunging her own hand into it, a demonstration of ownership perhaps, or absorption of her own darkness? I noticed that the music used during the fight scene was the same as in fight scene between her and Spike in Smashed. It suggested to me that perhaps Buffy had had a chance to get out of the basement of her psyche in Wrecked, but she lost that opportunity by denying her feelings, her darkness and Spike. At the end of Normal Again she is in the basement still but she refuses to leave or rest until the antidote is ready, an incredibly hopeful vision of her taking control of her reality, of perhaps finally finding the way out of the basement.
A certain Linda's essay
Date: 21 November 2004 03:24 pm (UTC)Hi, guys, new poster here. Some kind folks suggested I crosspost to this list, so here goes (I actually tried to post earlier this evening, but my screen froze during the process). I lurk here occasionally but haven't posted before.
The Doctor, The Demon and Buffy's Twisted Mind: Comments on Normal Again
The last time I was actually moved to write a detailed analysis of an episode was with Dead Things, but nothing since then has moved me to do the same until last night's Normal Again. What a wonderful episode. Kudos to the new writer, Diego Gutierrez.
As with Dead Things, there were wheels within wheels in Normal Again. The two episodes are related thematically. And they both feature Spike in a central, pivotal role. Much of Normal Again is about Buffy's relationship with Spike, her friends, and what these relationships say about Buffy, superhero and would-be grown-up, responsible adult. Buffy takes a dark journey into her own psyche to confront the deep-seated conflicts that are threatening to rip her and her "family" apart.
Normal Again is full of little ironies: e.g., the title itself. The fact that Buffy's darkest journey takes place in an overly bright, sunny world. Jonathan, one of the "three little men" who is responsible for her delusions is also mentally ill, trapped in the basement, paralyzed with guilt, no longer trusted by his comrades in crime. It's Jonathan who compares himself to Jack Torrence, the hero of Stephen King's The Shining, the good husband and father who goes crazy and stalks his own family. But it's Buffy who turns into an eerie clone of murderous Jack.
In the course of her demonic poisoning, Buffy nearly kills the people she loves most in the world - Willow and Xander, her two oldest friends, and Dawn, for whom she gave her life last season. Why does this horror happen? All Warren and Co. knew was that the venom of this demon would drive her nuts; what happened while she was under its influence was orchestrated by Buffy herself and her own "twisted" (as Spike put it) mind.
To me there's no question which world is real - Sunnydale (although Spike's comment about alternate realities is fascinating, especially since it's a theme that's been raised over and over this season). The final scene, in the mental hospital, was the only thing I didn't like about the episode. Since Buffy hadn't had the antidote yet, it was just another hallucination. Still, it was kind of a cheap trick.
Otherwise, the delusional world that Buffy constructed in her mind after being poisoned by the demon is brilliantly twisted. It mirrors her own reality, but shifts that reality in disturbing ways.
Re: A certain Linda's essay 2/?
Date: 21 November 2004 03:25 pm (UTC)The mental asylum delusion represents a psychological regression to an ideal childhood, where Buffy has no responsibilities, no noble calling, and is burdened with no power. She is an only child, with no little sister to divide her parents' attention. Her delusional world, as Dawn realizes to her sorrow, shuts Dawn out altogether. Buffy's last episode of catatonia (WOTW) was induced by her guilty belief that she had already killed Dawn in her head as soon as she realized she couldn't defeat Glory. In her Normal Again delusion Buffy goes one better - she shuts Dawn out altogether.
She lives in a cell, dominated by a bed with arm and leg restraints. What a great way to contain all the rage she is feeling - at Spike for arousing feelings in her that she can't deal with, with her friends for pulling her back into this bright, harsh world. The Slayer can't hurt anyone when she's bound in straitjackets, restraints, behind a locked doors. For dark-side-denial Buffy, this is a seductive vision, just as giving up power sexually to Spike in his crypt when he handcuffed her was incredibly seductive. It allows her to give him all the responsibility for her feelings, for what he was doing to "helpless" Buffy.
In Buffy's hallucinations, she is the author of what she sees, and each scene in the delusional world is tightly linked with what's happening to her at the time in Sunnydale. More importantly, she populates her delusional world with the people she interacts with in her real life. But she disguises them from herself, and quite cleverly.
Thus, when first overpowered and stabbed by the demon, Buffy hallucinates a nurse or orderly injecting her. Next, one of her Doublemeat Palace co-workers briefly morphs into another nurse. But the delusional world doesn't really take shape until Buffy meets Spike in the cemetery, the site of many of their erotic trysts.
Buffy has just been talking to Spike, who is strolling through the cemetery carrying a bag of groceries, like an ordinary human. Not the sort of thing vamps usually do in cemeteries. They manage to have a civil conversation until Xander and Willow show up. It is the confrontation between her best friends, Willow and Xander, and her erstwhile demon lover, Spike, which shapes Buffy's hallucinatory world into a solid and coherent structure. Why? Because that confrontation mirrors Buffy's worst fear - that she is really a creature of darkness, incapable of love (Intervention), a "dead thing" who must be denied, sent away, and rejected.
And, for the first time in this episode, we learn why Buffy has been tormented (for six years) with this terrible fear of rejected. She was, in fact, rejected by her parents. "Back when I saw my first vampires-" Buffy confesses to Willow, "I got so scared. I told my parents, and they completely freaked out. They thought there was something seriously wrong with me. So they sent me to a clinic."
Re: A certain Linda's essay 3/?
Date: 21 November 2004 03:26 pm (UTC)Instead of soothing their daughter's fears, believing her and trusting her, Joyce and Hank sent Buffy away, turning her over to be probed by the doctors. They abandoned her. Only when she pretended to give up her "delusion" of vampires, did they accept her back. Buffy: "I was only there a couple of weeks. I stopped talking about it, and they let me go. Eventually, my parents just forgot."
Buffy had to feign being something she wasn't - the normal girl who didn't have to fight vampires - in order to be taken home and loved again by her parents. Or so it must have seemed to her at the time. Seeing vampires is bad. "Seeing" vampires must be even worse. (Willow uses the word about Tara and the girl she sees Tara kissing: "it's--when I was seeing her, she was seeing someone else--a girl." Buffy: "You mean-?" "I mean...not seeing-seeing. Well, maybe. I don't know.")
Buffy has been "seeing" Spike. Now, in the cemetery, as they talk about Anya and Xander's disaster, Spike's own pain comes out as he says, "Yeah, well, some people can't see a good thing when they've got it."
He's cutting very close to Buffy's central conflict - the problem that's been dogging her for several months - her unrelenting sexual attraction to this unsouled vampire. Buffy's still suffering from the conviction that loving Spike is wrong. That she is wrong. "This can't be me," she said to Tara when Tara insisted nothing had gone wrong with the resurrection spell. She shouldn't want him, she's trying to stay away from him, but he's in her life and she can't seem to get him out. If her friends, who are now her family, find out that she is "seeing" a vampire, they, like her parents six years ago, will reject her.
Afraid that her secret may be revealed, Buffy lies to Xander and Willow about Spike: "Hey, guys. I, uh, I found Spike and was, uh, trying to figure out what kind of dangerous contraband he had."
Here she's calling on her idea of the mysterious "Doctor," as Riley called him, who dealt in lethal demon eggs. This, she believes, was Spike. As Xander and Spike start to go at each other, Spike gets a good dig in about Xander's abandoning Anya, calling him "The king of the big exit." Willow tries to smooth things over, make everything all right, the way Joyce used to do.
Re: A certain Linda's essay 4/?
Date: 21 November 2004 03:26 pm (UTC)So who is the third major player in Buffy's hallucination --the psychiatrist - the doctor? Who else but Spike.
Buffy's delusional world is like a reverse photographic negative of the cemetery. It's light where the cemetery is dark. A big bed, with arm and leg restraints clearly visible, dominates the room where Buffy is essentially a prisoner. It's a stark, orderly room that's not at all like her real life home, where dishes are piled in the sink, there's always laundry to do, and stains on her coat that won't come out. Is the bed a reminder of Spike's bed, Spike's bondage gear? The doctor has her imprisoned there, dead to the world for six years in what might as well be a crypt. But she's seeing it as a benign imprisonment, with a doctor who wants to help her, a doctor who is trying to fix her life, which is exactly what Buffy expected Spike to do for her in Life Serial when he took her to the demon bar.
As her hallucination begins, the doctor is leaning over her. "Buffy, can you hear me?" (Note: this sounds like a reference to Ken Russell's version of The Who's Tommy, the psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind boy, who creates an messianic world for himself. Warren says the demon poison has "got her tripping like a Ken Russell film festival.")
The doctor a reverse photographic image of Spike - he's a black male in a white coat, where Spike is a white man in a black coat. Spike, in the cemetery scene holds a lit cigarette in his fingers. The doctor, in the last scene in particular, holds a similarly shaped penlight, burning as he shines it into Buffy's eyes.
But the Spike/Doctor parallels are more than reverse visual images. It's the psychiatrist who seems to know all the details about her, just as Spike is the one who really knows Buffy. He's her guide, as Spike has been Buffy's guide/watcher/shrink all season as she's struggled to adjust to living in her body again. The psychiatrist is the one who supposedly tells her the truth about what she has to do to get well (just as Spike does in the real world).
"Do you know where you are, Buffy?" The doctor asks.
Buffy: "Sunnydale."
The Doctor: "No. None of that's real. None of it. You're in a mental
institution."
Spike has told Buffy many times that Sunnydale isn't her real world (especially the "Sunny" part!). "That's not your world," he tells her in Dead Things. Spike has also told her she's crazy. In Older and Far Away, he declared that she was insane.
Re: A certain Linda's essay 5/?
Date: 21 November 2004 03:27 pm (UTC)Compare the above dialogue with the lines later attributed to Joyce in the delusional world: "You're our little girl, Buffy," Joyce says, "Mom and Dad just want to take you home and take care of you."
"Put a little ice on the back of her neck," says Dr. Spike as they leave, offering first aid suggestions.
The Spike/doctor identification isn't a perfect match; there's also a touch of Giles in the psychiatrist. In a later scene, the doctor has analyzed his charge's supposed illness, describing it to her "parents" in Giles-like terms. But there continue to be echoes: "She believes she's some type of hero," the Doctor says. "Stop with the bloody hero trip," says Spike.
And Spike, of course, is on one level, the stand-in for Giles. The very night that her Watcher took a plane out of Sunnydale, Buffy was in Spike's arms, kissing him passionately in the Bronze. And in Restless, Spike was training to be a Watcher; in Tabula Rasa, he and Giles believed themselves to be father and son.
Buffy's Bedroom
Spike is once again the catalyst for the crucial scene that takes place in Buffy's bedroom after the demon has been captured and the antidote brewed. Again, Buffy's poisoned mind takes the material from her confrontation with Spike and inserts it into her delusional world. But as her delusions have advanced, her "re-writing" of Sunnydale has become more twisted. She doesn't like what she's hearing in the real world, so she changes it in her delusional world to something more palatable.
Spike at her bedroom door, looking gorgeous, sexy as hell - oh the pain and temptation of it for Buffy. When was he last there? This was the one place she has never allowed him to enter as her lover.
"You need to leave me alone. You're not part of my life," Buffy tells him as he hovers on the threshold to her bedroom. And, sure enough, he is unable to enter because sunshine from the window blocks his way and drives him back. The barrier between them - the closed door to his tomb in Dead Things - still remains.
Re: A certain Linda's essay 6/?
Date: 21 November 2004 03:28 pm (UTC)Spike knows the importance to Buffy of her friends - it's something he's known since he first met her in School Hard. They have always come between him and Buffy - first when he was trying to kill her; now when he's trying to love her. It's one of the few areas where he has been in denial this year (Spike isn't usually a denial-type guy). He has crystallized it all for Buffy in Dead Things: "You try to be with them, but you always end up in the dark with me. What would they think of you if they found out all the things you've done? If they knew who you really were? Look at them. That's not your world. You belong in the shadows with me."
Those words of his terrified her and fed into her core fear - not just that she's "seeing" a vampire, but that if her friends look too closely at her, they may see a vampire too. The Slayer was always a killer. Now she's a dead and climbed out of her grave killer, too.
Spike, though, is coming out of his denial. Maybe he was wrong about where Buffy belongs. "You were right," he tells her. Then Dr. William goes on to diagnose her problem and tell her what she needs to do to solve it. He's pretty accurate, too, except that he still doesn't fathom the sheer terror Buffy feels at the possibility of being cast out by her friends.
What Buffy hears in this scene from Spike is repeated shortly thereafter by the doctor, but in a very twisted fashion. The basic ideas are similar, but her mind alters and shapes them into something frighteningly different:
Re: A certain Linda's essay 6/?
Date: 21 November 2004 03:29 pm (UTC)The doctor: "You have to start ridding your mind of those things that support your hallucinations." (The doctor suggests a simpler solution).
Spike: "You can't help yourself."
The doctor: "It's not gonna be easy, Buffy."
Spike: "It's why you won't tell your pals about us. Might actually have to be happy if you did. They'd either understand and help you- God forbid- or drive you out where you can finally be at peace in the dark. With me. Either way, you'd be better off for it, but you're too twisted for that."
And he's right; right now she is too twisted. Spike is offering Buffy a choice - be honest, tell your friends and take the risk of what will happen - either you end up with them or you end up with me. Just bloody decide! But Buffy can't take the risk of making that choice. All she allows herself to remember is that Spike, like the doctor, has in the past tried to separate her from her friends.
The doctor: You understand? There are things in that world that you cling to. For your delusion, they're safe holds, but for your mind they're traps. We have to break those down. Last summer, when you had a momentary awakening, it was (your friends) that pulled you back in."
And there it is -- her rage over being jerked her out of whatever peaceful, happy dimension she was in. She hasn't forgiven her friends for that. And, as Spike declared in Afterlife, there are always consequences. Always.
"They're not really your friends, Buffy." Mom-delusion puts in. "They're just tricks keeping you from getting healthy."
What Spike, impatient, but still being reasonable, said in the real world was this: "Let yourself live already, and stop with the bloody hero trip for a sec. We'd all be the better for it."
In the delusional world, the doctor is also telling her to stop with the hero trip, but the consequences of that will totally different in the real world, and no one will be the better for it.
In Buffy's bedroom, Spike takes things one step farther. He delivers his ultimatum: "You either tell your friends about us, or I will."
No, no. If they know what she really is, as Spike convinced her in Dead Things, her friends will turn on her. And she needs their love and acceptance SO much.
She can't tell them. She can't allow him to tell them. Buffy's been abandoned too often. Her father. Angel. Parker. Riley. Her mother. Giles. She is terrified that her relationship with Spike will mean she loses Willow and Xander, too. Maybe even Dawn, for whom she gave her life.
Buffy can't live in a world where her best friends - all she has left - reject her. So she dumps the antidote and returns to her delusional world, running back inside to the apparently loving, accepting parents. But, ironically, they pull the same stunt all over again: The parents judge her just as they did six years ago. They make her meet a condition before she can be free, before they will, as they promised, always be there for her. She must change. "I--I wanna go home with you and Dad."
Joyce: "I know, Buffy. But first you've gotta get better."
Delusional mom and dad threaten to reject her too, unless she does something to prove herself "healthy." Unless she kills her friends.
No wonder she goes off the deep end (into the basement). Her poisoned brain is telling her that in order to avoid being rejected by her friends, she must kill them.
I really should have just e mailed this
Date: 21 November 2004 03:29 pm (UTC)The last few scenes of Normal Again are truly chilling. Buffy using all her Slayer strength to stalk and overpower the people she loves is a perversion of everything we've always believed about Buffy. She has sunk to some low points this year (beating Spike, for example), but this is the worst.
It is positive, though, that even without the antidote, Buffy manages to snap out of her delusional world in time to save her friends, after all. I think it's significant that it's the arrival of the one person who knows the truth about Buffy and Spike - Tara - that pushes Buffy to her realization that her delusions are false. Tara did not reject her. Tara has reassured her that she is not "wrong." Tara, the mature, alternate mother figure is the one person Buffy has been able to confess to.
The terrified Buffy under the stairs attacks Tara by grabbing her foot and sending her tumbling down into the basement, but Tara has already acted to free the Scoobies. As her spell releases their bonds, Buffy's delusional world begins to break up, too.
The point where she finally breaks through is when mom-delusion tells her "Your Dad and I, we have all the faith in the world in you. We'll always be with you. We'll always be here for you." Only in a regressed, infantile world are mom and dad always there to take care of you; grown ups have to deal with loss and learn to live independent lives. But, in another sense, Buffy carries her parents (Joyce in particular) inside her, and she sees to realize this. Joyce's speech here, and Buffy's increasing clarity as she takes it in, represent her integration of the internal voice of her parents with her real, adult self.
Joyce: "I know the world feels like a hard place sometimes, but you've got people who love you." That's not just her mother speaking - Buffy herself has spoken very similar words to Dawn. Joyce: "You've got a world of strength in your heart. I know you do. You just have to find it again. Believe in yourself." This is true, and Buffy knows it. She is, after all, speaking to herself. As she finally begins to believe in herself again, she no longer needs her mother, or her delusions. She gives up the "heaven" of being safe in her parents' arms and returns to the harsh but real world of Sunnydale, where demons exist and she is needed to battle them.
Speaking of demons, Spike isn't in the climactic basement scene. Or is he? The second time I watched the moment when Buffy snaps out of it and fights the demon I had an eerie feeling of deja vu. It almost looked as if she was fighting Spike. If you ignored the disgustingly ugly head, the demon was dressed like Spike in this episode. Black shirt, black jeans, boots, and a long, floppy, black leathery garment.
Earlier in the episode, Buffy says, "I was checking houses on that list you gave me and looking for Warren and his pals, and then, bam! Some kind of gross, waxy demon-thing poked me."
Xander, with his subconscious knowledge and sex always on the brain, chimes in: And when you say 'poke-'"
"In the arm." Buffy clarifies. "It stung me or something, and then I was like-- No. It wasn't 'like.' I was in an institution."
Hmm, Buffy's crazy because she's "seeing" a vampire. And, what a coincidence -- it's because Buffy has been, er, poked by a demon's, uh, spike, that she becomes crazy in the first place.
Ze End
Date: 21 November 2004 03:30 pm (UTC)He's everywhere. Just as Buffy was for him in Out of my Mind right before he realized he loved her (and right after he'd tried unsuccessfully to kill her): "You don't understand. She's everywhere. She's haunting me, Harmony. This has got to end."
Spike has threatened to expose Buffy for what she really is. He's done it because his patience and tolerance are finally beginning to fray. While out demon hunting with Xander, Spike's anger breaks through:
Spike: "So, she's having the wiggings, is she? Thinks none of us are real. Bloody self-centered, if you ask me. On the other hand, it might explain some things-- this all being in that twisted brain of hers. Yeah. Thinks up some chip in my head. Make me soft, fall in love with her, then turn me into her soddin' sex slave."
He's running his own fantasy here. What if there were no chip in his head? What if he were the Big Bad again? And the ultimate: What if he didn't love her? (Don't you think I've tried not to?" he demanded in the alley in Dead Things). What if he were free of his sexual obsession with her?
Spike is thinking the previously unthinkable.
The demon in the basement has been chained there by Spike himself. And Spike has chained himself up where Buffy is concerned. His chip does not fire when he's with her. What if he were unchained? He could hurt her. He could bite her. He could rape her. He could kill her. Buffy is quick and strong, but Spike is very nearly a physical a match for her. He's bested her in several previous battles, only to have someone or something save her neck at the last minute (School Hard, Out of My Mind, Halloween). And now that she's dumped him, he's been rejected again. Spike hates rejection almost as much as Buffy does.
When the demon who dresses like Spike is chained up and poked with a barbecue fork by Willow, its "spike" comes out and is broken off and put in a bottle. Emasculated much?
While still deep in her delusion, Buffy herself, crazy Buffy, unchains the demon. Has she also symbolically unchained the real Spike? Or is she the demon herself? Like Spike, she has clawed her way out of her grave and now, with her Slayer/Destroyer impulses unchained, she is attacking her friends. The demon's power is in its hand, and Buffy is the hand, the manus, the physical manifestation of the Slayer energy.
In one sense, Spike has become her shadow self.
When Buffy finally decides to save her friends and take on the demon, she kills it the way she'd kill a vampire - she thrusts her arm into its chest in the region of the heart. Her hand - that deadly hand again - does the killing. I can't help finding this an ominous development for the Buffy/Spike relationship. She tears out his heart? She tears out her own heart? The death of love? She kills Spike? She kills the vampire part of Spike? She kills her own inner demon, the vampire part of herself? How will it all shake down?
There is a bright spot. We learned from Willow that the demon's "pokey stinger carries an antidote to its own poison." The very thing that made Buffy crazy, that poisoned her, is also the thing that can heal her. That darn spikey thing that Willow broke off and put in a bottle also represents the cure. What this may say about where ME is going with the Buffy/Spike relationship remains rather murky.
In the end, Buffy deals with Mom and Dad in her delusional world, but she still doesn't deal with Spike. In the final scene in the hospital, we're in her head, seeing the doctor and his flashlight poking at her (to which she does not react). The Doctor: "I'm sorry. There's no reaction at all. I'm afraid we've lost her." Has Spike lost Buffy for good now? Has she lost him? Will he lose himself?
Buffy has integrated her parents, but integrating her lover/mentor/watcher/friend/enemy is going to be a helluva lot more difficult, not only from her point of view, but also from his.
Re: A certain Linda's essay 4/?
Date: 22 November 2004 09:49 am (UTC)Hmm, I knew this Mara which was a big fan of Spike, wonder if it is the same.
Re: A certain Linda's essay 4/?
Date: 27 November 2004 06:43 am (UTC)Plus am I hallucinating, did Buffy ever let Spike handcuff her?
In Dead Things we see at one point Buffy stroking her wristles as if they were painful. Which strongly suggests that she eventually accepted being handcuffed.
Re: A certain Linda's essay 4/?
Date: 27 November 2004 12:25 pm (UTC)Tons of it, which sort of weakens the whole thing, the most far-reached symbolism analysis make me just want to scream that cigars can be just cigars and all that. Maybe some of the symbolism is valid and intentional, but a lot of it seemed far-fetched and in whole it seemed to be more about what the essayist is projecting into the series. I know, I am picky.
Don´t get it either, sorry. I now consistency is not too high between characters but in one episode it is a very definite consistent no, a gesture which could be teasing the fans in another without further confirmation, nah not enough. Plus I get the feeling that the Spike and Buffy relationship works the other way, he is is the one which wants to be hurt - which, ok, if she finds out she likes to hurt him, could be one good reason to all that melodramatic disgusting myself thing - but back to handcuffs, can not quite see it, though again some author of some episode might like the idea and all and want to hint at it.
no subject
Date: 21 November 2004 02:03 pm (UTC)*squee!* Well, not so much for the threesome as much as that father thing X3 *craves to see something like that right now* T_T;
no subject
Date: 21 November 2004 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 November 2004 02:13 pm (UTC)*showers with love for just thinking about it* <333
no subject
Date: 21 November 2004 02:29 pm (UTC)sexlove unless I've got at least 500 words on disks.no subject
Date: 21 November 2004 02:33 pm (UTC)All I can do is hope someone will do something one day. That's all XD;
no subject
Date: 21 November 2004 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 November 2004 10:50 pm (UTC)