Re: ::BuffyLovesWillow:: FIC: Ascension's Shadow (1/?)

[danspector@xxxxxxxxx]

Alan,

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

Didn't you just get through telling me offlist that you didn't have
anything ready yet? Even if this is all you have written, that's a heck
of a start.

And are you the same guy who said he couldn't write angst? Lord, I'm
having agita here, and I'm not even IN this universe. Apparently, it'll
be just Buffy and Willow against a ridiculous horde of villains (and
I'll count the new Watcher, for the moment). And this is supposed to be
the lighter version, if that "you don't want to know" signifies a tonal
difference between the two.

Some nicely written stuff here, about Xander and his mom and his worry
she'd been vamped (glad she died, though; I thought you were getting
uncomfortably Oedipal) and Buffy's visit to Faith and blaming the whole
thing on her failure to save Faith, and being all too familiar with the
hospital, and making the calls when she got the bad news. I like to
think Buffy made the toughest call first, and I was thinking that's
Cordelia, but given how badly Willow is hurt by the news, maybe that's
the demon Buffy stares down first, her comfort zone with her friend
being cancelled out by her pain at having to be the one to hurt Willow
by telling her the news.

Now for the quibbles and nitpicks:

Quibble #1: You've got at least three separate divergence points
working here: Xander's dad shooting up the joint, Wilkins not dying,
and the Council sending out the new guy and kidnapping G/We/C. I was
trained by years of Marvel Comics to pin my AUs on a single divergence,
and so I'm really psychologically resistant to this. Maybe it all ties
together somehow in the past?

BTW, I'm not as resistant to things that make no claim to have any
connection to canon, like snoe's "Stop, Don't Go" over at Faithful.

Quibble #2: Cordy's wearing only jeans, sneakers, and a raincoat? No
top, no undies? Kind of sexy, but uncomfortable for the trip to the
airport, much less Britain. I'd think I'd have spared 3 seconds to grab
a T-shirt.

Quibble #3: If Angel thought the mayor might still be alive, why did he
let the good guys disperse? Not the sort of situation to play a lone
hand, as he's found out and should have known.

Nitpick #1: I don't think Xander was actually in the basement then. In
"The Freshman" he comes back from his cross-country tour that turned
into a dishwashing job at the infamous "Ladies Night" club in Oxnard,
and says he's living at home and everything's the same "except NOW
[emphasis mine] I live in the basement and pay rent." So it sounds like
the bachelor basement didn't exist until them.

Nitpick #2: Wilkins a warlock? I never heard that, never saw him
practice magic. I understood that his immortality was because of his
alliance with the demonic forces, of which his Ascension was to be the
climax.

Nitpick #3, aka THE BIG ONE: "Elizabeth Anne 'Buffy' Summers". No.
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, a thousand times NO! The gravestone in
"The Gift" says "Buffy Anne Summers". If it were Elizabeth Anne it
might say "Elizabeth Anne" or it might say "Buffy", but it wouldn't say
"Buffy Anne" because nobody is so informal as to use a diminuitive and
simultaneously so formal as to include the middle name. In the South
people might use two diminuitives (Billy-Bob) but Buffy isn't Southern,
and they're usually quite formal in the cemeteries anyway. 
When I wrote about this a month ago, someone (whose name, forgive me,
escapes me) wrote in to add that the Birth Certificate also says
"Buffy", so that's that, although I don't know which episode he was
citing.

I know people do this so they can get cutesy and give Buffy another
name, like Lizzie or Beth, but stop it, and I quote BuffyFaith in "Who
Are You", "because it's wrong."

You can call her Buffy, you can call her Anne, you can call her some
entirely different name she's adopted for whatever reason you dream up,
but you should not 
act as if her given name, or its diminuitive, is any of the following:

Elizabeth, Elisabeth, Ellie, Elsie, Elle, Ella, Elise, Elisa, Elissa,
Eliza, Elspeth, Lizabeth, Lisabeth, Lisbet, Lise, Lisa, Liz, Liza,
Lissa, Lizzie, Libby, Beth, Bethie, Betty, Betsy, or Bitsy

Okay, I know I'm being didactic here, but it's annoying (the "Elizabeth"
thing, not me, although maybe me, too). And besides, 9/10 of the reason
for this post was so I could write out that whole list. Did I miss any?

Well, maybe only 6/10 (I did like the fic, after all).

BTW, the HTML was nice with the usage of the boldface and Italics.
There was one paragraph that accidentally repeated itself, though.

Keep going, as if I could stop you, and I look fearfully forward,

Dan (not "Dan Ross")