Re: ME homophobic?--Spoilers for Seeing Red

["blinviz" <debvii@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- In buffywantswillow@y..., "tvs_wanderer" <tvs_wanderer@y...> 
wrote:

ooh, ooh, witchy woman, she how high she fliiiiiies!

> > S
> > P
> > O
> > I
> > L
> > E
> > R
> > S
> > P
> > A
> > C
> > E
> > 10
> > 9
> > 8
> > 7
> > 6
> > 5
> > 4
> > 3
> > 2
> > 1

> Of course, on the other hand, two simple counterpoints could be 
made.
> 
> 1) the straight people on "Buffy" get it as bad or worse than the 
gay 
> people. It's difficult to accuse a show of glamorizing 
heterosexuality 
> when the whole season so far has largely revolved around the 
> destructive Buffy/Spike pairing.
> 
> 2) Willow's "evil" is solely due to the magic, which is a totally 
> separate facet of herself. She's been with Tara for two and a half 
> seasons without being terribly evil, after all.

Okay, here's my counterpoint to your counterpoint. :) Bear in mind, I 
DO NOT consider ME "homophobic" but I do think they got caught in a 
big ole cliche. :shrug: It happens. The thing is, they could have 
avoided it. Myself, I wanted to wait and see how SEEING RED would 
play out before I said anything about cliches.

Tara died; shit happens on the Hellmouth. Fair enough. Where ME 
stepped smack dab in the middle of the pile of cliche-poo was to have 
Tara die standing in Willow's bedroom after 48 straight {heh} hours of 
sexing. Now it's *also* the case that even the most uneducated of us 
could see there was something totally bizarre about the behaviour of 
Warren's bullets. As Dan suggested, why not have Tara rush toward the 
window in response to the gunfire? I confess I couldn't follow a good 
bit of what Phoen Dusk said earlier, but I can tell you that, as a 
person who lives across the street from a HIGHWAY and is therefore 
used to noise, gunfire is something you notice. I've heard live 
gunfire once in my life and it was at 3:00 in the morning and it woke 
me up from a sound sleep. Point: Having Tara react to the gunfire 
and, even better, move to help and then get hit makes the cause of her 
death more about being A SCOOBY rather than as a result of being 
Willow's just-dressed-after-sex lesbian lovetoy.

Second, Willow's fall from grace is inextricably linked to Tara and 
their magicking & loving. Yeah, Will's been spell-casting since S2, 
but Tara's main function was to move Willow faster along the path of 
witchcraft. DeKnight in his interview last night claims that ME 
started planning the Willow's Fall arc mid-S4 with Tara, but I didn't 
need DeKnight to tell me that that's what Tara's function was: It's 
been pretty darn obvious. Furthermore, a major chunk of W&T's 
spellcasting in the early days was a proxy for sex (and Joss picked 
that up again in OMwF). So, ya got Tara->lesbian->witchcraft...death 
and insanity. Sorry, that's cliche with a Big, Giant C.

How could ME have avoided that? Stick with their original premise 
that Will's magicking was all about being Buffy's right hand. Let me 
tell you, at the beginning of this season when they were still 
meandering around searching for a throughline but it was already 
obvious Willow was going to go thru hell, I was absolutely MANIC about 
the fact that they were ignoring that Willow really ramped up in S5 
and over the summer in response to Glory and to Buffy's death. ME 
seemed to be *pointedly* ignoring that aspect of the story, almost as 
if had they acknowledged it then it would be too hard or sumpin to say 
that Will's magick was A Bad Thing[tm]. So, come to Seeing Red and 
they ended up with Will's Breakdown being ALL ABOUT THE LESBIANISM. 
Stupidly cliched and easily avoided.

It's so frustrating to me because I know that Joss is better than 
that. Back in the day, the man ate cliches for breakfast. And he's 
on record saying that he's fully aware of the Doomed Lesbian Cliche 
from Hell. So what happened? Where's the Whedon that flipped cliches 
while blindfolded and with one hand tied behind his back?

Don't know, but really no longer care. I've had my say now, and look 
forward to Alyson Hannigan giving the end of this season a solid kick 
in the orbs. Woohoo, bring it on!