beer_good_foamy

OK, still trying to put down some thoughts on the Twin Peaks finale, but I might as well post it so I can get on with my life.

And it's with mixed feelings. Because I loved season 3 to little pieces, and that fucking ending simply won't leave me alone. So this will get long and not entirely coherent as I try to piece together what The Return and Fire Walk With Me and all that it seems to do, before I try to let it sit for a while and then do a rewatch.

( The past dictates the future )

Go, then. There are other worlds than these.
- Jake Chambers, Stephen King's The Gunslinger

So I wanted to post something for Buffy's 20th birthday, and why I still care so much about this little series, but I wasn't sure just what until I started a rewatch and got to this line in "The Harvest":

JOYCE: Everything's the end of the world when you're a 16-year-old girl.

Which got me to this:

She saved the world. A lot.

Which got me thinking about just what the hell (heh) the "world" and saving it means in terms of the Buffy- and Jossverses, and why that would matter. ( You're in my world now. )

I had a weird nightmare last night. I'm not saying it was a premonition or anything like that, just that when I tried to write it down this morning I promptly forgot it when I saw the headline "WES CRAVEN DEAD".

I grew up on Craven's movies - the ones I could find in reasonably non-mutilated state in my local video store, at least - and it's hard to imagine a Buffy TV series getting greenlit without the success of Scream.



I mentioned nightmares. His three big franchises - The Hills Have Eyes, Nightmare on Elm St and Scream - all worked (arguably up to a point) because they understood what dreams do, the fundamental weirdness that we spend a third of our lives unconscious giving our brains free rein: They take things we pretend we don't know and make us face the monster under the bed. The people left behind as part of our progress, the murders swept under the rug, the things you can't talk about in daylight. The calls that come from inside the house. You can choose not to go to summer camp, you can choose not to go to that weird cabin in the woods, you can choose not to build on top of graveyard... you can't choose not to dream. That Scream took the idea to another meta level made perfect sense, because where do those nightmares turn up? In horror movies.

Don't go there, Sid. You're starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick or something. Don't freak yourself out, okay? We've got a long night ahead of us.

He always brought a level of humour and self-awareness to his movies, not to replace horror (OK, some of the Elm St sequels got pretty ridiculous), but to heighten it, to make it more human, but also to help us handle it. You can't choose not to dream, but you can always fight back if you know the rules - just don't expect to ever, y'know, win permanently. He weaponised the sequel: The battle always goes on.



I rewatched Nightmare on Elm St for the Nth time a few weeks ago - the original, with a tiny Johnny Depp getting killed in one of the most memorable movie deaths I know - and it's still ridiculously good. 30 years of deconstructions, reconstructions, CGI advances and so-called culture wars (and if we're honest, some pretty crappy sequels) haven't taken one jot of power from Nancy desperately trying to make her parents understand that nightmares are real - and unlike all those other Final Girls of the 80s, calmly and deliberately taking matters into her own hands when they refuse to admit what they've created.

Thank you, Mr Craven. Sweet dreams.

I promised red_satin_doll I'd post some Nick Cave songs for beginners. Which is tricky, because much like that other lot of artists he often gets lumped in with (Leonard, Bob, Patti, Tom, etc) he can be a bit of an acquired taste; at once a horrible and fantastic singer, a whiny dealer of manpain and violence, and a viciously funny or heartbreaking deconstructor of it... There's his band, the Bad Seeds, who can play just about anything in the space between folk and punk as if they just got out of bed after spending three days getting drunk and listening to old blues records. He is one of the best lyricists in rock music - one of the few whose lyrics can even hold up without the music. His lyrics read like short stories, or even complete novels condensed to 5 minutes, with character voices, context and backstory snuck in through subtle little references to everything from the Bible (much like with Cohen and Dylan, there's a LOT of biblical imagery in his songs without it being necessarily religious) to Miley Cyrus.

So here goes, ten songs from young punk to elder statesman of rock'n'roll.

( The beast it cometh, cometh down )

Also, a few thoughts on his 1996 album Murder Ballads as it relates to narratives about, to quote Johnny Cash, love, god and murder:
( So it's Rorschach and Prozac and everything is groovy! )

Fan edits to the rescue: HIMYM alternate ending, get it before the lawyers do.


ETA: Aaaand, whaddyaknow, it's gone. Almost as if the Powers That Be don't approve of alternatives.

Yes, it's childish, in a way. I don't care. If nothing else, it makes me less annoyed that they used "Downtown Train" (even if it's a cover) for that scene; HIMYM always had good music choices, and I really don't want to have to connect my favourite songs to ... less favourite endings.

As for the finale itself, Alan Sepinwall says it best.

Just a few disjointed thoughts, under the cut.

( spoilers for HIMYM and Breaking Bad )

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (which I guess will forevermore make it impossible to talk about The Shield in Whedon fandom without causing confusion): ( Vauge spoilers for the first two eps )

Breaking Bad. Other people have said it better than I could, so I'll just note that damn, that was a brilliant, brilliant series finale.

...OK, I do have a few words.

Now, everyone loves a good anti-hero. Or anti-villain. Let's face it, apart from The Middleman, uncomplicated knights in shining armour are boring (which, again, most action series...) We love those shades of grey, we love to see good people do bad things... and bad people too. A lot of great TV series of the last 10 years have spent season upon season digging deeper into the souls of people doing horrible things for, what they maintain, are good reasons. At the centre is usually a man, who more-or-less genuinely Loves His Family, who has his own Code Of Honour, who does things for what he things are The Greater Good, who is trapped in a Culture Of Violence, etc etc etc. Basically, he is Just Like Us. Except he's also a (check any that may apply) racist, misogynist, sociopathic, mass-murdering, drug-dealing, hit-ordering, raping, self-righteous, hypocritical, wilfully-blind-to-the-effects-of-his-actions villain. Fine; those make for good stories. But sooner or later you get to the point where you need to end this story. And then what? You can't end it with our anti-hero retroactively turned into a knight in shining armour; that would be dishonest. Yet you can't end it with him simply getting his just desserts either.

( Spoilers for Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, The Shield (the Shawn Ryan series), Angel, Dexter... )

Did that get long? Sorry. I did it because I liked it.

Speaking of making excuses, though, the current season of The West Wing running on all channels really sucks. I know the Sorkin years were criticized for making caricatures of republicans, but it's nothing compared to this. When your supposedly adult characters start acting like 3-year-olds holding their breath until mom buys them ice cream, you need new writers.

And speaking of endings, How I Met Your Mother is just phoning it in for the last season, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, HIMYM phoning it in is still better than 90% of the sitcoms on TV, but we know this plot and we know these characters and we know how it's going to end and they should just have made a 2-hour movie and been done with it.


But at least I'm still watching it, unlike Under The Dome which never managed to breathe even a spark of life into a pretty good idea and seems content to be a poor man's Lost. Give me an ambitious failure over a competent bore any day.

Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was pretty neat, though. And on one final musing on endings, The World's End does a neat job with a loosely connected film trilogy - building not on the characters but on the themes, and aging (or refusing to age) along with the actors.

Posted a couple of thoughts over at the

FREE-FOR-ALL META COMMENT-A-THON!
(click on the picture)

upupa_epops asked:
Buffyverse, translations. Have you ever seen Buffyverse in any other language? Tried to translate anything? Wrote fic in another language? I'm very curious about other people's experience with Buffyverse language in translation.

( My response, and some additional thoughts )

wheatear asked:
Sci-fi fandoms: do sci-fi shows tend to present an atheistic or theistic universe? Discuss the differences.

( My response, and some additional thoughts )

There's a lot of other interesting questions and posts there, and some interesting replies to my posts as well which I won't copy here without permission. Go check it out!

I want to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how there's a (to quote a phrase) question hidden in plain sight in both the title and the story that the show must address. Basically yet another attempt by me to try to explain what "Chosen", for all its faults, does right as a series finale. This is in no way meant to sum up everything that happens in the last couple of seasons, and if there's anything you feel I leave out altogether, that's because I leave it out altogether to talk specifically about this:

Buffy The Vampire Slayer isn't just the title of a television show, it's the central conflict of it. The very thing that gives Buffy (and Buffy) strength is the same thing that traps her. The story itself is the biggest bad, and the central problem of season 7 is, how do you end the story without killing the story?
( Read more... )

I have a few half-written fics and meta posts waiting for a rainy day that doesn't come, so just a short one since Mark was discussing this today:

I expected that Buffy would hold on to the truth about where she was while she was dead for the remainder of the series. She had resolved to never tell the Scoobies, and I know it’s because she knew it would destroy them.

( Musings on right and wrong )

There's been talk of redemption again in fandom, partly inspired by Mark Watches getting up to "Sanctuary". deird1 had a good post about it here, for instance.

And I just wanted to jot down some loose thoughts.

( Redemption arcs, how they work and how they break )