http://local-max.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] local-max.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] beer_good_foamy 2012-08-29 07:09 am (UTC)

Wonderful, as always -- and very much in keeping with, but going beyond, thoughts I've already had. I am sure there will be much more to stew about later, but three thoughts for now.

1. The real conflict in season six, perhaps the central one, is the Metaphor Frame vs. Real Life Frame -- real life manifests itself as life itself as hell compared to a (possibly imagined?) metaphor-death heaven, bills, failed weddings, abusive relationships, attempted rape, gun-toting maniacs. Buffy's two episodes in which she comes nearest to killing her friends and lover are Dead Things and Normal Again, and both involve rapid shifts between these two frames -- she is fighting a vampire and then she's fighting Katrina, she starts punching Spike in vampface and finishes with the guy in human face; Normal Again has a fantasy-frame poison from Andrew convince her that her real life frame story cannot be real and she nearly kills all her friends for a fantasy-frame realer-than-her-real-life hallucination (probably). The reason Willow is the proximate Big Bad is that she is the one who has accrued the most Fantasy Frame power over the last few seasons, surpassing even Buffy's in terms of raw power, but it's also abstracted power: "magic" is less well defined than Buffy's very specific metaphor-frame power. And so Willow tries to use metaphor-frame power to combat life-frame problems, and because ultimately they are separate frames, she fails repeatedly, culminating in a desperate attempt to blot out the real life frame with her fantasy frame powers. Which means many things, but ultimately the only way to break out of the constraints of the Real Life story really *is* to die, and that is ultimately not the preferred option. The real life frame has *always* been a part of the show, of course -- it is where many of the emotions lie -- but the metaphor frame was always there to provide the outlets necessary to deal with the real life frame problems, as long as the metaphor frame still existed -- which, in your construction, would be "as long as Buffy doesn't die and her story doesn't end." Buffy's reembracing life happens as a person, not as a slayer, just as Everyman RL-frame Xander convinces Willow lets herself *not* use her metaphor-powers to destroy the whole world, while Spike goes off and changes himself.

2. The fact that Willow doesn't end the world also shows the problem with narrative. We are all trapped in a narrative, which is that we will live until we die; there simply is no escape from it, and the pain that accompanies it, *except death*, which, even then, is not really an escape. Ending the story can't be the answer, because without a story there only *is* death. Which emphasizes why Buffy can't just, shouldn't just remove her slayerness from the equation entirely and why she has to take control of, and *use*, her story to make both her life and the world around her better. Simply destroying the story is *tempting*, and I am grateful for the show to present that as a possibility and finally rejecting it for humanistic reasons. But Buffy et al. have to find the good in her story (their story) to expand it outward.

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