Oh yes, absolutely. They've spent five years inside a traditional* fantasy narrative. Then Glory's spell breaks down the walls between realities (!) and when they wake up again, not only is the fantasy narrative out of juice, but it actively clashes with the real life one. (And agreed with all your comments on Willow.)
Whoa -- do you think that the results are the effect of Glory's spell? Or is it more that In The Metaphor, Buffy's death halted the total narrative collapse, but her being resurrected means that the same thing happens again, albeit this time as a slow motion train wreck rather than Glory's bomb explosion. (Um, I should probably think of better analogies but hey, violent show.)
It's noteworthy that it's in season five which follows Buffy's first genuinely non-supernatural (or sci-fi grounded, counting Buffy/Riley as being related to the Initiative's clear genre underpinnings) grounded story -- i.e. Joyce's illness and death. That human death is I think what leads to the necessity of having to deal with the Real Life frame on its own terms, and it's only Glory's full-out assault on Dawn that can postpone it as long as it can. (Though The Body recognizes that it's a lie, within Sunnydale, to act as if the metaphor frame ever fully goes away. Which is interesting: even The Twilight Zone had some episodes with no sci-fi or supernatural elements, though of course anthologies are anthologies.)
"You die in the dream, you wake up in reality. Ask me what happens if you die in reality." "What happens? "You die, stupid. That's why it's called 'reality'."
http://xkcd.com/180/. Which, you know, I'm Canadian, so, I guess my immortality is not ensured after all....
It can be argued that "The Gift" is Buffy trying to escape (in "Normal Again", the Doctor hints that she had a previous "lucid" episode over the summer). But the narrative changes that she's set in motion, by already redefining the role of the Slayer and adding sidekicks to the "she alone", won't let her; Buffy The Vampire Slayer, through Willow (and the magic of ad revenue) tells her that oh no, you're not done yet, there's more to this story.
Right. And of course this started as soon as (or earlier than, but it was definitely underway) Buffy took Willow under her wing in WttH, and followed through Xander breaking the narrative that was "written" to breathe her back to life in PG. But in PG, from a *narrative* perspective, death was practically just a flesh wound (though with serious emotional scarring I don't mean to undermine). Buffy certainly is trying to escape, but that's not a bad thing -- the thing she's escaping from is the set of circumstances that force her to choose between her sister and the world, metaphor and reality, etc. Though if it were only that particular situation and not the broader situation, she would (probably) not struggle so heavily with her return -- it's not just that situation but the whole broader dilemma that she has to solve.
You know, having poked at this post for over a week, I'm probably the last person who should be criticising fannish engagement... :)
:) I hear you, and I was trying to figure out how to phrase what I wrote while making clear that we who live in fandom are not Andrew (for one thing, I presume most of us haven't killed our best friends because someone quoted Star Wars at us). I do think that the show's ending has a very "this story is over, move on with your life" vibe to it that a lot of TV series have, in one way or another. Which, I want to come back to that later....
The flipside of that is "use it to deal with your actual life." Which of course is the central role of any myth, or at least was before we started taking them literally...
Yes, definitely -- which, Buffy does put on a show in order to inspire Andrew to face his actual life, which is another part of her arc of understanding and rewriting her own myth. The line between using narrative to hide from your life and using narrative to help with it can be fuzzy, and the episode exists to emphasize the distinction between them.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-08-29 12:35 pm (UTC)Whoa -- do you think that the results are the effect of Glory's spell? Or is it more that In The Metaphor, Buffy's death halted the total narrative collapse, but her being resurrected means that the same thing happens again, albeit this time as a slow motion train wreck rather than Glory's bomb explosion. (Um, I should probably think of better analogies but hey, violent show.)
It's noteworthy that it's in season five which follows Buffy's first genuinely non-supernatural (or sci-fi grounded, counting Buffy/Riley as being related to the Initiative's clear genre underpinnings) grounded story -- i.e. Joyce's illness and death. That human death is I think what leads to the necessity of having to deal with the Real Life frame on its own terms, and it's only Glory's full-out assault on Dawn that can postpone it as long as it can. (Though The Body recognizes that it's a lie, within Sunnydale, to act as if the metaphor frame ever fully goes away. Which is interesting: even The Twilight Zone had some episodes with no sci-fi or supernatural elements, though of course anthologies are anthologies.)
"You die in the dream, you wake up in reality. Ask me what happens if you die in reality."
"What happens?
"You die, stupid. That's why it's called 'reality'."
http://xkcd.com/180/. Which, you know, I'm Canadian, so, I guess my immortality is not ensured after all....
It can be argued that "The Gift" is Buffy trying to escape (in "Normal Again", the Doctor hints that she had a previous "lucid" episode over the summer). But the narrative changes that she's set in motion, by already redefining the role of the Slayer and adding sidekicks to the "she alone", won't let her; Buffy The Vampire Slayer, through Willow (and the magic of ad revenue) tells her that oh no, you're not done yet, there's more to this story.
Right. And of course this started as soon as (or earlier than, but it was definitely underway) Buffy took Willow under her wing in WttH, and followed through Xander breaking the narrative that was "written" to breathe her back to life in PG. But in PG, from a *narrative* perspective, death was practically just a flesh wound (though with serious emotional scarring I don't mean to undermine). Buffy certainly is trying to escape, but that's not a bad thing -- the thing she's escaping from is the set of circumstances that force her to choose between her sister and the world, metaphor and reality, etc. Though if it were only that particular situation and not the broader situation, she would (probably) not struggle so heavily with her return -- it's not just that situation but the whole broader dilemma that she has to solve.
You know, having poked at this post for over a week, I'm probably the last person who should be criticising fannish engagement... :)
:) I hear you, and I was trying to figure out how to phrase what I wrote while making clear that we who live in fandom are not Andrew (for one thing, I presume most of us haven't killed our best friends because someone quoted Star Wars at us). I do think that the show's ending has a very "this story is over, move on with your life" vibe to it that a lot of TV series have, in one way or another. Which, I want to come back to that later....
The flipside of that is "use it to deal with your actual life." Which of course is the central role of any myth, or at least was before we started taking them literally...
Yes, definitely -- which, Buffy does put on a show in order to inspire Andrew to face his actual life, which is another part of her arc of understanding and rewriting her own myth. The line between using narrative to hide from your life and using narrative to help with it can be fuzzy, and the episode exists to emphasize the distinction between them.