Win + drabble

[beer_good_foamy]

Thing ye firste: Yay!



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Thing ye seconde: A drabble for open_on_sunday and the prompt "Defend".

Wings In Water
Post-s6

Throughout a cold English summer, Giles waits for the coven to hold some sort of trial. They’re an ancient order, they must have rules. He’d speak in her defense, explain why Willow should be allowed to live, why she’s worth saving. He’d tell them of the girl waiting at the library doors on his first day at the hellmouth, six years ago. How he failed her. How he couldn’t keep her from becoming ever more powerful, more arrogant. How he couldn’t control her.

He keeps waiting, but the witches never ask his opinion. They just take care of their own.

Comments

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Here's a thought: Giles' and Willow's central internal conflicts over the series are very similar. They're both characters who think they know a great deal, who amass knowledge through studies, and end up having to learn how to unlearn and figure out instead. Their brains are full of a prioris that Must Not Be Challenged, unlike Buffy who tends to look at things fresh and then decide how she feels about them ("Note to self: religion freaky."). Giles and Willow deal with this in different ways - Giles more gradually and less drastically, but also far less in general; he never has his entire belief system shaken to its core the way Willow does several times.

Ooh, I like that, and it also hints at the fundamental difference between the abstraction people and the living-in-the-world thing that Buffy does easily. Giles and Willow's abstractions are different -- computers don't have smell, after all -- but they both have Ideas about the world that are more fundamentally ingrained and that are easier to deal with, and live within, for them than it is for Buffy who is always really a part of her surroundings. Well, not always -- because she also cuts herself off from them; but even then she is living in a different kind of present reality.

This isn't always a good thing for Buffy -- because Buffy lives very much in the Now and lives in the world, she accepts certain baseline facts about the social order that are not based on Ideas but realities. So there is a mild Cordelia side to her and some popular girl entitlement, as well as some majorly trusting her instincts as a slayer in ways that usually steer her right but occasionally lead her into fight-hunt-down mode (e.g. against Faith). She also doesn't really HAVE to present arguments for moral truths that she knows exists, so that when she has to be put in the position of communicating the things she's internalized over the years, she often falls short (e.g. her speeches to the Potentials which can never really get to the central issue). Buffy can find herself focusing on the necessity of Making Pie while Giles and Willow yell at each other over moral concepts that they've already decided well before the current Chumach situation has sprung up. But meanwhile, that means that Buffy never loses herself the way Willow does and Giles did in the past. She can never disconnect from her reality that strongly: she can only actually go far off course if something messes with her instincts as a person and a slayer, like Ted being a robot or Faith threatening her lover, or her having a vampire lover, or the Trio messing with her internals with demon poison putting her in a mental hospital. She is never so far away from where she actually is; emotionally she can be cut off, but intellectually I don't think she is that far away. She can't look Ben in the face and kill him when he's sitting there helpless. Willow and Giles can be intellectually miles from their reality, and can threaten to re-Key Dawn because energy is better than people or drug Buffy because Council Edict #1732. In a fundamental way, Buffy is Buffy, and while she changes over time, and makes big mistakes, she never...really flies out of orbit, the way Willow does and the way Giles flirts with.

I think Anya is another person who fits into this, though it's comical in the extreme with her: she seizes onto a few simple philosophies and then bases her identity around them (vengeance! communism! capitalism! marriage!) until she realizes that none of them, alone, actually work.

Apparently this alone got Really Long so another comment-reply forthcoming.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Pretty much agreed with everything.

She also doesn't really HAVE to present arguments for moral truths that she knows exists, so that when she has to be put in the position of communicating the things she's internalized over the years, she often falls short (e.g. her speeches to the Potentials which can never really get to the central issue).

Oh yes.

I'd love to see a Joyce defense post. Joyce is disadvantaged by the story that essentially makes her an antagonist for the first two seasons, culminating in "Becoming" and early s3 up to "Band Candy" - not because she's against Buffy, but because Buffy is forced to hide secrets from her, and because Joyce's priorities of taking care of her teenage daughter actively clash with said daughter's of saving the world.

when she lets Buffy pack her bags for her in "Graduation Day" (and how wonderful is it that Buffy tries the same thing with Dawn and Dawn, The Next Generation, won't stand for it <3)

*icon*

Dawn was always very much Joyce's daughter.

I also really like the subtlety with which you dispense with Kennedy as a romantic threat to Willow/Fred ("all slayered out").

Thanks! As a member of the People Who Don't Hate Kennedy Club, I always feel a bit iffy about writing post-"Chosen" fic pairing Willow with someone else. It's not necessarily that I think Willow/Kennedy are a forever kind of love, but with all the fics I've read where Kennedy is either completely dismissed or turned evil, I want to treat her fairly. In this particular case, I couldn't really get into what happened between them, but I'd like to think it was just... one of those things that don't work, and part of the reason Willow's still upset about it is that she carries some of the blame for that.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, in a weird way, Joyce reminds me of Rita on Dexter -- who gets flak for not somehow guessing that the protagonist's weird behaviour that is being kept away from them happens to be the thing that the audience is tuning in for. Hating on Rita for daring to be annoyed that he had a secret apartment without telling her bothers me much more, for obvious reasons (Buffy is a hero, Joyce is a parent and thus the dynamic is not supposed to be necessarily equal), but in both cases audience reaction seems to expect the matriarchal figures to be all-forgiving of the protagonist's trespasses, and a lot of that is that they get in the way of the story people to see, the one with blood and fighting and stuff in it.

I would love to see Dawn - Joyce comparisons; they do seem to have a similar function in Buffy's life, where obviously the age dynamic is reversed.

I like your stance on W/K -- and I think I buy that.