What's interesting is also to compare Giles' smashing of the amulet, and the CitW ending, to Normal Again and Grave, where Buffy and Willow come very close to "destroying the world" -- in NA, there's a real threat not just that her friends will die, but that the entire world will stop existing and the "real" one will return, if she goes through with the killing, because, you know, this is her story, and without her there to interpret it, what happens?
WILLOW: Because social phenomena don't have unproblematic objective existences. They have to be interpreted and given meanings by those who encounter them. (Buffy stares at Willow) MIKE: Nicely put. So, Ruby, does that mean there are countless realities?
(And what is Life Serial but Buffy universe-hopping, and seeing the monsters lurking behind jargon-filled, sped-up academia, back-breaking parochial blue collar construction, soul-destroying repetitive-motion late-capitalism, and even go-nowhere faux-rebellion slackerdom, which are invisible to those universe's own inhabitants? And hey, maybe hyperfast abstraction denying objective reality, ordinariness combined with backbreaking labour, repeating the same activity for generations and continuing to be disappointed when it doesn't work, and exhausting the concept of perpetual rebellion until you're a loser cheating at kitten poker are universes that Buffy was right to leave, and Willow, Xander, Anya/Giles, and Spike are going to have to eventually universe-hop out of those too, huh, if only after a lot of damage has already been done?)
But it's also that it's a matter of something personal. Let's say that the demon-poison is all that was -- Buffy's just hallucinating the hospital. Her friends might die, but "the world" will live on. Maybe it will die next time Buffy fails to save it because she's permanently trapped in her own head. Or maybe what we are looking at is a personal journey: do you kill off whatever part of you believes that you have power to do something -- and if you do that, does that mean you've destroyed the world? Maybe it does, insofar as you can do anything about "the world" at all -- it all comes down to whether or not you are willing to participate. You save the world every time you save a life; you end the world every time you end one. Because, let's face it, most of us are not going to be the ones to save or destroy the human race. We can only decide on an individual level whether any of this means anything for us. Willow doesn't end the world, in the end, though she could, given power by her own despair, augmented by "the world's", and we have a conscious choice not to destroy the world every day we continue believing in it. And sometimes what it takes is a heroic battle, and sometimes it takes a few words. Heroism is about knowing when to talk the guy with the rifle down by showing him that you are willing to see his world, and that there are other worlds out there he doesn't know about, and when to listen to a few words about vermin eating filth and decide that this isn't going to be settled with logic.
ETA: "Whew" means, wow, I really liked this. (Sorry, I should have been clearer.) To continue the ETA, I think that the universalism, the idea that everyone has their own internal world, is probably THE thing that makes me so attached to the Buffyverse, and to Whedon's (good) works generally (and some of his less-good ones). Of course the very first scene of the show depends on us assuming that we're in one story, and it turning out to be another, and everything follows from there. I'm picturing Buffy standing before the desert in "Restless," as an image encapsulating the infinitude of interior space -- one's own world can go on forever, and/but as you emphasize, so does everyone else's. At its best (and even at its middle and sometimes worst) the show depicts how people go all the way down, and also have the room inside themselves to incorporate others' worlds too.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-03-23 08:28 pm (UTC)What's interesting is also to compare Giles' smashing of the amulet, and the CitW ending, to Normal Again and Grave, where Buffy and Willow come very close to "destroying the world" -- in NA, there's a real threat not just that her friends will die, but that the entire world will stop existing and the "real" one will return, if she goes through with the killing, because, you know, this is her story, and without her there to interpret it, what happens?
WILLOW: Because social phenomena don't have unproblematic objective existences. They have to be interpreted and given meanings by those who encounter them. (Buffy stares at Willow)
MIKE: Nicely put. So, Ruby, does that mean there are countless realities?
(And what is Life Serial but Buffy universe-hopping, and seeing the monsters lurking behind jargon-filled, sped-up academia, back-breaking parochial blue collar construction, soul-destroying repetitive-motion late-capitalism, and even go-nowhere faux-rebellion slackerdom, which are invisible to those universe's own inhabitants? And hey, maybe hyperfast abstraction denying objective reality, ordinariness combined with backbreaking labour, repeating the same activity for generations and continuing to be disappointed when it doesn't work, and exhausting the concept of perpetual rebellion until you're a loser cheating at kitten poker are universes that Buffy was right to leave, and Willow, Xander, Anya/Giles, and Spike are going to have to eventually universe-hop out of those too, huh, if only after a lot of damage has already been done?)
But it's also that it's a matter of something personal. Let's say that the demon-poison is all that was -- Buffy's just hallucinating the hospital. Her friends might die, but "the world" will live on. Maybe it will die next time Buffy fails to save it because she's permanently trapped in her own head. Or maybe what we are looking at is a personal journey: do you kill off whatever part of you believes that you have power to do something -- and if you do that, does that mean you've destroyed the world? Maybe it does, insofar as you can do anything about "the world" at all -- it all comes down to whether or not you are willing to participate. You save the world every time you save a life; you end the world every time you end one. Because, let's face it, most of us are not going to be the ones to save or destroy the human race. We can only decide on an individual level whether any of this means anything for us. Willow doesn't end the world, in the end, though she could, given power by her own despair, augmented by "the world's", and we have a conscious choice not to destroy the world every day we continue believing in it. And sometimes what it takes is a heroic battle, and sometimes it takes a few words. Heroism is about knowing when to talk the guy with the rifle down by showing him that you are willing to see his world, and that there are other worlds out there he doesn't know about, and when to listen to a few words about vermin eating filth and decide that this isn't going to be settled with logic.
ETA: "Whew" means, wow, I really liked this. (Sorry, I should have been clearer.) To continue the ETA, I think that the universalism, the idea that everyone has their own internal world, is probably THE thing that makes me so attached to the Buffyverse, and to Whedon's (good) works generally (and some of his less-good ones). Of course the very first scene of the show depends on us assuming that we're in one story, and it turning out to be another, and everything follows from there. I'm picturing Buffy standing before the desert in "Restless," as an image encapsulating the infinitude of interior space -- one's own world can go on forever, and/but as you emphasize, so does everyone else's. At its best (and even at its middle and sometimes worst) the show depicts how people go all the way down, and also have the room inside themselves to incorporate others' worlds too.