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?
Absolutely. And also,
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.
there's also the fact of the Wishverse. And I do mean the fact of it; "Doppelgangland" makes clear that alternate universes stay real, independent of ifs and maybes. The universe Cordelia had Anya create goes on existing without her - both within "The Wish", and after it. The world is real; no more, but no less so than the verse in which Buffy Summers does come to Sunnydale. When she saves the world, she saves a subset of worlds. That doesn't make it pointless; rather the opposite.
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.
Yep yep yep.
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.
Again, yep yep yep. (And also, now I want to insert turtles into the Buffyverse mythology somehow.)
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Date: 2017-03-25 10:17 am (UTC)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?
Absolutely. And also,
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.
there's also the fact of the Wishverse. And I do mean the fact of it; "Doppelgangland" makes clear that alternate universes stay real, independent of ifs and maybes. The universe Cordelia had Anya create goes on existing without her - both within "The Wish", and after it. The world is real; no more, but no less so than the verse in which Buffy Summers does come to Sunnydale. When she saves the world, she saves a subset of worlds. That doesn't make it pointless; rather the opposite.
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.
Yep yep yep.
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.
Again, yep yep yep. (And also, now I want to insert turtles into the Buffyverse mythology somehow.)