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beer_good_foamyBrief and not overly polite thoughts on #25 below the cut.
Yes, the Kafka!Dawn "arc" is finally over and done with - in pretty much the same way I suggested it should have been dealt with before it even started, though with no explanation why it took them this long to think of the most obvious solution imaginable. We got very little payoff both to the centaur subplot and the entire Kenny/Dawn story, very little relevance to anything outside it, not to mention a slightly skeevy conclusion (are we supposed to sympathise with poor Kenny? I suppose Angel could have saved himself a lot of trouble in "Waiting In The Wings" by simply having the ballerina beg the poor count's forgiveness for hurting him so badly). So Dawn's big secret was pretty much exactly what she told Xander in #11, making everything after that which wasn't just cheap jokes an even more pointless retread of Dawn's season 7 arc. Whatever. It's over, Dawn's human, Kenny won't be back (not that he was ever in it), I'm retiring this icon, and we shall speak of it no more.
The "everyone thinks vampires are the good guys" storyline continues to confound. We continue to have no actual evidence of it (maybe the ease with which they dealt with them was supposed to tell us it's really all in Buffy's head?) and in fact, for the second issue in a row we have gangs of vampires roaming the countryside and (presumably) killing people. I know that Scotland and Southern Germany are very remote and technologically backwards regions, but surely someone would notice at this point that they're not all blonde MTV stars with cuterats chihuahuas?
And of course, Scott Allie's promise that this issue would bring some big revelation about Twilight turned out to bea straight-up lie misdirection; he wasn't even mentioned. (Unless Xander or Dawn are Twilight, or unless Allie was talking about the similarities between Kenny/Dawn and Edward/Bella.) It's interesting that Xander refers to the s2 finale of Veronica Mars, which featured a last-second revelation of the Big Bad that was... shall we say, not very convincing.
That said, I loved the way the fearsome vampire gang was dispatched. And the Yellow Submarine reference (maybe Twilight is Paul McCartney?) And at least everyone was in character this time around; while whatever little content there was is 2 years late and a few hundred dollars short, the actual dialogue and character interaction is spot on. And even if Xander turns out to be Twilight, I'll forgive him since he outs himself as a Werner Herzog fan. Also, it's interesting that Willow doesn't even bother doing her spells in pretend Latin anymore; she just speaks English backwards.
Predators and Prey as a whole, then? Probably my least favourite arc so far, even by Season 8 standards. At least most of the other arcs seemed to have a basic idea of where they were going and what was going to happen, and if they failed they at least failed spectacularly, but this? Something that should have been the biggest change to the rules of either Buffyverse since vampires lost their ability to fly was swept under the rug and made a non-event, leaving us with a series of interludes that at best offered some nice character insight and plot advancement (#21 and #23 especially), at worst sacrificed characterisation completely for pointless placeholder plots (the Faith & Giles issue) and mostly just felt like unfocused padding. Some of it was obviously setup for later issues; for instance, the blurb for #27 promises the return of the submarine from #22 (and confirms that yes, they stole it from South Korea, not North), and there were some interesting parallels with the overall season arc, but it would have been nice if they'd put more effort into making the stories interesting in and of themselves, too. But oh well, the TV show had some mid-season clunkers too. I guess we'll see what happens when the proper arc starts in two months.
Yes, the Kafka!Dawn "arc" is finally over and done with - in pretty much the same way I suggested it should have been dealt with before it even started, though with no explanation why it took them this long to think of the most obvious solution imaginable. We got very little payoff both to the centaur subplot and the entire Kenny/Dawn story, very little relevance to anything outside it, not to mention a slightly skeevy conclusion (are we supposed to sympathise with poor Kenny? I suppose Angel could have saved himself a lot of trouble in "Waiting In The Wings" by simply having the ballerina beg the poor count's forgiveness for hurting him so badly). So Dawn's big secret was pretty much exactly what she told Xander in #11, making everything after that which wasn't just cheap jokes an even more pointless retread of Dawn's season 7 arc. Whatever. It's over, Dawn's human, Kenny won't be back (not that he was ever in it), I'm retiring this icon, and we shall speak of it no more.
The "everyone thinks vampires are the good guys" storyline continues to confound. We continue to have no actual evidence of it (maybe the ease with which they dealt with them was supposed to tell us it's really all in Buffy's head?) and in fact, for the second issue in a row we have gangs of vampires roaming the countryside and (presumably) killing people. I know that Scotland and Southern Germany are very remote and technologically backwards regions, but surely someone would notice at this point that they're not all blonde MTV stars with cute
And of course, Scott Allie's promise that this issue would bring some big revelation about Twilight turned out to be
That said, I loved the way the fearsome vampire gang was dispatched. And the Yellow Submarine reference (maybe Twilight is Paul McCartney?) And at least everyone was in character this time around; while whatever little content there was is 2 years late and a few hundred dollars short, the actual dialogue and character interaction is spot on. And even if Xander turns out to be Twilight, I'll forgive him since he outs himself as a Werner Herzog fan. Also, it's interesting that Willow doesn't even bother doing her spells in pretend Latin anymore; she just speaks English backwards.
Predators and Prey as a whole, then? Probably my least favourite arc so far, even by Season 8 standards. At least most of the other arcs seemed to have a basic idea of where they were going and what was going to happen, and if they failed they at least failed spectacularly, but this? Something that should have been the biggest change to the rules of either Buffyverse since vampires lost their ability to fly was swept under the rug and made a non-event, leaving us with a series of interludes that at best offered some nice character insight and plot advancement (#21 and #23 especially), at worst sacrificed characterisation completely for pointless placeholder plots (the Faith & Giles issue) and mostly just felt like unfocused padding. Some of it was obviously setup for later issues; for instance, the blurb for #27 promises the return of the submarine from #22 (and confirms that yes, they stole it from South Korea, not North), and there were some interesting parallels with the overall season arc, but it would have been nice if they'd put more effort into making the stories interesting in and of themselves, too. But oh well, the TV show had some mid-season clunkers too. I guess we'll see what happens when the proper arc starts in two months.
