Warren Meers: Short drabble, long meta

[beer_good_foamy]

Right, so I'm going to make like Tolstoy and offer up my Warren piece. I've got a 100-word drabble and a 2500-word meta; act now and I'll throw in a bag of knives too.

Polly Shouldn't Be
Timeline: roughly 6 months before “The Long Way Home”

”Happy birthday!”

The candles throw shadows across the cave, but Warren’s slimy fingers pass right through the birthday cake. “Right. Just a glamour.” He bites back a vicious comment. “Well, I guess it’s the thought that counts. But... my birthday’s in January?”

“It’s two years since I raised you from the dead.”

“Wow. Time sure flies when you’re trapped under tons of rock with nothing but crushed übervamps to eat. Thanks, I guess. Again. Hey, how about as a birthday gift, you get us OUT OF THIS EX-HELLMOUTH?”

“Patience, sweetie.” Amy coughs. “The army should find us any month now.”

---

And then, the meta:

Night of the Living Dead Geeks

Last thoughts (yeah right) on the big s8 "retcon". You know which one. I don’t know if this covers any new ground, but I wanted to get it down. It gets longish.

There's an old joke about a guy who goes to the circus, and when he comes back his wife asks him how it was.

- Well, they had the most boring escape artist I ever saw.

- Really? What was boring about him?

- Well, they put him in a straitjacket...

- And then he got out of it?

- Well, no, then they wrapped a chain around him and padlocked it.

- And then he got out?

- Well, no, then they put him in a big steel box and welded it shut.

- And then he got out?

- Well, no, then they dropped the box in a huge tank of water.

- So he's in a straitjacket, in chains, in a sealed box, underwater?

- Yup.

- Wow. And then he got out?

- Hell no. Told you it was boring.

...I was re-reading s8 #1-4 and mulling over the Warren thing, as I have been known to do. Initially, my reaction was pretty much “NO! Warren dead! Joss stupid! This no happen!”, but the more I think about it, it can work without breaking continuity. Let’s see if we can try to clear up exactly what the deal is with the former Mr Meers.

SkinlessWarren’s exact words to Willow are:



Now, if we give Joss some credit and assume that he's not completely forgotten “Villains”, and assuming SkinlessWarren isn’t lying (after all, it's a "No Mr Bond, I expect you to die" scenario), this is interesting. You don’t need a stopwatch to know that a LOT more than four seconds pass between Willow ripping his skin off and… whatever happens when that fire blazes up. By my reckoning, it’s about 15.8 seconds; that means that given the four-second window, there's a very simple solution to how Warren survives.

Much like the escape artist in the joke, he doesn't. He can’t possibly.

Now hang on, hang on; I’m not just going to say “Joss is wrong!”, I’m going someplace with this. SkinlessWarren’s own words confirm that he dies “of shock alone”. Once those four seconds have passed – and coincidentally, we see his body go limp just over four seconds after Willow rips his skin off – he’s not dying, or half-dead, or comatose, or non-semi-pseudo-magically-supernaturally-quasi-un-dead. He’s Tara-dead, Joyce-dead, Kendra-dead, Jenny-dead, dead from natural causes – which, as Joss makes a point of telling us a few pages later, cannot be reversed by just anyone. (Wolfram & Hart do it – maybe – with Connor and Darla, but if Willow can’t do it even by s8, I think it’s a safe assumption that Amy can’t either.)

AMY: The rest of us… we had to work twice as hard to be half as good.
- The Killer in Me

So ironically, SkinlessWarren's explanation of how Amy could have saved him means that she failed to save him. Even if she can "think on her feet", even if she can somehow read Willow’s mind to know at exactly which split second she has to pull Warren’s body out of there and make it look like Willow sets fire to him (which I still have trouble buying), even if she managed to trick Anya (who, just a few seconds earlier, knew that Warren was still alive), even if she somehow manages to teleport Warren’s body to wherever she’s at, and yes, even if she really gives enough of a rat’s (which is to say her own) ass about this Warren guy to go to all the trouble simply to spite Willow… that's all irrelevant; she still fails in keeping him alive. Assuming the TV series is still canon, which I guess is another debate, and unless Amy is secretly Illyria and knows how to travel in time, that four-second window stated in the comics can only mean that she’s about 11.8 seconds too late*, and what she ends up with is a skinless, slightly singed, and utterly, completely, stone dead body (and possibly a ruined carpet). The explanation still jars a bit, but we’re back in continuity; the short and long of it is that Willow still killed Warren, freeing him up for returning as The First in s7.

* Does this sound like an insignificant detail? Well, why doesn't Joss simply have him say "20 seconds" and give himself a clear margin? Hey, Tara had a second or two to step away from the window when Warren started firing; she didn’t, and any plot line arising from the idea that she might have will be irrevocably AU. Same diff.

GUNN: Dead! So dead! So very, very dead. Just how dead are you, huh?
- Billy

That was the first point. So if Warren's dead, what is that thing allegedly lobotomizing Willow in “The Long Way Home”? Well, hey, this is the Buffyverse; think "Some Assembly Required", "The Zeppo", "The Thin Dead Line". With basic magic knowledge, the right ingredients and a monkey wrench, anyone can bring naturally dead people back – not to life, but to unlife. That’s an important distinction; we’ll get back to that in a minute. Suffice to say Warren seems to be aware of this:



So what is he now? A zombie? That’s a matter of definition, I guess. Most zombie movies make up their own rules, and the Buffyverse being the postmodern hodgepodge it is, just about anything goes. Besides, no self-respecting zombie story uses that word anyway.

ED: Any zombies out there?
SHAUN: Don't say that!
ED: What?
SHAUN: That!
ED: What?
SHAUN: The Z word. Don't say it!
ED: Why not?
SHAUN: Because it's ridiculous!
ED: Alright... are there any out there though?
- Shaun of the Dead

So let’s just call SkinlessWarren a reanimated corpse. He’s dead, but thanks to Amy, he's still jumping around. Most of his brain functions seem intact, and despite the lack of skin he's nimble enough to at least hold a scalpel (exactly what he does with it will probably remain a mystery), so let's say Amy used the same spell that Jack did when he raised his buddies in "The Zeppo", or something very similar. It would even explain why he looks exactly as he did when he died (well, minus the bullet wound, but let's file that with Willow's red flashback hair).

Problem solved? Nnnot quite. Because now we get to the WHY SkinlessWarren is back – not from Amy’s perspective, but rather from Joss’, and this is the reason the escape-artist epiphany (OK, it’s not that revelatory, but humour me) still makes me think this is a bad idea: there’s a hell of a difference, plotwise, between a live Warren (which might have been interesting, but impossible) and an undead one (which is what we’ve got). Many readers have remarked that it should be interesting for Willow to have to face Warren - after all, she has never shown all that much remorse over killing him; quite a lot over almost killing everyone else, and for being the kind of person who would kill someone, but not for Warren being dead. Considering what he did that’s hardly surprising, but still:

WILLOW: I killed him for a reason!
- The Killer In Me

True, that would be interesting, expecially considering that Willow in s8 seems to show an unhealthy tendency to be a little too self-complacent... but IMO, there’s a couple of things here that will make it difficult for Joss to tell that story using Warren:

Past wrongdoings coming back to haunt you is nothing new to the Jossverse, of course, it’s a matter that’s been covered thoroughly (especially on Angel), from “Lie To Me” right up until “Why We Fight”, not to mention that great cloud scene in Serenity. (Arguably, Willow herself faced a metaphor of it when Gnarl tried to kill her by stripping her skin off.) If you create a monster, it will come back and bite you in the ass. Or neck. But Warren, in life, was a self-made man (literally - are there any Warren/Warrenbot shippers out there?). He showed worrying signs of sociopathic behaviour in his very first appearance on the show, he then spiraled (heh) throughout s6, and by the time Willow took up the hunt he already had several attempted murders, two successful ones, attempted rape and various petty crime under his belt. Not to mention a sense of entitlement and lust for revenge a mile wide. When offered a last chance at remorse, his exact words were:

WARREN: I'm gonna walk away from this - and when I do, you're gonna beg to go join your little girlfriend. (...) Because you deserved it, bitch!
- Villains

Does this make him a monster that deserves being tortured to death? I guess it depends on your view of what is justice; personally I tend to think that if this were the real world, he should be in jail making special friends with Roscoe the weightlifter for 50 years or so. On a cool-calm-and-collected level, Buffy’s speech holds up:

BUFFY: So the human world has its own rules for dealing with people like him-
XANDER: Yeah, we all know how well those rules work.
BUFFY: Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. We can't control the universe.
- Villains

So even if Willow’s actions can be understood, they are unmistakably wrong, by our rules and by the Buffyverse’s. Perhaps she's never paid the full price for what she did – and yes, I'm aware of the fact that the whole atonement thing aside, Willow's death count is equal to Warren's, and that some people have reported that Roz the weightliftress is lonely for a cell mate now that Faith's out. (Sidebar: Willow's activation of all the potentials could be seen as either her ultimate atonement or, depending on how the s8 storyline goes, a snafu that makes flaying Warren look like crushing a mosquito.) But here’s the kicker: she’s responsible for Warren’s death, but unlike what Angelus did to William, Penn and that unnamed girl who became Drusilla, unlike what Ripper and Ethan ended up doing to Jenny in “The Dark Age”, or unlike what Walter Kindall in "Damage" did to Dana, Willow can’t be held responsible for Warren’s actions. She made him a messy, icky corpse, but she didn’t make him a vindictive killer, and if he’s now an undead monster running around lobotomizing cartoons, that’s Amy’s doing. Willow is not facing something she’s created, but a rerun of something she’s faced (and given its face) before. Only this time, with the moral ambiguity mostly removed.

Because sure, meeting Warren again could be either a wake-up call or a signal for descent into darkness for Willow (hopefully the latter, as it’s very ambiguous whether Willow has a problem to wake up to right now) but the impact of it is very much weakened by the distinction I mentioned earlier: this is not Warren. It’s Warren’s reanimated undead corpse. Which means that, to quote another Willow fan, “time’s up. Rules change”.

BUFFY: C'mon, we fight monsters. This is what we do. They show up, they scare us, I beat 'em up and they go away. This isn't any different!
- The Dark Age

Slayage can be funny (Xander dispatching zombies in “The Zeppo” using mailboxes and coke machines), angsty (Buffy staking Billy Fordham, Dawn stopping ZombieJoyce), or just another day on the job (every redshirt Sunnydale resident who gets vamped). But with (very) few exceptions, if you’re an evil monster, it’s what’s for dinner. Angel feels remorse for what he did to Lawson in "Why We Fight", but there’s never any question about staking him.

The great thing about Warren as a villain was this:

XANDER: I'm just saying - he's just as bad as any vampire you've sent to Dustville.
BUFFY: Being a slayer doesn't give me a license to kill. Warren's human.

In a season all about dealing with the realities of life, he was perfect; non-metaphorical, non-slayable, outside the scoobies’ jurisdiction. Buffy could no more stop him than she could Willow –

ANYA: You can't. Something else Giles said. No magic or supernatural force can stop her.
BUFFY: What does that mean?
ANYA: I don't know. He said "the Slayer can't stop her."
- Grave

- since that’s not the Slayer’s job. The Slayer stops monsters – metaphorical ones – but once you strip away the metaphor and make it real, she’s as powerless as any of us. Buffy can fight manifestations of life and death; she can’t fight life and death itself (remember the last scene of “The Body”?), she can't fight grief, and she can’t fight ordinary stupidity and cruelty. There’s a reason she never kicked principal Snyder’s ass.

But by making Warren just another monster, that delicious little problem is solved in one Gordian swoop. For SkinlessWarren's reappearance to truly make Willow re-examine her actions, there has to be a conflict – do I kill him, do I forgive him, do I heal him… But the explanation Joss gives us leaves no other option: he’s dead. He doesn’t have a soul, he can't be fixed and he’s harming others: if you wake Buffy at 3AM (assuming she’s asleep and not out slaying vampires) and quiz her on whether SkinlessWarren meets the slay-on-sight criteria, her response would be a crystal clear “uh-huh”. If Willow was wrong in killing him the first time, all those pesky grey areas have now been removed, should she or anyone else get a second chance. All that remains is tracking him down and killing him, which frankly doesn’t make for very good drama. This doesn't mean that Willow is "whitewashed" in any way; her previous actions remain exactly the same. The problem is that the available future actions are simply business as usual.

And it’s at this point that I have to confess that after prattling on for five pages in Word, I don’t have a conclusion. I still don’t get it. It seems like a lot of hassle to bring Warren back, have him escape with his unlife, only to put him out of his misery later. I could have bought it if Willow or Buffy (or Satsu – give her some character development) had slayed (or is it slewn?) him right there at the end of 8.04 and angsted a bit about it, but not to stretch it out over several episodes; except to us fans, there's no conflict in Warren's existence, and his arc died with him. Warren is a reminder, a mirror image yada yada yada, but what exactly is he supposed to DO? If he’s going to keep popping up now and then with nothing more to add than “Mwahaha! I’m evOl!”, too psycho to come up with any real plans, and offering no harder decision for the scoobies than exactly what kind of sword to kill him with, then colour me…



(Though, for a view on s8 which brings up the good sides – of which there are certainly a few, and the harder you look the better they are, check out stormwreath's latest meta.)

Comments

[elisi]

I love your brain. Seriously! This is utterly superb. I quite simply never cared enough to think this deeply, but I was nodding along with every word.

Buffy can fight manifestations of life and death; she can’t fight life and death itself (remember the last scene of “The Body”?), she can't fight grief, and she can’t fight ordinary stupidity and cruelty. There’s a reason she never kicked principal Snyder’s ass.
So much word I ran out...

(And I know all about things just growing... I'm currently writing a (spoilery) Asylum review, and sadly the meta ate my brain. It's 3000 words long now and not finished yet. And probably not original. *sigh*)

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Heh, thanks (and thanks for reccing!)

the meta ate my brain

Very appropriate in a discussion about zombies. :-)

[shapinglight]

Makes sense to me and made me laugh too, which is always a plus.

Makes an awful lot more sense than Joss's decision to bring Warren back.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And yeah.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Via elisi, although I’m thinking I should friend you anyway.

So basically Amy had “maybe a four-second window” (revenant Warren isn’t giving times to the decimal point) to start mystically re-skinning. I’m good with that, I always said he was dead (although even Xander can revitalise the merely clinically dead).

Willow’s fault was not killing him but not killing him enough. I think I said that too :

Finding …that the one positive thing Willow thought she’d achieved (removing the threat Warren posed to future Taras) was an illusion makes things more complicated not less for her.

What is Warren supposed to do? Well you know that Marx (Karl not Groucho) quote about history repeating itself first as tragedy second as farce? The purpose of Warren’s second act is entertainment pure and simple. Self-quoting again:

Warren is more spectacular but I think Amy will prove the more significant villian, her SO somewhere between extremely gross pet and darling boy, almost cute when he’s talking about never getting tired of his exit line. There’s a definite Spike'n'Dru vibe between them..

As originally conceived it was Dru who was to be the major villain of S2, Spike was just the toyboy to be killed off mid-act. I don’t quite see skinless Warren getting the same reprise but you never know in comics.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Via elisi, although I’m thinking I should friend you anyway.

Go right ahead if you want, I'll be happy to friend you back (my flist is getting a little unmanageable, so I hope that doesn't sound like bartering...)

(although even Xander can revitalise the merely clinically dead).

Sure, so did Pamela Anderson in Baywatch every week. :-) But the point is, he doesn't say that she had 4 seconds before he went into shock, but before he died of shock. Then he's NOT merely clinically dead, but... well, dead. I can come up with 3 or 4 reasons why the Slayer mechanism would work with clinical death (lack of modern medicine at the shadowmen's time, Slayers being more efficient the younger they are, the need for the shadowmen to control the Slayer, etc) but if you shoot someone and then rip their skin off, we're not talking about a mere case of respiratory arrest anymore.

Finding that the one positive thing Willow thought she’d achieved (removing the threat Warren posed to future Taras) was an illusion makes things more complicated not less for her.

Which is a good point, though I'm not sure Willow was thinking about future Taras so much as about Taras past when she killed Warren. She may have rationalized it that way later. But how does the "don't kill humans" rule work with that? Is it OK to kill humans if they pose a threat?

As for Amy being the significant villain, I'm not much more enthusiastic about that one, frankly. At least Warren had an arc once; Amy was never more than a trickster who showed up whenever they needed some black magic (not completely unlike Ethan Rayne). Though unlike Ethan, Amy tended to shift personality and ability to fit the story, and I really don't see her carrying a whole (or part of a whole) season. She used to be fun in small doses, but Spike/Dru/Angelus she ain't.

Here via elisi's rec

[moscow-watcher.livejournal.com]

It was a great read, and your essay helped me to sort out my own thoughts - but I suspect you're trying to catch an imaginable black cat in a dark room. There is no cat in this room. Joss isn't aiming to create new moral dilemmas with the reintroduction of Warren. He's just using him as a cool-looking (albeit utterly stupid) villain. But how many comics could boast a skinless villain?

Re: Here via elisi's rec

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And part of me agrees, but... damnit, I want it to mean something. I don't want Joss to throw away one of his most well-constructed storylines (and no, I'm not talking about s8) just because it's cool.

[fangfaceandrea.livejournal.com]

word. heee I love how I keep saying that bringing back Warren was lame with not well thought out reasons what so ever but now you just put into words what I've been feeling about the whole thing. And it makes sense.We were right!

XD

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Fandom wins again! :-) Thanks!

[mrs-underhill.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I thought something like this as well: that Warren realy died and Amy made him into some kind of an undead creature. What I haven't thought about is how it would affect his story. You are right - there's nothing ambigous about him now. Just a monster who needs killin'. And who isn't fun anymore. But we'll see. Maybe he'll get Ethan's treatment and it'll be Amy's grief which would be of interest.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Maybe he'll get Ethan's treatment and it'll be Amy's grief which would be of interest.

Good point. Though in that case, I hope they sell Warren/Amy (Warmy, as I like to call them) a bit better than they have done so far; I honestly don't see why the Amy we saw on the show would be attracted to Warren even with skin.

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

(elisi mode) I don't have a lot of time at the moment (/elisi mode) so I'll just give you one thought:

Warren is no longer human - so you suggest he can now be slain on sight. Fair enough (I've also pretty much taken it as read that he now counts as undead.)

But according to Twilight, Buffy and the other Slayers are no longer human either... As Voll says: "You're not human (...) you'll decide the world still isn't the way you want it and the demon in you will say just one thing. 'Slay'"

The thing about changing the world... the world's all different. When Buffy looks into Warren's skinless face, which one of them is reallythe monster? Is Voll just as justified in trying to kill Buffy as she and Willow are in trying to kill Warren?

(Also, thanks for the rec. :) )

[elisi]

(elisi mode) I don't have a lot of time at the moment (/elisi mode)
Snerk!

When Buffy looks into Warren's skinless face, which one of them is reallythe monster?
Warren. At this point, that's all he is. Before he died however he was a *human* monster, and that's where the nub, the crux, of the story is. Take Faith - take any Slayer going rogue. Buffy sees the world very clearly - when someone is human (no matter their powers - see Willow or Faith), you try to *save* them. Yes their powers make them dangerous, but as she says, it is not her job to punish.

The thing with Warren was that he was a human gone wrong who actively sought out that kind of power - just so he could shape the world the way he wanted, and if it didn't do what he wanted, all he said was 'Slay'. It's coming at the exquation from the other side. Except all that's old hat now, since he's not technically human anymore, which is what the argument hinges on (see 'Selfless').

Is Voll just as justified in trying to kill Buffy as she and Willow are in trying to kill Warren?
It's very early but I think I managed to explain why 'no' is a good answer. :)

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

elisi already adressed rougly the same points I was going to, but just for good measure:

As Voll says: "You're not human (...) you'll decide the world still isn't the way you want it and the demon in you will say just one thing. 'Slay'"

But what Voll is ignoring is that there's always been a code. Don't kill humans. That's the big ol' #1 right there (note Buffy's offering to have Willow heal their enemies). Warren is here as a reminder of the most obvious case of breaking that rule - and curiously, it seems to be human Willow who is least affected by it.

When Buffy looks into Warren's skinless face, which one of them is really the monster?

I'll take "The one with no soul and a big ol' yen for torture" for 500, Alex.

Is Voll just as justified in trying to kill Buffy as she and Willow are in trying to kill Warren?

Key words, even if we look past the soul thing, are "harming others". The "demons BAD!" thing did get considerably more complicated in the later seasons - especially on Angel - but it's still "bad demons BAD!" Just because Buffy falls in love with is friends with Clem, defends Tara even when she thinks she's a demon, and... there was something with a white-haired vampire, can't quite remember his name right now... doesn't mean she's going to start letting the evil ones off. Whereas Voll could be seen to represent an almost racist purist view: anything that taints the human race is evil.

I'm not saying that Slayers-vs-humanity isn't an interesting concept, because (as X-mennish as it is) I think there is a story there. Just like there used to be a story with Warren that - as elisi pointed out - addressed much the same points; bringing him back in this way can only make Buffy's job easier - he's the clear black-and-white to Voll's grey.

[selinamoonfire.livejournal.com]

Wonderful essay.

I'm not sure if Warren was supposed to cause moral angst, be a punishment for Willow's sin or what.

I thought that maybe the canon-verse couldn't handle sweet, innocent Willow being a killer so they resurrected Warren so she'll be free of that guilt.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I thought that maybe the canon-verse couldn't handle sweet, innocent Willow being a killer so they resurrected Warren so she'll be free of that guilt.

I've heard that argument before, but I don't buy it. For starters, it's not like mean ol' Marti Noxon made Willow a killer without telling Joss; he set her up to be just that since... oh, season 2 or so, and had originally planned to have her go bad and kill people at the end of season 5. Besides, if I'm right, the point is that Willow still killed Warren. Still tortured him, slowly and methodically. Still ripped his skin off, obviously. Resurrecting Warren as a happy and well-adjusted human being who's praising Willow for what she did to show him the evil of his ways might have absolved Willow of guilt (at least from her viewpoint); turning him into even more of a monster shouldn't.

[spuffyduds.livejournal.com]

WOW. That was amazing. ::loves on you::

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks! *hugs*

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, good food for thought.

Meta like this? Is the best thing about S8. :)

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

*takes a bow* Thank you.

*remembers "Bad Girls" and quickly puts bow back before police gets there*

[mouthmount.livejournal.com]

All excellent points, even if you don't have a conclusion. It's a confusing enough issue that it's near impossible to make one. After exhausting every other theory, I decided that Warren has to just be a zombie. But a "Zeppo" zombie, not a "Dead Man's Party" zombie, meaning he's really kind of innocuous. He's no more dangerous this way than he was as a human, and he was no worse as a human than any other murderer that none of the Scoobies would ever try to kill. The only difference is he's dead. So really... He's kind of pointless.

That was my rambling way of agreeing with you. Good meta.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks. In a way, it feels good not to be able to draw any certain conclusions; that means there's still some way to be surprised by the comics. If they manage to keep my interest long enough for me to let them, that is. Though so far, it's difficult to know what's deliberately mysterious and what is just poor plotting...

Warren Meers: Short drabble, long meta

[chianazhaan.livejournal.com]

Lovely meta. I liked how you concluded that he was some sort of zombie and explained about what his role could be in the story.

It's even more confusing now that Warren survived to the end of season 8. And he didn't die at the hands of a slayer. And he didn't really play a major role after torturing Willow either. He's just more annoying than he was in season 6.

Thanks

Re: Warren Meers: Short drabble, long meta

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

It would have been fun - not "forgive everything else they screwed up" fun, but a small compensation - to watch Willow re-kill Warren. But they never seemed to have any specific purpose for him, which is weird considering how much of canon they sacrificed to bring him back. I guess his only function in the story was to slaughter Slayers in Twangel's employ without Twangel having to get his hands bloody.

Oh well. At least they gave up the idea of trying to redeem Warren that they seemed to be shooting for in the later issues, though I suppose it's possible they think they took care of that and his re-death was supposed to be tragic.