beer_good_foamy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beer_good_foamy) wrote2007-06-26 09:07 pm
beer_good_foamy) wrote2007-06-26 09:07 pm
Entry tags:
Warren Meers: Short drabble, long meta
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 outslaying 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stormwreath's latest meta.)
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
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.)
no subject
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. :) )
no subject
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. :)
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;-)
The thing is, seen from a certain perspective everything you say about Warren also applies to Buffy. Is she really human any more? Spike's chip said not. Voll doesn't think so.
The Shadowmen took the heart of a demon, and put it inside a girl. Buffy and Willow took that same dark power and put it inside several thousand girls... they actively sought that kind of power, just so they could shape the world the way they wanted.
Yeah, it's simple to think of Warren now as just a kind of zombie that can be slain without moral qualms. He's red and ugly and Buffy's blonde and pretty, so it's obvious who's the good one and who's the evil one who deserves death...
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Spike's chip said not post-resurrection. Before that she registered as perfectly human, Slayer powers or no. All the new Slayers are not deeply traumatised twice-dead angst ridden Buffies. They're S1/2 Buffy, but with a network to support them and not feeling like a freak.
Yes there is darkness in Buffy, but does that darkness come from her powers, or just from being human? We've seen more than enough human monsters to know that it's not a simple conundrum. Look at Dana. Look at Dark!Willow. Should they be killed? What do they deserve?
Yeah, it's simple to think of Warren now as just a kind of zombie that can be slain without moral qualms. He's red and ugly and Buffy's blonde and pretty, so it's obvious who's the good one and who's the evil one who deserves death...
Of course it is. It wasn't back in S6, but *now* it is. Super!Warren was the perfect flipside/parallel/dark mirror to Buffy. Skinless!Warren is icky and pointless.
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Well, kinda.
"She's uncomfortable with certain concepts. It's understandable. Aggression is a natural human tendency. Though you and me come by it another way."
"We're not demons."
"Is that a fact?"
"Your craving goes deeper than that. You think you know. What you are,
what's to come… you haven't even begun. Find it… the darkness… Find your true nature."
"You're afraid that being the Slayer means losing your humanity."
"Does it?"
"You are full of love. You love with all of your soul."
(Not from the scene)"Um, you avoided answering my question. I'm full of love, that's nice and all, but you haven't said if i'm losing my humanity. Yes or no?"
Living Warren was a parallel to Buffy from her perspective, because she's confident that she's basically human. But as aycheb remarks in her own review of TLWH, one of the themes of seaosn 8 is that the Slayer can no longer hide in the shadows; with thousands of them, they're exposed to public view in a way they never were before. And so from an outsider's perspective, the contrast isn't between Buffy and Warren as two humans, but between Buffy and Warren as two monsters.
Forget Warren and Amy for a moment, because after all they're just Voll's minions. Is Buffy justified in declaring war on humanity? Is Voll justified in seeing her as a greater threat to the world than any skinless corpse could ever be?
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Ooh don't start quoting 'Buffy's Darkness' snippets at me. I love those. :)
Forget Warren and Amy for a moment, because after all they're just Voll's minions.
And right there is my problem. I think the general idea could be fascinating - after all I've been writing about Buffy's darkness for years. I'm praying that this storyline will throw up all sorts of new and interesting fascets to the topic. Does the general have a point? What should Buffy do? What can she do? Etc. All Warren and Amy do is muddle it up and get in the way. And if they add nothing, then why have them at all? See I will readily admit that Caleb wasn't the best thought-out villain. Nor was Adam. But they both *had a point*, even if they were lame.
::grumbles and goes back to Asylum meta::
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Declaring, or accepting a declaration after she's been attacked first?
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(And Churchill was quite pleased about the fact that Britain actually declared war against Japan before the USA did, because the British constitution made that an executive decision (ie, his own) rather than a legislative one).
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"Esteemed Mr Hirohito,
Oh... kay.
Sincerely,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
Of course, we don't know yet exactly what that declaration of war means, what sort of war it could possibly be (frankly, it looks more like jihad (from both sides) than a good ol'fashioned military campaign.) That bit will be interesting to see. In true Buffy fashion, we should get to it in episode 3 or so - ie sometime next year.
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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 withis 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.
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But is that universal to Slayers, or just something Buffy devised for herself? Or is it a code that she'd be willing to ignore if the prize was big enough - and a code that other Slayers might even think is so much pious holier-than-thou crap?
"People need us to survive. In the balance? Nobody's gonna cry over some random bystander who got caught in the crossfire."
The one with no soul and a big ol' yen for torture
How do we jump from "Warren's a magically animated living dead creature" to "Warren has no soul"? (Not that his soul was all that impressive a specimen even before he died).
Anyway, I'm not saying Warren's not really a monster; just that in others' perspective, maybe Buffy's the same. Worse, even, because a skinless thing only inspires revulsion, but Buffy is charismatic and beautiful and has shiny hair, and can inspire other people to follow her. She's by far the bigger threat to humanity.
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Judging from "Consequences", it's at least something the Council advocates and enforces.
GILES: Buffy, this is not the first time something like this has happened.
BUFFY: It's not?
GILES: The Slayer is on the front line of a nightly war. Now, it's, it's tragic, but accidents have happened.
BUFFY: W-what do you do?
GILES: Well, the Council investigates, um, metes out punishment if punishment is due.
and a code that other Slayers might even think is so much pious holier-than-thou crap?
Now this is interesting. There were hints of that in... 8.01, I think? That scene with Andrew (not) explaining to TankGirlSlayer why guns are a no-no? That WILL come up again. In fact, it's the kind of thing Joss might have spent some more of his precious few comic pages on rather than zombies.
How do we jump from "Warren's a magically animated living dead creature" to "Warren has no soul"?
Since when do any undead creatures or demons have souls, unless they are magically re-inserted? (Now there's an idea for a spin-off; ensoul Warren and ship him off to his own 'verse where he helps the helpless and eats pig's brains.) I'm the first to agree that the soul concept is confusing at best and ridiculous at worst, but them's the rules of the 'verse. If it kills without soul, kill it without mercy.
Buffy is charismatic and beautiful and has shiny hair, and can inspire other people to follow her. She's by far the bigger threat to humanity.
From Voll's perspective, sure. And by not killing a monster like Warren, she'd be confirming that suspicion. Funnily enough, Warren is Voll's minion... As elisi said, this is really Angel territory. And so far, Voll's no Holtz.
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I was thinking of her too, although Faith's speech made a better quote. :)
As for the Council, they may talk piously about protecting humanity, but they also arrange the Cruciamentum for 18-year old Slayers, and maintain a wetworks team. (Interestingly, the shooting script for 'Who Are You?' has Giles saying he's not aware they've ever taken out a contract against a human... but that line was cut before broadcast and never spoken. :) Not that Giles was exactly in the loop where the Council was concerned anyway).
So what am I getting at here? Um... that maybe if the Council did say killing humans was wrong, they were also a huge bunch of hypocrites. :)
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The Council was fighting a war, the Slayer was their weapon. Human casualties (*cough*Ben*cough*) would be consigned as 'collateral damage' and they'd not worry about it overmuch. Such things happen, tragic, but true.
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If Faith thought like that, and so did TankGirlSlayer in S8, how many more Slayers will come to believe it? Enough to outvote Buffy?
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My point is that Warren is pretty pointless.
*beat*
Well you know what I mean.
He *could* been seen as the very end-product of a descent into evil and monster-ness, but honestly with all the vampires around, doing the same thing, why bother?
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Well, THAT goes without saying. :-) As far as I understand it, the rule isn't "no humans should die" but "the Slayer shouldn't kill humans" (or, if you will, "soldiers fight wars, but they don't get to shoot civilians"). Which, in a way, is one more nail in the Council-controlling-the-Slayer coffin that turned out to be one of the pegs around which the whole series turned...
I started the thread with Tolstoy, here's Dostoevsky: if the Council's rules are removed, does this mean anything goes? In other words, does the absence of God mean all moral laws are dismissed?
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Can't keep from adding my 2c.
I think the s8 differs from X-Men drastically. For X-Men their abilities are a real burden in the majority of cases. They are freaks: either ugly-looking, or unable to touch other people, or something else. Their abilities usually have nasty side-effects. So when humans find the means to heal them, many mutants see it as their salvation. And, for many of them, it is. And the actual conflict is between those who want to change back into humans and those who don't.
But slayer's abilities don't have negative side effects. Their loneliness is a social side-effect, imposed by the Council. Otherwise, they're young gorgeous babes who also may win in a fight against Terminator. Faith's example proves that no prison can keep them under control. And they don't have a reason to comply to human rules.
Unlike X-men, they're master race who consists mainly of teenagers (a very unstable and arrogant species, believe me, I'm a mother of two adult children and I vividly remember their teenage phase) and who absolutely don't need humans. And they don't want to give up their power.
In RL such situation would go out of control very quickly. In several months these 1800 teenage girls would rule (or destroy?) the world. Or be destroyed by human governments. I wonder if writer's honesty will clash with genre conventions and how far is Joss ready to go in suspension-of-disbelief route.
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Slayers do have power and potential influence in the demon world and that raises questions about the extent to which the world of the Buffyverse is run by demons. Is the Twilight organisation truly anti-demon, protecting the status quo or planning a apocalypse all of his own (and hoping to move into power himself once the demons have gone).
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Agree, but, unlike mutants, slayers may disappear in the crowd. They may impose global terror. They may create new cult. In any case, in RL the whole social system would be completely destabilized and, I suppose that "a good shot" - or rather "many good shots" would be the most probable scenario.
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So can normal human terrorists. I can see that the existence of Slayers might reek havoc with professional sports organisations but unless their demon hunting proclivities come into conflict with the social order prevalent in the Buffyverse it's not obvious why 1800 Slayers would cause more problems than however many vampires and demons there are in this world.
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Really interesting issue. I've got the impression that within Jossverse demons' and humans' power structures never mingle. They exist on separate planes. It's just a plot necessity that is and will be maintained as one of the basic rules of the show. But slayers in s8 are depicted as members of human society who are supposed to live by human laws.
Again, I agree that Willow has much greater power than Buffy and in RL The New Initiative would have focused on her, but I believe it's another suspension-of-disbelief moment: since the show's name is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not Willow the Mighty Witch, Joss is and will be downplaying Willow's power and will focus of slayers' issues.