Warren Meers: Short drabble, long meta
Jun. 26th, 2007 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyRight, 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.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-06-27 03:49 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-27 04:31 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-27 05:55 pm (UTC)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.