genius, endings, fans, moving on
Feb. 26th, 2003 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennybut first, for the librarians among us
Found via Bookslut: Librarian Pick-Up Lines. My personal favorite? My budget just got cut, buy me a drink. Runner-up: I can do the neatest thing with a full set of the OED.
okay, on with the show
Slayage has a link to a Zap2It story that seems trustworthy: Sarah Michelle Gellar is leaving Buffy after this season. And in the interview with Joss Whedon I linked to a while back, they ask him if this is the last season of Buffy, and he says, God, I hope so.
To which I say: good on you. Good on both y'all.
Not because I'm tired of Buffy, but precisely because I'm not. See, once upon a time, I loved The X-Files. It wasn't as brilliant a show as BtVS, but it was innovative and quirky, frequently frightening in a way BtVS almost never is, and I loved Scully. Really, I loved Scully in a way that I think I don't love anybody on BtVS, although I love the collective Slayerettes, and am invested in them, far more than I loved anything about The X-Files. But Scully was special. I still miss her.
But Chris Carter couldn't understand that he had to quit while he was ahead. And so The X-Files dragged on, through the misery of Season 8 and the unspeakable nightmare that was Season 9. (Horrible tests! Random women! Dark secrets!) We were a fairly hard-core group of fans (me,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck, MH, and a couple RL friends), and we had to stop watching. We simply could not abide the travesty that the show had become. We watched the series finale out of a sense of (tragically misplaced) loyalty, and were, all five of us, screaming at the television for the acutely painful lameness of every word that came out of the characters' mouths. We won't go into the intense lameness of the plot, or the vomit-worthy final scene. Let's just draw a veil over the carnage and move on.
My point is that Chris Carter didn't know when to give up; he kept pushing the show on into new seasons, when the evidence was rising around his ears that his stars were tired, his writers were tired, and he had nothing more to say. Nothing.
Carter was a man with one really good idea, an idea which powered the first three to five seasons of The X-Files. The subsequent deterioration of the show--and his inability to launch anything else that wasn't automatic crap--suggests that that one good idea was all he had to offer. Or perhaps that he got swept into the money-making machine and didn't have the cojones to refuse to play. That happens a lot in f&sf publishing and is responsible for a lot of the worst books you never want to read.
Joss Whedon, I would argue, is a genius. BtVS is a show that has taken its initial idea and spun it, first one way, then the other, turned it upside down and shaken it ... in 7 seasons, we haven't come to the bottom of the Buffyverse. The power of the storytelling isn't dependent on externally imposed parameters of the universe. For me, The X-Files started to lose cohesion as soon as they said, Yes, there are aliens. The first three seasons are amazing because of the constant up-in-the-air ambiguity, the unresolved war between Scully's science and Mulder's belief. Once the show came down heavily and with finality on Mulder's side, *sigh* The End Was--well, sadly Not Nigh. But it should have been. Carter never really had the sense to see the story was over. Whedon does, bless his geeky socks.
Not, mind you, that I wouldn't just about sell my soul for a Faith-centric spin-off. But that's 'cause I'm a fan, and I don't have to worry about coming up with new stories.
It's one of the things I most dread: that I'll become a published novelist, there will start being pressure to continue a series I don't have anything more to say in, and *I* won't have the guts to say no. Because I've read so many stories just run into the ground and it's stupid and wasteful and ass-backwards to the way things are supposed to be.
Fans are greedy. That's part of being a fan. We always want more: more Buffy, more Miles Vorkosigan, more Wizard of Oz books, more Sherlock Holmes ... Human beings are hungry for stories, and we get addicted to stories that we really like. That's what the endless series of romance novels are all about; they're feeding an addiction for a particular flavor of story, which the romance publishing industry has figured out how to divorce from individual authors and characters.
In f/sf, it sometimes works that way (Star Trek novels, TSR novels, etc.), and sometimes not. The media franchises seem to me relatively harmless, although nothing I want to spend my time on. It's when the addiction latches onto a particular story that things start to crumble. It seems sad and ironic and typical of the human condition that fans' love for a story can destroy it. I'm not going to give examples, because I'm feeling strangely unlike a vindictive bitch this morning, but I imagine most people can supply their own.
I'm not trying to say that loving a story and wanting more of it is a bad thing. Because it's not. And some authors (Terry Pratchett springs to mind here) can continue to give their readers more story indefinitely and still have new things to say, new things that they're excited about. It's when the fans turn into a Roman mob a la Coriolanus and the popularity of the story becomes the deciding factor instead of the integrity of the story, that's when people start becoming Chris Carters. (And can I just say how deeply it disturbs me that my fingers keep trying to type "Christ Carter"?)
There's a point where you have to let go of a story, have to admit that you have nothing new to say. Joss Whedon can see that point when he hits it, and Sarah Michelle Gellar's decision, while made for her own reasons, gives him a wall at his back. I don't want to see BtVS turn into the shambling zombie that The X-Files did, so, while I'm sad, this is still good news.
Found via Bookslut: Librarian Pick-Up Lines. My personal favorite? My budget just got cut, buy me a drink. Runner-up: I can do the neatest thing with a full set of the OED.
okay, on with the show
Slayage has a link to a Zap2It story that seems trustworthy: Sarah Michelle Gellar is leaving Buffy after this season. And in the interview with Joss Whedon I linked to a while back, they ask him if this is the last season of Buffy, and he says, God, I hope so.
To which I say: good on you. Good on both y'all.
Not because I'm tired of Buffy, but precisely because I'm not. See, once upon a time, I loved The X-Files. It wasn't as brilliant a show as BtVS, but it was innovative and quirky, frequently frightening in a way BtVS almost never is, and I loved Scully. Really, I loved Scully in a way that I think I don't love anybody on BtVS, although I love the collective Slayerettes, and am invested in them, far more than I loved anything about The X-Files. But Scully was special. I still miss her.
But Chris Carter couldn't understand that he had to quit while he was ahead. And so The X-Files dragged on, through the misery of Season 8 and the unspeakable nightmare that was Season 9. (Horrible tests! Random women! Dark secrets!) We were a fairly hard-core group of fans (me,
heres_luck, MH, and a couple RL friends), and we had to stop watching. We simply could not abide the travesty that the show had become. We watched the series finale out of a sense of (tragically misplaced) loyalty, and were, all five of us, screaming at the television for the acutely painful lameness of every word that came out of the characters' mouths. We won't go into the intense lameness of the plot, or the vomit-worthy final scene. Let's just draw a veil over the carnage and move on.My point is that Chris Carter didn't know when to give up; he kept pushing the show on into new seasons, when the evidence was rising around his ears that his stars were tired, his writers were tired, and he had nothing more to say. Nothing.
Carter was a man with one really good idea, an idea which powered the first three to five seasons of The X-Files. The subsequent deterioration of the show--and his inability to launch anything else that wasn't automatic crap--suggests that that one good idea was all he had to offer. Or perhaps that he got swept into the money-making machine and didn't have the cojones to refuse to play. That happens a lot in f&sf publishing and is responsible for a lot of the worst books you never want to read.
Joss Whedon, I would argue, is a genius. BtVS is a show that has taken its initial idea and spun it, first one way, then the other, turned it upside down and shaken it ... in 7 seasons, we haven't come to the bottom of the Buffyverse. The power of the storytelling isn't dependent on externally imposed parameters of the universe. For me, The X-Files started to lose cohesion as soon as they said, Yes, there are aliens. The first three seasons are amazing because of the constant up-in-the-air ambiguity, the unresolved war between Scully's science and Mulder's belief. Once the show came down heavily and with finality on Mulder's side, *sigh* The End Was--well, sadly Not Nigh. But it should have been. Carter never really had the sense to see the story was over. Whedon does, bless his geeky socks.
Not, mind you, that I wouldn't just about sell my soul for a Faith-centric spin-off. But that's 'cause I'm a fan, and I don't have to worry about coming up with new stories.
It's one of the things I most dread: that I'll become a published novelist, there will start being pressure to continue a series I don't have anything more to say in, and *I* won't have the guts to say no. Because I've read so many stories just run into the ground and it's stupid and wasteful and ass-backwards to the way things are supposed to be.
Fans are greedy. That's part of being a fan. We always want more: more Buffy, more Miles Vorkosigan, more Wizard of Oz books, more Sherlock Holmes ... Human beings are hungry for stories, and we get addicted to stories that we really like. That's what the endless series of romance novels are all about; they're feeding an addiction for a particular flavor of story, which the romance publishing industry has figured out how to divorce from individual authors and characters.
In f/sf, it sometimes works that way (Star Trek novels, TSR novels, etc.), and sometimes not. The media franchises seem to me relatively harmless, although nothing I want to spend my time on. It's when the addiction latches onto a particular story that things start to crumble. It seems sad and ironic and typical of the human condition that fans' love for a story can destroy it. I'm not going to give examples, because I'm feeling strangely unlike a vindictive bitch this morning, but I imagine most people can supply their own.
I'm not trying to say that loving a story and wanting more of it is a bad thing. Because it's not. And some authors (Terry Pratchett springs to mind here) can continue to give their readers more story indefinitely and still have new things to say, new things that they're excited about. It's when the fans turn into a Roman mob a la Coriolanus and the popularity of the story becomes the deciding factor instead of the integrity of the story, that's when people start becoming Chris Carters. (And can I just say how deeply it disturbs me that my fingers keep trying to type "Christ Carter"?)
There's a point where you have to let go of a story, have to admit that you have nothing new to say. Joss Whedon can see that point when he hits it, and Sarah Michelle Gellar's decision, while made for her own reasons, gives him a wall at his back. I don't want to see BtVS turn into the shambling zombie that The X-Files did, so, while I'm sad, this is still good news.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-02-26 10:05 am (UTC)Okay, my big XF theses:
On UST (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=melymbrosia&itemid=40620)
On the MSR (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=melymbrosia&itemid=31569)
On what I liked about the damned finale (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=melymbrosia&itemid=115941)
no subject
Date: 2003-02-26 11:05 am (UTC)Also, those posts made me remember my mad crazy Doggett love from S8. And that's good. Because my love for Doggett was all-consuming and made me forgiving of some truly craptastic episodes. I so very badly wanted the damn show to forget Mulder already! and go ahead and let the relationship between Doggett and Scully unfold and blossom in all its prickly dysfunctional weird-ass gender-subversive glory. Also sans sprog-arc.
And I still think "Invocation" was one of the best X-Files episodes, for particular values of "best," that we ever got. Although that's probably just my biases showing through.
Anyway, thank you for the pointers and for the interpretive framework that allows both show and analysis to be functional. It helps.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-27 08:17 am (UTC)The only other person I know who likes "Invocation" is also a huge Doggett fan. I don't think it's horrible, but I think it does stupid *and unnecessary* things to Scully's characterization, and mostly it just bored me.
My biggest problem with the Doggett-Scully relationship was that it was rushed into this forced and unrealistic peace, whereas it made much more sense with Scully's character and also the two actors had much more chemistry when Scully was bristling with distrust towards him.
Er, how was it gender-subversive?
no subject
Date: 2003-02-27 08:41 am (UTC)Well, maybe it wasn't. But what I liked about it (and I totally agree with you about the stupid over-rushed detente) was that here's Doggett, this guy with the military training and the kind of low-key macho swagger (I loved him more every time he said "May we come in?" after he was already in the house) and the chip on his shoulder and all the rest of it ... and when Scully tells him what to do, he does it. The subway episode (sorry, cannot for love nor money remember X-Files ep titles) was stupid in a lot of ways, but it does have that great moment where the chauvinist jerk says something like, Why are we doing what she says? and Doggett just says, She's the boss. I was completely charmed by his willingness to accept Scully's authority and by how absolutely unthreatened he was by the fact that she was smarter than him. To me, Doggett (as played by the incomparable Robert Patrick--i.e., I don't know how much of what I love was what RP did with the character as opposed to what the character was in and of himself) was a much more interesting character than Mulder. Now, they did stupid stupid things with him and clearly never cared about him the way they did about Mulder, but that was their fault, not his.