Since I'm the one who made the argument you are critiquing, I guess I should reply.
1. Your clarification about B&R:DK is an improvement on the original formulation. But it continues to carry with it a strong assumption: namely that *the* way to tell any story about this material is to be serious. You rule out someone who might want to do a satire on that material, who might want to tell it the way the old series did -- which was a lot of fun for me as a kid, and so on. If the basic material is that rich, it ought to be capable of being treated from very different approaches. Basically you and the originators of this argument are taking ONE approach, canonizing it, and then measuring all comers by that standard. So I stand by my rejection of the argument. I'm happy to say with BGF that B&R fails by its own standards. I'm willing to say that if I could only chose one approach, my own preference would be DK. But I'm not willing to say that DK is the standard by which all other treatments of the batman myth should be measured. Like I say, I still have a soft spot for Adam West, and I'm not going to let Christian Bale make me renounce him. West does spoof/satire very well. Bale does brooding/serious very well. Happily, we live in a world where both are not only allowed, but positively celebrated.
2. I have no problem with an argument that confines itself to saying that season 8 isn't doing right by its own source material. Notice that Promethea doesn't need to come up in that argument. I'm not willing to say such arguments are right -- but they are fair arguments to make.
3. I don't see that Promethea is a similar story, since I'm not yet sure if the universe really is sentient and so on (preview page from #36 says we don't really know what's going on yet). Even if it is, critique #1 applies in full force. Like you I haven't read Promethea, but it sounds like it takes all these dimensions and fucking to new planes of existence *seriously*. Certainly that's implied in the critique that season 8 is too cartoonish for that subject matter. But what if that's exactly what Joss wants to do? He's saying -- look, you might believe in a world with kabbalah and mystical realms and what not, but I'm an atheist and I think at the end of the day all you have is a Daffy Duck cartoon. He's saying all this kabbalah stuff is a joke. He's allowed to mock Moore, if that is, indeed, what he's doing. I certainly think he is mocking here. Now, if it turns out that we are supposed to read this as a straight-up serious story about Buffy reuniting with her true love and bolting to a new dimension with said love and it's epic tragic because to have her true happiness, Buffy has to sacrifice the world, or to save the world she has to sacrifice her place in Shangri-la with Angel, then yeah -- the tone is not serious enough for the subject matter. But until I get Jossed in Last Gleaming, I think it's more straight-forward to take the tone as written. Y'all want epic true love for ever? Take that. Y'all want to think that Buffy can evolve to some knew plain and get some higher purchase on the human wisdom or whatever it is that the Moore characters get (judging from the wiki summary)? Take that. It is a joke. There is no higher truth. There's just the freedom to say fuck this and get back to the business of life. Which, in point of fact, is exactly what Buffy does here. There is a LOT of meta that works very well for the tone as given. Whether it works in story is another question. I want to know more about this new mythology and broiling oceans and what not. #36 gives us one preview page that suggests we are going to hear more about wheret that comes from. But IF Joss can tie this into the story, I think the meta stuff is terrific. And the tone is exactly right. BtVS has had cheesy monsters from the word go. That is and always has been one of the points. Having Buffy get to a Daffy Duck cartoon and say fuck this is so very Buffy. The pages I've seen from Promethea and the summary of that story are so very NOT Buffy. Season 8 may fail. But it'd fail worse if it tried to adopt the tone Promethea seems to adopt.
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carisma_sensei
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Date: Jul. 13th, 2010 09:45 pm (UTC)1. Your clarification about B&R:DK is an improvement on the original formulation. But it continues to carry with it a strong assumption: namely that *the* way to tell any story about this material is to be serious. You rule out someone who might want to do a satire on that material, who might want to tell it the way the old series did -- which was a lot of fun for me as a kid, and so on. If the basic material is that rich, it ought to be capable of being treated from very different approaches. Basically you and the originators of this argument are taking ONE approach, canonizing it, and then measuring all comers by that standard. So I stand by my rejection of the argument. I'm happy to say with BGF that B&R fails by its own standards. I'm willing to say that if I could only chose one approach, my own preference would be DK. But I'm not willing to say that DK is the standard by which all other treatments of the batman myth should be measured. Like I say, I still have a soft spot for Adam West, and I'm not going to let Christian Bale make me renounce him. West does spoof/satire very well. Bale does brooding/serious very well. Happily, we live in a world where both are not only allowed, but positively celebrated.
2. I have no problem with an argument that confines itself to saying that season 8 isn't doing right by its own source material. Notice that Promethea doesn't need to come up in that argument. I'm not willing to say such arguments are right -- but they are fair arguments to make.
3. I don't see that Promethea is a similar story, since I'm not yet sure if the universe really is sentient and so on (preview page from #36 says we don't really know what's going on yet). Even if it is, critique #1 applies in full force. Like you I haven't read Promethea, but it sounds like it takes all these dimensions and fucking to new planes of existence *seriously*. Certainly that's implied in the critique that season 8 is too cartoonish for that subject matter. But what if that's exactly what Joss wants to do? He's saying -- look, you might believe in a world with kabbalah and mystical realms and what not, but I'm an atheist and I think at the end of the day all you have is a Daffy Duck cartoon. He's saying all this kabbalah stuff is a joke. He's allowed to mock Moore, if that is, indeed, what he's doing. I certainly think he is mocking here. Now, if it turns out that we are supposed to read this as a straight-up serious story about Buffy reuniting with her true love and bolting to a new dimension with said love and it's epic tragic because to have her true happiness, Buffy has to sacrifice the world, or to save the world she has to sacrifice her place in Shangri-la with Angel, then yeah -- the tone is not serious enough for the subject matter. But until I get Jossed in Last Gleaming, I think it's more straight-forward to take the tone as written. Y'all want epic true love for ever? Take that. Y'all want to think that Buffy can evolve to some knew plain and get some higher purchase on the human wisdom or whatever it is that the Moore characters get (judging from the wiki summary)? Take that. It is a joke. There is no higher truth. There's just the freedom to say fuck this and get back to the business of life. Which, in point of fact, is exactly what Buffy does here. There is a LOT of meta that works very well for the tone as given. Whether it works in story is another question. I want to know more about this new mythology and broiling oceans and what not. #36 gives us one preview page that suggests we are going to hear more about wheret that comes from. But IF Joss can tie this into the story, I think the meta stuff is terrific. And the tone is exactly right. BtVS has had cheesy monsters from the word go. That is and always has been one of the points. Having Buffy get to a Daffy Duck cartoon and say fuck this is so very Buffy. The pages I've seen from Promethea and the summary of that story are so very NOT Buffy. Season 8 may fail. But it'd fail worse if it tried to adopt the tone Promethea seems to adopt.