Yeah, I'm going there

[next_to_normal]

I've seen a couple posts now regarding Season 8 and Promethea and how they might be related. I'm not in any way qualified to talk about this, since I've never read Promethea, and my interest in Season 8 vanished long ago. But when has that stopped me from talking? lol

Anyway, the thing that got me thinking was eilowyn's comparison to Batman. The short version is this:

Season 8 : Promethea :: Batman and Robin : The Dark Knight

And it seemed like the criticism of that comparison is, "Batman and Robin wasn't meant to be serious, so you can't criticize it by saying, 'It's not serious enough.'" And that's where I started thinking (always dangerous, I know).

I think maybe the point isn't to say that Batman and Robin would've been better if it were more serious. I think it's to say that the source material (the story of Batman) is more suited to a serious, gritty tone than a cheesy, tongue-in-cheek one. And that's why The Dark Knight works better as a movie - because the storytelling matches the story.

I get that Batman and Robin wasn't meant to be serious, and that's exactly what's wrong with it. It's taking a serious story and telling it in an incompatible tone. The cheesiness undercuts the inherently tragic nature of Batman, which makes it neither a compelling drama nor a comedic romp. You can't make it better simply by cutting out the jokes. You have to tell a totally different story.

And that's the argument being made about Season 8, I think. It's not the appropriate tone for the source material. The bubblegum art doesn't fit the style of the TV series, the sentient Universe explanation doesn't fit the mythology of the TV series, the over-the-top space fucking doesn't fit the tone of the TV series, etc. And people are citing Promethea as an example of a similar story where they got those things right. The storytelling (art, mythology, tone, etc.) is suited to the story that Alan Moore is trying to tell (I'm assuming - like I said, I haven't actually read it). I think for a lot of people, Season 8's storytelling doesn't match the story of Buffy that we watched for seven years.

I don't think eilowyn or angearia are saying "Batman and Robin should be more like The Dark Knight." Batman and Robin was simply the wrong story to tell with that material. Season 8 is the wrong story to tell with this material. The take away I get isn't, "Season 8 should be more like Promethea!" but rather, "Season 8 should be more like Buffy... and a good way to do that is to examine how a really good comic with some notable similarities (Promethea) synthesizes the elements of its own story, and apply those techniques to the Buffyverse."

Redundant Disclaimer is Redundant: All art is subjective. That means that other people might think Season 8 is totally cut from the same cloth as the TV series. That doesn't mean the people who see a problem are wrong. It suggests that they latched onto different elements of the show, which may or may not have been carried over to the comics.

Now, y'all go ahead and argue. :) Except I don't really have enough knowledge to go deeper than that, and I'll be at class most of tonight anyway, so the arguing thing isn't likely to go anywhere, lol.

Comments

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

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.

[mikeda.livejournal.com]

Preview page? There's a preview page up from #36?

[next_to_normal]

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.

*sigh* Clearly I shouldn't have gone with a tiny font for my Redundant Disclaimer. People respond to things differently. If someone else thinks that the Batman story is more suited to a humorous or satirical tone, they're certainly free to do that, and if that captures the source material for some people, they'll probably enjoy it. I wouldn't be one of them, but I never said my opinion was the only one that mattered.

I feel like you're trying to make this much more absolute than it is, Maggie, and I don't know what to say to you other than "people think differently." Some of us don't like the way the story's being told. Maybe it is exactly the way Joss wants it to be told. That doesn't change the fact that I don't like it.

It doesn't matter to me whether Joss is being serious or whether he's mocking on purpose. I don't like the tone. It doesn't feel like Buffy to me, and no amount of other people telling me "NO BUT IT IS YOU'RE JUST READING IT WRONG" is going to change how I react to it.

I also don't get what the big deal is with talking about Promethea. You seem to be violently opposed to any type of comparison, and I don't really understand why. What's wrong with saying, "Hey, here's a comic with really beautiful art and a cool story, which I like so much better than season 8"? I think for most of us, having a point of comparison helps to illustrate what about season 8 is not working. I know for me, seeing flake_sake's comparison of the space fucking really brought home the failure of Jeanty's art. I disliked those scenes from the moment I saw them, but seeing something I liked better helped me articulate why I disliked it and what could have been changed to make it more appealing to me.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I totally get that a lot of folks don't like season 8 and I'm not trying to change any minds.

There's nothing wrong with saying here's a pretty story that I liked better.

Why is it a big deal to me? When the issue gets presented as an exercise in analogical logic like you'd get on the GRE's, rather than an emotional reaction, I feel compelled to reply. Logic says rational people should see it this way. And since I don't see it that way I feel compelled to reply about why the logic does not work. It's also the case that this got started with a post that was saying a great deal more than just Promethea is an example of a comic I could get behind. If that had been the initial argument I've got no quarrel. And if you want to say that season 8 sucks the way lots of other sucky things have sucked I've got no problem. But more than that was being said, and I didn't agree with it and I made the big mistake of saying so. Then it prompted first eilowyn and then you to take the argument out of the comment section to the original post and put it out more publicly, and I felt compelled to defend my argument (since both of you were pretty much directly targetting my argument). What can I say? If people go out of their way to make sure everyone knows why they think my arguments don't hold up,, I have too much ego to not respond and defend myself (when, as in this case, I think my arguments are quite defensible). But lesson is learned: Do not reply to anti-season 8 arguments on LJ. They are all good arguments.

[next_to_normal]

Maggie, I'll be honest. I think your arguments are just as emotionally driven as the other side, and I don't see the need to get snarky about it. If you don't want to argue anymore, don't argue, but please don't get snarky at me for expressing my opinion, even if it happens to be in response to yours.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I wasn't meaning to be snarky and I'm sorry it came across that way. It's just frustrating to be told, in essence, that I'm making too big of a deal about something when all I'm doing is replying to a public argument against my position. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but it comes across as: "now that I've had my say about why you're wrong, I'm going to bust your balls for going on about the subject". That's what leads me to the conclusion that I oughtn't to say anything at all. Let me know what you want here. I'm not trying to be a jerk.

[next_to_normal]

I'm certainly not telling you not to say anything at all. But I do feel like the conversation's not terribly productive at this point. I mean, the comparisons were put out there, and you said, "Those comparisons aren't valid." I said, "Hey, I think these comparisons are useful, and here's why." And you said, "Those comparisons aren't valid." I don't really know what else to say at that point. It feels like we can only criticize S8 on your terms, or you refuse to even acknowledge that our opinions might be things that we actually feel, rather than some nefarious scheme to bash Joss and S8.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I agree it's not productive, which is why I was surprised that you re-raised the issue -- and not by replying in a comment thread, but in a completely new post. It seemed to me like it had been well and truly done to death on eilowyn's thread. But having it re-raised made me feel called on to explain why I didn't think your amendment to Eilowyn's argument worked.

Anyway, enough of this. I am not, for the record saying you all don't feel what you feel or shouldn't feel what you feel. I don't mean *any* of this to say anybody should like season 8. I just don't like seeing charges levelled that I regard as unfair. I'm failing to make myself clear about why I think these charges were unfair, and it's not helpful to keep trying to explain why I thought they were unfair. But that is what I was trying to do. I've been known to defend people I hate when my sense of fair play gets violated. I'll try to refrain from that reaction on this subject in the future. Obviously from your POV it's all been fair play which would make my own reactions seem offensive to you. And for that, I am sorry.

[next_to_normal]

Honestly, I made a new post because I didn't read the conversation until yesterday, and at that point it was a couple days old. There's very little traffic on a two-day-old post, particularly when the comments have died down, so who would see it if I commented there?

To address the larger issue here, though, I feel like this statement of yours - Basically you and the originators of this argument are taking ONE approach, canonizing it, and then measuring all comers by that standard. - is the sentiment on both sides. EVERYONE feels like they're being dictated to and told how to think. And I think it's horribly silly.

It's ludicrous to think that any of us are looking at season 8 with any sort of dispassionate, impartial eye. Every single one of us has an intense emotional stake in BtVS - otherwise we wouldn't be in fandom. And with that kind of bias, I don't see how anyone can claim to be fully objective about season 8. We're all invested in some way, whether it's because we're excited to have new material to analyze and enjoy or because we're protective of our show and/or our favorite characters and don't want to see them tarnished. Everyone's just throwing out opinions, and it's largely emotional because that's what fandom IS, and yet people act as though anyone who disagrees with them is making pronouncements that automatically become law, and dissenters will be flogged and hanged in the town square. I just don't understand that AT ALL. I don't see why there's such a drive to INVALIDATE people's opinions - why can't people say what they think without it being a threat to someone else? I mean, that seems to be the issue here - you feel threatened (or you feel Joss is threatened) by the comparisons we're making, and I don't understand what the big deal is.

Er, sorry to rant at you. It's not just about you, it's a frustration I've had with fandom in general and season 8 in particular for quite a while now, and I'm starting to feel like 90% of fandom is just banging my head against a wall, which pretty much sucks.

Also, if you felt like I was coming after you personally by making a new post, I'm sorry. For future reference, if I did want to do that, it would look like this: "Maggie, I am calling you out." :) Otherwise, it's usually just saying something that happened to be prompted by something else. That's how a lot of posts come about - I'm betting that you didn't spontaneously decide to post about Batman in your journal coincidentally at the same time we're having this conversation. :)

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

In all internet seriousness, I agree with beer_good_foamy that Bats has been all over the map in terms of how he's been presented. The "Bat Shark Repellent" (and, really, that wacky awesomeness of that entire movie) is a fond memory. Burton's formula was a mixed bag, selecting bits and pieces that were funny and dark/scary. There were certain things I liked about Nicholson's Joker that I felt were missing in Ledger's (and vice versa), but they were both valid takes on that character, who is about as old as Batman himself.

It's worth noting that while Buffy is a very young character, she has also been depicted in more than one way. I thought Swanson's Buffy was very, very different than Gellar's, for example. So it doesn't surprise me that when presented in a third medium, there would again be marked differences in the way she was presented. If there's an animation or a reboot, we'll see yet more mutations. That's just what happens with beloved characters when the mass culture sinks its fangs it them. It's natural.

Think about fan-fic. Aren't all of our Buffy's slightly different?

[next_to_normal]

Yeah, I get that. The thing is, people have different ideas about what's essential to a character or a story, and the many versions of it will hit a person as "good" or "bad" depending on whether the interpretation includes the things that person thinks are important.

To use a different example, Maggie and Emmie found the Angel comics to be disappointing because they weren't polysemic. That's a quality they look for in Whedonverse stories, and After the Fall didn't have it. Other people thought After the Fall was just dandy, because they were there for the character relationships or the epic battles or even just because they thought NFA needed a resolution. Now, people might argue that there IS deeper meaning in ATF that Maggie and Emmie are just missing, but they can't tell them they're not allowed to criticize it on that level. Saying, "But it's not SUPPOSED to be polysemic" isn't going to make them enjoy it any more, because that's what they wanted out of the story and they didn't get it.

For a lot of people, season 8 is lacking something essential. And all of this discussion is just trying to identify and explain what that "something" is. It doesn't invalidate the opinions of people who think season 8 fulfills their Buffy needs - but it's clear they have different priorities.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

For a lot of people, season 8 is lacking something essential. And all of this discussion is just trying to identify and explain what that "something" is.

Hrrmm. For some reason I don't think we'll be able to come up with a universal answer for that. I'm sure there are many different"somethings", just as fans of the show seemed to enjoy it on many different levels. You used that great, juicy word "polysemic" and that's a bingo: multiple meanings and contradictory signifiers slathered on top of one another are going to produce different "somethings" in our heads.

For me, the comic left me flat fairly quickly, but I think for different reasons than some other fans had. For instance, one thing that took me out of it right away was their clusmy handling of "The Girl In Question." I smelled a cop-out right away. Even if they decided that they just HAD to go that route, there were far Jossier ways to go about it (The Buffybot, for instance, would have allowed an opportunity to capture the funny, kitschy aspects of the show while paying homage to the source material).

Skimming over the formation of this new Multi-Slayer reality in general also felt hamhanded to me. The 7th season of the show offered plenty of juicy unresolved "pinches" hanging, and after the first few issues I sensed that they were content to just leave them hanging permanently and start from scratch. In other words seemed like the "Season 8" thing was more a brand name for a reboot. Which, okay, but I couldn't get into it. For me the show was about the winding journeys of its various characters, and the comics seemed like they abrubtly stopped the car, picked a new destination, and made a hard left turn.

[next_to_normal]

For some reason I don't think we'll be able to come up with a universal answer for that. I'm sure there are many different"somethings", just as fans of the show seemed to enjoy it on many different levels.

I don't think anyone's trying to come up with a universal answer. Hell, most people have multiple answers just for themselves, let alone trying to figure out why anyone else doesn't like it.

That's the thing I don't get - the way that personal opinions get turned into universal statements that everyone in fandom is obligated to agree with. No one's saying that.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

That's the thing I don't get - the way that personal opinions get turned into universal statements that everyone in fandom is obligated to agree with.

BECAUSE THIS IS TEH INTERNET AND IT IS SERIOUS BUSINESS!

Well, anyway, you said you wanted discussion and that's what I think is happening here.

Frankly, there isn't much agreement about the show, either. How many people I've run afoul of that think Xander was supposed to be representative of a "racist" I swear I do not know. Hundreds? So, okay, that's how they experienced it. I don't have to think that's valid (I don't) or pretend it's valid for the sake of argument (I don't do that either). To me, opinons like these hold the same amount of water for me as people who don't think we landed on the moon. I just ignore it and keep on keepin' on.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

The batman post was definitely a response. :) If we're going to do it all above the line, as it were, I figured I should have my views represented above the line. Also, batman! I really do love Adam West's batman!

I get your rant -- fandom is frustrating. My adamence on this has to do with the specific form of the argument, which I regard as unfair. See Gabs reply to my batman post for another articulation of the same thing. It is not meant to be an adamence that people can't dislike season 8. I don't claim objectivity for my general reaction to the comics. Heck, I'm not even sure what my reaction will end up being -- I'm very far from saying "it's great" as is. I just think this one particular form of argument is unfair. It's all been blown up way out of proportion to the original sentiment, however --though as consolation, it generated a nice back and forth between me and flake sake on my thread, and I've learned some stuff from her and others.