…will probably die for

Spike Omnibus TPB

Hey, all you fellow Spike lovers!

Love him or hate him, few can deny that this was and is one of the most fascinating characters — and character arcs — ever to appear on television.

He had and has style and wit. He was and is sexy, vicious, romantic, loyal… a monster with the soul of a poet and even, eventually, a champion…

And did James Marsters ever play him convincingly!

Could anyone else have played him as well? I find it hard to imagine.

Learn more about the bad boy of the Buffy-verse in Spike’s earliest stories like Lost & Found, Old Wounds and Old Times, then read along as Spike battles that lord of the undead in Spike vs. Dracula, and finally catch up with Spike as he heads to the Asylum on a work-for-hire mission before heading to Japan to stop maniacal puppets in Shadow Puppets. It’s more Spike than you can shake a sharp, wooden stake at!

Get It Now: $22.49

I don’t know what this says about me, but I enjoyed the music, I enjoyed the imagery, I just enjoyed it! But it’s kinda hot, so be sure to keep your toddlers away from this, as well as your monks, your priests, your puritans, your uptight relatives, your sexually repressed neighbors… well, you get the pic.

The Chosen One, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, needs help against the evil minions of Sunnydale! Wanna help? Roll the dice to battle the monsters directly, or cast some mighty magic spells against Buffy’s foes. The game is designed to showcase Buffy’s toughest challenges and her greatest strengths, which are all controlled by a roll of the die. The game board features familiar characters, of course (like Willow, Buffy, Oz, Xander) and locations from the hit TV show (like the Sunnydale High School and the Sunnydale cemetery).

There are four villains and scenarios to the game: the Master from Season One, the Judge from Season Two, the Mayor from Season Three, and Adam from Season Four. Though the other seasons are not represented, the various scenarios do effectively make this four games in one, albeit very related. And of course with a little imagination, you can make up variations on the different scenarios, i.e., changing the villains, or making one of the good guys into a bad guy or vice versa.

That’s the good.

Now here’s the bad:

This game takes a little while to set up and learn the rules. Even so, in my opinion, kids will get a lot more out of it than adults will — unless you are very much the kid at heart (like I can be from time to time), in which case you may love it as much as the best show ever made for television. (Er, I’m speaking of BtVS of course.) And if you expect it to be educational, well, not bloody likely as Spike might say. It does generate discussions of the Buffy mythos, and that can never be a bad thing. But it takes several players to play it right. Either that, or some will have to play more than one character. There are resources, weapons, and help cards (the help cards are all other characters from the show) for the good characters, and evil cards for the evil team.

A couple of other minor complaints: most of the weapons are, well, different kinds of stakes. Also, the villains rarely win. That’s the way we like it in the show, but it negates some of the motivation to play on the evil team. Also, the game won’t take a lot of abuse. It might be best to play it infrequently, or simply put it aside as a conversation piece or collector’s item.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Game

And with that said, I will get on with it:

So after all the discussion that has gone before, the natural questions may be, so what?, why are you making so much of it?, what does it all mean, or what do you, Elijah, believe it all means?

Well, fair enough. I’m most definitely getting to that, beginning with this post (the first part of what I expect to be a two part conclusion) but first, let me get one last semi-observation out of the way:

Although the show’s relative absence of hierarchies has already been discussed in previous posts, it recently has occurred to me that there is usually no tyranny of time either in BtVS, i.e., it is fairly rare that anyone punches a clock. Plot grows organically. It is (usually) driven by characters and events rather than by time constraints. This is not always and completely true, of course. Particular episodes and several of the overall season arcs are subject to some very explicit time pressures, i.e., options running out due to some looming deadline or another, but I believe, on balance, that the characterization is valid.

I bring this up because when characters are subject to the rule of time, it too, can be seen as establishing a type of tyranny, though entirely mechanistic. In fact, in modern life — actually, pretty much beginning with the dawn of the industrial age, the modern constraints of time and time management increasingly have proven to be one of the most impersonal and most demanding tyrannies of all. A lack of respect for another’s time, especially if that other is deemed to have a higher rank, has become the equivalent to many in our culture of showing disrespect for the the entire pantheon of modern hierarchies.

But enough of that, and back on the main topic of my conclusions — what do all my foregoing observations mean? To begin, I’d suggest the confluence of the lack, or essential insignificance, of hierarchies between, and imposed upon, the primary characters, along with the punctuated good-versus-evil duality, places a tremendous importance on the emotional, personal and intimate nature of those relationships.

This emphasis may even explain, at least partially (aside from the youth and physical attractiveness of many of the cast members, of course), why so much of fan fiction has been of an erotic nature.

The advantages to this emphasis on, for lack of a better term, ‘emotionality,’ for Joss and his fellow writers in terms of drama and immediacy, I hope, is rather obvious. For the very talented actors, mostly, who made up the primary cast of BtVS, I suspect there were also advantages (and challenges). But the main thrust of my conclusions is not what was advantageous to the creators of BtVS, but the how and the why — strictly in terms of the foregoing discussion — of the show’s appeal and what that appeal may have to say about our times. (No doubt, you recall my having broached those subjects in a previous post.)

I can no longer be sure where I first heard it, and I won’t take the time to research it just now, but I believe it was Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (and I will correct this at some point if I find out I’m wrong) who once concluded, more or less, that the purpose or merit of an artist can be evaluated by the extent to which he (or she) portrays or is able to give back to his (or her) age what it is most lacking.

Whoever might have said it, and whether or not the above is a fair spin on what Nietzsche actually said, I believe there may be some truth there, and so it naturally occurs to me that the lack of hierarchies and the emotional and intimate connections between the primary characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer very well may be some of what our mainstream society and culture are missing. And perhaps the argument could be extended by suggesting that the relative lack of time constraints in the show’s plotting, as well as the frequently discussed moral ambiguity in the show (also Nietzsche-ian in some sense), may also reflect, respectively, an experience and a perspective that have often been in short supply in recent years in our prevailing culture.

Let’s think about it. How many hierarchies do we find ourselves caught up in on a daily basis? How many of our relationships are essentially superficial? How many people in our daily lives do we feel truly intimate with? Don’t we sometimes feel as if we are emotionally closer to the characters in BtVS than we are with some of our own family members, and co-workers, and friends?

Perhaps I’m the only who has felt this way, but I rather doubt it. Not more than 75 years ago, the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world, including in the US, lived in extended multi-generational families and among friends and neighbors they would know for decades at least, if not for their entire lifetimes. Needless to say, the opportunities for intimate connections were, essentially, limitless. In recent decades, however, three or more generations living together in the same household is rare (or at least certainly so in the US and most western cultures), and so-called friends complain of having difficulty staying in touch, and those who do manage it stay in touch through artifice, e.g., via letters, phone calls, emails, or social media and so forth — all of which are far less intimate than yesteryear due to the lack of an actual physical presence.

It seems many of us are constantly moving from one place to another, breaking ties and estranging friends and lovers, losing contact even with those with whom we hope to stay in touch due, perhaps, to the pace of our lives and the difficulty of actually taking the time for long-distance "intimacy" — and sometimes it seems, even growing impatient and annoyed by the time it takes to maintain intimacies in the here and now of our lives.

The notion of staying in the same geographical location and being surrounded by the same people for your entire life seems quaint to many of us by today’s reckoning. Even in the statistically unlikely event that you have never found yourself relocating due to a career move, or otherwise, it is overwhelmingly likely some of your friends and family members already have done so, or soon will. Further, given the divorce rate in the US and some other western nations, it is evident not even our marriage bonds hold quite the same sense of permanence they once did.

So how often can truly intimate relationships propagate and flourish in our lives when, while still inchoate, much of the proximal basis for that intimacy is so frequently ripped away from us? Of course it’s just a theory, but maybe, just maybe, part of the appeal of BtVS is that very lack of respect for rank, and for hierarchies, that most of us can seldom get by with anymore, and the resultant and explicit intimacy between the primary characters that is so often scant in our own relationships.

By extension, the lack of time constraints is also an escape from much of our experience, no? (How many of us don’t feel any pressures to get to work, or church, or to business and doctor’s appointments, on time?) And any sense of moral ambiguity, well, that requires recognition of how complex the reality of our world really is — a level of sophistication we haven’t seen all that much of lately in our political leadership, our mainstream media, and perhaps especially, in our popular storytelling.

But before I belabor all these matters to the point of being boring or depressing (if I haven’t already), I’ll move on.

When I set out, my intention was to limit my discussion to the relationships of the primary characters in the world of Buffy Summers, but along the way, I have mentioned a few other matters (the extreme good-vs-evil dualism and the moral ambiguity often evident in the show coming immediately to mind), and have had some other unmentioned thoughts, some related, some not, about what some of the values are that are being communicated in the show, i.e., what Joss and his fellow creators were really up to, consciously or not, and I want to touch on some of that before I conclude.

And I will do so, but  — as this has already run on so long — in part two of this conclusion. Coming soon. I hope.

Duration : 0:2:10

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Anyhow, I understand well over 125,000 are expected this year. Awesome. But far more important, Joss Whedon, et al, are slated to play a major role in the festivities. Anybody want to get an exclusive video of Joss for me? Or give me an exclusive report? I’ll post it right here. I may even be able to pay you something.

But probably not. Money? For money?! What are you thinking? You should just do it in the spirit of fandom, y’know? It’s not like you or your kids need to buy more comics or anything, right?

Among various and sundry other events that include Whedon sometime associates (in one sense or another) like Georges Jeanty, Juliet Landau, Brian Lynch, Peter David, Morena Baccarin,  Jed and Zack Whedon, etc., a special screening of the Dollhouse never-before-seen episode Epitaph One is scheduled, followed by a Q&A with Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku, as well as a Q&A session with Joss Whedon about his upcoming projects with Dark Horse Comics and a special signing event, Dark Horse Presents: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (a ticketed event; see Dark Horse for details).

Also scheduled, an audience participation screening of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode Once More With Feeling is scheduled. It’s a major event. I understand the con will be closed with it. Whoa.

So . . . this is truly the age of Joss, but we all already knew that, didn’t we?

http://television.aol.com/insidetv/2009/07/13/greatest-tv-bad-boys