VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 09:09:53 04/25/07 Wed
Author: Age
Subject: Re: L.W.Look at 8.1 (Spoilers) Part Six.
In reply to: Age 's message, "Re: L.W.Look at 8.1 (Spoilers) Part Five." on 09:08:23 04/25/07 Wed

Still, who is to say that these demons should be put down? Why shouldn’t they continue their joyful destruction and consumption of human beings? Who? Only someone with enough power to stop them, that’s who. As we learned back in season seven, it’s about power. Back to the beginning, before the big bang, back to the real beginning, everything starts and ends with power, in whatever form that takes, whether physical, emotional or conceptual, whether its fighting with a pointy stick and a whole wad of demon soul stuck into you without your permission or activating a whole bunch of potentials in the face of a formidable army of uber vampires, that which gives you power allows you to act on your choice, allows you to live. What you do with that power distinguishes you from being simply an animal or a child; with great power comes great responsibility…but that’s another comic book character.

Now, let’s assume these demons have metaphorical content. Firstly, they have killed inside a church. While there’s no overt religious meaning here, there’s certainly the idea that these demons hold nothing sacred, especially that which the reader would hold the most, namely his or her life. The general condition of decay and degradation of the church add to this idea. There’s something deeply rotten here, something that has long since lost its natural human state and has been taken over by something violent and violating. One might venture that the exaggerated hiss of the demons’ speech as an allusion to Gollum might suggest this also, as well as the ‘Rings’ theme of ultimate power in the hands of one being the metaphorical idea these sisters are here to slay. As the three demons are huge, dwarfing the slayers and reminding the reader of the original power imbalance that girl power was meant to rectify, the original idea of problems getting too big when you hide them away, just as these demons were locked away in this church, comes to mind. There are three demons the colour of green, and three, so far, green slayers accompanying Buffy. Buffy is showing the new team members how to face their demons literally and metaphorically, here the demons of inexperience. The final panel shows this whole heartedly with the demon announcing his intention through his culinary remarks (the new slayers are just going to get eaten up) and Buffy through her full on run at the demon. It may well be that there are two other Buffys acting as decoys for the real one, but this Buffy is acting as decoy for the slayers under her command/care, distracting and disarming to some extent the demons in order to gain the upper hand…as has always been the role of her diminutive size as disguise.

Turning the pages…

Buffy takes on the demon single handedly on the next page. I’m not a comic book reader. To be honest I’d have preferred a new TV series, but beggars can’t be choosy. Still, the huge words describing the sounds just made me think parody having grown up with the campy satirical Batman series of the sixties. Is this meant to be funny or am I just out of parlance with comic-speak? I guess in a visual only medium you have to do what you can to create the scene and enhance the action. And enhance the drama. That’s what this set of panels is meant to do. The arrangement of the panels is logical, and the two on the right have been put there because the writer wants to convey the meaning of the one on the left: if you turn your back on your demons, this, the two panels on the right, is what happens: you lose what you hold sacred, your life, as symbolized by the cross and candles, the latter yet another symbol of the many like the stars seen earlier. Wow, this derelict old church is not as disused as first thought by its appearance. There’s still spiritual life left in it. Buffy’s acting alone also reminds the reader of what happens when you do act alone: you are vulnerable and, as the final panel at the bottom shows, you leave others vulnerable too. It seems that Buffy has acted recklessly, but there’s a plan, divide and conquer, which the reader knows is about to take place because the writer has the demons telegraph it for him/her: these are not sad little girls and the element of surprise may be just the other side of the stain glass windows that reminded me of Star Wars figures for some reason.

Let’s turn the page before the green slayers get eaten by the big green hungry monster demon thingies. Still, I wonder what words would be put on the panels to signify the sounds of eating: SSSCRUNCH, SSSSLURP, SSSBURP!

Boy, these slayers just love breaking down barriers: CRISSH! UUURLUGH! Holy destruction, Batman. And great gallons of metaphorical green blood (cause it always has to be blood)! What was I saying about slayers not turning their backs on demons, well, for all you demons out there, never turn your backs on windows, there may be a handful of slayers with sci-fi harpoons just waiting to make whale mincemeat out of you, sci-fi whale mincemeat, not the real kind. Well, this is a Long way from Home: sci-fi stakes of the metal kind. A crack team of slayers covering each others backs and misdirecting the big bads: you almost might think that these ladies are so well organized and professional that they would be seen as a threat to an established military, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I mean, not only are these young women good at what they do, they aren’t all American, for goodness sake. I mean it’s like the reader has stumbled into a terrestrial version of Star Trek with its multi-species crew. Buffy even used a ‘phaser’ earlier in the comic!)

You mean the slayers only got two of them! Damn, that means there’s a set up to have Buffy make a come back from her first encounter and show that you never give up facing your demons. Improvising as usual, Buffy takes the symbol of life/personal responsibility, the cross, and uses it to kill that which would kill life and take no responsibility for it. The demon just has no idea what it’s up against. It thinks this young woman is stupid when in fact she’s smart and versatile, using the physical object as a means of ramming home the point about life and underestimating women, with the demon’s reference to her as human reminding us what this fight is all about. What’s that old saying attributed to Freud that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar; well, a pointy object, even if it’s shaped like a metaphor, is still a pointy object; here again the literally physical and the metaphorical both included, the masculine and the feminine. A demon may be a metaphor but literally in the story it’s still just something to stop. Finally in this set of panels, I’m not sure that the joke about the demon, now dead, starting to fear the cross, isn’t really a reference to the organization gaining more power and the undead beginning to fear this real threat to them.

End of Part Six.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Post a message:
This forum requires an account to post.
[ Create Account ]
[ Login ]
Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.