From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #26 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Thursday, February 3 2000 Volume 02 : Number 026 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Willow / Tara speculation [GHighPine@aol.com] February sweeps predictions [GHighPine@aol.com] Re: Willow / Tara speculation [GHighPine@aol.com] Re: Willow / Tara speculation [meredith ] b/comments ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/the rumormongering continues [meredith ] Re: b/comments ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: Willow / Tara speculation ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: b/jung2 ["David S. Bratman" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 12:45:22 EST From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: Re: Willow / Tara speculation The more I think about this speculation, the more it does make sense to me structurally. Tara is a mirror to Willow -- same sex and same witch calling -- the way that Faith was a mirror to Buffy. And Willow has already been tempted to misuse her powers, so that theme has been set up. Lots of potential parallel between Willow / Tara and Buffy / Faith. I'm thinking, this may come to fruition right around the same time that Buffy is going through a moral crisis that reconnects with the Faith setup from last season. If it doesn't turn into revenge =on= Willow, it may go into the direction of Faith leading Buffy into the "want / take / have" ethic. Or possibly that first, then a revenge spell thing afterward. At any rate, though, I expect that Tara will represent a mirror for Willow of the temptations related to her calling. I also get a sense that Willow's line "I'm not your sidekick" from last night's rerun might be foreshadowing and tie into this arc. The one thing that I DON'T expect is a nice peaceful contented happy little romance. And betcha betcha the repercussions of this Tara arc will continue beyond this season. In a message dated 2/1/00 9:38:54 PM Pacific Standard Time, thuff_007@yahoo.com writes: << ClickTV often has the same synopses for Buffy episodes that TV Guide does, and the one for February 15th has a major, major spoiler. Something I haven't even seen speculated about in any of our posts. Beware. >> It's a good thing I don't know the URL for Click TV, because spoilers are so tempting. Let me guess, it involves some major change with or for Riley? Something, I would guess, paralleling the sudden shift in plotline when Faith killed Finch in February sweeps. (I had already speculated that Walsh might die -- because I believe that someone human will die and it will be Buffy's fault, and that it would happen during Feb sweeps. And Riley no longer seems like the most likely candidate, so Walsh is up there as a possibility -- so if this is something we never speculated about, it can't be that.) At the very least, we know that some startling and shocking change in plot direction is about to wham us. Gayle ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:45:17 EST From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: February sweeps predictions I have seen the titles of the next two episodes and they are both very suggestive. Next week is "The I In Team." This suggests to me that what I predicted a long time ago is happening: issues of control, which continue thematically the "graduation" of last season. The three Second Slayers (Kendra, Faith, and Riley) all represent different relationships with authority figures. The Initiative would not work with Buffy unless they could control her, and Walsh's speech about Buffy's lack of discipline in "A New Man" were, I believe, major foreshadowing for this episode. Week after is "Goodbye, Iowa." Iowa is Riley, the title suggests a major permanent change in him. Loss of innocence. He'll never be the same afterward. Is this the point last year when Faith killed Finch? It would be too repetitious for the Second Slayer to do a killing again. I think that Buffy will be (or feel, justifiably or not) responsible for killing someone. The only likely candidates seem like Riley and Walsh. Riley was my choice at first, but I doubt it now because the setup about the romance seems more a setup for emotional crisis between them, plus when I realized that Riley was the Second Slayer, Buffy's mirror for this season, I started to doubt he would be killed. Walsh seems more likely, since she has also started to play a role in Buffy's life. The only other likely candidates seem like Riley's friends, Forrest and Graham (?) Not that I am predicting this death will necessarily happen in this episode, but I think it will happen before February is out. Anybody have info on guest stars? (I'm especially interested in knowing when Faith and Oz will appear.) Gayle ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:11:39 EST From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: Re: Willow / Tara speculation In a message dated 2/2/00 10:16:09 AM Pacific Standard Time, kenneth.houghton@us.pwcglobal.com writes: << It's a pity that the ClickTV URL is so easy to guess. But don't bother, though I will remind you that the title of the episode is "Goodbye, Iowa"--and the refernce is not to Captain James Tiberius Kirk. (The interesting thing about the Feb 15 description is that it doesn't follow from the Feb 8th description--which reveals nothing that wasn't in the preview last night. So the real "revelation" may be this week.) >> Okay, I gave in and looked at the spoiler. Well, hm. No comment. 'Cept I think you may be right. It may not be intended as a spoiler for that episode because the event it spoiled may have already happened. And I think it =does= follow from what I predicted about the upcoming episode. Issues about control... if it hadn't been for Buffy's lack of discipline... I better shut up. Oo! Oo! What if there is a reversal of the Faith / Buffy role.... Faith comes and says, "You've become me..." I better shut up. Gayle ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2000 19:50:12 -0500 From: meredith Subject: Re: Willow / Tara speculation Hi! You people are all *evil*. I actually got as far as the ClickTV home page before I slapped myself upside the head. This is _Buffy_ we're talking about here. I *never* read the spoilers for this show! (_Xena_, on the other hand... now that's another matter entirely. :) Of course, I just found out I'll be away on business on the 15th, so I'll have to remain blissfully ignorant of what happens even longer than the rest of you. Sigh. +==========================================================================+ | Meredith Tarr meth@smoe.org | | New Haven, CT USA http://www.smoe.org/~meth | +==========================================================================+ | "things are more beautiful when they're obscure" -- veda hille | | *** TRAJECTORY, the Veda Hille mailing list: *** | | *** http://www.smoe.org/meth/trajectory.html *** | +==========================================================================+ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 21:50:26 -0500 (EST) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/comments Just a few random comments on things people have been saying. Thanks to Micole for passing along those Joss Whedon posts. I think another appropriate definition for "acceptable spoilers" would be "anything Joss Whedon is willing to tell us," i.e. mostly stuff we've guessed already. I was very cheered by the idea that all the Faith/Buffy dream will turn out to be meaningful. Very intrigued by the Tara speculations. Seems =very likely= to me that the demon's talisman is going to at least tempt her; something like that isn't introduced to be summarily dropped. I'm less sure about her being 1) not real 2) newly created; there's always a first time, of course, but the show tends to introduce new (real) characters as "shadows" (in the Jungian sense) as a matter of course. It's true that the dialog matches the speculative facts, though, so who knows. I haven't finished writing a long post about Riley, and about the character-constellations on the show (Gayle is right about Riley being the "second slayer," symbolically speaking), and I'll take up there some more stuff about Tara (and Willow and Amy). Soon. A coworker of mine surprised himself by coming up with something I hadn't thought of. He asked what had happened to the soul-restoring spell; I replied that I was nearly certain that Willow 1) still had the computer disk and/or 2) had downloaded it onto her computer and/or 3) still had the printout she used in "Becoming" (i.e. it was around somewhere). Why? Well, he said, could they use it to "curse" Spike? Huh. Hadn't thought about it, but why not? By the way, though I've bought all the =Buffy= novels and novelizations, I'm behind in reading them; but I scarfed down the most recent one, =Deep Waters=, by Laura Anne Gilman and Josepha Sherman, and I recommend it. Fairly light but plenty of chills, and they handle the characters very well. Involves selkies. (Their earlier title =Visitors= was also very entertaining.) Watching "Fear Itself" (the Halloween episode) again last night, I'm pretty sure after several viewings just where the ignore-Xander syndrome kicks in: just before the bat attack Willow turns back and says something to Xander, and after that no one even acknowledges him. For =several= scenes. Very very clever. One of the reasons to watch the reruns is to catch the "next week's scenes" clip. Nothing we couldn't have foreseen, except that...are we to surmise that the Initiative =takes Buffy prisoner=??? Wow. Jennifer: Good points. Obviously, I think =Buffy= is responsible horror (though I don't think it always foregrounds "real" horrors; it's pretty balanced between fantasy and reality). By the way, can you explain the differences, if any, between Hermeticism, Alchemy, and Rosicrucianism? They seem to be intersecting disciplines, at least (throw in Art of Memory, too, as I know that's a specialty of yours). I do have, to my surprise (found it in a box with John Crowley books, semi-logically), Frances Yates' Bruno/Hermeticism book, but her others are hard to come by. Gayle: Sorry. The diagrams are coded thus: "A-->B" means "Character A penetrates (in any Freudian sense) Character B" while "A-/->B" means "Character A fails to penetrate Character B." The symbols were supposed to more obviously represent arrows and struck-through arrows. Re Hindu mythology, I wonder if we're foundering on cultural differences again. Indo-European mythology (which includes Hindu, Greek/Roman, Norse, and Celtic among the better-known ones) seems to me to so pervade contemporary fantasy that it seems =much= more likely that patterns found in Hindu mythology would underlie Buffy than that alchemical esoterica would. But on the other hand Jung is digging out symbology on such a basic level that he's probably on to something too. By the way, looking at the broadcast schedules for the 2nd and 3rd seasons again, =both= years (as this year) had reruns the first Tuesday in February; so there's no anomaly there. After that point, 2nd season ran 3 episodes in 5 weeks before taking most of March and April off; 3rd season ran 3 straight (and 4 in 6 weeks) before its hiatus. So we're only going to get a few more new ones, probably, before waiting until late April or May. Argh. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2000 21:51:54 -0500 From: meredith Subject: b/the rumormongering continues Hi! Just saw this on www.scifi.com: >Updated 12:37pm ET on 2-February-2000 > >9:00am ET, 2-Feb-00 > >Fox Says Buffy Has A Future > >The WB's not talking, but 20th Century Fox >Television, which produces Buffy the Vampire >Slayer for The WB, says that no decisions have >been made about the future of the hit series >once its five-year contract with the network >expires in 2001. Seventeen magazine has >reported that The WB is considering jettisoning >the popular show because its ratings aren't >that high. > >"It's come up in the media," Kim Sandifer, >spokesperson for Twentieth Century Fox >Television, told SCI FI Wire. "The first time it >came up was last summer. Sandy Grushow, >[who was] at the time the head of the studio, >said that we're going to be looking for fair >market value for the show when it's time to >renegotiate" with The WB. > >Does Fox think that The WB is underpaying for >Buffy? "No," Sandifer said. "But when it comes >time to renegotiate, the studio wants to make >sure it gets fair market value for this show." In >any case, there's a future for Buffy, she added. >"The show 's going to be with The WB until >2001, so we have a year and a half before it >becomes an issue. ... It's too early to even >have those discussions." The WB declined >comment and referred questions to Fox. How utterly bizarre. +==========================================================================+ | Meredith Tarr meth@smoe.org | | New Haven, CT USA http://www.smoe.org/~meth | +==========================================================================+ | "things are more beautiful when they're obscure" -- veda hille | | *** TRAJECTORY, the Veda Hille mailing list: *** | | *** http://www.smoe.org/meth/trajectory.html *** | +==========================================================================+ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:13:30 -0500 (EST) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/comments I've been rather busy for several days -- still am, in fact -- but I wanted to take a little time to respond to some of these fascinating posts lately. This system doesn't facilitate combining quotes from different posts together, so there may be a few scattered ones from me. On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Donald G. Keller wrote: > I'm less sure about [Tara] being 1) not real 2) newly created; there's always > a first time, of course, but the show tends to introduce new > (real) characters as "shadows" (in the Jungian sense) as a matter of > course. It's true that the dialog matches the speculative facts, though, > so who knows. Always a first time indeed, but if not, what we're seeing here is the difference between the symbolic role and the subcreational role. Tara's symbolic pairing/childhood to Willow is evidence that she's a creature of Joss's imagination: for her to be a creature of Willow's imagination would be quite another matter. > Gayle: Sorry. The diagrams are coded thus: "A-->B" means "Character A > penetrates (in any Freudian sense) Character B" while "A-/->B" means > "Character A fails to penetrate Character B." The symbols were supposed to > more obviously represent arrows and struck-through arrows. If it's any consolation, I figured the symbols out, partly through matching them to what you'd said in the text. > By the way, looking at the broadcast schedules for the 2nd and 3rd seasons > again, =both= years (as this year) had reruns the first Tuesday in > February; so there's no anomaly there. After that point, 2nd season ran 3 > episodes in 5 weeks before taking most of March and April off; 3rd season > ran 3 straight (and 4 in 6 weeks) before its hiatus. So we're only going > to get a few more new ones, probably, before waiting until late April or > May. Argh. It's comments like this that make me realize that the literary equivalent of a show like this is a 19th-century serialized novel. Only in such a circumstance can there be such detailed analysis of an unfinished corpus. It's against etiquette, almost, to discuss, at least in public, a book (complete books, now) that you haven't finished reading: yet discussing a serial between installments is the very spice of life. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:18:16 -0500 (EST) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: Willow / Tara speculation So you think that Tara, like Faith, will turn out to have a dark side only dimly evident at the beginning? If so, I expect it will have something to do with her hunger for witchly power, which she's already expressed a certain yearning for. Willow, by contrast, is relatively blase about her power for power's sake; her witchly enthusiasm tends more towards simple intellectual curiosity and the equivalent of physical exercise. Now that Tara has seen what a "powerful" witch can do, there's potential for a conflict. On Wed, 2 Feb 2000 GHighPine@aol.com wrote: > The more I think about this speculation, the more it does make sense to me > structurally. > > Tara is a mirror to Willow -- same sex and same witch calling -- the way > that Faith was a mirror to Buffy. And Willow has already been tempted to > misuse her powers, so that theme has been set up. Lots of potential > parallel between Willow / Tara and Buffy / Faith. I'm thinking, this may > come to fruition right around the same time that Buffy is going through a > moral crisis that reconnects with the Faith setup from last season. > > If it doesn't turn into revenge =on= Willow, it may go into the direction > of Faith leading Buffy into the "want / take / have" ethic. Or possibly that > first, then a revenge spell thing afterward. At any rate, though, I expect > that Tara will represent a mirror for Willow of the temptations related to > her calling. > > I also get a sense that Willow's line "I'm not your sidekick" from last > night's rerun might be foreshadowing and tie into this arc. > > The one thing that I DON'T expect is a nice peaceful contented happy > little romance. > > And betcha betcha the repercussions of this Tara arc will continue beyond > this season. > > > In a message dated 2/1/00 9:38:54 PM Pacific Standard Time, > thuff_007@yahoo.com writes: > > << > ClickTV often has the same synopses for Buffy episodes > that TV Guide does, and the one for February 15th has > a major, major spoiler. Something I haven't even seen > speculated about in any of our posts. Beware. > >> > > It's a good thing I don't know the URL for Click TV, because spoilers are > so tempting. Let me guess, it involves some major change with or for Riley? > Something, I would guess, paralleling the sudden shift in plotline when > Faith killed Finch in February sweeps. (I had already speculated that Walsh > might die -- because I believe that someone human will die and it will be > Buffy's fault, and that it would happen during Feb sweeps. And Riley no > longer seems like the most likely candidate, so Walsh is up there as a > possibility -- so if this is something we never speculated about, it can't be > that.) > > At the very least, we know that some startling and shocking change in plot > direction is about to wham us. > > Gayle > ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:28:32 -0500 (EST) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: stillpt-digest V2 #23 On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Jennifer Stevenson wrote: > I've got a screed of my own about horror fiction, taking the position that > it is essentially escape fiction, =because= the author's position is that > the Horrible Thing is not a part of the self, nor a part of the familiar > world (which is an extension of the self)--it's a stranger. OTOH horror can > also be a praiseworthy attempt to grapple with something inside that's too > painful to live with: it grapples with it by externalizing it, putting an > alien monster face on it, and declaring it to be Other, thus giving the > participant (reader and author) some elbow room in which to work with their > feelings of horror, their anger about the bad things being done, their > assessment of the damage and fallout...the psychological "work" that needs > to be done when shit happens to people. I'm not sure where the difference between these two things lies. But I have noticed the evasiveness of horror, dating back at least as far as Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper", which is supposed to be a classic story but which explains Jack away by postulating that he was an inexplicably malevolent alien. In my view this answers nothing. (Unless you think that monstrous humans really are aliens, literally or symbolically.) > Buffy (back on topic) manages not to sin against my amour propre where > horror is concerned by =always= keeping the awfulness of real life > foreground, and the monsters and monstrous relations with the monsters > background, where they act like shadow puppets showing you the DUH! moments > in very high contrast--yet ultimately taking a back seat to real life > horrors. I agree. _Buffy_ works because 1) the vampires and demons are not on the secondary level substitutes for real-life criminals committing real-life crimes, and 2) they're not what the show is about. The show is about the humans (and the at least partially non-monstrous vampires) in this situation and how they handle it. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:43:25 -0500 (EST) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/jung2 On Sun, 30 Jan 2000, Donald G. Keller wrote: > And on this early acquaintance, I'm finding this stuff to be almost > alarmingly fecund; it gets my synapses overfiring and I find I can only > read a few pages at a time before overloading on the patterning of symbols > and tropes--very much the same experience I have reading Dumezil, or Greer > Gilman's novel =Moonwise=. It's a lovely feeling. Here's the line that most expanded my mind lately. It's from a comparison of Tolkien's _The Notion Club Papers_ with Lewis's _The Dark Tower_, noting several points in common and claiming that their similarities indicate not borrowing, but that the authors were working on them simultaneously (contrary to the usual chronology). This doesn't prove anything, but it's a nifty. "Both books contain a scene in which a protagonist gazing at a building in an alien world suddenly realizes that he is in fact lookinng at a familiar site seen from an unfamiliar perspective, and in both cases the building in question is a university library." Well, it's a nifty if you've read both books and the comparison never occurred to you before. It certainly startled me. This is from an essay by John Rateliff in a new collection from Greenwood called _Tolkien's Legendarium_, which has a whole bunch of really good essays on Tolkien's posthumous work by really good people. I'm in it, too, though I don't claim any particular virtues. This is my first actual book publication, so I'm feeling chuffed. You might enjoy reading this; and Greenwood is publishing a second collection of essays on Tolkien this summer, I think. > How to justify this more "esoteric" reading over the "normal" dramatic > pattern of attraction/repulsion can't-live-with-'em-can't-live-without-'em > of standard contemporary romance? First of all, the alchemical patterns, > if Jung is right, are what John Clute in the =Encyclopedia of Fantasy= > calls "underliers," old patterns prefiguring new ones; secondly, there is > an excess of resonance, or numinousness (call it mythic, call it > Gothic) in the story not present in the ordinary romance; thirdly, notice > that the supernatural apparatus that governs the drawing together/pulling > apart is different in each case. Excllent way of making the distinction. > And by the way, I'm quite aware that there is a thoroughly persuasive and > consistent Freudian reading to be made on the whole narrative, on the > theme of penetration, i.e. Buffy/Angel/Faith serially puncturing one > another like some kind of horrorfest round robin. Absolutely. Even if Freud is utter nonsense, that is no reason an author can't make use of Freudian tropes in fiction. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #26 ****************************