From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #85 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Thursday, April 20 2000 Volume 02 : Number 085 Today's Subjects: ----------------- comments4/19 ["Donald G. Keller" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 00:49:16 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: comments4/19 More briefly tonight. Micole: Thanks for passing that stuff about =Angel= along. I suspect I would have liked the show better if it had been pitched that way as well. (Note to self: borrow Meredith's =Forever Knight= tapes one of these millenia.) Meredith: Somewhere around here I've got a reproduction of a Greek artwork depicting Heracles (= Hercules) at the breast of Hera (which is where he got his super-strength, if I remember correctly). It's obviously a common motif, as you say. That's right, I'd forgotten about the crucifixion. Having read scads of myth and mythanalysis over the last couple years, my opinion on the whole Christian question (ANTI-CHRISTIAN STATEMENT ALERT) is that the Christian =insistence= that not only is their myth True, but also Only (legislated by the sword) has done incalcuable psychic damage ever since. (END ALERT) One of the things you can do in a long-running TV show is take the same set of tropes and run through them again, with variations and different emphases. Buffy has gone through the Campbellian monomyth a few times herself. Think about how point-by-point similar much of the latter half of the 2nd and 3rd seasons are (final-battle-with-stabbing, just for a quick instance). One of the points of my rant about "suburban fantasy" is that Greg and his ilk can go soak their heads: =Bone Dance= is a complex, clever, and well-done book, and =War for the Oaks= is really good too (my daughter says it's the best book she's ever read). Don't let 'em get to you. Todd: =Mater Tenebrarum= is Latin for "our lady of shadows [= darkness]," and if memory serves the Latin epithet is used in the novel, so it's understandable you remembered it as the title. But the actual title is in English. Gayle: When talking about the "Hush" dream last night I realized I'd left out a point I'd meant to make. =The fact that= Riley hadn't kissed Buffy yet in waking life (as they emphasized in the scene following the dream) meant that when he did it in the dream it was so clearly a "signal" or "trigger" for "crossing a threshold" (major change of dream scenery). And notice that when he =did= do it in waking life later in the episode, it preceded by only a short time another "crossing a threshold," i.e. discovering each other's "secret identity." Which is followed by the moment where Buffy puts to use the knowledge she gained in the dream. The whole set of experiences thus collapses into a single symbolic equation. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #85 ****************************