by RainbowVanessa » Mon Sep 04, 2006 4:04 pm
First I have to say that, um, Spike wasn't sodomising Buffy in the Bronze. Any information about the show from ME indicates that it was regular sex, albeit, not the healthy kind. If that's not enough proof, thinking about the mechanics a little bit should show that you can't just bend someone over sodomise them with that kind of ease, there would have to have been prep. There wasn't prep.
Well, I guess I have to be the odd man (woman) out on this one because season 6 was my favorite season (with the exception of killing Tara, which was horrible - but I did like Willow's rampage...I guess I wished Tara would magically be able to come back or something! This from someone who isn't straight, and who did look up to that relationship as what love between 2 women can be like) . I was watching the show on DVD at a very difficult time in my life, when everything was going badly. It was such a comfort to see the characters on the show go through the very same kind of things I was going through, walking though that dark place. I didn't feel so alone. The story seemed real - so real that the most fake thing about the show was how perfect everyone's hair stayed (I guess I didn't really notice the vampired and magic as being "not real"). As has been said, life isn't all puppies and kittens, and to me, I don't necessarily want to see a show I love dwell in an antiseptic place where troubles, the big kinds, don't touch them. Yes, bad things happened to the scooby gang before, but not like this season, one after the other, after the other, to everyone. Many fans found this too oppressive, but this was exactly what I could relate to, this was my reality. To me the show was like a salve to my life, not because it was entirely an escape to happy-land where my beloved characters didn't have to hurt, but because I saw that the darkness could happen to anyone, that even good people can do things that they regret deeply, not understanding why they do it, and that in the end, things are, mostly, ok. Frienships can stay strong, you can get through it, change things around, and even grow from the experience. Buffy et al was a role model to me not because she was someone great that I could look up to, but because I could relate to her deeply, felt she was real, and feel hope, knowing it was possible to get past this time in my life, and be a better person for it. Because of that season, where otherwise I would have been alone, I wasn't. Someone understood. And the way I felt, the way my life was going, when reflected back at me, seemed important, was validated.
Besides, someone comes back from the dead, is suddenly having to take the full weight of adult responsibility with no help, and can't tell anyone else about their experiences - I mean, can you blame Buffy?
I guess being a role model for young girls is one thing, but to be a role model for someone older, who has experienced the way life changes when you become an adult, and knows what that dark place is like, is to require a different kind of plot arc. And hey, even though I'm not longer a child, I can still use someone to look up to.
I don't think it's fair to judge an icon based on "this one made better, more role-model worthy choices than the other one did". In the end, both Tara and Buffy did the strong, difficult, worthwhile thing. But though Tara was my favorite character in the whole series (and the only I still have a crush on!) you cannot compare her role to Buffy's. There are so many pivitol things in her life which we did not see, like the death of her mother, etc. How do we know what her reaction was, really? Or how self descructive she could have been had she been brought back from the dead? How can we compare that to the reaction we do see in Buffy? It would be like comparing an end of season 7 Buffy to Tara, if Buffy said, yeah, I got really out of touch with life when that happened, I even slept with this vampire jerk. And unfortunately, though there were strong suggestions of Tara's character, her story and character was never developed close to fully. I was always upset about this, that she is not really given a full life on the show. Though I think she would have been a formidable person, her role, and most powerful impact was within a relationship, not a seperate individual. Even when she is not with Willow, it's still very much about the relationship. The strength of character she does show through that time is unfortunately, only a glimmer of the fully developed characters we see. In my opinion, both Faith and Anya, for instance, got more screen time, were fuller people, and less defined by their relationships. Had Tara been given that kind of focus, because she was such a strong character in comparison, then maybe this question could have been asked. But as it stands in BtVS reality, no way was she a bigger icon.
My 2 cents.
Hope it all helped.
