quote:
Originally posted by tommo:
Yeah, I thought that too. Buffy's name was mentioned a bit too often for it to be coincidental. And I honestly don't like that much. I mean, that's taking it back to Season 1 when Xander was a lovesick puppy for Buffy's attentions. Bah. It just seems so pointless, you know?
Here's what got me about the Buffy mentions... it's not a "lovesick puppy" issue for Xander, but fierce loyalty is (ostensibly) what he does. The show has said this (Xander the heart, even if we think it's really Tara now) various times. So here's my point; this is the season where everyone really questions their path. Willow has to basically decide magick, no magick, where she's going and what kind of fighter-of-evil (the choice she made their senior year) she's going to be, as well as find the moral path that hopefully Tara will help her toward, or the inspiration of Tara, anyway. Buffy faces the most obvious "Where do I go from here?" arc this season although her choices aren't set out as simply (this/not this) as the others'. Heck, while I'm here, Spike's kinda got to pick a direction and go with it sometime soon, as well, although I realize it's not really the same. Anya has an incredibly obvious and immediate call to make; the wedding disaster is what sets her at her real fork in the road--she has mourned for being a demon, lamented her newfound humanity while she has really come to love it, now she has to decide if she still wants it, when she lives through possibly the worst it can offer her. Anya's got her own "the hardest thing in this world is to live in it" decision coming up here. Giles made his choice; Dawn is kinda part of Buffy's choice, as well as, you know, a person. Tara, well, I'd like to hear people's ideas about what lifepath choice she has before her. The obvious one is; Take Willow back? Let the hurt and danger she might represent back in? What about magick? That kinda thing.
Which brings me to Xander. The frequent Buffy references get at something real--Xander does not think of himself as a construction worker. Being Buffy's helper has given him an out, for years now, from a life he otherwise tends to consider worthless and a failure. Helping Buffy makes him feel like SuperXander, as I said before, and we know by know, from the Geeks, from Willow, that SuperMe is never the RealMe or the RightMeforMe. All the conflicts we've seen him have over Anya's behavior? "How can I balance being a Scooby and Anya's boy/man/whatever?" He has fairly consistently, until recently, always chosen his Scooby loyalty first. In OMWF, Anya sings "When things get rough, he just hides behind his Buffy, now look he's gettin' huffy, 'cuz he knows that I know." and again with Xander's idea that "she thinks I'm ordinary" in that song.
As for the future, I was revisiting "Restless" the other day... interestingly enough (and I'm going to leave the fact that it's Spike out of this) there's a scene that fairly clearly enunciates this lifepath choice time for Xander. Giles and Spike (in outfit he reprises in TR) swing on swings while Buffy's in a sandbox. various important points to me are childlikeBuffy in the sandbox, where Xander is still worried for her and wants to protect her like a little sister (she calls him Big Brother) so that's what's keeping him there, and that when Spike says "he's training me to be a watcher" or some such Xander says "I did that for a while, but I've got other things going on now" and he looks toward the ice cream truck the other-him is driving. They freeze there kind of--Xander the loyal wants to stay as Buffy's junior watcher/helper, but somebody else needs to fill that role... Xander's other direction is to the boring, unfulfilling job, seeming all the drabber next to watching and slaying and Buffy's calling, but in the truck waits Anya as well. It just capture his essential conflict so wel... "Super"ScoobyXander? He had been pretending he could be a Scooby and Xander--the husband and man, all together, forever. He can't. He's got to grow up (not to sound redundant to this season) and realize plain old Xander is what Anya wants and what he needs for himself. He's got to realize that Anya truly is what he wants, and that he can't be a Scooby first, forever. He's not immortal, or superstrong, he's Xander. He's the heart, and his heart belongs somewhere else. He's got "other things going on" now, as he says in Restless.
Okay, I'm terminally long-winded, I know that, sorry, but I'd love to hear others' takes on this.
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"I think this line's mostly filler"
"Tara: I do not know in other things concerning everyone, but, the chicken is loved."
