alwaystheocean (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alwaystheocean) wrote2014-12-28 11:27 pm
alwaystheocean) wrote2014-12-28 11:27 pm
Fifth December Topic: Nostalgia time!
I stared at my remaining topics and wasn't sure which I felt like talking about, and then I landed on this one because I finally picked a fandom to talk about. ;D I've been struggling with this one ever since carawj requested it because I'm pretty generous in what I define as an active fandom. Like thanks to Tumblr I consider say, Harry Potter, Buffy (ETA: turns out I lied and can't talk about Angel without Buffy), Xena, and Farscape to be fairly active fandoms for me because they come up on my dash a lot, I re-watch eps periodically, I watch vids, I ponder and read meta, so they were all out, and they're some of my oldest fandoms.
I also pondered and rejected Doctor Who because dear show, I feel like I already expend more energy on you and justifying our break-up than is good for me at the mo.
And I regularly re-read say, the Vorkosigan Saga and Robin Hobb, so they're also out.
I briefly considered 'Grey's Anatomy' cuz I had a really fun conversation with someone on twitter about it earlier this evening but maybe another time as this is SO LONG.
Shows I've come to in the last 5 years don't even count as nostalgic yet, so that rules out a LOT. ;)
But! As I mentioned in my entry earlier, I've fallen down a 'Person of Interest'-shaped rabbit-hole, which is ENTIRELY because of Amy Acker, for whom I have a huge thing. And I tend to forget this is the case until I actually see her moving and talking in something? Like stills and even gifsets don't really convey it? But anyway, this has sort of been simmering sincepurplefringe's beautiful Festivid last year, with which I am slightly obsessed, and then I saw isagel's fantastic character study from POI, and like months later, here we are. ;)
The problem here is that prolonged pondering about Amy Acker inevitably leads me back to Angel in the end, and for various reasons, I haven't hung on to Angel over the years the way I have Buffy. But, because of the Amy Acker thing, it has been on my mind lately more than usual.
(Btw, this entry is going to have massive spoilers for all of Buffy and Angel, so if you're in the process of watching those, or plan to watch them some day, look away.) So yes, reasons why I haven't hung on to Angel the same way I have Buffy. In short, I think Buffy has aged better, and I think a lot of the drama/melodrama of Angel worked better for me at the time than it does now. I feel like there's a lot of narrative tropes and feminist ~stuff~ I'm aware of now that I wasn't at the time that makes a lot of Joss Whedon's work problematic, and Angel suffers on that count much more than Buffy. (For me, anyway. I know there's a metric fuck-ton of meta and academia around the Whedonverse and a lot of this is old ground. All this comes with an entire salt-shaker of YMMV.)
All of this means that I have really mixed feelings about even attempting to re-watch Angel now, because I'm scared I'll hate it, and I'd rather remember how much I loved it. Because I re-watched it enough and I am atextbookwiki with arms for some fandoms including this one enough that I can spot some huge problems from memory, and I think watching it would be worse. Like it sucks thinking about all the wank and meta I read that I disagreed with and rolled my eyes at at the time that I suspect I would now think was right on the money.
However, I don't really want to spend the whole entry grousing about Angel, which I so easily could. Rather, I'd like to indulge in some nostalgia and reminisce about how it affected me at the time. I mean, if you want a laugh, you can probably find my LJ entries from the time but um, actually, please don't. ;D
For whatever reason (probably sheer cosmic contrariness knowing me) I really properly fell for the show somewhere around S4 or S5.
In hindsight it feels weird to remember that I watched both Buffy and Angel basically live. Like often months and years behind as this was pre easily available downloads and I didn't have Sky, but even so. I remember watching Buffy on the BBC, and Angel on Channel 4. I remember when I found Buffy VIDEO box-sets in HMV and how much my mother chastised me forwastingspending all my money on them. (We still have almost every single Buffy and Angel bloody video box-set in my mum's garage in NEW ZEALAND because my Dad SHIPPED A TON OF OUR STUFF OVER THERE about 8 years ago. Some of those box-sets are sellotaped together. I used to keep them in a carefully stacked shrine in my room and lend them to my friends.)
I remember seeing scenes that had been cut when I got the videos, episodes I'd missed because I'd been away, finding the Internet partly due to Angel and Buffy, the BBC Cult website. I was a terrible spoiler whore (a term I'd forgotten), I had zero self restraint about reading episode summaries and even transcripts for episodes before they aired in the UK or at least the box-set came out. Sometimes I'd get friends to tape episodes I really wanted to see for me off Sky. (E.g., I remember knowing about Hush ages before it aired here and being excited for it.)
I remember some of the two-parters were released on their own separately, like Welcome to the Hellmouth and The Harvest, What's My Line, Surprise/Innocence and Becoming I and II.
I had huge, ridiculous collections of music from the show, found via carefully researched lyrics and specific websites, ridiculous .wavs of my favourite scenes (IDK why I had these but it means I can quote swathes of Buffy and Angel like nothing else). I remember so many occasions staying up all night with my sister, or my friends, or just by myself, marathoning both shows. Like how I do fandom now is not at all how I did Buffy/Angel fandom back then, but at the same time a lot of my tendencies and compulsions are the same? (Namely the repeat viewing/repeat +1 thing. I very painstakingly recorded Buffy and Angel's theme from my Buffy soundtrack CD onto AN ENTIRE CASSETTE TAPE repeatedly because the loop +1 button did not, at that point, in fact, exist. Look, when I say the loop +1 button changed my life I'm really not kidding. ;))
This is all pretty general so far. Like at this point I hadn't found LJ, or fanfic, or even worked out that I could TALK to other people online. Like I knew they were there, I just didn't think I wanted to talk to them. ;) (See above, ref: contrary. ;)) All my online interaction for Buffy was about resources and info and trivia and is prob around when S4 was airing in the US.
At first I didn't want anything to do with Angel, I was absolutely heart-broken that Angel had left Buffy and that they'd broken up, but for some reason my sister and I tried it and we really liked it.
By the time S6 of Buffy and S3 of Angel were airing I sort of recognise my current Internet/fandom set-up more, I had an LJ, I had found fanfic and people I talked to about shows we were all actually into. (Unlike my intro to talking to people on the Internet, the Gargoyles fandom.)
I wonder if I liked Angel better once Buffy was over? I think that might be it, actually, I got much more into S5 cuz it was the only season after Buffy finished.
Spoilers start here.
I actually don't think a lot of what happens in later seasons of Angel IS much of a spoiler in feminist fandom, but just in case. As you may have gleaned from my aforementioned Amy Acker thing, Fred was my favourite character, and I was S-O U-P-S-E-T about 'Hole in the World'. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I've not been as upset about a fictional character's fate before or since, Fred is still the benchmark by which I measure all other fictional angst. I include Tara, and Anya, and, like, all of Harry Potter in this. And nowadays it is stupid but it still HURTS, and it's sort of worse because as well as like 10 years of fictional hurt, I also have feminist RAGE to boot.
Like this would never happen to me on this scale now because I'm much more critically/feministically aware when I consume a text, so I'd be unlikely to get too invested in something I didn't trust? I mean, I'm not infallible, it happens and I still get furious, but this one was a first, and the hurt came first and the anger later. So I was upset Fred died, but even though I remember the wank at the time, I personally didn't think it was a feminist fail. Whereas now I have that as well as my hurt.
(Actually I also think it would never happen to me now because Fred is when I looked at myself and was like 'dude, maybe we are getting a little over-invested? Maybe we should take a step back?' and I've sort of taken ever so slightly more care with fannish feelings since. Yes, this is me taking care. Scary, right? ;p Oh, who am I kidding, not a lot of care, lbr.)
And Tara is definitely on a par, and the rage there as some sort of rubbish chaser is there too, because I became aware of sad dead queers as a trope AFTER feeling sad about Tara's death. (The list of tropes, from good and fun to bad and messed up, that the Whedonverse is responsible for introducing me to, thus meaning I don't recognise it as an example of the trope, is LOOOOOOONG. Bodyswaps, sad dead crazy queers, nice guys, women in refrigerators, AU verses, memory loss, sex pollen, de-aging, we could be here a while.) So again, what you're left with is old sadness over the death of fictional characters, and also on a Doylist level, new anger at the creator's decisions.
IDK, am I being clear in what I'm trying to describe? I guess I did start ranting after all. And I could've made this a lot shorter by just spelling it out a few hundred words ago: I am pretty certain I will hate season 5 if I re-watch it, so I'd rather exist with this sort of uneasy 'well I remember it fondly' than actually confront it? Like I hate the decision to kill Cordelia, and I hate it more since reading Charisma Carpenter only signed on the condition they wouldn't, I hate that they then killed Fred too and made her death angst for the boys, I hate that they had Spike at all, I hate what happened to Gunn, I hate that what happened to Fred was his fault, I hate that Wesley died too, I HATE how much of Fred's storyline was to be angst-fodder for him, and that Illyria's stuff plays into that too, in fact, I just HATE 'Not Fade Away', I HATE the bleakness of it, I HATE BLEAKNESS PERIOD.
Hm.
I suspect I've been in some denial about my Angel Season 5 feelings. For approx 10 years. Good work, Cleo, that's some quality ostriching my girl. ;)
OK that's not true, I was aware I felt this way, but if I don't re-watch, I get to remember how those things just hurt me, but in a 'hurts so good' way rather than 'I'm angry and hurt and want to put it in the freezer and never take it out and I wish I'd never heard of the bloody thing' way.
Like it would be ridiculous and untrue to say I'm not capable of the depth of feeling I had for Buffy and Angel but they're both wrapped around my me-ness and personality in ways it's harder for things to be as I get older, because my personality and sense of self are more formed.
As an aside, they're the first fandoms I shared with Alex. Like we met through mutual friends in Gargoyles fandom, but we were both done with Gargoyles by the time we started hanging out. She's hugely responsible for my Tara love, I didn't like her at first because I missed Oz. (I know, I know.) We used to hotly debate Buffy/Angel vs Cordelia/Angel. She was very sympathetic (and frequently mocking) over my Fred feelings. My LJ still has an Alex-only filter, and if I ever let another living human being on that filter, they would find hundreds of comments, because that's how we used to talk to each other, and lots of them are about our Buffy and Angel re-watches. We didn't simul-watch because time-zones can bite me but we used to watch more or less concurrently a lot.
Heh, she tried to get me to watch Justice League Unlimited because so many Jossverse alums voiced the characters, chiefly Amy Acker as Huntress.
I don't really know how to wrap this one up. I don't even know what it'll be like to read, it's very introspective (navel-gazey ;)) and rather sentimental. Thinking it over I don't think it's age or depth of feeling that's different about how I watch TV, it's critical thinking. When I watch TV or movies or read a book now I can't switch off pondering whether it has passed the Bechdel test yet, where are the queers, where are the PoC, hey, that woman just got put in a fridge*. Etc. And I wouldn't change that even if I could, even though it makes me a killjoy sometimes, but I'm also glad I got to watch Buffy and Angel BEFORE I learned to do that. (Also I think I worked through a lot of my feelings about relating to canons and problematic canons and how to be a fan of problematic things through Buffy and Angel. Like there was a point where it was important to me to like everything about every aspect of the show, so I worked hard to say, love freaking Spike and Riley, and it was freeing to work out that I didn't have to do that.)
Like I often talk about how much I've learnt about feminism and equality and intersectionality from fandom, and it's TRUE. I am not sure I even gave credit to how much that's true until I wrote all this down.
(My god, I am so sorry about how long this one is.)
*Not to say every type of media I consume is a paragon of representation or anything, VERY far from it, but part of the automatic process of watching that is critiquing it.
carawj requested it because I'm pretty generous in what I define as an active fandom. Like thanks to Tumblr I consider say, Harry Potter, Buffy (ETA: turns out I lied and can't talk about Angel without Buffy), Xena, and Farscape to be fairly active fandoms for me because they come up on my dash a lot, I re-watch eps periodically, I watch vids, I ponder and read meta, so they were all out, and they're some of my oldest fandoms.I also pondered and rejected Doctor Who because dear show, I feel like I already expend more energy on you and justifying our break-up than is good for me at the mo.
And I regularly re-read say, the Vorkosigan Saga and Robin Hobb, so they're also out.
I briefly considered 'Grey's Anatomy' cuz I had a really fun conversation with someone on twitter about it earlier this evening but maybe another time as this is SO LONG.
Shows I've come to in the last 5 years don't even count as nostalgic yet, so that rules out a LOT. ;)
But! As I mentioned in my entry earlier, I've fallen down a 'Person of Interest'-shaped rabbit-hole, which is ENTIRELY because of Amy Acker, for whom I have a huge thing. And I tend to forget this is the case until I actually see her moving and talking in something? Like stills and even gifsets don't really convey it? But anyway, this has sort of been simmering since
purplefringe's beautiful Festivid last year, with which I am slightly obsessed, and then I saw isagel's fantastic character study from POI, and like months later, here we are. ;)The problem here is that prolonged pondering about Amy Acker inevitably leads me back to Angel in the end, and for various reasons, I haven't hung on to Angel over the years the way I have Buffy. But, because of the Amy Acker thing, it has been on my mind lately more than usual.
(Btw, this entry is going to have massive spoilers for all of Buffy and Angel, so if you're in the process of watching those, or plan to watch them some day, look away.) So yes, reasons why I haven't hung on to Angel the same way I have Buffy. In short, I think Buffy has aged better, and I think a lot of the drama/melodrama of Angel worked better for me at the time than it does now. I feel like there's a lot of narrative tropes and feminist ~stuff~ I'm aware of now that I wasn't at the time that makes a lot of Joss Whedon's work problematic, and Angel suffers on that count much more than Buffy. (For me, anyway. I know there's a metric fuck-ton of meta and academia around the Whedonverse and a lot of this is old ground. All this comes with an entire salt-shaker of YMMV.)
All of this means that I have really mixed feelings about even attempting to re-watch Angel now, because I'm scared I'll hate it, and I'd rather remember how much I loved it. Because I re-watched it enough and I am a
However, I don't really want to spend the whole entry grousing about Angel, which I so easily could. Rather, I'd like to indulge in some nostalgia and reminisce about how it affected me at the time. I mean, if you want a laugh, you can probably find my LJ entries from the time but um, actually, please don't. ;D
For whatever reason (probably sheer cosmic contrariness knowing me) I really properly fell for the show somewhere around S4 or S5.
In hindsight it feels weird to remember that I watched both Buffy and Angel basically live. Like often months and years behind as this was pre easily available downloads and I didn't have Sky, but even so. I remember watching Buffy on the BBC, and Angel on Channel 4. I remember when I found Buffy VIDEO box-sets in HMV and how much my mother chastised me for
I remember seeing scenes that had been cut when I got the videos, episodes I'd missed because I'd been away, finding the Internet partly due to Angel and Buffy, the BBC Cult website. I was a terrible spoiler whore (a term I'd forgotten), I had zero self restraint about reading episode summaries and even transcripts for episodes before they aired in the UK or at least the box-set came out. Sometimes I'd get friends to tape episodes I really wanted to see for me off Sky. (E.g., I remember knowing about Hush ages before it aired here and being excited for it.)
I remember some of the two-parters were released on their own separately, like Welcome to the Hellmouth and The Harvest, What's My Line, Surprise/Innocence and Becoming I and II.
I had huge, ridiculous collections of music from the show, found via carefully researched lyrics and specific websites, ridiculous .wavs of my favourite scenes (IDK why I had these but it means I can quote swathes of Buffy and Angel like nothing else). I remember so many occasions staying up all night with my sister, or my friends, or just by myself, marathoning both shows. Like how I do fandom now is not at all how I did Buffy/Angel fandom back then, but at the same time a lot of my tendencies and compulsions are the same? (Namely the repeat viewing/repeat +1 thing. I very painstakingly recorded Buffy and Angel's theme from my Buffy soundtrack CD onto AN ENTIRE CASSETTE TAPE repeatedly because the loop +1 button did not, at that point, in fact, exist. Look, when I say the loop +1 button changed my life I'm really not kidding. ;))
This is all pretty general so far. Like at this point I hadn't found LJ, or fanfic, or even worked out that I could TALK to other people online. Like I knew they were there, I just didn't think I wanted to talk to them. ;) (See above, ref: contrary. ;)) All my online interaction for Buffy was about resources and info and trivia and is prob around when S4 was airing in the US.
At first I didn't want anything to do with Angel, I was absolutely heart-broken that Angel had left Buffy and that they'd broken up, but for some reason my sister and I tried it and we really liked it.
By the time S6 of Buffy and S3 of Angel were airing I sort of recognise my current Internet/fandom set-up more, I had an LJ, I had found fanfic and people I talked to about shows we were all actually into. (Unlike my intro to talking to people on the Internet, the Gargoyles fandom.)
I wonder if I liked Angel better once Buffy was over? I think that might be it, actually, I got much more into S5 cuz it was the only season after Buffy finished.
Spoilers start here.
I actually don't think a lot of what happens in later seasons of Angel IS much of a spoiler in feminist fandom, but just in case. As you may have gleaned from my aforementioned Amy Acker thing, Fred was my favourite character, and I was S-O U-P-S-E-T about 'Hole in the World'. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I've not been as upset about a fictional character's fate before or since, Fred is still the benchmark by which I measure all other fictional angst. I include Tara, and Anya, and, like, all of Harry Potter in this. And nowadays it is stupid but it still HURTS, and it's sort of worse because as well as like 10 years of fictional hurt, I also have feminist RAGE to boot.
Like this would never happen to me on this scale now because I'm much more critically/feministically aware when I consume a text, so I'd be unlikely to get too invested in something I didn't trust? I mean, I'm not infallible, it happens and I still get furious, but this one was a first, and the hurt came first and the anger later. So I was upset Fred died, but even though I remember the wank at the time, I personally didn't think it was a feminist fail. Whereas now I have that as well as my hurt.
(Actually I also think it would never happen to me now because Fred is when I looked at myself and was like 'dude, maybe we are getting a little over-invested? Maybe we should take a step back?' and I've sort of taken ever so slightly more care with fannish feelings since. Yes, this is me taking care. Scary, right? ;p Oh, who am I kidding, not a lot of care, lbr.)
And Tara is definitely on a par, and the rage there as some sort of rubbish chaser is there too, because I became aware of sad dead queers as a trope AFTER feeling sad about Tara's death. (The list of tropes, from good and fun to bad and messed up, that the Whedonverse is responsible for introducing me to, thus meaning I don't recognise it as an example of the trope, is LOOOOOOONG. Bodyswaps, sad dead crazy queers, nice guys, women in refrigerators, AU verses, memory loss, sex pollen, de-aging, we could be here a while.) So again, what you're left with is old sadness over the death of fictional characters, and also on a Doylist level, new anger at the creator's decisions.
IDK, am I being clear in what I'm trying to describe? I guess I did start ranting after all. And I could've made this a lot shorter by just spelling it out a few hundred words ago: I am pretty certain I will hate season 5 if I re-watch it, so I'd rather exist with this sort of uneasy 'well I remember it fondly' than actually confront it? Like I hate the decision to kill Cordelia, and I hate it more since reading Charisma Carpenter only signed on the condition they wouldn't, I hate that they then killed Fred too and made her death angst for the boys, I hate that they had Spike at all, I hate what happened to Gunn, I hate that what happened to Fred was his fault, I hate that Wesley died too, I HATE how much of Fred's storyline was to be angst-fodder for him, and that Illyria's stuff plays into that too, in fact, I just HATE 'Not Fade Away', I HATE the bleakness of it, I HATE BLEAKNESS PERIOD.
Hm.
I suspect I've been in some denial about my Angel Season 5 feelings. For approx 10 years. Good work, Cleo, that's some quality ostriching my girl. ;)
OK that's not true, I was aware I felt this way, but if I don't re-watch, I get to remember how those things just hurt me, but in a 'hurts so good' way rather than 'I'm angry and hurt and want to put it in the freezer and never take it out and I wish I'd never heard of the bloody thing' way.
Like it would be ridiculous and untrue to say I'm not capable of the depth of feeling I had for Buffy and Angel but they're both wrapped around my me-ness and personality in ways it's harder for things to be as I get older, because my personality and sense of self are more formed.
As an aside, they're the first fandoms I shared with Alex. Like we met through mutual friends in Gargoyles fandom, but we were both done with Gargoyles by the time we started hanging out. She's hugely responsible for my Tara love, I didn't like her at first because I missed Oz. (I know, I know.) We used to hotly debate Buffy/Angel vs Cordelia/Angel. She was very sympathetic (and frequently mocking) over my Fred feelings. My LJ still has an Alex-only filter, and if I ever let another living human being on that filter, they would find hundreds of comments, because that's how we used to talk to each other, and lots of them are about our Buffy and Angel re-watches. We didn't simul-watch because time-zones can bite me but we used to watch more or less concurrently a lot.
Heh, she tried to get me to watch Justice League Unlimited because so many Jossverse alums voiced the characters, chiefly Amy Acker as Huntress.
I don't really know how to wrap this one up. I don't even know what it'll be like to read, it's very introspective (navel-gazey ;)) and rather sentimental. Thinking it over I don't think it's age or depth of feeling that's different about how I watch TV, it's critical thinking. When I watch TV or movies or read a book now I can't switch off pondering whether it has passed the Bechdel test yet, where are the queers, where are the PoC, hey, that woman just got put in a fridge*. Etc. And I wouldn't change that even if I could, even though it makes me a killjoy sometimes, but I'm also glad I got to watch Buffy and Angel BEFORE I learned to do that. (Also I think I worked through a lot of my feelings about relating to canons and problematic canons and how to be a fan of problematic things through Buffy and Angel. Like there was a point where it was important to me to like everything about every aspect of the show, so I worked hard to say, love freaking Spike and Riley, and it was freeing to work out that I didn't have to do that.)
Like I often talk about how much I've learnt about feminism and equality and intersectionality from fandom, and it's TRUE. I am not sure I even gave credit to how much that's true until I wrote all this down.
(My god, I am so sorry about how long this one is.)
*Not to say every type of media I consume is a paragon of representation or anything, VERY far from it, but part of the automatic process of watching that is critiquing it.