2004-06-09 - 1:49 p.m.

Slayage, part 2.

Ok, on the second day we went to the 8am Keynote Address “On the Philosophical Consistency of Season Seven.” Guess what? It was awesome. Guess what? You should’ve gone. I’ve never wanted to hear it from Season 7 trashtalkers & I now really really REALLY don’t care to hear it.

The next session, I was pained to not be hearing these papers:

Spike the Vampire, the Vampire Slayer, or BtVS’s Preoccupation with “New” Masculinity

Alexander Harris: Buttmonkey No More

Demon Power Girl: Regimes of Form and Force in Videogame Versions of BtVS

Slayers, Pre-Slayers, Preachers, and Hellraisers: Comic Influences on the Buffyverse

Christophe Beck and Buffy’s First Romances: Paradoxes of Musical Scoring in BtVS

Be My Buffy: BtVS and Girl Group Music-Cultural Representations of the Teenage Girl

I chose to go to “Cancellation as Apocalypse: A Panel Discussion on the End of Angel”. The panel was 3 ladies from universities and a dude from the New York Daily News. This was an awesome, lively, discussion, that I kept raising my hand in and not getting called on. It was actually a lot of “My favorite moment was…” kind of thing, but great because everyone was smart about discussing why. I wanted to talk about 2 things: One was during a discussion of Lorne ending as a Sam Spade-type character, as a return to Angel’s noir roots. I wanted to talk about how much this relates to all the women dying off – that part of Lorne died too, no more fancy suits or Sea Breezes or songs, just learning to be a proper stoic man who kills. A painful, largely un-mourned loss. My other thing was Gunn and Anne in the last ep, & how she is the hero she is because of Buffy, and she really gave the Big Answer to Gunn and to the audience – you can discuss these big “why” kind of questions, but really the truck needs to be unpacked. If the fight is right, fight the fight. This was a beautiful testament (is that the right word?) to Buffy, much better than “The Girl in Question.” And not only does Anne stand for Buffy/Buffy's influence, but she also brings in concretely, in a way that Gunn used to, the real-life problems of capitalism that all the Buff/Ang stuff is dealing with metaphorically (killer cops and unequal distribution of wealth among other things.) Ok, these are my 2 points & I’ve made them here if not in the session.

Other stuff: The News guy did regular conference calls with other critics and Joss – he said in the last one, a dude was saying how Hamilton is a conscienceless asshole in expensive suits with all the power (my paraphrasing) and asked Joss if Hamilton is the network. Joss said he’s not at all uncomfortable with that interpretation. This entire session made me see the end of AtS as being a lot about Joss as an artist, trying to make complex, progressive, thrilling art, & being continually battled. The critic said that after Freaks & Geeks was cancelled, he saw a column written by another critic that was an open letter to Feig & Apatow saying basically “Please don’t change how you make TV, you did everything perfectly,” and this column being written AFTER the show was cancelled changed how he thought of himself as a critic. It made him decide to champion shows that are great, whether they have a chance of survival or not – it’s not his job to only champion safe things, he should just point out everything that is being done correctly. And when he was asked if he thought the fans’ campaign to save Angel accomplished anything (as far as making HBO receptive to something or a feature film more likely), he rejected the question saying making a difference wasn’t the point – we were exemplifying the message of the show. Fighting to keep it on was the right thing to do, so fans fought that fight.

Joss apparently told him we haven’t seen the last of puppet Angel.

Someone made a point in the audience that Illyria allowed Wesley to return to his experience as a Watcher, which he always felt he fucked up with Faith, & re-do some of that stuff better.

I loved this session.

Next session, I didn’t see:

The Nah-Nah-Nah-Nah-Nah Approach to Naming: A Slice of Slayer Slang

“You’re Beneath Me”: The Stigma of Vampirism in Buffy and Angel

“Actually, No Wheeling Is More My Specialty”: Why Buffy Doesn’t Drive

Whose Revolution Has Been Televised? The Transnational Sisterhood of Slayers

I went to Dream and Prophecy. More on that tomorrow!

*perv* *next*