solitary_summer | Entries tagged with wesley

Hu. Because I seem to be in a writerly mood again all of a sudden, I went through my notes from rewatching Buffy - the whole of it; I actually made it through all seven seasons, albeit with the occasional bit of fastforwarding, as well as binge-watching over the Christmas holidays.

( BtVS S 1-7 )

( Wesley in BtVS and AtS )

Current Mood: productive

Saturday randomness:

* I don't even like the music, but will watch entire videos for the sheer prettiness of Gwen Stefani.

* What bugs me about Angel can be summed up in two quotes:

"The fact that his death is prophesied - which isn't good news - doesn't concern me nearly as much as the way he took that news. (...) Death doesn't bother him because there is nothing in life he wants. It's our desires that make us human."

[Wesley in To Shanshu in L.A., S1 finale]

"There is no perfect day for me, Illyria. There is no sunset or painting or finely-aged scotch that's going to sum up my life and make tonight any... There is nothing that I want. "

[Wesley in Not Fade Away, S5 finale]

In conclusion, Joss Whedon is a sadist.

Project uncluttering notepad, pt. 1:

( Happy relationships make for boring television [or not], or B5 vs. Angel )

( More AtS thoughts: Wesley, and S5 Wesley/Fred )

I really should write an entry in

_thankyou_, because Russia made me appreciate and re-evaluate a lot of things in my life I took for granted or even bitched about... I doubt this epiphany will last long, but it's worth noting.

On a rather less philosophical note, I can't believe I bought the German cast We Will Rock You CD because of an almost ten year old ex-crush, who's barely on it anyway... this seems to be the most pointless musical, ever.

::headdesk::
::headdesk::
::headdesk::

Current Music: sneaker pimps, splinter

Morning run, after a week of just not getting out of bed in time because, (um...) a whole season Angel in four evenings. I refuse to be embarrassed, though, I just love this show too much.

Does it make sense that the finale has vaguely depressed me all day?

( cut for... spoilers, as in, really major spoilers, in case *someone* wants to watch and avoid those... *shifty glance at soavezefiretto* )

I'm going to miss it. It kind of sneaked up on me, but in the end Angel is perhaps the only other tv show after B5 I really got emotionally involved in and ended up loving, flaws and all.

Confession: the Fred dies/is taken over by Illyria OMG! drama! tragedy! plot-line totally fails to impress or touch me. The whole thing feels a little forced and over-done, although that may be due to the fact that for the most part my feelings for Fred are more along the lines of finally! and good fucking riddance. There's such a thing as a too perfect character.

My main issues are 1) Give Wesley some peace, for god's sake. For a change. Last season he had to decapitate Lilah only to have her return from hell, and now this? To have Fred finally decide she does love him, only to have her die in his arms in the next episode? There's a point where the angst is cranked up to a level where IMO it ceases to have real meaning. For me his conversation with dead Lilah in Salvage had a much greater emotional impact in its quiet, understated way than Fred's endlessly drawn out dying scene.

2) Wesley and Fred (or AD and AA?) don't have any real chemistry. Wesley and Lilah may not have had the grand epic true love going for them, but they had chemistry, they connected, and when you looked at them you knew that they belonged together in a sense, however twisted that sense might be. Wesley may love Fred, but more than that I think he loves some pure ideal she represents for him, something he longs for desperately; and Fred herself has a particular selective perception where Wesley is concerned... I rather doubt they'd have worked out, because Wesley's gone to places Fred simply doesn't understand: there were enough moments where you could see just how far apart they really were. Her reaction to Wesley's relationship with Lilah, worse, that maybe he did actually care for her; her insistence that Wesley knew it wasn't actually his father when he shot him. There are plenty of things she doesn't want to see and/or tries to forget. But then, women seem to also make this kind of mistake about Angel all the time...

Too much gratuitous angst, on the whole.

Also, if they'd let Wesley keep his memories, there'd probably been a little less shooting and stabbing people, because then he'd remember what it's like there to lie in that hospital bed after a former friend tried to kill you and all your other friends hate you, because you fucked up once and triggered a sequence of events you couldn't have foreseen.

It's a rather interesting twist, reversing the roles like that and emphasising in yet another way the parallels between Angel and Wesley's character arcs, but it's a little too schematic for my taste.

This said, they broke my heart all over again with the end of Shells, Wesley and Illyria. Not the big drama death scene, but this, where he's willing to put up with this millions of years old demon (herself? itself? confused and lost in this world she/it doesn't know) who took over the body and burned away the soul of the woman he loved, in order to hold on to any scraps of memory, any timy little thing of Fred possibly left, a physical resemblance, if nothing else.

- But you will. If I abide, you will help me.

- Yes.

- Because I look like her?

- Yes.

- We cling to what is gone. Is there anything in this life but grief?

- There's love. There's hope...for some. There's hope that you'll find something worthy... that your life will lead you to some joy... that after everything... you can still be surprised.

- Is that enough? Is that enough to live on?

Hm.

Possibly/probably JW will give some sort of explanation during the second half of S5 that I haven't seen yet, but at this point I'm a little confused about what happened at the end of S4, when Angel made the deal with W&H in order to assure Connor a normal, happy life: Apparently only memories were modified, and the sequence of time and events remained the same, because Angel at least remembers what happened. However, this begs the question, if none of the others remember Connor, what did happen during the last year, and how did it happen, as far as they're concerned? It doesn't make that much of a difference for Fred or Gunn, but it makes all the difference for Wesley. There is no noticeable break in his character from S3/S4 to S5; the Wesley seen in Lineage only emerged during the darkness of that time and wouldn't have been possible otherwise - does or doesn't he remember how he turned into this man he became? How can he even be this man without the memories? Apparently the thing with Lilah happened (more or less) exactly as shown during S4 (Lineage, Wesley to his father, 'The last girl I was with I had to chop into little tiny pieces because a higher power saw fit to stab her in the neck.'; Unleashed: 'but my guests have paid a high price... some higher than others.', and the cut to Wesley's face suggests that this line (which feels a little forced in any case) isn't coincidence and that Wesley does remember the context Angel said these words to him) but how, in his (modified) memory, did he end up with Lilah in the first place, if not for kidnapping Connor and the ensuing events? Does he remember Angel trying to kill him and Fred and Gunn rejecting him, the summer with Justine in his closet, rescuing Angel, the slow way back into the group? Did these things happen in another context, for another reason?

I have to admit the full implications of this occurred to me only when Eve said 'Maybe Wesley knew what he was doing after all. Even if he doesn't remember any of it.', and it struck me as kind of sad, almost cruel, to have gone through all this, only to have it erased from your memory. It's one thing for Connor, who never had a chance from the beginning, who was already psychotic when he stumbled through the portal in S3 and fucked up beyond the help of anyone by the end of S4, but Wesley deserves to have the memories of this time, they're part of who he is, after all - not only the suffering, but that he made it through it; that he survived and made the right decisions in the end, despite the fact that no one made it easy for him. Not to mention that taking these memories is also taking a major part of the development of his friendship with Angel.

Otherwise, major fanish love. As in, five episodes per evening fanish love. [::blush::] There are still great emotional moments, but there's also great humour, and it feels good to be able to laugh again after all the deadly seriousness and big drama & tragedy of S 3/4.

Finished S4 yesterday, meaning I can now at least temporary un-glue myself from the tv until sometime in May when S5 is released. ~~Provided, that is, I can stifle the rather persistent urge to re-watch every single Wesley episode...~~

So maybe it's occasionally flawed and the characters are occasionally a little irritating, and I still feel like I've been dumped into a different show sometime mid-S3, when suddenly it's all pain, angst & apocalypse and hardly any laughter anymore, but despite all that I'm in deep fanish love. I think I'd have preferred if they'd allowed a little more time for characters and events to unfold, because since mid-S3 for me everything seemed a little too fast-paced, some episodes a little over-freighted, characters forced to to adjust to story-lines too quickly, but S4 especially has some terrific story-telling with things falling into place, and I did mention the glued-to-the-screen thing? If it's flawed it's because it's over-ambitious, and this is rare enough on tv these days.

( more rambling ... )

( Wesley & Angel... )

Also finished Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange ad Mr. Norell, which made a curiously satisfying read, considering the fact that at no point I was really emotionally invested in any of the characters. But it's always a pleasure to read a well-constructed story and I did find it compelling and occasionally touching, the world-building was convincing and despite the rather detached, Austen-esque style the inclusion of magic felt genuine - genuinely magic, more so perhaps than the Potter-verse. The ending was perfect and true to character, anything else would have spoiled the book.

Current Mood: tired, lazy, procrastinating

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

life without a plot

Entries tagged with wesley

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

late night not-so-fanish note

early morning fanish musings

(no subject)

Profile

March 2013

Syndicate

Expand Cut Tags