Buffy season 10 no 24
Feb. 17th, 2016 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shapinglightJust a quick review, as again, mostly harmless.
Spoilers behind cut. Also, I'll be away when the next two issues come out so will probably do a joint review of them some time towards the end of April.
In short, the gang catches up with the Mistress and the Soul Glutton and defeats them, mainly because during the battle the Soul Glutton gloms onto the fact that Dawn is Buffy's sister and tries to drain her soul so that Buffy will feel the same pain as he felt when the Slayer killed his family. But he can't drain Dawn because she's the Key. Instead, he loses all his energy and he and the Mistress smash the Restless Door to stop it falling into the gang's hands, then run away, leaving them to deal with an open portal to a hell dimension full of ravening demons that they can't close. It ends with Dawn asking why everyone is looking at her.
So far, so facile plotty stuff, I suppose. I did get a slight feeling of disconnect, though. The book starts with Mini!Giles back from Fairyland already and everyone acting like some time has gone by. For one thing, from what Xander says to Ghost!Not!Anya, he's been sat in his room for ages doing nothing and just hanging out with her, etc, etc. Buffy and Spike, meanwhile, have a sort of not-argument, which for once is not full of 'this relationship is doomed' anvils, but comes across as way more like the sort of argument people in a relationship tend to just have.
But it is all a bit like the 'everyone knows about vampires now' plot line in season 8. You're left thinking a lot of things are meant to be going on elsewhere, but because we haven't seen them and they're only referred to in passing, it feels like important stuff is missing. Even with Buffy and Spike, I think we're meant to think they've been arguing a lot, but there's no sense of that when all you see are a couple of not-really-arguments-at-all.
Not that any of it matters, of course. That very spoilery blurb for no 27 has already revealed that the upshot of trying to use Dawn's keyness to close the portal will result in her and Xander being stuck on the other side and that the Magic Council, the army and the fae are going to betray Buffy and the gang. Which duh! really, except that if there was more of a sense of a lot of time passing Buffy would seem like less of an idiot for semi-trusting them in the first place.
Actually, that's a bit unfair, I suppose. She has been more or less steam-rollered into it. But of course, that's part of the problem. She's not acting, just reacting.
Oh well.
ETA: a couple of plotty things I should have mentioned, I suppose. Firstly, Xander tells Not!Ghost!Anya that she's not really Anya, and that Doctor Mike has told him he should ignore her, because she needs to move on and that's the best way to make her do it. Secondly, Mini!Giles has a fae girlfriend. That's not going to end well, is it?
I also think the easy defeat of the Soul Glutton and the Mistress (though unlike the Sculptor they aren't dead) makes it even more likely that the voice in the cave talking to Ghost!Not!Anya was D'Hoffryn's. I'm expecting a grand alliance of the Magic Council, the Soul Glutton and the Mistress, the army, and the new and old vamps (led by Harmony and Vicki), and possibly (though I really hope not, he's such a crap villain)Archaeus to go after Buffy and the gang before the end of the series, and for Angel, Faith, Fred etc to turn up to help them.
If that does happen and Gage manages to juggle all those characters along with their personal relationship stories and bring them to any kind of satisfactory conclusion (even if only plotwise), I think he'll deserve some kudos for it, no matter what the series' failings.
Spoilers behind cut. Also, I'll be away when the next two issues come out so will probably do a joint review of them some time towards the end of April.
In short, the gang catches up with the Mistress and the Soul Glutton and defeats them, mainly because during the battle the Soul Glutton gloms onto the fact that Dawn is Buffy's sister and tries to drain her soul so that Buffy will feel the same pain as he felt when the Slayer killed his family. But he can't drain Dawn because she's the Key. Instead, he loses all his energy and he and the Mistress smash the Restless Door to stop it falling into the gang's hands, then run away, leaving them to deal with an open portal to a hell dimension full of ravening demons that they can't close. It ends with Dawn asking why everyone is looking at her.
So far, so facile plotty stuff, I suppose. I did get a slight feeling of disconnect, though. The book starts with Mini!Giles back from Fairyland already and everyone acting like some time has gone by. For one thing, from what Xander says to Ghost!Not!Anya, he's been sat in his room for ages doing nothing and just hanging out with her, etc, etc. Buffy and Spike, meanwhile, have a sort of not-argument, which for once is not full of 'this relationship is doomed' anvils, but comes across as way more like the sort of argument people in a relationship tend to just have.
But it is all a bit like the 'everyone knows about vampires now' plot line in season 8. You're left thinking a lot of things are meant to be going on elsewhere, but because we haven't seen them and they're only referred to in passing, it feels like important stuff is missing. Even with Buffy and Spike, I think we're meant to think they've been arguing a lot, but there's no sense of that when all you see are a couple of not-really-arguments-at-all.
Not that any of it matters, of course. That very spoilery blurb for no 27 has already revealed that the upshot of trying to use Dawn's keyness to close the portal will result in her and Xander being stuck on the other side and that the Magic Council, the army and the fae are going to betray Buffy and the gang. Which duh! really, except that if there was more of a sense of a lot of time passing Buffy would seem like less of an idiot for semi-trusting them in the first place.
Actually, that's a bit unfair, I suppose. She has been more or less steam-rollered into it. But of course, that's part of the problem. She's not acting, just reacting.
Oh well.
ETA: a couple of plotty things I should have mentioned, I suppose. Firstly, Xander tells Not!Ghost!Anya that she's not really Anya, and that Doctor Mike has told him he should ignore her, because she needs to move on and that's the best way to make her do it. Secondly, Mini!Giles has a fae girlfriend. That's not going to end well, is it?
I also think the easy defeat of the Soul Glutton and the Mistress (though unlike the Sculptor they aren't dead) makes it even more likely that the voice in the cave talking to Ghost!Not!Anya was D'Hoffryn's. I'm expecting a grand alliance of the Magic Council, the Soul Glutton and the Mistress, the army, and the new and old vamps (led by Harmony and Vicki), and possibly (though I really hope not, he's such a crap villain)Archaeus to go after Buffy and the gang before the end of the series, and for Angel, Faith, Fred etc to turn up to help them.
If that does happen and Gage manages to juggle all those characters along with their personal relationship stories and bring them to any kind of satisfactory conclusion (even if only plotwise), I think he'll deserve some kudos for it, no matter what the series' failings.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-25 09:48 am (UTC)Yes, the writing is on the wall, especially going by Gage's Twitter comment about how this would be the issue where 'everyone' (by which I interpret him to mean Spuffy 'shippers) starts hating him, and when challenged about how nothing terribly bad happens in this issue said it must be in the next one then.
It's a shame, if only because their relationship as written so far was almost 'realistic,' if you can put it that way. Their disagreements were just the small disagreements you have in daily life. In fact, I have trouble squaring what not!Anya says with what happens on the page. I didn't feel that Spike was being especially unsupportive. Oh well. Does make me wonder, given there's going to be a season 11, what they're going to do with Spike in it. I know season 10 started with him sticking around near Buffy as a 'friend' but we all could see he wanted more, and if he's had more and it hasn't worked, I don't see him sticking around near Buffy afterwards, or at least not nearly so closely. So where will he go?
Maybe they really are planning a Spike/Angel book?
no subject
Date: 2016-02-27 07:23 pm (UTC)I have to admit, not!Anya in that section came off to me as a parody of shippers (and maybe certain segments of fandom in general. (And not just one segment, because the comments I see from Bangel fans on various forums are just as insane as Spuffy comments can sometimes be. Yeah, I said it. We can be CRAZY in support of our ships, every one of us.)
I mean, it's not particularly far-fetched. Read the comments here or at one of the comics forums, then look again at Anya's "interpretation" of the scene - and notice she's interpreting every single gesture, like a "pout" as if it had some deeper meaning. If this is truly NOT Anya, as we've been told, she doesn't know Buffy and Spike, and we haven't seen her observing them or interacting with them. What gives her analysis any more weight than Vicki's a few issues back? (Other than the fact that Gage has various characters repeating said analysis over and over....)
*And then something stupid will happen and I will end up contradicting myself. I know. S10 is so weirdly frustrating to me - good enough that I want to follow it, bad enough that I bitch about it afterwards, and then wait for the next issue.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-02 04:36 pm (UTC)Yeah, I'm in pretty much the same situation.;)