I’ve been “getting my geek on” over at the past few weeks, letting my viewage of BtVS season one inspire some essays in the good ol’ ATPo style:
Vampires and the Clarity of Evil
Of Vampires and Souls
A(n Un)Natural History of Demons
Take a peek, and indulge your inner geek!
Good stuff. I was all ready for spoilers
I haven’t said much about the whole LJ fiasco, because I’m generally on the outside of it all except as it impacts people on my flist. But I am curious where the line is. I think of Season 2 of BtVS, for example, where 16-turning-17 year-old Buffy is showing sleeping with Angel, who of course is an adult in every sense of the world. Or on Deep Space Nine, where the 16-year old Jake Sisko dates a 20-year old dabo girl.
There are underage-older relationships on TV all the time, many of them explicitly sexual, and that’s not illegal, depicting that. So what’s the line, anyway?
“In January 2008 the Duke University Press will publish “Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer” edited by Elana Levine and Lisa Parks. The collection of essays come from media studies scholars, who tackle the Buffy phenomenon and its many afterlives in popular culture, the television industry, the Internet, and academic criticism. The writers engage with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s celebrity image, science-fiction fanzines, international and youth audiences, Buffy pulp fiction, and Angel’s body, showing how this primetime drama became a blockbuster that stands out from much entertainment television by offering sharp, provocative commentaries on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and youth.
Recognizing that you run a Buffy fansite devoted to philosophical studies, we are very excited to offer you the chance to receive a free advance copy of this upcoming book. Please email me your current mailing address, and I will send a copy of “Undead TV” your way promptly.”
The other day, another person wrote asking if I was going to do ATPo analyses of the Season 8 comics. With the usual argument–“Joss says they’re canon!” Yeah. Uh. Joss also once said spatulas were haunting him.
Anyway, leaving aside the fact that a great deal of what’s going on in the comics is just recycling of old villians (and not even the most interesting ones), in a medium (comics) where the sky *ought* to be the limit with new and interesting stuff from the master’s imagination,
one of the main points of ATPo analyses was to explain what the frig is going on in an episode (or issue) and I can’t for the life of me figure it out! Every panel, I’m like…”*Now* where are we?!” “Who’s that?!” “How’d we get from what was just going on to *this*?” “What are they *talking* about!?”
If I can’t understand it, I can’t explain it, and…
I suppose there’s a part of me that wants Season 8 up at ATPo for completeness’ sake, and that’s why I’m even bothering to mention it. ‘Cause, not impressed with it (the paranoid military story line’s kinda cool, but still feels a bit recycled….) for the most part, and, I guess I’m one of those fans who was satisfied with season 7 being the end of the story.
I complain about ST’s regressiveness by contemporary standards, but this show was ground-breaking in its day. Back in 1964, when the show was first pitched to the networks, sci-fi was commonly thought of as the province of pre-pubescent boys–the stuff of Saturday matinees, comic books, and serialized periodicals that got stuffed in with the kiddy mags.
Star Trek gave sci-fi a decidedly adult face by putting it in a military setting any World War II vet would have recognized (well, except for the women, and the inevitable cheesiness). And it had a mixed-race, mixed gender crew in the days of pre-second-wave feminism and segregation.
So credit where credit is due.
Now onto my random comments: 1.1-1.10
So to celebrate my recent change in job title, I bought myself DVD sets of the original Star Trek.
*OMG geeks*
OTOH? This show has a sexist offense every ten minutes. I’m timing them. Soon there will be a drinking game.
ETA: How annoying is it that the episodes are on the disks in their air date order, instead of the order they were intended to be shown in? We all know networks suck!!
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 