Inconsistentlywrittensoul - Hey, I Could Be Lots Of Things - Tumblr Blog

just wait for part 2

okay, so she's definitely the Rani, right?

okay, so she's definitely the Rani, right?

Average autistic friend group:

I forgot to post this here LOL

evil twiglimmer c'mon.... pre-ponyville twi and pre-reformed star (insane)

I'm So Evil, And Skanky, And I Think I'm Kinda Gay (Bad Girls)

In 1872, a full twenty-five years before the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu published Carmilla. This story depicts the relationship between the young and innocent protagonist, Laura, and the confident and mysterious title character, Carmilla. A friendship blossoms between Carmilla and Laura and the two become close, but over time Laura becomes suspicious of Carmilla’s strange behaviour. She flees from her, and it is revealed that Carmilla is a vampire who has been preying on Laura – feeding on her nightly and attempting to turn her into a creature of darkness. Carmilla is confronted, killed, has her head removed and body burned, and the ashes of both are thrown into the river. 

A simple story and much shorter than a true novel, Carmilla’s historical impact outweighs its length. Not only is it one of the earliest and most notable pieces of vampire fiction, and a great influence on Dracula itself, it is also the origin point of one of the most controversial tropes in this genre of fiction: the Lesbian Vampire.

The vampire myth as constructed by Dracula and its compatriots positions vampires as a corrupting sexual influence upon women. Older men sneak into the bedrooms of virginal young women, penetrate them, and therefore transform them into something tragic and ungodly. They personify a threat to patriarchy; a threat perceived in the form of female sexuality. The idea is that an unmarried woman having symbolic sex will irrevocably twist them into some kind of monster.

The Lesbian Vampire exists as an extension of this idea, focusing on one of the most diabolical threats to patriarchal ideology – a woman who sexually desires another woman. Carmilla’s victims are exclusively female, and her pursuit of Laura is very visibly romantic in nature. She kisses Laura, confesses love for her, the two take walks in the moonlight and embrace each other. This is what leads to Carmilla feeding upon Laura and threatening her death. Symbolically, there is no separation between the two. The danger Laura is in is caused by same-sex desire. Carmilla’s villainy is her lesbianism. The trope does not have to include vampires in a strict sense, but more generally the link of sapphic seduction leading to corruption.

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Big fan of sun motifs in characters not necessarily being about positivity and happiness and how they're so " bright and warm" but instead being about fucking brutal they are.

Radiant. A FORCE of nature that will turn you to ash. That warmth that burns so hot it feels like ice. Piercing yellow and red and white. A character being a Sun because you cannot challenge a Sun without burning alive or taking everything down with them if victorious.

"She didn't even kill me! [...] She didn't even care enough to cut off my head, or set me on fire. Is that too much to ask? Y'know, some little sign that she cared?" - Spike about Drusilla, definitely not Faith about Buffy

Lovers Walk is about Faith.

One of the reasons I don't mind that Faith is physically missing for so much of S3 is that she is such a strong thematic presence that episodes where she doesn't even appear are still very much About her and what she represents in the narrative. Like Band Candy showing us the events of Bad Girls eight episodes in advance, The Wish showing us how easily Buffy could end up a more jaded, bitter, friendless slayer, Earshot being centred around characters whose jealousy and insecurities can turn suicidal as easily as homoicidal. But Lovers Walk might be my favourite of these.

If you read the events of Revelations as Faith feeling cheated on and dumped (which you should, because that's how the narrative describes it. It's not literally what happens but it is explicitly how Faith feels about it), then that makes Spike in Lovers Walk very clearly a proxy Faith. Like, we leave off Revelations with Faith alone in her motel, feeling sad and heartbroken and cut off from Buffy, and then we roll into Lovers Walk and Buffy's other dark shadow self turns up a heartbroken mess, having just been cheated on and dumped, and spends the whole episode being very sad and bitter about it, and I think it's a good reference point for what Faith is also feeling at that point.

Faith is already linked to the events of this episode through the "we're just good friends" axis that connects Buffy/Faith, Buffy/Angel and Willow/Xander that I've talked about before. She's also linked through the dog/love theme that is woven throughout S3 and pops up here with the "love's bitch" reference. And Spike's speech puts a bow on this, by being, to be honest, a better desriptor of Buffy/Faith than it is of Buffy/Angel. Everything that Spike says in this episode Faith could say herself, and most likely wants to say herself.

"You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends."

I picked Dorfl, but I also think Colon and Nobby would be a good pick - they'd do the wrong thing at every point, but somehow end up accidentally dropping the ring into Mount Doom anyway.

The one character I would never give it to is Granny Weatherwax. Even if she resisted the temptation - and the temptation would be profound, far moreso than for any other character on the list - she would hate every moment of it. It's a terrible thing to do to her, and potentially a terrible thing to do to the world.

Explanations welcome! No "other" option, sorry.

Also, Buffy and Faith are absolutely girlfriends in early Season 3, but are also completely unaware of that fact.

I’m way behind on posting about my rewatch - there’s plenty I do want to say about S2, and there’s a whole essay about gender and Phases that I’m probably never going to write - but I’m into Season 3 and I really want to note how much early S3 establishes the issues that are going to drive Buffy’s long breakdown in seasons 6 and 7.

Firstly, Buffy's tendency to pull away from her friends, feeling she has to take care of everything for herself and protect them from her problems and her feelings rather than sharing them. It’s a consistent pattern, and we see it in her running away at the end of Season 2, and continually refusing to talk about what happened with Angel with both the Scoobies and Faith. When she eventually does try to talk to her assigned school counsellor about Angel, she explicitly says she can’t talk to anyone else about what’s happening (only to find him dead, which I’m sure didn’t help).

Of course, this isn’t just a flaw of Buffy’s - her friends have a pretty big role to play, especially Xander. His sanctimonious, judgemental whining about Buffy leaving, as well as anything to do with Angel, does a lot to push Buffy away. (Not to mention the first thing he does when he finds out Angel is back is try to manipulate Faith into murdering him.) It’s also hard not to suspect that Xander’s lie back in Becoming did a lot of damage - because of that, Buffy thinks even Willow hates Angel and wouldn’t understand her continued feelings for him. ‘Kick his ass’ made Buffy feel like literally no-one is on her side.

Regardless of the reason, here we see the beginning of the split that will make Buffy feel increasingly isolated and unable to trust or rely on anyone as the series continues into the depression years, especially Season 6. But we also see the start of a pattern that will become a central flaw in Season 7 - her inability to express empathy or care for anyone who she sees as a reflection of herself.

I’m actually not talking about Faith here - that’s related, but it’s also a whole can of lesbian worms I don’t want to get into right now. But aside from Faith, in the first few episodes of Season 3 there are two girls who mirror Buffy, specifically in her relationship with Angel. In Anne, we have Lily/Anne, who’s wants to spend the rest of her life with her older boyfriend, who has a criminal past and seems a little crappy but also genuinely loves her and is trying to be good to her, and who ends up being sent to hell. Then in Beauty and the Beasts, we see Abby, who started dating a guy who seemed nice at first, but who turned out to be an abusive monster. Both are very obvious parallels to Buffy in her relationship with Angel (in soul-having and soulless forms), and serve as ways for her reflect on that relationship.

But what I want to focus on is the fact that, while Buffy does try to help both girls, she’s also unusually harsh and unempathetic towards them. Her attitude is ‘This is how things are, and you need to set aside your emotions and just deal with it immediately and without emotional support’; it reflects how she treats herself, but it’s also a pattern in how she treats people whose challenges reflect hers. Which will come to a head in how she treats the Potential slayers in season 7, and the way she alienates everyone around her in part through her treatment of them (and therefore also her treatment of herself).

It’s just interesting to see these issues that will dominate the last couple of seasons come across so strongly in this early part of Season 3.

most of these are useless and probably inconvenient - certainly wings are going to be both - but imagine being able to hold something in both hands and still have free hands you can use

no matter how terrible my day is. i can always end my day in bed imagining fictional characters making out sloppy style and fucking raw. and that's beautiful. there's some good in this world mister frodo and it's worth fighting for

Almost exactly 10 years later and Joyce is still trying to get this information out of Dorothy

[guy who likes to help everyone always but is also suicidal and some sort of pervert voice] no yeah you can drink my blood. It’s fine

Most Divorced Buffy Couple Tournament

Not to be painfully insightful, Xander, but perhaps it is you who is having parental issues, and I that should be doing a little dance as I tell you that.

I just think him immediately latching onto Ted as a seemingly functional father figure isn't just about the tasty, tasty drugs.

hate how much the lyrics to this fit Faith

she'd hate this. what the fuck

I want to talk about Buffy and Angel's relationship in Ted (and, I guess, Bad Eggs as well, a little). And I think it's a good time to look at them together - for one thing, at this point, post-What's My Line, I think they are definitely in a relationship, rather than the weird murky situation they were in for most of the early season. And in two episodes time, Angel's going to lose his soul - this is basically the peak of their Season 2 relationship, and also of what I see as Angel's pre-'Surprise' arc, of him gradually becoming less of a complete fucking disaster.

So now in Ted, we see them together as boyfriend and girlfriend, and... well, the scene starts with her talking his ear off complaining about Ted and him clearly bored. It's not as bad as it sounds - he's pretty good in this scene, and gives Buffy some sensible advice. (Ignoring the fact that Ted turns out to be abusive and also a robot, which isn't a factor yet.) This might be the first time in the series that Angel actually seems more emotionally mature than Buffy, and he uses that maturity to be a good, supportive boyfriend helping her through her issues...

But...

This is also a scene where Buffy is very much a teenager and Angel very much isn't. (This is also in an episode partly about Buffy's parental issues, which seems relevant to their relationship but I'd like to ignore for ick reasons.) His maturity is an advantage here, but there's also a clear disconnect between them, and that becomes more apparent as Angel gradually works his way towards being a functional person.

Bad Eggs is similar. Again, we see the positive side of their relationship, in the form of fun makeouts, but we also see the shadow of deeper problems in their relationship from a long-term perspective - the fact Angel can't have kids, Buffy's immaturity and inability to think about the future (for both normal teenager and doomed slayer reasons).

I am glad we get this period of them being mostly happy together, of their relationship mostly working - it's not just all-angsty- melodrama-all-the-time, a common failure state for their relationship and for Buffy as a whole. But even at the best of times, the issues in their relationship are always present - not the grand, dramatic problems that are the focus of Season 2, but the mundane issues that are the reason they ultimately break up in Season 3.

Twiglimmer/StarTwi/TwiStar stuffs (because I'm so twiglimmer-pilled right now)

Slightly half-assed designs because I just wanted to draw out the prompt, but yes... all love to Twilight who wears both dresses and suit and tie, and Starlight suit and tie... this mostly focuses on an au-ish (is it called canon divergent) type of setting? but it's very based off from the fact that Twilight and Starlight work closely since Twilight took Starlight to live in her castle with her and spike (domestic... but I digress)