Buffy

You should be able to start off with Season 2 and not miss anything that's too important. Occasionally, they'll reference or make jokes about the early stuff (like Xander having a crush on his teacher who turns into a praying mantis), but it doesn't get in the way of following the story.

definitely. or even start with season 3 to avoid more cumulative angel screen time.

Where's she been, anyway?

She's been struggling with her career. Done a few movies but never were successful. Also had a kid (like A) with Freddie Prinz Jr. They've been together quite a long time.

are you saying she had kid a with freddie prinze

riley was the Dean of buffy

― plaxico (I know, right?), Wednesday, 30 December 2009 11:15 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

if this is a gilmore girls reference then it is so otm :(

tuomas- if you want to watch buffy, and please do it is the greatest tv show ever in the history of tv like seriously, but want to skip to the real good stuff, go: Welcome To The Hellmouth, The Harvest, Witch, Angel, Out of Mind Out of Sight, Prophecy Girl, When She Was Bad, School Hard, Halloween, Lie To Me, What's My Line Pt. 1&2, Surprise/Innocence and then watch every episode. That cuts out like 15 episodes of filler.

if it's a gilmore girls reference it's not otm! riley is one of the worst ever.

so was dean

oh i am so dumb and annoying but im pretty so rory plz love me

lol she reads books and eats and says funny things so i dont have to

riley always seemed like an underwritten jagoff to me but nonetheless i was srsly affected by the direction his character took. got all choked up and i was like 15!

i was srsly nauseated by the direction his character took >:[

dean was rad f u g2h

yeah i love dean and at least that actor is cute ffs

i liked dean at first but he was such a pussy. jess ended up being disappointingly underwritten but he > dean no doubt, though tristan was the best male character of the first 2 seasons imo!

besides christopher duh

jess is gross + that is the wrong way to watch gilmore girls, but this thread is not about that

xpost christopher is like the devil what is wrong with you???!

yeah chris is evil. i like dean actually but they are both super dopey and kinda pointless. dean is aiight because he is just something for lor/rory to bounce off of; riley doesn't smile as much as dean and thus isn't as good at this

riley was pretty boring but he was also the only one of buffy's boyfriends i would possibly consider dating material because he was the least crazy. yet more evidence that good tv is not equivalent to good life.

^^^ haaa yah dean was kinda boring compared to a 30yo poet living in his uncle's attic or the heir to a media baron's fortune but he was the best bf that rory had imo and the kinda solid car-fixing dude u want to d8 irl

oh hai guise check out this cool thread i found: Tell me what's happening on "Gilmore Girls" a.k.a. The "Gilmore Girls" thread.

riley always seemed like an underwritten jagoff to me but nonetheless i was srsly affected by the direction his character took.

Oh man: I have to agree with this and marvel at one of those rare instances of Horseshoe possibly being wrong. Riley was underwritten and bland and feckless, at first, kind of a generic love interest and a way to introduce the Initiative. And the show eventually realized that. The brilliant thing is that they dealt with this by having Riley realize it too. That was the awesome and affecting part -- Riley actually trying to cope with the fact that he was sort of useless and unimportant in the show! Which was actually part of a larger theme with a lot of the men on the show: Xander feeling useless and left-behind when he lives with his parents and doesn't go to college; Giles eventually feeling like he has nothing left to offer Buffy, etc. (Also Tara and even Dawn, to an extent, during this period where almost everyone on the show feels totally shut out and left behind by the ever-growing power of Buffy and Willow.)

I mean, I don't want to sound too lit-crit about this, because all I'm really talking about is good characterization and interpersonal dynamics, but ... I think this was an interesting flip-side to Whedon's thing for powerful female characters -- he also spent a whole lot of time on the male characters around them feeling un-powerful and useless and, umm, loser-y. And Riley was one of the more interesting ones -- you spend all this time finding him bland and useless and then one day he's like "oh shit, I'm completely bland and useless, aren't I," and at that moment he becomes incredibly interesting. To me. (He says this to Xander, too, doesn't he? That bit where they're moving and he's like "eh, she doesn't love me, I'm not important, but I guess I'll just live with that until she figures it out.")

(Granted, the Riley-hanging-with-vampires / heroin-den thing was a little on the nose, but it fit perfectly, and I actually really like their last argument, because Buffy is interestingly sort of wrong and mean -- or not so much objectively "wrong," but she confirms what Riley predicted, that she really doesn't have a ton of time or tolerance for him, that he's a bland leave-behind.)

I remember when Riley first met Buffy, he tells her that talking to her is like an "oral exam." Um, yeah, that's sexy. And when he finds out what she is, he tells her that she's a) stupid for not wanting to be with him, b) taking the Slayer thing too seriously, and c) self-involved. He makes all these judgments and assumptions about her life when he barely knows her.

In season 5, when Buffy is simultaneously trying to take care of her sick mother, her needy sister, school and slayer responsibilities, all Riley can do is whine about Buffy not being there for him and not having enough time for him. He should have dated Dawn, they were at about the same level of maturity.

To be honest I think their entire dynamic is cemented during the bit in "Hush" where she motions desperately for him to smash the box, and he smashes something else entirely and then looks up proudly at her like he's done a very good job

i think the thing that soured Riley's difficult self-realization arc for me was that horrible speech Xander gives Buffy after Riley cuts out of town after he has that whole vampire sucking/blowjob fiasco. it's all about how she should have held onto Riley because he was a good one and it really felt like the show was endorsing that sentiment, which i found intolerable. maybe this was a naive reading on my part. maybe it was supposed to say something about Xander's identification with Riley.

i am often wrong, sadly.

k3vin you should get out of this spoilery thread btw

it's all about how she should have held onto Riley because he was a good one and it really felt like the show was endorsing that sentiment, which i found intolerable.

Iirc any of the writers for the show were angry/bitter that the audience never warmed to Riley, so in a way I think it was a meta-lecture to the viewers as well as to Buffy.

Oh man: I have to agree with this and marvel at one of those rare instances of Horseshoe possibly being wrong. Riley was underwritten and bland and feckless, at first, kind of a generic love interest and a way to introduce the Initiative. And the show eventually realized that. The brilliant thing is that they dealt with this by having Riley realize it too. That was the awesome and affecting part -- Riley actually trying to cope with the fact that he was sort of useless and unimportant in the show! Which was actually part of a larger theme with a lot of the men on the show: Xander feeling useless and left-behind when he lives with his parents and doesn't go to college; Giles eventually feeling like he has nothing left to offer Buffy, etc. (Also Tara and even Dawn, to an extent, during this period where almost everyone on the show feels totally shut out and left behind by the ever-growing power of Buffy and Willow.)

I mean, I don't want to sound too lit-crit about this, because all I'm really talking about is good characterization and interpersonal dynamics, but ... I think this was an interesting flip-side to Whedon's thing for powerful female characters -- he also spent a whole lot of time on the male characters around them feeling un-powerful and useless and, umm, loser-y. And Riley was one of the more interesting ones -- you spend all this time finding him bland and useless and then one day he's like "oh shit, I'm completely bland and useless, aren't I," and at that moment he becomes incredibly interesting. To me. (He says this to Xander, too, doesn't he? That bit where they're moving and he's like "eh, she doesn't love me, I'm not important, but I guess I'll just live with that until she figures it out.")

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Wednesday, December 30, 2009 4:21 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is so, so otm

i feel like characters in angel did this too

he does say that to Xander, btw, nabisco, it's all dramatically at the end of one of the lovey-dovey Buffy-Riley episodes, and he says it all stone-faced and the episode ends, so it's meant to be and is a shock. the whole vampire/whoring plot follows soon after, i think?

xpost - Yeah, I think it makes sense that Xander would sympathize. Like: the show makes Riley bland and extraneous. The viewer finds him bland and extraneous. He himself comes to realize he's bland and extraneous. Buffy begins to treat him as bland and extraneous. This makes sense to everyone involved. But of course in terms of an actual relationship, you can't have one partner just be bland and extraneous, which I think is most of what Xander's trying to communicate there -- that if you can't think of them as more than bland/extraneous they will eventually leave. Which Riley does, and he winds up someplace where he's not extraneous, in a relationship with someone where the two of them are on an equal footing.

I didn't feel, with Xander's speech, like the show was trying to endorse the Keep Riley viewpoint so much as throw this realization in Buffy's face that she couldn't necessarily expect anyone to stick blandly/extraneously around without ever feeling important himself. The Rory + Dean comparison is kind of interesting, because these are two shows that have really strong central female characters, and both of them are way more fascinating and realistic than a ton of shows about men in terms of the idea that you can't have a relationship with someone who's vastly secondary to yourself as a main character. I dig the way, with Riley, that this is sort of meta, how he's partly dealing with the logic of the show itself, in which he's just not significant.

okay fine

(maybe "meta" is not the word, but I really like those seasons where so much of what the characters are dealing with involves their own feelings of importance/unimportance, power/powerlessness, leading/being-left-behind, etc., within the context of the show they're in!)

not to keep talking about the gilmore girls but maybe the reason dean doesn't bug me the way riley does is that i kind of hate rory. nobody could ever be good enough for buffy, tbh, which is the point all of her romantic storylines tend toward it seems.

nabisco do you ever get tired of being otm?

ha, agreed about Rory -- plus "nobody's ever good enough for you" + "you don't have time to care about them anyway" = a major part of her whole Burden of Slayerdom issue, right?

yeah it seems like it's also a generic superhero issue

ha BTW the other reason Riley can't be Dean is because that guy dated Lauren Graham (as did Spike, I think)

did not read the long posts i assume told me the entire plot of buffy but ^this is not otm, there was definitely a little tacit thing there between dean and lorelei imo

so that's why she was so mad when Rory lost her virginity

Nabisco I think one interesting thing about Buffy (which underpins your point) is that the characters really can think of themselves as being in "the show" the same way that we do - this is much less likely to be able to happen in shows either that purport to be realist, or where the fantasy element is totally accepted at the level of reality (Star Trek, say).

Buffy (and Angel too, though I think it was muddier there) is kind of odd in that you've got a very tightly defined group of people who know and interact with Buffy-as-Slayer.

One thing I thought about fans' Riley-hate is that a lot of that was down to Buffy (the character) never making him interesting. The angst-to-petting ratio in the Buffy/Angel relationship was ridiculously high, while Buffy's relationship to Riley appeared prosaic by comparison (or as much as possible for a r'ship between two such people) - the audience knew that Buffy invested pretty much zero in it apart from her sex drive long before Riley did. If the writers truly intended for us to take to him more strongly then they are responsible I think; there is so much more they could have done by making Riley's genetically mutated GI Joe-ness (not to mention Buffy-as-Slayer) an issue for the relationship back in Season 4 when I think people's opinions weren't settled. Buffy winning Riley over from The Initiative could have been a much more dramatic plot arc than it was. And (although it would have been predictable and repetitive), it would have been sensible to give him some kind of time-bomb genetic flaw that could then have been used to symbolise more subtle emotional stumbling blocks in the relationship in a way that made it easier to show its layers (in the same way that Angel's vampness was always a metaphor for the danger of sex in teenage relationships more generally) (I seem to remember there was some kind of time-bomb issue actually but it wasn't used in this way and was pretty minor from a plot-arc perspective I think?).

Tara provides a good example of this: a somewhat wispy character right up until the point where she and Willow's relationship started to fray, at which point she improved dramatically.

i don't really get why ppl think tara is a good character too

can i

http://buffy_the_vampire_slayer.oldiblog.com/sites/images/articles/575/article_575148.jpg

yeah i never really found tara a great character either. the second time i watched buffy i realized she was a pretty human and realistic character, but i still don't think she was interesting, which is also necessary.

the second time i watched buffy i realized she was a pretty human and realistic character, but i still don't think she was interesting, which is also necessary.

Yeah I think this is probably spot-on. Very true-to-life, but true-to-lifeness isn't really what you go to Buffy for.

I think the way the relatioship was set up was similarly understated, kinda secondary to Willow being shy about telling her friends, such that Tara ended up seeming like a coming-out-fling which... persisted.

Much prefer Tara to Willow's second girlfriend though.

Tara's awesomeness can be singled down to own episode iirc: The Yoko Factor- miss kitty fantastico, going to the bathroom w/ anya, her delicate enthusiasm for willow even when spike is ripping on her

how's it going k3ller?

oh christ i'd forgotten all about wes

i bought 2 and 3 but havent gotten around to watching them yet. i've gotten too into the Wire which has the better fortune of having a dropdead classic first season, can't stop.

btw halfway thru season 2 and this is incredible now

no it is by far the WORST... it doesnt really get good until disc 3 of s2

― my girl wants to sharty all the time (s1ocki), Monday, December 28, 2009 6:05 PM (3 weeks ago)

it got great a little before this for me but "innocence" (on disc 4) is stunning