Hope I prepare better than my students

[cornerofmadness]

Today's midterm was a brutal killing and I'm betting tomorrow's is worse. As for me I'm trying to get ready for the fact that in two weeks I'll be on an author panel that like 8 people will probably attend but it's still freaking me out.I also have a novella due by the end of next week. Luckily it was done but has been rejected in the past. I'm hoping this might be a good fit for it though.

And a question for those who read the Buffy comics, did the 'loss of magic' start immediately? I know that down the road Willow talked Connor into going to Quor-Toth after some sort of magic (or some nonsense). I'm trying to make sense of this Slayer b ook because chapter one doubled down on Buffy as the villain who 'broke magic' and there is none left in the world (which I still say doesn't jive with Angel season five and I'm struggling to find reasons to keep reading.


ETA - I've picked out my wipbigbang which will have sing ups soon. It's 20 year post Angel final (ignoring this asinine magic thing) I know the personal and main subplot.What I need is a Big Bad to hit L.A. something big enough seers are worried. Any thoughts? Anything you'd like to see?


And fluffbingo is running again. Sign ups are open.



fluffbingo fluffbingo fluffbingo



And a couple fan vids I wanted to share to the same song (not a song I particularly mind but it works). I remember this first one from YEARS ago and it was redone (still nearly a decade old). Yeah I know Connor isn't most people's favorite but this one is very well done, rendered in black and white with splashes of well-used color. I still find the father-son dynamics compelling (even if that puts me in the minority)

"Counting Bodies (Angel: the series)" (Watch on YouTube)

And this one led me to this Drusilla one. Even I, who loved Dru, tend to forget just how damn dangerous she was.

"Counting Bodies Like Sheep || Angelus & Drusilla" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[rahirah]

Uuuuuugh the magic thing in the comics was so stupid.

In theory, yes, magic went away as soon as Buffy broke the Seed of Wonder at the end of S8. However, the writers probably realized that if they took this seriously, they wouldn't have a story any longer, as demons and vampires and Slayers all run on magic. So immediately, at the beginning of S9, they began to weasel about it. For some reason, demons who were already on Earth didn't just die or disappear because their metabolisms were suddenly impossible. Vampires didn't just turn into corpses. Slayers didn't turn into normal women. No, they all just chugged along like normal because they had their own internal magic supplies. Or something. Dimensional travel, which was supposed to be impossible now because Earth was sealed off from all other dimensions, still happened whenever the plot required it, for Reasons.

The only things that were really affected by the so-called end of magic were 1) Witches, who couldn't cast spells any longer, and 2) siring new vampires. Hold on now, this gets INCREDIBLY stupid.

The writers of S9 decided that every time a new vampire is sired, it gets a brand new demon from a demon dimension, instead of "inheriting" its demon from its sire. Now logically, if this were the case, and Earth was sealed off from all the demon dimensions, then siring new vampires shouldn't work at all, right? Because no new demon could cross the dimensional barriers to inhabit the corpse, correct?

But nooooooooooo. The S9 writers decided that SOMEHOW, the new demon could control the corpse BY REMOTE CONTROL FROM THE OTHER DIMENSION. Just not very well. So all new vampires, or "zompires" as Xander called them, and unfortunately it stuck, were shambling brainless monsters permanently stuck in game face. Which is boring as shit, but whatever.

Once Willow brought the new Seed back from Quortoth or wherever and renewed magic, new vampires changed AGAIN in Season 10, and got the ability to turn into bats and mist and shit like Dracula. So by the end of the series there are two breeds of vampires, the BtVS Classic type like Spike and Angel, who are, I guess, doomed to eventually die off, and Vampires 2.0, which the writers stripped of everything that makes BtVS vampires unique for no particular reason I can see.

[cornerofmadness]

Holy fuck that sounds stupid. I can't even imagine WHY they would want to keep this canon. So if I get this right this would then not be what Buffy does in Sunnydale but rather like a year or so later (so not to interfer with Angel's final series)


I'm SO glad I decided against reading these comics because the stupid you just described burns. And now I want to read this novel even less. I mean I probably will try to go forward with it since I bothered the library into getting it but wtf?

Also if there's no magic how do Connor and Willow get to Quor-Toth? He just beat another hole in the universe? (and I read some nonsense about him staying there for a while but comes back not really aged much....which okay)

Also thanks for taking the time to fill me in. It probably cost us both some brain cells here...

[rahirah]

Right, Season 8 takes place some undetermined amount of time after the last season of AtS. At least a year, but possibly as much as two or even three years, depending upon how much of the IDW comics you consider canon for Angel and Spike. The timeline (and a lot of Angel and Spike's characterization) is borked because even though the last IDW Spike miniseries was supposed to count as Dark Horse canon for the purposes of tying the two series together, the Dark Horse writers didn't give a shit about maintaining continuity with the IDW stuff.

TBH I can't remember exactly how they got to Quor-toth... let me google. Oh, yeah. There was a ~convenient loophole~ that because Quor-Toth had never been accessed by dimensional portals, you could still get to it with a different ritual, which WIllow conveniently found. Willow used the Scythe as a magical battery to power the spell, and once they got to Quor-Toth she was able to suck up enough magic there to get them to the other places they had to go.

ETA: Oh, and in S10, the new writer went back to the "Vampires inherit their demons from their sires" theory and there was a whole massive plotline depending on it, so Dark Horse didn't even give a shit about its OWN continuity. Not that I mind in that case; I'd have ditched it too if I were stuck with it.

[cornerofmadness]

borking their own continuity is a right of passage for comic book authors, I swear. Honestly some of the IDW ones did that in the Angel books (and in that case, being handed actual angels making it seem a bit too much like Supernatural, I don't blame them either).

Yeah I knew that Dark Horse didn't pay any attention to IDW which in a way was just as stupid because Joss is the one who outlined the in hell part of this from what I gathered of Angel and company's fate.

Ah a loophole but of course.

Thanks again for the help and really REALLY REALLY wished they had not kept the comic canon for this novel since it can't even agree with itself.

[all_choseny]

I stopped reading the comics mid s7. I need to catch up on the comic reboot.

I think I will sign up for Wip Big Bang, too! And thanks for the shout out!

[cornerofmadness]

Given the insanity that rahirah just described in the comics I can see why. I had no money at all when they came out so I think that's why I didn't get into the comics. I have the hard bound compliation of the first 5 or 6 of them but didn't like it. I have the reboot lying here but they've changed so much that I'm struggling to get interested.

You're welcome for the shout out, always happy to help. And the bigbang was fun. Gave me a reason to concentrate on a project. Now if only it had a big bad...

[beer_good_foamy]

I abandoned the comics before the Seed of Wonder bullshit, but I remember there being a lot of discussion about exactly when it's set before then. I think there was some remark from Dark Horse about it being set about 12 months post-Chosen, which would place it in mid-2004...ish, but then they kept making pop culture references about stuff that happened years later and saying Xander and Willow had been away doing other things for more than a year, so... Basically, any attempt to establish a time line, except that it happened after "The Girl In Question", was impossible. The charitable interpretation is that they deliberately wanted to make the timeline vague to keep the story current. (There were other, less charitable interpretations too.)

[cornerofmadness]

Thanks! So that makes the novel a couple years post the Buffy finale. And honestly I am going with the less charitable interpretation. Though, sometimes you do forget the time period. I literally just did that with Key to Destruction I wrote for fandom_stocking but luckily realized before posting that smartphones and easy texting didn't exist in 2004 and that Skype was brand new.

[beer_good_foamy]

I forgot to mention that there was a LOT of disagreements about exactly how much time passed over the course of "season 8" as well; some claimed it all happened over a few weekends (that would explain why nobody seemed to take five minutes to think about their decisions), others that it took at least a full year... So if the starting point was vague, the end point would be even vaguer.

Yeah, it's easy to forget how quickly time can move. Especially since canon was always a few years behind (nobody had a cell phone until s7, really?) I keep meaning to do a present-day s3 rewrite, just to play with what's changed in... oh god, 20 years. o_O

[cornerofmadness]

Yeah that whole crew (Angel's team too) never seemed to take a minute and think things thru (frankly half of my post Angel S4 fanfic is about exactly that). Given the haziness of all this you'd think that they'd want to skip the comic canon when making new books but whatever. Now that I know this, I can get thru this one and never do this again.

Seriously, they had beepers (and I had to get that off my syllabus a year or two ago when I realize come on, it's NOT 2007, who the hell has a beeper any more. these kids don't even know what it was). 20 years, I know, I know. Don't ask me how so much time has passed.

[beer_good_foamy]

and I had to get that off my syllabus a year or two ago when I realize come on, it's NOT 2007, who the hell has a beeper any more. these kids don't even know what it was

I recently had to explain to a 19-year-old colleague what a fax machine was. I'm still not sure she believed me.

[cornerofmadness]

Ahahahaha and we still have people using those at the library (and getting charged a boatload for it)

[beer_good_foamy]

Our library hasn't had a fax machine for at least 10 years, and people still occasionally come in demanding to use it.
"Sorry, we don't have one."
"Then why did the bank TELL ME you had one? HUH?"

...Then again, a while back I was talking to some tech bro who asked me what was the most common thing people needed to do on the library's computers.
"Printing."
"What?"
"Printing. Documents, letters, applications, tickets..."
"Wait... printing? On actual paper? People still do that?"
"...Yes."

[cornerofmadness]

Yes, tons of people still do paper. Our brain is WIRED for paper. Reading entirely online does bad things to it