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Troops on the water.
Having seen the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the first season of Angel, I'm really in it for the long haul now. Swapping the series' and alternating the seasons' viewing was a good choice - it's an opportunity to enjoy the experience of incomplete information. It's very clear there's more going on around the edges of the story I just haven't been informed about yet, and while I've been spoiled for some things I haven't been spoiled for all of them, or the particular circumstances of how they happen.
What it really reminds me of is the feeling of reading X-Men comics in the nineties before widespread fandom wikis. I didn't read everything in order, just chunks here and there when I had enough money to get another trade paperback, so there were some significant gaps between the stuff I knew, and the stuff I had to infer and extrapolate about. With Buffy and Angel, it's kind of like that, and I'm struggling to avoid spoilers - even indirect ones - to sustain that feeling of filling in the blank spaces.
Watching the shows also reminds me of those comics in the way the casts and themes get retooled every so often. Again, the X-Men kept getting new 'volumes' and major team shifts, and sometimes it was swift and decisive and sometimes it was slowly constructed and realized over a number of years to the point where it wasn't immediately evident even while it was happening. The general ethos and drive is still generally intact, but the execution changes. The first "volume" of Buffy, which was about as neatly designed as anything Whedon's ever done, was the first three seasons, and after that it's onto volume two. Which I can understand, having seen that come through before.
Oddly enough, the first direct experience I had with any Buffy-related media - not counting vids - was the first Fray trade paperback, which my hometown library had for some reason. And from that, I got the impression every Slayer got the memories and experiences of each past Slayer. Not quite reincarnation, but certainly some form of singular collective memory. When I watched the show and found it was just prophetic and illustrative dreams, I was fairly disappointed, in no small part because it was a retroactively lost opportunity for so much good storytelling - Buffy having to maintain herself against the tide of all the past Slayers and their lives to bring more emphasis and emotional undercurrent of her struggle for personal identity and not just her rallying against her grand destiny, having the strength and the memories of the skills but but not knowing how to put them together, and the dichotomy between ageless warrior and young girl would make her relationship with Angel much more compelling. If she's both the young girl and ageless warrior, as Angel is always a young man and ageless demon, there'd be a sense of understanding between the two of them that would provide weight and resonance to their love beyond new relationship energy that first came from Buffy being sixteen which got lost after she grew up a bit and it turned into a contractual obligation.
This misconception also had me anticipating that when another Slayer showed up, she'd have all of Buffy's memories to the moment of her death. Which had me thinking - would Faith, with her copy of Buffy's life stored safe in her head, be the only person who remembered life before Dawn was rewritten into it? I know she was on another show at the time, but wouldn't that have been interesting to explore?
Also, the moment Charles Gunn appeared, "Right-Hand Man" came into my head - "You were expecting someone else?" Here comes the General - BOOM!
What it really reminds me of is the feeling of reading X-Men comics in the nineties before widespread fandom wikis. I didn't read everything in order, just chunks here and there when I had enough money to get another trade paperback, so there were some significant gaps between the stuff I knew, and the stuff I had to infer and extrapolate about. With Buffy and Angel, it's kind of like that, and I'm struggling to avoid spoilers - even indirect ones - to sustain that feeling of filling in the blank spaces.
Watching the shows also reminds me of those comics in the way the casts and themes get retooled every so often. Again, the X-Men kept getting new 'volumes' and major team shifts, and sometimes it was swift and decisive and sometimes it was slowly constructed and realized over a number of years to the point where it wasn't immediately evident even while it was happening. The general ethos and drive is still generally intact, but the execution changes. The first "volume" of Buffy, which was about as neatly designed as anything Whedon's ever done, was the first three seasons, and after that it's onto volume two. Which I can understand, having seen that come through before.
Oddly enough, the first direct experience I had with any Buffy-related media - not counting vids - was the first Fray trade paperback, which my hometown library had for some reason. And from that, I got the impression every Slayer got the memories and experiences of each past Slayer. Not quite reincarnation, but certainly some form of singular collective memory. When I watched the show and found it was just prophetic and illustrative dreams, I was fairly disappointed, in no small part because it was a retroactively lost opportunity for so much good storytelling - Buffy having to maintain herself against the tide of all the past Slayers and their lives to bring more emphasis and emotional undercurrent of her struggle for personal identity and not just her rallying against her grand destiny, having the strength and the memories of the skills but but not knowing how to put them together, and the dichotomy between ageless warrior and young girl would make her relationship with Angel much more compelling. If she's both the young girl and ageless warrior, as Angel is always a young man and ageless demon, there'd be a sense of understanding between the two of them that would provide weight and resonance to their love beyond new relationship energy that first came from Buffy being sixteen which got lost after she grew up a bit and it turned into a contractual obligation.
This misconception also had me anticipating that when another Slayer showed up, she'd have all of Buffy's memories to the moment of her death. Which had me thinking - would Faith, with her copy of Buffy's life stored safe in her head, be the only person who remembered life before Dawn was rewritten into it? I know she was on another show at the time, but wouldn't that have been interesting to explore?
Also, the moment Charles Gunn appeared, "Right-Hand Man" came into my head - "You were expecting someone else?" Here comes the General - BOOM!