#btvs liveblog

[blog-of-frontiers]

Sorry but this is Angel to me. Like this is the only pose and expression he does when he's trying to be cute

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #btvs liveblog

[debbthelesbianbountyhunter]

And just like that I fell in love.

I could write a whole dissertation on Cordelia “says faiths hair is obviously fake even though it is brown” chase. But the thing that I love specifically in this line, and why it’s so iconic, is because Cordelia isnt scared of Buffy, she’s ANGEY, and she doesn’t just ask Buffy what her issue is, she asks her what her childhood trauma is. She says the cattiest, funniest thing and then immediately goes and tells everyone that the weird new girl threatened her w a stick.

I adore you ms. chase.

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #buffy summers #btvs meme #buffy #cordelia chase #Cordelia btvs #btvs liveblog

[ohmyoverland]

Giles the Librarian ❤️❤️❤️😍😍😍🥰🥰🥰❤️❤️❤️

#btvs liveblog

[hmslusitania]

Lore in Buffy is of course extremely loosey goosey but I will never not love that a number 2 pencil counts for the purpose of a wooden stake to the heart for vampire slayage

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #sorry for the buffy liveblog shitpost spam friends who aren’t here for this #I’m doing my biennial rewatch

[herinsectreflection]

I love it when the the show doesn't even try to make the Girl/Slayer Dichotomy discussion subtle.

#this is right after Buffy fails to save Cordy (her Girl side) but then Cordy saves herself #which is exactly what Buffy manages at the end of the episode - the Girl survives on her own #with or without the Slayer #btvs #helpless #liveblog

[chasingfictions]

doublemeat palace as about bodies and autonomy and systems!!!!! buffy moving as a body within the minimum wage service economy with the things that allow her full personhood being stripped away systemically by her employer ("in it for life. like me. you wanna get something out of this, Buffy? you'll do the same." / " yeah. they all start to look the same to me too." / "do you think they'll mind if I take another break? "we're not allowed. downtime robs us all."). and then anya within the system of marriage and heterosexuality and there's something about that being questioned by halfrek that's like. okay what would it mean for you NOT to put your body through this system. the simple question of : "so, um … you're marrying that man with the large upper arms?" "yes" "why?" . and then Willow in the process of renegotiating what it is to live in her body in this world then having her bodily autonomy violated by Amy ("You don't get it. What you did to me was wrong. Do you have any idea how much harder that makes, just, everything?") but in a way that nonetheless doesn't recognize that that's just what she did to Tara.

meanwhile dawn is processing the reality of what it means to have to live in a world run by money ("but that means she's gonna have like crap jobs her entire life, right? Minimum wage stuff. I mean, I could still grow up to be anything. But for her … this is it.") . in a way that is also about buffy and dawn's different roles in life and buffy's bodily autonomy being violated at 15 and in another way being violated in time immemorial when sineya's autonomy was violated, and how "i could still grow up to be anything. but for her, this is it" is about buffy's slayerhood. but also it's dawn in a moment of contending with her own powerlessness -- as a minor who sustained an injury a few weeks prior because of one of her caregivers wasn't in control of their body either, and trying to figure out a way out of this system. is there a way for her to have power. and there isn't yet, not like this -- like, the next two episodes again in the dawn pov are about her having no power over what her caregivers decide to do or how that affects her life. and then the macrocosm of that extending to the spuffy conversation in the dmp which a) is so funny bc it's just like wow ok two upper middle class guys say what. please youre embarrassing yourselves. and b) is like.

this could just be any conversation about buffy's general attitude towards life as a whole in this season. in the last season. like, don't make this harder and the throughline of hardness throughout this season --

and like, this season being so much about the way buffy's life is not in her control and you can see it with all the time-fucky and identity-bending plots of the season, and this episode is engaging with that in such an interesting way bc the dmp does feel like this liminal time-stuck space where you lose your personhood but that's also not through magical means like in life serial or tabula rasa or dead things it's just baked in societally, economically, structurally. and maybe im getting away from myself but like, the way buffy's entire life has been this timefuck and this identity bending, personhood-denying experiment. what does it do to your perception of time to know you're going to die before you reach 25. that you just have less time than everyone else. buffy's managers pointing to their 5-year, 10-year badges, and buffy knowing that she's currently 7 years into slayerhood and her number's been up twice already. the identity-bending and autonomy-denying of all of that being forced upon her at age 15, simply being told that this is her life now, forever.

and like, all of that is so highlighted in this specific episode because i do think like, buffy is vampirecoded all series yeah but all season in particular, she is undead, she crawls from her grave, she came back wrong, "sun sets and she appears" "every single night the same arrangement," all of that. but in this episode in particular there's something about the almost cryptlike sunlessness of the employee area of the doublemeat palace. the insistence that they need to eat the food the dmp produces mirroring the like, closed cycle of vampires feeding on blood, it's just blood in and blood out. doublemeat in and doublemeat out. the way they're also slowly being fed on by wig lady, and by the system, and the way all vampires are also victims of vampires, and vampires also are about autonomy and denial of personhood. we're told it seven episodes into the series. "a vampire isn't a person at all" and the way especially the first vampires we meet in the series are so invested in hierarchy, in system, that that's seemingly a tremendous part of vampiric culture and just like!! also buffy affirming some piece of her identity by taking a break she's not supposed to take to go have sex with a vampire in the alley and engage in this very bodily and human act with someone whose body is not human and instead is meant to be abject, and it's this tiny and sad little moment of trying to assert her personhood in the middle of endless systems that deny it .

anyway something something capitalism and the alienation of the worker from the body something something how patriarchy and capitalism are threaded together through the explicit villains of the doublemeat palace but the implicit villains of the watchers council and straight marriage and the american family structure. something something willow saving buffy and herself at the end of this episode and her doing that in the process of telling buffy about what happened with amy and processing her feelings about it and something about these two friends who love each other and have known each other since they were sixteen and didnt know fully how badly the world was going to try to mangle them standing there still alive and still themselves after an entire episode of feeling like they are the last people in control of themselves. willow being the one to save buffy for once, and then affirming a boundary to amy and she doesnt get it yet but maybe she will some day and buffy returning to the doublemeat palace but on her own terms and i dont know that i have a conclusion because i think there isnt one, it's just the whole thing, the whole season about what does it mean to really try to live in the world . can we find a way to survive. i dont know. can we? let's keep trying anyway. ill throw this monster that's about to eat you into the meat grinder to prove it.

#btvs rewatch #im NOT back to liveblogging whole episodes bc that was insane BUT i did just watch an episode of buffy for the first time in forever #soo!!!! #or ok I’ve watched a few random episodes with friends socially bc that’s the kind of life I live but u know what I mean. #btvs script #btvs meta

[caricature-of-a-witch]

bloody fucking hell I was expecting some. funny lil song and dance episode with some dangerous but ultimately easily resolved guy responsible for the shenanigans. instead now I want to cry about mediocre songs and my heart is breaking for just about every single character

#Liveblogging btvs #but oh god. Once More With Feeling certainly is an episode. I got so terribly invested what is wrong with me. #Buffy. Buffy my darlingest depressed babygirl please. Please. #gods help me but I liked Spike's song. edgy dumbass drama vampire I love you. yall's relationship is so fucked up #Willow Tara oh hell oh fuck oh no. oh Willow. why did you have to do all this fuck. #and the Buffy revelation neatly delivered in song oh man how have I not at this point seen fic about this omfg. Willow. Baby. Help. #... I'm fine. as you can tell. #Ash's ramblings

[feylived]

i complain a lot about certain characters that are love interests to one of the main scooby gang not having dynamics or friendships outside of their partner and while it's especially true for someone like tara, i do really, really love seeing the dynamic she has with people within the scooby gang. like buffy, but anya and dawn especially. they're two people who are on the outskirts of the gang but they love her so much and protect her fiercely and vice versa. you see it when willow goes into buffy's mind to try and bring her back after dawn being taken by glory, anya's so ready to do whatever she needs to do to help her and keep her safe, especially when she's not all there.

#shelley watches. #ig i'll make a liveblog tag that i'll just use very very sporadically but i'm almost done with s5 of btvs #not ready for s6 tho so might go back to angel instead #ooc. #i love anya sm. tara too. i love the little background moments between them especially too #they're just so important

[lovely-v]

This is just my personal opinion as of being one and a half seasons into this show, but to me, Giles is the only tolerable man on Buffy. I want to like Xander but he’s always too much of a friendzoner “nice guy.” Angel is just sort of around. I do not think about his existence until he is on screen. I don’t know much about Spike but he seems like a rejected sex pistols member. Just no one can compete with Giles. Giles is this 40 year old british librarian who gives both life advice and weapons to teens. He hates computers. The books are his friends. He has adopted three of his students so far. He is the voice of reason and also the weird uncle. He is quite pathetic at times. Giles invented dark academia

#veesaysthings #no spoilers please i'm just liveblogging my tv consumption #i want to be clear. i am not saying this as someone who is attracted to giles. #i simply want to be him #i want to be a vampire slaying librarian #btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #rupert giles

[eldritchwyrm]

continuing my btvs semi-liveblog

season 4 episode 3 ("the harsh light of day")

"SHE LEFT HIM FOR A FUNGUS DEMON" ASDHFAKSDJFKASHDFKAHSDFKJASDFJ AKSJDFKALSJDJ ASDJFAKSJD KASJD F

the way spike just BOOKS IT out of the club. iconic. outstanding. no notes

"i'm waiting to see if i freckle" no one is doing it like him

season 4 episode 4 ("fear, itself")

halloween episode !

giles has a chainsaw

giles. he has a chainsaw. contemplating this

season 4 episode 5 ("beer bad")

oh we love a bubbling beaker. we love a set of bubbling beakers. we love an intricate web of multicolored bubbling beakers while scary high pitched music plays

cave? men? cavemen?

...

cavemen.

any episode where xander is the nominal hero / save-the-day guy is automatically just so perfectly beautifully stupid, i love it

GILES IS WEARING GILES-LIKE CLOTHES AGAIN. thank god. not that i didn't appreciate the extremely divorced dad look, but it's just not healthy when a giles isn't wearing a blazer or a suit. it's a sign the giles terarrium is misaligned. it's not proper care and feeding of your giles.

season 4 episode 6 ("wild at heart")

why is every other episode about romantic jealousy and romantic insecurity. i understand this type of jealousy is an emotion that other humans experience but i literally never have. my personal problems are flavored much differently. is it really so ubiquitous that EVERY OTHER episode can realistically be about relationship jealousy? like? how does your brain not explode from that? simply cannot relate. it feels like these storylines move in circles, never actually progressing.

the daylight campus scenes are lit realistically and they really do look like an actual UC campus omfg...

i s2g every season they completely change their mind about what a werewolf looks like asdfhasdjfaksdjfkajskfjkasdfkjasdkfjaksd fasj they're really just throwing darts at a dartboard here

the director chickened out of showing the naked post-transformation cross-campus scuttle, huh. just typical

at 19:03: i totally have willow's green fake leather pants

oz is being very silly.

looking at the stickers on the rear window of oz's van, i'm wondering what the characters' laptop stickers would look like in the age of personal computing

season 4 episode 7 ("the initiative")

so we open with several TAs -- well, at least one is a TA; i think the others might just be non-freshman undergrads? possibly? can't quite figure out how i'm supposed to read them -- talking about how they want to have sex with freshmen. freshwomen? i guess? i know that was a relatively normal thing to see on tv in 1998. feels weird today.

oh good, spike is back. he's been such a failguy this season and i'm honestly loving it

ORGANIZATION STORES MONSTERS IN A GRIDDED ARRAY OF WHITE CUBES! THAT'S MY #34th FAVORITE EXTREMELY NICHE SCI FI HORROR VISUAL TROPE!

i had a horror film professor who did a cool analysis of that visual schema in cabin in the woods (the mid-2010s film; unrelated to buffy except by genre) by talking about the collector-impulse and the "biggest crossover event ever" fannish pleasure-via-ordered-recognition you see in overdetermined franchise media like the mcu

okay i'm not explaining that well but in my defense this tumblr post is not a graded assignment

#small scream #btvs #liveblog

[blog-of-frontiers]

Angel's pussy can't have been that good

#btvs #btvs liveblog

[debbthelesbianbountyhunter]

Rewatching Buffy season one and Giles mentions succubi and I gotta say, wish we got to see more succubi.

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #buffy summers #btvs meme #btvs liveblog

[ohmyoverland]

“Does it say how he’s gonna kill me?

… think it’ll hurt?”

BUFFY 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

#this scene is perfectly heartbreaking #btvs liveblog #S1

[tuiyla]

starting Buffy s3 and I meaaaaan... you can kinda blame Joyce for Buffy leaving. Not entirely but it's not like she's in the running for parent of the year 1998

#btvs lb #i don't wanna liveblog the whole thing cause i'm watching so many eps #but some things need to be said #joyce summers

[herinsectreflection]

I can't get over a) how Buffy chooses to make a joke about her and Faith dating like completely unprompted and also, Buffy, if it's that farfetched then why are you thinking about it?? and b) Eliza Dushku choosing to react to the "good friend" line with confusion! She chose to fully play this like Faith thought they were dating, and this was the correct choice because it's the only one that makes her actions in the rest of the episode make sense.

#revelations #fuffy #btvs #liveblog

[chasingfictions]

Buffy: He threw me out? He threw me. Did I, like, fall into some … backward dimension here? Is this Bizarro World? And after he's always going on and on about being the only one that understands me. 'We're alike, you and me. Birds of a bloody feather.' Uh! He's so … [annoyed sigh]

also i feel crazy abt this specific bit . one the fact that it's not in the shooting script so someone (presumably marti?) was like . u know what we fucking need specifically is buffy mimicking spike's accent :)))))

SECoND OF ALL i just continue to feel insane abt the way spike and buffy are both so deeply aware of the dynamic of like . buffy is in charge and buffy is the one who says how they relate to each other and spike is just Lucky To Be There . i feel insane about their dynamic i feel insane about spike even kicking her out in "gone" . like so much of this episode has been both of them seeing evidence that buffy not only wants him but likes him and only thing keeping that from being public is shame .... and also the difference between this episode and "as you were" --

Spike: No more games? That's all you've ever done is play me. You keep playing with rules you make up as you like. You know what I am. You've always known. You come to me all the same

which is INSANE!!! and makes me insane!!!! and i also kind of love the nuance there -- that it's not some cut and dry thing, that spike is putting up a stand for the fact that he is in love with buffy, and if he can't have all of her, he doesn't want her at all -- because it is also the other thing!! that spike is so in love with buffy, that he is SO in love with her, that he doesn't care what games they play, as long as he can have her, be with her, touch her, hold her. he just loves her, is desperate for them to be something real!! bc ALSO !!! ALSO this same exchange later in that same episode:

Buffy : I'm using you. I can't love you. I'm just ... being weak, and selfish... Spike: Really not complaining here.

and honestly the more i think about it the more "gone" and "as you were" feel so much like sister episodes. both of them are buffy -- in her queer supernatural depressed world -- coming up against the "real" world -- represented by doris and social services, represented by riley and the military. people who can see that she's doing life ~wrong~ . honestly even the fact that doris points out she's unemployed, and next episode buffy gets her job at the dmp, to buffy's specific embarrassment that riley finds her working at the dmp. the fact that both episodes have buffy wanting to hide from real life, from being seen, by going to spike's -- the line in the "as you were" shooting script that she has spike cover her like a human blanket. being discovered in bed with spike by one of the men in her life who has strong feeling about her sexual connection with vampires -- only in the case of the later episode, they're really perceived. or even smaller items-- the point i mentioned earlier in my rewatch posts -- buffy finding spike's lighter wedged into the couch cushions, how it both parallels and contrasts finding riley's sweater in the same place. even the fact that spuffy are fucking for so long in "gone" -- it's mid-afternoon at the latest, it seems, when she arrives at spike's crypt, and when xander finds them it's after dark, + this line in "as you were"

Buffy: I do want you.. Being with you … makes things … simpler. For a little while. Spike: I don't call five hours straight a little while.

and that line also has more to it!!! buffy in "gone" refusing to admit outwardly that she wants spike, but they both know it -- he finds the lighter in her pocket . to buffy in "as you were" able to admit it in words!! for the first time!!!! closing the loop on what was once an impossible dream -- literally a dream -- spike asleep in "out of my mind" (another spike-riley parallels ep) imagining buffy saying "spike, i want you." or even the changing of her physical appearance ! buffy's haircut in "gone" in negative response to spike liking her hair. buffy breaking up with spike in her diaphanous lilac shirt -- a far cry from her general outfits of the season and also an outfit as far removed from spikecore clothes as possible .

or!!! the fact that both episodes end with buffy making a both depressed and optimistic statement about her life, about her desire for life -- compare this bit from "gone:"

Buffy: Except … when I got Xander's message … you know, that I was … fading away … I actually got scared. Willow: Well, yeah. Who wouldn't? Buffy: Me. I wouldn't. Not too long ago I probably would have welcomed it. But I realized … I'm not saying that I'm doing back-flips about my life, but… I didn't … I don't … wanna die. That's something, right?

With this ending bit from "as you were" that we talked about above in a different context:

Buffy: I can't love you. I'm just ... being weak, and selfish... Spike: Really not complaining here. Buffy: ... and it's killing me. I have to be strong about this. I'm sorry ... William.

Like,!!!! both episodes ending with buffy having to state out loud that she doesnt want to die. it doesnt come naturally to her!!! it's this tentative, effortful thing, to not do things that would kill her, and yet she's still doing them!!! she's putting them into words and actions!!! even the distinction of buffy closing out "gone" sedentary -- staring all morose at the ground with willow --

to how she ends "as you were" -- tentatively and shakily moving into the distance, but still moving. and like, the thing with "as you were" is that's not all it takes!! it's not like breaking up with spike is some magic key to feeling better -- but she's still putting into effect whatever she can do . she is trying so hard to want to be alive !!!!!!

#btvs rewatch #btvs meta #dfkljdslfdsf this post was fun and also is a good example of the fact that when i am liveblogging this show i never know where i am going #when i start typing #i just wanted to talk about buffy mimicing spike's accent and then it was like uh oh!!!!! uh oh sister episodes!!!! #guys i specifically cant take sister episodes i speCIFICALLY cant deal with them