#no shame at all he's just there fuckin slaying the role of being a woman flawlessly

[darkness-star-draws]

Remembered the time Kid dressed up as a bride and it gave me the urge to draw Nichov with a bride dress too (since he was with Kid when the story happened)

#the doraemons #ザ・ドラえもんズ #dora the kid #dora nichov #it's the same background in both drawings cuz I got lazy #digital art #also I think that if Nichov were to play as a female character he would be so into it #no shame at all he's just there fuckin slaying the role of being a woman flawlessly

[tyrantisterror]

Bonus: More Buffy Characters I’d Ruin

I had to cut myself off while writing my How I’d Ruin It: Buffy the Vampire Slayer article because it was almost 10pm and I still hadn’t finished, but goddam if there aren’t more Buffy characters I wanted to talk about, so here’s the “deleted scenes” for the article.

Anya: Introduced as a monster of the week (specifically a demon), Anya was demoted by her bosses to a mere mortal human after she was defeated, and went on to be a recurring cast member.  Anya had a delightfully warped outlook, since she really wasn’t accustomed to human society and as such didn’t understand many social taboos. While she could be blunt and callous, she meant well, and was a good ally.  Unfortunately, she was also written to be Xander’s love interest, and most of her plots were built around him.  Worse, the rest of the characters kind of treated her like shit, regarding her with annoyance at best and outright hostility at worst.

Since my reboot is a bit kinder to monsters in general, we’d go a different way here.  Instead of being annoyed by Anya, the group would all actively try to rehabilitate her – their end goal is coexistence with the supernatural, after all, and Anya could be instrumental in that.  Though it takes a while and is often frustrating, they make progress, and Anya eventually learns the value of humanity and in turn becomes an essential ally.  Especially once her powers start coming back…

Tara: Introduced as Willow’s first female love interest, Tara was a young witch whose family told her (and all her female family members) that women in her family would become demons on their twenty first birthday, and thus had to be hidden away to keep from incurring the wrath of the outside world.  This was resolved in one episode, and afterwards Tara had little to do except be Willow’s girlfriend.  The writers later killed her off for drama because they had nothing else for her to do.

But, I mean, c’mon!  A young woman raised by an abusive and misogynistic family goes to college, discovers witchcraft AND her own homosexuality, and then rebels against her family despite being told that doing so will reveal her true inhuman nature?  Surely that has potential for more than just one episode of focus!   Let Willow and Tara have solo adventures!  Get her involved in helping the rest of the cast!  Shit, you know what, given our reboot’s stance on monsters, let’s make the family’s threat true – maybe she IS part demon.  Demons rebel against authority, and some authority needs to be rebelled against.  Tara has the potential for interesting and awesome plots – plots about how being different from what is normal doesn’t have to be a cause of shame, but can instead be literally empowering.  Let’s make it happen.

Jenny Calendar: Jenny Calendar was introduced as the high school computer teacher, and also a “technopagan,” i.e. a witch who incorporates modern technology into magic, rather than remaining in the past.  That is such a badass concept that it’s a damn shame they never did anything with it.  Instead, Jenny became Giles’ love interest, and then was revealed to be part of the Roma family that cursed Angel to have a soul, which is treated as a betrayal for some reason.  Then Angelus kills her so Giles can feel sad.

Again, there’s so much lost potential here!  Given that this reboot is playing up both the magic AND technology expertise with Willow, Jenny could easily find stuff to do as Willow’s mentor, and making a mix of magic and technology more of a thing could also allow for a lot of weird and fun monster plotlines that they would be key in solving.  Having a strong, adult female role model would also be good for, like, all of the main characters – Buffy’s mom can’t fill the role entirely since she needs to be out of the loop for plot reasons.

Kendra: The first time Buffy died and came back to life resulted in another Slayer getting called into being, violating the “there can only be one Slayer” rule after a grand total of one season.  Kendra is one of the few black characters in Buffy who gets more than one line, AND she’s a Slayer, AND she’s from Africa!  There’s a lot of potential there!  Sadly, she was kind of, well, boring, and her case wasn’t helped by the fact that the writers clearly didn’t do a whole lot of research into any of the various countries and cultures in Africa, resulting in a character that’s pretty stereotypical.

But that potential though! Let’s have the reboot violate the “only one slayer exists at a time” rule right from the get go – instead, there are many slayers, albeit still very few (definitely under 100).  Each would be the hero of their own story, and there could be fun stories where we get glimpses of the different types of supernatural threats on other parts of the globe.  We could explore how different Watchers work with their respective Slayers, comparing Giles and Buffy to others while also examining the problems with the Watchers Council (and perhaps showing that more Slayers than just Buffy realize they’re getting a raw deal here).  The potential is so great!

Faith: As mentioned in the article proper, Faith is Buffy’s evil opposite, the rogue Slayer who became a villain.  Faith loves fuckin’ and killin’, and the show makes it very clear that both of those interests are the reason she’s evil – everyone seems to go out of their way to slut shame Faith, to the point where “evil” and “skanky” are both treated as her defining attributes, each equally vilified. While Buffy has a fairly normal middle class life (despite being in a single parent household and, y’know, a vampire slayer), Faith grew up poor in an abusive environment, and has overall had a hard life.  She is very clearly a troubled person before she turns full villain, and her character arc is primarily focused on her envy of Buffy’s life.  She rants repeatedly about how often she is unfavorably compared to Buffy, and one of her evil schemes involves swapping bodies with Buffy to escape punishment for her actions.

The fact that Faith is positioned as Buffy’s evil opposite because her life situation sucks is, well, problematic, and the slut shaming piled on top of that definitely doesn’t help. However, since we inverted Buffy for this reboot, why not invert Faith as well?

Reboot Faith comes from a ridiculously rich family, is valedictorian at her school, and treats vampire slaying as an unfortunate responsibility rather than an adventure. She’s a brutally efficient yet utterly merciless Slayer.  In her mind, she’s an exterminator, not a hero who saves civilians and certainly not someone who wants to find a peaceful solution to the humans vs. monsters conflict. As far as she’s concerned, supernatural creatures threaten humanity just by existing, and the conflict can only end with one side’s total destruction.  She is essentially every negative implication of a typical “Human slays monsters” story condensed into one character – a proper opposite for Reboot Buffy’s open minded rough housing party girl monster fighter.

Forrest Gates: “Who the fuck is Forrest?” you may be asking. Working for the same government monster task force as Riley Finn, Forrest was essentially Riley’s sidekick and foil.  He was both Riley’s second in command and best friend, and he stuck with the government when Riley rebelled to be with Buffy.  Being a foil, his personality deliberately contrasts with Riley’s: while Riley is straight laced, soft spoken, and “nice” in a bland “I’m not vocally racist but I still voted for Trump” sort of way, Forrest is hot blooded, individualistic, outspoken, sarcastic, and sometimes deeply cynical. If you were to guess which of the two would rebel when they learned their government employers were up to shady shit, you’d guess Forrest – which I suppose makes it an interesting twist that he stays while rule-abidin’ Riley goes rogue.

Forrest doesn’t develop more than that, and when I first saw the series I wrote him off as just what he was written to be: Riley’s foil.  Upon rewatching the series this year, though, I noticed something: Forrest is, well, interesting.  He’s far more analytical and aware than Riley.  He’s got better lines, he’s got a good sense of humor, and he brings a wild sort of energy to every scene he’s in.  He’s got more vocal interest in and chemistry with Buffy than Riley did before they hooked up (not a hard feat, to be fair – Riley has all the romantic energy of two week old mashed potatoes).  And, yeah, he seems much more believable as the army guy who would spot the flaws in his organization and go rogue.  Let’s make Forrest the Initiative Agent who switches sides and goes with our heroes.  It verges into crackfic territory, sure, but that’s what How I’d Ruin It is all about.

Harmony: Starting as “Cordellia except without the depth,” Harmony was just a Mean Girl stereotype until she became a vampire. Then she evolved into something slightly more complex: Harmony was a woefully ineffective villain, a ditz who was not cut out for causing evil that everyone, good and evil alike, made fun of. She also became an abuse victim, which might have been poignant if the show didn’t spend all the rest of her screen time making fun of her for being dumb, shallow, and promiscuous.

I have a noted soft spot for affable and ineffectual villain characters, and I think Harmony could play a valuable role in my heretical reboot’s approach to monsters.  Harmony would be the rare person who actually improved upon becoming a vampire, as her death and rebirth as a monster helps her realize how bullshit all her high school clique nonsense was.  At the same time, she’s grossed out by the whole “eating people” thing, and her general cluelessness actually gives her a unique perspective that other vampires and monsters lack – Harmony, in her own simple way, could note the pragmatism of not eating people, since no one’s gonna stake you for buying blood from a butcher.  When grander villains rope her into their schemes, they quickly find she’s more of a hindrance than a help.  She’d be the loveable rogue of the story – not quite a hero, but never a true villain either.

And maybe we could explore toxic relationships with someone who isn’t quite so cartoonish.

“Angel”: While the core of Angel’s character – being the only vampire with a soul and the guilt that comes with – doesn’t work in the reboot’s setting, that doesn’t mean we can’t have him altogether.  Reboot Angel would take a page from his spinoff and make him a vampire Private Detective, and one of the first vampires Buffy meets that is inarguable a decent person.  He helps the helpless, gets his blood from non-human animals in a human way, and is generally a good person despite being a vampire.  In this take, Angel wouldn’t be a love interest – ‘cause even when he’s not evil, there’s a creep factor to the whole “vampire with a body that’s in its mid 20’s dating a 16 year old” thing, and also because it would be kind of funny to me for a vampire to rebuke the interests of a young vulnerable woman, since, y’know, that’s the opposite of what vampires usually do. Buffy’s crush would, painfully for her, be unrequited.

“Angelus”: In the original show, Angel lost his soul and became the evil Angelus when he and Buffy bumped uglies in the figurative way instead of the literal way they usually do.  It’s one of the more clever results of the show’s “All monsters are metaphors” approach – a guy seems nice until he sleeps with you, then he turns evil. That’s a really good way to use a monster story as a metaphor for a real problem young women face.

But.

There is a crucial difference between the figurative meaning of this plot and the LITERAL events of it, and that difference rests in the guy’s autonomy.  Angel has NO CHOICE in the matter – he has no control of his actions, no agency in the horror that follows.  His soul is magically removed by the coitus, and the evil done by Angelus is the responsibility of the vampire spirit that now runs his body. The only one who has agency here is Buffy – the person who, in the real life problem this situation is an allegory for, should be the VICTIM of the resulting abuse.  Women get blamed for making men abusive a LOT – “she was asking for it” and all that bullshit.  And here we have a monster plot that literally makes the victimized woman the only person in the relationship who has agency in causing the abuse that follows – she literally removed his soul by sleeping with him.  It’s not an unintended thing, either – some of the characters call Buffy “rash” and “careless” for sleeping with Angel, and  taken within the show’s general opinion that girls who sleep with men before marriage are bad, it’s not something we can ignore.

Still, there’s a good idea beneath the awful execution.  We just need to tweak it.

So our “Angelus” would begin as a decent guy who dates one of our young female characters – maybe Buffy, maybe Willow, maybe Cordelia, we’ve got options here.  He seems nice at first – he’s got sort of a bad boy thing going on and he’s a bit older than is normal, but whatever doubts he inspires are quickly dissuaded by the help he offers the group and his general kindness. He might be broody and angsty from time to time, but any red flags he sends are easy to write off.  Until he sleeps with the girl in question.

Then, quite literally, he turns into a monster.  Up till this point the audience would be lead to believe he’s human, but no, he reveals his true colors as something inhuman and heartless – perhaps something much worse than a vampire.  The personality change is as drastic as the physical, and our heroes quickly learn that all his “kindness” before was a ruse.  He is nothing more than cruel and sadistic predator, and one that needs to be put down.

Vampires as a whole: Buffy’s take on vampires is one of my least favorite in fiction, since they’re basically just strong guys with sharp teeth, weird eyes, Klingon bumps, and often an inexplicable knowledge of martial arts.  Like most post-Anne Rice vampires, they’re very simple so as to avoid being “goofy” – no transformation, hypnosis, etc.  My preference is for the “goofy” stuff though – turning into mist, or a giant bat, traveling on moonlight, commanding legions of rats, all that good Bram Stoker shit.  I also love some of the weird folkloric takes on vampires, like the ones with multiple hearts and other weird shit.

Borrowing a page from my own fictional universe, the vampires in my Buffy reboot would be weird and varied.  There would be multiple breeds, and even within those there’s a lot of individual variation.  While some vampires are stronger than others, ALL would be significant threats.  We’d be going for quality over quantity – while Buffy has less vampires to fight in this reboot, the ones she does slay take a lot of work to kill.  So, in short – vampires by way of Stoker rather than Rice.

#buffy the vampire slayer