From: "macha" To: Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 7:55 PM Subject: gray, simple: meditations BtVS started out with a black and white universe. The Council of Watchers set the parameters. There were men, and there were monsters. It was all so clear. Except it was untrue. So in the seventh episode, Buffy put down the crossbow ("Feels good, doesn't it. Feels simple") and learned to make choices that better fit the world she actually lived in. By 2.07 Lie to Me, "nothing's ever simple anymore". By 5.22 The Gift, she could no longer bear to live in a world that offers no choices at all that she can live with: she jumped rather than kill Dawn, and it's Giles who had to kill Ben. But then, it's a world requiring sacrifice, isn't it? And Slayers, they're a renewable resource. So sacrifice, guess that's the way it's supposed to work in this world. In that sense, every time she dies she's still being a good, obedient little girl. And of course saving the world is so much more important than the question of doing just a little evil in order to do a lot of good, isn't it? Well, isn't it? The end justifies the means. Power is everything, so everything that will give you power is automatically a Good. Isn't that the way the world works? To play, you gotta be in the game, go with the flow, stand ready to do the needful. It's simple. So who's setting the parameters in this year's model? Answer: it's still the Council, the Men, the First, and/or the Dark. Because all of them live by a simple credo, and interestingly they've all got the same one: who's got the power? But Buffy's a colorful girl. She slips the bounds of all that Council programming, and goes looking for what she can trust. She learns to trust herself. She makes for herself a sunlit world of family and friends she can count on, and that was never allowed for in the manual. She never goes dark. She never gives in. Instead, she's chockfull of dangerous scruples. She's averse to getting her hands dirty in the metaphorical. How can she be so self-indulgent, doesn't she know it's always gonna be a greater good to sacrifice one little girl in order to save the world? She did it once, after all, with her boyfriend. But otherwise, she has preferred to offer herself as sacrifice rather than compromise her principles: she knocked Giles out before she went to meet the Master, and she wouldn't let Dawn jump. Now this year, back from the land of the dead at last, she refuses to accept the demon essence, so full of power, the Men try to force upon her, the Slayer chained to her own Well. And she unchains Spike by taking out the chip and asserting that he's a good man who needs to be able to make his own choices. What is she thinking of, with little girls to protect and a world to save, turning down power she clearly needs to fulfil her Purpose? "I can't live in the world if these are the choices", that's what she's thinking. Not giving up, mind. Looking for other solutions. Maybe it's time for a new paradigm. Maybe it's time for a new world. Buffy may live in a gray world, but she never chooses anything but light. Locking the door behind Billy Fordham in Lie to Me, that's as close as she's ever come to gray as a Slayer. Faith in season 3 tries to interest Buffy in power for its own sake, but Buffy pulls back and only Faith gets swallowed by it whole. You can't fight evil by doing evil. Sounds kinda High and Mighty, doesn't it, all self-righteous. But, worth remembering, this is her eighth year of slaying, and Buffy's still here, and look, so's the world, check it out. AtS's universe is nominally the same one. In fact, though, it has always been quite different. Angel gets his guidance from the Powers that Be, supposedly Agents of Balance. Kinda odd in itself, that, considering that Angel sees himself, and genuinely tries to act, as an Agent of Good. The Powers that Be have only ever come to Sunnydale on Angel's behalf: Angel returning from hell to the mansion after she leaves the claddagh ring, the snow that prevents the sun from rising, and the appearance of Whistler. Inasmuch as Angel is good and Angelus is bad, it might make some kind of sense that he is a Force of Balance even though he endeavors to fight for Good. And he needs a compass: he has a soul, but he is a vampire. A monster lives within him. Buffy doesn't need a compass, or a handbook, or a set of Powers that Be, or a god in the machine: she has herself. Once he had Buffy, but now it's different, they're not together any more. But Angel's whole universe is not merely gray, but also morally ambiguous, bigtime. Demons might just as easily be good as evil over there in his town. There are a multitude of Powers, and elementals, and minor Gods, and Loas, and Oracles, and intradimensional beings to contend with, and they don't all cooperate by coordinating their wardrobes so you can easily discover their true alignment. So Angel, armed only with a soul that can all too easily wander off, wades through all this muck every day and he has trouble, way more trouble than Buffy, figuring out sometimes which end is up. Because it's, like, a metaphor, isn't it?, for who they are, and where they stand with the world they live in. So Angel requires a moral beacon, to keep him on track, to reveal to him however cryptically what exactly he's doing here, a vampire fighting on behalf of the Light that's gonna fry him by definition if he ever tries to get too close. Vampires, in the buffyverse, are supposed to be unambiguously Evil. Aren't they? In the world of Men, the world of the Council, that's certainly canon. That makes sense too, cause it's all about the power, isn't it?: turned, they go from powerless to powerful. Results: et voila. Angel and Spike, though, both encountered the Buffyometer, and they were changed. Now they want, so unnaturally, to fight for a world they can't even live in. Now they want her to measure them up like a pintsize Judge on their Day of Judgment, in the hope that she will declare them Good Men. And who's got the power in that equation? Even in a world that will never accept them. How pitiful is that? So what's Angel got to work with, out here in the trenches still trying to fulfil Buffy's admonition to go hence and make amends? First, Cordy: armed with the visions of the Powers that Be, and the truth her sharp tongue never withholds. We hope - been a shortage of visions, though, lately. Plus: betrayal of various kinds, bottles broken, etc.: what with one thing and another, we all can't help but notice that she doesn't seem to be playing for the same team, and she's not exactly doing poor Connor much good. Second Wesley, yep Wesley. Well, that's a worry. Cause: oh, just for a short list, trained as Watcher, noted for very poor judgment, possibly a bit miffed cause of the pillow thing, and seems to have gone off the deep end. And Angel trusts him because? Well, Angel's litmus test is, he wants unconditional loyalty, and it's gotta include total confidence that the party of the first part will be prepared to stake him if Angelus gets out. Oopsie. Both Cordy and Wesley are looking like poor risks lately, and where does that leave our hero? Provided we ever get him back. Provided he's not back already. Yeah, whatever. Cordy, well, Exhibit A, been a poor risk since AtS 3.11 Birthday, when Skip, lately of some of the Hotter Regions, took her on a tour of the mall and demonized her already. Few visions since, and those kinda suspect. Up to where? Because of using her Higher Powers well, eh? Must be a bad connection, when exactly? Sorry, bit of hysterical deafness on my part, there. Result: not good for Angel, it even led to speeches after, never a good. Now, maybe Cordy, maybe baddy, maybe baby, yecch, forget it.... Summarized: evil ensued. No Powers, to speak of, just Angel lost without her, and Dinza, Goddess of the Lost, tells him "I'd love to keep you, but you have so much left to lose". Okay, plot, but whose? Is everything in the multiverse out to get poor Angel? Does everything he does always have to turn to...? Can't the poor sod ever set a foot right in what Darla called 'this horrible world'? Cause he's been definitively separated from those Powers that helped define his mission. The world, you might say, wants him gone. Ah, there cometh Angel's old righthand Wesley to the rescue, choosing his side, after his bit of a fling with the forces of evil: W: There is a line, Lilah. Black and white. Good and evil. L: Funny thing about black and white. You mix it together and you get gray. And it doesn't matter how much white you try to put back in, you're never gonna get anything but gray. (Wesley & Lilah, AtS 4.08 Habeas Corpses, written by Jeffrey Bell) Choosing it, in fact, at the single moment, looked like to me, he might have saved Lilah. Hmm. Also huh. And it's pretty odd, when you look at it, isn't it, the way he puts it? Should we think of Wesley now as a White Hat? He did choose to fight with Buffy on Graduation Day. He did choose to stand with Angel. He used to be so earnest, you could see him trying valiantly to do the... was it the right thing? Well, seldom, truth to tell, but was that a hapless thing, or a question of his goals. Hard to be sure. It was rather endearing, if you weren't standing too close, if you weren't trying to save the world that day. He's gone now, that Wesley, since Justine slit his throat, since Angel tried to smother him, since he was isolated from AI, where he once got to rub shoulders with real heroes and sometimes even play boss. Good lord, do you think he, hapless and powerless (indeed gormless) as he started out, might have always tried to gravitate towards power rather than the Good? It's possible. One could argue instead, though, that Wesley always chooses what he believes to be the side of Order, possibly even unaware that this is not necessarily the same as the side of Good. He likes a chain of command, preferably (in his dreams) with himself at the pinnacle. When he gets to give orders, though, he tends to revert to type. And he also chose to take Connor from Angel, without talking to anyone about it first, and by doing so he set himself up as judge and jury, the one boy in all the world with the strength and skill to choose what's best for everyone, without consultation. Why did he assume his own judgment, historically rather suspect, gave him the right to act so decisively on behalf of other people's lives (or unlives)? Patriarchal behavior, became the thing he hated, overweening pride. All of the above. The answer, perhaps, is that Wesley was molded by the Council and his father's notions of correction, and neither one look anything like Buffy's model of judgment: G: I'm only gonna say this once. The guys you send to create these diversions are going to die. W: Yes, they are. You try not to get anybody killed, you wind up getting everybody killed. (Wesley & Gunn, AtS 2.22 There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb, written David Greenwalt) Wesley takes Giles' in-field moral relativism to its (un)natural conclusion: he was trained to lead, to give orders and make decisions, and never to question why he might or mightn't be up to the task or even whether everyone shared the same objectives and understanding. Now he's trying to act as Faith's Watcher, and because she's afraid of the darkness in herself she's trying to let him. She wouldn't have let herself out yet if she hadn't thought Angel needed her. But he doesn't seem to have the slightest notion of which actions are good and which are evil. He's clear that he wants to wear white, but he doesn't recognize the darkness in him. He's not even dressing in the right uniform. You can't do evil in order to do good, and ironically enough even Lilah could have told him that much. He's trying to break Faith down, then rebuild her the way he thinks she needs to be, old military idea as to the making of Men. But Faith has way more moral sense at last than he does, if not much confidence in herself. She has learned the hard way what Buffy tried to teach her so long ago, ' you can't do that, because it's wrong'. In a gray world Angel and Buffy both continue, against all odds, to search for knowledge rather than for power as their best weapons in the eternal struggle against evil. After dark they patrol a world that contains both evil and non-evil evil things: predators, built to kill, they both always try to negotiate a clear understanding of which is which before they wade into the fray. Angel once refused the Gem of Amarra; and he refused to become human if it meant he could not help. Buffy's gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. She tells the Men flatout that power "isn't the way". "You don't understand", she tells them clearly, just like she'd tell Wesley, on Faith's behalf. "You violated that girl. Made her kill for you, because you're weak." When she tells Dawn in Lessons the bad guys have the power, it's worth noting that who's got the power is not the actual lesson she's teaching: instead the lesson is, it's always real. Eight years into her term of office, Buffy's still guarding the Hellmouth. Wood (amazed): She got it done. Spike: Always has. Wood: So far. (BtVS 7.16 Storyteller, written by Jane Espenson) With so much strength she's giving it away. Strength, and knowledge, and the moral authority of fighting on the side of Light, these are the weapons they elect to bring. Two Slayers, two vampires (usually with souls, but it doesn't always matter). Nothing like a good dose of Angelus to make it clear how dark Angel isn't. Nothing like a bad Watcher to make a dark Slayer look pretty good in the light. Nothing like a closeup of BigBadSpike in costume to show how choices make a good man. Who has known the dark as intimately as they have over the years? And there they are, still working hard at making the right choices in a gray world. Funny that it's the humans that seem to be having most of the trouble these days turning on the light. macha, still unspoiled macha@ntl.sympatico.ca