Veronica vs Buffy: Mind vs Emotion?

[james_davis_nicoll]

That's a grossly simplified summary of this entry over on resolute's LJ. Go read it.

If I were David Brin, I would use this as a springboard to show how this mean Veronica = Civilization and all that is good, whereas Buffy = the shadowy menace of irrationality. Note that Veronica and her father's snoopiness clearly is a metaphor for the Transparent Society.

Comments

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I'd agree with that; but then, Xander wasn't allowed to be good at anything else, so he kind of had to focus on growing up.

The thing I noticed about Buffy et al was that they were almost purely reactive -- they would respond whenever a Big Bad did something, but Evil always took the initiative and the Scoobies were therefore always on the defensive. They'd eventually come up with some plan for defeating the Big Bad, and it would work; but then they'd lapse back into passivity and just sit around waiting for something else to crawl out of the woodwork. That's no way to win a war.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

In the board game, Evil always moves first, too.

But how proactive can they be, in the absence of a threat to respond to? Buffy had patrols as her regular job. They're not fighting a winnable war, they're keeping a lid on vampiric crime or apocalyptic terrorism by free-lancers. Kill one vampire and another one will come. But it's good to kill that one.

Well, proactive might get into public service announcements: "hey, vampires are real! Here are some tips!" But that'd break the conventions of the show/genre.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Well, the Hellmouth makes nice bait. Maybe they could turn Sunnydale into the world's large roach motel for monsters. Start the Evil Plans themselves, recruit minions, send minions to horrible doom.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

That, and/or try to figure out ways to permanently cauterize a Hellhole.

And, genre conventions aside, why don't they blow the public whistle on the whole Supernatural Beasties business? In a place like Sunnydale, collecting a superfluity of compelling evidence should be a trivial procedure. Yeah, there are Supernatural Beasties entrenched in high places, but can they really control all the media?

I don't remember if the show ever explored whether vampires were affected by a UV lamp; but they did demonstrate that you could reliably detect vampire body temperature at range with a handheld gadget. If you can get those into mass production then vampires are pretty much toast; I bet the general public could cull the vamp population by at least 90% within a couple of months.

In the commentaries on the Buffy S4 DVDs, a writer explains that one of the things they were trying to show was that when science goes up against magic, science gets its butt kicked. I wanted to shake the TV and yell, "How can you write these episodes yourself and not see that they're making exactly the opposite point?" The Initiative was doing quite well -- starting slowly, compared to Buffy, but they were figuring things out as they went instead of having centuries of experience advising them -- but they were handling the monsters pretty handily until they were taken down from inside by deranged mad-scientisting. Science was making a darned good showing for itself, really.

(Sorry; got a little ranty there. Ahem.)

Anyway, an alert populace could handle most of the run-of-the-mill threats themselves, leaving the rogue gods and whatnot to the Slayers, agents of the PTB, and other forces of Goodness. And even those guys could benefit from being able to call in the odd artillery strike or two.

That Always Bugged Me About the Initiative...

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

Caveat: I know that Whedon was never big on internally consistent world-building. That said...

Both Buffy and Angel make it pretty clear that as a last resort, the best way to defeat evil is a judicious application of high explosives (cf. the Judge, the Mayor, etc.). With that principle established, they still wind up backing away from the natural consequences of it.

The Slayer may be preternaturally strong, The Chosen One, etc., but in the end, she is one person. An infantry platoon could pretty well deal with just about every threat that Buffy faces.

Of course, I do appreciate that Whedon was setting up the idea that you really can't trust the State, but the solution to such untrustworthiness doesn't strike me as the unaccountable lone Slayer. The solution would be a more accountable military/law enforcement unit.

I will sandwich this comment again by saying that I am well aware that Whedon is all about the relationships rather than the internal consistency of his worlds. I just don't think that the two have to be mutually exclusive.

Re: That Always Bugged Me About the Initiative...

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Is there anything Sunshine didn't improve? The effects of high explosives on her Buffyesque vampires was I think unspecified, but targetting would be clearly a problem. They're fast, and have the enthrall on eye-contact thing going for them. As for lair-searching[1], the vamps can't kill in daytime, but their other mojo might work, and daytime guards are mentioned in an ominous fashion, though for all we know those were just hired humans with guns[2]. Plus it's not clear there'd be any mortal entrance to a mastervamp lair. So the human gov't knows about vamps and has our tech and some magic, but it's still at best an even fight.

[1] I forgot to mention in my other entry: there were various occasions on Buffy where I thought "look, you know where the lair is. Go knock holes in the roof during daylight. Or burn it down."

[2] I still love the image of master vampires hiding in their basements and lurking on the Internet. It's up there with S1 Buffy: "Whoosh, they're gone." "Vampires can fly?" "They can drive."

Re: That Always Bugged Me About the Initiative...

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I did start wondering how Sunshine would fall on the VM/Buffy scale. Most of the book is Sunshine's internal monolog, she's fairly introspective in some ways. But some of the introspection is along the lines of "la la la I don't want to think about that" or "my, I never did wonder what happened to my father's family, did I?" Very emotionally reactive, and impulsive when she does do things.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Ah, consistency, wouldn't it be nice...

Thing is, the Scoobies were able, as a team, to take out a fair number of anonymous vampires. I think Buffy shows up one episode to save them from getting slaughtered by a more competent vamp. The Initiative captured a fair number of vamps, including even Spike by surprise. But we see Angel and Buffy each taking out a whole Initiative team.

Might still be able to take out run of the mill vamps, but there could also be a strong selection effect for vampires not as dumb as dirt, or even more training of new vamps.

They may have been inconsistent on the body heat thing; I don't remember.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Joss Whedon was never particularly troubled by that hobgoblin, no.

I think one of the benefits of a general populace alerted to the vampire problem would be some wholesale changes in funeral practices. Cremation might become mandatory; or if not, a precautionary stake hammered through the heart before the body is laid to rest. That should cut way down on the incidence of people killed by vampires rising up to become vampires themselves. Vamps who want to create baby vamps would have to not only turn the victim, they'd have to hide the body until it rises.

It's true that the older, stronger, less dumb vampires could probably dodge or slaughter a lot of the mobs of normals armed with body temperature detectors and stake-firing shotguns. But those detectors could do a good job at flushing many entrenched vampires from their cushy -- and influential -- positions as captains of industry or wealthy gadabouts or whatever they're posing as.

Or heck, you don't even need the fancy-schmancy detectors, now that I think about it -- crosses seem to be universally dangerous to Buffyverse vamps. (A fact with theological implications which were never explored, but I digress.) Scatter checkpoints around everywhere where you have to put your bare hand on a cross for a few seconds, and then display your lack of a burn mark. Cheap and easy.

The vampires may be individually quite powerful, at least the older ones. But they have severe and distinctive vulnerabilities, we outnumber them several million to one, and we can build useful gadgets to exploit their weaknesses. I still say that if the whole population went knowledgeably after vamps, we'd get most of them in pretty short order. Not without casualties, of course; but hey, can't make an omelette without losing a few civilians along the way.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Thing is, the Scoobies were able, as a team, to take out a fair number of anonymous vampires. I think Buffy shows up one episode to save them from getting slaughtered by a more competent vamp. The Initiative captured a fair number of vamps, including even Spike by surprise. But we see Angel and Buffy each taking out a whole Initiative team.

Maybe it works like Fenf Shui, where unnamed mooks have half the hitpoints of named characters.

I'd talk about what we see in ANGEL but either ANGEL is set in a slightly different universe or Sunnydale is the occult version of a sunset town.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Sunnydale is the occult version of a sunset town.

[*]

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Towns where black people had to vamoose by sundown or risk arrest or beatings.

In Angel's LA, there are non-humans who are just folks. In Sunnydale, everyone knows demons are just evil stake-bait.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

In Sunnydale, everyone knows demons are just evil stake-bait.

Well, not everyone in Sunnydale knows that demons even *exist*. And there are plenty of exceptions, even in Sunnydale. Willy's place was allowed to operate for a long time, no-one suggests killing Clem, etc. Plus, what we see of Sunnydale is centered on someone whose profession is all about killing demons; Angel *is* a demon, and has a mission statement of "Help the Helpless" -- this is bound to have an effect on the kinds of people they respectively meet.

There certainly are different tones between L.A. and Sunnydale, but they seem in keeping with the standard differences between large urban metropolises and small suburbs.