Woden’s Day May 14 2003

Nothing good, nothing bad. Neither of my checks showed up today (Unemployment, Website Which Must Not Be Named). No one tipped the website via Pay Pal. And noooooooo email. The world may be my oyster, but I hate seafood.

I’m tired, as always... not sleeping well. Didn’t sleep at all last night; by the time I was really tired enough to nod off, I had to go over and see the podiatrist at 8:30 this morning so he could take a look at where my ingrown toenail used to be a month or so ago, before he yanked that puppy right out of there. He seemed more or less pleased with my progress, although he’s thrown his back out, so he was in constant pain while doing his little inspection and cleaning and re-bandaging thing. I felt bad for him. If there’s one thing I can manage to be spared in this life, please, God, let it be back problems.

I tried to get some sack time when I got home, but about 12:30 my kindly upstairs neighbors decided to watch TV, and they watch TV the way they do everything else in this life... loudly. I didn’t really feel I could legitimately complain about them watching the tube at half an hour after noon, though. I just hope they move out and go back to Spain, or wherever it is they’re from, soon. (They don’t speak English well... apparently, at all, if you go up to complain about them being too noisy... and I think what I have heard them speaking on occasion is Spanish. But I can’t be sure.)

I was somewhat pleased to make myself a meal out of leftovers that was reasonably tasty. I fried up some turkey sausage (I’ve had a tube of the stuff deep frozen for about two years now, since my mom gave me a lot of stuff from one of her ‘meat paks’... these things she gets discounted from my grandmother that contain random amounts of different kinds of meat... about that long ago), poured a cup of water into the sizzling fryer, then dumped in some Minute Rice and a packet of chicken gravy I’ve had sitting around for probably just as long as I’ve had the turkey sausage in the freezer. I seasoned to taste (salt, pepper, garlic) and honestly, while I wouldn’t have wanted to pay a lot of money for the result in a restaurant, it was nowhere near as bad as most meals I improvise are.

I’m getting low on groceries, though. Some cash needs to roll in here soon. And that’s not worrying about abstract future luxuries like, say, next month’s rent, or the TECO bill.

Well, still, all this is depressing, and according to one of my email correspondents, he doesn’t post comments on my blog because he feels like he has nothing to say, in the face of my grim day to day realities. I told him that this is the time I need interesting comments MOST, to distract me from this shit, but I guess all this nonsense does make most people uncomfortable. At least, the hit counter keeps clicking upward, and the comment count stays depressingly flat.

Okay, now we’re going to talk about BUFFY metaphysics. And we’ll probably do this for awhile. Abandon hope, all ye who read further.

SOUL SURVIVORS

This one’s a geek fest, where I try to figure out exactly what the ‘soul’ is and isn’t on Earth: BUFFY. Skip it if you don’t care about BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER or its spin offs, or if you have a short attention span, or you’re just really bored by metaphysical continuity concerns. However, since ANGEL has been renewed, and Spike, the other vampire with a soul, is transferring out to LA after this season, this seems to be a bit pertinent... if you’re a BUFFY geek, like me.

The typical idea of most religions regarding the 'soul' is that it is basically an invisible, intangible duplicate for the body, that survives the body's death, and that carries with it the essential identity, or the 'real you', either to some afterlife, or into another mortal vessel, depending on what you believe. The 'soul' as such, when it does not reach the afterlife, or take on a new mortal incarnation, becomes a 'ghost'.

There is much in Buffy-lore to support this. First, Buffy has fought entities she assumed were ghosts. In "I Only Have Eyes For You", Buffy became aware of, and helped to resolve, what she felt at the time was a haunting... two spirits, frozen in place by the horrors of the events surrounding their deaths in 1955, forcing others to relive the events of those deaths, until somehow the cycle could be broken and they could be freed from their obsessions to go on to wherever it is that spirits go on Buffy-Earth.

Second, in "Becoming" we saw both occasions on which Angel's soul returned to him. Through a flashback to 1898, we saw the original curse take effect, and at the very end of "Becoming", we saw Willow's recasting of the curse take effect. In both cases, Angel seemed to become an entirely different person than he had been without his soul, and in both cases, he acted as if he had no memory of what had transpired with his body in the time his soul had been gone. In 1898, he seemed lost, saying "Where am I? I can't remember..." while in the modern day, he looked at Buffy and said "It seems like months since I've seen you."

All of these are strong arguments that the 'soul' is no more nor less than the actual essential identity of a human being that lives on after the death of its body, and seem to be insurmountable evidence supporting that particular hypothesis.

One straightforward problem with this is that if the 'soul' is the essential, spiritual identity-entity, then creatures without souls - vampires, demons - should not survive the death of their bodies in any form. Soulless creatures should be present on the physical plane only, and when their bodies turn to dust, they should simply cease to exist. That soulless creatures DO survive the deaths of their bodies, and have their essential identity preserved... somewhere... has been demonstrated beyond logical argument by Wolfram & Hart’s resurrection of Darla.

Nonetheless, this standard concept of the soul as it is generally held in our culture seems to be the concept being utilized, without much refined thought or deliberation, by the writers of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. However, to those of us who have watched every show and who pay attention to detail and who think about these things, it is obvious that, in point of fact, the ‘soul’ in the Joss Whedon BUFFY metaphysical continuity cannot be simply a spiritual body that holds our essential identity, that is immortal and indestructible, and that continues to exist somehow, somewhere, after our body dies.

The following clearly depicted spiritual events on Earth: BUFFY make this plain:

Darla’s resurrection. Darla, whom Angel, as well as all of us in the audience, has only ever known as a vampire, is brought back to life by Wolfram & Hart as a human, with her soul restored.

Now, here’s how it works, in the ‘the soul is the essence of identity’ model, when a vampire kills someone: their soul, as Giles has often told us and Buffy has echoed in several eps, goes somewhere else. The vampire doesn’t get it. The vampire is a demonic spirit of some sort inhabiting the dead body of a human murdered by another vampire. It has the memories as well as the physical features of the murdered human, and in every case we know of, it chooses to behave in a manner consistent with the personality of the murdered human, albeit without kindness, love, compassion, or any other emotion or psychic characteristic springing from the attribute of empathy.

If this is true, then when Darla is raised as a human and has her soul restored, she would not even remotely be the same being as Angel, and all of us, know. She should not have any memories of what she has done as Darla the vampire, because her soul, which holds her essential identity and all her mortal memories, was not present in her vampire body. In this model, we can posit that Angel remembers his crimes as Angelus, and is tormented by those memories, because his soul was put back into his original body, and his now-Undead brain has all the memories of Angelus’ deeds. Therefore, Angel ‘remembers’ what Angelus did, and emotionally feels responsible, and is tormented by his guilt.

But Darla’s original body turned to dust. She does not have the brain that contained copies of her mortal memories, or that also recorded her vampiric deeds. She has been resurrected, presumably in a mystically regenerated living body, and there is no reason she should, would, or could remember anything she has done as a vampire, since her soul would not have any of those memories, either. Angelus retained the original brain from the murdered Liam, and Angel inherited that brain and its recorded memories. With Darla, there is no physical, metabolic, biological continuity. If her soul contains her essential identity, she should not remember being Darla the vampire. She should not know who Angel is. She should not feel guilt for her vampiric deeds. She should, quite simply, be only Darla the cynical self hating prostitute, and nothing more... assuming the ‘soul as duplicate spiritual body holding our essential identity’ model is true.

Angel’s curse – beyond this, there’s another, even more overwhelming reason why the ‘soul as essential identity carrier’ model cannot be true. Simply put, if it is, the character of Angel makes no emotional sense. If the ‘soul’ is, in fact, a spirit-body, eternal and indestructible, that holds our essential identity, then... okay, this gets complex, follow along with me now... there's no reason why Angel should feel the slightest guilt for anything that his body has done while his soul was not inhabiting it.

‘Angel’, the ‘vampire with a soul’, the Champion of the Powers That Be, Buffy’s ex and perhaps future boyfriend, is in no way ‘Angelus’. ‘Angel’ is a being composed of two parts, physical and psychic... the vampiric body created by Darla’s murder of Liam long ago, inhabited by a demonic spirit named Angelus... and the soul of murdered Liam, returned to ‘life’, bound once again to his original, but now transformed and Undead, body. You can’t, reasonably, blame a body for what it does under the command of its guiding spirit. And Liam wasn’t present, nor did he have any control over, what Angelus did with ‘his’ body while Liam’s soul was off somewhere in the ether.

If indeed we use the standard ‘soul’ model, then Angel is basically in the position of someone who had his car stolen by a maniac. Said maniac drove the car throughout Europe and Asia, running over women and kids and enjoying himself hugely while doing it. Then some Gypsies found the car for Liam and put him back behind the steering wheel. (Apparently, Angelus remains tied up in the back seat, and occasionally, he gets loose again and takes over driving the car for a while.) Liam immediately knows everything that his car has been used for in the last hundred years, and for some reason, blames himself... but in point of fact, he’s not responsible, Angelus is.

In which case, the central conflict that makes Angel the fascinatingly complex and conflicted and tormented character he is, is bogus... and any Watcher could and should have long since told him so. The things 'Angelus' does, when Angel's soul is out of his body, are not Angel's responsibility. He has no control over them, and should feel no guilt. If the soul is actually the key and essential component to individual identity that survives the body after death, then 'Angelus' and Angel are two separate entities, and the former is always driven into dormancy when the latter returns and takes over control of his own natural form again... and that being the case, the heroic and noble Angel, whom Buffy loves and who has saved the world several times in his own right, is an entirely different guy from that demon Angelus, who also lives in Angel's body and who wakes up and takes control of it whenever Angel steps out for a while. And since Angel's departures and arrivals in his own body are never subject to his own control... well, he simply has nothing to feel bad about, or to make up for. He hasn't done anything wrong. It's all the demon who lives inside him.

And, of course, this is not how people treat Angel. And these are people who, if this were true, should know it, and who would tell Angel he shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Giles once told Xander that Undead Jesse was not Xander’s friend, he was the monster who had killed Xander's friend. If Giles truly believes that Angel is not, in fact, Angel when he is without his soul, but is, instead, the monster who killed Angel, then he should have long since advised Angel, and Buffy, and the rest of the Scooby Gang, that the evil, soulless Angel who for lengthy periods acted as Buffy's arch enemy and chief tormentor, is not, in fact, the same being/entity/person who loves Buffy, is a friend to the Scooby Gang, and a devoted enemy to evil. The fact that he hasn't irrefutably indicates that Giles knows there is more to personal identity than simply the presence, or lack thereof, of a soul.

Therefore, the ‘soul’, in Joss Whedon’s metaphysics, is not what we generally believe it to be here in our world. If it were, Darla could not have been resurrected with vampiric memories. And Angel would have no valid reason to feel guilty for the crimes committed by Angelus, and his scholarly friends would have long since told him so.

Therefore, I believe the spiritual mechanism of self, identity, and ‘the soul’ is far more complex and subtle than that, on Earth: BUFFY. In point of fact, a Whedon vampire is not merely a soulless, demonic monster in possession of a dead human body. It is actually something far more terrifying and horrifying than that... it is a human being, murdered and deprived of its capacity to make moral and ethical judgements, possessed of a ravening, insatiable hunger for living human blood, that has no capacity for seeing other individuals as anything except potential meals. Its original body has been altered by the vampiric curse to make it a more effective predator, just as its original personality and mentality have been fundamentally transformed by the loss of its ‘soul’... but its original human ‘self/identity’ remains intact.

Which is to say, Angel is Angelus, and Angelus is Liam... Angelus was simply Liam without any empathy, conscience, or psychic connection to his fellow humans, and Angel is simply Angelus, with that empathy, conscience, and psychic connection restored... on top of a centuries worth of memories of having committed horrifying atrocities.

Spike is the original Sweet William that he always was, he simply had his conscience and connection to other humans stripped away. Drusilla, Darla, every vampire we’ve seen... all of them are the people they once were... they are simply, basically, completely sociopathic, and in addition, they constantly hunger for human blood... a combination pretty much guaranteed to universally turn anyone, no matter how nice or gentle in real life, into a predatory monster.

Angel seems a particularly complex character. I posit that when he loses or regains his ‘soul’, which is indeed some sort of essential psychic component, like a non-physical organ, that humans have and demons don’t, this acts as a trigger, causing a shift from one schizoid personality to another. The formation of Angel’s split personality probably happened as a defense mechanism over the course of the century after Angel was first given his soul back. In order to keep from killing himself, he became subconsciously convinced that ‘Angelus’ had done all his evil acts. This allowed him to continue to survive, but of course, he never consciously allowed himself to believe it. However, such was his need that the rift between ‘Angelus’ and ‘Angel’ became, psychically, very real. When ‘Angel’ loses his soul, he instantly reverts to ‘Angelus’... but they’re both the same person, simply different aspects of him.

This is amply demonstrated by the fact that there are other psychological triggers for the shift, namely, joy. Angel distrusts happiness; he knows that Angelus was nearly always insanely, sociopathically cheerful, and he associates happiness with, well, evil and wickedness and a complete lack of self control. So when he feels himself becoming happy, he becomes afraid that Angelus is resurfacing... which, naturally, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Thus, when an actress dosed Angel with a magical version of XTC in the first season of his own show, ‘Angelus’ briefly resurfaced, even though Angel still had his soul. And when Angel recently fell under Jasmine’s spell of perfect happiness, he fretted that Angelus would return... however, I would theorize that since Angelus also needs a lack of self control to resurface, and Angel was under Jasmine’s mental dominance at the time, there was no way for Angelus to emerge. (In fact, Jasmine pretty much told Angel that.)

Spike’s recent re-acquisition of a soul also underscores this. Spike was, fairly clearly, in the throes of a schizoid breakdown himself shortly after his soul returned. And he may well have been well on his way towards developing the same split-brain dichotomy as Angel/Angelus uses to deal with his own guilt. However, Spike didn’t have a century to mope; he got screwed with by the First Evil, and then pulled into Buffy’s ongoing battle against the First Evil. This forced Spike to, basically, suck it up and more or less accept his own past evil acts without dwelling on them overly. Being more shallow than Angel, he doesn’t at this point seem to feel the same deep seated urge to avoid relapsing into wickedness, nor does he seem to feel any true need for redemption. Mostly, he seems to simply want to be a good man so he can impress Buffy... not the worst motivation in the world, but not a profound or lasting one, either.

I suspect, with ANGEL being renewed and Spike transferring over to that series with next season, we’ll see some genuine remorse and a growing need for redemption there. Or perhaps Spike will remain mostly an unrepentant sonofabitch, which will doubtless annoy Angel hugely.

BAD REPORTING

And, here’s another really long geek-oriented essay. What the hell, right? May as well alienate as much of my potential audience as I can...

There's a lot of interesting stuff out there right now on most of the more intelligent and lucid political blogs. But I try to stay away from the political stuff here, because I'm just not very fucking smart and when I discuss high level policy shit and international politics and crap like that, I tend to sound like a moron. So instead, I'm going to discuss a completely brilliant concept my one time email buddy Mike Norton once described to me, as an explanation for out and out mistakes in the writing of beloved fictional characters:

'bad reporting:

All real comics fans know that every once in a while (or, actually, these days, every four or five panels) a bad, ignorant, or lazy writer makes some sort of mistake in how they depict the events occurring to our favorite four color super buddies. Nowadays, these mistakes often occur on our favorite ongoing TV shows, too. These errors tend to break down into two broad categories:

a) continuity errors

or, b) out of character characterization.

Continuity errors are largely errors in consistency between what we know has happened in the past, and what a particular, later reference to that particular time period or past event says, or infers, happened in the past. For example, the Emerald Egret shows up and ambushes Pauline Platitude, screeching 'this time, Vapor-Babe, you die!'... but the the last time we saw the Emerald Egret, Vapor-Babe utilized the narcohypnotic fumes from one of the Egret's own Assault Eggs to remove all the Egret's memories regarding Vapor-Babe's secret identity. Unless there's an explanation for how the Egret got his memory back, or discovered Vapor-Babe's secret identity all over again, this is a continuity error.

Other common errors when new writers come on long running comic books are stuff like doing a story in which the Capitalist meets Dr. Dynamite for the first time, when a long time fan knows that those two characters actually met once before in GIANT SIZED CODPIECE TEAM UP #27, when they saved all of Greater Latvia from the minions of The Insidious Boinkmeister, and they were also actually briefly in the same room together in MIGHTY CABBAGE MERCHANTS #27, when Dr. Dynamite applied for membership in the team and was rejected after the Capitalist revealed his embarrassingly low credit rating.

Generally, continuity errors are mistakes in firmly established, if entirely fictional, factual detail. If Blowfish, the Aquatic Avenger, has always been established as carrying twin .45 automatics, and suddenly we see him sporting a single .357 magnum instead, it's a continuity error, and we want to know when he traded in his guns, and why. And if Cat Queen has always had the super ability to project particle beams from her strange, slanty eyes, and then suddenly she gets captured by renegade ronin, hung from a beam in a warehouse, and tortured for hours, and never makes the slightest use of this well established power, with which she could fairly easily have vaporized her cruel and malevolent tormenters (and we want to see her do it, too) well, we're going to scream bloody murder about it.

These are, in other words, objective errors... fans can point to a certain issue of a comic, or a certain episode in the second season of the Beast Buddies TV show, and display how, in that issue or that episode, Brother Gumbo was clearly established as being from a small town outside Shreveport, Louisiana, where his father was a shrimp rancher and his mother was an exiled voodoo priestess. It's right there, in print or on videotape; somebody said it, or we actually saw the shrimp ranching father and the voodoo priestess mother, and Brother Gumbo had an adventure with them, and helped save them both from the wiles of the eeeeevil Uncle Octopus. So when there's suddenly an episode in the sixth season in which Red Foxx shows up supposedly portraying Brother Gumbo's entirely different father who is a former Soviet cosmonaut, well, we know that's not right. It's a continuity error... an objective error of consistency between what we are being told now and what we were told then, and we want an explanation, and toot fucking sweet, too.

Characterization errors, on the other hand, are much more subjective. Oh, sometimes one is inarguable. If Superman suddenly starts wearing a black leather jacket, combing his hair into a pompadour, and riding around on a motorcycle, he'd better be either infiltrating the Hell's Angels for the FBI, or have recently been exposed to Red Kryptonite. Otherwise, it's pretty clearly a characterization error... and just as clearly, this new writer is a complete asshole who doesn't know anything about Superman, and should most likely be nailed into a packing crate and mailed to somewhere deep in the Ukraine before he can do further damage to the Last Son of Doomed Krypton.

Most characterization errors are more subtle than this, though. (Not all of them. Pretty much everything John Byrne has ever written about any established character has clearly been wrong. But that's a sidebar.) If a new writer takes over Batman and suddenly Batman completely forgets how to solve crimes and immediately begins acting like a paranoid psychotic and killing everything within eyeshot with his feet, well... I personally think that's a characterization error, but 23 billion 12 year old Batman fans think it's just plain darned cool and want more of it, now now now.

Which is to say, these are subjective judgements, for the most part.

There's a third sort of error, which I guess is simply best called 'inconsistency'. This is best summed up with the ages old example of a superhuman character who can do certain things once in a while, but not all the time (especially when it would ruin the story), or who can do one thing, but who can never do something that should logically be extropolated from his ability to do that one thing. Some superhuman characters are explicitly designed to not be affected by inconsistency. Todd McFarlane's Spawn, for example, basically has the power to do anything that Todd McFarlane feels like drawing at any particular time. However, these various powers and visual manifestations come and go pretty much as the plot dictates, so just because Spawn is hurling brightly colored energy beams out of his eyes this month, that doesn't mean he won't be lobbing around lightning bolts from his hands like baseballs next month, and just because he's flying around the cityscape with his big cape stretched out behind him this month, that doesn't mean he won't be swinging from building to building on his weird looking chest chains like Spider-Man next month. Spawn's powers seem to derive from (a) him being Undead and (b) him having this strange magically powered alien bodysuit exoskeleton that he does not fully control. Spawn never seems to know from one panel to the next what super powers he currently has, or will have five minutes from now, and that's just part of the character's 'charm'... a word I use rather ironically.

Probably the best and most consistently frustrating example of 'inconsistency' I can think of right now is the way vampire physiology, and the nature of the 'soul', are presented on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. But that's an old riff, and I can do it for months on end, and you can find me shrieking and wailing and guh-nashing my teeth about it in other places, so I'll spare you it here.

Now, there are basically two ways of dealing with these kind of errors when you catch them: make up your own explanation (a popular subset of this is, threaten the writer until they make up an acceptable explanation and put it into a story to make it 'official') or ignore it. The people who want it explained so it makes sense are pretty much known (politely) as 'continuity buffs', while the folks who just don't care are, well, the folks who just don't care. (They tend to refer to 'continuity buffs' as 'continuity Nazis', however. Their mantra is 'it's just a stooooooory, fanboy, LIGHTEN UP!', and I loathe them entirely; if they think it's just a stooooooory and the details don't matter they can go read Casper the Friendly Ghost and shut the fuck up about actual adult entertainment.)

Anyway, Mike Norton has a delightfully simple explanation for all these kinds of errors: It's bad reporting.

I love this explanation. And if you're a continuity geek like me, you should love it as well... but perhaps you won't, because many continuity geeks really want to believe that the stuff in the comics is the actual, objective truth, presented exactly as the actual, objective truth occurred. Believing in 'bad reporting' requires one to be able to pull back a bit, and to see that the comic books, or the TV shows, are just a layer... a sort of filter, between us, the audience, and the actual world where these actual events took place.

The 'just a story' bunch are right out of this; they simply think the characters in the story are, well, characters in a story... not at all real, and therefore, they don't care, because, well, 'it's just a story'.

Yeah, they sound much more sane than me and Mike, but I hate them, so shut up.

It's not simply that I'd like to believe that these characters that I love so much are actually, on some level, in some alternate dimension, 'real'. Actually, I don't. Most of these fictional characters occasionally travel between dimensions; if they were 'real' and existed somewhere, on some alternate timeline, it's possible they could come here... and while I wouldn't mind taking Tigra or Crystal, or Phantom Girl or Supergirl, to a movie, I certainly don't need Thanos or Darkseid showing up in my home dimension, no, thank you very much. (It's sad; I originally started to type in the names of some of the female characters from the Buffy franchise I'd like to watch a video with while giving a neck rub to, and as I went down the list, had to realize that over the last year, all of them have turned into either unpleasant or outright scary bitches that I actually no longer want to ever be in the same room with. Well, we grow and change, and in the Buffy universe, apparently, they grow and change become really, really terrifying.)

(Oh, wait, I'm lying... I'd happily take Faith to a matinee and make out with her as much as she wants; she's actually moved in the other direction, from scary/psychotic to nice/seeking redemption. I shall redeem you, young Slayer. I shall redeem you with these silk bondage cords... hmmm... better make that, these stout steel handcuffs. Four pairs, one for each wrist and ankle. And a sturdy steel bedframe, please, none of that flimsy maple.)

ANY frickin' way. I don't necessarily want to think these folks are real, at least, not objectively or intellectually. But I do want to be able to emotionally believe in their reality while I'm watching their show or reading their comic. And since I'm intelligent and have a functional memory, and as far as I know, in 'reality' history does not change simply because a lazy writer doesn't bother to do their research, for me to emotionally accept these characters as 'real' while I'm reading or watching, writers have to not make these stupid and idiotic mistakes. Or I get really antsy.

But, see, with 'bad reporting', I can accept that these characters are 'real'... it's simply the filter (the comic or the TV show) that is portraying the real events inaccurately.

Thus it is that I can say to myself "well, yes, it's stupid that Angel, who can see perfectly in complete darkness, turns on the lights every time he walks into a room. BUT, that's just on the TV show. The 'real' Angel, on Earth-Buffy, probably sits around in the dark all the time, reading or drawing or just brooding, until one of his human buddies shows up and turns on the lights". (And probably jumps out of their skins when they see Angel sitting in the middle of the previously pitch dark room, looking up from his book or sketchpad, cocking one eyebrow inquisitively at them.)

Bad reporting. When Superman acts like a great big jerk, using his super powers during his high school years to cover himself with easy athletic and scholastic honors in unfair competition with normal humans who don't know he's an alien, well, it's just bad reporting; he really never did any such thing. When Buffy decides to search Spike's lair and is too stupid to take a flashlight, yet finds that Spike has conveniently left torches burning even while he's out, despite that fact that open flame is one of the few things that can kill a vampire, and Spike, being a vampire, can see perfectly in the dark anyway, I no longer worry about it. It's 'bad reporting'... there are no torches, Buffy actually remembered to take a flashlight. When Willow loses her mind and decides to blow up the world by bombarding an ugly statue with purple energy bolts for several hours (don't ask me, I didn't make it up) and Xander shows up and talks her out of it with inane babble about yellow crayons, while Buffy is trapped in a pit for no reason fighting zombies with crayfish hands... it's, you guessed it, bad reporting.

Now, the only problem with the 'bad reporting' explanation is sometimes it gets pretty old. The DC Universe has been subject to universal bad reporting since around 1985. The Marvel Universe... hmmm... other than in occasional spots, the MU has been 'badly reported' since probably 1976, or thereabouts. Buffy has been badly reported since about two thirds of the way through the first season (and the character of 'Anya' has always been 'bad reporting'; I don't know who Xander has been dating for four years, but 'Anya', as a character, simply makes no sense at all, and never has).

Nonetheless, 'bad reporting' is something that all we really anal continuity nazis can embrace, if we want to, and cherish in our hearts, as a way to keep our favorite imaginary friends 'real' and alive to us even in the face of lazy or just outright stupid writing. When the 'bad reporting' goes on long enough, though...

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough with, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

NOTICE

There is such a thing as a social contract. Even among bloggers. And I pay attention to it.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man