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NEWS AND VIEWS - DECEMBER 2021
WRITING NEWS ...And that does it for 2021. This hasn't been a great year for me. Back in January, seemingly apropos of nothing, I started having trouble sleeping, and ever since I've had this chronic insomnia, which has impacted my life in all kinds of big and little ways. I'm doing better now than I was when this whole thing started -- I'm having fewer bad nights than good nights now -- but it can still get pretty rough. I barely slept at all over Christmas, for example, which kind of killed my Christmas spirit this year. Because of the insomnia, I didn't write as much this year as I did last year or the year before, but I managed to release a couple of new books anyway: The Brassfire Fleet in March and The White Ribbon and the Heart of the Night in November. I've also added about 30,000 words to A City Burnished Silver, which I'm still hoping to release next year. Unfortunately I haven't had any real success in selling these books, or even of getting them in front of people for review. It's hard to get people interested in self-published books. At this point, though, I don't really even mind that these books haven't found an audience; I'm writing them more for my own personal satisfaction now than for any other reason. I just like to write. So what have I got planned for 2022, writing-wise? Well, like I said, I'm hoping to finish A City Burnished Silver. After that I'm planning on finally writing that Playground Noir novel I keep talking about, and then...well, I don't know yet. I might write another fantasy, or I might write another Signalverse novel if the mood strikes, but I feel like I've been going back to that well a little too often lately, so maybe I won't do that. Another Sam Fortune novel is also a possibility. Anyway, I hope you had a better year than I did, and as always, if you'd like to get in touch with me for any reason, you can send an email to theblakeshow@gmail.com. * * * * * * * * ON BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER I've mentioned here before that I sometimes watch reaction videos on YouTube, of people reacting to Star Wars or The Wizard of Oz or whatever for the first time. A few days ago I stumbled across a couple of channels where people watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel for the first time, from beginning to end, and it got me thinking about both shows. Before I get into that, though -- seeing these college-age YouTubers geeking out over these twenty-year-old shows seems very strange to me. When I was a college kid, back around 1999-2000, I would have found it impossible to become really heavily invested in a live-action TV series from twenty years previous -- the cultural gap between the late 70's and the late 90's would have been just too huge for me to get over. Disco, bell-bottoms, feathered hair...that just wasn't my world. I thought the 70's were lame. But these YouTubers don't seem to have an equivalent problem relating to Buffy. And this ties in with a pet theory of mine that we're currently living through an era of serious cultural stagnation. My favorite example is the TV series Friends, which ran from 1994 to 2004. In the first few episodes of that series, you can tell that the clothing styles, hairstyles, cars, and so on clearly belong to another era. By the third or fourth season, around 1997-1998, you don't notice those differences anymore. The clothing styles and hairstyles seen during those seasons are basically the same as those seen today. Car designs haven't changed much in twenty years either (though this is mainly due to safety regulations forcing them to conform to certain designs). To a college-age kid, probably the only hint that these later seasons of Friends were filmed over twenty years ago is the fact that no one seems to own a smartphone. And I guess Buffy and Angel fall into that same category. 
Anyway. I really enjoyed the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The third season was especially good, and if the show had ended after the third season I'd still be recommending it to people and calling it an absolute classic, because that would have been the perfect place to end it. Unfortunately...well, unfortunately there was a fourth season. The fourth season is where Buffy started to run off the rails for me. There were still plenty of good individual episodes in this season, but a bunch of things went wrong: 1) The loss of the high school setting really hurt the show. I understand that they couldn't keep Buffy and her friends in high school forever (most of the actors were well into their twenties already, and a few were even closing in on thirty), but this show just seemed to work best when it was set in one central location, which gave the characters a reason to interact with each other every day, and a reason for Giles, posing as the school librarian, to always be hanging around these kids. Without the school setting, the show began to lose some of its focus. 2) Buffy lost some of its most interesting and charismatic characters at the beginning of season four, and replaced them with characters that were not as interesting or as charismatic (at least, I didn't find them so). Angel and Cordelia left to star in Angel, and Oz left shortly thereafter. Faith only made occasional appearances. These characters were replaced by Buffy's new boyfriend Riley -- who, let's face it, didn't have anywhere near the show-stopping intensity of Angel -- and Willow's new girlfriend Tara, whose character was never really developed very much beyond "she's Willow's lesbian lover." Anya, now a part of the main cast after some earlier guest appearances, was a slightly more interesting character, and of course Spike's return was cool, but they couldn't make up for the loss of all these others. 3) The Initiative was a bad idea. In the previous three seasons, Buffy and her friends were basically the only people who knew about Sunnydale's vampires and demons and magic-workers, so when bad things happened, it fell to them to deal with them. That made things exciting -- it's up to our heroes to save the day, because no one else can! In season four we learn that the government knows about demons and witches, too, which really kind of cheapens the concept (and which makes it very difficult for viewers to believe that the ordinary inhabitants of the Buffyverse could be totally ignorant about these things). Why are Buffy and her friends dealing with this crap, when the federal government is running around out there with all these demon-killing fireteams? 4) Adam was a dumb villain. His costume looked silly, and compared to the Master, Drusilla, Angelus, Faith, and the Mayor...well, he just wasn't a very complex character. Season five of Buffy was an improvement, with a better villain and a fun twist (the introduction of Dawn) but most of the problems that had arisen in season four were still there -- obviously they couldn't go back to the high school setting, bring back Angel and Oz and the rest of the earlier cast, or undo the nonsense surrounding the Initiative. Season five also introduced Warren and his super-technology robots, which I found ludicrous -- I mean, I'm already suspending my disbelief here in regards to all the demons and magic and whatever, and now you expect me to believe this one teenager can build totally lifelike robots, too? Maybe I could have bought it if Warren's genius had been given some kind of supernatural explanation, but the show never bothered to do that. In spite of that, though, season five wasn't bad, and if the series had ended here, again, I would have been left with positive feelings about the show overall. But season six was awful (apart from the musical) and season seven wasn't much better. Series creator Joss Whedon's absence during these seasons was very keenly felt -- I find his style a little shopworn now, but whenever he returned to write or direct an episode, the show's quality just shot up immensely. But the last two seasons of Buffy kind of soured me on the whole franchise and I never bothered to check out the comics that continued the story. I find my previous infatuation with the show (I bought almost all the DVD sets) just a little bit embarrassing now. As for Angel...well, Angel was quite a bit more consistent in terms of quality, I think. The show didn't really have a season like Buffy's season four, where everything went downhill, and it didn't have a flat-out, jump-the-shark bad season like Buffy's season six. It still had its share of problems, though -- Cordelia's anitclimactic ending, the whole thing with Connor (I found this guy especially annoying), the "turgid supernatural soap opera" of the fourth season. But unlike Buffy, Angel actually seemed to get better as it went on, particularly in its final season, and it at least ended on a very satisfying note. |