*happy sigh*

[butterfly]

I love Season Six Buffy. How often is depression so realistically depicted anywhere? You have the false epiphanies, the backsliding, the hopelessness. And then, it does get better. It always does pass - the depression. Doesn't mean it won't come back, but it does go away.

Pay no attention to me. I'll be over here making icons of pretty Season!Six Buffy. She was gorgeous that season (I think she's gorgeous every season, though). And Season Six has some great lighting.

Comments

So with you.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Season Six is one of my favourites for that very reason. And I loved (still love) both Buffy the character and Buffy the show.

Re: So with you.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if you have to have experienced or seen depression to 'get' Season Six. Because I was always running across people (mostly on TWoP) who said that Buffy's behavior made no sense and that she was just being a bitch and I always wanted to say, "Well, it's nice that you've never felt that way. But since you haven't, stop pretending that you know how she should act."

[mekare-enra.livejournal.com]

Amen! :D To all you said above. I think it was indeed a very realistic depiction of depression...and she was beautiful that season :)

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

It's always nice to find people who feel the same way.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on it being a triumph as regards the depiction of depression, but I still didn't enjoy Season Six very much. Willow's addiction storyline felt very anvil-ish, and to this day, I still don't understand why Xander left Anya at the altar. Admittedly, they were my canon OTP so I might be intentionally blind on this, but I felt there was no lead-up at all (minus the normal premarital jitters we saw in OMWF) and Xander seemed so committed that I couldn't see how the crazy demon-sent delusions could cause him to break up with Anya.

The show didn't sparkle that season. Okay, so it wasn't really meant to, but that didn't make it more of an enjoyable watch.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Well, I loved it more than I enjoyed it, though there were many enjoyable moments in it.

The Willow thing... I think that it helped that I didn't trust Willow one bit. She can say it's an addiction all she likes. Doesn't make it true. I always saw it as a power issue and accept for about three episodes, everyone else treated that way, too. And even in those episodes, it's the people who are clueless about magic who are acting like it's an addiction. So I guess I believed that the narrator was unreliable. For me, it was always a power and control issue (as they make clear in S7).

The Xander thing made sense to me, though I'm not sure if I can word it the right way... he loved Anya, that much is definitely true. He was committed to her. Only he proposed when the world was ending and didn't tell his friends that they were engaged for months. In the songs, it seems like the longer they went on, the deeper they went and their last verse ends with "We could really raise the beam in making marriage a hell." And Xander didn't want Anya to regret marrying him.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I think I could have bought the altar thing much more easily if they'd got back together afterwards. Even given Anya's, ahem, vengeful nature, I couldn't understand them breaking up completely just because Xander wasn't ready for marriage. In that episode, I was distraught, and convinced that in a few episodes' time, they'd be back together, even if the wedding wasn't back on. But it seemed understood by everybody that they were broken up, completely broken up, with no prospect for the foreseeable future of ever getting back together again. And they never did, excluding a couple of times they fell into bed that never seemed to lead anywhere. I rather got the impression that the writers wanted to make everyone miserable to fit the mood of the season, and so didn't bother giving the couple a convincing breakup. And of course, come Season 7 both of them are COMPLETELY sidelined in favour of the Peroxide Pair. (I hope you'll forgive me in my complete hatred of S7 Buffy. S6 Buffy's actions I can easily sympathise with.)

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Well, Xander wanted to get back together. ("You left her at the altar but you still wanna date?" - Buffy, Normal Again), but Anya pretty much went all scorned woman.

(Oh, I'd forgive you if you hated S6 Buffy, S2 Xander, Swhatever Whoever. I just probably won't agree with you as I adore Buffy in all her incarnations. And since S7 is the season that pushed Buffy off the pedestal for me, it has a special place in my heart.)

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Xander never made any actual effort to get back together with Anya, though. He just showed a vague preference for the idea. I'm pretty sure he could have won her back if he'd tried. Especially post-Selfless.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

S7, it maybe could have happened. Except, when they slept together in Storyteller, Anya was the one that made it sound like a last time. I think that he would have, if she would have, but she wanted to find herself. She didn't want to be Xander's Anya. Just Anya.

:(

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I miss her soooo.

*cries*

Re: :(

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

*pets*

She was a great character. She went from all bitter to a loving hero, all without losing her unique personality.

[grlnamedlucifer.livejournal.com]

Well, I gotta say I hated Season Six (though I thought Season Seven was worse), but I do think you are right about how realistically they portrayed Buffy's depression. I also liked how they were portraying abusive relationships that season (Willow/Tara, Buffy/Spike), though it did take me two viewings to realize that Buffy was as much the abuser as the abusee.

The main problem for me about Season Six is I really just never totally believed that Xander, Anya, and Tara would've bring Buffy back from the dead. (Willow, sure.) That and Tara was the only character who didn't seem to self-destruct during the season.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Well, Willow was the driving force. And... you know, I hate to say this, but how do we know she wasn't influencing Tara with magic at that point?

And Xander... well, Willow summed it up - "It's Buffy." And Xander helps Buffy. That's his thing. "Buffy alive. Me glad." And Anya did it because Xander did.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Yep, I agree. Xander would never have been able to flat-out refuse to help with any plan to bring back Buffy.

Also, the factor that everyone seems to forget in discussing this is that Sunnydale was falling apart without Buffy. The Buffybot scam was just about working, and then it all fell to pieces. Other than getting an assassin in to kill Faith in jail (which, as we saw a bit later, isn't a plan that works very well) and waiting for a new Slayer to arise, they wouldn't have had much of a choice.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Everyone was falling apart. Giles left. None of the four had grieved because they were going to bring Buffy back. Dawn was sleeping with the Buffybot because she felt so alone. Spike was probably the most well-adjusted of the bunch, really.

And yeah, Sunnydale still needed its guardian. No rest for Buffy while there's still Sunnydale.

[grlnamedlucifer.livejournal.com]

>Sunnydale was falling apart without Buffy.<

See, I never understood that either. I mean, what made this summer-without-Buffy any different from when she was in LA with her dad, or when she had run away, or even before she got there?

And couldn't they have called Giles and had him call the Watcher's Council, or that witches coven thing for help? Or used Willow's scarey magic to take them out (since it's obviously powerful enough to raise the dead, I don't get why she wasn't powerful enough to take out random baddies).

I can't remember, did those biker guys start the destruction or was it already going on when they got there?

>kill Faith in jail ... and waiting for a new Slayer to arise<

And heck, if you listen to Season 7 logic there should already be another Slayer running around. ^_-

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

I can't remember, did those biker guys start the destruction or was it already going on when they got there?

They started it because they heard the Slayer was dead.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

What is this 'Season 7 logic' you speak of?

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Buffy was all talking about how if she died, one of the potentials would become a Slayer. I just think she was wrong. Buffy isn't always right.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Heh! No, I remembered that. I meant that calling it 'logic' is a bit of a stretch.
I don't think we can fall back on 'unreliable narrator' in this case - Buffy would have to have been retarded to have failed to realise that if no new Slayer arose the last time she died, Kendra was probably a once-in-a-deathtime occurence.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Unless she was just trying to spook the potentials. I need to rewatch S7 now (oh, I always need to rewatch everything).

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Spooking the potentials? That doesn't make much sense. It'd be a pointless lie. And the truth would be a much better way to spook them ("I could die and then the burden will all fall on you, even though you still won't have special Slayer powers, because Faith's going to be in prison for a long time and she's unlikely to die before her term's up." That would have gone much better with her theme of "You have to fight NOW, you can't just wait around!")

(I didn't mean, of course, that I actually thought Buffy was retarded. Just that the writers apparently think their audience is, if they think we can buy continuity errors like that.)

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Like I said, I need to rewatch the pertinent eps, but my main impression of General Buffy? General Buffy does not make the smartest choices. General Buffy was running scared. General Buffy was a sucky general.

[grlnamedlucifer.livejournal.com]

>And Xander helps Buffy. That's his thing.<

Yeah, I know, but there's a big difference between doing CPR and doing huge magics. But, yeah, it is his thing to help Buffy.

But I somehow don't think Willow fully explained what was going on. I mean, he was pretty shocked about what Willow went through during the spell and then when Spike told him something horrible could've gone wrong it was like he never realized it. I honestly think if it weren't for Willow, the rest would've never considered it.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, he had no clue about the killing of the fawn or any of that. After all, he wasn't anywhere near the whole thing where Dawn tried to raise Joyce.

And I think that if Buffy had died and Willow hadn't thought of resurrecting her, that Xander would have... he wouldn't have mentioned her again. Like he never mentions Jesse. Like he automatically thought of Buffy in the past tense when she ran away in between S2 and S3. If he can't do anything about something, he suppresses his feelings about it.