Comic Thoughts: Ben is Glory
So I finally got around to reading Buffy Season Eight #32-35, and now I’m finally caught up again for the first time in many months. But I’m also not sure what just happened. Did I read a few issues of Buffy, or did I somehow ingest something hallucinogenic? Is today Wednesday or Thursday? Or is it Friday already? There are spoilers everywhere, but they are as cleverly disguised as Twilight’s true identity.
So, okay. I had figured that Angel/Twilight was just being a jerk for the greater good, and trying to work against Buffy because she was getting semi-evil and on the verge of breaking everything. I guess that was somewhat true, but it was barely relevant compared to his real plan of having super sex and creating paradise, only to completely scrap that plan in the end anyway.
I just don’t know what to make of this story arc. It happened, and…? I do like the idea that the universe apparently tries to maintain a cosmic balance, but taken to this extent, it’s a little hard to swallow as part of the series mythology. But it does make me wonder if this is the ultimate event that the Senior Partners said Angel was a major player in. It certainly is pretty big and important. Though, at one point, Giles seemed to imply that Angel was possessed by the Twilight paradise force, and I would really like to know more about that, but I don’t think I’ll ever get my wish.
I can’t really decide if any of this was good or not, though I am leaning towards “not.” Actually, there was one particular thing that really bothered me: the swearing. Now, I’m hardly a prude or anything; I can and do swear a lot, depending on the situation. But these few comics have exemplified some of my biggest pet peeves related to swearing. 1) It’s self-censored. I hate self-censored swearing. If you can’t or won’t say the actual word, then say something else. Get a fucking thesaurus. 2) It sounds tacky and unrealistic. Other than Faith, I cannot picture any of these characters realistically dropping F-bombs. Especially not this casually. For fuck’s sake, they’re a bunch of middle-class white nerds. And that brings me to… 3) I hate when people refer to sex as “fucking.” Or at least when most people do it, because they just can’t pull it off. People like Tupac Shakur or Joe Pesci can realistically talk about people fucking. Willow Rosenberg cannot.
There were some positives, though. There was Andrew, and… I liked how, at the very end of #35, Spike suddenly showed up in a spaceship. It was obvious he’d be around at some point, but with a spaceship? It might not really be a spaceship, but there’s no other logical explanation for that thing in my memory, so I’ve decided that’s what it is.