That Ultimate Buffy Scene – Willow’s Long Walk

What does storytelling mean to me?

Sometimes, I have to look back at the tales that make me glad to play in the writers’ sandbox. The moments, and the craft behind them, that have burned themselves into my brain as the best ever.

And there’s nothing like Buffy… and the longest, darkest school hallway walk in history.

“Things are about to get very interesting”

–That was a dialogue quote that played in the ads for the sweeps story of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

–Yes, that season. The big one.

I would put a massive SPOILER ALERT here, but… well, I can’t imagine a dark fantasy reader on this blog who doesn’t know the turning point of that show-defining two-parter called “Surprise!” and “Innocence.”

But if you still don’t, readers all, you’ve had your warning. After all, omens are in the spirit of that storyline.

And second chances are not. So:

First glimpse is our heroine watching a dream of Angel, the world’s only vampire with a soul, being murdered… and fearing it’s one of the rare prophetic dreams that being the Slayer sends her. This is called establishing the, um, stake.

Especially since she’s in love with him. And how, in spite of having saved the world once already, Buffy Summers is very much a girl turning seventeen.

(Note, this was years before those books. The one word that can be spoken against Buffy is that it inspired Twilight as a pallid, pull-all-the-punches imitation of one piece of it.)

But the story isn’t only about her boyfriend. It’s got a few other threads too.

Willow, Buffy’s shy little friend, daring to ask an offbeat musician on a date, to their surprise party for Buffy. Sweet.
Xander, the long-suffering and all-too-human boy at their heels trying to get the snooty Head Cheerleader to admit how they’ve been sort of dating, between fights. Sweet and sour.
Computer teacher and ally Jenny Calendar getting a secret message revealing to us that she’s only been in town for one reason: to guarantee that Angel suffers. Especially by her removing Buffy.
And of course, the crazy-deadly (and simply crazy) vampire Drusilla receiving her own presents for her own party (why yes, it’s a theme). Namely, the severed pieces of an immortal demon called the Judge that can destroy anything remotely human with a touch, or build up his power to cleanse the planet. Dru’s first act when he reassembles is to let him vaporize one of her own vampires who almost one of his arms, and immediately squeal “Do it again!”

So all while our heroes are trying to slow down the assembly of the Judge, we can see Jenny picking some very clever moments to lead Buffy into a trap, or send Angel away on a solo mission (who else can hide the last piece of the Judge on the far side of the planet, and of course that means months away on a cargo ship…). And Buffy’s telling herself what many fans had been screaming from day one, that she should just take Angel to bed.

One narrow escape from the Judge later, she does.

And that’s what destroys Angel, and what Jenny had actually been sent to prevent: a hidden clause in The Curse that had been keeping Angel human, so that if his eternity of guilt was ever interrupted by one moment of real happiness, the soul the gypsies had forced back on him would slip away. Unleashing what an ancient vampire had once called “the most vicious creature I ever met.”

Why It Works

Meticulous buildup.

And, keeping so many threads fighting for our attention at once: we never did find out where Jenny would have taken Buffy if they hadn’t spotted those vamps.

All on top of the ultimate wish-fullfillment for the fans, turned inside out into the ultimate cautionary tale for any girl. (When Joss Whedon throws you a bone, it’s usually a grinning skull. One that bites.)

And then the second half of the two-parter.

All the right pressure points are hit: the first thing the restored Angelus does is to rip out a woman’s throat. The second is to join up with Drusilla, his creation, and letting the Judge find he doesn’t have one scrap of humanity to be burned with. (One guess why the Judge wasn’t written with simple weapons like poison or a thousand knives.) The third is to go back to the just-waking Buffy and rip out her heart… by keeping his secret and triggering every one of her teenage insecurities, finishing with “I’ll call you.”

So we know the world-burning demon is the minor threat now. Angelus is just getting started.

But all Buffy knows is she’s a total wreak.

Meanwhile her friends are scrabbling through the usual books, reciting more and more often how unstoppable the enemy they know about is: “no weapon forged can harm” and “it took an army.” But the guilt-stricken Jenny is nowhere to be seen. At least Xander and Willow are trying…

And Willow catches Xander making out with Cordelia, the Queen of Mean. “You’d rather be with someone you hate than be with me.”

But…

Just then, when pretty much the entire cast has been given a custom-built trauma, Willow is able to pull herself up and tell Xander they still have a world to save. And then Xander—hapless, helpless, all-heart Xander who’s always failed—Xander says “I’m getting a thought.”

And THAT’S WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT.

There’s Angelus, standing in the shadows at the far end of the hallway, casually calling Willow to him. She walks trustingly toward him… and when the episode premiered it felt like it took a full minute for her to cross that hall, and that was still too fast.

Because of every twist that Joss took to tighten the screws, again and again.

Because there had never once been only one plotline in play that would let us catch our breath.

Because every one of them was aimed where they’d hurt the most.

Because by now everything and everyone our heroes relied on has been stripped away… and just now teased with that one glimmer of hope, except that Willow’s walking into the grasp of the hidden monster….

And we know that with every step she takes, no matter what comes next, nothing in this story can ever be the same again.

Nobody writes quite like Joss Whedon.

But God knows we have to try.

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Photo by dbnunley

Dark Fantasy and Darker Horror – Common Webs

If dark fantasy and some of the other delightfully edgy shades of storytelling draw on horror (like I said last time), just how many variations does horror have? What kind of sinister heart does it have at the center of all those, how far can it stray away from that, and what does it have in common with Jane Austen?

–I admit, I’m not a full-time reader of horror (or Austen) over the other styles I follow. I’d also never say a tale “isn’t horror” if it crosses some specific line, but I’m interested in what all the genres have to lend each other and different ways to strike a balance. So let’s take a look:

First off, dark fantasy… it may draw on the “darker” side of the “fantastic” (you’ll meet more demons than angels), but it’s not writing with the same aim as horror. You can find plenty of articles like Alan Baxter’s at The Creative Penn, http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2009/07/19/dark-fantasy/, that spell out how full-on horror takes its name seriously: it’s out to scare us.

Or take Alien. And then, Aliens.

The first is well-known as “a horror movie in space,” and it’s a doozie: dark tunnels, a literal “monster within,” and even Sigourney Weaver’s survival making her a “Final Girl.” The sequel has the same danger, but instead of one xenomorph terrifying a handful of crew, the suspense shifts to dozens of critters and hundreds of bullets fired by doomed soldiers. Still dark, still a fine tale in its bloody way, but “Game over, man! Game over!” isn’t the same kind of spooky, is it?

Call it an ironic pattern:

[bctt tweet=”Other genres tend to creep into and take over territory that used to be #horror’s. http://bit.ly/1M1jdfB”]

Consider how vampires—even not counting the romantic spins on them!—seem less and less likely to be a sinister, unstoppable Dracula classic or a Salem’s Lot. Instead, they more often build up their own vast but killable hordes like The Strain. Or more often still, the monster-fighting heroines (or heroes, yes) have more supernatural power as the beasties themselves: Buffy, Blade, Kate Daniels, and whole shelves of anime super-action seem to be making Jonathan Harker’s very human struggles obsolete.

Or zombies. “First the zombies overrun the world, then comes the hard part,” pushes the fear to a whole different scale. Dodging a few Walkers, or even blowing them away, becomes only the punctuation for the real question, of what it takes to survive for days and years in that world. Like any apocalypse, that’s more an extra-dark Speculative Fiction than pure horror.

Do we take horror for granted?

So here’s a question: with all the demon-powered Slayers and horde-kicking survivors on our book covers, does that mean we’re less and less interested in simply being scared?

Horror certainly never goes away, but it can seem like it loses ground sometimes. But here’s a theory: how does that pattern of horror’s shift look, from the viewpoint of the storytellers—or the horror story itself:

Horror’s easier to sell (in some places!) than action or other genres, because fear is so primal.
Good horror can starts varying its base, to stay fresh; bad horror-makers lose track of it before they know it’s gone.
Result: it can be true horror that gets its foot in the door, and then it spreads out and takes on other forms.

(Hope that description was as spooky as it deserves!)

To look at that second step again:

It’s often said that horror draws a lot of its power from the unknown, the sense of facing a kind of danger we can never truly understand. I think that puts an extra pressure on horror writers to either start with concepts the reader doesn’t know as well, or show how they can mutate them. –Same as for any other genre, of course, it’s only that “Same old vamp” can be a bigger letdown than “Same old gangster.”

Even horror’s plot shows some of that evolution. Watch any number of old Universal Studios monster movies and you’ll see the creature shambling slowly toward its prey, showing off how many bullets it can shrug off. But the more “so it’s armored” began to seem like a cliche, the more movies had to look for other kinds of unstoppability. (Not that that can’t have its uses: consider the original Terminator, something you can’t shoot and that only needs a phone book and a clear view across the room to shoot you.)

But, compare to ghosts. Ghosts (fittingly) never seem to go very far out of fashion, and neither do possessing demons and other less-than-solid horrors. I’d say that’s for one simple reason: it’s a huge head start to have an enemy you can’t see until it wants you to, and that you can never simply hurt. Build a story around a ghost and the hero has no chance except to enter the spirit’s own world of rules and try to find a weakness that makes no human sense. Not many werewolves inspired as deep a terror as the victims scrambling to make it through The Ring, let alone The Exorcist.

Horror’s eye of the beholder?

Then again, “unknown” is a matter of perspective, and we storytellers own perspective. Some monsters may make it easier to force the heroes out of their comfort zone, but it’s better still to simply bring that hero’s comfort zone to life and show how any evil that really tears into it is horrific enough.

For instance:

Stephen King wrote two famous books both about girls with paranormal powers pushed toward becoming monsters. But Charlie and Carrie (ah, those matching names! King was having fun, wasn’t he?) take different routes, simply because the former had a loving father who gave her a reason not to burn up the world. The latter never had a chance.

[bctt tweet=”#Firestarter < #Carrie: one has running from The Shop, the other has teen bullying and child abuse.”]

It’s more than a rule about villains, monstrous or not. What really brings a predator to life is the right prey and making us believe we’re there in that hunting ground, hoping Jamie Lee Curtis can turn the tables on Michael. It’s the whole connection between villain, hero, and everything else lining up to make the fear real. And any of those can let the story down; it’s often said:

[bctt tweet=”Bad #horror’s first sin is a boring villain. Its *worst* sin is a boring hero. http://bit.ly/1M1jdfB”]

Or look at gothic horror, that can build up so much atmosphere it barely matters if the threat turns out to be the Devil himself or “only” a madman. And consider, how much of that menace comes from the sheer dependency of the hero(ine)’s position: usually a destitute bride or helpless orphan child (or both), she’s vulnerable in whole other ways. Even if the lurking danger doesn’t kill her, if that enemy turns out to be the one man in the world who was willing to take her in, much of her life is over anyway.

–And that’s what I’d call the connection between horror and Jane Austen. No, Pride and Prejudice isn’t a long study in terror, no matter how many men (who didn’t read it) say it is. But any romance of the time has at least a bit of a thriller edge behind it: who a 19^th-century woman marries has much higher stakes than a modern prom date. One wrong choice or twist of fate could leave a woman the property of a man who gambles away their money, beats her, or worse. And any romance that focused on that would count as full-blown horror.

I’d call that the essence of horror, something that it mixes with other genres any way it wants: taking us to a place of helplessness.

Many genres say the villain isn’t complete without a vicious, devastating “gun,” facing down a hero who has a right to his own “gun.” Horror says the villain has a devastating “gun” and the hero has a set of antlers.

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Can A Villain Want To Be Evil? Case study: LaCroix

Maybe the first rule we hear about writing villains is “No villain believes he’s a villain.” That is, in a story or in real life, even the people who do the most evil believe either that they’re doing right or that “good and evil” simply don’t matter. I’ve always agreed with that, but (this being the Unified Theory and all) I can’t help trying to test it a bit. Say, with one of the most “deliberately evil” villains I know: Forever Knight’s master vampire LaCroix.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Forever Knight was a vampire TV series that came out a bit (sorry) before the current crazes, and it focused squarely on its reluctant vampire’s reluctance and guilts that he faced while working as a police detective. Meanwhile the vampire that created Nick Knight, Lucien LaCroix, was…

Well, LaCroix went beyond killing people; he reveled in the idea of killing, and loved to point out human failings and lecture Nick that treating people as prey was the great pleasure of immortality. He’d attack the very notion of love, mercy, justice, anything that was part of Nick’s trying to “repay society for his sins.” –Picture all the melodramatic lines that bad villains use to announce that nobody wrote them a motivation, then strip them down so they actually sound believable, and give them to a completely committed actor. That’s Nigel Bennett as LaCroix.

(Or just consider: this is a vampire who named himself “the cross,” after all. [In fact, the full name is “Light of the Cross,” as Mona’s comment below points out.] And yes, Forever Knight vampires do have a problem with crosses, and no, the “cross” half of it wasn’t from our General Lucius’s birth name. Nasty.)

So does it mean anything that this villain actually likes evil for its own sake, that he doesn’t just “want your __” as the Theory’s analysis of villains covers?

One explanation for LaCroix is that he “doth protest too much” about having no softness in himself, in that he’s been actively crushing it out of his soul over the centuries until it’s become a reflex. After all, a vampire isn’t like a terrorist who believes God needs murders or a serial killer who simply wants to kill. A vampire, unless he makes serious sacrifices like Nick did, needs to kill humans just to stay alive, not to mention playing cat and mouse with them to keep his secret and then watching any humans he may still connect with age away and die. The core of existing as a vampire is dealing with the killing and isolation… and likely LaCroix has been working very hard to keep any regrets in line for a very long time.

That’s a powerful lesson for us writers. Yes, we love to justify villains and less extreme kinds of conflict by crafting situations where someone really would start doing the Troublesome Things the plot needs—especially if we can establish his character to show that he still had a choice to refuse the darkness, and he’s just not someone who would. But it makes him seem even more determined and also more believable (and tragic) if we show that he came to that place through a journey, through making that choice more than once, and how those choices and their effects changed him over time.

Or of course, to start pushing a hero down that same path…

And there’s another point about LaCroix: how exactly he matches his hero’s struggle. We all know the villain has to threaten something the hero cares about, but consider how much we can zero in on that exact point.

Because LaCroix isn’t trying to control a city or running around killing—or rather, the show leaves it as a given that Nick could never stop his feedings if he dared try. And LaCroix’s real goal isn’t exactly to be evil: it’s to keep human weakness from spoiling his eternity, and especially for his favorite creation, Nick, to give up trying to become human. As a motive, it’s not so different from the classic Dracula trying to seduce or carry off a woman into vampirism, or from any tale with a controlling father who refuses to let his son go.

“Every parent wants something in return. Love? loyalty? nothing is free… What did your father promise you? did he promise to take care of you? Did he keep his promise?”

–LaCroix to a crowd (and Nick), “Father’s Day”

In fact, most often LaCroix isn’t sabotaging the pieces of Nick’s human life. Instead he challenges him purely on that moral level, by pointing out all the flaws in human beings and in Nick’s struggle to join them, because he seems to believe our hero needs no more than that to bring him around sooner or later. And by refining just what the villain strikes at, the show prevents “so the hero fights the vampire” from distracting us from the focus it really wants, how each human crime gives Nick another challenge to his determination to be mortal.

Yes, you could argue that LaCroix isn’t actually used as a villain or other true opposition, more a symbol of the temptations the hero faces from whatever the story is. But a story can do great things with a tempter like this if it can capture that the hero really might be drawn into the dark each time, probably by letting him sometimes give in and having to face the consequences. (And okay, LaCroix does mix in episodes where he acts directly to interfere with Nick; a little uncertainty adds tension to those staredowns.) The real point is keeping LaCroix as representing the “shadow self” to Nick, that whether or not he’s the big tangible threat he shows how our hero might become the threat himself.

It’s worth trying, for any writer. Know just what your hero is struggling with, and define some villain or foil to challenge that as specifically as you can. And/ or, find the path that brings the villain (or the hero, or both) right to being willing to do that… even if it’s by way of how times he’s refused to turn back.