Some thoughts on the Season 8 comics.
The focus is more on general developments rather than specific
events, however there WILL be spoilers below.
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1) General themes and atmosphere. In one sense, of course, Season
8 is about the repercussions of what happened in Season 7. In a
sense, however, it may resemble Season 4 more. The end of Season 7
changed things. Placed the Scoobies in a very different situation,
just as graduating High School did. And the new situation is
leading to the Scoobies starting to grow apart. And we have a
shadowy conspiracy, although this one is aimed right at them.
If we follow this analogy, we aren't at the beginning of "Season
4", we aren't seeing the initial adjustments, we're somewhere in
the middle.
2) Backstory. We haven't seen that much of how things got to this
point. My suspicion is that Buffy (and the rest of the Scoobies)
have mostly been improvising--figuring things out as they go along.
What seems to have happened, to a large extent, is that the old
Sunnydale structure has been mapped onto a worldwide organization.
It seems to be mostly working for now, but at some point they will
want to rethink things. Aside from anything else, they don't seem
to have thought through how to deal with the eventual succession.
3) Buffy's isolation. Buffy has a tendency to periodically
distance herself from the rest of the Scoobies. This tends to lead
to problems. The process seems already to have started, with a
partial estrangement from both Giles and Dawn and a certain
distance between Buffy and Willow. Xander is still there as
Buffy's loyal lieutenant. But if Joss's pattern holds, something
is going to cause tension between Buffy and Xander.
4) Buffy and Satsu. This seems to have led to some debate. I
think one of the main things that's happening is that Buffy is
simply feeling somewhat alone right now. Burden of leadership
combined with partial estrangement from several of the Scoobies.
And there's Satsu right there who's in love with her, and who
basically saved her life. So Buffy sort of defaults into a
relationship with her.
There is some similarity here to Season 6--Buffy having a
relationship with someone she wouldn't usually consider. With
someone who feels more strongly about her than she does in return.
There are some very important differences, though. For one thing,
Buffy likes and respects Satsu. And is trying her best to be
honest with both herself and Satsu about what is and isn't
happening. And what she's unsure of. She doesn't want to end up
hurting Satsu, and is trying to make sure that anything Satsu
decides is based on the real situation. Even if Buffy isn't
entirely sure what the real situation is.
Perhaps even more important is that in Season 6 there was an
subtext (and sometimes main text) of self-hatred that is not there
in Season 8. Buffy is a bit lonely, but she mostly feels
reasonably good about herself.
5) Finally a quick note about the description for Issue 15. It
refers to the Slayers suffering a "massive hit". It does occur to
me that Dark Horse could just be getting cute and this could refer
to Dawn either accidentally falling on one of the Slayers, or
returning to normal size at an inopportune time.
There are, of course, lots of other possibilities.
--
Michael Ikeda mmikeda@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Telling a statistician not to use sampling is like telling an
astronomer they can't say there is a moon and stars"
Lynne Billard, past president American Statistical Association
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