Buffy-- Sci-fi or Fantasy?
POSTED BY: NoVaGrAsS
UPDATED: Monday, August 22, 2005 17:30
VIEWED: 7344
PAGE 4 of 4
Chris, I responded to your remarks about season 4 before I read your response to my response to Grounded.
I don't believe the Warrencrap (the Season 6 Warrencrap) MUST come from the realm of Fantasy. I believe it comes from the realm of bad writing.
We are also getting into the territory of the Definition of Science Fiction.
As I said earlier in this thread, I don't believe Science Fiction has been adequately defined but Zoid did about as good a job as any I've seen.
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I actually felt that the Initiative was a good idea that was questionably executed. The archetecture of the sub/extra governmental agency seemed off-the-cuff, as if it wasn't gonna be around long enough to bother. The hearing at it's end was an excellent 'smooth over', more of that connection to real government earlier would have helped it's credibility wih me. And Adam was a visual mess. Good from a horror POV, but on the sci-fi side, he appeared a little hokey.
I just felt that if they were gonna open it up to being that big, it's tone should've remained dark and under (more) cover. It played more like a comic book the way it was handled, not the action-fantasy-horror S1-3 felt like, or the more X-Files-like twisted stuff it coulda been.
(And by Bond gadgets, I mean underground instalations (RIGHT under S.U.!?!?), hidden sliding door entrances, MRI and Retinal scan ID checkpoints, etc.)
So it's not so much that S4 violated tone; you could just see that actual violations were in the offing.
Not that I didn't like it Chrisisall
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Quote:
Originally posted by batmarlowe:
Do we agree that robots, freeze rays, and inviso-rays are tropes of Science Fiction?
Maybe not, but I think we do.
They're tropes of 'soft' science fiction, since they seem on the surface to be science-related, but actually have sod all to do with it. Do you believe someone in the far, far, super-advanced future could make an invisibility ray? In the context of the show, if they actually felt it necessary to have such a ray, all they had to do was tie it in to magic.
Quote:
Originally posted by batmarlowe:
So I'm wondering:
Why does the fact that "none of these things are given reasonable explanations for their inclusion" mean they don't qualify as Science Fiction even in the context of Buffy?
Because (in places) they're used purely as maguffins. You could make an argument for I Was Made To Love You being a bit sci-fi, but looking back it looks to me to be in there purely to introduce Warren and therefore allow the Buffybot.
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Does "soft" Science Fiction (even though it has sod all do with science) qualify as Science Fiction?
And since you said "sod all", should I assume you're British or did you just pick it up from Spike?
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I would say that Warren was an element of science fiction...in a way that the Initiative is not. I think they wanted to give him super powers in a non-occult sort of way, thus the robots. They already had warlocks witches wizards and vamps, along with assorted demons, and I think Warren was the evil genius addition.
I think it would have been better sans robots, since evil geniuses could use sharks with laser beams (or something else, obviously), but then, I didn't write the show.
I would personally classify buffy as horror genre, although there were other elements at times. It is not Sci-fi. It is not really fantasy. It has folkloric elements that make it horror, as Werewolves and vampires and slayers and witches and all the rest certainly are. Fantasy sometimes uses these elements as well, but horror taps into things that make us afraid...things that are written into our cultural consciousness. Things that go bump in the night. Yes, it was funny. Yes, it was well characterized.
That would be my 2 er 25 cents....
LB
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Quote:
Originally posted by batmarlowe:
Does "soft" Science Fiction (even though it has sod all do with science) qualify as Science Fiction?
I remember reading an article on sci-fi a while back that had links to a couple of really funny pages. One was a breakdown of sub-genres, the other was this: http://enphilistor.users4.50megs.com/cliche.htm
Unforunately I can no longer find the first one, since I can't remember what it was called nor the name of the article in which it was originally referenced. *kicks self*
Quote:
Originally posted by batmarlowe:
And since you said "sod all", should I assume you're British or did you just pick it up from Spike?
I'm from northeast Scotland. You don't get that much 'sod all' up here, but it creeps in every now and again ;)
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