Subject: re: mission
Author:
Posted on: 2023-01-16 23:33:53 UTC
Oh, sweet, it’s pre-season seven, so I get to read! (Just finished season six last month, heh heh!)
That opening assassination is great! It’s such a very PPC-style outsmarting of the Suvian, leading her on with her own power before tricking her with a B’rer Rabbit gambit. I was initially laughing about her eucalyptus wand, but then I remembered what good exhibit decorations eucalyptus wood makes, and honestly, it feels like a good idea for wands. They would be nice and sturdy, hard to break by accident . . . although maybe shooting magic through them would make them more brittle?
I really like the early scene with Moira comforting Buddy. It makes sense, given how recently he’s become human, that he needs that sort of emotional attention, the way a child or pet would. Actually, throughout the mission, he reminds me a lot of Aximili, the alien member of the Animorphs, in the way he he’s watching everything with a slightly detached eye, not understanding everything he sees, and not even sure if he wants to engage with everything he sees, as far as Blank’s aggression goes. His desire for stories about the sky is cute (and a little sad!), and I can understand his frustration at things like the labels for days of the week, which are of course an arbitrary measurement for time that we only accept because we grow up under it. It’s a difficult transition, but I can tell he’s trying!
Was Autumn considering naming herself after Willow? Heh, it’s like, “autumn willow.” It would have been a good name, but going for something original is good, too. I love the mental image of the Mary Sues That Weren’t having big watch parties together to start researching canons, while they were all adjusting to HQ life . . . Oh, is that Blessie in the photo, with the reddened nose? I feel bad for her and Blank, losing Zit . . .
Poor Cordelia; her continuum gets its first mission in over a decade, and her screen time gets completely taken over by minis! I love that they’re all dressed as teenage valley girls, and the Heathers joke Blank made about them.
I more or less guessed at the reason for Moira and Buddy to have Buffyverse knowledge without watching it beforehand, though I was guessing the Buffy incarnations came before the Tolkienverse ones, not after. It’s interesting that removing Moira and Buddy from Middle-earth seems to have drawn at least one alternate pair of themselves away from the other story; I wonder if they have more unexpected canon knowledge from alternate selves to uncover?
Blank gets, uh, Very Yikes in here. As I’ve probably said before, I can understand the source of her prejudice from Sparklee, but at the same time, she’s been living in Headquarters for fifteen years at this point; you’d think she would have spent some time interacting with other reformed Suvians before this. Plus, I find it weird that she sees Moira’s little “rewrite critique” moments as a sign of delusion, when to me, it shows Moira is capable of “improving her writing,” in a metaphorical sense. Blank comes off as awfully unempathetic, and even “bloodthirsty,” as Buddy says in this mission. It just makes me sad, but I’m rooting for her to face some character development down the line . . .
All that being said, oh boy. I hope Moira made the right choice in bringing Jackie into HQ. I’m all for finding alternatives to assassination, but Jackie had a major aura of smooth to force Spike to act like he had a soul, plus I was reading on the suspicion that Buffy was feeling so tired and emotional because Jackie was actively draining the Slayer powers out of her. It would be nice to see Jackie reformed, but I don’t want Moira putting herself and Buddy, or anyone else, in danger. I hope everything works out all right!
You’ve got a floating “r” here:
“A tiny crack in the shell, and it was Buffy the Vampire Slaye r.”
—doctorlit will totally get around to season seven at some point, but might skip all the comic seasons because graphic novels tend to be expensive