patxshand
Ensouled Vampire
Writer/director/Amy Acker's husband.[Mo0:0]
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Post by patxshand on Nov 18, 2010 8:59:15 GMT -5
Pat, I think you're giving vampire!Gunn a pass he doesn't deserve. Angel with a soul still feels responsible for all the evil he did before. So does Spike. The difference to me isn't the vampire/human deal but that Gunn had lost his soul. And if Angel and Spike have to own the evil they did, so does Gunn. So Gunn needs to eat his lumps. He murdered Connor. Connor died because of him and he remembers it. Gunn should expect Connor wanting to kill him--it's to Connor's credit that he's only verbalizing it. Oh, not giving him a complete pass. Gunn feels responsible. He begged Angel to let him die in the alley. However, looking at the big picture, Connor--at this point--should know that Gunn wasn't really in control of his actions. While you're absolutely right about Gunn having to own his evil actions, I think Connor's viewpoint during Willingham's arc was an oversimplification of things. He hated Gunn and wanted him dead; working with the guy disgusted Connor. I can see why Connor would be uncomfortable, but it seemed like a very immature reaction to something that's a lot more complicated that "I died, you killed me, f*** you." Not really to me, because that's not how it reads. Gunn isn't most upset about that, it's just needless salt on an open, gushing wound.
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Post by wenxina on Nov 18, 2010 9:36:39 GMT -5
Connor is what... 18 during "AtF". Given that Willingham's arc quickly followed "Aftermath", which more or less immediately followed "AtF", Connor's possibly still around the 18 mark. I wouldn't call shenanigans on him being a tad immature about his murder. Hell, I wouldn't call out a person who was 40 if he was bitter about being stabbed to death. Trauma lasts a good long time, if not forever. Yes, there's the nuance about lack of soul and whatnot, but the point is, the vampire wore Gunn's face. It's like telling a woman that the fact that she fears the identical twin of the man who raped her makes her stupid. It's irrational, sure, but quite a normal human response. Sure, we all like to think that we're bigger than that but I'm not surprised by Connor's insensitivity towards Gunn's own existential pain.
Gunn wanting to die in the alley isn't really atonement. The alternative he knew then was either death (which he was expecting anyway) and being vamped, which to Gunn, is a fate worse than death. Of course, he didn't know that the third option was to simply hitch a ride on Cor-dragon to the nearest ER. It's kinda nice that both Connor and Gunn are actually (inadvertently?) progressing. Connor's moved from hate to being uncomfortable (if I'm reading reviews right), while Gunn has moved on to being resentful of being blamed for something he only technically (vs. really) did. So really, if I'm reading all this right, the new writing actually makes the bad writing better, and in its turn, makes itself even better. So yay for all! Except those of us who are sitting out the IDW books for now. Reading the SPIKE stuff (not that impressed), but that's it for me.
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patxshand
Ensouled Vampire
Writer/director/Amy Acker's husband.[Mo0:0]
Posts: 1,918
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Post by patxshand on Nov 18, 2010 10:07:52 GMT -5
Connor is what... 18 during "AtF". Given that Willingham's arc quickly followed "Aftermath", which more or less immediately followed "AtF", Connor's possibly still around the 18 mark. I wouldn't call shenanigans on him being a tad immature about his murder. Hell, I wouldn't call out a person who was 40 if he was bitter about being stabbed to death. I don't know. If the dialogue was different, I might have taken that from it too. But Connor's dialogue just seemed incongruous with the situation. Didn't say it was atonement. My point was that the weight of Gunn's actions as a vampire was crushing for him, even as a human. In the alley, he remembered everything. He remembered all his actions in hell. He saw Angel dust the man who turned him. He didn't think that being vamped was an option at all any more, so it wasn't about that. He just wanted to die because of the guilt. Which is illustrated again in #23, when he is enraged that Non heals him. He didn't want to go to the ER. He wanted to die because of what he'd done. The guilt, for him, is still fresh.
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janas
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Post by janas on Nov 18, 2010 12:56:41 GMT -5
the "conflicts" between Connor and Gunn, date back to well before of ATF. Think of "Deep down," Connor and Gunn have never been very agree
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Post by wenxina on Nov 18, 2010 14:09:23 GMT -5
Which is illustrated again in #23, when he is enraged that Non heals him. He didn't want to go to the ER. He wanted to die because of what he'd done. The guilt, for him, is still fresh. And if Gunn hasn't forgiven himself, why should Connor? That's all I'm saying. The guilt is still fresh for Gunn, but the trauma is just as fresh for Connor. S'all I'm saying.
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patxshand
Ensouled Vampire
Writer/director/Amy Acker's husband.[Mo0:0]
Posts: 1,918
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Post by patxshand on Nov 18, 2010 15:18:59 GMT -5
Which is illustrated again in #23, when he is enraged that Non heals him. He didn't want to go to the ER. He wanted to die because of what he'd done. The guilt, for him, is still fresh. And if Gunn hasn't forgiven himself, why should Connor? That's all I'm saying. The guilt is still fresh for Gunn, but the trauma is just as fresh for Connor. S'all I'm saying. It's not about forgiveness, it's about Connor's disproportionate reaction. He can carry a grudge all he wants, but to compare the Connor's death threat to Gunn's guilt would be to expect Gunn walking around the Hyperion months later contemplating suicide.
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Post by wenxina on Nov 18, 2010 15:27:38 GMT -5
And human emotion is logical how? Which was my main point.
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patxshand
Ensouled Vampire
Writer/director/Amy Acker's husband.[Mo0:0]
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Post by patxshand on Nov 18, 2010 16:45:46 GMT -5
No, I'm with you kind of. Just playing a bit of devil's advocate. Unrestrained human emotion is illogical, for sure, but Connor hasn't had that kind of illogical outburst since he was Annoying!Connor in Season Four. I like to think that Connor has grown past outbursts that defy logic, especially since he was in a leadership position at the time the argument went down.
But really, in retrospect, I don't mind it much... thanks to Mariah and David's new take on the thing. When Connor looks back at it, he recognizes that he is perfectly in the right with being uncomfortable with Gunn, but wrong in how he went about it. Works for me and it, much like James as a villain retroactively makes a lot of "Aftermath" work, serves to make what I considered Willingham's low point a lot more readable.
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Paul
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Post by Paul on Nov 18, 2010 17:14:40 GMT -5
Let's be honest, the handling of Gunn's character has been one of the biggest disappointments from this series. "Become What You Are" was excellent, Only Human was okay but didn't really do a whole lot, and everything since has been rubbish. We didn't see Gunn return to the team, the tension between him and Connor was portrayed as a hissy fit, and he hasn't even had a one-on-one scene with Angel at all, which is ridiculous. Just another example of IDW's inability to plan long-term story and character arcs.
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patxshand
Ensouled Vampire
Writer/director/Amy Acker's husband.[Mo0:0]
Posts: 1,918
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Post by patxshand on Nov 18, 2010 17:36:25 GMT -5
Companies don't plan story arcs. People do.
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Paul
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Post by Paul on Nov 20, 2010 9:16:02 GMT -5
Companies don't plan story arcs. People do. Fine then, the people who work for the company - be it editors or writers - have failed to plan long-term story arcs. That's why the series is so fractured and jumpy, with weird plot holes and retcons. Those shouldn't really be happened in the space of about 20-25 issues. The actual plot of S8 may be nonsense, but at least it feels like it's been planned since #1, and not a different writer coming in every arc with a new direction.
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Post by angeliclestat on Nov 20, 2010 10:15:46 GMT -5
Companies don't plan story arcs. People do. Fine then, the people who work for the company - be it editors or writers - have failed to plan long-term story arcs. That's why the series is so fractured and jumpy, with weird plot holes and retcons. Those shouldn't really be happened in the space of about 20-25 issues. The actual plot of S8 may be nonsense, but at least it feels like it's been planned since #1, and not a different writer coming in every arc with a new direction. I can see where you are coming from Paul - but isn't that how a lot of comics work? A writer works on the title for a while, and then when he leaves a new writer comes on and continues the story. Apart from creator owned titles (Preacher, Y:The Last Man, The Boys, Fables etc) where a writer and artist stay on the same title for 70+ issues, it doesn't always seem to work that way. I'm not saying it's the best way, but the Angel title was like Hellblazer or Runaways, where there is a changing rota of writers/artists but no 'show runner' It would have been nice if Whedon has stayed on board as overseer. But he didn't. So IDW took a chance on new writers. Sometimes it worked out (Tishcman, Huehner, Williams) and sometimes it didn't (Armstrong, Willingham(for the most part)). That's the risk in running a title this way. But it also means that if it is not working a writer can be changed and a better, more suited, writer can be found. Ironically enough they did. From issue 28 onwards Willingham was building a long arc - but this was curtailed when the rights went back to DH. I see the IDW comics this way. Arc 1 - After the Fall (Epilogue to the Series) Arc 2- Aftermath (AtF epilogue) Middle issues (23-27) - Character-centric pieces Arc 3- 28-44 Sisterhood/Connor/James/Return of W&H
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Post by angeliclestat on Nov 20, 2010 10:22:58 GMT -5
I really enjoyed this issue as well-it was very much a set up for things to come (a pre-credits sequence almost:))
I had wondered why Angel had left LA (as he said the huge threat of James is still out there), but the explanation from Connor that Angel had gone away to 'find out what he could outside LA' made sense.
Havn't seen enough of the new HQ to comment on it yet, but it was a pity we didnt see a 'goodbye' to the Hyperion. On the series the last we saw of it was Fred sneaking out to go to the W&H limo, so there was no real goodbye. For a location with such important meaning in the show, it would have been nice to see them leave. I remember how happy I was in After the Fall when they returned to it:)
Do you think Angel was right to just jump off the building like that and not hear out what Darrow had to say? I suppose given the history between him and W&H he would be hesitant to trust them...but maybe it would have been better to see what they had to say? We'll find out next issue guess:)
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patxshand
Ensouled Vampire
Writer/director/Amy Acker's husband.[Mo0:0]
Posts: 1,918
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Post by patxshand on Nov 20, 2010 14:52:47 GMT -5
Companies don't plan story arcs. People do. Fine then, the people who work for the company - be it editors or writers - have failed to plan long-term story arcs. That's why the series is so fractured and jumpy, with weird plot holes and retcons. Those shouldn't really be happened in the space of about 20-25 issues. The actual plot of S8 may be nonsense, but at least it feels like it's been planned since #1, and not a different writer coming in every arc with a new direction. The seed seems planned since #1? And how about Angel's completely different motivations in #35 and the Riley one-shot?
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Paul
Ensouled Vampire
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Post by Paul on Nov 21, 2010 12:35:28 GMT -5
I can see where you are coming from Paul - but isn't that how a lot of comics work? To an extent yes, but there is usually some kind of long-term direction. For example, Brian Bendis has been involved in the Avengers books since 2004 and it's obvious that some of his stories were planned long in advance. Similarly, the Messiah storyline has been going on the X-Men books for a few years now. Even though there are numerous writers working on the books, there is some kind of long-term vision. I wish when AtF ended, IDW had taken the time to actually stop and think "Where do we go from here?" The seed seems planned since #1? And how about Angel's completely different motivations in #35 and the Riley one-shot? Well, the Twi-cat thing appeared in "No Future for You", the Seed appeared in "Anywhere But Here", there were early references to the "prince" and the "queen" which now make sense in retrospect... so yeah, whatever you make of the actual plot, it does feel like it's been planned from the start. It's not the same as Kelley Armstrong setting up new characters and directions, and then Willingham retconning her work and starting over. S8 has always had an endgame in sight, whereas Angel seems to make it up as it goes along. Angel's characterisation is probably the aspect of S8 I'm most critical of. I think his actions could be believable if the series explored or justified them properly and consistently, but it hasn't. I never said the series was perfect. *shrug*
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Jordan
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Post by Jordan on Nov 22, 2010 18:20:01 GMT -5
I have to say, for what has perhaps been the most inconsistent (and often times just plain BAD) ongoing series I've ever read, #39 has me feeling surprisingly optimistic about this final story arc.
After the Fall, the Epilogue, the Drusilla and Boys & Their Toys two-parters, the Last Angel in Hell annual, and Music of the Spheres were all fantastic reads, but somehow, the rest of the ongoing series simply fell short of the quality established by those titles. Aftermath, with its undeniably bad art, angels and animal transformations, and occasionally awkward characterisations, just didn't really feel like an Angel story, and certainly not the kind of thing that should follow something as consistent as AtF. Then came Willingham, who is a talented writer, but one that seemed to fail almost entirely at 'getting' this universe. My biggest problem with his other series, Fables, is that occasionally I feel like I'm reading excerpts from the Didactic and Wordy Essays of Mr. Bill Willingham, more than I am the words coming out of these unique characters mouths. Whether it's Snow or Bigby or someone else, a lot of them just sound identical, and almost all of the time they sound very formal and sometimes explain things in too much depth. And for a long time I was able to get past that, because I thought maybe that's just how the author feels people from that world speak. That is, until I read his work on Angel.
It's one thing for a writer to have a unique voice, but it's another when that voice is in no way compatible with someone else's. Hell, in the Buffyverse, tons of people inexplicably sound like its titular heroine, and we love that because that voice is also Joss's voice. But Joss's voice is so distinctive and such a part of the characters he creates that to fail to imitate it is to fail at proper characterisation. And that's where Willingham failed epically, because he replaced Joss's voice with his own and made these established and beloved characters sound, if not like different people entirely, then at the very least like very poor approximations. But as bad as that is for the person who is supposed to be spearheading an entire franchise, he also failed to grasp the personalities and motives of the characters he was writing for, which is a far greater sin.
The biggest and most obvious example of this is, of course, Spike. Seduction of a woman followed by cheap vampire sex followed by implied torture and interrogation followed by staking when she's of no more use? Really? Hiring a bunch of Hollywood screenwriters to write a bunch of prophecies about him so he can maybe perhaps be better than Angel for some reason? Really? Not even soulless Spike would do that. And yet, Willingham had such little care for or knowledge of Spike's character that he used that very idea as his explanation for why Spike was acting weird (or, more accurately, as a retcon to explain away his absolute failure at depicting the character when readers called him out on it). And not even that. "Soul flu," I think he called it. Whatever the frak that is.
Looking back, it's almost impossible to say anything NICE about Armstrong's and Willingham's runs. In fact, the former's contributions just end up feeling 'passable' by comparison. And you can't even take much solace in that, because Willingham did his darndest to retcon a bunch of stuff from that, too. I mean, I've already established that I wasn't the biggest fan of that Potentate business, or the animals turning into people nonsense (honestly, what the hell was going on in that story?), but he didn't do it with much tact. All of a sudden James is the Big Bad and Dez gets killed off like an afterthought. Now, I kind of loathed both of them, but the James thing makes about 50% of Aftermath even more nonsensical in retrospect, and the Dez thing was just disrespectful.
So now looking back, that stuff is unfortunately what kind of defines post-AtF Angel: the retcons. Willingham seemed to spend more of his time undoing what came before him and poorly covering up his own mistakes than he did actually telling a good story. But I really have to wonder, how did any of this get past the editors? Did only like 10% of IDW's staff watch the show? If this series had more effective oversight then someone might have picked up on the fact that vampires can't run like the Flash and their limbs don't turn to dust when they're severed, for one. At least then perhaps we would have possibly had a story that went somewhere, instead of devoting precious pages to lame retcons like limb-regrowth-thanks-to-ancient-evil-or-something and "soul flu."
But although every indication is that this series stopped being worth my time a John Byrne ago, I gave #39 a chance, and am going to continue to. Why? Well, for one, the writers actually seem to have a feel for the characters. For the first time in what feels like ages, the characters actually sound and feel like themselves. And despite all his faults (and my general dislike of retcons), Willingham may have actually done a good thing by making James a villain, and I'm curious to see how his story is resolved, and whether or not they'll use this opportunity to fix what the retcon did to Aftermath in the process. It also doesn't hurt that the Angel/W&H/time travel storyline is actually really compelling, not to mention how they might use that to tie it into Season 8. But most of all, I think it's the 'tabula rasa' effect. It feels like a clean slate, the story has some forward momentum, and it seems to actually be going somewhere. In fact, it has to, because this is the end. Ever since AtF ended this series has felt aimless, uneven, and inconsistent. Now, with the end right around the corner the writers have a chance to tell a tight, cohesive and meaningful story. Whether they do or not is of course up in the air, but judging from what I've read I'm hopeful. I think we're off to a good start.
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beeemkcl
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Post by beeemkcl on Dec 4, 2010 20:15:58 GMT -5
Angel #39
How the F is Spike and Angel #39 and after supposed to fit with Buffy Season 8? THIS is the horribleness that led Angel to decide to be gods with Buffy and destroy the world? Something that WOLFRAM AND HART showed him?
And it seems to talk about ‘non-canonical’ stuff like whoever James is.
And for some reason NOW they can’t afford the Hyperion. Just still move into an expensive location.
___________
For me, the major point of these comics should be to show why Angel decided to become Twilight. And there was pretty much nothing in this issue other than Angel's shown something by Wolfram and Hart. The guy's super gullible and very easy to use and manipulate.
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Post by angeliclestat on Dec 5, 2010 6:16:03 GMT -5
Angel #39 ___________ For me, the major point of these comics should be to show why Angel decided to become Twilight. Why should IDW have to explain the mess that Whedon and DH created?Buffy Season 8 had 40 issues to tell the story.It shows how bad the "explanation" for Angels actions were there that you think IDW needs to show the reasons for another companies story. I think the question you need to be asking is why were we not shown that story (through proper flashbacks) in Season 8?
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Shane
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Post by Shane on Dec 7, 2010 6:33:57 GMT -5
Just read this. Really cool. It'll be nice not having Angel as part of AI for a while - I like the tension between Gunn and Connor and hope to see some arguments about leadership decisions. Eddie Hope (?) seemed interesting. If he's a misunderstood antihero, I'll probably read his stories sometime. Speaking of... Angel doesn't smile throughout the whole book. Yay! I forgot he can do that. And what's this? W&H: The lesser of two evils? Awesome! As much as I enjoy the themes of Season 8, I find IDW's mysteries and suspense more intellectually appealing. Can't wait for more.
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beeemkcl
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Post by beeemkcl on Dec 7, 2010 23:04:02 GMT -5
Because they said they would. DarkHorse did IDW a kindness by pretty much stating that #39 and after would be canon and the Spike and Illyria series would be canon.
Then in the Spike series they get the timelines completely wrong so pretty much it seems only the stuff with Dru's current lover, Dru, and maybe Willow will be important. Maybe. Maybe Beck stuff as well.
And in Angel , they talk about stuff that's not canon and we're supposed to sift through what is maybe canon and what isn't?
There's a good reason why Spike and this Angel issue is only getting a tiny fraction of the comments that the Buffy Issue is getting.
If they were solidly canon, people would care about them a lot more.
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