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fannish5: What five unexplained mysteries or questions raised by canon do you most wish you knew the answer to?
1. Firefly: What the hell was going on with Inara's backstory, and what was the plan for that in the series? I'm sold on the idea that something pretty serious sent her away from the Guild proper, from what Nandi said, and it just drives me crazy trying to figure out what it would have been. I want to know, damn it!
2. Buffy and/or Angel: What's really the deal with vampires, demons and souls? I know that theoretically this is something that's totally covered by canon, but the explanations always struck me as pretty weak, and not just in the "I don't believe in absolute good and evil so I don't believe that anybody (demons, vampires, or 'good' spirits) can be completely good or evil" kind of way. Giles says at one point that there's no connection between the personality of a human and the "demon" who takes over their body after they become a vampire - that there's no remainder of the person in the vampire they become. Buffy and other characters repeat this frequently. But Angel starts to say that it's wrong (and presumably, he'd know...), and the vampires we see "close-up" in the series don't seem to follow that rule. Darla, Angel, Spike and Dru all seem to more or less continue to be the same people they were when living, with the exception of understandable changes in personality/thought process... and so does Harmony, so that knocks out the theory that it's just their bloodline being atypical. And yet, something does seem to appreciably change when a vampire "gets their soul back." And there are cases (mostly minor or bit-characters) where becoming a vampire really does significantly change a person's personality.
My theory: Canon states they still have all the memories of the human life, and I think memory makes up a significant amount of personality. So what's changed? Obviously, the necessities of living as a vampire are going to have an effect on a person. I take a "World of Darkness" view of this, I admit. I think vampires wake up the first time disoriented, confused... and starving, in a way they've never experienced before. Their senses are heightened, they're stronger than they ever were as a human, and they have an instinctual knowledge that blood will cure the hunger that's eating away at their mind and body. So they feed. That necessity makes them prone to regarding humans as cattle, as nothing like themselves. And the rest of their morality becomes skewed to accompany that.
Darla already ran counter to mainstream morality of her time, when she became a vampire. Flashbacks have shown that she clearly disdained the religious authority held by the church, and she seems to have easily embraced the opportunity to walk outside those strictures in her own power (as she had, apparently, in life). Angel was already a bad-boy and a drunk as a human - not exactly a model of personal willpower, and I got a distinct impression from the way he acted in flashbacks that he wasn't exactly a fabulous guy as a human, anyway. Spike (William) was disdained as a human, and he seems to have taken vampirism and all it gave him as an opportunity to be every kind of cool that he hadn't been in life. Additionally, he was already a man given to abandoning himself completely to love of a woman... and Dru gave him the opportunity to do that, exactly as he'd always wanted to. Darla may have made a joke of it, but I think Dru got exactly the noble knight she talked about wanting. ;)
Okay, so I got a little out-of-hand on that one. Back to the question.
3. Buffy: When the activated potentials (yes, I'm spoiled on that) die, will they each activate another new slayer? Or will only one true slayer remain after this one weird generation - that girl presumably being whoever is activated after Faith's death? I favor the latter theory, myself, since I really don't like the whole "now there's thousands of them!" thing. There's supposed to be only one, damn it! That's kind of the whole cool point!
And, on a tangent from that, 4. How did the Watchers Council remain cohesive and in contact before the advent of modern technology? How did they make sure a Watcher was there when a new slayer was activated when it would have taken months to get from one part of Europe to another, forgetting the rest of the world? With slayers popping up all over the globe from the beginning of humanity on out, how could they possibly have been that organized? Perhaps this explains the other great mystery of the Watchers - what is their connection to the Watchers of Highlander? Maybe they're really two factions of the same group that managed to schism early on, leaving both sides flatly unaware of the existence of the other while they operate right under each other's noses...
5. Why, out of all the species in the cosmos, were Minbari souls being reborn in Human bodies? Does this mean there's some kind of weird cosmic connection between the two races, or that Minbari souls are really being born into all the species, without them noticing? ...Actually, I'm not sure I really want the answer to that one. But it is something that bothers me on occasion. Edit: *Coughs* Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arionrhod, who reminds me that this was actually covered in canon... oops. Jen's a bad B5 fan. Move along to the next question... ;)
Edit! No, wait - a better question!
5.a., possibly meaningless to all but the housemates. James Alan Gardner's Expendable-verse: WHO/WHAT IS FESTINA RAMOS' PATRON????!!!
fannish5: What five unexplained mysteries or questions raised by canon do you most wish you knew the answer to?1. Firefly: What the hell was going on with Inara's backstory, and what was the plan for that in the series? I'm sold on the idea that something pretty serious sent her away from the Guild proper, from what Nandi said, and it just drives me crazy trying to figure out what it would have been. I want to know, damn it!
2. Buffy and/or Angel: What's really the deal with vampires, demons and souls? I know that theoretically this is something that's totally covered by canon, but the explanations always struck me as pretty weak, and not just in the "I don't believe in absolute good and evil so I don't believe that anybody (demons, vampires, or 'good' spirits) can be completely good or evil" kind of way. Giles says at one point that there's no connection between the personality of a human and the "demon" who takes over their body after they become a vampire - that there's no remainder of the person in the vampire they become. Buffy and other characters repeat this frequently. But Angel starts to say that it's wrong (and presumably, he'd know...), and the vampires we see "close-up" in the series don't seem to follow that rule. Darla, Angel, Spike and Dru all seem to more or less continue to be the same people they were when living, with the exception of understandable changes in personality/thought process... and so does Harmony, so that knocks out the theory that it's just their bloodline being atypical. And yet, something does seem to appreciably change when a vampire "gets their soul back." And there are cases (mostly minor or bit-characters) where becoming a vampire really does significantly change a person's personality.
My theory: Canon states they still have all the memories of the human life, and I think memory makes up a significant amount of personality. So what's changed? Obviously, the necessities of living as a vampire are going to have an effect on a person. I take a "World of Darkness" view of this, I admit. I think vampires wake up the first time disoriented, confused... and starving, in a way they've never experienced before. Their senses are heightened, they're stronger than they ever were as a human, and they have an instinctual knowledge that blood will cure the hunger that's eating away at their mind and body. So they feed. That necessity makes them prone to regarding humans as cattle, as nothing like themselves. And the rest of their morality becomes skewed to accompany that.
Darla already ran counter to mainstream morality of her time, when she became a vampire. Flashbacks have shown that she clearly disdained the religious authority held by the church, and she seems to have easily embraced the opportunity to walk outside those strictures in her own power (as she had, apparently, in life). Angel was already a bad-boy and a drunk as a human - not exactly a model of personal willpower, and I got a distinct impression from the way he acted in flashbacks that he wasn't exactly a fabulous guy as a human, anyway. Spike (William) was disdained as a human, and he seems to have taken vampirism and all it gave him as an opportunity to be every kind of cool that he hadn't been in life. Additionally, he was already a man given to abandoning himself completely to love of a woman... and Dru gave him the opportunity to do that, exactly as he'd always wanted to. Darla may have made a joke of it, but I think Dru got exactly the noble knight she talked about wanting. ;)
Okay, so I got a little out-of-hand on that one. Back to the question.
3. Buffy: When the activated potentials (yes, I'm spoiled on that) die, will they each activate another new slayer? Or will only one true slayer remain after this one weird generation - that girl presumably being whoever is activated after Faith's death? I favor the latter theory, myself, since I really don't like the whole "now there's thousands of them!" thing. There's supposed to be only one, damn it! That's kind of the whole cool point!
And, on a tangent from that, 4. How did the Watchers Council remain cohesive and in contact before the advent of modern technology? How did they make sure a Watcher was there when a new slayer was activated when it would have taken months to get from one part of Europe to another, forgetting the rest of the world? With slayers popping up all over the globe from the beginning of humanity on out, how could they possibly have been that organized? Perhaps this explains the other great mystery of the Watchers - what is their connection to the Watchers of Highlander? Maybe they're really two factions of the same group that managed to schism early on, leaving both sides flatly unaware of the existence of the other while they operate right under each other's noses...
5. Why, out of all the species in the cosmos, were Minbari souls being reborn in Human bodies? Does this mean there's some kind of weird cosmic connection between the two races, or that Minbari souls are really being born into all the species, without them noticing? ...Actually, I'm not sure I really want the answer to that one. But it is something that bothers me on occasion. Edit: *Coughs* Thanks to
arionrhod, who reminds me that this was actually covered in canon... oops. Jen's a bad B5 fan. Move along to the next question... ;)Edit! No, wait - a better question!
5.a., possibly meaningless to all but the housemates. James Alan Gardner's Expendable-verse: WHO/WHAT IS FESTINA RAMOS' PATRON????!!!
