{"id":1922,"date":"2013-02-06T10:00:26","date_gmt":"2013-02-06T18:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=1922"},"modified":"2013-02-06T09:54:59","modified_gmt":"2013-02-06T17:54:59","slug":"mark-re-watches-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-the-wish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2013\/02\/mark-re-watches-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-the-wish\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Re-Watches &#8216;Buffy the Vampire Slayer&#8217;: The Wish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oh god, I have some\u00c2\u00a0<em>things<\/em> I need to say about this episode.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Video first!<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/58996065\" height=\"375\" width=\"500\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 16px;\">So, there&#8217;s this\u00c2\u00a0<em>thing<\/em> I wanted to talk about in a review, but I haven&#8217;t necessarily had the right space to do it. It&#8217;s not something you can force in easily, but re-watching &#8220;The Wish&#8221; finally gave me the chance to do it.<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Mark Does Stuff gives me the opportunity to be horribly wrong without the normal fandom pains that come with it.<\/li>\n<li>I love being in fandoms. I grew up as an X-Phile, and then spent most of my late teens and my early twenties in bandoms. (Oh\u00c2\u00a0<em>god<\/em>, bandoms. CAN WE HAVE A COMMENT THREAD JUST ABOUT BANDOMS.) But I think all of us can say we&#8217;ve had negative interactions with specific fandoms we&#8217;ve been a part of, even on this website. And that&#8217;s par for the course with\u00c2\u00a0<em>any<\/em> group. Except maybe the Tamora Pierce fandom??? Y&#8217;all are so goddamn nice, I\u00c2\u00a0<em>swear<\/em>. Anyway, I don&#8217;t think fandom in and of itself breeds hostility and terribleness. People are just gross? And there are a myriad of reasons why that is the case, and today is not the day to come up with those.<\/li>\n<li>Instead, I want to focus on how off-putting it can be coming into a new fandom. I think one of the things most of us have had to cope with is the elitist know-it-all. They exist in nearly every group of people, but when it comes to something like a television show, a band, or a book series, my\u00c2\u00a0<em>god<\/em>, they come out in droves.<\/li>\n<li>And that&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve had to contend with throughout my entire Mark Does Stuff career! People want me to have the\u00c2\u00a0<em>right<\/em> opinions, they want me to know\u00c2\u00a0<em>everything\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>there is to know about a franchise, they want me to interpret things in the accepted, canon way. That&#8217;s especially frustrating to deal with when you&#8217;re new, you&#8217;re ignorant, and you&#8217;re inexperienced.\u00c2\u00a0<em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/li>\n<li>That&#8217;s one of the reasons I like watching television shows and reading books in the way that I do\u00c2\u00a0<em>and<\/em> with the rigid spoiler policy in place. As much as I can, I try to experience these things in a bubble free from the influence of others and free from any predisposition. That means I get to be wrong. Gloriously, horribly, unfortunately wrong. In most cases, it&#8217;s beautifully hilarious because I am forever unprepared for all time. My pain is your gain.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes, this is not the case. And the point of this is not to put y&#8217;all on blast but I&#8217;m gonna do it anyway.\u00c2\u00a0<em>Lord of the Rings<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0fans were pretty awful about this. If I did not understand every nuance of the world\u00c2\u00a0<em>they&#8217;d spend their whole lives studying<\/em>, I was reading the book wrong, and my experience was flawed. (True story: I entertained calling Th\u00c3\u00a9oden by the wrong title and saying \u00c3\u2030owyn was his daughter just to spite all the people who yelled at me in the comments and because\u00c2\u00a0<strong>74 OF YOU SENT ME EMAILS ABOUT THIS<\/strong>.)<\/li>\n<li>And that brings me to &#8220;The Wish.&#8221; I was so wrong about my assessment of this episode, and I&#8217;m glad I was. I came to appreciate Willow, Anya, and Cordelia way more because of it. I saw how the episode came to matter a great deal in the grand spectrum of the series, and it&#8217;s easily one of my favorite episodes of the whole run. Odds bobs, I was so fucking wrong about it.<\/li>\n<li>And y&#8217;all didn&#8217;t freak out! You just let me sit there in my wrongness, cackling at the future, knowing I&#8217;d come back to &#8220;The Wish&#8221; with a different understanding.<\/li>\n<li>That&#8217;s awesome.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Discuss!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh god, I have some\u00c2\u00a0things I need to say about this episode.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173,206],"tags":[433,174,400],"class_list":["post-1922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buffy-the-vampire-slayer","category-past-shows","tag-commissions","tag-mark-watches-buffy-the-vampire-slayer","tag-rewatches"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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