Wondering if the same feeling is generated by the finishing of a book or a series of novels (especially genres such as mystery or fantasy)?

Joanna Russ has an essay in _Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts_ about fans writing stories with the Spock and Kirk characters. Makes me think if there will not be Buffy blogs …

I think these were a few of my thoughts after the episode:

Deus Ex Machina?  Hey Spike.  Blink and burn baby, you’re a hero.  See you on Angel.

Timing?  Hey Willow.  Let’s not bother casting that nifty, long-term effects spell before we open this party up.  Let’s try it right when we throw the first punch.  Why be smart when we can be exciting?

Consistency?  Hey Buffy.  You must be losing your touch.  Just one of these uber-vamps killed half your SiTs and kicked your butt from here to Hawaii. Good thing Andrew’s around to dust a few of them now.  Thanks, Dawn, for picking up big sis’s slack.  Giles - mate, you have a wicked stakehand for an older gent.  Thanks though, Buff, for learning how to dodge and block half way through season 7. 

I knew I had blogged about it though (http://misc.wordherders.net/archives/000160.html), so I went back to see what I wrote and the following summarizes it pretty nicely:  ìThe episode excelled, however, in that I finally felt like I saw a gleam of the old characters I had come to love - the humor, the mutual respect, the “That was nifty” understatements far outweighed the battle sequence in my mind.î The rest of that post has a bunch of rants and thoughts on the seasonÖ

So, ìthe suckî?  I was probably being a little harsh.  It just always breaks my heart when a fairly carefully constructed universe just falls apart in the end.

Seriously, the suck?  I’m stunned.  The major thing that I thought was wrong with the last episode was that it wasn’t two hours long; really, it should have been.  Every moment in the thing ran at double-speed, and if they just could have taken their time…

But what I liked:  there was honestly no good way to end the series, and yet it ended exactly as it should have.  How do you end it, really?  Buffy defeats the forces of evil, once and for all?  Totally unbelievable; we all know the world we live in, and it’ll never work.  Buffy defeats the forces of evil, for now, but they’re bound to come back?  So in other words, the series doesn’t end so much as stop.  Ick.  Buffy dies?  Been there, done that.  (Twice.)

No—there needed to be some real change in the paradigm, if you’ll forgive my using that word, something that completely changed the rules.  Not just good winning, not just evil winning, but some radical rewriting of the landscape.  And what had Buffy ever wanted in the series more than just to be a girl, like every other girl, not to have to be the one?  And what more had every (female, perhaps) Buffy fan wanted than to vicariously experience that coming-into-slayerdom, that sense that she didn’t have to take it, whatever the it was that she was taking, that she could do something, be powerful, change the world?  What better outcome, to let Buffy off the hook, to give her (female) fans a rush of at least potential empowerment, and to massively undermine the patriarchal paradigm (yes, I know, again) than to make every potential slayer actual?

Oh, and along the way:  Spike’s sacrifice, the return of Angel and Faith, the awesome power of Willow.  There were a million things wrong with the final season, and I wasn’t sorry, in the long run, to see it end—but that had everything to do, for me, with the wholly satisfying conclusion.

How’s that?

I thought it was, as the kids say these days, “the suck.” I’m certainly willing to entertain other perspectives though - what did you like about the ending? 

For the record, lest I sound overly negative, I think the most beautiful moment in the last few episodes was when Andrew and Anya were joyfully playing with the wheelchairs … it was then that I knew that Anya was not long for this world, and that lost moment of joy was mixed with a deep - and well evoked - sorrow.

As far as Angel, I was starting to worry about a downturn, but this recent Puppet episode made me really wish the show would live on…