Norwescon: Day 2
Tue, Mar. 29th, 2005 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterIn which I attend my first panel and drop much money on loot
I woke up late. This turns out to be the case for most of the con.
I sort of stumbled into the first panel, half worried I'd be late.
How Do You Name Your Characters? with Sara Stamey (M), Patricia McKillip, and Derryl Murphy
I forgot to bring a notebook, so I don't remember much of this panel at all. I do remember that Derryl Murphy brought up very early on in the discussion that it would be nice if people deviated from the general WASPy names and more toward racial and ethnic variety, but after that, most of the discussion seemed to center on how to name characters and not really touch on that point. The panel did seem largely writer-focused (duh), and so various people tossed around ideas on how to name characters. McKillip mentioned that she would often just flip through dictionaries in search of interesting words and see if the meanings matched. She mentioned that she got Unciel, Yar, Nepenthe, and Tessera that way. Unciel meaning something like a small font used in manuscripts, which she thought was fitting given that his story was being written by a scribe; Yar meaning something like balance (I don't remember the context the character had in the book, or even which book the character was from); Nepenthe being the name of the river of forgetfulness, which was fitting because Nepenthe is an orphan who doesn't know her origins; Tessera being a piece used in a mosaic, fitting because she's one piece in a large story? don't quite remember.
There was also the general consensus that it's good for names to mean something, even if it's just something you know, because it adds that extra level for the reader. Someone in the audience mentioned that she didn't like it when names were too anvilly, and then someone else mentioned Neal Stephenson's Hero Protagonist and that it takes some balls to carry that off. Derryl Murphy said that he named the moon in one of his short stories "Hope" because the story was based on a story by Nadine Gordimer, and "Nadine" means "hope." Another thing was that people are very sick of unpronounceable alien names with lots of apostrophes.
McKillip and Stamey both mentioned that they feel like they can't really write until they know the name of the main character because that helps them get a feel for the character. There was also the point that you shouldn't waste a cool name on a minor character and that minor characters can have more boring names.
Also, people in the audience mentioned that it makes no sense to have names of different origins scattered throughout the same culture in your book (i.e. John and Adkma'awef both being names of humans in the same culture and planet). Someone else said that you very rarely see characters with the same name (Gene Wolfe being the only person she could think of who did it), even when it's a common name like "John." Others didn't really like having characters with names too similar, and Stamey mentioned that many publishers really dislike even having characters with names starting with the same letter because of confusion (I personally find this confusing too).
After this panel, I basically followed McKillip to her reading, which was next, and felt like a complete stalker because I was a few meters behind her. I was also trying not to walk to fast so I'd bump into her and not too slowly so that I'd lose her, because I had absolutely no idea where the reading would be. But yeah, I felt very stalkery. We all sort of milled around the door of the room since it didn't seem like the people ahead were finished, and I actually said something to McKillip. It was weird and my brain did not implode.
Patricia McKillip Reading
McKillip read the first chapter of Solstice Wood, the contemporary sequel to Winter Rose. It takes place in the same village, several centuries in the future, and the protagonist Sylvia is descended from Corbet and Rois, which I thought was cool. And her grandfather was named Liam! McKillip also mentioned that the village in Winter Rose and Solstice Wood is based on somewhere she lived, so it was easy to describe. Anyhow, what I gathered from the plot was that Sylvia didn't want to return to Lynn Hall though her grandmother kept pressuring her to. But her grandfather has died, and this draws Sylvia back. It was very strange hearing bits of McKillip's prose in a contemporary, although there were some very nice touches. There was a real sense of loss and history and the past reaching out to grab you in just that one chapter. I'm really looking forward to this coming out, especially since Winter Rose is my favorite of her books so far!
The reading ended early, so I headed off to see the end of Yoon's first panel, "Too Many Ideas," but to be honest, I couldn't really tell what was going on in the last ten minutes from the back of the room. Then we hied ourselves to lunch, and I finally got a chance to dose myself with caffeine and really wake up. Then while Yoon went off to go critiquing or some such, I wandered down to the dealer's room. Truly, it is evil!
I ended up getting a little plushie Monty Python rabbit with ginormous jaws and right now it's trying to gnaw its way through my lamp. It amuses me so much! 'It's got teeth like...!" And then I saw a hooded rat puppet, and I had to get it because it looks exactly like Fool-rat! I also wanted to get these gorgeous cloaks with lining and embroidery and everything, but alas, I could not spare the money. I also got myself a copy of McKillip's Fool's Run, which I haven't read. And then... there was this lady there who apparently collected kimono and was selling them! Real kimono! Not yukata or anything, but kimono! It was so cool! I stood around and talked to her for half an hour or so about collecting them and everything, and I ended up getting myself one. It's a very pretty grey, with very light white speckles that look like snow and some sort of ornaments around the hem. It's very subdued, and I got it for $45! She said it was supposed to be $75, but she ended up quoting the wrong price for me and said she liked talking to me and gave me the lower price! Joy! I have a kimono, lalalalala!
Pitfalls of Language Creation with Gregory Gadow (M), Patricia McKillip, Yoon Ha Lee
Yet another panel! I'm sure by this time McKillip thought I was a real stalker or something! The panel got quite linguistics oriented, and I think McKillip felt a little out of her league, given that she said she's never created a language for her books or anything. I asked her a bit afterward about the alphabets for Alphabet of Thorn, but she mostly said something about how she just liked the image without more detail.
Anyhow, some of the pitfalls that the audience came up with were direct translations from English, syntax included, languages and names no one could pronounce, the "subtitle" effect (when an author has a character say something in a language and then has him say it again in English), people randomly interjecting words of languages when that's not how people with a second language really talk, made up linguistic terms, and the frequent calling of languages "guttural." I don't particularly remember how the discussion went -- I was pretty tired and didn't take too many notes. Some tips that people mentioned were spelling out the language so that people can't mispronounce it (using "k" or "s" instead of "c"). McKillip thought that the inclusion of too many foreign words was confusing and made her put down books. People mentioned that you should remember that languages have dialects and that one planet or race won't have just a single language and that languages fragment. People also seem to dislike characters spouting an invented language with no reason at all. There was also a balance between accuracy of the language versus accessability to the reader and how each author weighed the values differently.
Some of my personal thoughts were that often in anime fanfic I've seen people just including random Japanese words, usually the really easy ones because those are the easiest to learn, and I think that people who write created languages do that as well. It makes it easier for the reader because it's easier to pick up on, but if it's an alien talking in English and suddenly reverting to its own language, I find that when I'm speaking Chinese, I revert to English when I'm expressing more complex ideas and phrases, which is exactly the opposite of how it's written. Also I thought it was interesting how Y: The Last Man had one character look fairly stupid in English because she was a native Russian speaker but then showed her speaking Russian and her grammar and voice completely changed.
The Art of Renaissance Swordplay with people from the Academia della Spada
This was so cool! It was part lecture, part demo. I'm just going to transcribe my notes (and clarify a bit) because I took a lot of them.
- rapier/fencing: thrust oriented, small deliberate movements
- English backsword: more bravado, more cuts, vulnerable forearm
History of the Sword:
- weapon dictates how you use it
- evolves from stick to rock, then metallurgy hits
- lots of historical treatises on swordplay circa the medieval and early Renaissance period. Rise of the middle class and the use of weapons by the middle class. The sword used to be the sumbol of the gentleman so middle class people bought them a lot when then could, so there was a large market for training this new class of people.
- it was very rare for a man over 19 to not have any weapon, even if it was just a dagger
- the first treatise on swordplay is written at the end of the 1300s on the arming sword. The sword is basically your last ditch attempt because it's short range (unlike a bow). It's fast, but has no reach (unlike a spear). Extending it also exposes a lot of arm. The buckler (a small metal shield about the size of a dinner plate) was very useful for protecting your arm.
- the goal is to lop off the arm of the other person and to stop fighting as soon as possible, since fighting and getting wounded meant possible infection and death.
- book by German priest in Latin called i.33 in the British Museum. Not a military treatise for the sword; rather, it's for a civilian fight, which is an important shift.
- armored combat doesn't get a lot of press because people were more interested in judicial combat for about 150 years or so.
- sword is almost always the not-best weapon for the job. The sword is a very good all-purpose weapon.
Longsword/Two-handed Sword:
- name depends on what text is consulted. Lots of swords in this category... even tales of five foot long swords.
- the one the guy was demo-ing was 37 inches or so, and longer ones were mostly specialized for use against pikes and the like.
- the longsword is a weapon of the Middle Ages, with mention in Viking sagas
- early longswords were designed for use against unarmored or chainmail clad opponents. They were a weapon of war.
- sword attacks against chainmail usually can't cut through the armor, so it's like hitting someone with a crowbar to break their bones. Because of this, most longswords are pretty blunt.
- late Middle Ages/early Renaissance, more plate armor. The longsword evolves so that the first six inches are pointy and sharp, but the rest is still used to bludgeon people.
- the two-handed grip puts more muscle on the sword and mainly gives the person more pivot power and so helps them better maintain control
- the longsword should generally be as long as it needs to be, with the cross coming up about to your navel.
Different Schools of Swordplay (i.e. the rapier vs the backsword):
- in the Renaissance you see more armed civilians without armor on
- wrapping a finger around the quillian (crosspiece) of the rapier protects your hand and helps you control the thrust (cut vs. thrust)
- the backsword also starts wrapping metal around your hand so you can use your buckler to protect your head. This gets you a more sophisticated technique. The term "swashbuckler" comes from the noise that is made when people walk around and their bucklers clang against their swords.
- spada: many more guard positions, and the positions and stances are much more fluid.
- mid-1500s, increase in civilian fighting. The Spanish and the Italians say that the thrust is superior to the cut because it's faster. Idea that you only cut if your opponent forces your point off line.
- George Silver's argument against the rapier was that the rapier got very long and once you get in front of the point, you aren't scared of your opponent's thrust anymore
- Italians and the art of the straight line and the thrust. Because of this, no big motions because big motions will push your point off the line
- the goal is to keep the fighting to the sword level so that you don't get beat up
- the Spanish rapier ~1400s, radically different. Italian fencing puts you in back stance and places the rapier next to the head. The Spanish stance is upright with the arm extended straight out. The Spanish kept their swordplay circle bvased. Never assult on the diameter, assuming that you and your opponent are the two ends of the diameter of the circle and your swords make up the diameter. Instead, always assault on a chord of the circle. This meant there were more cuts. No lunging (unlike Italian style), everything was more at a walking pace.
- French foil and the creation of the small sword. The stance is in between Italian and Spanish. Movement on the straight line. Very small and light and fast weapon. You can disengage faster so you can just knock aside the other person's sword. The cut is very secondary.
- classical foil used to teach you how to duel with a small sword. Fencing gets more academic and turns into modern fencing, with a focus on points and doesn't count every touch as potentially lethal.
Principles of Swordplay:
- measure: the distance between you and your opponent. This is your reach and how far you need to go to hit your opponent. For the long sword, the stance is with the left foot forward to give you longer reach, because you can pivot on that foot (this takes a longer time though). For the backsword, the measure is how far you need to be so that your sword cleaves your opponent's head in two. The sweet spot starts from about an inch or two from the point. For the rapier, there are 3 different measures. One is out of distance, which means you can't fight. One is in fighting distance, which means you can step and hit your opponent. One is narrow measure, where you can hit your opponent by hand. You want to stay in fighting distance so you don't get beat up.
- tempo/time: measure dictates time. Time doesn't exist if you're out of measure (no fight). You want to perform the action of the shortest time (thrust vs. cut). You must produce the time to cut by increasing measure.
- advantage: put yourself in a position not of immediate threat (close the line of immediate threat). With swords, you have more time to close the line.
Now I want to learn swordplay.
After this was more food gettage at the hotel, and then I showed off my loot and collapsed for a bit. Then I went off to a panel on Plagues and Pestilences, which I don't remember at all, except that it was rather scary. After that was a much appreciated break from panels and watching Fullmetal Alchemist eps. 1-4 in the hotel room and then a collapse into bed.
I woke up late. This turns out to be the case for most of the con.
I sort of stumbled into the first panel, half worried I'd be late.
How Do You Name Your Characters? with Sara Stamey (M), Patricia McKillip, and Derryl Murphy
I forgot to bring a notebook, so I don't remember much of this panel at all. I do remember that Derryl Murphy brought up very early on in the discussion that it would be nice if people deviated from the general WASPy names and more toward racial and ethnic variety, but after that, most of the discussion seemed to center on how to name characters and not really touch on that point. The panel did seem largely writer-focused (duh), and so various people tossed around ideas on how to name characters. McKillip mentioned that she would often just flip through dictionaries in search of interesting words and see if the meanings matched. She mentioned that she got Unciel, Yar, Nepenthe, and Tessera that way. Unciel meaning something like a small font used in manuscripts, which she thought was fitting given that his story was being written by a scribe; Yar meaning something like balance (I don't remember the context the character had in the book, or even which book the character was from); Nepenthe being the name of the river of forgetfulness, which was fitting because Nepenthe is an orphan who doesn't know her origins; Tessera being a piece used in a mosaic, fitting because she's one piece in a large story? don't quite remember.
There was also the general consensus that it's good for names to mean something, even if it's just something you know, because it adds that extra level for the reader. Someone in the audience mentioned that she didn't like it when names were too anvilly, and then someone else mentioned Neal Stephenson's Hero Protagonist and that it takes some balls to carry that off. Derryl Murphy said that he named the moon in one of his short stories "Hope" because the story was based on a story by Nadine Gordimer, and "Nadine" means "hope." Another thing was that people are very sick of unpronounceable alien names with lots of apostrophes.
McKillip and Stamey both mentioned that they feel like they can't really write until they know the name of the main character because that helps them get a feel for the character. There was also the point that you shouldn't waste a cool name on a minor character and that minor characters can have more boring names.
Also, people in the audience mentioned that it makes no sense to have names of different origins scattered throughout the same culture in your book (i.e. John and Adkma'awef both being names of humans in the same culture and planet). Someone else said that you very rarely see characters with the same name (Gene Wolfe being the only person she could think of who did it), even when it's a common name like "John." Others didn't really like having characters with names too similar, and Stamey mentioned that many publishers really dislike even having characters with names starting with the same letter because of confusion (I personally find this confusing too).
After this panel, I basically followed McKillip to her reading, which was next, and felt like a complete stalker because I was a few meters behind her. I was also trying not to walk to fast so I'd bump into her and not too slowly so that I'd lose her, because I had absolutely no idea where the reading would be. But yeah, I felt very stalkery. We all sort of milled around the door of the room since it didn't seem like the people ahead were finished, and I actually said something to McKillip. It was weird and my brain did not implode.
Patricia McKillip Reading
McKillip read the first chapter of Solstice Wood, the contemporary sequel to Winter Rose. It takes place in the same village, several centuries in the future, and the protagonist Sylvia is descended from Corbet and Rois, which I thought was cool. And her grandfather was named Liam! McKillip also mentioned that the village in Winter Rose and Solstice Wood is based on somewhere she lived, so it was easy to describe. Anyhow, what I gathered from the plot was that Sylvia didn't want to return to Lynn Hall though her grandmother kept pressuring her to. But her grandfather has died, and this draws Sylvia back. It was very strange hearing bits of McKillip's prose in a contemporary, although there were some very nice touches. There was a real sense of loss and history and the past reaching out to grab you in just that one chapter. I'm really looking forward to this coming out, especially since Winter Rose is my favorite of her books so far!
The reading ended early, so I headed off to see the end of Yoon's first panel, "Too Many Ideas," but to be honest, I couldn't really tell what was going on in the last ten minutes from the back of the room. Then we hied ourselves to lunch, and I finally got a chance to dose myself with caffeine and really wake up. Then while Yoon went off to go critiquing or some such, I wandered down to the dealer's room. Truly, it is evil!
I ended up getting a little plushie Monty Python rabbit with ginormous jaws and right now it's trying to gnaw its way through my lamp. It amuses me so much! 'It's got teeth like...!" And then I saw a hooded rat puppet, and I had to get it because it looks exactly like Fool-rat! I also wanted to get these gorgeous cloaks with lining and embroidery and everything, but alas, I could not spare the money. I also got myself a copy of McKillip's Fool's Run, which I haven't read. And then... there was this lady there who apparently collected kimono and was selling them! Real kimono! Not yukata or anything, but kimono! It was so cool! I stood around and talked to her for half an hour or so about collecting them and everything, and I ended up getting myself one. It's a very pretty grey, with very light white speckles that look like snow and some sort of ornaments around the hem. It's very subdued, and I got it for $45! She said it was supposed to be $75, but she ended up quoting the wrong price for me and said she liked talking to me and gave me the lower price! Joy! I have a kimono, lalalalala!
Pitfalls of Language Creation with Gregory Gadow (M), Patricia McKillip, Yoon Ha Lee
Yet another panel! I'm sure by this time McKillip thought I was a real stalker or something! The panel got quite linguistics oriented, and I think McKillip felt a little out of her league, given that she said she's never created a language for her books or anything. I asked her a bit afterward about the alphabets for Alphabet of Thorn, but she mostly said something about how she just liked the image without more detail.
Anyhow, some of the pitfalls that the audience came up with were direct translations from English, syntax included, languages and names no one could pronounce, the "subtitle" effect (when an author has a character say something in a language and then has him say it again in English), people randomly interjecting words of languages when that's not how people with a second language really talk, made up linguistic terms, and the frequent calling of languages "guttural." I don't particularly remember how the discussion went -- I was pretty tired and didn't take too many notes. Some tips that people mentioned were spelling out the language so that people can't mispronounce it (using "k" or "s" instead of "c"). McKillip thought that the inclusion of too many foreign words was confusing and made her put down books. People mentioned that you should remember that languages have dialects and that one planet or race won't have just a single language and that languages fragment. People also seem to dislike characters spouting an invented language with no reason at all. There was also a balance between accuracy of the language versus accessability to the reader and how each author weighed the values differently.
Some of my personal thoughts were that often in anime fanfic I've seen people just including random Japanese words, usually the really easy ones because those are the easiest to learn, and I think that people who write created languages do that as well. It makes it easier for the reader because it's easier to pick up on, but if it's an alien talking in English and suddenly reverting to its own language, I find that when I'm speaking Chinese, I revert to English when I'm expressing more complex ideas and phrases, which is exactly the opposite of how it's written. Also I thought it was interesting how Y: The Last Man had one character look fairly stupid in English because she was a native Russian speaker but then showed her speaking Russian and her grammar and voice completely changed.
The Art of Renaissance Swordplay with people from the Academia della Spada
This was so cool! It was part lecture, part demo. I'm just going to transcribe my notes (and clarify a bit) because I took a lot of them.
- rapier/fencing: thrust oriented, small deliberate movements
- English backsword: more bravado, more cuts, vulnerable forearm
History of the Sword:
- weapon dictates how you use it
- evolves from stick to rock, then metallurgy hits
- lots of historical treatises on swordplay circa the medieval and early Renaissance period. Rise of the middle class and the use of weapons by the middle class. The sword used to be the sumbol of the gentleman so middle class people bought them a lot when then could, so there was a large market for training this new class of people.
- it was very rare for a man over 19 to not have any weapon, even if it was just a dagger
- the first treatise on swordplay is written at the end of the 1300s on the arming sword. The sword is basically your last ditch attempt because it's short range (unlike a bow). It's fast, but has no reach (unlike a spear). Extending it also exposes a lot of arm. The buckler (a small metal shield about the size of a dinner plate) was very useful for protecting your arm.
- the goal is to lop off the arm of the other person and to stop fighting as soon as possible, since fighting and getting wounded meant possible infection and death.
- book by German priest in Latin called i.33 in the British Museum. Not a military treatise for the sword; rather, it's for a civilian fight, which is an important shift.
- armored combat doesn't get a lot of press because people were more interested in judicial combat for about 150 years or so.
- sword is almost always the not-best weapon for the job. The sword is a very good all-purpose weapon.
Longsword/Two-handed Sword:
- name depends on what text is consulted. Lots of swords in this category... even tales of five foot long swords.
- the one the guy was demo-ing was 37 inches or so, and longer ones were mostly specialized for use against pikes and the like.
- the longsword is a weapon of the Middle Ages, with mention in Viking sagas
- early longswords were designed for use against unarmored or chainmail clad opponents. They were a weapon of war.
- sword attacks against chainmail usually can't cut through the armor, so it's like hitting someone with a crowbar to break their bones. Because of this, most longswords are pretty blunt.
- late Middle Ages/early Renaissance, more plate armor. The longsword evolves so that the first six inches are pointy and sharp, but the rest is still used to bludgeon people.
- the two-handed grip puts more muscle on the sword and mainly gives the person more pivot power and so helps them better maintain control
- the longsword should generally be as long as it needs to be, with the cross coming up about to your navel.
Different Schools of Swordplay (i.e. the rapier vs the backsword):
- in the Renaissance you see more armed civilians without armor on
- wrapping a finger around the quillian (crosspiece) of the rapier protects your hand and helps you control the thrust (cut vs. thrust)
- the backsword also starts wrapping metal around your hand so you can use your buckler to protect your head. This gets you a more sophisticated technique. The term "swashbuckler" comes from the noise that is made when people walk around and their bucklers clang against their swords.
- spada: many more guard positions, and the positions and stances are much more fluid.
- mid-1500s, increase in civilian fighting. The Spanish and the Italians say that the thrust is superior to the cut because it's faster. Idea that you only cut if your opponent forces your point off line.
- George Silver's argument against the rapier was that the rapier got very long and once you get in front of the point, you aren't scared of your opponent's thrust anymore
- Italians and the art of the straight line and the thrust. Because of this, no big motions because big motions will push your point off the line
- the goal is to keep the fighting to the sword level so that you don't get beat up
- the Spanish rapier ~1400s, radically different. Italian fencing puts you in back stance and places the rapier next to the head. The Spanish stance is upright with the arm extended straight out. The Spanish kept their swordplay circle bvased. Never assult on the diameter, assuming that you and your opponent are the two ends of the diameter of the circle and your swords make up the diameter. Instead, always assault on a chord of the circle. This meant there were more cuts. No lunging (unlike Italian style), everything was more at a walking pace.
- French foil and the creation of the small sword. The stance is in between Italian and Spanish. Movement on the straight line. Very small and light and fast weapon. You can disengage faster so you can just knock aside the other person's sword. The cut is very secondary.
- classical foil used to teach you how to duel with a small sword. Fencing gets more academic and turns into modern fencing, with a focus on points and doesn't count every touch as potentially lethal.
Principles of Swordplay:
- measure: the distance between you and your opponent. This is your reach and how far you need to go to hit your opponent. For the long sword, the stance is with the left foot forward to give you longer reach, because you can pivot on that foot (this takes a longer time though). For the backsword, the measure is how far you need to be so that your sword cleaves your opponent's head in two. The sweet spot starts from about an inch or two from the point. For the rapier, there are 3 different measures. One is out of distance, which means you can't fight. One is in fighting distance, which means you can step and hit your opponent. One is narrow measure, where you can hit your opponent by hand. You want to stay in fighting distance so you don't get beat up.
- tempo/time: measure dictates time. Time doesn't exist if you're out of measure (no fight). You want to perform the action of the shortest time (thrust vs. cut). You must produce the time to cut by increasing measure.
- advantage: put yourself in a position not of immediate threat (close the line of immediate threat). With swords, you have more time to close the line.
Now I want to learn swordplay.
After this was more food gettage at the hotel, and then I showed off my loot and collapsed for a bit. Then I went off to a panel on Plagues and Pestilences, which I don't remember at all, except that it was rather scary. After that was a much appreciated break from panels and watching Fullmetal Alchemist eps. 1-4 in the hotel room and then a collapse into bed.
Tags:
(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 04:10 am (UTC)Oh, very true: it's not like people named Bo Vang and Karl Peterson and Khalid Muhammed could come from the same city in our world.
Oh wait. I live in that city.
Naming characters Adkma'awef O'Brien is not a mistake, it's worldbuilding.
(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 04:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 04:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 06:42 am (UTC)I love your loot.
(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 06:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 06:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Mar. 30th, 2005 10:58 pm (UTC)I need to nag you to write down your convention notes so I don't have to! Truly it is all a blur.
Also, had a question for you: mind is blurry, was Buffy S6 where you entered? How much of it made sense to you?
(no subject)
Thu, Mar. 31st, 2005 01:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Mar. 31st, 2005 10:54 am (UTC)Hrm, I started watching random (read: Spike-oriented) episodes of Buffy in S5, and I rather haphazardly watched the first half of S6. I started regularly watching when the eps aired around "Gone." I knew a lot of the background, since I basically went overboard looking for fanfic and assorted other episode details, and thoroughly spoiled myself for everything ;). But I think after watching it in order finally, a lot of the emotional development makes more sense. That is to say, I intellectually knew what was happening the first time I watched out of order, but after watching in order, it clicked more in my head.