Buffy 5x05 (Extended) - No Place Like Home
Added 2022-02-25 18:00:06 +0000 UTCOkay so.... We're getting some answers about lil miss imaginary sister while simultaneously creating about 500000 thousand new questions so..... Yup.
Comments
I'm playing a bit of catch-up with your reactions. People always talk about Dawn not "really" being Buffy's sister, or the memories not being "real," but I think there are a couple of caveats here that are very important. First and foremost, Dawn and Buffy clearly have a close, familial bond. The providence of that, how it came to exist, may be less conventional than most. And there's certainly some moral ambiguity of that history being forced upon them - although.... come to think of it, we don't really normally get much of a say in that with our siblings, do we.... ๐ค Whether biological or adopted, when a bond like that is formed, however it's formed, it's no less real. But I usually go out a bit further on that limb on the exact nature of what is or isn't "real" when it comes to Dawn. We're talking 14 years of not just memories, but physical, tangible items that accumulate over the course of that time - photos, report cards, stuffed animals, clothes. Since I know you've already seen the next episode, Dawn mentioned when Buffy is moving out of her dorm "some of your CDs are my CDs". These are real, physically real effects of Dawn's existence, brought into reality. Granted, it was brought about mystically, but so was the Wishverse; and that was very real. I like to speculate that, in order to achieve that kind of level of authenticity, which the monks no doubt would want to ensure the Key's protection, it would arguably have been easier to augment reality in some way similar to The Wish, whereby a newly formed human Key could be placed with the Summers at some earlier in time - when Dawn was conceived or born - and let their lives with Dawn unfold in due course naturally; rather than trying to craft every facet of that new life themselves. They would still invariably need to constrain this new reality in such a way as to line up with the present day (when the magic was invoked), to prevent discontinuity - Angel would still need to go bad when he originally did, and be re-ensouled when he was, and all of those thing in between would largely still be the same, but with Dawn apart of it in some way. But again, setting the parameters for the reality and letting it playout on its own is arguably simpler than them personally crafting it themselves wholesale, and out of thin air. Buffy's spell to see spells wasn't strictly seeing *through* a spell, but rather the variation of two realities with equal claim, but only the things that happened prior to the spell that created the new reality. If the Monks used something like a temporal fold to make this all happen, anything afterwards would be a single reality with Dawn in it. Theoretically, a photo taken that same day as Buffy's spell to see spells would have been solid, because there would be no alternate reality of that photo without Dawn. What's more, in this context, the memories and feelings are even more real, because while they might not have originally happened, they did happen *eventually*.
Stargazer1682
2022-05-03 14:52:03 +0000 UTCThe ending is one of my favourite Buffy/Dawn interactions! So greatly acted by both.
Phoenix Dawn
2022-05-03 10:02:09 +0000 UTC
