Thursday, October 7, 2010
Buffy and Ripley
Buffy and Ripley have alot of shared characteristics, for instance they both have male handlers who seem to think they know what is best the the two women, although buffy's handler/manager/teacher seems to have her best interests in mind is at least trying to help, ripley's does not inspire trust from the get go. Paul resier or birk from the instant we meet him is all about bottom lines and dollar signs, he seems less than interested in explainign about her daughter and more interested in getting her to work. He even tries to go so far as to sabotage her to try and bring back a live alien and find a way to exploit that for profit. Buffy's handler however tries to at least endear himslef to her and offers to eat ice cream weith her after her and angel break up, while birk offers money as a way to let ripley bring the alien back. The interesting part is even though both women are capable of taking care of themselves and often times others, there is still a male force trying to direct them. While birk is clearly a bad guy out for material wealth and social standing giles is more of a father figure although i have questioned whether or not his whole father figure act is just a way of trying to relate to buffy so that he can more easily control her. Bottom line both women are empowered and both male figures are trying to grasp at that and dictate their will to them.
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I agree that in both Buffy and Aliens, there is a male figure to play opposite of the female figure. However, I think that Aliens is far more extreme than Buffy. In Buffy (despite Giles’ best attempts) there are times when Buffy will be a teenager and simply won’t listen, for better or worse. Likewise, Giles does reciprocate this by listening to Buffy instead of the other way around. Their relationship is a lot more realistic then the one in Aliens. Almost like a father-daughter kind of thing (which kind of makes sense as Buffy’s own dad is mostly out of picture. But that’s a whole new topic).
ReplyDeleteRipley is pretty extreme as far as characters go. She’s stubborn to the max, anti-social, can’t trust others, and yet somehow in a blink of an eye she does worry about them, she does care what happens to them, and she does trust them. How did that happen? As for Burke, well, I have a hard time seeing him as realistic. It’s hard to think that there’s someone who is faced with extremely and obvious danger and only see money. Personally I think he’d be more realistic if he weren’t so fearless in his pursuit of money. But like Ripley, he’s just too unbelievable for me.
If I had to say which character felt the most ‘real’ to me in Aliens, I'd say Bishop, and considering that he’s a machine, well…