Calling a scythe a Scythe: what's in a name?

[quinara]

[Precursory tangent: Yay! WriterConUK MidiMeet tomorrow! Many apologies if I miss comments on this from mid-Friday through to Monday – I’ll be replying today and hopefully tomorrow morning, then after that as soon as I can. :) ]

angearia had a post the other day about the Scythe and why that’s an appropriate name for the weapon Buffy finds in EoD. I think her explanation works very well, but I was struck by the impression that it didn’t wholly take into account the external-to-text issue that the shape of the scythe was not a done deal. In terms of the way the weapon was introduced, it may have tied worlds together nicely to have Buffy’s ancient slayer weapon be Fray’s ancient slayer weapon, but it’s not as if there weren’t other options or ME couldn’t have ‘artistic licence’ in the transition from comic to screen. (After all, I imagine that red enamel blade, or whatever it’s meant to be, would have remained fairly distinctive.)

The confusion therefore, around whether the scythe (or sith!) is really a scythe or whether it’s an axe pretending to be one, strikes me as something that cannot be easily resolved. Because there’s actually a lot at stake.

As Emmie pointed out, a scythe has unavoidable symbolic connotations – it is the tool of Death and Time that reaps us all in when we die, the thing which, being immortal, vampires avoid until Buffy comes along. Slightly more prosaically (but possibly not that much), it shows Buffy clearing up the mess of demons and civilising the land around her by playing Farmer of the World. The name ‘scythe’ has a lot to offer any weapon of Buffy’s, yielding an insightful commentary on her actions.

However, this doesn’t mean that we can say that this is an obvious or indeed ‘natural’ name for the weapon to take. It has been repeatedly recognised as an ‘axe’ in fandom and is shown to be recognised as an ‘axe-thing’ in the show itself, by both Angel (who we can assume knows his weapons) and the potential BuffyWorld.com calls Caridad. I got into a couple of discussions over on Emmie’s journal about whether we should be attributing a name to this weapon based on its shape (fairly, but not definitively axe-like; when does a blade on a stick become a scythe anyway?) or its function (are the demons trees or wheat/weeds – take your pick; battleaxes are more common, but battlescythes have been The People’s Weapon for a long time; isn’t Death what Buffy is more than Paul Bunyan?) – but I think it probably makes more sense to follow what we can empirically observe. There is no unquibbled-with consensus on what that weapon is: as many people who accept it is a scythe, there are many other people who see it as an axe being given an ill-fitting name.

I think the phenomenon of people ‘not buying’ the scythe name is an interesting one. Given the connotations of the name, the idea that it is the role of Death that Buffy is slipping into, the rejection of that name becomes a rejection of that role. If we will not allow that Buffy is carrying a scythe, we do not allow ourselves to see Buffy as the Reaper, instead retaining the image of the Slayer as a killer, wielding an old battleaxe against vampires in such a way that shows she has a history, but not exactly a great symbolic role. Rather than natural death triumphing over unnatural forces, rather than humanity overcoming the wild, she is a woman in a war. And if there’s one thing we know about war, it’s that the fighters on both sides deserve our sympathy. (As a thought experiment: weren’t the vampires of S1 as evil and feral as the Turok Han? Is it definitely impossible that they don’t have their own version of an Angel among them? A Spike? A Dru? A Harmony? A Holden Webster?)

Buffy is, we realise, the only person in the show to immediately recognise the weapon as “some sort of scythe” (EoD) rather than being told that’s what it is or deducing it from the available options. She is the one who initially commits to this idea, that ‘scythe’ is the correct name for the weapon, thus invoking and committing to the Death-like symbolism of her own role. If we agree with her then that’s fine, but if we don’t agree with her then it becomes apparent that Buffy is making a marked ideological statement (as Giles does when he decides it might be a scythe; “a scythe is a symbol of death”), not arbitrarily naming an unknown object but implicitly creating a narrative around the weapon’s purpose and what it means for Buffy to kill demons with it.

Of course, this ideological statement is confirmed to be ‘correct’ by the information provided to us, by the Guardian’s words and the legacy of the M?. Buffy’s perspective, that the weapon is ‘some sort of scythe’ is given the story’s seal of approval, but we shouldn’t see this as meaning this is unquestionably right (just because someone calls a knife a fork doesn’t mean it incontrovertibly is a fork) – what it shows us is that Joss is making the very same ideological commitment, and is trying to make us do the same. As Buffy’s perspective wins out over the others in the show we are being encouraged to be equally won over, to accept that this ‘axe-thing’ is properly recognised as a scythe and that there are good, sound reasons to imbue Buffy with this favoured, particular role and narrative.

This motive has been part of the show’s rhetoric from its very opening, but we generally don’t take any notice of it, because it is so entwined with the show’s premise. Consider the following:

In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.

As the premise for the show it is a clear combination of fictional fact (change to our own reality in order to set the show rolling – that the Slayer and demons exist, in the first instance) and ideology (the situation that shapes the fiction – that the Slayer stands ‘alone’ and that she is ‘chosen’). We have to suspend our disbelief over the fictional facts before the show can go forwards, so there’s not much we can argue with there. The ideology, however, presents us both with ideas that become challenged and investigated across the series – that Buffy does/should/must stand alone – and those left rather uninvestigated – that Buffy is the Chosen One (chosen by whom?). By exploring some threads at the same time as it leaves others unqualified, the show moves from this initial position to shape its own ideology – not the ideological premise (this quote) that is a constructed fiction for the story to attack and renegotiate, but the message that it actually wants us to take away as the audience. ‘A girl is chosen and she stands alone’ becomes ‘a girl is chosen, but she can choose others, and she doesn’t have to stand alone, though the power can make her feel lonely’.

I’m coming back to my point a little slowly, but it seems worth commenting at this juncture that fanfic in turn allows us to address the show’s message as a second order constructed fiction. By saying the story is not the whole story, we are coming back against the show’s rhetoric and attacking/renegotiating its ideology in turn. Fics that make ‘slayerness’ genetic, for example, retain the fictional facts of slayers and demons, but rework the canonically unquestioned idea that slayers are ‘chosen’, making the potential to be a slayer an inherited trait rather than anything more ‘special’. Similarly, any fic that has Buffy accept the scythe ‘is really’ an axe (or merely more ‘axe-like’ than Chosen argues) is an attempt to pull EoD/Chosen’s projected image of Buffy and the act of slaying into question. (“It’s not just a tool; it’s important,” Buffy says in EoD. ‘Should we agree?’ these fics ask.) That Buffy is a Reaper stops being presented as pseudo-fact and what she becomes as the wielder of the weapon is opened up once more to a new definition.

I would argue, therefore, that there is a lot more at stake in calling Buffy’s weapon from EoD a scythe than is initially apparent. As a name that word means something, a something very different from ‘axe’, as angearia pointed out. It’s not a case of one being right and one being wrong because of that, however, but a case of both terms becoming ideological signifiers to be attached to an object that doesn’t offer up an immediate description of itself. Because we don’t know what to call this blade on a stake-ended stick we have to choose, but by making a choice (and being unable to rely on physical appearance) we are projecting impressions onto the object – how to use it and what it’s for. We are given the power to define what sort of weapon it is and what it means for Buffy to use it.

Watching the show, we realise exactly what Joss/the story chooses. However, I don't think that means we have to choose the same for ourselves. Not without thinking about it, anyway. Personally I don’t see Buffy as a Reaper – she has too much agency in choosing who she kills and the demons equally have too much ability to resist – so I don’t believe she makes any weapon she wields a scythe. Nor do I believe the weapon offers her Reaper-like powers, so the ‘scythe’ name, from my perspective, doesn’t make much sense. Were ME to have made the weapon less axe-like, and indeed more scythe-like, we would be dealing with different symbolic signals – as it is, however, the weapon becomes little more than the image of our own perception, which is why I think it’s hard to argue ‘what it is’ one way or another (in terms of being either an axe or a scythe). It was a bold move by the writers, but not one that I think came off exactly the way Joss intended.