HMPC0408 - Pangs

[bdegrande]

Discuss.

My take on the whole white picket fence/Iowa thing is that it is absolutely NOT everyone's ideal. Many people that grow up in environments like those can't wait to get away at the first opportunity.  As a college friend of mine from Indiana said, "there have to be places like New York where people can do what they want to. Not everywhere has to be like that, but there have to be some places like that."  After dealing with the Hellmouth, I can't imagine Buffy happy in a "normal" life.

Apart from that, plenty of women are attracted to bad boys, they like the swagger - and it's not only women.  Given the chance to date Faith, Anya, or Buffy, Buffy would be a distant third choice for me.  Now if you included Willow it would be different, so there are other factors involved as well.

But my objection to Riley isn't that he's a corn fed Iowa boy, it's that he's an egomaniac without anything to justify it. Buffy is an egomaniac, but she has some reason to be, which makes her far too good for Riley.  What is Riley actually any good at?  He can't dance. His pickup lines are so bad that even when a girl is interested in him, she leaves with another man.  He can't capture a defanged Hostile 17 despite having a full squad of men with high tech weapons.  What does he do well, grading papers? He even seems to be behind at that.  I think the writers really did him a disservice by not really establishing him at someone who was good at at least fighting vampires/demons at the start of his story arc. The he could have been plausibly seen as a worthy match for Buffy rather than a posturing buffoon.

[smartgirl63]

But how did he become such a high-ranking agent if he was so bad at everything? I think he fumbles a lot around Buffy because he's so smitten.

[Princessmela]

I think it's obvious why Riley was promoted
 He was the son professor Wash desperately but did not have.

[mike.gollihue]

   Like I have said before, the only thing I do not like about Riley is the fact he is not Angel. I think he's an awesome guy with nothing but good intentions. He was trained in an almost Dogmatic fashion that he saw the world in black and white. Like a lot of people thats raised with simular views, he got out in the real world and and realised it was on big shade of gray.

[bdegrande]

I think it's obvious why Riley was promoted
 He was the son professor Wash desperately but did not have.

A platoon leader is not such a high ranking position, nor is a TA.  He may well actually have done well (he has of course, dealt with 16 hostiles).  We haven't seen any of it though. As an audience, all we have seen is  him fail at whatever he tries and have a really inflated opinion of himself. Flashbacks were used to establish the vampires (Spike. Angel, Darla, and Drusilla) as legitimate badasses, it would have been nice to have seen a few similar scenes with Riley, it would have made his character easier to take seriously.