Things have been a bit busy in ascianland, so I didn't get to see Angel until last night, and then it was suddenly 3am and thus time to go to bed.

However, I have Thoughts. Yeah, yeah... late to the party. I know.


Here's how I think about the difference between knowing things and understanding them. Things which are known are present, but flat. Like words on a page. Two dimensions. Things which are becoming understood lift themselves up and inflate, suddenly, into three dimensions. When they become shapes, then they can have meaning.

When Connor brushed himself off after killing Sahjahn, and turned to face his father, some things which were flat before started to get up and move around.

In practical terms, I suppose it goes something like this: if I had read a year ago that Connor was the face of Angel's redemption, I would have nodded and cruised right past without giving it more than a brief consideration and probably a shrug. Now, I could wake up at 3am with the sudden, shaking realization that Connor is the face of Angel's redemption. The words are the same, but the shapes are different, now. Things have been taken out, moved around, reconfigured. Lines acquire volume, and learn how to dance.

Things which have volume can be turned around. Closed shapes can be sliced.

1.

superplin cut it like this: It turns out that you can be saved by a lie.

And this is interesting, right, because it's not the first understanding that you want to reach for. The intuitive grasp of the deal that Angel made to take over Wolfram and Hart goes along these lines: Order was returned by a lie. Peace obtained by a violation. Autonomy exchanged for power. We understand all of these things to be negative exchanges, and wait for the fallout. The idea that the lie is the right thing does not really fit the rules of the A-verse as they are understood, because isn't the story always about Doing The Right Thing? People who Do The Right Thing do not violate the minds of third parties, no matter how good the reason. People who Do the Right Thing do not buy into the machine at any price (or maybe they do; we all make the same deal every day, so it's really hard to be sure about this.)

But the lie unravels, and the ending is happier than Angel (and everyone else) has any right to expect. Connor is content; Angel receives a kind of forgiveness. Peace replaces pain. Can you really be saved by a lie?

As in so many cases, I want to say yes and I want to say no. The fact that the lie was an unambiguously wrong choice in utilitarian terms - greatest good for the greatest number - clashes with the evidence. Connor is happier; Wesley has found a replacement hell. Although the mindwipe is no less of a violation for that, there's something odd in the way it touches Wes. Wes tries to do the right thing by "saving" Connor and delivering him to Justine; it kicks off a nightmarish period of descent, desperation, betrayal, and the complete absence of hope. His relationship with Angel sundered; his relationship with Justine twisted and cut into wire and broken glass; his relationship with Lilah founded on his own terrible emptiness.

Stop; go back. Start over. Wes is back where he started, maybe even a little better. His relationship with his friends intact. A chance with Fred. Betrayals erased. But this Wes - the Wes who never kept a woman in his closet - still empties his clip into what he believes to be his father. This Wes gets the girl, finally, and finds that she has turned hollow in his grasp. The two threads end in the same place: isolated, broken. Hollow. Wes can't be saved by a lie, but then, it seems that Wes can't be saved at all.


2.

Cut again. This time, another axis: The wrong decision for the right reasons.

Does motivation matter? Is it better to do bad with good intentions, or good with bad ones? Angelmorality says that intent should matter more, but if you asked the recipients, they'd probably opt for the results.

In the Jossverse, this question is usually tilted sideways. In practice, it's usually hard to tell the good reasons from the bad ones. Every action is chosen for a reason, and there's usually a way to justify it or believe in it that looks like "the right reasons" if you squint at it hard enough. So reset the question. Base the decision on an internal compass instead of an external one. Are you acting out of a personal understanding of The Right Thing, or an abstract (universal) one? Abstract tends to be self-destructive; personal is usually pitched as world-destructive. Both Angel's story and Buffy's are, in a sense, about conflict between what you want and what you have to do.

Where Buffy's story was about needing to reconcile those things, though, Angel's starting place is already firmly in the camp of the abstract good. He's tried the "what you want" part, and tens of thousands of people died. Now he doesn't want what he wants. He's afraid that anything he wants is wrong. Buffy had a ground state of "girl" that was moving (always reluctantly) towards "hero". Angel has a ground state of "hero" that ultimately needs to inch towards "man."

Each story proves the point from the opposite direction: you have to find a way to meet in the middle. You can't do good unless your heart is in it. You need the heart, or how else can you tell what good is?

When Angel chose the mindwipe, he made a very typically Angel decision, to make things better for the people he loved without asking them whether they wanted it or not. Now, I don't think this can ever be a good thing, in and of itself. It's a kind of rape; it's wrong. But the difference in this case is that Angel made the decision for love, rather than in denial of it. He chose a personal Right Thing - saving his son, rescuing his son and giving him back his life - over the abstract Right Thing. That's a huge thing for Angel. Angel chose the good of the heart over the Good of the world.

Maybe you can't be saved by a lie. But maybe you can be saved by love.


3.

And again. Cut here: Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Connor is many things. Connor is a beloved child. Connor is a mythic hero, or villain. Connor is broken beyond comprehension, twisted and betrayed. Connor is well-adjusted, and doing well in school. Connor is loved. Connor is loved. Connor is loved. Connor proves the case that sometimes, all love does is cut. And then, he proves that sometimes it's enough to make you whole.

Connor is, among other things, the embodiment of Angel's worst fears. He's the son that Angel stole from so many families. Angel knew, in him, what it meant to have the world, and what it means to have it taken away.

Connor is the innocence that Angel made a career out of stealing, returned twisted and changed, redirected into a destructive force. Connor - Stephen - was the embodiment of Angel's inability to forgive himself. Connor stood there as the personification of all the worst things that Angel has done, and Angel asked forgiveness, and was refused.

But Angel loves Connor, and that's the difference. He doesn't love himself. He can't. He sees what Connor saw - all the black marks on his soul, a weight of betrayal that can never be eased. But he can't stop loving Connor, can't help it, and won't turn away from it. He will love Connor to the end, even if it means killing him and remaking the world around that act. Connor is the embodiment of Angel's heart, worth loving at last, damaged as it is.

Angel took the world away from his friends, but he gave it back to his son. And even though it was a lie... even though Connor's whole life was a lie, it wasn't the truth of it that mattered. It was the fact that he had something he'd never had before: a choice. Love or betrayal? Pain or belonging? This Connor remembers both, and when he has the chance to choose, he does something that's both extraordinary (considering where he's coming from) and totally understandable, remembering that he's made the same choice before. More than anything, Connor wants somewhere to belong, to love and be loved and be safe. Jasmine offered it to him, once, and he accepted it from her. But the world that Angel created for him offers a different thing entirely, and something completely unexpected: perspective. All of the experience that the first, broken Connor might have one gained, the things he might have learned about love and family if he'd had enough time, all of that stuff was sort of backloaded into him. And although it was a decision that Angel made for him, all it really did in the end was give him the ability to make better choices of his own. Connor chose life.

Now, you could argue that when Connor said "I learned that from my father," the father he really meant was Holtz. And I think it's certainly possible, but I also thing that he also meant Angel. Connor - both Connors, the broken and the remade - looked back from the elevator with a tiny, genuine smile, and meant it in forgiveness.


4.

Cut here: Everything I never needed to know about raising a child, I learned from Angel.

I always get uncomfortable about the idea that stories exist to push a moral agenda, or that deriving one from the story is a necessary part of reading it. This whole line of questioning is as good an illustration as any of where I'm coming from on that score, because I don't think the reading works if you take it out of context. Angel wants to do good, but can't follow his heart; doing good in the Jossverse isn't possible without one. Everything that happens to Angel as a result of this conflict is directed towards it, and if you want a lesson, I suppose you can take that one, but it makes a better story than it does an absolute truth.

The thing is, I think, that we have an innate tendency to want a sort of abstract morality - bad deeds lead to bad ends, unless you can count up the good intentions in Column B and subtract them from the total on Line F. A lot of stories are told that way, and it's fine, as far as it goes.

The thing that's powerful about Angel's story in my mind (and Buffy's, and most of the ones that are really worth hearing) is the ways that it doesn't balance out. The way you can't possibly add the way people behave and who they are with the results that it brings, because we're not an economy of actions. We're people. And we're messy like that. Sometimes, we love people who don't deserve it. Sometimes we do bad things and sometimes we do good things, and sometimes we can't figure out the difference. We're a bit embarassed about that, because we want things to be clearer, but they're not. We want to be able to reconcile fictional relationships into healthy forms (or understandable ones) but then we have stupid, incomprehensible relationships of our own. We want to see people getting it right, even while we're inevitably, somehow, always getting it wrong.

Somehow, Angel did get it right, despite everything.

Connor grew up smart and tough and brave, at last, and if I were Angel (and hell, even if I were me)... well, I'd be proud.

mood: busy
now playing: american pie, don mclean