It sounds late Victorian.

Google didn't find me much yet, but it DID find me this amazing essay on the notion at hand when applied to Blade Runner: [link]

Wow.

That's... yes. That!

Thank you Bartletts! It's from Edgar Allan Poe: "The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

Hmm, that link justs gets me to the author's bio.

Hey! I was just about to post that I found that!

Also, that I feel I have lost mass goth points for only having the vague, "Eh? Sounds familiar..." response.

Fixed. It's actually [link]

(I had both open.)

Also, that I feel I have lost mass goth points for only having the vague, "Eh? Sounds familiar..." response.

heh, well me too.

The body-count by sex came up before ages back... I only remember because like most things, it led me to make a spreadsheet. I wonder if I can dig up the conversation.

I think Spike's overall arc would have worked better if after he had gotten the soul, he made a choice to go back to being evil.

I so longed for Spike to go back to being evil by choice. It would have been more interesting, I think, to have that explored -- given a soul and the ability to hurt people he went back to killing. I really got bored with Buffy defending Spike with "he has a soul", which she seemed to forget that Warren had a soul and it didn't stop him from doing bad.

Plus it might have made Buffy a bit more interesting, her only reference to a vampire with a soul is Angel and so I see where her default is that souled vampire =good, but then to have Spike like killing and go back to it might have really thrown her.

I also wish Anya hadn't died I really liked her and wanted her to make it through.

I really got bored with Buffy defending Spike with "he has a soul", which she seemed to forget that Warren had a soul and it didn't stop him from doing bad.

Yes, exactly. Plus, "he has a soul" was exactly like the "but he's changed!" that gets uttered about abusive partners. I really wanted the ME writers to do something interesting with that cliché, instead of play it straight.

(Why yes, this is a conversation Plei and I have had a lot.)

The Bladerunner question is a little tricky because Scott is very consciously framing Zhora and Pris as mannequin and wind up doll. It's not unconscious, or falling for an unexamined trope, but carefully designed and purposeful. Which could be his sexism, but I always thought it was to underscore Deckard's POV that the replicants were not human.

Because Zhora is also presented as formidable - Deckard escapes more by luck than anything - and her death has pathos to it. The scene where she comes out of the shower naked and looking him over plays as if she's in control, she's exploiting his gaze to drop his guard. And while Pris' death is made to look grotesque and inhuman, previous to that her character was fairly sympathetic. (Though the later developments indicate she was just being manipulative.)

Certainly both of their deaths were sexualized as the essay notes.

But I don't see the same sexism in Ridley Scott's filmmaking that I see in Brian Depalma's so I wonder how I'm supposed to read such purposeful visual cues to the dehumanization of Zhora and Pris. The arc of the film is that Deckard is constantly confronted with his prejudice against replicants until with Roy and then Rachel he has to accept their humanity. With of course the subtext throughout the movie being that Deckard himself is unfeeling, inhuman and probably a replicant.