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Post by myrabeth on Jan 13, 2019 15:23:47 GMT -8
A thought came to me while reading the discussion of Anya's soul in another thread: When Wishverse Giles broke Anya's amulet, wouldn't that have undone every wish Anya had granted, and not just the latest one? And doesn't that mean the world we come back to at the end of the episode is not the world we knew at the beginning of it?
Anya has been changing peoples' lives for 1100 years. We don't know who she impacted, or how undoing her impacts would change history (thus snowballing into the present). We know she played a significant role in the Russian Revolution, at least, which would have had far-reached effects. Did the writers give themselves an automatic 'out' for not acknowledging world events, and/or creating their own history, by setting every minute of BtVS and AtS after The Wish in a drastically altered world? Prior to The Wish, their world appeared to be very much like our own, and its incursions into historical explanations for events were few, and mostly local. After... Well they eventually built a universe wherein a huge percentage of the teenaged girls in the world got superpowers, after a year-long series of worldwide murders and a giant explosion in London didn't even make the papers in LA.
So is the Buffyverse post The Wish the same place as the Buffyverse prior to it? Do we have anyway of knowing for sure?
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darcygall
Watcher/Pearl
Head of Tourism
Posts: 28
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Post by darcygall on Jan 13, 2019 15:29:58 GMT -8
Ohhh interesting thought!
I think...and I could be very much wrong...that only the current wish was undone. I have no idea why I think that!
I'm kind of loving the idea of this though!
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Post by Zab Jade on Jan 13, 2019 15:30:01 GMT -8
Oh wow, that is a lot to think about. Would Anya know the changes (if any) that occurred? I'd like to see a fanfic delve into this idea.
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Post by petitpalmier on Jan 15, 2019 7:37:26 GMT -8
The most likely explanation is, like Darcy said, that only the current wish is undone. The main piece of evidence for this is Stewart Burns, the demon who crashes Anya and Xander's wedding in Hell's Bells. Anya turned him into a demon to fullfill a vengeance wish in 1914. And he still is a demon in 2002, that wish never undone.
You could argue that he was "protected" from the reversal since he was most likely being tortured in a Hell Dimension when Giles destroyed Anya's amulet. But even then, would he ever have ended up there in the first place?
So you can probably make up a relatively coherent explanation for him if you do want to explore the ramifications of every vengeance wish granted by Anyanka being undone. It's a difficult topic to explore - the farther back you go changing history, the less you're able to predict the changes. And Anya was a very busy vengeance demon. We don't get a lot of stories from her vengeance days, mainly because the Scoobies always tell her to shut up when she brings it up, but the little we do know is pretty momentus. Anya is shown to have started the 1905 Russian Revolution. It resulted in the creation of the Lower House of the Russian Parliament, the Russian Constitution of 1906 and allowed the emergence of Bolchevism. Some even consider it set the stage for the 1917 Revolutions, including Lenin. So what happens if the 1905 Revolution never happens? Do the 1917 ones? Are they different? Does the Russian Civil War? Is the Soviet Union created? How does that impact WWII? The Cold War? And that's only for a wish 100 years old. Who knows what else Anya was up to.
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darcygall
Watcher/Pearl
Head of Tourism
Posts: 28
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Post by darcygall on Jan 17, 2019 6:16:30 GMT -8
Would Buffy even be the Slayer? I mean, it seems highly unlikely.
Man! This is an interesting idea!
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Post by spindlekitten on Jan 18, 2019 11:25:49 GMT -8
I think this is one of those gaping holes in canon. The writers said (implied?) that all wishes would be erased if the amulet was broken and then very confidently erased only the last wish.
It would be interesting to imagine a world without the influence of Anyanka. I mean, just think of all the minor changes from the hundreds of thousands of scorned lovers who weren't changed into something nasty or inflicted with something painful that would have probably prevented future attempts at reproduction. How many more humans would that be? How many amazing thinkers (because doubtless a large number of Anya's clients sought vengeance over petty matters that a generally 'good' man had done to them) or downright scary dictators could that be.
On top of that you have the wars and revolutions and general mass chaos that she instigated...
I really doubt that the world would be very recognisable at all if every single wish was undone. Though it is an idea I wouldn't mind seeing in fanfic.
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Post by Zab Jade on Jan 18, 2019 15:09:28 GMT -8
The writers really didn't seem to pay much attention to what they'd set up. The changes brought about by Cordelia's wish were pretty huge and included Willow and Xander being turned. Just breaking Anya's amulet undid it all, including the deaths of Willow and Xander. So why wouldn't have destroying Anya's new amulet have undone the wish she granted in season seven?
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Post by spindlekitten on Jan 18, 2019 15:17:10 GMT -8
Because then we wouldn't have been able to watch Halfrek die?
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