Magic Telepathy That Doesn’t End The World

At the end of the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow Rosenberg goes full on evil.

After a full season of being addicted to magic (whatever that means) the murder of her girlfriend makes Willow snap: she goes full goth. She goes all black everything from pupils to peasant tops to veins. She decides to murder everyone, including her best friends.

She is fed up and Full On Evil. And when Willow goes Full On Evil, she gets telepathy.

In Buffy, every time anyone gets telepathy, they immediately lose their fucking mind.

The last time I watched the Season 6 finale, willing myself to ignore the bad dialogue and facial prosthetics, it struck me how much telepathy in Buffy looks, sounds, and feels like social media. On Buffy, telepathy is always depicted as people screaming inanities inside of your head— you have no control over the volume, content, or pacing.

It sounds kind of like a newsfeed would, if you read it out loud.

—

So Willow, newly telepathic, goes on a world ending rampage.

It’s bad fucking news. 

But Willow’s motivation for ending the world, besides her new deep goth hair style, is almost pure. 

“There’s so much pain, so much pain in the world,” she says, wavering between monotone villain and weird shrieking. (Alyson Hannigan tried her best, okay?)

“It’s so pathetic. I just need to put these people out of their misery.“

Who hasn’t felt this way after logging into Twitter on a Friday night? 

In Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data, Dr. Daniel Barron argues that textual analysis of social media is one of the best predictors of individual mental health. The book is an overview of big data’s role in psychiatry, filled with case studies of rapid diagnosis based on a patient’s tweets, Google searches, Facebook posting. As I was reading, all I could think was:

 “If you have enough information to potentially diagnose a psychiatric disorder from 3 tweets – what does it do to you to scroll through your own newsfeed in the middle of a global pandemic?“

Like I said: on Buffy when anyone gets telepathy, they immediately go fucking insane.

—

My friend Ruby, a somatic therapist, is a lot more optimistic about the potential of global telepathy than I am. 

Ruby talks about memes as the ultimate telepathy — based on intuitive instantaneous understanding, a collective shared experience we can parse faster than words. Rather than seeing social media as a collective nightmare, Ruby sees potential for healing in our intuitive memetic connections – the internet as a tool through which we can see the full perspective of the others we engage with, understanding each other and ourselves more deeply than we did before in a way that allows for greater forgiveness, compassion, and love.

I don’t entirely know how to reconcile what Ruby sees in memes with my own fatalism about the Internet, the world. It’s hard for me to envision telepathy (the Internet kind and otherwise) beyond “put the poor bastards out of their misery.” 

It also feels worth mentioning here Ruby‘s regulation practice is probably more diligent than mine.

—

The way they stop Evil Willow hits me hard, though I hate to admit it. It gets me in my chest, the same way Tony Stark dying in the Avengers had me bawling even though Robert Downey Jr. made $1 billion from those movies! He’s fine! Fiction is a trap!

Anyway.

Willow is doing her whole world ending thing, lost in the pain and misery of the world, etc etc. Then Xander appears, the heart member of the team. 

“Even if you end the world, I still love you,” he says. Oh no, I’m gonna start crying just typing this out.

Even if you end the world, I still love you.

You get the idea.

Love saves the day. 

And as Ruby reminds me, there’s a stage after “you poor bastards,” when it comes to empathy, even when you’re doomscrolling.

That stage is the part of empathy that matters. The part people talk about when they talk about empathy as a gift.

It’s the part when, you see all the pain, all the suffering, and you reach out with love, knowing that it’s your pain too. 

And nobody has to end the world.