Martin Malmkvist wrote:
Hey Reggie. What's this Maru-thing? I saw you used it on the old list as well.
Short answer: Maru is a term that is stuck on to the end of ship names in Japan as sort of a blessing or good-luck charm. On the Culture list, which (in theory, at least) talks about the Culture novels of Ian Banks, members sometimes stick a little comment at the end of a posting after their name and preface that comment with one of the ship abbreviations Banks uses in his novels. This would be the equivalent of a Star Trek fan ending an email with NCC and then a comment. I'm not a member of the Culture list myself, but the way I understand it, some Brin list members who joined Culture started adding comments and using Maru instead of the Culture ship names. This practice has dribbled over onto the other Brin list where I and several others have picked it up.
Usually, Maru is added at the end of a somewhat comical or self-deprecating comment, or a statement that sums up the post.
For a longer answer (covering the history and development of the term Maru) I can forward off-list a rather long email that has been sent to the other list a couple of times.
... Buffy!? Come on.
What's not to like about Buffy? First of all, the basic concept is cool. Whedon says he originally got the idea from watching other horror movies where there's always a girl that wanders off into a dark alley and gets killed. He felt bad for those girls and decided to create a girl that could fight back.
He wrote the original movie but then the director and others made some pretty drastic changes which Whedon has been very vocal in condemning. He got a chance to do it his way with the TV series.
The first season of the series (and some episodes from later seasons), he took classic horror stories and horror cliches and turned them on their head. There were a few clunkers during that first season, but overall the series was very good. I can only think of 2 or 3 clunkers in all of the rest of the series, seasons 2 - 7.
Since the first season, Whedon has created long-term story arcs like the ones seen in Babylon 5, later seasons of Deep Space 9, Jeremiah, and other series. Characters have grown and changed quite a lot over the years, and the stories keep getting more complex and more interesting. Events from years ago come back and have interesting consequences. Relationships form and break up. Recurring characters, sometimes major recurring characters, get killed. Actions have consequences that reach several episodes and sometime several seasons into the future.
And in many ways, the stories are more about the main characters than about the villain of the week or the recurring villain of that season. Many of the monster stories, especially early on, were metaphors for the everyday horrors of growing up and of high school and college life. The symbolism can be rich and deep in some episodes.
A lot of people couldn't get past the silliness of the name Buffy. A lot of people aren't fans of the classic horror movies that were being referenced. Some people didn't get or didn't like all of the pop-culture references, or the show's propensity for mixing sometimes ridiculous humor with it's horror, sometimes side by side in the same scene. I certainly don't expect everyone to like the show, any more that I expect that there is *anything* that everyone will like. Everyone has different tastes and interests. But there are certainly a lot of good reasons for liking Buffy and it's spinoff, Angel, including excellent writing and fantastic acting (with very few exceptions).
Reggie Bautista
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