I keep banging on about season 8

And I'm really not sure why. Because it's a little schadenfreude-y, perhaps. In any case, I saw this bit of advice from sci-fi author A. Lee Martinez (via io9):

Just because you can write something, that doesn't mean you should. The burden of the novelologist is self-control. Not just the self-control to make yourself write at a reasonable pace, either. I'm talking about the ability to take a good idea and not use it. Movies and television have a natural control mechanism. They have budget and time constraints that make some things impractical. The original Star Wars films are infinitely better than the prequels, and it's not because of the writing (which has never been the movies' strong point). It's because the originals were made with a budget, without CGI. Just because someone could imagine it that didn't mean it could appear on screen. And that made the original Star Wars trilogy stronger versus the prequels, which are overindulgent, so crammed with visuals and ideas that none of them really get the time they deserve to get us invested.

Reword this a bit, like, replace "Star Wars" with "Buffy" and "CGI" with "badly drawn comic book 'art'" and I think then it would be great if someone could slip this to Joss. I hate that this comic book debacle has made me seriously question my Joss-love. A year ago I'd have been thrilled he was going to direct a big-budget Avengers movie. Now? Not so much thrilled and more with the trepidation.

I can think of a few instances where fan fic went down this kind of path to wtf-ery, too. Maybe they turned out all right in the end, I don't know. I bailed way before the end of those stories, too. Anyway.

Shorter post: What he said.