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BTVS: Critiquing the Gothic Romance Trope....
A while back, can't remember when exactly, I watched an old interview with Audrey Hepburn during the interview she said a lot of things, but the statement that stuck with me was this:
"When you are young you want wild passionate love, where you can't stop thinking about the other person, you become lost in them, and you fight and have wild love at night...but it gets tiring. You can't sustain it. After a while...you find you are just tired. Later, when I got much older...I realized that I didn't want that. I wanted someone I could just sip tea with, talk to, sleep with, go on walks, who was a companion, and we didn't necessarily have sex all the time, but we loved and it was deeper and lasted longer." I wish I could remember her exact words.
Been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S1-S3 at the moment, and have just completed the first five episodes of Season 3. What I've become struck by this go around, which I didn't really notice before, no idea why - is the deft critique of romantic love and in particular the gothic romance trope, with all of its horrific consequences. Joss Whedon and his writing team are deft satirists of the horror and in particular gothic horror/gothic romance tradition. Not surprising, considering the name of the series is Buffy the Vampire Slayer - that alone, just screams satire.
There's a great line in the fourth episode of S3, the episode in which Angel returns from hell, entitled Beauty and the Beasts:
"It's okay to get lost in love. There's nothing wrong with that. But sooner or later you have to get un lost, see what is going on around you and take part in it. Because if you stay lost...then love becomes your master, and you - its dog."
The speaker is Doctor Plat. A psychiatrist that Buffy is forced to see after she is reinstated in school. The line occurs after Buffy has confided in him her feelings regarding Angel. She's told him that she had loved this guy, he had been her first, and then...he turned mean, but she still loved him anyway.
Doctor Plat is killed, rather brutally, by the boyfriend of another patient, a couple who serve as metaphorical stand-in's for the Buffy/Angel romance of the last season and this one. They even look a bit like Buffy and Angel, Debbie is blond, and her boyfriend is dark headed and when he turns into Mr. Hyde - has the ridged forehead, slanted demon eyes, and speaks a bit like Angelus. It's subletly done. As we had with Angel - Angel/Angelus - who appear as separate as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, so does this guy - he's the cute angelic hunk/ and abusive monster. When he changes, the monster remembers but he does not. Angel similarily claims to have no knowledge of Angelus or Angelus's deeds when he returns to Buffy at the end of Becoming Part II - just as Debbie's boyfriend acts as if he has knowledge of Mr. Hyde. But when she attempts to get rid of the formula that turned him into the monster - he tells her, he no longer needs it - she is enough, all by herself, to do it to him. Just as Angelus states that all Angel requires is Buffy to turn him into mean old Angelus.
In case we don't get the point, there are camera shots that emphasize it - when Debbie's boyfriend changes back into his Dr. Jekyll persona and sees that he hurt her, he falls to his knees in front of her and hugs her waist crying. And she pats him, saying that's not you. This isn't you. At the end of the episode, Angel is in the same pose, his head buried in Buffy's stomach, as Buffy looks past him...the camera pulls back to show us what she sees - in the foreground, while she and Angel fade into the background - it's Debbie lying on her back, dead on the ground, killed by her boyfriend who had turned once again into Mr. Hyde. The image serves as a warning and potentially foreshadowing.
Then there's the first episode of S3, Anne, written and directed by Joss Whedon. It's an episode that I was admittedly less than fond of when it first aired. Now, I see the satire that I didn't see then. It feels obvious to me now. So much so, that I wonder how I could have missed it. In this episode, Buffy is attempting to get lost, to lose herself in her memories of Angel, in her love of Angel, and her grief and overwhelming guilt at his loss.
Buffy had killed Angel and sent him to hell at the end of Season 2, at her friends urging, and in order to save the world. But, for Buffy, nothing but Angel matters, and part of her wishes she'd gone with him. She runs across a young couple, Lily and Ricky, who have tattoos - on Lily's arm is half a heart with Ricky, and the other half of the heart is on Ricky's arm with Lily. They are both fairly pale, undernourished, and wrapped around each other - as if they are all that matters. They see nothing else. Then Ricky disappears, and Lily is lost. Wandering about like a ghost. Buffy tells her that she needs to deal, not close her eyes to everything but Ricky or what she's lost. But Lily doesn't listen and gives into the despaire, what is life without Ricky? So she literally follows Ricky to hell. Except he's long gone, having gone there before her, and left an old man. 80 years of age. Buffy save Lily, and Lily taking inspiration from Buffy - takes her pseudonyme Ann, and her job at Denny's waitressing.
Ricky and Lily are much like Debbie and Dr. Jekyll (Pete?) - stand-in's for Buffy and Angel. Victims of love.
In Season 2, the episode I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU - shows this as well, except in this episode Angelus and Buffy get stand-in for the doomed lovers. The lovers in this episode, are an older teacher and her love-sick student, who as the title states only has eyes for her. She is his life. He can think of nothing else. When she rejects him, because she's much older and their love can't work - he kills her, then himself - because life without her is something he can't handle. Buffy is the person he picks to possess in order to find his own peace - because as she states, he knows she can identify. And Angelus is picked for similar reasons - he is obsessed with Buffy, much as he had been when he had a soul. [ETA for clarity: Like the teacher, he finds himself obsessed with Buffy, he can't break it off, he can't leave her. Even though he knows it is wrong, even though he knows he is hurting her. Even when he has the chance - to leave town on her birthday, he gives her a gift keeping her with him. The implication here - in case you missed it - is the teacher who has the experience, the knowledge, who knows what will happen, keeps the relationship going until it almost too late to break it off. And when the worst does happen, she continues it by possessing people, enabling her lover to kill them each night again and again. The misdirect is that the student is the villian her, that is what Buffy thinks, because Buffy blames herself for Angel going bad. As may well the viewer. But if you pay close attention to the metaphors before and after that episode, from Inca Mummy Girl to Ted, you'll see that it is not necessarily Buffy's fault, any more than it is Xander's for loving the mummy girl or Joyce's for loving Ted. It's her fault for letting herself get lost in him. Letting the love take over, so she's sees nothing else. But Angel is the one that pursued Buffy, and Angel is the one who went after her. Just as the mummy girl, Ted, Malcolm the Robot, and the Praying Mantis (monsters from the first season) go after their targets.]
Angel much like the teacher in I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU, loves her, but it is love that is not rational, and leads him about by the nose. As Spike states in an earlier episode, Innocence, "it sickened me, watching you play the slayer's lap-dog" - which in effect is what Angel had become. As Angelus, he wants to hurt her. To make her feel as he did. Yet, he still, as Willow states in Passion, Buffy is all he thinks about. And as a result the world falls down. In I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU - the two doomed lovers kill innocent people as they replay their self-involved love story over and over again, killing all and hurting all that get in the way of it. They are not kind ghosts. Angel and Buffy similarily inflict harm on all around them - Angelus going so far as to attempt to open the mouth of hell and suck all into it, while Buffy comes wickedly close to losing everything, including her own life - as it stands, all she loses is Jenny Calendar and Kendra.
Season 2, also had a stand-in couple or metaphor for the Buffy/Angel romance - in the form of Spike and Drusilla - who were fools for love, obsessed lovers, who cared not for anyone but each other. Spike was much like Ricky, Pete, Angel/Angelus, and the doomed boy mentioned above in his devotion for Drusilla. Drusilla was also, much like Lily, Debbie, the doomed teacher, and Buffy in her devotion to Spike. It is clear from School Hard through Becoming that Spike would do anything for Dru. He would die for her. He would kill for her. He would sacrifice everything. He would even betray Angelus, and strike a deal with the enemy - the slayer - to get her back. Buffy likewise appears to be willing to do anything to get Angel back - including stall when she thinks Willow can re-insoul him. They are both love's bitch, being lead about by a leash - at Angel and Dru's whim. While Angel and Drusilla cavort behind them, seeming not to care. Angel and Drusilla go from weak, damsels in What's Your Line two-parter, to devilish controllers in Innocence and Becoming. And Spike and Buffy go from sacrificing everything to save them in What's Your Line - to fighting them in duels that are, but not quite to the death.
It's the gothic romance turned inside out.
Beside these wild passionate love affairs - are the romances of Buffy's friends. Each a separate take on her own. Xander and Cordelia - which typify the mortal foes or star-crossed lovers, who realize they really have a lot in common and fall headlong into lust and possibly love. Willow and OZ - the companionable gentle lovers, who just snuggle and never argue and rarely appear to kiss - yet OZ turns into a beast and has that violent potential but like Angel, it's not OZ - he isn't aware when it happens. Then finally Giles and Jenny, the more mature, adult romance, complete with awkward courtship, and minor betrayals and forgiveness - it is the one that does end the most abruptly, a direct casualty of the Buffy/Angel romance.
The message seems to be clear, it is not romantic love in of itself that is the problem, so much as being completely lost in it, where the only thing you care about is your lover, they are all that matters and all that you see. There are other things, more interesting things than romantic love...which you can forget, when you are caught inside it.
It's an interesting critique - particularly when you consider all the tv shows and books that play into this fantasy or trope. The most famous amongst them is the best-selling Twilight series. Whedon's Buffy in a way satirizes the romances in Twilight, True Blood, Moonlight, Forever Knight, and many many more. It is what distinguishes Buffy and why the show and writing stand out. In Buffy, the lover's do not ride off into the sunset, instead she tells him at the end of the series - what was the highlight of our relationship? When you tried to kill me? Or when I sent you to hell? But then Buffy, unlike the others is not a romance, it is a coming of age horror tale, focusing on the journey of a flawed heroine through a world filled with demons both literal and metaphorical. Told with satiric wit and often undercutting the romantic tropes within the genre. The irony, of course, is that a good portion of the fandom has resisted the satire and continues, much - I suspect - to the writers considerable chagrin not to mention annoyance - to insist on the durability and sustainability of whatever romantic trope the writer is lampooning. Stubbornly blind to the satire contained within the tale.
We see, I think, what we want to see. We hear the story the way we want to hear it, regardless of how well it may be told. It's the most frustrating thing about human communication - no matter what language and no matter how well translated, you cannot force someone to hear or see what you want them to, especially when they wish to see something else entirely. Any more than you can force them to agree or see your point of view. You can write volumes arguing it, they will still stubbornly only read the bits of what you wrote that they wished to read. As I fear you may well be doing now with what I wrote above.
"When you are young you want wild passionate love, where you can't stop thinking about the other person, you become lost in them, and you fight and have wild love at night...but it gets tiring. You can't sustain it. After a while...you find you are just tired. Later, when I got much older...I realized that I didn't want that. I wanted someone I could just sip tea with, talk to, sleep with, go on walks, who was a companion, and we didn't necessarily have sex all the time, but we loved and it was deeper and lasted longer." I wish I could remember her exact words.
Been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S1-S3 at the moment, and have just completed the first five episodes of Season 3. What I've become struck by this go around, which I didn't really notice before, no idea why - is the deft critique of romantic love and in particular the gothic romance trope, with all of its horrific consequences. Joss Whedon and his writing team are deft satirists of the horror and in particular gothic horror/gothic romance tradition. Not surprising, considering the name of the series is Buffy the Vampire Slayer - that alone, just screams satire.
There's a great line in the fourth episode of S3, the episode in which Angel returns from hell, entitled Beauty and the Beasts:
"It's okay to get lost in love. There's nothing wrong with that. But sooner or later you have to get un lost, see what is going on around you and take part in it. Because if you stay lost...then love becomes your master, and you - its dog."
The speaker is Doctor Plat. A psychiatrist that Buffy is forced to see after she is reinstated in school. The line occurs after Buffy has confided in him her feelings regarding Angel. She's told him that she had loved this guy, he had been her first, and then...he turned mean, but she still loved him anyway.
Doctor Plat is killed, rather brutally, by the boyfriend of another patient, a couple who serve as metaphorical stand-in's for the Buffy/Angel romance of the last season and this one. They even look a bit like Buffy and Angel, Debbie is blond, and her boyfriend is dark headed and when he turns into Mr. Hyde - has the ridged forehead, slanted demon eyes, and speaks a bit like Angelus. It's subletly done. As we had with Angel - Angel/Angelus - who appear as separate as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, so does this guy - he's the cute angelic hunk/ and abusive monster. When he changes, the monster remembers but he does not. Angel similarily claims to have no knowledge of Angelus or Angelus's deeds when he returns to Buffy at the end of Becoming Part II - just as Debbie's boyfriend acts as if he has knowledge of Mr. Hyde. But when she attempts to get rid of the formula that turned him into the monster - he tells her, he no longer needs it - she is enough, all by herself, to do it to him. Just as Angelus states that all Angel requires is Buffy to turn him into mean old Angelus.
In case we don't get the point, there are camera shots that emphasize it - when Debbie's boyfriend changes back into his Dr. Jekyll persona and sees that he hurt her, he falls to his knees in front of her and hugs her waist crying. And she pats him, saying that's not you. This isn't you. At the end of the episode, Angel is in the same pose, his head buried in Buffy's stomach, as Buffy looks past him...the camera pulls back to show us what she sees - in the foreground, while she and Angel fade into the background - it's Debbie lying on her back, dead on the ground, killed by her boyfriend who had turned once again into Mr. Hyde. The image serves as a warning and potentially foreshadowing.
Then there's the first episode of S3, Anne, written and directed by Joss Whedon. It's an episode that I was admittedly less than fond of when it first aired. Now, I see the satire that I didn't see then. It feels obvious to me now. So much so, that I wonder how I could have missed it. In this episode, Buffy is attempting to get lost, to lose herself in her memories of Angel, in her love of Angel, and her grief and overwhelming guilt at his loss.
Buffy had killed Angel and sent him to hell at the end of Season 2, at her friends urging, and in order to save the world. But, for Buffy, nothing but Angel matters, and part of her wishes she'd gone with him. She runs across a young couple, Lily and Ricky, who have tattoos - on Lily's arm is half a heart with Ricky, and the other half of the heart is on Ricky's arm with Lily. They are both fairly pale, undernourished, and wrapped around each other - as if they are all that matters. They see nothing else. Then Ricky disappears, and Lily is lost. Wandering about like a ghost. Buffy tells her that she needs to deal, not close her eyes to everything but Ricky or what she's lost. But Lily doesn't listen and gives into the despaire, what is life without Ricky? So she literally follows Ricky to hell. Except he's long gone, having gone there before her, and left an old man. 80 years of age. Buffy save Lily, and Lily taking inspiration from Buffy - takes her pseudonyme Ann, and her job at Denny's waitressing.
Ricky and Lily are much like Debbie and Dr. Jekyll (Pete?) - stand-in's for Buffy and Angel. Victims of love.
In Season 2, the episode I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU - shows this as well, except in this episode Angelus and Buffy get stand-in for the doomed lovers. The lovers in this episode, are an older teacher and her love-sick student, who as the title states only has eyes for her. She is his life. He can think of nothing else. When she rejects him, because she's much older and their love can't work - he kills her, then himself - because life without her is something he can't handle. Buffy is the person he picks to possess in order to find his own peace - because as she states, he knows she can identify. And Angelus is picked for similar reasons - he is obsessed with Buffy, much as he had been when he had a soul. [ETA for clarity: Like the teacher, he finds himself obsessed with Buffy, he can't break it off, he can't leave her. Even though he knows it is wrong, even though he knows he is hurting her. Even when he has the chance - to leave town on her birthday, he gives her a gift keeping her with him. The implication here - in case you missed it - is the teacher who has the experience, the knowledge, who knows what will happen, keeps the relationship going until it almost too late to break it off. And when the worst does happen, she continues it by possessing people, enabling her lover to kill them each night again and again. The misdirect is that the student is the villian her, that is what Buffy thinks, because Buffy blames herself for Angel going bad. As may well the viewer. But if you pay close attention to the metaphors before and after that episode, from Inca Mummy Girl to Ted, you'll see that it is not necessarily Buffy's fault, any more than it is Xander's for loving the mummy girl or Joyce's for loving Ted. It's her fault for letting herself get lost in him. Letting the love take over, so she's sees nothing else. But Angel is the one that pursued Buffy, and Angel is the one who went after her. Just as the mummy girl, Ted, Malcolm the Robot, and the Praying Mantis (monsters from the first season) go after their targets.]
Angel much like the teacher in I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU, loves her, but it is love that is not rational, and leads him about by the nose. As Spike states in an earlier episode, Innocence, "it sickened me, watching you play the slayer's lap-dog" - which in effect is what Angel had become. As Angelus, he wants to hurt her. To make her feel as he did. Yet, he still, as Willow states in Passion, Buffy is all he thinks about. And as a result the world falls down. In I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU - the two doomed lovers kill innocent people as they replay their self-involved love story over and over again, killing all and hurting all that get in the way of it. They are not kind ghosts. Angel and Buffy similarily inflict harm on all around them - Angelus going so far as to attempt to open the mouth of hell and suck all into it, while Buffy comes wickedly close to losing everything, including her own life - as it stands, all she loses is Jenny Calendar and Kendra.
Season 2, also had a stand-in couple or metaphor for the Buffy/Angel romance - in the form of Spike and Drusilla - who were fools for love, obsessed lovers, who cared not for anyone but each other. Spike was much like Ricky, Pete, Angel/Angelus, and the doomed boy mentioned above in his devotion for Drusilla. Drusilla was also, much like Lily, Debbie, the doomed teacher, and Buffy in her devotion to Spike. It is clear from School Hard through Becoming that Spike would do anything for Dru. He would die for her. He would kill for her. He would sacrifice everything. He would even betray Angelus, and strike a deal with the enemy - the slayer - to get her back. Buffy likewise appears to be willing to do anything to get Angel back - including stall when she thinks Willow can re-insoul him. They are both love's bitch, being lead about by a leash - at Angel and Dru's whim. While Angel and Drusilla cavort behind them, seeming not to care. Angel and Drusilla go from weak, damsels in What's Your Line two-parter, to devilish controllers in Innocence and Becoming. And Spike and Buffy go from sacrificing everything to save them in What's Your Line - to fighting them in duels that are, but not quite to the death.
It's the gothic romance turned inside out.
Beside these wild passionate love affairs - are the romances of Buffy's friends. Each a separate take on her own. Xander and Cordelia - which typify the mortal foes or star-crossed lovers, who realize they really have a lot in common and fall headlong into lust and possibly love. Willow and OZ - the companionable gentle lovers, who just snuggle and never argue and rarely appear to kiss - yet OZ turns into a beast and has that violent potential but like Angel, it's not OZ - he isn't aware when it happens. Then finally Giles and Jenny, the more mature, adult romance, complete with awkward courtship, and minor betrayals and forgiveness - it is the one that does end the most abruptly, a direct casualty of the Buffy/Angel romance.
The message seems to be clear, it is not romantic love in of itself that is the problem, so much as being completely lost in it, where the only thing you care about is your lover, they are all that matters and all that you see. There are other things, more interesting things than romantic love...which you can forget, when you are caught inside it.
It's an interesting critique - particularly when you consider all the tv shows and books that play into this fantasy or trope. The most famous amongst them is the best-selling Twilight series. Whedon's Buffy in a way satirizes the romances in Twilight, True Blood, Moonlight, Forever Knight, and many many more. It is what distinguishes Buffy and why the show and writing stand out. In Buffy, the lover's do not ride off into the sunset, instead she tells him at the end of the series - what was the highlight of our relationship? When you tried to kill me? Or when I sent you to hell? But then Buffy, unlike the others is not a romance, it is a coming of age horror tale, focusing on the journey of a flawed heroine through a world filled with demons both literal and metaphorical. Told with satiric wit and often undercutting the romantic tropes within the genre. The irony, of course, is that a good portion of the fandom has resisted the satire and continues, much - I suspect - to the writers considerable chagrin not to mention annoyance - to insist on the durability and sustainability of whatever romantic trope the writer is lampooning. Stubbornly blind to the satire contained within the tale.
We see, I think, what we want to see. We hear the story the way we want to hear it, regardless of how well it may be told. It's the most frustrating thing about human communication - no matter what language and no matter how well translated, you cannot force someone to hear or see what you want them to, especially when they wish to see something else entirely. Any more than you can force them to agree or see your point of view. You can write volumes arguing it, they will still stubbornly only read the bits of what you wrote that they wished to read. As I fear you may well be doing now with what I wrote above.
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Was tempted to skip it this go-around as well. Very glad I didn't.
Sure the central part feels very after-school specialish. And it is a bit on the preachy side regarding the whole domestic violence/abusive boyfriend syndrom. But...
when you watch with the other episodes...you pick up things.
One of the themes I picked up on, and keep in mind this is a horror series so tends to go for the nasty - is the whole love dynamic. The men literally become dogs - Angel, Pete, OZ - in regards to the women they love. But it's not the women who turn them into dogs. It's the passion/love - the feeling.
Not the person. They've become so lost in the emotion, they can't think, rational thought is gone, it is all about devoring, consuming, and killing. Destroying all that gets in the way. And the women involved - all enjoy to a degree being the focus of that passion, they ignore the monster, want to ignore it, want to cage it, yet at the same time...
Pete and Debbie were fine, but Pete felt he had to be more for Debbie, much as Xander feels he has to be more for Cordelia in Go Fish. Or Scott Hope wonders if he is enough for Buffy. She seems so distant. He can't connect to her. Buffy in turn can't connect to Scott - he's not dangerous, he doesn't excite her, and he can't begin to fit in her life as the slayer. Re-enter Angel...who at this point she can't figure out, is he good, is he damaged and broken?
Giles gives her two options - he could have come out of hell, a monster, with no remorse, no good in him, a beast - the Mr. Hyde character that he'd been after Innocence and the MR. Hyde character that Pete becomes whenever he drinks the potion.
OR he could have survived, found a way to hold onto himself, not given in, which would take extraordinary will - that person may be redeemable. Pete or Dr. Jekyll or Willow's OZ - who wants to beat back the wolf. Pete unfortunately loses himself to Hyde, and no longer requires the drug to change.
OZ...the jury is still out on at this point. And Angel appears to at least at this point to have held on to himself, he comes in at the last minute and fights off Hyde, killing him. Sure you can see it as the typical guy saves girl, but I think the reason the writer chose to have him save her was to show him fight off Hyde, to fight off himself. It isn't Pete, Angel attacks in that scene but Angelus. For Pete is saying to Buffy all the things Angelus did and fighting her as Angelus did.
Yet, it still isn't a happy ending - that's why we get the final frame - as reminder that these two can't be happy together. Buffy can never allow herself to trust Angel.
Trust is non-existent. And without trust...love can not sustain itself.
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Now, what should one make of it in light of S6, and the fandom's view of S6 relationships? (Presumably, this 'message' of this episode would be met with angry howls as applied to S6.)
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And...well, I'm trying not to get ahead of myself in my viewing. Because I've discovered something interesting while viewing these episodes - that I'm not looking at them in the same way that I did before.
If memory serves, and I may change my mind once I make it to Season 4 - OZ does end up embracing the wolf which is what sends him scurrying away, and when he returns, he realizes that Willow brings it out - he can't handle her choices. Also, if memory serves, Angel does end embracing his inner demon towards the end of the season due in part to Buffy's urging in order to save his life - which almost kills her, and sends him scurrying off to LA to find himself. At least that's how I remember it.
So, what I see in Beauty and the Beasts is foreshadowing, and a warning - OZ and Angel are doomed to become Pete at some point in the near future. And Willow and Buffy doomed to fall in Debbie's footsteps.
TV shows will often do this, heck Dollhouse is at the moment - they will tell the story we don't want to see with the guest performers - spell out the doom of our characters relationships through that A story thread.
Then a few episodes down the line, we actually see it played out.
Regarding S6? I'm going to wait until I rewatch, before discussing it again. I want to see how it looks in context to the rest of the episodes. I'm sort of re-watching the series much as one might re-read a favorite novel. It's weird I know, not to mention a tad on the annoyingly anal side, but it's making me happy. LOL!
That said, I think base purely on my memory of it, yes, portions of Season Six and Season 7 as well as Season Five echo portions of Seasons 1, 2 and 3 but from a far more complex and gray perspective. The metaphors are a little less heavy handed and there are more gaps in the storytelling. It's almost as the writer is retelling the story but from another, more adult, angle and to an adult as opposed to juvenile audience. As a result - The writer seems to trust his audience more in the latter seasons than he did in the earlier ones. But again that's based on my memory of the seasons. We'll see what I feel when I watch them again.
As far as fandom's view of S6? Sigh. I don't share it. But then you may have already guessed that to some extent. Fandom's take on season 6/7 and some of the relationships is why I have a bit of a cranky relationship with fandom. I have to keep biting my tongue or I'll get myself verbally slapped.
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Angel has already decided to leave, and told her he is leaving town, when that happens.
Both Angel & Oz leave because they have an inherent monstrous nature they cannot control or wholly suppress, (but wish to because they value the human side of their nature), and because they do want to impose that struggle on the people they love. It is perhaps noble and stupid, but also a valid value choice. Particularly as both believe Buffy and Willow can (and should) be happy without them. Whether they prefer it or not.
And also, Angel has aspirations to do things with his life, that would be permanently frustrated if he remained in a small town like Sunnydale. In fairness, I think this applies to Buffy too, who always looked considerably less miserable every time she contemplated possibly escaping town.
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Not sure what you mean by "fandom's view" since I find it varies depending on which sector of fandom you're in. But the fact that you brought up s6 is interesting... because the first thing I thought of when I read the Audrey Hepburn quote was Spike and Buffy's exchange from "Seeing Red":
SPIKE: Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.
BUFFY: Until there's nothing left. Love like that doesn't last.
(Sidebar: I wonder if Buffy is speaking from experience here, if she recognizes that this is what happened with Angel, or if she's just disagreeing with Spike on principle.)
In any case, I think they're making the same statement then as they were in the episodes discussed here. Spike's passionate, all-consuming love for Buffy is dangerous, and they're better off in season 7, when they've built trust, even if it's not a sexual relationship.
You could also apply the same idea to Willow and Tara, I think. Their relationship only goes bad when Willow taps into her own "inner monster" - her use of magic.
Xander, on the other hand, seems to ruin his relationship with Anya out of fear of the monster, before it ever really makes an appearance.
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I believe she's arguing as much on principle as experience, because she does come into most of her interaction with a baseline moral/value system - and that total/obsessive devotion Spike defines love by is inimical to the broader sense of responsibilities held by someone who takes the Slayer role so seriously.
But I do also think Buffy has a longer memory than she necessarily lets on, and I also think she's evaluating things in light of past experiences. (Although, there's a certain limitation on applicability, since they broke up over what they viewed as unworkable curse and mortality/immortality issues rather than deciding 'love had burned them out' or something.) It's also likely she's thinking of other examples - maybe her parents, friends, I don't know...
But I do see what you mean with the experiences feeling like call-backs. Sort of - in the same way - I couldn't watch their argument over Katrina's murder in "Dead Things" without also thinking about Buffy & Faith's arguments in "Consequences". And the differences between how they interact, I think, mean a lot for her.
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True, although I get the sense from the crossovers (post-IWRY, that is) that they do see their love burning out over time. When Angel left, I don't think Buffy could imagine not being madly in love with him. But with time and distance, she's able to see him... and then walk away. It's easier and easier for them to part, so I think she recognizes that the great love that once consumed her is burned up. (If she doesn't recognize that here, I think she definitely recognizes it by "Chosen." Her cookie dough speech is not the speech of a girl still madly in love.)
I couldn't watch their argument over Katrina's murder in "Dead Things" without also thinking about Buffy & Faith's arguments in "Consequences".
Oh, definitely.
no subject
That's true. It goes to her experience and awareness that life is more than romantic grand gestures, and that she can't live day-to-day, exclusively by them. Now, I also think there are day-to-day things she did get from him (a lot of emotional support and a sounding board who recognized and shared many of her concerns) that she does miss out on. But rather be tied up in ideals of love, she did adjust, grow, move and live in the world.
I actually think they were more mature about their relationship than a surface reading gives credit for. Most of S3 is the process of them coming to terms with an inevitable break-up, and that can be very hard to do - particularly when standard romantic tropes say "True Love" is supposed overcome adversity, damn all else.
Buffy sometimes indulged herself but reluctantly accepted this doesn't hold given her larger set of values, so she's naturally not going to accept it coming from Spike later on.
None of which says they either could or could not sustain a different or more mature relationship in the future if they had circumstances that supported it. The mad love isn't there, but there were other things there too.