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shadowkat[Because I'm feeling a bit crazy today and trying to distract myself from other things... here's a rough meta on stuff that was rolling about my brain today and yesterday.]
After finishing Darkapple's Imitation of A Man this morning...I realized something about the difference in fanfic, many vampire gothic romance novels, and the Whedon Television Series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
It can be summed up rather nicely in the following lyrics from a Lady Gaga number entitled Bad Romance
I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything, so long as it's free, I want your love, love, love, love, I want your love, I want your drama, the touch of your hand, I want your leather studded kiss in the sand, I want your love, love love love, I want your love, you know that I you, and you know that I need you, I want it bad, a bad romance, I want your love and, I want your revenge, you and me could write a bad romance, I want your love, and all your lover's revenge, you and me could write a bad romance, oh oh oh, caught in a bad romance
The Bad Romance - and I don't mean bad in the idea of badly written or poorly scripted, but bad as in the type of romance that is all drama, storm and drange, wild and passion, burning love, desire...where the lover's die for one another, or yearn, and forget all else. Which works quite nicely in a romance novel - something written by Rosemary Rodgers, Laurell K. Hamilton, or Stephanie Meyer or even Shakespeare - where the lover's die or ride off into the sunset, happy, without dealing with the painful reality of it.
There's actually really good bit of dialogue in the Buffy Series, but it is unfortunately overshadowed by the scene that comes immediately after it - even though that scene and those that follow emphasize every word and validate every word spoken, as have all the scenes before it including those in the first four seasons.
BUFFY: (calmer) I have feelings for you. I do. But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to be love.
SPIKE: (laughing) Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. (Buffy rolling her eyes) Great love is wild ... and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.
BUFFY: Until there's nothing left. Love like that doesn't last.
The words the heroine, Buffy, states to her lover, Spike, are those that come from experience. She's been caught in more than one bad romance. Appears to be doomed to replay the same moves, over and over, just with different partners, and it never gets any easier. Each partner, if anything, seems better suited to her, she cares even more about them, and losing them - hurts even more. Love...love...love..it's become a choke in her throat.
The first, Ford - her first crush, reunites with her later in the episode Lie to Me - which in some respects states the same message stated above. In Lie to Me, a teenage Buffy fancies herself in love with Angel, but she doesn't know who he is. She trusts him, but should she? Her trust is the trust of an adolescent, more hormone driven then anything else.
During the course of the episode, she is given multiple reasons not to trust Angel, each of which she discards. First she spies him with Drusilla, a female vampire. Then later, finds out from Angel himself who Drusilla is and what he did to her, how he made Drusilla. It's a warning, which Buffy discards. The warning is emphasized by her relationship with Ford, her first crush, a guy who in some respects isn't all that different from Angel - older than she was, popular with the girls, a jock. And he's dying of a brain tumor, so Ford decides to use what he figured out about Buffy, along with Buffy's feelings for him, to bargain for eternal life. He tricks Buffy into entering a vault with a bunch of other willing victims, deluded souls who have romanticized vampires. She only manages to escape by threatening to end Drusilla's life - Drusilla is the love of Spike, and Spike - Buffy quickly figures out is as enamored of Dru as she is of Angel. He would die for Dru, at least at this point. He lets Buffy and everyone go. Except for Ford - who he turns into a vampire, well aware that Buffy will slay him come morning. The episode ends with a conversation between Giles and Buffy, Buffy wanting Giles to tell her that the world is not this complicated, this painful. And he sighs, in compassion. And lies.
This episode is a percursor to the ones that follow - Innocence, the aptly named episode where Buffy discovers who Angel is, without the soul, without the curse. A monster. She tells herself throughout the series that Angelus is not Angel. It wasn't you. Rationalizing her love for him. Lying to herself. Because of course, as Angelus himself states, and Spike, and all who have known Angel as both Angelus and Angel - on an intimate basis - it is him. Angelus is merely Angel without a moral compass or soul. That's it. Angelus is Angel without the guilt. Turn off the guilt and you have Angelus.
LJ Rahriah - in her WIP fanfic - Parliament of Monsters actually writes a rather decent characterization of Angel, which I think comes relatively close to the series intentions:
They all forgot--even he, sometimes--that Angel hadn't sprung full-grown from the forehead of Angelus, just add soul and stir. No, he'd built Angel with his bare hands: forged a new self out of guilt and misery and the least promising of raw materials, day by day, year by laborious year. Liam of Galway had never been a good man, in life or in death, with a soul or without one. Once upon a time he hadn't been an evil one, and that was the highest goal he could conceive for himself after his soul had been thrust back upon him.
In Buffy's arms he had believed, for the first time in two and a half centuries, that he could aspire to more than simply not evil. No mere girl could give him that, but Buffy was no mere girl.
[Chapter 5, POM, from http://www.allaboutspike.com/chapter.html?id=712&expid=1487]
But Buffy has romanticized Angel, much as have others, for many of the same reasons. He is every young girl's fantasy and I include myself in that depiction - the hulking hero, strong, brutal, dangerous, mysterious - could kill with a smile, but never you. Older. The Father but not the father - not related at all, yet he is older than you and therein lies the taboo. You know nothing about him, but you love him. And when you kiss him, you just want to die, to be swallowed up whole. He's our celebrity crushes, his visage sits on the posters in our rooms. When David Boreanze was cast in the role - he was cast purely for his good looks. They were hunting for a guy who was tall, dark, handsome, and had a wicked smile. The casting agent found him walking his dog in her neighborhood and took a picture then passed it around and all the women at work, fawned over him. His acting skills such as they were - came as a surprise. (This is in the commentary of at least three of the Series DVDS).
But theirs is a bad romance. Angel almost kills her more than once. Their first kiss - he turns into a vampire and she screams. They sleep together - and he wakes him with a taste for human blood, kills a woman on the street, and then attempts to kill everyone else. She sends him to hell - but with a kiss. He comes back, ferocious, she tames him, but only to discover that he can play the role of Angelus far too well for it to be someone else. He gets poisoned, she saves him but only by almost killing herself. It's Romeo and Juliet, except with superpowers and the ability to destroy the world. When he finally leaves, he continues to haunt her, stalking in the mists, a foggy presence just outside her range of vision. Never quite gone, but never quite there either - perhaps he never was. That's the problem with first loves or lusts, they always remain out of reach. We touch them, come too close and they become dust. By the time she falls for Riley, Buffy has come to the horrid realization that being around Angel is akin to having her skin ripped off repeatedly. He will always hurt her. And she will always hurt him. This is made apparent in the episodes I Will Always Remember You and Sancturary, as well as Pangs and Yoko Factor.
Yet, we like the fantasy. The idea that it could work. Or just to watch it play out.
Buffy/Riley was no better. The issues Buffy faced with Angel and Ford, were repeated with Riley. The perfect boyfriend. He was Angel, but without the drama or the baggage, without the fangs. Older, smart, big, muscular, handsome, the popular guy - the jock. A man's man. She could take him out on double dates with Xander. Or hang out with Willow. He was safe to bring home to Mom. She didn't have to worry about him killing anyone. Trust should not have been an issue. Yet, it still was. Their romance quickly soured, and became the Bad Romance. He was part of an organization that Buffy could not trust or respect. His values and view of the world were far more rigid than hers. He needed things from Buffy that she could not provide at that point in her life. I honestly think she would have had the same problems with Angel. Riley needed to be the hero, he needed to be in control - the dominant partner. You see it in his by-play with Sam in As You Were - Sam is in the subordinate position. She's his partner, but he takes the lead, and she joined his unit, his team. As his friend Graham states - do you want to be the mission or the mission's boyfriend? Angel ironically made the same exact decision in I Will Always Remember You - when given the choice to be Buffy's boyfriend/her lover or to be the champion/the mission? He chose the latter. And he chose not to let her remember any of it or even to really have the time to stop him from doing it. In Into the Woods - Riley more or less does the same thing. He makes his decision and gives Buffy relatively little time to stop him or come to grips with it. She can't stop him any more than she could stop Angel. Except Angel may be bit kinder in that he saves her from the guilt, as Riley is a little bit kinder in telling her what he is doing and not choosing for her. Riley does at least give her the option to stop him. Angel never does.
This brings us to Spike. A lot has been written regarding the controversial Buffy/Spike relationship in S6 and S7 of the series. In S6 it is definitely a Bad Romance. With all the trappings. Fanfic writers attempt to rewrite that season - to find ways of reconciling bits and pieces of it. I've read numerous versions, each depicting how the relationship would have worked if Spike had not gotten a soul and Buffy decided to have an actual relationship with him.
In the most recent fic I've read, Darkapple's Imitation of A Man - Spike and Buffy are whisked away to another dimension at the end of Dead Things. In this dimension they meet not one but two versions of Spike. One is William - the man - before he was turned. The other is Rebel - a version of Spike that was turned by Angelus and never loved Drusilla. They are whisked there on a bet - Buffy, to stop the Lord of Vampires from taking Spike back to hell because he appears to be defective (he hasn't drunk human blood or killed for more than a year due to the chip), bets the Lord that Spike is more than capable of doing something nasty. So they are whisked there. If Spike fails to kill the human William, Buffy is stuck in the other dimension and Spike is whisked back to hell.
The story has all the trappings of a bad romance. Buffy beats up Spike. Spike loves her no matter what. Buffy thinks Spike is killing again and fears loving or trusting him. He bends over backwards to plead his innocence. And so it goes. There are some rather funny bits - I almost busted a gut laughing at Ganral, Lord of Vampires, describing Spike's killing habits. Apparently instead of killing a human, Spike choloroforms a whole series of humans, in order to kill an East India Trader's pet moongoose. The only fight he has is with the pet moongoose. (This made me laugh.) There's also a rather funny bit - when Dawn finds out that Buffy attempted to claim/resire Spike - which is far too long to reproduce here - so go: http://darkapple.livejournal.com/25026.html (to read it). (Which almost needs to be read to be truly appreciated. I laughed really hard. The writer truly makes fun of the whole claiming bit in romantic fiction.)
At times, Imitiation feels like a satire. The depictions of William are reminiscent of the penny-dreadful novels that we are told he is reading. And his blind devotion to Buffy speaks more of lust or mere idol worship than love. William's love for Buffy reminds me of Buffy's love for Angel -about as substantial as a cloud or passing rainbow after a storm. He wants to die when he kisses her. He wants to devote his whole self to her. She makes him "heartsick". It is to a degree all about him. He does not see Buffy, so much as he sees what he desires. His fantasy. Spike is much the same way. In Dead Things - Buffy is in the alley, getting up the courage to turn herself in for killing Katerina. She believes, as does Spike, that she killed Katrina. Their disagreement is not whether she did it, but whether she should have to pay for it. Spike could care less about Katerina. Even if Buffy deliberately killed Katerina, he'd still be in the alley, still blocking her path, he'd still hide the body. He does not understand her guilt. It's not that he is incapable of guilt. He does feel it. But he is incapable of feeling guilty regarding the death of a stranger or someone he is not directly connected to. Spike is not a strict sociopath - he can feel. He just doesn't have a moral compass. Why Buffy is upset about Katrina - makes no sense to him. He would however understand why she'd be guilt-ridden over killing someone close to her or to him. His love is selfish. His actions selfish. Most people's are, actually.
What is established early on - is Spike's view of love is possession. It is again the bad romance. He wants her ugly, he wants her disease, he wants her revenge...it's all emotion. Pure poetry. Hearts and flowers. And to an extent, we all crave that - wild passion. It can be freeing. To devour someone else. In the series, Buffy eventually does the right thing - and attempts to break things off clean with him. Realizing that she can not love him, that she is merely hurting him and herself.
The question so many of the fanfics pose regarding this relationship is if human beings like Buffy do horrible things with souls, why does Spike need one. Perhaps a better question is not that they do horrible things with or without souls, but the degree to which they do them. It often comes done to a matter of degree. Ensouled, Spike realizes their relationship could not work - that she did not love him and was using him to deal with her own pain. He gains her trust and love in the Seventh Season, and also gains an understanding of what selfless love is - the ability to let someone go or to stay and help them, without needing something in return. To love as he states in Touched, without requiring a response. Not using love as a weapon or a tool to acquire what one wants. Without a soul, he is all emotion, all fury, he wants. It is the difference between someone ruled by their own desires, what they want over all else, and someone who realizes that sometimes what we want...is harmful to someone else. Temperance.
Buffy knows, even at the end of Darkapple's tale, that their relationship can't work. She knows as does he, that she can never truly trust him. With her perhaps. But not really with anyone else. And yes, trust is a delicate thing in any event...soul or no soul...but in most cases, not all, but about 85% of them, people with a moral compass don't kill.
Vampires. Why the fascination in romantic fiction? We go from Bram Stoker's depiction of the vampire - a seductive evil that insinuates his way into his victim's life and sucks it dry, turning the victim into a ghoulish creature like himself to Stephenie Meyer's sparkling vampires who play baseball, frolic, and can walk in the sunshine. The only thing the two have in common is they don't die, well not easily at any rate and not unless something or someone deliberately kills them.
Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - stated during a Q&A at the Secular Humanist Society, that vampires are a metaphor for the necessity of death, to give life meaning. Without death, we don't fully appreciate life. Or others lives. Mortality makes us human, it gives our lives purpose, and an outline. It is something we all share. I remember reading somewhere - I think it was from the writer of the Life of Pi, that death wishes to devour life, loves life, envies life, wants to possess life, stalks life. But life drifts from its grasp.
Spike is S6 reminds me a great deal of that metaphor. Their dance feels like a dance between life and death. Buffy wants to die, she is literally dancing with death, over and over again she throws herself into its arms, but death can't take her - because in doing so, death extinguishes the very thing he wants to possess. It's a bad romance - both characters can't have what they want. Buffy wants death. Spike wants life. She wants the fire, but doesn't want to be burned. He wants it to, and seems not to care if he gets burned. This can't end well.
Nor does it. In Whedon's series - Spike does go up in flames, the flame of his love, his very soul amplified a million times over, literally consumes him. He is consumed by his own love, which consumes all the evil in the room, leaving Buffy alone to race out of the falling debris, to live. He does it twice. First in Once More With Feeling - when he stops her from burning up and states - you have to live, so one of us is living. Life is hard, but better than this.
In some respects their dance is the bookend to her dance with Angel. When she kisses Angel she wants to die, when she goes to kiss Spike, she wants to die, then suddenly live.
Both are bad romances, both end badly, but for different reasons. In one Angel - leaves because he knows if he stays, she will be consumed by flames, killed by his hand. In the other - Spike goes up in flames, is consumed, and in some respects killed by her hand.
The Spike/Buffy romance ends much the same way as Lady Gaga's video does...with the guy up in smoke and the girl riding off into the sunset, finally free. Many fanfics regardless of the pairing, be it Spike and Buffy or Buffy and Angel, try to imagine a different ending - where Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolode live happily ever after, even if one of the two is dead, well mostly dead, and has a craving for human blood, yet it is still a bad romance a la the song below. Filled with longing, yearning, and pain. We want the fantasy, so well depicted in Lady Gaga's video below - yet in her vid, as in reality, the fantasy ends in flames.
After finishing Darkapple's Imitation of A Man this morning...I realized something about the difference in fanfic, many vampire gothic romance novels, and the Whedon Television Series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
It can be summed up rather nicely in the following lyrics from a Lady Gaga number entitled Bad Romance
I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything, so long as it's free, I want your love, love, love, love, I want your love, I want your drama, the touch of your hand, I want your leather studded kiss in the sand, I want your love, love love love, I want your love, you know that I you, and you know that I need you, I want it bad, a bad romance, I want your love and, I want your revenge, you and me could write a bad romance, I want your love, and all your lover's revenge, you and me could write a bad romance, oh oh oh, caught in a bad romance
The Bad Romance - and I don't mean bad in the idea of badly written or poorly scripted, but bad as in the type of romance that is all drama, storm and drange, wild and passion, burning love, desire...where the lover's die for one another, or yearn, and forget all else. Which works quite nicely in a romance novel - something written by Rosemary Rodgers, Laurell K. Hamilton, or Stephanie Meyer or even Shakespeare - where the lover's die or ride off into the sunset, happy, without dealing with the painful reality of it.
There's actually really good bit of dialogue in the Buffy Series, but it is unfortunately overshadowed by the scene that comes immediately after it - even though that scene and those that follow emphasize every word and validate every word spoken, as have all the scenes before it including those in the first four seasons.
BUFFY: (calmer) I have feelings for you. I do. But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to be love.
SPIKE: (laughing) Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. (Buffy rolling her eyes) Great love is wild ... and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.
BUFFY: Until there's nothing left. Love like that doesn't last.
The words the heroine, Buffy, states to her lover, Spike, are those that come from experience. She's been caught in more than one bad romance. Appears to be doomed to replay the same moves, over and over, just with different partners, and it never gets any easier. Each partner, if anything, seems better suited to her, she cares even more about them, and losing them - hurts even more. Love...love...love..it's become a choke in her throat.
The first, Ford - her first crush, reunites with her later in the episode Lie to Me - which in some respects states the same message stated above. In Lie to Me, a teenage Buffy fancies herself in love with Angel, but she doesn't know who he is. She trusts him, but should she? Her trust is the trust of an adolescent, more hormone driven then anything else.
During the course of the episode, she is given multiple reasons not to trust Angel, each of which she discards. First she spies him with Drusilla, a female vampire. Then later, finds out from Angel himself who Drusilla is and what he did to her, how he made Drusilla. It's a warning, which Buffy discards. The warning is emphasized by her relationship with Ford, her first crush, a guy who in some respects isn't all that different from Angel - older than she was, popular with the girls, a jock. And he's dying of a brain tumor, so Ford decides to use what he figured out about Buffy, along with Buffy's feelings for him, to bargain for eternal life. He tricks Buffy into entering a vault with a bunch of other willing victims, deluded souls who have romanticized vampires. She only manages to escape by threatening to end Drusilla's life - Drusilla is the love of Spike, and Spike - Buffy quickly figures out is as enamored of Dru as she is of Angel. He would die for Dru, at least at this point. He lets Buffy and everyone go. Except for Ford - who he turns into a vampire, well aware that Buffy will slay him come morning. The episode ends with a conversation between Giles and Buffy, Buffy wanting Giles to tell her that the world is not this complicated, this painful. And he sighs, in compassion. And lies.
This episode is a percursor to the ones that follow - Innocence, the aptly named episode where Buffy discovers who Angel is, without the soul, without the curse. A monster. She tells herself throughout the series that Angelus is not Angel. It wasn't you. Rationalizing her love for him. Lying to herself. Because of course, as Angelus himself states, and Spike, and all who have known Angel as both Angelus and Angel - on an intimate basis - it is him. Angelus is merely Angel without a moral compass or soul. That's it. Angelus is Angel without the guilt. Turn off the guilt and you have Angelus.
LJ Rahriah - in her WIP fanfic - Parliament of Monsters actually writes a rather decent characterization of Angel, which I think comes relatively close to the series intentions:
They all forgot--even he, sometimes--that Angel hadn't sprung full-grown from the forehead of Angelus, just add soul and stir. No, he'd built Angel with his bare hands: forged a new self out of guilt and misery and the least promising of raw materials, day by day, year by laborious year. Liam of Galway had never been a good man, in life or in death, with a soul or without one. Once upon a time he hadn't been an evil one, and that was the highest goal he could conceive for himself after his soul had been thrust back upon him.
In Buffy's arms he had believed, for the first time in two and a half centuries, that he could aspire to more than simply not evil. No mere girl could give him that, but Buffy was no mere girl.
[Chapter 5, POM, from http://www.allaboutspike.com/chapter.html?id=712&expid=1487]
But Buffy has romanticized Angel, much as have others, for many of the same reasons. He is every young girl's fantasy and I include myself in that depiction - the hulking hero, strong, brutal, dangerous, mysterious - could kill with a smile, but never you. Older. The Father but not the father - not related at all, yet he is older than you and therein lies the taboo. You know nothing about him, but you love him. And when you kiss him, you just want to die, to be swallowed up whole. He's our celebrity crushes, his visage sits on the posters in our rooms. When David Boreanze was cast in the role - he was cast purely for his good looks. They were hunting for a guy who was tall, dark, handsome, and had a wicked smile. The casting agent found him walking his dog in her neighborhood and took a picture then passed it around and all the women at work, fawned over him. His acting skills such as they were - came as a surprise. (This is in the commentary of at least three of the Series DVDS).
But theirs is a bad romance. Angel almost kills her more than once. Their first kiss - he turns into a vampire and she screams. They sleep together - and he wakes him with a taste for human blood, kills a woman on the street, and then attempts to kill everyone else. She sends him to hell - but with a kiss. He comes back, ferocious, she tames him, but only to discover that he can play the role of Angelus far too well for it to be someone else. He gets poisoned, she saves him but only by almost killing herself. It's Romeo and Juliet, except with superpowers and the ability to destroy the world. When he finally leaves, he continues to haunt her, stalking in the mists, a foggy presence just outside her range of vision. Never quite gone, but never quite there either - perhaps he never was. That's the problem with first loves or lusts, they always remain out of reach. We touch them, come too close and they become dust. By the time she falls for Riley, Buffy has come to the horrid realization that being around Angel is akin to having her skin ripped off repeatedly. He will always hurt her. And she will always hurt him. This is made apparent in the episodes I Will Always Remember You and Sancturary, as well as Pangs and Yoko Factor.
Yet, we like the fantasy. The idea that it could work. Or just to watch it play out.
Buffy/Riley was no better. The issues Buffy faced with Angel and Ford, were repeated with Riley. The perfect boyfriend. He was Angel, but without the drama or the baggage, without the fangs. Older, smart, big, muscular, handsome, the popular guy - the jock. A man's man. She could take him out on double dates with Xander. Or hang out with Willow. He was safe to bring home to Mom. She didn't have to worry about him killing anyone. Trust should not have been an issue. Yet, it still was. Their romance quickly soured, and became the Bad Romance. He was part of an organization that Buffy could not trust or respect. His values and view of the world were far more rigid than hers. He needed things from Buffy that she could not provide at that point in her life. I honestly think she would have had the same problems with Angel. Riley needed to be the hero, he needed to be in control - the dominant partner. You see it in his by-play with Sam in As You Were - Sam is in the subordinate position. She's his partner, but he takes the lead, and she joined his unit, his team. As his friend Graham states - do you want to be the mission or the mission's boyfriend? Angel ironically made the same exact decision in I Will Always Remember You - when given the choice to be Buffy's boyfriend/her lover or to be the champion/the mission? He chose the latter. And he chose not to let her remember any of it or even to really have the time to stop him from doing it. In Into the Woods - Riley more or less does the same thing. He makes his decision and gives Buffy relatively little time to stop him or come to grips with it. She can't stop him any more than she could stop Angel. Except Angel may be bit kinder in that he saves her from the guilt, as Riley is a little bit kinder in telling her what he is doing and not choosing for her. Riley does at least give her the option to stop him. Angel never does.
This brings us to Spike. A lot has been written regarding the controversial Buffy/Spike relationship in S6 and S7 of the series. In S6 it is definitely a Bad Romance. With all the trappings. Fanfic writers attempt to rewrite that season - to find ways of reconciling bits and pieces of it. I've read numerous versions, each depicting how the relationship would have worked if Spike had not gotten a soul and Buffy decided to have an actual relationship with him.
In the most recent fic I've read, Darkapple's Imitation of A Man - Spike and Buffy are whisked away to another dimension at the end of Dead Things. In this dimension they meet not one but two versions of Spike. One is William - the man - before he was turned. The other is Rebel - a version of Spike that was turned by Angelus and never loved Drusilla. They are whisked there on a bet - Buffy, to stop the Lord of Vampires from taking Spike back to hell because he appears to be defective (he hasn't drunk human blood or killed for more than a year due to the chip), bets the Lord that Spike is more than capable of doing something nasty. So they are whisked there. If Spike fails to kill the human William, Buffy is stuck in the other dimension and Spike is whisked back to hell.
The story has all the trappings of a bad romance. Buffy beats up Spike. Spike loves her no matter what. Buffy thinks Spike is killing again and fears loving or trusting him. He bends over backwards to plead his innocence. And so it goes. There are some rather funny bits - I almost busted a gut laughing at Ganral, Lord of Vampires, describing Spike's killing habits. Apparently instead of killing a human, Spike choloroforms a whole series of humans, in order to kill an East India Trader's pet moongoose. The only fight he has is with the pet moongoose. (This made me laugh.) There's also a rather funny bit - when Dawn finds out that Buffy attempted to claim/resire Spike - which is far too long to reproduce here - so go: http://darkapple.livejournal.com/25026.html (to read it). (Which almost needs to be read to be truly appreciated. I laughed really hard. The writer truly makes fun of the whole claiming bit in romantic fiction.)
At times, Imitiation feels like a satire. The depictions of William are reminiscent of the penny-dreadful novels that we are told he is reading. And his blind devotion to Buffy speaks more of lust or mere idol worship than love. William's love for Buffy reminds me of Buffy's love for Angel -about as substantial as a cloud or passing rainbow after a storm. He wants to die when he kisses her. He wants to devote his whole self to her. She makes him "heartsick". It is to a degree all about him. He does not see Buffy, so much as he sees what he desires. His fantasy. Spike is much the same way. In Dead Things - Buffy is in the alley, getting up the courage to turn herself in for killing Katerina. She believes, as does Spike, that she killed Katrina. Their disagreement is not whether she did it, but whether she should have to pay for it. Spike could care less about Katerina. Even if Buffy deliberately killed Katerina, he'd still be in the alley, still blocking her path, he'd still hide the body. He does not understand her guilt. It's not that he is incapable of guilt. He does feel it. But he is incapable of feeling guilty regarding the death of a stranger or someone he is not directly connected to. Spike is not a strict sociopath - he can feel. He just doesn't have a moral compass. Why Buffy is upset about Katrina - makes no sense to him. He would however understand why she'd be guilt-ridden over killing someone close to her or to him. His love is selfish. His actions selfish. Most people's are, actually.
What is established early on - is Spike's view of love is possession. It is again the bad romance. He wants her ugly, he wants her disease, he wants her revenge...it's all emotion. Pure poetry. Hearts and flowers. And to an extent, we all crave that - wild passion. It can be freeing. To devour someone else. In the series, Buffy eventually does the right thing - and attempts to break things off clean with him. Realizing that she can not love him, that she is merely hurting him and herself.
The question so many of the fanfics pose regarding this relationship is if human beings like Buffy do horrible things with souls, why does Spike need one. Perhaps a better question is not that they do horrible things with or without souls, but the degree to which they do them. It often comes done to a matter of degree. Ensouled, Spike realizes their relationship could not work - that she did not love him and was using him to deal with her own pain. He gains her trust and love in the Seventh Season, and also gains an understanding of what selfless love is - the ability to let someone go or to stay and help them, without needing something in return. To love as he states in Touched, without requiring a response. Not using love as a weapon or a tool to acquire what one wants. Without a soul, he is all emotion, all fury, he wants. It is the difference between someone ruled by their own desires, what they want over all else, and someone who realizes that sometimes what we want...is harmful to someone else. Temperance.
Buffy knows, even at the end of Darkapple's tale, that their relationship can't work. She knows as does he, that she can never truly trust him. With her perhaps. But not really with anyone else. And yes, trust is a delicate thing in any event...soul or no soul...but in most cases, not all, but about 85% of them, people with a moral compass don't kill.
Vampires. Why the fascination in romantic fiction? We go from Bram Stoker's depiction of the vampire - a seductive evil that insinuates his way into his victim's life and sucks it dry, turning the victim into a ghoulish creature like himself to Stephenie Meyer's sparkling vampires who play baseball, frolic, and can walk in the sunshine. The only thing the two have in common is they don't die, well not easily at any rate and not unless something or someone deliberately kills them.
Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - stated during a Q&A at the Secular Humanist Society, that vampires are a metaphor for the necessity of death, to give life meaning. Without death, we don't fully appreciate life. Or others lives. Mortality makes us human, it gives our lives purpose, and an outline. It is something we all share. I remember reading somewhere - I think it was from the writer of the Life of Pi, that death wishes to devour life, loves life, envies life, wants to possess life, stalks life. But life drifts from its grasp.
Spike is S6 reminds me a great deal of that metaphor. Their dance feels like a dance between life and death. Buffy wants to die, she is literally dancing with death, over and over again she throws herself into its arms, but death can't take her - because in doing so, death extinguishes the very thing he wants to possess. It's a bad romance - both characters can't have what they want. Buffy wants death. Spike wants life. She wants the fire, but doesn't want to be burned. He wants it to, and seems not to care if he gets burned. This can't end well.
Nor does it. In Whedon's series - Spike does go up in flames, the flame of his love, his very soul amplified a million times over, literally consumes him. He is consumed by his own love, which consumes all the evil in the room, leaving Buffy alone to race out of the falling debris, to live. He does it twice. First in Once More With Feeling - when he stops her from burning up and states - you have to live, so one of us is living. Life is hard, but better than this.
In some respects their dance is the bookend to her dance with Angel. When she kisses Angel she wants to die, when she goes to kiss Spike, she wants to die, then suddenly live.
Both are bad romances, both end badly, but for different reasons. In one Angel - leaves because he knows if he stays, she will be consumed by flames, killed by his hand. In the other - Spike goes up in flames, is consumed, and in some respects killed by her hand.
The Spike/Buffy romance ends much the same way as Lady Gaga's video does...with the guy up in smoke and the girl riding off into the sunset, finally free. Many fanfics regardless of the pairing, be it Spike and Buffy or Buffy and Angel, try to imagine a different ending - where Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolode live happily ever after, even if one of the two is dead, well mostly dead, and has a craving for human blood, yet it is still a bad romance a la the song below. Filled with longing, yearning, and pain. We want the fantasy, so well depicted in Lady Gaga's video below - yet in her vid, as in reality, the fantasy ends in flames.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 09:49 pm (UTC)OTH, in some respects a bad romance is in the eye of the beholder. I've occasionally asked friends of mine who ship B/A to beta scenes involving Angel and Buffy for me, and their interpretation of those scenes can be radically different from the betas who ship B/S.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 12:22 am (UTC)There's quite a bit of truth in that. Which is why discussing Buffy's relationships is akin to discussing politics and religion at times. ;-)
People think differently and focus on different things. I remember someone showing me two vids they did - the first was Buffy/Angel and showed the couple only kissing. (The vidder ignored all the fight scenes, all the horrible bits of their relationship - almost as if those bits never existed. I found myself politely nodding my head and biting my tongue. They obviously did the same thing while watching the series. Saw what they wanted to see.) The second was Spike/Buffy - vid, where the only scenes the vidder showed were of Spike and Buffy fighting, nothing else. The vidder turned to me, proud, and smugly stated along with another B/A shipper - see, isn't it interesting that Spike and Buffy always just fight and Buffy and Angel always kiss? And I remember rolling my eyes and saying very nice vids. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get some punch. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 03:53 am (UTC)Curious what you said about Angel thinking Buffy's slow slide into darkness being Spike's fault? Where's the textual support for that?
Because, I can't recall ever hearing Angel say that or see it implied that he thought it anywhere in the series or in the Buffy comics or the Angel comics for that matter.
No where in either series does Angel EVER think or directly state that Buffy's relationship with Spike is responsible for her slow slide into darkness. Actually no one states that. Not even Xander states that. The only place I've seen that is a)fanfic and b)meta interpretations.
I can't help but wonder if after a while, we all start to blend the fanfiction, interviews, commentaries and interpretations we've read or written with what was on the show and forget which is which. ;-)
Angel most likely wouldn't think that - because Angel doesn't know anything about Buffy's slow slide into darkness, he's not in her life and knows nothing about it (fans forget that - they had little to no contact after their quick get together between Flooded and Life Serial). He knows zip about what is going on, just as Buffy knows zip about him. Not that he doesn't have his own issues plus he isn't exactly in a position to judge Spike or Buffy, which Angel would be the first to state and has.
It's a bit illogical to blame Spike for Buffy's slide, not that she actually slides that far. All she really does is a lot of S&M sex with Spike (hardly dark), beat up Spike (which she did prior to S6 and long before they were in a relationship), ignore her whiny sister (also long before S6), play invisibility games (she'd have done that in S5 and Spike calls her on it), and try to kill her friends while under the influence of hallucingentic/psychodelic drugs (which had nothing to do with Spike and she was broken up with him at that point, granted he may have pissed her off enough not to drink Willow's antidote, but it's not he hasn't said stuff like that before.). Willow and Xander do more horrible things in that season than Buffy did. And they aren't involved with Spike. So, you can't blame Spike for Buffy, unless you want to blame Anya and Tara for Willow and Xander...the argument just doesn't hold water. Also unlike Buffy, they have no excuse, they didn't get drug back from heaven. No Buffy's slide to darkness - had to do with the fact that she died and was pulled back from heaven. Spike was just her way of coping with it - albeit badly. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:04 am (UTC)I had a long bit on the soul, but I'm rather glad I lost it. I more or less agree with you on it.
I see where others are coming from. But the soul arc has problems, because I'm unconvinced that the writers bought that Spike needed a soul to be good. You almost get the feeling they are arguing with themselves over it.
I was happy that Spike got a soul - because I find him more interesting with one, just as I found Angel more interesting without. It was the layer that we didn't see - what lay underneath, the part both characters are hiding. Angel is introduced as this straight-up, noble protector, the mysterious batman like hero. When in reality he was the equivalent of Buffy's Professor Moriarity. A fiend who spent over a century turning people into monsters. He created Spike and Dru - and consider them to be his greatest accomplishments. That's a great twist. The only thing that keeps him from being that again is a gypsey curse or so we're told. When we travel with him into his own series - we see that the lines between Angel and Angelus are far more blurred. Spike is the opposite - he is presented as the ultimate big bad, a professor moriarity type fiend, a killer of slayers, who won't stop until everyone is dead - yet we learn that he's really just a fool for love who is playing the role of big bad.
Most of his evil is bluff. Words. Granted he's done horrible things.
But the great twist is he becomes the reluctant hero, helping Buffy, and Angel tries to destroy and kill everyone. You give Spike the soul and you get at that part of him he is working so hard to hide, to overcome, he is trying to not be William, while Angel is trying not to be Angelus/Liam. It's rather fascinating. Because the question becomes - not whether or not you need a soul to be good, but what will it take for Angel to become a better man than he was to rise above the evil person he once was, and what will it take for Spike to go back to the good man, the good person who cared about others that he once was - the person he attempted to erase. I find that interesting.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 07:15 am (UTC)To me Spike is a more interesting character (at least to write) without a soul... but I've always felt that the "Does Spike need a soul?" argument is kind of irrelevant. The answer depends totally on what he needs the soul for. If your goal is a working relationship between Spike and Buffy, then giving Spike a soul certainly makes it much easier. If your goal is for Spike to be capable of pure altruism, then absolutely, he needs a soul. If your goal is to have Spike work with the good guys, giving him a soul is an option but not a necessity. Etc.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 06:52 am (UTC)It's very confusing mixing fanfic and canon analysis in one post...
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 03:42 pm (UTC)Not necessarily.
As rahirhah points out below - there are such things as drabbles which focus on one tiny bit. I've also read a long fanfic that only focused on the people that Spike killed and how they felt about it. We saw nothing else. It was a brilliantly written fanfic. Each victim's voice clear as a bell.
Another long fanfic I read once focused solely on the Buffy/Angel smoochies, and another on Spike/Buffy smoochies. We got very little of the character we know in the series. A third was a grudge fic and only showed the negative sides of the characters the writer despised. I read a fic once that was just sex, nothing else. Another that was just the characters sitting around reading fanfic about themselves - which presented the writer's views regarding fanfic and her views regarding each of those ships.
Meta is no different. You can write a meta that only focuses on the good qualities of Buffy and Spike or the bad qualities. Or just on one small aspect of the series that fascinates you. I've written a wide variety. In the meta above I focused primarily on the bad in each of these relationships - showing the bad romance element.
I've also seen vids that act as metas - there's one I believe that aycheb did on slayer mythology. And another by Stormwreath on the same topic.
So no, you don't have to cover every aspect.
You are correct we do focus on what stands out in the relationship for us, what turns us on or off as the case may be. If you are squicked by Buffy and Spike - you'll focus on what squicked you. If you are squicked by Buffy and Angel you'll focus on that. And often, I think, whatever that thing is, it is deeply personal - which is why we get so many kerfuffles. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 05:05 pm (UTC)My first inclination is to agree with you - and I certainly have posted similar views in the past. There's vids that promote only the negative aspects of a character - pushing the view, how can you like this character - look what he did? And those vids...make me think of political commericials or placement ads or propaganda - where the creator is using visual images to persuade.
But, I have seen vids that do more than that. Vids that actually do show nuance. Granted it is hard to do. Requires more time. And effort.
Look at Lady Gaga's vid above - very complicated video. Or there is a video floating around with huge Buffy S8 spoilers regarding Twilight, that is equally complicated with lots of nuance and to a Lady Gaga song.
While my inclination is to say, yes, vids tend to be well like a haiku poem, with less nuance and to the point. I've seen vids that make me think of a sonnet.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 12:33 am (UTC)I've noticed that this is true of a lot of fantasy/science fiction tv shows, particularly soap operas. Not so much regular non-fantasy dramas. You see functional relationships on shows such as Modern Family, Grey's Anatomy, Brothers & Sisters, House, Bones, etc.
Of course BTVS is a horror show - and Whedon goes for the horror.
Which makes sense. He even states as much in the commentary and in interviews - that he prefers to examine the horrific aspects of a relationship gone sour. So functional relationship sort of goes against the genre.
Also, interestingly enough? Ratings rose when they broke up Angel and Buffy. Innocence - high ratings. The episodes where they were all happy and things were going great? Such as all the ones before that? Low ratings. Same deal with Buffy/Riley - split them up - high ratings. Together and happy? Low ratings. Buffy/Spike - the ratings were high in S6 during the Spuffy bits.
So...the people who liked the functional happy relationships? Were either not being counted by the network or were in the minority. Or so the writers stated in interviews. They found it fascinating.
Whedon stated - we discovered early on that people were more interested in the angst. Buffy and Angel together was apparently boring.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 12:37 am (UTC)I see them every where. I don't want to watch them on tv. Boring.
I want the what-if scenarios...conflict, and what I don't see in reality.
I think that to a degree is true of most of us. We don't want the bad romance in reality, but it is fun to fantasy about it. (Which is what Lady Gaga's video - I think - gets across.)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 11:43 pm (UTC)I found this interesting but have no thoughts of my own to add.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:06 am (UTC)I'm much the same way. It's why I don't always respond.
Also, I'm learning that I get in trouble when I respond too quickly. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:28 am (UTC)Just as a change of pace, for the sake of variety or suspence, it would be nice if we didn't know going in that it would almost certainly end in catastrophe (and I'm not just talking Buffy and her vampires).
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:55 am (UTC)You aren't wrong.
He does have a tendency to rely to heavily on character death as a plot twist or drama. He goes for the emotional melodrama.
It's a definite weakness in his stories.
Doctor Horrible felt rather cliche - when she died. It would have been stronger - if she just left both of them. Instead her death motivates him to be evil? Shrugs.
And in Firefly - he needed the death for what - emotional catharsis? To make the battle feel real? Then why not kill off
someone else? Granted everyone was coupled. But he had already killed off Shepard Book.
Same deal with Buffy - Anya's death was needed to make the battle real - so I understood that. And Spike's well for the arc and metaphor - that made sense. Tara's to make Willow go dark - although it would have been more interesting if she'd gone dark without out that happening (as I've recently seen done to great effect in fanfic.). Angel? I would have preferred that they didn't kill Wesley. I forgave the Fred death - because I prefer Illyria - much more interesting character. Cordy...there was a backstage reason for that, and no it had nothing to do with her pregnancy and everything to do with the fact that she was impossible to work with. (Apparently the network told Whedon he had to do something to get rid of Cordy and Greenwalt who were costing the network oodles of money by unnecessary delays in production and diva trips - that was the scoop I got from someone whose best bud was a production assistant on the set. I didn't believe the guy, until all the spoilers he gave me came true, and the commentary verified the story plots that didn't air that he told me about. Charisma is apparently a bit too much like the BTVS version of Cordy in real life. I don't care. She's not the first or last actor/actress to be difficult to deal with - Boreanze was allegedly, and so was Dustin Hoffman, and not everyone is fond of Whedon. Reminds me of my own workplace experiences. Like it or not, we don't get to choose our work colleagues. We're sort of stuck with them. ;-))
That said, I think Whedon is a bit obsessed with death - which to be fair, he admits. He did say that death was his obsession. He'd lost someone very important to him (his mother) and was obsessed with death and fearful of it. And a lot of his writing dealt with that.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 07:42 pm (UTC)That said, I think that Joss goes to the death well a bit too readily a bit too often. As a Spike fan, I hated Spike's death. But that's emotional. Intellectually, I can understand the reasoning for it and think it made a lot of sense. That said, I'm not uniformly thrilled with its execution.
And, in isolation, it makes some sense why the deaths were chosen. It's when looking at the canvas as a whole that it becomes overkill because it follows the same pattern so many times.
It's a bit like the ratings drop at "Hells Bells". I don't think that that many people were upset over Xander/Anya breaking up. But coming on top of an already morbidly depressing season, it became a straw that broke a lot of viewers backs. It was "What? Is no one allowed any happiness?"
I think that while angst and trauma definitely provide grist for the fictional mill, that if it's the only note being hit, it too becomes repetitive. Okay, so maybe the front burner story is sturm und drang. But maybe one of the second or third tier stories shouldn't be. There has to be a bit of deviation to provide some contrast. Otherwise it becomes a rather monochromatic palette.
Riley Thoughts
Date: 2010-02-21 04:48 am (UTC)Trust should not have been an issue. Yet, it still was.
It's always an issue, but in this case it wasn't until Buffy became aware that The Initiative wasn't as clean and wholesome as her beau. The trust issues then developed for Riley when Riley was forced to choose between Buffy and "his people". Do recall that in the end, he chose Buffy.
Their romance quickly soured.
Not really. Whedon wrote the space between seasons in "real time", that is, 3 or 4 months. Buffy and Riley were lovers for nearly a year or more. Compared to one night for Buffy & Angel, and a few months at best for Buffy & Spike. Both of the latter ships were severely dysfunctional.
He needed things from Buffy that she could not provide at that point in her life.
This was the real problem in the end, but the way Whedon dealt with it used a very atypical role-reversal, which leads me to:
Riley needed to be the hero, he needed to be in control - the dominant partner.
Here I disagree. Like Spike, when he was with Buffy, he was the submissive partner. A lot of the confusion between them is that when she was with Riley, Buffy was torn between playing the submissive female role her society had prepared her for and playing the more natural dominant role her Slayer side had revealed in her. If she had played closer to that role, and Riley had played closer to a submissive one, things might have been vary different. Much of their relationship was Whedon flipping the "normal" male/female roles and showing how each character profoundly didn't know how to deal with that reversal.
In the end, their relationship was doomed, as all Whedon relationships seem to be, but it was in reality not only the longest relationship, but the least dysfunctional by far.
Re: Riley Thoughts
Date: 2010-02-21 05:21 am (UTC)He also had a lot less baggage.
It was also the most boring of the relationships - which is the Doylian reason for why it did not last. Ratings dropped significantly during the Riley/Buffy arc. Season 4 was not a highly rated season, if I recall. And even my kidbrother told me that the character was lame. I liked Riley better than most people did. I actually like Riley quite a bit. And I sort of was annoyed when they wrote him out. I did not like how they wrote him in AYW.
But then I didn't like As You Were - poorly constructed, directed and written. Riley deserved better. ;-) Nor do I like how he is being written in the comics - which is rather boring. Again Riley deserves better.
That said?
It was doomed partly because Riley could not handle being second-best in Buffy's life. And his way of handling it was much the same way her father handled Joyce - by leaving. The Riley/Buffy relationship reminds me a little of Joyce/Hank and I would not be at all surprised if the issues were similar.
Riley felt that Buffy did not trust him. Which was partly true.
Buffy couldn't trust Riley - not enough to let him in. She was struggling with who she was and what she needed. She was too young and too overwhelmed to handle the relationship he needed.
Riley needed Buffy to be there for him, to lean on him - and the truth is she'd been there, done that with Angel and was reluctant to do it again.
It was complicated relationship. I'm not sure if it was dysfunctional. Was it a bad romance? Debatable. I think you can argue it either way. I see it as a realistic bad romance and reminiscent of one's that I've seen myself. It is the romance we see the most often on tv shows. The only difference as you note, is the role reversal. In Riley/Buffy - Buffy takes on the dominant role - something Riley wasn't comfortable with. Spike is more comfortable with it than Buffy - but, Riley is correct in AYW when he states that Spike is opportunistic and amoral. That he will manipulate things to his own ends. Without a soul - that's what Spike will do. He's a criminal. Riley's an ex-cop.
Whedon repeats the Riley/Buffy story a bit with Ballard/Echo. The two relationships remind me quite a bit of each other, and may explain why I was somewhat detached during the latter.
It's hard to do that type of relationship well and I don't think Whedon knows how to pull it off. It's not his style. He is better with bad romances. Note - the same thing with Angel - Fred/Gunn was actually fairly functional but boring as all get out.
Fred/Wes - also boring. Neither could last.
Other series do pull this off - notably BSG, and Whedon oddly enough pulled it off in Firefly with Wash/Zoe.
But with Buffy...it never quite worked. People say she didn't love Riley. I disagree. I think she did. But it couldn't work, because I think ultimately - Riley needed Buffy to give up more than she was ever willing to - in order to be with him. He chose her , but she never chose him. She wasn't willing to let him be a part of her mission or to share her mission with him. While she does choose to share her mission with Spike and did choose to share it with Angel. The reason she doesn't with Riley is fear that she'll lose him and fear that he'll see a part of her, she doesn't want him to see. In that sense it is dysfunctional but not melodramatically so, it is dysfunctional in a mundane way.
Re: Riley Thoughts
Date: 2010-02-21 05:24 am (UTC)Re: Riley Thoughts
Date: 2010-02-21 07:56 pm (UTC)(That said, I rather lost patience with him in the Initiative storyline. I had defended him to a friend up until he knew the truth of what was going on. But the episode where he was to react, I was substantially underwhelmed. Given the opportunity that was to make Riley interesting, and given that it actually... didn't. I was mostly ready for him to leave then.)