I've written before about this, but it seems like a good time to revisit:
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.
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branchandroot
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.