Shipping Spuffy ....whys and wherefores
Apr. 8th, 2012 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatAfter scanning Mark Watches ...picked up on a random comment about Spike and Buffy. I'm guessing he's spoiled on this relationship, because he feels the need to state that he can't see the two characters together and is really turned off by the pairing every time it is even remotely teased at in the series. Which oddly, grates on my nerves. Oddly, because what the heck do I care what this guy thinks?? This has resulted in a spate of navel gazing regarding ships and shipping and my own rather reluctant habits regarding both.
First off? I don't really actively ship relationships in TV series or books. And by "actively", I mean I generally don't read fanfic, get involved in fandoms, or write meta about them. Often I just go wherever the story takes me. Rarely disagree with it. Oh, I may ship the relationship or characters for a bit...but it passes. Generally speaking. The closest I came to writing fanfic prior to Buffy was an original story inspired by the Indiana Jones films, where I flipped the gender of the character. I entitled it Flight of the Falcon. The lead character was a female adventurer named Jade Falcon and it took place during WWII. Didn't read any fanfic or write any meta until Buffy. Of course I didn't know it existed either. The show started pre-internet in 1997. The internet in the late 90s was pretty much in its rudimentary stages.
While reading Mark's blog, I found myself thinking...okay how did I view the series back then? I only vaguely remember. It was to be fair over ten years ago. Almost 15 by my count. I know I was shipping Angel and Buffy. That I hung around during the first season for Angel primarily - I found him interesting. And during the second season for the Angelus storyline which blew me away at the time. I know this because I actually sought out websites to get spoilers back then. Bored at work and dissatisfied...it's what people often do, whether they want to admit it or not, and if their workplaces permit it. I also am pretty certain, not absolutely, that I did not become a Spike/Buffy shipper until long after the S5 episode Intervention. And I certainly didn't see that ship happening until Once More with Feeling when she literally shoves her tongue down his throat in perhaps the hottest kiss that I'd seen on the show. I was, however, a Spike shipper prior to that point. Spike interested me from day one. Just not a Spuffy one. As far as I remember. It's hard to know for certain. It's sort of like lovers trying to pin-point the exact moment they fell in love. Okay, that may not be the best analogy.
As near as I can figure there are about four or five different types of Spuffy shippers. Possibly more. I won't bore you by attempting to categorize all of them, hard to do in any event, people aren't as easy to categorize as one might think. The vast majority...tend to be female, between the ages of 30 and 60, identify more with Spike than with Buffy, and feel dis-enfranchized by the mainstream media who has basically told them since the get-go that their ship can't sail, is the abusive bad boyfriend, and is either deranged or not the one that the creator intended. In short, Buffy's one true love is Angel, case closed. And they are nitwits for wanting otherwise. Get on the Twilight band-wagon, already, the media seems to be stating. Not that I necessarily think Bangle and Twilight are the same, but they are a specific trope - that is popular with mainstream readers and watchers. The trope is older/experienced guy, powerful, knowledgable, wealthy and a control freak with either a dark secret, a dark past, or an abusive childhood - seduces younger girl, who is less experienced, and not wealthy and who saves him or heals him in some way. It's a partriachial trope for a patriachial world. Examples? Stefan/Elena, Angel/Buffy, Christian Grey/Anatasia, Edward/Bella, Dracula/Mina, Mr. Rochester/Jane Eyre, Cordelia/Angel, Fred/Wesely, Fred/Gunn, Echo/ What'shisname who played Helo (Ballard?) there are others. It's an old trope. I'm not belittling the trope. I liked it at one point. It's popular for a reason. I like to call it the Beauty and the Beast complex. It sort of goes back to that fairy tale, I think. Very popular with the 18-24 set. Also for some reason with successful career women and mothers in their 40s, if Shades of Grey is any indication.
Somewhere along the line I started shipping Spuffy. And...I'm not sure when it happened exactly, but I became weirdly obsessive about it. Like an insane NY Mets fan or Chicago Cubs fan, although I think the Cubs have actually won recently as have the Red Sox for that matter. The Met's are, however doomed. The Nationals are more likely to win at this rate than the NY Mets. Yet, at the same time, it didn't feel doomed to me. The Spuffy ship seemed to work on some level. Any more than the NY Mets seem doomed. I'm convinced they'll win someday. And damn the Yankees anyway. I keep rooting for that dumb team to lose. (It's the KC Royals and Phillies in my blood...I just can't root for those Damn Yankees. Sorry for the baseball analogy, it's really the only spectator sport outside of maybe Basketball and Soccer that I have any respect for. I don't like or understand Grid-Iron Football - its too male dominant, a sport for a patriachial world, men strategize, bash heads, go to war, while women shake their boobies on the sidelines with pom poms. Although, I would not be opposed to doing away with war entirely and just making everyone play football. At heart, I'm a baseball girl - it's how I was raised. My father raised me to love Baseball and Basketball. He routinely fell asleep or disappeared outside to rake leaves during football.)
Shipping online is a bit like rooting for sports teams or preferring one sport to another. It has that same insane loyalty to it. And I've never really been much of a strong sports fan, sort of ambivalent really. I rarely watch the games. Which is a good analogy, because I'm somewhat the same way, generally speaking about shipping. I didn't ship any of the relationships in any of Whedon's other shows. And only half heartedly did in other tv series - in that I read very little fanfic, didn't write much meta, etc. I honestly don't care who ends up with whom in TVD (Vamp Diaries) or any of the other tv series currently on. But for some bizarre reason the Spike/Buffy relationship was different. I don't know why. Was it the fandom? Was it the story? Was it the actors? Was it me? Was it how it was built up? Was it the internal dynamics of the relationship? How they wrote it?
I've lost interest in the detractors. I've heard all the arguments against the relationship. All the reasons people disliked it. I've argued it to death. And being a born devil's advocate, can argue both sides of the debate ad naseaum. I know why the relationship shouldn't work. I know why it offends people. Why it pushed their respective buttons. I know why people hate Spike or Spuffy, I know why they are offended. And I find myself at this stage incredibly bored by it all. Shoo, I think. Go away. To rain on my parade some other day. There's nothing you can say that I haven't argued myself or thought or read online in the last ten years. It's just...echoes now. And it feels at times...that's all we are doing with pop culture nowadays, just echoing each other.
How many different ways can you call the Spike/Buffy scenario the bad boyfriend or the abusive relationship? And yet, while I see that, at the same time...I don't think it quite fits inside that trope, in some respects the Angel/Buffy relationship fits it better. Because Spike unlike Angel isn't a top, he's a bottom. He's not the one in control of the relationship. He's not the one who breaks it off. And he's not the one who makes the decisions. She does. He's the femme fatale, the secret mistress, the damsel, the weaker party, not the other way around. That's why I got obsessed. They flipped it. And they NEVER do that on tv. Or if they do, it's pretty rare.
For as much as Mark and others goe on and on about how insanely cool and different Willow and Tara are, for me, at least, Spike/Buffy felt insanely cool and different, because of the weird gender flip. Whedon doesn't do this in any other series or work. So I can't quite decide if it was Whedon's idea or someone else's. Because I've never seen Whedon do it outside of Spike and Buffy. The closest he comes might be Xander and Andrew, but no they stay more or less within the trope of nerdy guy. William the Bloody...or Spike is a contradiction. He's set up as the sexual predator, the player, the guy who seduces the girl, and leaves her dead or wishing she was...yet, in S4, he's emasculated. He becomes the femme fatale. The confidante. The informer. The weaker sex. In S5, she saves him from a powerful female god, who is torturing him. A female god who in some respects represents the worst in Buffy herself - the popular, fashion obsessed, ditzy cheerleader. He can't save Buffy from Glory or herself. His role reminds me a lot of more of the bad girlfriend than the bad boyfriend. The bad femme fatale who takes the bullet for the male hero in all those pulp noir novels that I devoured as a youth. We also see him without his shirt a lot, in sexy clothes, looking like a sex kitten sprawled on his bed. He has the kinky cuffs, and the kinky candles. And on that excruciating date in Crush...he reminds me of the bad girl out of a 1940s Philip Marlow film or a Batman film...where she has a crush on the hero. Heck he reminds me a lot of Lilah in Angel S4 - who has had the ill luck of falling for Wes.
I've never seen anyone in any tv series flip a hot male character, a villain, a bad guy, and turn him into, well, the bad girl with a heart of gold. He's the girl in Angel too, by the way. He takes over Cordelia's role in that series with Angel. That entertained me as well. Although it is admittedly more subtle. You see it in his relationship with Illyria - who treats him like her pet as does Angel.
So the point that I became a shipper of the Spike/Buffy relationship may well have been when I picked up on the fact that Spike was playing the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. He is a lot like Faith in the series. That's why the two characters play off of each other so well. They are both the bad girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The misunderstood hooker with the heart of gold. Note he's not the misunderstood rouge, but the misunderstood hooker.
The only other series that I've seen flip gender roles this neatly was BSG with Kara Thrace who is the misunderstood rogue pilot with the heart of gold. Which is why I liked the Apollo/Starbuck relationship. Apollo plays the wholesome girl who desires this rogue pilot who won't settle down. Apollo in BSG2 is basically Athena from BSG1 with the hots for Starbuck, who is busy playing the field. So gives up finally and marries someone else, but still can't get over Starbuck. If Starbuck had been male and Apollo female? I wouldn't have been interested. Same with Spike and Buffy, if Spike had been female and Buffy had been male? Yawn. (Which by the way was what Angel the series did, they went the traditional route. As did Firefly. Mal was male, Inara was female. It worked better and was lot more interesting the other way around. Same deal with Dollhouse, Echo was female,
and the savior, the guy agent, was male. More interesting the other way around. It's why neither of those series grabbed me, they didn't really do anything interesting or new with gender.)
I was surprised by Spike and Buffy. I didn't think they'd go there. And they almost didn't.
James Marster prodded Whedon. As did Marti Noxon. I seriously doubt from everything I saw before and since that Whedon came up with it on his own nor do I think he knows what he did. Or why it was so damn interesting. Or why so many fans went nuts over it.
But I could be wrong about that. We don't know what lies in another's mind and heart, after all, we can only speculate. Also what appeals to one person, another may never even see or for that matter want to see. I get that. I may not like it, but I do get it.
Did I want Buffy to end up with Spike or vice versa? To this day I really don't know.
I jump back and forth on the issue. I've read fanfics and written them that go both directions. I have friends online who see them together, have in fact written whole verses with them together, and others who don't. You can't really generalize too much about shippers by the way. Oh you can try...but you'll run into a brick wall eventually.
While most Spuffy shippers tend to be women. They aren't all heterosexual. There are oddly enough quite a few Spuffy shippers who are lesbians. Lesbians, I might add, that did not like Willow and Tara and found the coupling to be borderline offensive. Oddly, I've found men to like that pairing better than many women do. Which I always found interesting. I don
why that is. By men - I mean both heterosexual and homosexual men. There are a lot of homosexual men who loved Willow and Tara and identified, but a lot of lesbians who did not.
Although I know of a lot of lesbians who loved them as well. So you can't generalize.
So I can't really speak to why others loved or hated Spuffy. And to be honest, I'm no longer interested in why they hated the ship. The tv series is over. And I no longer read the comics, any of the comics - so really can't comment on them at this point. Most likely for the best.
As for what happened after the final episode of Angel or Chosen? That's open to interpretation. I'm not sure you can realistically call the comics canon since they do not follow a logical trajectory from the end of the series. Too many plot inconsistencies even for the best spackler and wanker on the planet. Also the team that wrote the comics bares little to no resemblance to the television series writers. Even the actors have changed.
But I'm clearly of two minds regarding this, and go back and forth all the frigging time.
I don't like the comics. So I choose to ignore them. For me, the Buffy series ended at Chosen. The Angel series ended at Not Fade Away. Everything after that is speculation.
What surprises me is that part of me, even after ten years, still wants a satisfying ending for Spike and Buffy. And I've no clue what that ending is. It's not what I saw on screen. It's not in the comics. And to be honest? I don't think Whedon is capable of writing one that would satisfy me. What satisfies me most likely won't satisfy someone else. And I'm moody so that often changes with the wind anyhow.
What also surprises me is that part of me still loves that ship, is still fiercely protective of it. And still gets riled up at the detractors. It is a small part. Barely noticeable. Like an old scar that aches on occasion. That type of Love fades it does not quite disappear.
I wonder why I care what others even think of it. It's not like the show will continue.
And the comics...well...I've given up on. I know others haven't. But I have. Lost interest finally. And may never forgive Whedon for a five year tease and no deliverance on the goods.
Oh well it's late...I'm tired. Foggy in the brain and I'm not even sure any of this makes sense. I do know that the trope Spike/Buffy fell under continues to interest me - to the extent that I find myself obsessively searching out similar pairings (harder to find then one would think, Twilight this ain't). And I'm not sure we're all on the same page as to what that trope is or rather what it was about that trope that turned me on and why I shipped it as hard as I did. I do not and never really have viewed Spike as the bad boy. So no, it's not the bad boy trope. That's not it. The strong heroic woman, and the hot, guy, who looks like he can take her, but in reality is subordinate to her? Sort of. The fact that they keep switching roles. One day she's on top, the next day he is. Neither is fully dominant, neither is fully submissive. Partially. The fact that he is in the traditional female role and she's in the traditional male one, definitely. She controls the relationship not him. She breaks things off for his own good, not him. She agrees to help him, but is careful not to touch, not him. She saves him. He's the victim, mostly.
It's rare to find this in fiction. When you do, it's usually the victimized little girl, or adolescent. Such as Lisbeth Salander and the much older Blomkvist from GWTDT, or River and Mal from Serenity (although that at least wasn't sexual), or Nikita and Michael from La Femme Nikita. It's very rare to have the woman be a fully grow woman who is not a victim, not abused as a child, not raped, be in the lead here. Very rare.
Most of our tropes and ships - the man holds the reigns. In Spike and Buffy's relationship - the woman held the reigns. I liked Zoe and Wash, because that relationship to a degree was similar. As was Adelle/Topher in Dollhouse. In books? I haven't found it that often, it's in His Dark Materials - Lyra and the little boy she falls for, she holds the reigns in that relationship. And in Hunger Games - with Katniss and Peeta, she's the one in control there as well, much to Peeta's frustration as well as Gale's. In fact the trope in the Hunger Games is the opposite of the one in Twilight. The girl is in control. Same with
The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel Grace holds the reigns. Although actually in that novel, it's more equal. As it is eventually in all the others. Equality is easier to find, I think, when the woman can be on top and on bottom.
All of this is obviously my own point of view. Mileage I know varies. I'm certain many of you will vehemently disagree with all or most of what I've said above. But it is late on a Saturday the night before Easter Sunday, and this is what I'm thinking...
First off? I don't really actively ship relationships in TV series or books. And by "actively", I mean I generally don't read fanfic, get involved in fandoms, or write meta about them. Often I just go wherever the story takes me. Rarely disagree with it. Oh, I may ship the relationship or characters for a bit...but it passes. Generally speaking. The closest I came to writing fanfic prior to Buffy was an original story inspired by the Indiana Jones films, where I flipped the gender of the character. I entitled it Flight of the Falcon. The lead character was a female adventurer named Jade Falcon and it took place during WWII. Didn't read any fanfic or write any meta until Buffy. Of course I didn't know it existed either. The show started pre-internet in 1997. The internet in the late 90s was pretty much in its rudimentary stages.
While reading Mark's blog, I found myself thinking...okay how did I view the series back then? I only vaguely remember. It was to be fair over ten years ago. Almost 15 by my count. I know I was shipping Angel and Buffy. That I hung around during the first season for Angel primarily - I found him interesting. And during the second season for the Angelus storyline which blew me away at the time. I know this because I actually sought out websites to get spoilers back then. Bored at work and dissatisfied...it's what people often do, whether they want to admit it or not, and if their workplaces permit it. I also am pretty certain, not absolutely, that I did not become a Spike/Buffy shipper until long after the S5 episode Intervention. And I certainly didn't see that ship happening until Once More with Feeling when she literally shoves her tongue down his throat in perhaps the hottest kiss that I'd seen on the show. I was, however, a Spike shipper prior to that point. Spike interested me from day one. Just not a Spuffy one. As far as I remember. It's hard to know for certain. It's sort of like lovers trying to pin-point the exact moment they fell in love. Okay, that may not be the best analogy.
As near as I can figure there are about four or five different types of Spuffy shippers. Possibly more. I won't bore you by attempting to categorize all of them, hard to do in any event, people aren't as easy to categorize as one might think. The vast majority...tend to be female, between the ages of 30 and 60, identify more with Spike than with Buffy, and feel dis-enfranchized by the mainstream media who has basically told them since the get-go that their ship can't sail, is the abusive bad boyfriend, and is either deranged or not the one that the creator intended. In short, Buffy's one true love is Angel, case closed. And they are nitwits for wanting otherwise. Get on the Twilight band-wagon, already, the media seems to be stating. Not that I necessarily think Bangle and Twilight are the same, but they are a specific trope - that is popular with mainstream readers and watchers. The trope is older/experienced guy, powerful, knowledgable, wealthy and a control freak with either a dark secret, a dark past, or an abusive childhood - seduces younger girl, who is less experienced, and not wealthy and who saves him or heals him in some way. It's a partriachial trope for a patriachial world. Examples? Stefan/Elena, Angel/Buffy, Christian Grey/Anatasia, Edward/Bella, Dracula/Mina, Mr. Rochester/Jane Eyre, Cordelia/Angel, Fred/Wesely, Fred/Gunn, Echo/ What'shisname who played Helo (Ballard?) there are others. It's an old trope. I'm not belittling the trope. I liked it at one point. It's popular for a reason. I like to call it the Beauty and the Beast complex. It sort of goes back to that fairy tale, I think. Very popular with the 18-24 set. Also for some reason with successful career women and mothers in their 40s, if Shades of Grey is any indication.
Somewhere along the line I started shipping Spuffy. And...I'm not sure when it happened exactly, but I became weirdly obsessive about it. Like an insane NY Mets fan or Chicago Cubs fan, although I think the Cubs have actually won recently as have the Red Sox for that matter. The Met's are, however doomed. The Nationals are more likely to win at this rate than the NY Mets. Yet, at the same time, it didn't feel doomed to me. The Spuffy ship seemed to work on some level. Any more than the NY Mets seem doomed. I'm convinced they'll win someday. And damn the Yankees anyway. I keep rooting for that dumb team to lose. (It's the KC Royals and Phillies in my blood...I just can't root for those Damn Yankees. Sorry for the baseball analogy, it's really the only spectator sport outside of maybe Basketball and Soccer that I have any respect for. I don't like or understand Grid-Iron Football - its too male dominant, a sport for a patriachial world, men strategize, bash heads, go to war, while women shake their boobies on the sidelines with pom poms. Although, I would not be opposed to doing away with war entirely and just making everyone play football. At heart, I'm a baseball girl - it's how I was raised. My father raised me to love Baseball and Basketball. He routinely fell asleep or disappeared outside to rake leaves during football.)
Shipping online is a bit like rooting for sports teams or preferring one sport to another. It has that same insane loyalty to it. And I've never really been much of a strong sports fan, sort of ambivalent really. I rarely watch the games. Which is a good analogy, because I'm somewhat the same way, generally speaking about shipping. I didn't ship any of the relationships in any of Whedon's other shows. And only half heartedly did in other tv series - in that I read very little fanfic, didn't write much meta, etc. I honestly don't care who ends up with whom in TVD (Vamp Diaries) or any of the other tv series currently on. But for some bizarre reason the Spike/Buffy relationship was different. I don't know why. Was it the fandom? Was it the story? Was it the actors? Was it me? Was it how it was built up? Was it the internal dynamics of the relationship? How they wrote it?
I've lost interest in the detractors. I've heard all the arguments against the relationship. All the reasons people disliked it. I've argued it to death. And being a born devil's advocate, can argue both sides of the debate ad naseaum. I know why the relationship shouldn't work. I know why it offends people. Why it pushed their respective buttons. I know why people hate Spike or Spuffy, I know why they are offended. And I find myself at this stage incredibly bored by it all. Shoo, I think. Go away. To rain on my parade some other day. There's nothing you can say that I haven't argued myself or thought or read online in the last ten years. It's just...echoes now. And it feels at times...that's all we are doing with pop culture nowadays, just echoing each other.
How many different ways can you call the Spike/Buffy scenario the bad boyfriend or the abusive relationship? And yet, while I see that, at the same time...I don't think it quite fits inside that trope, in some respects the Angel/Buffy relationship fits it better. Because Spike unlike Angel isn't a top, he's a bottom. He's not the one in control of the relationship. He's not the one who breaks it off. And he's not the one who makes the decisions. She does. He's the femme fatale, the secret mistress, the damsel, the weaker party, not the other way around. That's why I got obsessed. They flipped it. And they NEVER do that on tv. Or if they do, it's pretty rare.
For as much as Mark and others goe on and on about how insanely cool and different Willow and Tara are, for me, at least, Spike/Buffy felt insanely cool and different, because of the weird gender flip. Whedon doesn't do this in any other series or work. So I can't quite decide if it was Whedon's idea or someone else's. Because I've never seen Whedon do it outside of Spike and Buffy. The closest he comes might be Xander and Andrew, but no they stay more or less within the trope of nerdy guy. William the Bloody...or Spike is a contradiction. He's set up as the sexual predator, the player, the guy who seduces the girl, and leaves her dead or wishing she was...yet, in S4, he's emasculated. He becomes the femme fatale. The confidante. The informer. The weaker sex. In S5, she saves him from a powerful female god, who is torturing him. A female god who in some respects represents the worst in Buffy herself - the popular, fashion obsessed, ditzy cheerleader. He can't save Buffy from Glory or herself. His role reminds me a lot of more of the bad girlfriend than the bad boyfriend. The bad femme fatale who takes the bullet for the male hero in all those pulp noir novels that I devoured as a youth. We also see him without his shirt a lot, in sexy clothes, looking like a sex kitten sprawled on his bed. He has the kinky cuffs, and the kinky candles. And on that excruciating date in Crush...he reminds me of the bad girl out of a 1940s Philip Marlow film or a Batman film...where she has a crush on the hero. Heck he reminds me a lot of Lilah in Angel S4 - who has had the ill luck of falling for Wes.
I've never seen anyone in any tv series flip a hot male character, a villain, a bad guy, and turn him into, well, the bad girl with a heart of gold. He's the girl in Angel too, by the way. He takes over Cordelia's role in that series with Angel. That entertained me as well. Although it is admittedly more subtle. You see it in his relationship with Illyria - who treats him like her pet as does Angel.
So the point that I became a shipper of the Spike/Buffy relationship may well have been when I picked up on the fact that Spike was playing the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. He is a lot like Faith in the series. That's why the two characters play off of each other so well. They are both the bad girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The misunderstood hooker with the heart of gold. Note he's not the misunderstood rouge, but the misunderstood hooker.
The only other series that I've seen flip gender roles this neatly was BSG with Kara Thrace who is the misunderstood rogue pilot with the heart of gold. Which is why I liked the Apollo/Starbuck relationship. Apollo plays the wholesome girl who desires this rogue pilot who won't settle down. Apollo in BSG2 is basically Athena from BSG1 with the hots for Starbuck, who is busy playing the field. So gives up finally and marries someone else, but still can't get over Starbuck. If Starbuck had been male and Apollo female? I wouldn't have been interested. Same with Spike and Buffy, if Spike had been female and Buffy had been male? Yawn. (Which by the way was what Angel the series did, they went the traditional route. As did Firefly. Mal was male, Inara was female. It worked better and was lot more interesting the other way around. Same deal with Dollhouse, Echo was female,
and the savior, the guy agent, was male. More interesting the other way around. It's why neither of those series grabbed me, they didn't really do anything interesting or new with gender.)
I was surprised by Spike and Buffy. I didn't think they'd go there. And they almost didn't.
James Marster prodded Whedon. As did Marti Noxon. I seriously doubt from everything I saw before and since that Whedon came up with it on his own nor do I think he knows what he did. Or why it was so damn interesting. Or why so many fans went nuts over it.
But I could be wrong about that. We don't know what lies in another's mind and heart, after all, we can only speculate. Also what appeals to one person, another may never even see or for that matter want to see. I get that. I may not like it, but I do get it.
Did I want Buffy to end up with Spike or vice versa? To this day I really don't know.
I jump back and forth on the issue. I've read fanfics and written them that go both directions. I have friends online who see them together, have in fact written whole verses with them together, and others who don't. You can't really generalize too much about shippers by the way. Oh you can try...but you'll run into a brick wall eventually.
While most Spuffy shippers tend to be women. They aren't all heterosexual. There are oddly enough quite a few Spuffy shippers who are lesbians. Lesbians, I might add, that did not like Willow and Tara and found the coupling to be borderline offensive. Oddly, I've found men to like that pairing better than many women do. Which I always found interesting. I don
why that is. By men - I mean both heterosexual and homosexual men. There are a lot of homosexual men who loved Willow and Tara and identified, but a lot of lesbians who did not.
Although I know of a lot of lesbians who loved them as well. So you can't generalize.
So I can't really speak to why others loved or hated Spuffy. And to be honest, I'm no longer interested in why they hated the ship. The tv series is over. And I no longer read the comics, any of the comics - so really can't comment on them at this point. Most likely for the best.
As for what happened after the final episode of Angel or Chosen? That's open to interpretation. I'm not sure you can realistically call the comics canon since they do not follow a logical trajectory from the end of the series. Too many plot inconsistencies even for the best spackler and wanker on the planet. Also the team that wrote the comics bares little to no resemblance to the television series writers. Even the actors have changed.
But I'm clearly of two minds regarding this, and go back and forth all the frigging time.
I don't like the comics. So I choose to ignore them. For me, the Buffy series ended at Chosen. The Angel series ended at Not Fade Away. Everything after that is speculation.
What surprises me is that part of me, even after ten years, still wants a satisfying ending for Spike and Buffy. And I've no clue what that ending is. It's not what I saw on screen. It's not in the comics. And to be honest? I don't think Whedon is capable of writing one that would satisfy me. What satisfies me most likely won't satisfy someone else. And I'm moody so that often changes with the wind anyhow.
What also surprises me is that part of me still loves that ship, is still fiercely protective of it. And still gets riled up at the detractors. It is a small part. Barely noticeable. Like an old scar that aches on occasion. That type of Love fades it does not quite disappear.
I wonder why I care what others even think of it. It's not like the show will continue.
And the comics...well...I've given up on. I know others haven't. But I have. Lost interest finally. And may never forgive Whedon for a five year tease and no deliverance on the goods.
Oh well it's late...I'm tired. Foggy in the brain and I'm not even sure any of this makes sense. I do know that the trope Spike/Buffy fell under continues to interest me - to the extent that I find myself obsessively searching out similar pairings (harder to find then one would think, Twilight this ain't). And I'm not sure we're all on the same page as to what that trope is or rather what it was about that trope that turned me on and why I shipped it as hard as I did. I do not and never really have viewed Spike as the bad boy. So no, it's not the bad boy trope. That's not it. The strong heroic woman, and the hot, guy, who looks like he can take her, but in reality is subordinate to her? Sort of. The fact that they keep switching roles. One day she's on top, the next day he is. Neither is fully dominant, neither is fully submissive. Partially. The fact that he is in the traditional female role and she's in the traditional male one, definitely. She controls the relationship not him. She breaks things off for his own good, not him. She agrees to help him, but is careful not to touch, not him. She saves him. He's the victim, mostly.
It's rare to find this in fiction. When you do, it's usually the victimized little girl, or adolescent. Such as Lisbeth Salander and the much older Blomkvist from GWTDT, or River and Mal from Serenity (although that at least wasn't sexual), or Nikita and Michael from La Femme Nikita. It's very rare to have the woman be a fully grow woman who is not a victim, not abused as a child, not raped, be in the lead here. Very rare.
Most of our tropes and ships - the man holds the reigns. In Spike and Buffy's relationship - the woman held the reigns. I liked Zoe and Wash, because that relationship to a degree was similar. As was Adelle/Topher in Dollhouse. In books? I haven't found it that often, it's in His Dark Materials - Lyra and the little boy she falls for, she holds the reigns in that relationship. And in Hunger Games - with Katniss and Peeta, she's the one in control there as well, much to Peeta's frustration as well as Gale's. In fact the trope in the Hunger Games is the opposite of the one in Twilight. The girl is in control. Same with
The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel Grace holds the reigns. Although actually in that novel, it's more equal. As it is eventually in all the others. Equality is easier to find, I think, when the woman can be on top and on bottom.
All of this is obviously my own point of view. Mileage I know varies. I'm certain many of you will vehemently disagree with all or most of what I've said above. But it is late on a Saturday the night before Easter Sunday, and this is what I'm thinking...
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Date: 2012-04-08 07:01 pm (UTC)Admittedly the above meta may not have been very clear about that. I sort of wrote it half-distracted last night. And mind wandering...;-)
Thank you for the magna references.