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shadowkatI was going to entitle this entry shipping the bad boy, but when I thought about it, I realized I don't really see Spike that way, even though most people do. Regrettably. And while it is true that most of the characters on Buffy or any well-written television serial are controversial...my experiences shipping a controversial character that split the online fandom associated with the show he was in, begun and ended largely with Spike. Unlike many people on lj, I'm not a cereal fan - I don't jump fandoms. And I've only really been in one. One from my perspective was more than enough.
This should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway just in case, everything I post within this entry is opinion, none of it is factual and it is based solely on my perspective. I can't speak for others, only myself. I've done polls on shipping Spike, recently in fact, and yet, I feel they are largely inaccurate. Can I really state with any certainty that the majority of Spike Shippers are female and over the age 40? Just because one poll provided that result? No. Polls, all polls, specifically those on the internet provide little truth. Just conjecture.
I can't remember when I started shipping Spike to be honest. At the moment it feels like frigging forever. The character is so ingrained in my psyche. Even before the show aired, I had character tropes similar to him in a book that I'd written. Ambiguous snarky male characters that stepped out of the dark shadows of a noir gothic novel or mystery.
Edgy. Reluctant heroes. Male hookers with hearts of gold.
I do know that when I ventured online to join the Buffy fandom and discuss the show on fan boards - I was shipping the character pretty hard. And back then, as cliquish as fandom was and still is, it was easier to join the public spoiler boards. The character specific boards that were more tightly monitored required networking to get in. I know I remember investigating a few. If you didn't know the posters, you were ignored or pushed to the curb. BAPS and Sunnydale U were definitely like that. The public forums were easier in that regard. But they weren't in another.
It depends on what your purpose was of course. I wanted to analyze the show in detail.
Speculate on future plot arcs. And discuss all the characters arcs, in particular Spike's.
In short, I wanted to read and discuss meta and to a degree fanfic - which was new to me.
My difficulty was - when I jumped fully online in Jan 2002, Spike was a controversial character and his fans...had a reputation that made if difficult to ship him on public boards without people jumping to conclusions. I feared that my meta and essays would not be taken seriously if I let people know up front that I shipped Spike back then. I was right about that. So for a while I posted and discussed everyone but Spike, building up interest and respect from non-Spike fans. I was afraid, and rightly so it turns out, that people would dismiss everything I had to say based solely on the fact that I loved Spike and Spuffy.
The character was volatile. Most if not all of my fights in fandom centered around Spike. I'd been accused on boards for liking him solely for his cheekbones (because other Spike fans squee-ed about them on the boards, so obviously I must feel the same way), people told me I was a rapist-sympathizer (considering I worked prior to law school on a domestic violence project and was involved with a rape crisis center and had written articles in college on date rape..this annoyed me), been compared to women who fall in love with serial killers (I've met serial killers and hitmen in real life - trust me they are nothing like Spike, actually quite a bit like Walt on Breaking Bad to be honest and the drug-dealing characters on The Wire), or told that I was racist because some Spike fan who I'd never met or interacted with saw Spike as metaphor for the dis-enfranchized minority (honestly, I find the idea of a vampire representing a disenfranchized minority deeply offensive and insane, but clearly if one Spike fan thinks it, we all do).
The human tendency to generalize and how faulty that can be - is no more evident than in fandom. Bangle shippers get a bad name because of the fanatic fringe who attacks everyone else, just as Angel shippers often do...the vocal minority can make us all look bad.
Not all Bangle shippers hate Spike or Spuffy. Any more than all Spuffy/Spike shippers hate Angel or Bangle. You can't really generalize, well you can try, but you'd be wrong.
Posts such as this one - " An Educated Fangurl's Guide to the Spike Wars which was written by a long-time Buffy fan who was clearly not a Spike shipper and had issues with people who were, often, and unintentionally, made it hard for me to be a Spike shipper, because I often felt as if I was constantly being categorized and/or judged by the non-Spike shippers or those who did not ship the character, rather it was because they didn't like the character, didn't like specific fans interpretations, didn't like how the character affected their precious fandom base, or were largely ambivalent. I felt that the moment they discovered I was a "Spike Shipper" - they ceased to take anything I said seriously - I was placed in a category in their head. I remember at one point writing a similar post myself, except I was categorizing the detractors, and getting blasted for it. Deservedly so.
This happens with controversial character shipping - we start to build factions, or teams, (Team Spike, Team Angel, etc) and we fight with each other over whose interpretation of the character is the correct one or worse, which one the creator intended. Pulling in writer and actor interviews to support our perspective or interpretation of the text - which is a Doylist analysis and doesn't work for everyone, because at the end of the day a work of art is a bit like a child. You may have raised that child to be this one thing or created that work to express this specific view, but I'm sorry - it's not going to do that. It becomes its own entity and the more people it interacts with, the more it changes its meaning. James Joyce once wrote that he preferred not to reveal his intent, he often forgot what it was anyhow, feeling what the reader found inside his work was what he intended and often far more interesting that what he may have originally intended. Often what we find in a work of art is far more interesting than the creator thought we'd find. Taking that away from someone...as the writer of the Kite Runner expressed, can ruin their enjoyment of the work, kill its appeal. The work can in fact be rendered meaningless or could become something the viewer now hates. Intent is also, murky, writers don't often know, particularly collaborative writers...their intent is mostly to write something that is entertaining, gets good ratings, and provides them with a steady income.
Of course the writers didn't make it easy on me either...they put the character through the ringer. I never knew what they'd do with Spike next, which to be honest was what I liked about him. He felt like the quintessential existentialist. Making his own fate. Trying to change his lot in life. Falling down on the job constantly. Unlike Angel, who appeared to be a Fate's proverbial puppet, his strings pulled by either the PTB or the ancient old Ones, all depending on whether or not he had a soul, Spike seemed determined to be his own man, master of his own body, his own fate. He came into the story obsessed with controlling others...and left obsessed with controlling himself. I could relate to Spike - the social awkwardness, the pit-bull mentality, the god-awful poetry, the bravado, and the snark. And it helped greatly that the actor who played him - played him with rigorous and at times passionate abandon. Never had I seen a performance so raw, so unrestrained, so brave. To this day I'm not sure what it was that pulled me into the character - the actor's performance, the writing, the direction or a combo of all of the above. I'm guessing the latter. I've seen Marsters in other series and films, as well as on stage, but never like he was as Spike. For some reason - he brought a raw emotionality and physicality to this character that he did not choose to bring to any other. Why that is, I'll never know. I want to ask him. But I'm not sure he'll give an answer or even understand the question. It's not the sort of thing you ask a stranger.
Of the writing choices...the hardest one to deal with as a Spike Shipper, was one that I was actually prepared for and the reason I frequented the spoiler boards - because much like Tara's death, I'd guessed they would go down that road the moment Spike and Buffy started boinking each other like bunnies. Of course the writers would have Spike attempt to force Buffy to have sex with him, aka attempted rape. I knew they were going to do that.
Because they had to do something to convince the character to search for a soul or get the chip out - something major. Also they kept hinting at it in all their interviews. I hoped they wouldn't, because it would make life difficult online.
Being highly analytical, the attempted rape scene did not bother me. I could pull it apart rationally, and see it from a legal and psychological perspective. I could separate the raw emotion from what actually happened and break it down bit by bit. But I soon realized after various interactions with fans on and offline that not everyone is analytical. Or thinks that way. Also a lot of people saw what happened through their own lense of experience, experiences that were darker and different from mine. I had a friend online at the time, who had been raped, who had no problems with the scene and was a Spuffy/Spike shipper afterwards. She was a navy nurse. Happily married. While someone I meet in person at a fan board mini-meetup could not handle either Spike or Spuffy after that scene and insisted he raped her and he was a rapist and I was crazy for seeing otherwise. It was difficult for me not to tell the woman she was hair-brained and a bit dim in retaliation. I am happy to say that I merely stated that I saw it differently and changed the conversation to something less volatile. I did that a lot in regards to Spike.
Other problematic episodes included...Lies My Parents Told Me, which I'd also been heavily spoiled for and knew about ahead of time. I lost online friends over that episode. We just perceived it completely differently. I was not a fan of Robin Wood for various reasons, mainly the actor grates on my nerves - he always came across to me, regardless of the role he is playing, like a smug know-it-all ass hole. And I did not perceive Spike as deliberately killing Robin's mother, he killed a slayer - which was decisively different in my brain from how Angelus killed Dru's family, Holtz's family, and intended on killing Buffy's. Spike targeted the slayer, or the main person gunning for him, Angelus went after the family and slowly worked his way up to his target. That was obvious to me from the script, it made no sense that other's didn't perceive the same thing - but they saw it differently. So from my perspective, Spike didn't necessarily owe Robin anything more than he owed anyone else. As he put it - I've killed a lot of people's mothers. And he had. Of those people, Nikki really wasn't a big deal - she could fight, she could kill vampires, she wasn't really a victim. She was another warrior. It was different. I seriously doubt Spike even knew she was a mother at the time. Robin reminded me of Anya and Holtz (who I was more sympathetic towards and found more interesting - possibly because he was better written), he was about vengeance, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth...which rarely solves anything. And I thought the series did a good job of pointing that out. In many respects, Robin felt like Buffy's version of Holtz, except I had more sympathy for Holtz on Angel - Holtz lost everything, Angelus and Darla decimated his family, turned his children into vampires. And it was personal - they'd gone after Holtz' family instead of killing Holtz himself, which smacked of cowardice from my perspective. Spike went after the fighter, ignored Robin the defenseless little boy or her Watcher. I had to admire him a bit for doing that.
So I got into fights with fans over Lies. And was not helped by other factions of the fandoms...one that saw Spike as a metaphor for the disenfranchized minority (mind-boggling to me, I never understood that perspective) and another that was unduly obsessed with the metaphorical significance and redemptive qualities of that damn jacket. (I kept wanting to make them all read Frank Miller's Sin City - which was basically how the writer's viewed the jacket). That episode was controversial on so many levels.
Add to this mix Angel, and the various people who felt the need to compare Angel to Spike as evidence that Spike couldn't be redeemed, wasn't redeemed, or hadn't shown remorse. This of course only works if you perceive Angel as having any of those qualities or being remotely on the road towards redemption. If you, however, perceive Angel as a puppet who wants the approval of the big bully in the sky or the big bully down below, depending on the state of his soul at the moment and will do literally anything to get that approval...this argument won't work. Particularly if you tend to be more of an existentialist than a determinist, or believe strongly in free will and taking responsibility for your own actions and have serious issues with authority figures.
It also won't work if David Boreanze's acting skills feel stiff or wooden to you and you think he's basically phoning it in. If you, like me, are a fan of raw emotional acting, and find reactive or restrained acting on the wooden side...you probably thought Spike was more demonstrative in his remorse than Angel. So the problem with the Angel vs. Spike wars - was people didn't view the characters the same way. I fought with my own brother on it - my brother and I do not perceive the world from the same angle. He loved Titantic (cinematography), thought Ang Lee's The Hulk was the best superhero film, was bored by Hugo...and preferred Angel the Series to Buffy. We think differently and we have the same parents, the same dna makeup and were derived from the same gene pool.
The difficulty with shipping Spike was also to a degree the stupid media and marketing folks at Fox who regrettably catered to the viewers who shipped Buffy/Angel and did not like Spike except as a side-kick to either Buffy or Angel. Angel, curse him, became a problem for many Spike shippers. Except when we shipped Spike with Angel, then not so much, which many people began to do, myself included, because I did technically enjoy both characters. That said there were and still are fans that did not want Spike anywhere near Angel the series or Angel. I remember fighting with fans when Spike joined Angel. Some fans hoped he'd come back ugly, because then Angel wouldn't have any competition in the looks department. (I'm not kidding.) Other's felt Spike would take over Angel's show and ruin it and were requesting a boycott - which annoyed Tim Minear (one of the series writers) to such a degree that he popped up on a fan board and kicked their asses, shocking everyone. From the media and writers perspectives...Spike shippers were often depicted in a less than savory light. Articles in EW and various fan mags, depicted Spike as the perennial bad boy. And perhaps he was. But not everyone saw it that way.
And of course everyone is triggered or turned on by different things, I've learned it's impossible to generalize. There were so many aspects of the character that intrigued me, some of which I know creeped out or triggered others...his obsessive love of Buffy - to the point that it drives him insane. His layered character, you see one thing, peel it back, get the opposite. The bluster. The sexist comments. The banter. The ambiguity.
I liked the fact that I never quite knew which direction Spike would go in or why, neither did the actor who played him half the time - he was a chaotic character, a trickster,
filled with pathos and twisted morality.
Some fans believed he destroyed the series, by muddling the metaphors and making the morality of Buffy far more ambiguous, not to mention Angel's journey. By the end of S7, it was no longer clear if Angel could be redeemed without reconciling with his alter-ego, Angelus. Spike through a monkey wrench in that plot line. Also the line between soul and unsouled got blurred with Spike...who instead of trying to bite and drain Buffy either turning her into a vampire or killing her, attempted merely to fuck her - and when she stopped him, still wounded and vulnerable in her bathroom, horrified he retreats, he doesn't try to kill her or attempt to do it again - he goes in search of a way to ensure he doesn't that he can be worthy of her love.
In one infamous essay, How Spike Ruined Buffy - by yet another fan who despised Spike fans and Spike shippers and especially Spuffy, the writer lays the blame for everything he disliked about the final two seasons of the series at Spike's feet, citing the first three seasons sans Spike to be the best. The essay was often quoted by people who hated post S4 Spike and felt it validated their perspective. Reading it, I remember thinking...at the time, that yes, again this makes it difficult to write meta and be taken seriously. It also made it painful to be in the fandom. The essay, in retrospect, seems fairly silly...and reminds me a little of Gary Marshall's humorous response to fans who stated that Fonzie ruined Happy Days. He didn't. The writers ran out of ideas, Richie Cunningham the heart and soul of the series grew up and moved away. And they had no where to go. Anyone with an analytical bone in their body could figure that out. No more than Spike ruined Buffy - if anything Buffy for many fans became more interesting. And it certainly wasn't just about Buffy and Spike, there were various subplots. And people who have done Buffy by the numbers, literally counting the number of times Spike appears, number of lines, etc vs other characters such as Xander, noted there really is no difference from S4 and S4 and S6 and S7. And Xander, Buffy and Willow have more lines and mentions. Articles such as the one cited above made it difficult to ship Spike online. I lost count of the number of "helpful" souls who felt the need to either quote it or send it to me whenever I attempted to discuss the character on public fanboards or dissect the character's arc. Or when I discussed what did not work for me regarding the series...which granted opens up that door.
Shipping controversial characters in a fandom is always going to lead to friction. You will be attacked. And disappointed. Often feeling as if the writers are against you. Marti Noxon and David Fury made no friends amongst the majority of Spike shippers in S5 and S6 with their constant harping on Spike as the bad boy. Spike fans often wondered if the writers were watching the show they were creating or paying attention. Marti having no filter, stated outlandish and at times insulting things regarding Spike fans...but she paled in comparison to David Fury, who famously stated Spike fans were like women who sent serial killers letters in prison. It won Fury few fans. And as an entertainment writer...you sort of need to worry about that. Which was why Whedon refrained from interacting on forums and was far more careful. Ironically, Fury recanted everything he said on year later...stating he was wrong about Spike. As did Marti. But it was too little, too late.
On the flip side...you ran into a lot of creative people in the fandom, who came from all walks of life. You also had this delicious character that you could tear apart a million different ways. A character that was played with such abandon by the actor. Marsters unlike most of the cast, rarely phoned it in. He was always on. Always emoting. His performances in S6 were so raw they were painful to watch at times, as they were in S5 and S4. The actor took risks, he pushed through barriers, he took whatever the writers threw at him and pushed it to the next level. Other actors looked better and sparked more when they were paired with Spike, they became more interesting. At one point according to
DVD commentary, the other actors were begging the writers to write scenes for them with Spike. The difficulty with the Spuffy relationship is those scenes began to diminish, if anything I felt the show was hurt by less Spike - I wanted Xander/Spike scenes, Dawn/Spike, Willow/Spike and Giles/Spike. I felt short-changed. Being a Spike shipper did influence how I watched the series, if the writer of How Spike Ruined Buffy - saw too much Spike and wanted less, I was the exact opposite, I craved more. The more obsessed I became the more I saw the series through that character, and in a way it became the Spike show for me...Buffy falling into my review mirror.
Being a shipper of a character can do that...it can put blinders on. It becomes difficult to see past that haze. By the same token, I resented people derailing my posts or critiquing them - with the statement - you only see Spike or your blinded by your love of this character or "you obviously adore Spike" - heavily implying that therefore, I can't take anything you write seriously. They'd belittle you for what you loved. Today, someone stated to me...that we aren't defined by our beliefs but by what we love. It's what we love that guides us. And inspires. And makes us wake up each morning. To be told that your views are questionable on a series because you ship a controversial character is beyond annoying. Few things enrage me more than someone telling me how I think or feel, telling me how my feelings affect other things or my views of those items. My immediate response is the last time I checked? You can't see my face. You aren't a telepath. You don't know what I'm feeling or thinking - how dare you assume that you do!
That's possibly the hardest part of shipping a character online, controversial or otherwise...constantly being told how you think, feel, or view things...being belittled for your views - whether intentional or not. Feeling judged. And at times excluded.
Fandom has its factions, its cliques. Any group with people does, it's human nature.
And often that is based on which characters you love. Being part of a diverse fandom and wishing to interact with a diverse group of people can be difficult. Particularly when we all see the characters we adore so differently. Even inside the Spike fandom, I'd struggle.
Some saw him as a poor woobie, others preferred evil Spike, others the snarky ambiguous unsouled character, others the existentialist...the list is endless. Some are Spangle shippers, some Spuffy, some Spander and others Spillow. (Along with a vast array of ships, I have not mentioned.) We fight there too. Not quite agreeing. I, for example, had no problems with the whole quest for a soul bit, while others did. Nor did the fact that he forced himself sexually on Buffy (AR bit) bother me that much...I found the scene itself impossible to watch - they way they shot and filmed that sequence was brutal. I felt sorry for everyone involved. It was almost as if the filmmakers wanted to hurt the audience.
But when I thought about the scene and what actually occurred, I realized how the camera fooled me. But I've fought with people on that scene endlessly, getting nowhere.
Shipping Spike has never been easy. It wasn't in 2002, it isn't now. Different. Not easy.
And ten years later, I'm struck by how similar some of the problems are...demonstrating how little we understand one another or how unwilling we are to do so...so determined to push our own point of view. It's not really about who is wrong or right...so much as
being able to see a view that is different. But as a shipper, you don't want to see the negative view of something you love, you want to continue to love it. You also want to be
respected...for other views related or unrelated to that love. I think anyone who has loved a controversial character in a fandom, regardless of who it is...can most likely relate.
Then of course there's the people who think...why are you still into the character? But I'm not completely...not as invested as I once was. I can see things clearer now. I care less. Time has faded the love bit by bit. But the fact that the character trope was a favorite of mine before he appeared on screen, doesn't surprise me at all that is long after. As a friend stated once upon a time to me..."Spike is your sexual fantasy come to life" and perhaps in some respects he was. There were too many things that hit my kinks hard and still do. And they aren't necessarily what people think. The frustrated poet, philosopher, and psychologist inside me fell for him hard. I loved the duality. I loved how the writers took a romantic villian, a metaphor for lust, and slowly over time turned him into a romantic hero...albeit a deeply flawed one for both Buffy and Angel. He had the best lines, he never did what I expected, and he was sexy. Few characters before or since resonated for me in the same way.
I'm not sure the people on my flist who...saw the character vastly differently than I did will ever understand. Nor will the one's who saw him that way but are either turned off by the things I fell in love with - unless you've read bad poetry to a college audience of 100 people and had people come up to you afterwards and state...great performance, bad poetry - you may never get it. Or for that matter be the brunt of unrequited love, been horribly rejected, and never really experienced someone pursuing you...Spike may make no sense to you. Experience is 90% of it, I think. And if your experiences clash with mine, if you were stalked, had an abusive boyfriend, or hate poetry and think its silly or are an excellent poet - you make look at Spike with derision. And the whole Mommy bit, I know, turns many people off...but it fascinated me...it appealed to the mythologist and frustrated psyche major in my soul and it was such a nice twist away from the annoyingly stale Daddy issues mythos that permeated most tv shows including this one.
But regardless of what you think about Spike or whether you understand my feelings for this character specifically, I think you or rather everyone who comes upon this post probably does understand what it is like to love or ship something others violently dislike. Or don't comprehend. What it is like to be ridiculed for it. To be made fun of. To worry about admitting to it or be outted as a "shipper of XYZ", what it is like to be defensive about your favorite character or season or series, and what it is like to avoid the detractors. To get upset over negative articles by writers of the show about him or her. All fandoms have controversial characters that people adore. We all have read an article similar to How Spike Ruined Buffy in regards to our favorite character (*cough*Connor*cough* or *cough*Dawn*cough*). And, I get, oddly enough, a lot of comfort from that. To love something other's find ugly or stupid or silly or dumb...and find others who understand why you do, get it completely...that is the upside. And one of the reasons I ventured online in the first place.
This should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway just in case, everything I post within this entry is opinion, none of it is factual and it is based solely on my perspective. I can't speak for others, only myself. I've done polls on shipping Spike, recently in fact, and yet, I feel they are largely inaccurate. Can I really state with any certainty that the majority of Spike Shippers are female and over the age 40? Just because one poll provided that result? No. Polls, all polls, specifically those on the internet provide little truth. Just conjecture.
I can't remember when I started shipping Spike to be honest. At the moment it feels like frigging forever. The character is so ingrained in my psyche. Even before the show aired, I had character tropes similar to him in a book that I'd written. Ambiguous snarky male characters that stepped out of the dark shadows of a noir gothic novel or mystery.
Edgy. Reluctant heroes. Male hookers with hearts of gold.
I do know that when I ventured online to join the Buffy fandom and discuss the show on fan boards - I was shipping the character pretty hard. And back then, as cliquish as fandom was and still is, it was easier to join the public spoiler boards. The character specific boards that were more tightly monitored required networking to get in. I know I remember investigating a few. If you didn't know the posters, you were ignored or pushed to the curb. BAPS and Sunnydale U were definitely like that. The public forums were easier in that regard. But they weren't in another.
It depends on what your purpose was of course. I wanted to analyze the show in detail.
Speculate on future plot arcs. And discuss all the characters arcs, in particular Spike's.
In short, I wanted to read and discuss meta and to a degree fanfic - which was new to me.
My difficulty was - when I jumped fully online in Jan 2002, Spike was a controversial character and his fans...had a reputation that made if difficult to ship him on public boards without people jumping to conclusions. I feared that my meta and essays would not be taken seriously if I let people know up front that I shipped Spike back then. I was right about that. So for a while I posted and discussed everyone but Spike, building up interest and respect from non-Spike fans. I was afraid, and rightly so it turns out, that people would dismiss everything I had to say based solely on the fact that I loved Spike and Spuffy.
The character was volatile. Most if not all of my fights in fandom centered around Spike. I'd been accused on boards for liking him solely for his cheekbones (because other Spike fans squee-ed about them on the boards, so obviously I must feel the same way), people told me I was a rapist-sympathizer (considering I worked prior to law school on a domestic violence project and was involved with a rape crisis center and had written articles in college on date rape..this annoyed me), been compared to women who fall in love with serial killers (I've met serial killers and hitmen in real life - trust me they are nothing like Spike, actually quite a bit like Walt on Breaking Bad to be honest and the drug-dealing characters on The Wire), or told that I was racist because some Spike fan who I'd never met or interacted with saw Spike as metaphor for the dis-enfranchized minority (honestly, I find the idea of a vampire representing a disenfranchized minority deeply offensive and insane, but clearly if one Spike fan thinks it, we all do).
The human tendency to generalize and how faulty that can be - is no more evident than in fandom. Bangle shippers get a bad name because of the fanatic fringe who attacks everyone else, just as Angel shippers often do...the vocal minority can make us all look bad.
Not all Bangle shippers hate Spike or Spuffy. Any more than all Spuffy/Spike shippers hate Angel or Bangle. You can't really generalize, well you can try, but you'd be wrong.
Posts such as this one - " An Educated Fangurl's Guide to the Spike Wars which was written by a long-time Buffy fan who was clearly not a Spike shipper and had issues with people who were, often, and unintentionally, made it hard for me to be a Spike shipper, because I often felt as if I was constantly being categorized and/or judged by the non-Spike shippers or those who did not ship the character, rather it was because they didn't like the character, didn't like specific fans interpretations, didn't like how the character affected their precious fandom base, or were largely ambivalent. I felt that the moment they discovered I was a "Spike Shipper" - they ceased to take anything I said seriously - I was placed in a category in their head. I remember at one point writing a similar post myself, except I was categorizing the detractors, and getting blasted for it. Deservedly so.
This happens with controversial character shipping - we start to build factions, or teams, (Team Spike, Team Angel, etc) and we fight with each other over whose interpretation of the character is the correct one or worse, which one the creator intended. Pulling in writer and actor interviews to support our perspective or interpretation of the text - which is a Doylist analysis and doesn't work for everyone, because at the end of the day a work of art is a bit like a child. You may have raised that child to be this one thing or created that work to express this specific view, but I'm sorry - it's not going to do that. It becomes its own entity and the more people it interacts with, the more it changes its meaning. James Joyce once wrote that he preferred not to reveal his intent, he often forgot what it was anyhow, feeling what the reader found inside his work was what he intended and often far more interesting that what he may have originally intended. Often what we find in a work of art is far more interesting than the creator thought we'd find. Taking that away from someone...as the writer of the Kite Runner expressed, can ruin their enjoyment of the work, kill its appeal. The work can in fact be rendered meaningless or could become something the viewer now hates. Intent is also, murky, writers don't often know, particularly collaborative writers...their intent is mostly to write something that is entertaining, gets good ratings, and provides them with a steady income.
Of course the writers didn't make it easy on me either...they put the character through the ringer. I never knew what they'd do with Spike next, which to be honest was what I liked about him. He felt like the quintessential existentialist. Making his own fate. Trying to change his lot in life. Falling down on the job constantly. Unlike Angel, who appeared to be a Fate's proverbial puppet, his strings pulled by either the PTB or the ancient old Ones, all depending on whether or not he had a soul, Spike seemed determined to be his own man, master of his own body, his own fate. He came into the story obsessed with controlling others...and left obsessed with controlling himself. I could relate to Spike - the social awkwardness, the pit-bull mentality, the god-awful poetry, the bravado, and the snark. And it helped greatly that the actor who played him - played him with rigorous and at times passionate abandon. Never had I seen a performance so raw, so unrestrained, so brave. To this day I'm not sure what it was that pulled me into the character - the actor's performance, the writing, the direction or a combo of all of the above. I'm guessing the latter. I've seen Marsters in other series and films, as well as on stage, but never like he was as Spike. For some reason - he brought a raw emotionality and physicality to this character that he did not choose to bring to any other. Why that is, I'll never know. I want to ask him. But I'm not sure he'll give an answer or even understand the question. It's not the sort of thing you ask a stranger.
Of the writing choices...the hardest one to deal with as a Spike Shipper, was one that I was actually prepared for and the reason I frequented the spoiler boards - because much like Tara's death, I'd guessed they would go down that road the moment Spike and Buffy started boinking each other like bunnies. Of course the writers would have Spike attempt to force Buffy to have sex with him, aka attempted rape. I knew they were going to do that.
Because they had to do something to convince the character to search for a soul or get the chip out - something major. Also they kept hinting at it in all their interviews. I hoped they wouldn't, because it would make life difficult online.
Being highly analytical, the attempted rape scene did not bother me. I could pull it apart rationally, and see it from a legal and psychological perspective. I could separate the raw emotion from what actually happened and break it down bit by bit. But I soon realized after various interactions with fans on and offline that not everyone is analytical. Or thinks that way. Also a lot of people saw what happened through their own lense of experience, experiences that were darker and different from mine. I had a friend online at the time, who had been raped, who had no problems with the scene and was a Spuffy/Spike shipper afterwards. She was a navy nurse. Happily married. While someone I meet in person at a fan board mini-meetup could not handle either Spike or Spuffy after that scene and insisted he raped her and he was a rapist and I was crazy for seeing otherwise. It was difficult for me not to tell the woman she was hair-brained and a bit dim in retaliation. I am happy to say that I merely stated that I saw it differently and changed the conversation to something less volatile. I did that a lot in regards to Spike.
Other problematic episodes included...Lies My Parents Told Me, which I'd also been heavily spoiled for and knew about ahead of time. I lost online friends over that episode. We just perceived it completely differently. I was not a fan of Robin Wood for various reasons, mainly the actor grates on my nerves - he always came across to me, regardless of the role he is playing, like a smug know-it-all ass hole. And I did not perceive Spike as deliberately killing Robin's mother, he killed a slayer - which was decisively different in my brain from how Angelus killed Dru's family, Holtz's family, and intended on killing Buffy's. Spike targeted the slayer, or the main person gunning for him, Angelus went after the family and slowly worked his way up to his target. That was obvious to me from the script, it made no sense that other's didn't perceive the same thing - but they saw it differently. So from my perspective, Spike didn't necessarily owe Robin anything more than he owed anyone else. As he put it - I've killed a lot of people's mothers. And he had. Of those people, Nikki really wasn't a big deal - she could fight, she could kill vampires, she wasn't really a victim. She was another warrior. It was different. I seriously doubt Spike even knew she was a mother at the time. Robin reminded me of Anya and Holtz (who I was more sympathetic towards and found more interesting - possibly because he was better written), he was about vengeance, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth...which rarely solves anything. And I thought the series did a good job of pointing that out. In many respects, Robin felt like Buffy's version of Holtz, except I had more sympathy for Holtz on Angel - Holtz lost everything, Angelus and Darla decimated his family, turned his children into vampires. And it was personal - they'd gone after Holtz' family instead of killing Holtz himself, which smacked of cowardice from my perspective. Spike went after the fighter, ignored Robin the defenseless little boy or her Watcher. I had to admire him a bit for doing that.
So I got into fights with fans over Lies. And was not helped by other factions of the fandoms...one that saw Spike as a metaphor for the disenfranchized minority (mind-boggling to me, I never understood that perspective) and another that was unduly obsessed with the metaphorical significance and redemptive qualities of that damn jacket. (I kept wanting to make them all read Frank Miller's Sin City - which was basically how the writer's viewed the jacket). That episode was controversial on so many levels.
Add to this mix Angel, and the various people who felt the need to compare Angel to Spike as evidence that Spike couldn't be redeemed, wasn't redeemed, or hadn't shown remorse. This of course only works if you perceive Angel as having any of those qualities or being remotely on the road towards redemption. If you, however, perceive Angel as a puppet who wants the approval of the big bully in the sky or the big bully down below, depending on the state of his soul at the moment and will do literally anything to get that approval...this argument won't work. Particularly if you tend to be more of an existentialist than a determinist, or believe strongly in free will and taking responsibility for your own actions and have serious issues with authority figures.
It also won't work if David Boreanze's acting skills feel stiff or wooden to you and you think he's basically phoning it in. If you, like me, are a fan of raw emotional acting, and find reactive or restrained acting on the wooden side...you probably thought Spike was more demonstrative in his remorse than Angel. So the problem with the Angel vs. Spike wars - was people didn't view the characters the same way. I fought with my own brother on it - my brother and I do not perceive the world from the same angle. He loved Titantic (cinematography), thought Ang Lee's The Hulk was the best superhero film, was bored by Hugo...and preferred Angel the Series to Buffy. We think differently and we have the same parents, the same dna makeup and were derived from the same gene pool.
The difficulty with shipping Spike was also to a degree the stupid media and marketing folks at Fox who regrettably catered to the viewers who shipped Buffy/Angel and did not like Spike except as a side-kick to either Buffy or Angel. Angel, curse him, became a problem for many Spike shippers. Except when we shipped Spike with Angel, then not so much, which many people began to do, myself included, because I did technically enjoy both characters. That said there were and still are fans that did not want Spike anywhere near Angel the series or Angel. I remember fighting with fans when Spike joined Angel. Some fans hoped he'd come back ugly, because then Angel wouldn't have any competition in the looks department. (I'm not kidding.) Other's felt Spike would take over Angel's show and ruin it and were requesting a boycott - which annoyed Tim Minear (one of the series writers) to such a degree that he popped up on a fan board and kicked their asses, shocking everyone. From the media and writers perspectives...Spike shippers were often depicted in a less than savory light. Articles in EW and various fan mags, depicted Spike as the perennial bad boy. And perhaps he was. But not everyone saw it that way.
And of course everyone is triggered or turned on by different things, I've learned it's impossible to generalize. There were so many aspects of the character that intrigued me, some of which I know creeped out or triggered others...his obsessive love of Buffy - to the point that it drives him insane. His layered character, you see one thing, peel it back, get the opposite. The bluster. The sexist comments. The banter. The ambiguity.
I liked the fact that I never quite knew which direction Spike would go in or why, neither did the actor who played him half the time - he was a chaotic character, a trickster,
filled with pathos and twisted morality.
Some fans believed he destroyed the series, by muddling the metaphors and making the morality of Buffy far more ambiguous, not to mention Angel's journey. By the end of S7, it was no longer clear if Angel could be redeemed without reconciling with his alter-ego, Angelus. Spike through a monkey wrench in that plot line. Also the line between soul and unsouled got blurred with Spike...who instead of trying to bite and drain Buffy either turning her into a vampire or killing her, attempted merely to fuck her - and when she stopped him, still wounded and vulnerable in her bathroom, horrified he retreats, he doesn't try to kill her or attempt to do it again - he goes in search of a way to ensure he doesn't that he can be worthy of her love.
In one infamous essay, How Spike Ruined Buffy - by yet another fan who despised Spike fans and Spike shippers and especially Spuffy, the writer lays the blame for everything he disliked about the final two seasons of the series at Spike's feet, citing the first three seasons sans Spike to be the best. The essay was often quoted by people who hated post S4 Spike and felt it validated their perspective. Reading it, I remember thinking...at the time, that yes, again this makes it difficult to write meta and be taken seriously. It also made it painful to be in the fandom. The essay, in retrospect, seems fairly silly...and reminds me a little of Gary Marshall's humorous response to fans who stated that Fonzie ruined Happy Days. He didn't. The writers ran out of ideas, Richie Cunningham the heart and soul of the series grew up and moved away. And they had no where to go. Anyone with an analytical bone in their body could figure that out. No more than Spike ruined Buffy - if anything Buffy for many fans became more interesting. And it certainly wasn't just about Buffy and Spike, there were various subplots. And people who have done Buffy by the numbers, literally counting the number of times Spike appears, number of lines, etc vs other characters such as Xander, noted there really is no difference from S4 and S4 and S6 and S7. And Xander, Buffy and Willow have more lines and mentions. Articles such as the one cited above made it difficult to ship Spike online. I lost count of the number of "helpful" souls who felt the need to either quote it or send it to me whenever I attempted to discuss the character on public fanboards or dissect the character's arc. Or when I discussed what did not work for me regarding the series...which granted opens up that door.
Shipping controversial characters in a fandom is always going to lead to friction. You will be attacked. And disappointed. Often feeling as if the writers are against you. Marti Noxon and David Fury made no friends amongst the majority of Spike shippers in S5 and S6 with their constant harping on Spike as the bad boy. Spike fans often wondered if the writers were watching the show they were creating or paying attention. Marti having no filter, stated outlandish and at times insulting things regarding Spike fans...but she paled in comparison to David Fury, who famously stated Spike fans were like women who sent serial killers letters in prison. It won Fury few fans. And as an entertainment writer...you sort of need to worry about that. Which was why Whedon refrained from interacting on forums and was far more careful. Ironically, Fury recanted everything he said on year later...stating he was wrong about Spike. As did Marti. But it was too little, too late.
On the flip side...you ran into a lot of creative people in the fandom, who came from all walks of life. You also had this delicious character that you could tear apart a million different ways. A character that was played with such abandon by the actor. Marsters unlike most of the cast, rarely phoned it in. He was always on. Always emoting. His performances in S6 were so raw they were painful to watch at times, as they were in S5 and S4. The actor took risks, he pushed through barriers, he took whatever the writers threw at him and pushed it to the next level. Other actors looked better and sparked more when they were paired with Spike, they became more interesting. At one point according to
DVD commentary, the other actors were begging the writers to write scenes for them with Spike. The difficulty with the Spuffy relationship is those scenes began to diminish, if anything I felt the show was hurt by less Spike - I wanted Xander/Spike scenes, Dawn/Spike, Willow/Spike and Giles/Spike. I felt short-changed. Being a Spike shipper did influence how I watched the series, if the writer of How Spike Ruined Buffy - saw too much Spike and wanted less, I was the exact opposite, I craved more. The more obsessed I became the more I saw the series through that character, and in a way it became the Spike show for me...Buffy falling into my review mirror.
Being a shipper of a character can do that...it can put blinders on. It becomes difficult to see past that haze. By the same token, I resented people derailing my posts or critiquing them - with the statement - you only see Spike or your blinded by your love of this character or "you obviously adore Spike" - heavily implying that therefore, I can't take anything you write seriously. They'd belittle you for what you loved. Today, someone stated to me...that we aren't defined by our beliefs but by what we love. It's what we love that guides us. And inspires. And makes us wake up each morning. To be told that your views are questionable on a series because you ship a controversial character is beyond annoying. Few things enrage me more than someone telling me how I think or feel, telling me how my feelings affect other things or my views of those items. My immediate response is the last time I checked? You can't see my face. You aren't a telepath. You don't know what I'm feeling or thinking - how dare you assume that you do!
That's possibly the hardest part of shipping a character online, controversial or otherwise...constantly being told how you think, feel, or view things...being belittled for your views - whether intentional or not. Feeling judged. And at times excluded.
Fandom has its factions, its cliques. Any group with people does, it's human nature.
And often that is based on which characters you love. Being part of a diverse fandom and wishing to interact with a diverse group of people can be difficult. Particularly when we all see the characters we adore so differently. Even inside the Spike fandom, I'd struggle.
Some saw him as a poor woobie, others preferred evil Spike, others the snarky ambiguous unsouled character, others the existentialist...the list is endless. Some are Spangle shippers, some Spuffy, some Spander and others Spillow. (Along with a vast array of ships, I have not mentioned.) We fight there too. Not quite agreeing. I, for example, had no problems with the whole quest for a soul bit, while others did. Nor did the fact that he forced himself sexually on Buffy (AR bit) bother me that much...I found the scene itself impossible to watch - they way they shot and filmed that sequence was brutal. I felt sorry for everyone involved. It was almost as if the filmmakers wanted to hurt the audience.
But when I thought about the scene and what actually occurred, I realized how the camera fooled me. But I've fought with people on that scene endlessly, getting nowhere.
Shipping Spike has never been easy. It wasn't in 2002, it isn't now. Different. Not easy.
And ten years later, I'm struck by how similar some of the problems are...demonstrating how little we understand one another or how unwilling we are to do so...so determined to push our own point of view. It's not really about who is wrong or right...so much as
being able to see a view that is different. But as a shipper, you don't want to see the negative view of something you love, you want to continue to love it. You also want to be
respected...for other views related or unrelated to that love. I think anyone who has loved a controversial character in a fandom, regardless of who it is...can most likely relate.
Then of course there's the people who think...why are you still into the character? But I'm not completely...not as invested as I once was. I can see things clearer now. I care less. Time has faded the love bit by bit. But the fact that the character trope was a favorite of mine before he appeared on screen, doesn't surprise me at all that is long after. As a friend stated once upon a time to me..."Spike is your sexual fantasy come to life" and perhaps in some respects he was. There were too many things that hit my kinks hard and still do. And they aren't necessarily what people think. The frustrated poet, philosopher, and psychologist inside me fell for him hard. I loved the duality. I loved how the writers took a romantic villian, a metaphor for lust, and slowly over time turned him into a romantic hero...albeit a deeply flawed one for both Buffy and Angel. He had the best lines, he never did what I expected, and he was sexy. Few characters before or since resonated for me in the same way.
I'm not sure the people on my flist who...saw the character vastly differently than I did will ever understand. Nor will the one's who saw him that way but are either turned off by the things I fell in love with - unless you've read bad poetry to a college audience of 100 people and had people come up to you afterwards and state...great performance, bad poetry - you may never get it. Or for that matter be the brunt of unrequited love, been horribly rejected, and never really experienced someone pursuing you...Spike may make no sense to you. Experience is 90% of it, I think. And if your experiences clash with mine, if you were stalked, had an abusive boyfriend, or hate poetry and think its silly or are an excellent poet - you make look at Spike with derision. And the whole Mommy bit, I know, turns many people off...but it fascinated me...it appealed to the mythologist and frustrated psyche major in my soul and it was such a nice twist away from the annoyingly stale Daddy issues mythos that permeated most tv shows including this one.
But regardless of what you think about Spike or whether you understand my feelings for this character specifically, I think you or rather everyone who comes upon this post probably does understand what it is like to love or ship something others violently dislike. Or don't comprehend. What it is like to be ridiculed for it. To be made fun of. To worry about admitting to it or be outted as a "shipper of XYZ", what it is like to be defensive about your favorite character or season or series, and what it is like to avoid the detractors. To get upset over negative articles by writers of the show about him or her. All fandoms have controversial characters that people adore. We all have read an article similar to How Spike Ruined Buffy in regards to our favorite character (*cough*Connor*cough* or *cough*Dawn*cough*). And, I get, oddly enough, a lot of comfort from that. To love something other's find ugly or stupid or silly or dumb...and find others who understand why you do, get it completely...that is the upside. And one of the reasons I ventured online in the first place.
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Date: 2012-05-30 09:13 pm (UTC)Shakatany