There is no home for me in canon

[botias]

OK so you got this guy.  And you treated him really bad, and then he did something REALLY awful to you, ‘cause, well, he is bad.  But then he felt bad, and went to get his soul.

And you forgive him, and you help him out, save his life really, defend him to your family and friends, stand with him against overwhelming evidence, you let him know that he’s your hero, and Wind Beneath My Wings is playing in your head the whole time.  Finally you fricken hold hands with him even though he’s fricken on fire and standing in a fricken collapsing mouth of hell and, what the heck, you go ahead and say it out loud besides.  You love him.

And then he doesn’t call.  He doesn’t write.  Oh, but he has plenty of time for a nooner with his ex.  And so the verdict is in.  Now that he’s gotten his soul, made the changes, Spike is no longer ‘Hillside Strangler meets Hells Angel’ on the boyfriend scale.  The arrow is moving, it’s moving…  Ding, ding, ding!  Congratulations!  You’re now the ‘Guy That Doesn’t Call’.  Hello Parker!Spike.  Vast improvement I have to say.

  Now many folks contend that Spike was being self-sacrificing, not troubling Buffy with his bad self .  Or that he didn’t think she cared much one way or the other (when he was frickin on fire dammit.)  I’m fine with him not getting on the boat, so far as that goes.  But to not call or write? 

Setting aside the whole ‘I love you’ thing, if Spike could really look back on everything Buffy did for him in S7, going above and beyond and even against the call of her duty to give him a chance at a good life, and still think that it wasn’t extremely important to Buffy whether he was alive or dead, than that gives gives him the emotional intelligence of a one-celled organism.  I just can’t want Paramecium!Spike or Parker!Spike for Buffy.  To my mind… Spike’s wedding tackle shrunk 3 sizes that day.  And given Buffy’s trust issues, it’s hard for me to imagine her ever letting him in again.

I know the non-contact thing was largely dictated by external realities.  It’s pretty impossible to assume that if Spike wrote or called, that Buffy wouldn’t show up.  The Angel writers could have gone to the trouble of having them meet off-screen, but I doubt that the issue of whether Buffy, a non-character, would ever trust Spike, a secondary character, again was a big priority for them.

And so I just write off canon after Chosen.  And for post NFA fics?  I just suspend belief I guess.

Comments

[botias.livejournal.com]

worst of all, allowed the writers to shove all the uncomfortable questions that S6 raised under the carpet with a hand-wave and a "He's got a soooooul now!"

I agree with everything you said here except this.  I think ME made it clear in S6 that using Spike was wrong and that Buffy knew it (but was too weak to resist the temptation that was Spike).  I'm not certain why you brush aside Buffy's talk with Tara in which Tara assumes that Buffy's only problem with having sex with Spike is that he is soulless and evil and tries to comfort her on those grounds.  But Tara is wrong.  In response, Buffy incredulously asks her if Spike loving her somehow makes using him OK.  And I'm pretty sure that when Buffy breaks it off, that is THE reason she offers Spike, that she's only using him and that's wrong and that's killing her (Spike: Not complaining here!).  That she broke it off with him face to face and didn't just stop coming around, that she gave him an explanation, that she called him by his human name... I've never considered it before, mostly because Spike's pain steals the scene in no uncertain terms and I was too busy wanting to crush him to my breasts, but Buffy's actions speak eloquently of her considering him a person and deserving of the same consideration she would give a human lover.  It says a lot about Buffy's strength and decency and her regard for Spike that she doesn't do a Parker. 

It's funny(?), I think a lot of people, myself included, thought it was just brutal of her to blow up his home and then dump him.  But her crime was not in breaking it off, or even in insensitive timing.  It was in allowing him to put her in a position of trust in the first place, given that almost inevitably her sacred duty would be to destroy him (and/or his record collection) so long as he was still amoral.  She actually deserves kudos for breaking it off as soon as she realized that.  I'll even award her some Spuffy points, if not kudos, for not staking him as a continued threat to human safety.  ME are evil geniuses of tragedy.  Too bad they couldn't come up with a more believable catalyst for Buffy's realization than making Spike an international arms dealer...

The argument that Spike enjoyed Buffy beating the crap out of him...

By 'with him' I did mean like him rather than to him, it was poor phrasing, I never meant to imply that he enjoyed it.  Though, he is kinda twisted...  I do think there is some evidence that he sees abuse as I sign of love i.e. the classic domestic abuse cliche:  'She wouldn't hit me if she didn't love me so much.'  I find it really interesting that he doesn't think turning her would be a great idea, that he actually loves her as she is (well maybe a shade or ten darker would be nice).  I also never intended to express the idea that Buffy treats him badly because he is bad, presumably as some sort of justified punishment.  I can't fault her for finding him evil and disgusting, but her nasty behavior always came across to me as springing from self-loathing, both for using someone who loves her and for screwing someone so patently evil, which she then, wrongly, takes out on him.  Spike doesn't suddenly become more evil and disgusting somehow, but she doesn't start pouring on the abuse until she falls from her own standards and starts using him, kissing good-bye their pre-sex relationship that I liked so much.  :(

[rahirah]

A lot of my take on s6 is not a entirely rational response to the way the show's writers reacted to fan response to Spike and Buffy at the time. I don't know if you were involved in online fandom at the time, or if you're someone who tracks down every writer interview ever or avoids them like plague, but I was, at the time, reading every interview I could lay hands on and hanging out whith a couple of different groups of hard-core spoiler whores--people who have contacts on-set and were often able to get copies of writer's notes and even whole copies of scripts weeks before air date.

And the lot of us who were doing this realized, as the season went on, that we were watching a completely different show than the writers were writing. The writers never expected Spike and Buffy to be as popular as they were, and they were stunned and appalled that a lot of fans thought that Buffy was the one treating Spike badly. An interviewer brought up the domestic abuse angle, and Marti Noxon was horrified that he thought of Buffy beating on Spike as abuse, and saw Buffy as the abuser rather than someone who was just in a bad place and making a poor decision as to who she slept with.

Eventually this writer/viewer discontinuity culminated in Marti (with Joss's approval) inserting the attempted rape scene into the seasonal arc, over the objections of some of the other writers, particularly Jane Espenson, who accurately predicted that this was something the character could not come back from. However, Marti was determined to 'prove' to the fans that Spike was evil, evil, evil. (This she said straight out in the "I think we proved our point" interview; I think it's also possible that they felt that making Buffy a victim would regain her some of the sympathy she'd lost over the course of the season. It's a tried and true old soap opera plot to have unpopular female characters raped in order to make them more sympathetic.)

Noxon apparently based the incident on a true story from her own life where she tried to force an unwilling ex-boyfriend to have sex, and completely failed to realize how much more harshly it would play with the sexes reversed. According to Jane Espenson, Joss and Marti were also, at that time, convinced it wouldn't be a big deal and they could always get the characters together again later because "look at Luke and Laura!"

Of course it was a big deal and drew a firestorm of criticism from everyone, and Spike as a character never does really recover; sure, he gets a soul, but so far as Buffy is concerned he will be forever tainted and unworthy of her, because Joss does not have any intention of ever letting his feminist icon get groiny with the guy who tried to rape her. He says as much on the DVD commentary for Chosen and then has the colossal and hypocritical gall to add that if viewers want to imagine they had sex in the fade to black scene, that's OK. Golly gee, Joss. Thanks for nothing. If you really think that there should be no physical romance, then make them completely platonic from the get-go, don't try to have your cake and eat ours too.

The unfortunate thing is that in S6 the writers were as deeply divided over whether Buffy actually loved Spike as the fans were. Espenson was for it, Fury was passionately against the idea, the rest were strung out in the middle. And Joss, who could have ended the wrangle with a word, never seems to have ruled on the matter, being far too interested in playing with his shiny new toy Firefly to care what was going on back in Buffyland. Add to this the complete wreck of the season arc when Joss couldn't bear to kill Tara off on schedule (originally "Normal Again" was episode 9 or 10 and Tara was supposed to die mid-season, making Evil Willow the real Big Bad of the season) or to make Willow too unsympathetic (hence the magic crack rather than the overweening pride) and you've got a mess.

[botias.livejournal.com]

I came late to the game, but I love writer interviews. I track down as many as I can. Your synopsis here is yummy stuff for me. I can almost see how the writers would be surprised. I mean, Buffy slays vampires, it's what she does, so what's a little beating and emotional abuse? Duh, it's beating and emotional abuse, people. Slaying is supposed to be to protect human safety, period.

I can tolerate a certain amount of vampire abuse from Buffy because she knows that every vampire she goes up against wants to kill her and maybe rape her. But her behavior in S6 was far too far. I don't know how they couldn't see that. Especially since it was made clear that the vampire in question would never intentionally harm or kill Buffy given how he mourned her death and suffered so that she would not.

OMG when I heard reference to the relevant incident of Marti's I assumed that she'd tried on some exciting bad boy in her youth who turned out to be, well, bad, an abuser or date rapist. It astounds me that they didn't see what an impact reversing the sexes would make, or how much farther that scene went than Spike just being Mr. Bad Touch. And they went there on purpose. Buffy is stronger than Spike, about as a man is to a woman, so for Spike to make unwelcome sexual advances to her would be a similar scenario to Marti's. But they went out of their way to make Buffy unable to stop him.

They should have stuck with the original arc, it sounds like the two things I disliked the most, the AR and the 'magic crack' were deviations. They made a mess of my beautiful Spike. :( I wish I could say that the AR was not believable to me, but for them to make him incapable of doing something like that to Buffy would have been believable too. Grrr.

[rahirah]

I never found the AR unbelievable; I mean, there are plenty of fucked-up human guys who might make a similar bad call if they'd been drinking too much. For a demon whose ethical brake lines have been cut, the astonishing thing is really that it took that much to make him snap. (And that's another thing the writers can't agree on; Espenson thinks it happened because the demon made Spike do it; DeKnight says it was a human failing, because Spike's self-worth was entirely bound up in making Buffy see him... I tend to interpret it as some of both, myself.)

And they really did go out of their way to victimize Buffy, and show her whimpering and crying instead of, say, reacting the way she reacted to Hyena!Xander. Which I find, in a way, even more revolting.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Espenson thinks it happened because the demon made Spike do it; DeKnight says it was a human failing...

I do notice that they had him in human face the whole time, which may or may not mean anything. I love Espenson! I read that at a convention she said that she thought Darla was Angel's big love... which leaves Buffy for Spike. :) Spike always seemed very much an amalgam of demon and human to me. He is capable of love, but does so in a fierce, obsessive, ammoral way.

Her reaction didn't seem out of character. Buffy seemed like she might start whimpering and crying if she dropped her shampoo bottle at the point in her life, but you're right, they were definitely making the whole thing as awful as they could.

[quietpoet.livejournal.com]

i read a fanfic somewhere (blanking on the name or where I read it) that made the AR the Powers That Be behind the reins of Spike as a test for Buffy.

I tend to agree with you, that it was a mixture of human and demon parts of Spike. I think he was also going on the mentality that sex was the only way to reach Buffy, so in a way he was only doing what he knew worked, up until this point. I hated that they made Buffy the victim because she was hurt, but not so badly that she couldn't take Spike, tears and all. Sigh. Wanks a-plenty, years later.

[rahirah]

Because there was no writerly concensus on whether Buffy 'really' loved Spike or not, ambiguity reigned and everything in season 6 can be read two ways:

1. While Buffy does use Spike, she is also genuinely attracted to him. She can't reconcile her feelings with the fact that he was evil, and this exacerbated her post-heaven malaise and her conviction that if she felt like this for someone evil that must make her bad too. On some level she knows she is hurting him as much or more as she's hurting herself. If she really believed he was a thing, she wouldn't feel so bad about using him.

Or 2: Buffy is using Spike to feel, pure and simple. She is not ashamed of the fact that she is hurting him; she believes or has convinced herself that he is a thing, incapable of real feelings. She cannot really hurt him; there is no real person in there to be hurt. This is the whole reason she's using him and not some human guy. Nevertheless she is ashamed of the fact that she consorting with an evil creature to get herself through the day. That is what's killing her. When she tells Tara that it's killing her, she's telling the truth, but it never occurs to her that it's killing Spike too.

Either way, she would think that it was wrong to use Spike. Either way, breaking up with him would be the right thing to do.

Because the writers spent so much time and effort beating me over the head with the fact that Spike and Buffy together were WRONG and Buffy couldn't possibly love an evil disgusting thing, I decided I'd take them at their word. I went into season seven convinced that Buffy never felt anything for Spike but lust and a bizarre kind of possessiveness. Ironically, in accepting that Buffy did not have any feelings for Spike, I was forced into a far worse intepretation of her behavior than I imagine the writers would have liked. And I remained sourly unwilling to accept the Spuffy crumbs they tossed me for the rest of the season. I was willing to believe that Buffy regretted her actions and was doing her best to help Spike out of guilt and responsibility, but love? Uh uh.

And even if she did love him by the end of the season, the sad truth is I just don't care as much. Souled Spike is a nice enough guy. But he's not my Spike--not my fabulous quixotic monster who reached for an unreachable star. He's just another guilt-ridden, subdued guy with a tragic past to atone for. In a very real way, the Spike I loved died in a cave in Africa.

I have never been a proponent of "Buffy is a bitch for not loving Spike." No one is ever obliged to love anyone else; love cannot be forced. But I do think that Buffy did have one obligation to Spike: to remember that what he did for her and Dawn was real, and never to forget that. In telling Spike that he was a thing with nothing good about him, a thing who could never change, she broke that promise--and that broken promise, not her failure to love him, is what I find it very hard to forgive her. Even after she broke up with Spike, she continued to dismiss his feelings as not just unreciprocated, but unreal. That "I'm sure they're real... for you" speech was the thing that made me wash my hands of Buffy when I originally watched season six--not the alley beating, not her breaking up with Spike, but her casual dismissal of his feelings (and therefore him) as unreal--that and her absolutely loathsome cowardice in allowing Xander to slag off Anya rather than reveal her own dirty little secret.

Buffy's behavior towards Spike is the model of the 'straight-acting' queer who takes out their internalized self-hatred on their more 'out' brethern. It's a very emotional and unpleasant archetype for me. Tt's not a perfect analogy because vampires really are evil--but it's a metaphor the writers were playing with before deciding to reduce the whole thing to Buffy Good and Right, Spike Bad and Wrong.

I can understand why Buffy does all the things she does, and I can pity her. I can appreciate how hard it was for her to help Spike, and she deserves all the credit in the world for what she did in S7. But the things she did in S6 press every hot button I've got, and I've never gotten back to liking her again.

[botias.livejournal.com]

she believes or has convinced herself that he is a thing, incapable of real feelings. She cannot really hurt him; there is no real person in there to be hurt.

I think you have a good point, but I don't know how the break-up scene could be read this way. What would motivate Buffy to go to the effort to break up with, and apologize to, and address by their 'real person' name, something that she thought had no more real feeling than a dildo?

That "I'm sure they're real... for you" speech

I felt that line like a knife. Ouch! But I'm not sure if I would have been much more tactful in Buffy's shoes, assuming the depression, the months of stalking, her self-loathing about being involved in the relationship. There really was something (s) important missing from Spike's love, as they chose to portray it in the show.

[rahirah]

Taken by itself, yeah, calling him William does seem to indicate that Buffy thinks of Spike as a person. Yet...it's one isolated incident in an entire season--how much weight can one hang on it?

I admit I hold Buffy to a higher standard, because she does have a soul, and that should make a difference. I don't mind characters screwing up and doing terrible things. It's just that when that happens, I like to have some indication that the writers know that the characters are coming off badly, and are doing it on purpose. In this case, I'm never entirely sure.

[botias.livejournal.com]

I'm wracking my brain to see if I can think of anything else. (Oh no! I might have to rewatch the season!) Buffy saves his life three different times that season, once at some small risk to her own life and once after she was 'done' with him. If she just sees him as an evil worthless thing, ought she not be neutral or pleased about his misadventures bringing him to a dusty end? And that is in fact the position of the other Scoobies on the matter.

It's very interesting, it's really the show from a Buffy sympathetic position vs. from a Spike sympathetic position. :)

[rahirah]

Yup. And what's quite sad is that I started out as a Buffy person. It takes an awful lot to put me off a character, but ME managed it.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Well, they managed it with me too if you recall. I used to be all Spike sympathetic. My big thought when I saw the AR was 'Oh no, he ain't comin' back from that... *#*$@' not 'Poor Buffy'. Spike finally pushed the wrong button with me in AtS S5 when he didn't contact Buffy.

If only Jane Espenson had been in charge. I really like what I've seen of her, I think I would make her leader of the free world. She could hardly do worse...

[botias.livejournal.com]

it's a metaphor the writers were playing with before deciding to reduce the whole thing to Buffy Good and Right, Spike Bad and Wrong.

:P Dorky writers. I think this would have been a really cool and apt thing to address.