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

[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.