Origin Stories and the end of Buffy

[alias_sqbr]

This vid, Origin Stories, is made of awesome. It's a Buffy Angel vid (mostly S7 Buffy) which perfectly captures some of the serious problems I had with the show, especially Spike. (It focuses largely on race while I personally had more noticed the issues with gender, but that's probably an issue with me not the vid :))

Basically, we are expected to sympathise with Spike above all else, because he is pretty and he is sad, and that is much more interesting than all the boring grumpy people who just had their mothers killed in front of them or whatever. To see anything he's done wrong primarily as a source of Pretty Woobie Angst and to despise anyone who goes against him as a Big Meanie. This despite the fact that unlike Angel there is no clear cut distinction between souled Spike and unsouled Spike, in fact (imho) they deliberately kept him a "bad boy" because it was cool, despite the very negative message this sends about him not making any real effort to distance himself from the mass murdering would-be rapist he used to be (the scene in the vid? Where he takes back his coat? Guh!)

(In my mental version of season seven, Spike is dead, and we have the new character William, who is not the same as pre-vamped William, in the same way that Liam =/= Angelus =/= Angel. But I could have lived with a less problematic Spike-as-Spike-but-with-a-conscience.)

Comments

[flyingblogspot.livejournal.com]

I had so many gender issues with the way Spike was written but lusted madly after him regardless because he was Evil and Hawt. My Problems, let me show you them.

[alias_sqbr]

Heh. Yeah, I have the same thing with a lot of romance-y tropes, the id is not a very enlightened place most of the time :) (Personally, I tend to only go for brunettes, so I am fairly immune from Spike in particular. But the general principle still applies)

[flyingblogspot.livejournal.com]

There's quite an interesting essay here (http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage5/spah.htm) comparing the Buffy/Spike story to the literary tradition of courtly love, which you may enjoy for an alternative reading. It's certainly less *headdesk* than a feminist reading of their relationship. :)

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm... see to me there are two problems with that interpretation:
1) Spike was definitely not all that chivalrous or respectful towards Buffy when they got together
2) Courtly love has a lot of skeevy sexist undertones anyway :)

But I have Issues with a lot of old fashioned romance ideas like courtly love, chivalry etc, possibly a result of attracting the kinds of guy who believe in that sort of thing and thus seeing what it really leads to (I love you => I own you, I see you as an ideal => If you contradict my idealised picture of you I will despise you, etc)

[flyingblogspot.livejournal.com]

I do agree; courtly love is indeed an EPIC FAIL when you come back to the feminist reading.

I've got something in my head that I want to say, but I'm having trouble articulating it clearly. It's got something to do with the way that I've found it enjoyable to try fitting pop-culture relationships into the context of a much older and more rigid romantic form. And something to do with the way that, although I find certain (okay, most!) depictions of relationships problematic from a political point of view, I can still get a great deal of enjoyment out of them in terms of talking about literary context and...storytelling. Does that make any sense? I think I'm rambling. :D

(I think this thing that I'm failing to articulate is the reason that I found the whole Angel/Buffy storyline incredibly tedious, but found masses to entertain me in the Spike/Buffy arc. Somehow. I must think further on this.)

[alias_sqbr]

Mm. Certainly one can really enjoy a literary trope while thinking such situations would be a terrible thing in real life and, conversely, not enjoy stories where people do the sensible thing rather than obeying narrative causality. The archetypical example, I guess, being romances between perfectly nice people with lots of chemistry who drive each other crazy and probably are happier apart.

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

Wait - we were meant to sympathise with Spike?

[alias_sqbr]

Apparently!