Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan blog. Mostly focused on sapphic relationships and being a huge nerd.
Fanfic can be read here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BTVSFE/profile
Fic update: a hellhound attacked Xander and Cordelia is a dress shop! The gang gathers to analyse the CCTV video
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“Anyone recognise that guy?” Buffy asked, but nobody seemed to, despite some uncertain mutterings.
“He looks sort of familiar, like I think he’s a student here… oh!”
Willow jumped up and ran to the desk to grab a copy of the yearbook, listening to the ongoing conversation behind her.
“It looks like he’s using some sort of remote control…” Jenny was clearly intrigued.
“Is that something you’ve heard of?” Giles sounded worried.
“No! I mean, it would be big news if that turned out to be possible…”
“Indeed,” Wesley was nodding as she brought the yearbook over, leafing through the pages of photos. “If someone has found a way to control demons using modern technology, then we might be facing an unprecedented sort of danger… might this be the mayor’s doing?”
Wesley posed this question directly to Faith, then seemed surprised when an awkward silence settled over the room. She shook her head unhappily, then shrugged. “Not that he ever told me…”
“And Carmilla didn’t know of anything like this either!” Willow tried to draw the attention away from Faith, as much for Buffy’s sake as anything else. “She made it sound like he was sort of behind the curve on technology…”
“Besides,” Jenny pointed out, “isn’t his whole deal about preserving order? A rampaging hellhound seems like it disrupts his plans as much as anyone else’s.” Willow turned the page, still scanning for a face that matched the image on the screen.
“There!” Xander pointed, “Tucker Wells. His brother Andrew’s in my English class. Met him a few times.”
“Let me guess,” Wesley remarked, “He was quiet, kept to himself, but always seemed like a nice young man.”
Willow was already pulling out her laptop while Xander answered.
“Actually, the way Andrew seemed scared of him, a bit of light murder doesn’t actually seem like much of a stretch…”
Always enjoy writing Fuffy sex scenes from Faith's point of view because, like, she has such terrible self-esteem and so much roiling unhappiness underneath all her defensive layers, and Buffy is this one person who can somehow get past all those layers (at least, that's my take on Fuffy (this is late season 3 btw, dynamic could be different post-Chosen etc.)) so it's like every time they touch each other it's some sort of quasi-religious experience of ultimate judgement or redemption or successful corruption or *something* that's defining her worth forever in terms of how many times she can make Buffy come.
Fic update: newly ensouled, vampire Willow tries to balance the demonic personality that wants to beat up on Faith and hypnotise her for sexual humiliation (it's training, you see) against the human personality that wants to do homework and tutor her fellow students in math.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“Hey guys!” Kendra and Carmilla both jumped, but the voice didn’t come from Faith. Behind them, standing in the now-open door, was Willow. “I’ve got homewo– oooh…” her eyes fell on Faith, panting and now making faint whines at the back of her throat. “Sorry, don’t stop the bout on my account, I…”
“Don’t worry,” Carmilla smirked, “this bout is–” but before she could finish, Laura pushed into the driver’s seat and finished the sentence, “over! Hi Willow!”
She tried to stand up, but found that Faith’s legs were clamped too tightly around hers, so she stayed in her kneeling position and tried to act normal. “Did you say homework?” {Yawn. Seriously, you miss homework?}
She wished she could get Faith to calm down, but Laura wasn’t able to issue new commands: Faith was on a ballistic trajectory now, executing Carmilla’s command until it wore off.
“Yeah,” Willow smiled shyly as she approached, holding up worksheets and textbooks, “from math, chemistry, history, and biology – plus my notes on, uh,” she looked at Faith again, still grinding mindlessly with a glassy-eyed expression, “on what we covered in class, which was really good because in biology we actually recapped a lot of stuff from last year, which, you know…” Which I missed due to being evil. {You mean due to having better things to do!}
“That’s great!” She felt a shudder pass through Faith and into her leg, almost toppling her over. {The puppy’s going to come soon…}
[...]
“So it looks like Faith’s not making a lot of progress with the be-less-hypnotisable thing, huh?” Willow observed. Laura shook her head. {Yeah, because she’s a slut who loves being defeated.} Don’t be rude!
“Well, uh, anyway,” Laura tried to pull her mind out of the subterranean sex-combat-dungeon, “you want to go hang out and talk about school stuff?”
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E09, “The Wish” (1/3): I cannot stress enough how much I do not have plans
Well this is possibly the most structurally interesting episode the show has done yet. Obviously I’m fond of the wishverse elements (as the proud author of approximately 100,000 words of vampire Willow fic) but for this rewatch I decided I was actually going to watch the episode in two blocks.
First, I watched it up until Cordelia’s wish is granted, then jumped to the end, where reality is restored and Anya finds herself depowered, and watched the remaining minute or so. That, after all, is what happened, according to all in-universe physical traces and the memories of everyone except Anya. And I’m going to post some thoughts on this fairly short and not-super-consequential patch in the characters’ lives before moving on to consider the Wishverse, and then putting them together to look at how the episode works as a whole.
So, what is “The Wish” without the titular wish being granted?
Well we open on "a mucusy demon."
I sort of wish we got more information on the mucusy demon; it seems to have Buffy on the ropes but then goes down awfully quickly to a well-placed knife. I’ve seen people identify it as the same type of demon that will reappear, still unnamed, in “The I in Team”, controlled by brain-chips and used to try and trap and kill Buffy when Walsh betrays her. But having gone and checked, they’re not quite the same - the tentacles are similar, but the mouth isn’t an upside-down vertical slit in those guys. But maybe they’re still related!
Anyway, the demon is obviously not the focus - just a sort of gesture at there being various demons around that need slaying and get slain. (For what it’s worth, I sort of dislike this, and not just because every time I see a monster I want more info about it. Gesturing at there being all these other supernatural things offscreen feels like it’s saying that the supernatural is mundane and boring, and surely the point of having monsters and curses and so on in your show is that they’re strange and exciting? If they’re so unremarkable why both including them? (Yes it’s a character beat that the strange and exciting becomes mundane and boring to the characters after a while, but you can show that without actually making it mundane and boring to the viewers! We’re not Buffy: we’re glad she’s going through all this bullshit, we love it, in that respect we’re sort of her enemies… (and sure, the other benefit of mundane monsters is that it’s funny by incongruity, but if it makes monsters seem less significant then it seems like a long-term cost for a short-term benefit, which is not a great deal (ok that’s enough parentheses (probably)))))
Anyway, this transitions into the gang discussing their four bad break-ups, with the four love interests conspicuously absent: Cordelia, Oz, Angel, and Faith. (I mean, they don’t name the Faith thing as a break up with a love interest, but structurally the parallel is pretty clear...)
But at the same time Faith is absent-but-mentioned, you know who has been officially promoted from absent-and-unmentioned to absent-but-mentioned? Amy! Last we saw her, she was at the center of a terrifying botched love spell, now Willow is learning things from her about where Cordelia has been and how scary she looks. That’s a data point!
Anyway, we get a lot of focus on Cordelia, with the phone calls and the burning photos and the cool outfit walking into school and the asking random dudes if there’s stuff in her teeth. It’s striking how this contrasts with Oz, who is as usual quiet, and mature, and sympathetically clear-eyed about everything and firm in his boundaries. Which is, you know, refreshing when everyone else is a hormonal goblin, but it also means that he’s just offscreen causing no drama and we as the audience get nothing to work with. Give this character something to do!
Harmony’s clearly enjoying being queen bee (in a way that really underlines that it’s odd she wasn’t a homecoming queen candidate in E5?). Very mean to poor Jonathon, who’s just minding his own business. Four months from now he’ll try to take his own life. 😃👍 (Probably not just because of this event but I'm sure it's not helping.)
I guess I don’t know exactly how sympathetic I am to Cordelia here. Like, ok she’s now low-status...just like all the other low-status people (like Jonathon!) she used to mock. I mean I guess I see how it all fits together: she gave up her high-status clique, but she’s also now rejecting the low-status clique she had fallen in with, so between them she’s sort of uniquely alone, and of course she’s been cheated on, and she’s clearly genuinely hurt by that and doesn’t have anyone to commiserate with, or anyone who can sit and tell her how stupid and evil Xander and Willow are.
But at the same time (and here’s the central wrinkle of the episode, I guess) she directs an odd amount of her ire at Buffy, who did not in fact cheat on her or anyone else (except maybe symbolically Faith?), and who is actually trying to reach out and connect. (And possibly saved her life in that vampire attack?) So that sort of limits my sympathy a bit?
And also yes she has this horrible gut wound… but I did complain last episode that this feels sort of random? Like, there’s no reason why it happened to her and not to anyone else, it doesn’t seem to connect to any broader characterisation or specific choice? So I dunno.
Wait I lied the dude says he can’t be seen with her in public but offers to go somewhere private if she wants to fool around. I’m sympathetic again, supply her with weapons.
Um, just to shift over the Willow and Xander, observe the juxtaposition at the Bronze between Willow saying there’s not enough paying in all the world for what they did, and Xander saying he’s had enough, so “you want to do guilt-a-palooza, fine, but I'm done with that.” It’s a striking juxtaposition, it’s of a piece with last episode, where Willow was actively looking for ways to break out of the affair (everything short of just not doing jt) and him not. Reinforced by her insisting on them not touching. At least on the surface she seems genuinely penitent and he seems mostly just aggrieved. (You can just see him feeling like with every new voice message he leaves, he’s racking up grovel credits and becoming more entitled to stop feeling guilty, even though they aren’t doing anything to help Cordelia and she’s clearly not asking for them… is this the Angel model of entirely self-directed and self-adjudicated atonement?)
(But I also think there’s probably something interesting to be said about… Willow feels like she needs to actively do things (like not touch Xander) because she still has the hope of reconciliation, and next episode she will in fact achieve it. Xander won’t, and clearly on some level doesn’t expect to or think he can, and there’s a chicken-egg dynamic between those two facts. Like he's bitter and aggrieved because on some level he knows he has less going for him and probably won't be able to fix things? While Willow's confidence in her own fundamental goodness allows her to safely berate and self-flagellate because she trusts the world to forgive her?)
Um, anyway, shockingly bad vampire security here, is everyone really just walking through this dark passage area that vampires randomly jump out into? Still?
And that maybe does connect back to the central wrinkle, of why Cordelia is so hostile to Buffy. The episode sort of contrives a justification for this by having the vampire jump them when she’s talking to Buffy, and then she gets shoved in the fight, but… would she have been better off if Buffy wasn’t there? It sort of feels like this, like the gut wound, reflects the writers' lack of confidence that her venom towards Buffy is grounded in something about her character, so they have to bolster it with these contrivances...
And then of course we get the immortal line, “I never would have looked twice at Xander if Buffy hadn’t made him marginally cooler by hanging out with him.”
Grand unified theory of season 3: Cordelia, Willow, and Faith all get together with Xander because it feels like the closest option to getting together with Buffy, who they’re all in love with.
(Or second closest, after getting together with Angel, which two of them also try to do… hmm maybe this grand unified theory has legs…)
(I know there are more nuanced ways to read Cordelia's emotions here, I guess I'll to work them out in post 3/3.)
And finally there’s Anya, who it suddenly occurs to me occupies the same structural role in relation to Harmony and Cordelia that Buffy did in S1E01 in relation to Cordelia and Willow: new girl falls in with the popular crowd, sees their leader be performatively mean to an unpopular girl, immediately goes to befriend that unpopular girl.
And in a way, just watching the non-Wishverse parts of the episode, what it leaves me with most of all is the missed opportunity of Cordelia and Anya. Because Cordelia finally looks so happy and so pleased to have this friend who will validate her grievances, and follow her around pretending to grant her vengeful wishes. She just needs a flunky or two with good taste in bags! This could have been so healing for her.
Instead, the next time we see them together on screen is, I believe, at the Prom, when… Anya is there with Xander? I feel like the space of 11 episodes makes us forget but that’s sort of a shocking reversal, isn’t it? Sort of kick in the teeth, or a spike in the guts?
It makes me wonder: what’s going on with the Cordelia-Anya relationship in between? At what point does Anya stop hanging out with her? At what point does Cordelia find out that Anya was a demon? Does she ever find out? Oy. I’ve already got Amy-Willow to think about, there’s a limit to how many completely off-screen female friendships I can mentally reconstruct…
there’s something really interesting with the buffy/parker relationship where the show does not really seem able to articulate why what parker did to buffy was bad? like, when parker and willow talk, he defends himself by saying that sex shouldn’t necessarily mean commitment, and sometimes a good time is just a good time. which is true! but what was wrong about parker’s behavior was how he led buffy on and then ghosted her and blamed her for being upset about it. but nobody in the show actually really points that out? so the message ends up being that parker is bad because he sleeps around, not because he’s manipulative and deceitful.
there’s something similar with the xander/anya relationship, where anya is insecure that xander doesn’t like her that much, and xander is sort of baffled over the fact that he is a boyfriend now and he has to do boyfriend things. their relationship begins when they start sleeping together and it’s just decided that they’re dating now even though xander does not actually like or understand anya that much. it’s like, not only is there never a “what are we” conversation, but the concept that a “what are we” conversation might be needed seems totally foreign to everybody. it’s an interesting inability to understand that it is not necessarily the correct or moral thing to start dating someone once you’ve had sex with them, and that casual sex can be healthy so long as there is respect and communication.
I think Parker’s conversation with Willow, especially the part where she shuts him down and tells him “This isn’t connecting!” is the show’s attempt at naming the problem, which is that Parker is a manipulative creep who pretends to offer emotional connection when all he wants is sex. However, Willow then follows that up with the idea that he’s just following his id, chasing the pleasure principle. And the idea that that’s a problem because it hurts people doesn’t really get articulated very well. It’s a problem because it makes him shallow, like the cavemen.
But if Parker is a bad guy for luring Buffy in with false ideas, that doesn’t apply to Xander. Xander slept with Anya after clearly communicating that there were no feelings involved (on his side). She said it was a one-time thing. I don’t know if I yet have a sense of what the show thinks he should do. He does invite her to a party in the next episode (in contrast to bad guy Parker, who is ignoring Buffy) and when Anya asks if they’re dating, he responds, “There are definitely date-like qualities at work here.” Is he a gentleman for agreeing to date her? Is he an innocent being hounded by her? Is he pathetic for not being more assertive of his boundaries? I guess I’ll figure out as I watch the rest of the season what I think the show thinks of his relationship with her.
I do think it’s interesting that the show brings up the Xander/Faith hookup right before Xander sleeps with Anya. It gives me the sense that Anya’s likability relies on the idea that she won’t get over Xander easily. If she did sleep with him and get over him, she’d be bad, like Faith. Instead we’re supposed to find it cute that she’s been affected by the good human emotion of having a crush on him. Personally, I find her cute for many reasons, but her affection for Xander is (so far) not one of them.
This is a really good analysis of how the show sort of doesn't quite stick the landing on the Parker/Buffy storyline, because it blends together "manipulating someone into doing something under false pretences is wrong because it hurts them" and "having casual sex with no strings attached is wrong because it's shallow and dirty".
Which, just to flag another connection, is arguably the flipside of why it fumbles the love spell issue in "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered": it's got this idea that deep and abiding feelings for someone are inherently noble, so Xander's vengeful possessiveness over Cordelia is somehow morally superior to the "shallowness" of her friends...
Fic update: Oz and Willow have broken up, but it's that time of the month and someone needs to mind him. Kendra takes a radical approach. Also a flashback to when she was first called.
[Content warning for pseudo-therapeutic lycanthropophilic fellatio]
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“Kendra, I’m glad you’re here. These two are telling me something quite ridiculous.”
She slowed her approach, coming to a stop a respectful distance from them all. “What are they telling you, Mr. Giles, sir?”
“Well,” he adjusted his glasses, “they’re saying you plan to provide Oz here,” he gestured at the ravening beast in the cage, “with some sort of…” he waved his hand vaguely, “pseudo-therapeutic lycanthropophilic fellatio!”
Kendra frowned. Behind him she could see Buffy and Faith looking mystified by what Giles had said. But she had studied enough Greek and Latin to piece together his meaning.
“That is correct, sir. I intend precisely that.” Giles’ face fell, and she felt her stomach drop at the sight. She didn’t like to think about how closely his shocked dismay probably matched what Mr. Zabuto would feel, if he knew how she lived now.
“And what does, what does… your master, uh, think about that?” But Kendra didn’t have to answer that, because her master had just entered the library behind her. And when they did, Giles entirely forgot what he had been talking about.
Her master now appeared entirely human; their face and arms, hair and hands, were unclothed and fleshy, with the dark hair and sardonic eyes of the woman Kendra had seen in photos all throughout their house. A careful comparison might have shown them now a little taller: their robotic skeleton was tall for a woman and short for a man, but average enough to be unremarkable in either case. One eye was of vitreous humour, the other a life-like glass-and-metal imitation holding a camera. And they were wearing a long, loose, black dress, with a satchel slung casually over one shoulder. After months of concealing the various strange and unnatural parts of their body, they looked shockingly normal.
“Jenny…” Giles was frozen, as if entirely unaware of his surroundings; Buffy and Faith were also staring, and even Oz had paused in his raging, as though suspicious of the sudden silence.
“Hi everyone.” Her master paused, then kept walking to the table and dropped their bag on it. “As you may have noticed, I’ve made some progress with Balthazar’s amulet.”
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“We should inform the Council?” But he shook his head.
“In time, but… Travers can read the signs himself. If he deserves his position, he will know already.” Her Watcher had never been shy about his disdain for the modernists on the Council, who trusted telephone calls over auguries. If she had not been Called, she would have striven to be a traditionalist Watcher, to make him proud that way.
“For now, we should hunt. Your Gifts will let you know your quarry, even while it hides, even while it sleeps. But for its full effect you must practice. You have to hone your senses. Come!”
She started to follow him outside, but almost faltered. “Sir, I am…” unsteady. She didn’t want to seem incapable, but she didn’t want to stumble at some crucial moment. “The memories, sir, they come upon me without warning.” And it seemed foolish to muddy them by trying to focus on her surroundings: these were insights into her heritage, a thousand lives spread all across history and the globe. Something far more significant and interesting, it seemed to her, than checking one more time whether any vampires still lurked in their little town.
“Ah, of course.” He nodded understandingly. “Fear not, that will pass.”
“Pass?” She didn’t understand.
“Today, you are put suddenly in touch with all who went before you, and it is a chaos and cacophony. You are struck with sudden fragments, are you not?”
She nodded, unsure what feeling was curling inside her belly.
“Within a short time, they will settle: the details of each individual life will fade into the harmony. All that will remain will be what is common: battle, training, the hunt.” He said this as a reassurance, and of course it was. What she needed was the combat skills, that common element across all the thousand lives. That was the point. The details of each individual life were irrelevant. Just as the details of her life, her past, her family, were all irrelevant.
It is very strange that my phone’s autocorrect has learnt from my writing habits sufficiently that it now automatically capitalises the words ‘faith’ and ‘willow’, but still somehow assumes that if I begin ‘Angel’ with a capital A, it should autocorrect to ‘Angela’.
This is also annoying because I worry it makes me sound like I am misogynistically mocking him through impugning his masculinity. Which I’m not! That's Spike's thing, and I’m not Spike!
Anyway, if I ever post something about Angela, please do not scratch your head about who I mean...
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E08, “Lovers’ Walk” (2/2): FAQ about vampire world
Ok so I’m going to wrap up my thoughts on Lovers’ Walk by looking at it, foolishly, as an exercise in worldbuilding - through Spike, Angel, and Drusilla, as well as through the mayor and Giles and Buffy discussing the demands of Slaying. (I recognise this might be a little bit reading against the grain, in terms of what the writers’ goals and priorities are, but it’s still a diverting intellectual exercise so whatever.)
Let me start with a few questions about the general setting, including the one that seems like it might dictate Buffy’s whole future.
Question 1: Must there always be a Slayer on the hellmouth?
Giles and Buffy talk as though Buffy has a responsibility to be here in Sunnydale - a responsibility which Faith might relieve her of, though at the end of the season that option will have vanished, and so Buffy does in fact stay here. The idea of such a responsibility is brought up again in seasons 6 and 7, and ultimately relieved only through the extreme expedient of destroying Sunnydale entirely.
But it’s weird, right? There was no Slayer here before season 1, and no other Slayer we’ve heard about was fixed to Sunnydale. The Chosen One brief is “you must battle the forces of darkness”, not “you must relocate to Southern California.”
I think the best is a way to reconcile these two sides is through the idea that a hellmouth can be dormant or more or less active (or, in the extreme, open). In “Welcome to the Hellmouth”, Giles says:
“It’s getting worse! The influx of the undead, the supernatural occurrences, it's been building for years. There's a reason why you're here and a reason why it's now!”
This suggests that maybe up until the 90s, Sunnydale was just a regular town — which kind of fits with the way that the Harvest and all these other prophesied big deal events seem to be on some sort of calendar? The stars align, the hellmouth begins to open, and that’s when you need a Slayer on it.
Of course, in the same episode Giles also says:
“Dig a bit in the history of this place. You'll find a steady stream of fairly odd occurrences. Now, I believe this whole area is a center of mystical energy,that things gravitate towards it that, that, that you might not find elsewhere.”
The language of “steady stream” seems initially in conflict with “it’s been building for years”, but I think both can be true. Suppose the baseline level of vampires and supernatural shenanigans across the world is pretty low (as is required for homicide and missing persons statistics to be anywhere near their actual levels). Maybe even a dormant hellmouth leads to, say, ten times that level - enough for a “steady stream” of odd occurrences, but still one that only becomes apparent to those who “dig a bit” into local history. Maybe that’s the situation in Cleveland.
But in the few years leading up to season 1, Sunnydale has stopped being that: it’s gone from being a dormant hellmouth to being an active one, which means a rate of supernatural stuff that, by season 1, is, like, a thousand times higher than normal - enough that the steady stream is now noticeable to any high school student or concerned parent who pays attention.
(In “the Harvest” Giles says:
“Some sixty years ago, a very old, very powerful vampire came to this shore, not just to feed. [Buffy: He came 'cause this town's a mystical who's it.] Yes. The Spanish who first settled here called it 'Boca del Infierno'. Roughly translated, 'Hellmouth'. It's a sort of, um, portal between this reality and the next. This vampire hopes to open it.”
This suggests that the activity level of the hellmouth has been high before - high enough, at least, to attract the notice of the Master and some Spanish people. But that might be an “every 50-100 years” sort of thing?
Anyway, the upshot would be: while the hellmouth is in this highly-active state, it maybe does sort of need a Slayer on it? Consider that Kendra had to visit Sunnydale twice in a 6-month period, and she still missed a potential apocalypse-level event (the reassembly of The Judge). That does sort of suggest that if you want to keep the world really safe, boots on the ground is best practice for an active hellmouth - and the Sunnydale Hellmouth, for whatever reason, has stayed active for multiple years in a row now.
You might ask, why would anyone live in a place like this? Which brings us to…
Question 2: Is the mayor really on top of everything?
The mayor talks casually about how, when Spike was around last year, they were keeping tabs on him, and holding back from intervening into his various “shennanigans”. (The deputy mayor’s reponses seem to suggest he remembers this, so I guess that answers my question from back in E5 about how long he’s been in the know.)
M’learned colleague @coraniaid suggests that this “doesn't really hold water”, especially given what we see next episode in the Wishverse timeline. And it certainly doesn’t seem like everything was "under control” in the last two years, what with the hellmouth briefly opening, the Bronze being taken over for the Harvest, the Judge attacking a shopping mall and Acathla almost sucking the world into Hell. Those all seem like things that you’d expect the mayor to have done something about.
But I think there might be a way to thread the needle? In a previous post about local and global apocalypses, I suggested a scenario roughly as follows: if necessary, the mayor (and probably other shadowy figures around the world) could have probably closed the hellmouth, or reversed Acathla’s portal, etc. But doing so would be costly and dangerous would require revealing themselves (to other shadowy forces, to the Slayer, etc.) in a way that they’d rather avoid. So they take a gamble: hang back and monitor the situation, and see if someone more heroic fixes things first. If they do - great, you’ve kept your hands clean. If they don’t, well, some large number of people have probably died by the time you manage to resolve things, but they’re not you so who cares?
(Not to jump the gun on the Wishverse, but appealing to a mayor of this sort also strikes me as the best way to explain why the Master in the wishverse hasn’t already opened the hellmouth and ended the world - the mayor steps out of the shadows when it’s clear that nobody’s going to stop that happening, and negotiates some sort of truce (at least until after graduation…).)
I mean, obviously the big apocalypse plots of the previous two seasons aren’t written to signal anything like this, but I think they’re just about compatible with it…
(To link this to question 1, Faith in E17 will say “the mayor built this town for demons to feed on”, which suggests the “steady stream” model of abnormally high supernatural occurrences. Just, maybe not as high as these last few years. High enough, at least, for the Spanish to have decided not to settle right on top of the hellmouth! And for that clever decision to have only been made once there was a guy who hoped to profit off a century of people getting quietly snacked upon.)
Question 3: What’s the deal with holy water?
I had forgotten until this rewatch that the one thing Angel and Buffy actually achieve is driving off a large group of vampires by throwing lots of holy water at them. This is, I think, the first time we’ve seen holy water used since season 1? Crosses and stakes have been reliable go-tos, but not holy water, even though it seems to be pretty effective whenever it's used.
The best explanation I can think of is that it’s good for driving vampires away, but not actually for killing them. I think me and m’learned colleague @badwolfwho1 had a back-and-forth a bit earlier in the rewatch about what crosses actually do, and my preferred reading is that their effect is as much mental as it is physical - in the Master’s words from S1E10, they “suffuse [vampires] with mortal dread”, a sort of supernatural terror. And maybe holy water does the same thing, but doesn’t do much to actually kill them (unless drunk, as in E12). We do see (in E16) that Wesley carries some with him, suggesting that it has a valid defensive role, but you can see why a Slayer who’s meant to be hunting vampires down and slaying them wouldn’t have much use for something that will make their quarry run away.
(A deeper question is what holy water is, because the characters clearly don’t act like it’s water that’s been imbued with the power of Jesus Christ the one true God by ministers of the true church that represents Him on earth. The best reading seems to me to be something like: at least some priests and their congregations are sort of stumbling into a fairly basic sort of magical spell, conferring power onto one individual which they can then imbue into water (and, as we see in S2E01, earth). It’s sort of like invitations, in terms of vampires being affected by certain sorts of human socio-psychic-acts, even without the humans involved knowing why? And it makes me sort of want to write a fic where Buffy or Willow or someone tries to figure out what they need to do to start making their own holy water…)
(Is there such a thing as, or a counterpart to, holy water in Judaism? Could Willow deploy… holy oil? Or is it better not to get into that?)
Question 4: What’s the deal with magic shops?
When Jenny went to get her orb, the shopkeeper very clearly differentiated between “tourists” and those who were “in the trade”, to the extent of using different accents with each. This shopkeeper (who will survive approximately as long) doesn’t seem to do that - does she already know that Willow is serious? How long did that take? Has Willow been coming here all year so far? Since the summer?
(Does Amy come here? @badwolfwho1 suggests that Amy’s role in this episode would probably be to advise Willow against doing the anti-lust spell and be ignored - I've been toying with a fic idea that she arrives at the magic shop and finds the shopkeeper, who she’s only recently persuaded to trust her, dead and vampirised, and it reinforces her feeling that she ought to stay as far away from vampire-slaying as possible.)
I’m also sort of curious what the shopkeeper planned to say after “are you sure you know what you’re doing?”, if Willow had confirmed she was planning a love spell. What are the professional ethics here? Are you just selling the equivalent of roofies and firearms to any teenager who comes in?
What’s really disappointing in this regard, though, is that Giles himself takes over running a magic shop in season 5, and does so little vetting that he sells vital magical supplies to a Hellgod! Though I suppose Anya does look over the receipts and identify a problem, implying there’s some level of expected oversight that simply lapsed here, but…
I dunno. This is just an area that I feel like would be really interesting to explore. Presumably to be profitable you need to be running two games at once, selling harmless nonsense to the many guillible “tourists” and rarer high-ticket items to the professionals, but… just lots of unanswered questions.
Question 5: What is involved in “putting together a welcoming committee”?
This isn’t really a big question anyone’s asking, but it just occurs to me that there’s no clear reason to think that all 15 or so of these vampires was already around, contemplating the fact that they can live forever, finding and killing humans regularly and driving up the homicide rate. It’s equally possible that “putting together a committee” means finding a group of, like, outlaw bikers or something and turning them into vampires very quickly, then exploiting their impressionable young minds to send them straight into battle. (I think in Vampire: The Masquerade this is termed a “mass embrace”?)
Question 6: What’s going on when vampires fight?
In the big fight scene at the end, Buffy does some staking, and gives stakes to Angel and Spike, but they don’t use them much (I believe Spike stakes one opponent, and only after beating on them for a while). And I sort of realised: if you put two random vampires in front of each and make them fight, there’s…basically no way for either of them to die? They can’t suck each other’s blood, and without weapons they’re not decapitating each other or staking each other or setting each other on fire.
There’s a thing in nature where animals with serious natural weapons tend to have a lot of evolved instincts to let them settle disputes without actually maiming each other, with displays and submission signals and dance-offs and so on. What’s interesting is that vampires seem to be the opposite: because there’s so little they can do each other, they’re very willing to just beat each other up. They probably welcome the fact that they can’t kill each other, since it means they get to spend more time fighting.
(If you’re leaning into erotic metaphors of vampirism then their fighting is mostly just foreplay…)
But they can, presumably, still do various amounts of damage to each other’s bodies, which leads into:
Question 7: Why did they let Spike go?
I really wish they hadn’t let Spike go. Sure, have him get away so we can use him again, sure, but would it be so hard to clearly indicate on screen that he is escaping, not just strolling off while the supposed Vampire Slayer watches?
As it is, what’s shown on screen is very ambiguous. There’s one reading, which some of my Spuffy-leaning colleagues will probably prefer, that something in Buffy already has a bit of thing for Spike (she lets him live three times before he's chipped - in "Becoming", in this episode, and again in "The Harsh Light of Day.") I don’t really like this reading, just because it sort of undermines the serious of her mission, (especially with how everyone was so mad about letting Angel live). Spike just turned up and almost killed Willow and Xander!
The other reading, which I prefer, is that Buffy feels she can’t pursue him because she’s worried about Angel. Because while clearly none of these dozen vampires was able to kill him, they did drop a wall on him and run over top of it. Plausibly, all of his ribs are broken and all of his internal organs are punctured? If he has to keep fighting, he might be at risk of collapse - just becoming physically, mechanically, unable to move around effectively. And if she engages Spike and he realises he has no insurance any more (having told her where her friends are), he’s suddenly much more dangerous and might use the stake she just gave him to finally kill Angel.
(Though if I were, say, Xander, given the option of risking Angel to kill Spike, I might make some remarks about bird-to-stone ratios…)
Question 8: Why can Spike drink?
I think this is the first time we’re shown vampires eating or drinking human food/alcohol? I don’t really like it - I want my vampires to remember that they’re dead! If they want to get drunk, find a drunk human and feed from them!
But Spike is, at least, shown to be kind of a freak in this regard (see also Season 4 and the weetabix). So I guess the easiest thing to say is: Spike is a freak, and he just kept on consuming human food and drink for years as a vampire, and somehow it eventually altered his stomach so that he’s able to metabolise at least some of it.
Question 9: Why can Spike drive?
That blacked-out car thing - what? It blocks sunlight enough that he doesn’t burn and yet still lets through enough light that he can see the road?
Man, I dunno. I guess my answer here is:
Question 10: Why did Angel happen to be hanging around Buffy's house?
Because he's compulsively creepy like that, it's his single most consistently established character trait. Next question.
Q11: Is Spike right about Buffy and Angel?
It’s already been pointed out that “I can fool Giles, I can fool my friends, but I can’t fool myself. Or Spike for some reason” is pretty clearly not true. Giles and her friends were not fooled: Buffy was perhaps only fooling herself. At least, that seems true on the topic of whether she and Angel have romantic feelings, a desire to be more than friends. Spike is clearly right about that, but everyone already knew that (the kissing and almost-kissing sort of give it away).
But Spike's actual claim goes beyond this:
"You'll never be friends. You'll be in love until it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends."
And this isn't, actually, true, is it? They are, admittedly, rather miserable and end up in an excruciating half-together-half-not situationship for the rest of the season, but they actually don't fight, or shag, or hate each other. By season 5, for instance, they do seem to be, approximately, friends. And they could both live decades more in which to settle more comfortably into that relationship. So I'm inclined to think that Spike is just flat wrong here.
(What, the drunk pathetic vampire is projecting his own problems onto others? Who'd have thought it!)
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E07, “Revelations” (2/3): Secrets are good, there must be a reason why we keep them
So the episode title is about revelations, the flipside of which is, as Willow says, secrets. The show sets up a lot of secrets - most centrally the secret that Angel is still alive, but also fairly obviously the secret that Willow and Xander are having illegitimate kisses, and that Gwendolyn Post is, not to put too fine a point on it, evil.
There’s also a couple of extra, smaller scale ‘secrets’: in the early scene of Faith and Buffy discussing their history with boys, Faith clearly feels hurt that Buffy is, as she sees it, keeping her own romantic history secret, refusing to talk about it, and later on Faith is turned against Buffy et al. partly by Post mentioning their ‘secret meetings’, and it is in fact true and notable that Faith and Post are not brought into all the discussions (to the point that Giles deliberately obfuscates things by calling Angel “a friend of Buffy’s” when talking to Post).
So secrets and secrecy abound. But no doubt you want to know: who’s right and who’s wrong and what should they have done instead? Never fear, weird internet nerd is here, ready to delve into the ethical minutiae of a teenage horror show from 25 years ago, for your entertainment.
The tl;dr, of course, is that everyone makes mistakes for understandable reasons, and overall it manages to be a good episode in part because you can both see where everyone is coming from and see some of their blind spots. But I also think there’s a lot of complexity to unpack so, you know, it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it.
So some of the secrets are pretty morally straightforward: Willow and Xander shouldn’t be kissing, and Gwendolyn Post shouldn’t be evil, and if they’re not going to stop they should at least tell people. But what about the central secret, about Angel?
I think if you watch without really thinking about it, the sense you’d get is: Buffy keeping this secret was the wrong decision, but still done for understandable reasons; the others overreact at first, though again for understandable reasons. In the final scene where Buffy asks if they’re cool and Xander affirms that they’re cool, they’ve all accepted this, as should we the audience.
But this time around I’ve had three things that have made me reconsider this a bit. Two come from posts by @coraniaid:
One, pointing out that the natural conclusion for Buffy’s friends to jump to isn’t that she sent Angel to hell and then recently he inexplicably came back, but that she was lying all along and possibly spent the summer with him.
The other, pointing out that Giles’s stance, that “you owe it to us as a matter of Slayer duty to share all this information” stance, is rather undercut by the fact that he’s not including Faith or Gwendolyn Post in these discussions.
And a third was something that struck me while watching “Beauty and the Beasts”: Buffy might very reasonably expect that if she revealed Angel’s presence, her friends would insist on killing him.
And all of this complicates things, so I’m going to try to work through the different choices made by different characters. Perhaps not exhaustively, hopefully not exhaustingly, but enough to disentangle some of the tangles.
Question 1.
So the question we have to start with, I think, is: should Buffy have killed Angel in Episode 4?
The case for saying “no” is fairly easy: he’s got a soul again, he seems to be at least somewhat responsive to her reaching out, it seems like a live possibility that he can recover and become a force for good, and, y’know, a healthy default is “if in doubt, don’t kill someone”. Especially from the point of view that he’s just suffered an enormously traumatic stay in hell for some unknown length of time.
But here’s the case for saying “yes”: at this point, she has no way of knowing how quickly he’ll recover, or if he ever will. It’s a live possibility that he’ll be a dangerous, unpredictable animal forever, and it’s a live possibility that he’ll break free and kill more people.
Moreover, when Buffy first meets him in the woods, there’s blood on his mouth! We never find out if it’s human or animal, if he killed someone or wounded someone or found a dead body (like the boy who everyone ends up assuming was killed by Pete… but who might in fact have been killed by Angel!)
And if Buffy had staked him when she first met him, then most likely Pete Clarner would still be alive: she tries to chain him up, but he breaks free and immediately kills someone. Now, I shed no tears for Pete, he’s an abusive murderer, but he’s also a teenage human, and there’s no guarantee that the next victim would be as deserving.
So it looks to me like the decision Buffy faces in Episode 4 (and which she is, perhaps, psyching herself up to make when she’s talking to Debbie, and inwardly debating when she's talking to Giles about whether anyone who came back from hell would be "a lost cause"), of whether to kill Angel (again!), is basically a toss-up. Do you sacrifice one life, and all the future lives he might help save, or do you gamble on his recovery and risk sacrificing other, innocent, lives for nothing? I don’t think there’s a clearly right answer there, even from a purely objective point of view.
(With hindsight we can see that not killing Angel was the right thing to (however annoying he ends up being, and however much he messes up Buffy’s chances with Faith) but that’s not knowable at the time.)
Of course, Buffy isn’t being purely objective: she presumably very strongly wants to keep Angel alive (though I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a deeply-buried part that’s angry enough to want to kill him, but we don’t need to get into that…). It’s just that this desire isn’t working against her objective duty, it’s just a tiebreaker.
Question 2
Ok, so having suggested an answer to that first question, the second question is: should Buffy have told her friends about Angel in Episode 4?
And here the very fact that question 1 is objectively a toss-up provides a pretty good reason to say ‘no.’ These guys are not inherently more objective than Buffy is (in this episode, Williams stance is half-determined by her own guilt about an unrelated matter, Xander clearly has all of his own issues, and even Giles makes a point of bringing up his own personal experiences with Angel, which are clearly weighing on his mind). So there’s a live chance that they might decide the toss-up the ‘wrong’ way and force Buffy to kill Angel. Which would be 1) devastating for her, 2) bad for him and for the world, and 3) probably experienced by them both as a sort of betrayal - he lost everything because of things she did in season 2 (either unknowingly, like having sex, or for good reason, like sending him to hell) and now when he crosses dimensional boundaries to get back to her, she fails to protect him.
Of course there are also reasons to say ‘yes’ - most notably:
Her friends and others may be in personal danger, if Angel turns evil or remain feral
As her friends, they have a reasonable expectation of honesty about things important to their friendship
As her comrades in arms, they have a reasonable expectation of honesty about things relevant to the Slayer cause
If you buy the claim of identity-continuity between versions of Angel, maybe he just deserves to die anyway
They might end up making the ‘right’ call, and if they agree with her about what that is then Buffy herself will be a lot happier
But… I think it’s actually perfectly fair that none of these win out against “I have someone whose life is at stake who I need to protect.” So again, I think the objective considerations here are pretty balanced, and personal feelings are just a tie-breaker.
Question 3:
Should Buffy have told her friends about Angel in this episode?
If I’m right that a lot depends on whether people would want to kill Angel, which in turn depends on the odds of him recovering or staying feral (/getting worse), then the balance shifts after he’s made visible progress at becoming lucid and controlled. And since the five considerations listed above continue to have weight, I think it’s pretty clear that Buffy should have told everyone about Angel now.
But of course, how soon is now? Angel has been getting better gradually for a few episodes, without any clear moment when it’s clearly the right time to go public with it. And of course the longer it goes on, the more the others are going to feel lied to, and of course also the kissing is not great. I mean, I don’t think they were at serious risk of “getting pelvic” (they have a whole season of yearning ahead and never even really get close), but it’s not great.
Was Buffy going to tell the others at some point? She claims so, but her scenes with Angel are sort of ambiguous: last episode they had the exchange:
“I’m getting stronger.
Yeah, pretty soon, you won't even need me.
That'll be better.
Yeah.”
Which is heavy on the angst but light on the specifics. I suspect if not found out, Buffy might have prevaricated a few episodes longer, but I do think she would have told people eventually. It would have been better to do it sooner, and better if it came out differently, but I don’t actually think the decision to hide Angel was clearly wrong from the start.
So in sum, I think I come out of all this holding a membership card for the Buffy Summers Defence Squad. To put it metaphorically: Willow is right that when it comes to Angel, Buffy “can’t see straight”, but she has her non-visual senses, and she can feel her way through pretty well. She has a good feel for what’s really important, even when bursting clouds of angst and hormones and guilt are filling her vision. Like Xander at the end of the episode, I basically trust her.
Question 4
Should Buffy’s friends have reacted the way they did?
So this one is extra complicated both because I think it matters which friends we’re talking about, and it matters which situation they think they’re responding to.
To tackle the which-person thing first, I noted above some different reasons why Buffy should tell them, and I think these yield basically three reasons why they might feel upset that she didn’t: that it puts them in danger, that it betrays their trust as friends, and that it betrays their trust as (to use a slightly archaic term) comrades in arms.
But take Cordelia. Cordelia’s… not really Buffy’s friend? They hang out together in a group but she’s not shy about telling Buffy how much she thinks she’s a freak, how much she doesn’t trust her, etc. She shows zero remorse over leaving her out of the yearbook photos in episode 5. They just don’t really have the sort of relationship where she would reasonably expect honesty and openness. So it makes sense that Cordelia’s complaints during the intervention are all safety-focused: she’s worried that Angel is going to hurt or kill her.
Giles talks in very different terms, about “respect for me [and] the job I perform.” But it’s also pretty clearly a personal thing for Giles (for a start, he doesn’t have Gwendolyn Post, who performs the exact same job, here in the meeting). And like Giles, I think Xander and Willow could reasonably feel personally hurt, as friends, to not be in the loop about something so seemingly important.
It’s not clear if it makes sense for Xander and Willow to also feel “professionally” disrespected, because it’s not clear if “Slayerette” qualifies as a role with responsibilities and expectations. Indeed, I think that’s sort of a long-running undercurrent of tension: Willow and Xander want it to, they want to be recognised parts of the group and not just hangers-on, while Buffy is ambivalent (and has more than once tried to dissuade them from being involved).
Ok but it also matters what situation they think they’re discovering. The actual scenarios, with the going to hell and coming back and recovering from trauma stuff, is quite different from the scenario they might naturally be suspecting, that Angel has been alive and in this dimension all summer, possibly hanging out with Buffy in LA.
On the issue of safety, I think it’s actually not clear which scenario is more dangerous? On the one hand, if he’s been around (and kissing?) all summer and (hopefully) not killing people or trying to end the world, then that maybe suggests things are pretty stable - if he’s popping in and out of hell dimensions and losing his mind, that’s arguably more worrying. On the other hand, if he’s been around all summer then the scope of what he might have done, and how much might have been concealed, is much larger.
But on the issue of trust between friends, or between Slayer, Watcher, and (possibly) Slayerettes, the difference is huge. The actual scenario is one where Buffy has mostly told them all the truth, with omissions - she’s left out details of the Summer, and of the events of “Becoming”, and this really weird thing happened recently that she hasn’t (yet) told them about, but she’s shared the broad brushstrokes accurately. When people have made space or pushed her in the right ways, she’s been more forthcoming (e.g. when Giles got her to admit that Angel’s soul was restored). That’s not ideal, but it fits with what you might realistically expect from a good friend who’s got some specific secrets.
But the alternative scenario, that she took Angel away for a summer, then came back and claimed to have killed him, while actually hiding him (and bringing him back to Sunnydale to hide him?), feels much more like: who are you? The whole story of what’s been happening, of what Buffy’s life is about, of who she’s loyal to and what she’s planning, is suddenly up in the air. It would feel like discovering your best friend isn’t really your friend any more.
(Which is why it’s really hard for us as viewers to even think of that option! It rewrites the entire last 7 episodes of the show we’ve been watching!)
If that’s the scenario they think they’re working with, then honestly Willow’s really under-reacting! Her readiness to forgive Buffy for “keeping a secret” feels out of proportion to the scale of this - potentially everything Buffy’s said to her so far this school year was a lie, or infected by one.
Whereas Xander’s reaction, while unsympathetic and uncharitable, feels at least on the right level of emotion. What’s missing from Xander’s reaction, and arguably from Cordelia’s (taking her as the exemplar of “I don't care about our relationship, I just don’t want to get murdered”), is curiosity. Surely the first thing you’d want to do here is find out as much as you can about what happened.
Did Buffy actually “kill” Angel and in what sense? Why is he still alive then? How long has this been going on? Has he, e.g. killed anyone at this school recently? Are we sure that “getting pelvic” is actually the only way for him to lose his soul again? Are we really really sure? What happened to him in Hell? Did he spend hundreds of years with demons putting hypnotic triggers in his brain? Is he possessed? Will he see me and the red mists descend and through hundreds of years of repression the name “Xander Harris” will float up, subtitled “that guy just bugs me” and the violence will begin again?
And no, “he's better for how long, did you even think about that?” doesn’t really count as curiosity, by my lights. “Did you even think about (the thing that’s been consuming you for almost a year now)?” is not what you say when you’re actually interested in understanding someone's perspective better. Nor is bringing up Jenny from last year to blame Buffy for it.
I dunno, I just think that in this episode, like Dead Man’s Party, Xander comes across not just as jealous of Angel but as resentful and vindictive about Buffy’s sex life generally, and as not particularly interested in letting her defend herself because he fears it’ll blunt the edge of his righteous anger.
(Righteous anger which you’d think would already be blunted by the fact that he rather notably lied to Buffy about Angel in “Becoming”, and is right at this moment hiding his own secret affair, but which instead seems to be intensified by those things.)
(Sorry, I am not on the Xander Harris Defence Squad today.)
(I mean I am maybe on the Xander Harris Intelligibility Squad - this is, in a certain dark sense, his perfect day, the confirmation of all his greivances, it's not surprising that he hangs onto like a dog with a dead rat.)
But equally, I’m not really on the Willow Rosenberg Defence Squad, because, as I said above, if she’s not privy to the information we viewers have, it actually seems like she should take this much more seriously than she does. It’s weird that only a couple of scenes later she’s saying that she feels “zero” negative feelings about this, saying that Buffy just “kept a secret”, and asking salaciously about "a not so secret rendezvous with Angel.”
And objectively, given the actual facts of what’s happened, this seems pretty reasonable, but it doesn’t feel like she’s reacting this way because it’s reasonable. It feels like she’s reacting this way because 1) she feels guilty about her own secret, 2) she’s in love with/very close to Buffy, and 3) she’s a Bangel shipper, and that adds up to wanting to keep seeing Buffy/herself as intrinsically good people who can always endlessly be forgiven. She and Xander, as is often the case, are going in opposite directions here for equally personal reasons.
Final thought on the question of scenarios: with a few days to digest @coraniaid's post about what Buffy’s friends are likely to think, I’m sort of feeling like the writers are pulling a Schrodinger’s lie maneuver. To maximise the emotional stakes of the confrontation, have them accuse her of lying, and talk as though they believe the radical scenario (Angel has been around all summer). To allow for a swift and efficient resolution, don't have them ever explicitly say this, so that people can move on and be cool with each other in light of the real scenario (specific and isolated details were held back).
The cost is… either Buffy’s friends remain wildly misinformed for several more episodes (or forever?) or a lot of important discussion happens offscreen. I can sort of see why they don’t show it on-screen, because explaining everything that’s already happened and then having a lot of people go “oh, that’s actually much less bad than I thought” would be anticlimactic.
But then again, that’s sort of their fault for setting up tension based on a misunderstanding. It can be comic, when it’s resolved, or tragic, if it’s never resolved, but it’s not particularly dramatic. Since the library confrontation does manage to be very dramatic, I suppose I can forgive that.
Question 5
Final question: should Giles have held the meeting the way he did?
The meeting ends with Giles saying:
“Buffy knows our concerns, and her actions, however ill-advised, can be understood. Our priority right now is to retrieve the Glove of Myhnegon and try to destroy it.”
He’s clearly not thrilled at how everything went (nobody was doing the I-statements!) but it does make me wonder what would have counted as it going well. Like, here are four possible goals:
An intervention, i.e. an attempt to compel the intervened-on person to change their behaviour in some way. Get Buffy to stop seeing Angel or… maybe kill him?
A briefing/debriefing, i.e. an attempt to compile and share information, to get a clearer sense of why Angel is alive and what’s been going on.
A trial, i.e. an attempt to ascertain and declare guilt, and dole out appropriate punishment.
A heart-to-heart, i.e. an attempt to (re-)establish emotional equilibrium in relationships, share feelings, reconcile, etc.
Willow, at least, seems to see it mostly as a heart-to-heart, while Buffy clearly experiences it as a trial, and it definitely comes across, in her exchange with Xander about excuses and reasons, and his subsequent actions with Faith, like he was hoping it would be an intervention with a dusty ending. But it doesn’t really succeed at any of these: everyone is still seething and mistrustful, no new plans for what to do about Angel, no particular resolution.
(I’ve suggested that there’s a pressing need for a debriefing, but they really don’t get that much information out of Buffy: she insists Angel is better, that their relationship isn’t sexual, and that she was going to tell them but “didn’t know why he came back” - and nobody asks “came back from where?”)
All of which suggests to me that Giles’s main goal here is more crisis management than anything else: have people in one place where they can reveal what they all know, and feel their big feelings, and then hopefully wind it down before anyone says anything they can’t take back. Hence the remarkably anodyne “Buffy knows our concerns [but] her actions [...] are understandable.” Because, as he says, the priority is the glove and the meeting is mostly to try and stop this new complication from messing everything up.
(Which actually provides a fairly sympathetic reason for not including Faith and Post - if you’re expecting your gang of teenagers to get messy and loud with each other, it’s probably kinder to not have two famously blunt outsiders there. You think Gwendolyn Post is going to be using I-statements?)
(Yes I suppose I’m on the Rupert Giles Defence Squad as well today.)
(But! This is still only compatible with all the duty and respect stuff if he is planning to tell them eventually… when they have the glove and have destroyed it? Or when?)
(Oh ho ho the “I was just getting around to eventually telling you” shoe is on the other foot now isn’t it?)
(But also just to add: I think there’s a good case for not having Faith and Post there for the initial meeting, in terms of kindness to all the teenagers involved, but it’s pretty clear that there’s also a personal motivation: this is pretty damn embarrassing for Giles, who was just insisting that he has total trust in Buffy and complete control of the situation when Xander bursts in with the bad news. He probably does plan to come share everything with Post eventually, but… he’s not exactly in a rush.)
Now by that standard, with those goals, does he succeed? Well, no! Partly because Gwendolyn post turns out to be evil, but also because he seems to completely misjudge both Xander (who he expects to, what, walk away from the meeting satisfied?) and Faith (who, let’s be honest, he probably didn’t think about much at all).
He might fairly ask ‘how was I to know that Faith would immediately set out to kill Angel?’, or ‘how was I to know that Xander would tell her anything?’, or ‘how was I to know that she’d get wind of us holding secret meetings that she wasn’t part of specifically because she’s seen as an outsider to the group?”, or “how was I to know that she’d already been primed to resent that sort of secrecy because Buffy wouldn’t trade stories of bad exes with her?”
But I think a fair response to all of these would be “these are exactly the kind of things that you should expect might happen.” His job, which he says Buffy has no respect for, is ultimately to manage hormonal teenagers engaged in traumatic violence, so actually, yes, being aware of their emotional state and pro-actively trying to make sure they trust you and manage what and when they find out things is pretty much his job. And he’s pretty good at it with Buffy! He just doesn’t seem to even try with Faith. Post is better at this than him after two days!
Maybe that’s because Giles just doesn’t vibe with Faith, maybe it’s because he figures he’s already got one Slayer and that's enough, maybe it’s because he thinks the way he’s cultivated a sensitivity to Buffy’s emotional state is actually a failure of boundaries that he needs to try not to repeat with Faith (that is, after all, what Quentin Travers will say to his face in five episodes’ time). But for whatever reason, it blows up and almost leads to the group imploding.
So I count Giles as failing pretty seriously in this episode. And here’s a final note - look, watch, I’m going to tie this altogether into a big thematic point.
Xander, Willow, Cordelia, and Faith all operate in this episode in pretty much the way you’d expect for teenagers: things make them feel a certain way, they react to that feeling. Buffy and Giles are at least trying to do something more advanced: balance their feelings against the needs of saving lives, even when it’s hard and even when it's deeply unclear what will actually save the most lives. But they both fail, and they both fail in similar ways: they hold back information because they’re worried about managing the fallout, with the result that this information comes out at the worst moment and has even more fallout.
Because Buffy and Giles exhibit the same contradictory pattern: their role requires them to keep secret after secret (including, in Giles’s case, secrets from Buffy, as we’ll see in 5 episodes’ time), and they both develop a habit of compulsive secrecy and withdrawal on top of that to deal with stress (see: Giles in “The Dark Age”, or Buffy in basically every episode so far this season). Neither of them, I think, can really register or address how others around them (like Joyce) perceive this as a betrayal, because after all they’re only doing it for the greater good!
And yet they both feel deeply betrayed when someone holds information back from them (see, among other things, their reactions to Jenny’s secret identity last season).
And, just to go back to something I said back in season 1, I think this reflects the show’s conflict as well. Its genre and setting require secrecy, but its ethos condemns it: and so you get these characters, swimming in secrets, keeping one more secret and then Learning the Lesson that honesty is the best policy. It’s… fascinating? And at times frustrating, but overall I think manages it to pull off being rich and interesting rather than collapsing into total incoherence.
On the point you raised in Question 3 of when was Buffy going to get around to telling everyone about Angel being alive, I honestly think there's an argument to be made that if the secret didn't come out this episode it could've just ended up that Buffy would never tell anyone that Angel was actually alive, like you say in the exchange last episode of.
“I’m getting stronger," "Yeah, pretty soon, you won't even need me," "That'll be better," "Yeah.”
And given how Angel ends s3 I think given the absence of the plaster being ripped off he might make one of those unilateral decisions to protect Buffy that she hates and he's known to do to leave ahead of canon as soon as he's healed up, which is vaguely soon I think? He's been doing his Tai Chi, I'm fairly certain he's wandering around town next episode, he could just leave, possibly without even telling Buffy, to protect each other from their unparalleled magnetism and also specifically Buffy to spare her from the Angel intervention she has this episode.
Afterwards I see a couple of obvious paths, the first is he does just leave for his spin off, nobody ever learns that he's alive and it's just a burden Buffy's silently carrying. Until Cordelia meets when she leaves for LA, which is a bit rockier. Everyone else finds out when she casually drops it in a phone call to Willow a year later for tech support/general Harmony unlife updates.
Alternatively, and this is the more likely path I think, he remains trapped in the Bangel death spiral as is in canon and does return within a few episodes for the secret to be revealed at a suitably dramatic moment. Almost certainly around about the time Faith is fulfilling her dream of being Buffy's rebound. So that everything could explode to a spectacular degree. Maybe he holds out a bit later and it's Bad Girls, he'd heard about Balthazar and all that, shows up to let Buffy know, gets seen by someone else first, huge drama that gets compounded upon by the imminent Faith killing Allan Finch.
Oh yeah, that’s a good point - I hadn’t considered that he might just leave town and be somewhere else. Would probably get drawn back in at some point, e.g. maybe Bad Girls, but also it would be sort of funny for him to try and get as far away as possible and they only bump into him 20 years later in South Africa. (Or Oz meets him in Tibet next season?)
The more interesting question is… does not having the experience of “Revelations” change Buffy’s thinking enough that she responds differently to Finch’s death? She might be more inclined to keep a secret if she’s already got this one buried that seemed to go ok, like if she's learnt the opposite lesson from this?
Fic update - Buffy tries to reintegrate Faith into society, but everyone keeps talking about "prom"...
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“Uh,” Faith tried to speak again, “not to rain on anyone’s parade, but shouldn’t we maybe talk about the Ascension?” It seemed sort of bizarre to be talking about a school dance when everyone around them was likely to be horribly devoured in a couple of weeks. Her knuckles were white from gripping her legs. The mayor’s plan was evil, so evil that her working for him had been almost unforgivable. Almost. She’d been punished, endlessly. And yet now it seemed like it wasn’t such a big deal?
“Okay Giles,” Buffy rolled her eyes. Being compared to Giles was a new experience for Faith, “we get it. Miles to go before we sleep. But especially if we're all gonna vaporize or something on Graduation Day, we deserve a little prommy fun. One night of glory, not too much to ask.”
She smiled at Faith, as though that made sense. Faith resisted the urge to shrug dismissively, and nodded instead. That’s normal people for you. They see the monsters and then they just pretend they didn’t see anything.
“So what about the kick dress?” Willow asked Buffy, "The pink one?”
Suddenly Faith was on her feet, taking a step back from the table. They were all staring at her. You’re ruining everything.
“Hey, Faith, what’s up?” Buffy’s hand was being held out, and Faith was holding it, holding it like a little kid, pathetic, and she was trying to figure out why she had stood up.
“Nothing,” she shrugged. “Just, uh, didn’t feel like sitting.” Funny dog, sitting like it’s people. She shifted to standing behind Buffy. She had seen Kendra do this, standing behind the Magpie like a bodyguard. Not even pretending to be a regular person.
“Right, so instead,” Xander was making a joke, as always, “you feel like standing at attention in case Buffy orders you to beat someone up?” Yeah, exactly.
“It is a little intimidating, Faith…” Buffy was looking up at her, and she must have seen the little quiver on Faith’s face. Bad dog, scaring the people. She took her hand again, squeezed it, glanced down at the ground. That’s a signal. That’s an order.
In an instant Faith was on the ground, at Buffy’s feet, kneeling. Good dog. Well trained. At this height she could still just about see the other two over the tabletop: Xander looked very confused, but Willow was blushing. And Buffy was looking at her with that secretive half-smile that told Faith she might be enjoying this more than she would let on. I see you, bad girl.
“Ok.” Buffy sighed indulgently, and turned back to her conversation. As she did so, she discreetly ran a hand over Faith’s hair, and finally the restless, uncomfortable, out-of-place energy was gone. She didn’t have to be a regular person. Just a bad girl’s good dog.
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E08, “Lovers’ Walk” (1/2): The human romances
Ehhhhhh. Plenty of parts of this episode are fun enough to watch, and I can see why a lot of people (e.g. Spike fans) would love it, but I have to be honest that I don’t really like it, personally. It just sort of rubs me the wrong way.
One way to put the basic problem is that it feels like it was written to be a comedy, rather than being written to be a story that’s then also funny. One key difference is that most of what happens is sort of just random chance, coincidence, or contrivance, rather than being the meaningful consequences of the character’s choices and actions. The eventual resolution here is almost purely by chance - Buffy and Angel don’t achieve anything by their efforts, Willow and Xander don’t achieve anything by their efforts, but everything works out because 1) Spike gets into a fight and it’s good for his mental health, and 2) Oz has previously-unmentioned-werewolf-smell-powers and they happen to be driving by the right spot.
I’ll start by jotting down some thoughts on the human-for-human relationships (i.e. the Xillow cheating plotline) because it exemplifies this particularly clearly, and because most of my thoughts on the vampires and vampirophiles takes the form of defensive headcanons (i.e. attempts to give good answers to various awkward questions the episode raises about vampires and mayors and magic shops.)
So: Xander and Willow. The foundation is already shaky, in that the previous episodes have rather failed to make this relationship either compelling or plausible. And then in this episode everything sort of happens for no reason. They keep kissing each other because of this sudden strange compulsion that comes over them - and which they both seem equally affected by, and equally dismayed by, at exactly the same time. (I feel like it would be so much more interesting if one or the other was pursuing, or one or the other was resisting successfully, rather than them just both being united in wanting to not kiss but failing to.)
They are eventually found out by random chance, and then Cordelia falls through the stairs and is injured on a metal bar by random chance, but she’s going to be ok because it didn’t pierce any vital organs… by random chance.
And yes. the Cordelia death fake-out is pretty funny, sure… but it feels like it’s at a place in the episode, at the big climax, where you’d expect to find things that actually matter, so it instead being a gag just adds to my feeling like the episode’s not really worth it. Like it’s putting too much weight on being funny? And that’s not the main thing I’m watching for?
Now to be fair, there are some choices made, at least if you count failures to choose as a type of choice. Both Willow and Xander fail to just stop kissing, which is, I think, actually fairly grounded in their characters. Neither of them are self-disciplined people, though Willow can give the superficial impression of it. (And “I never knew there was something inside me that could feel this bad” is also revealing, in its own way.)
The problem is that we still don’t really know why they have this desire now, all of sudden (and will stop having it abruptly as soon as this episode ends), so the character insight is very partial.
Willow does at least seem to see the situation as calling for some sort of action - whether that’s trying to confess to Buffy (last episode) or wanting to cancel their bowling plans or, in the extreme, resorting to an “anti-love spell.” The contrast between this and Xander, who seems content to just sort of coast along, is also grounded in character: Willow is consistently someone who believes problems can be solved if you just look hard enough for a solution, while Xander has this sort of gallows humour pessimism.
But! None of Willow’s choices have any meaningful consequences! Her confession to Buffy was derailed by Lagos and she lost her nerve, and this episode she never gets to cast her anti-love spell. You could argue that her attempt is what gives Spike his idea and leads to him capturing them, but… there’s no reasonable way to foresee that result, it’s not connected to her motivations or values, it’s just pure coincidence. Hence the overall feeling that the episode is structured primarily as a comedy.
It would almost be more interesting to see things play out without Spike there: does she convince Xander to go through with the spell? Does she use it as a sort of leverage: he goes and confesses to Buffy or else she’ll magic him? (Did she really expect him not to notice the spellbook, or was the plan always for him to realise what she intended?) If Buffy does find out, what does she do?
But hmph yeah. I guess I appreciate the symmetry: we begin with three couples (sort of) on good terms and one broken up; we end with the first three broken up and Spike setting off to win Drusilla back. But almost none of it sticks: two of those couples are back together very quickly, and Spike is still dumped next time we see him. It’s just first a bunch of dramatic things happened one after another. :/
in the original queer coding of magic in buffy's first five seasons, amy is allegorically an incest victim who discovers magic through her mother's abuse of her and then begins to experiment with it on her own terms. this implies that she has feelings for willow. consequently, the turn in season six from queer coding to substance use becomes amy battling addiction after a years long essential magical binge against her will because a spell backfired. after all, magic is dangerous. the show has always said this, even when magic was queer coded. it can kill people. giles and ethan both knew this after having practiced unsafe magic together, during the aids crisis. then fresh off a breakup with tara over her addiction, willow and amy go on a bender together, when amy has harbored something for willow since they were girls, before she was abused and her relationship with power and control changed.
So... I feel like I actually want to go along with this only halfway.
Magic is very explicitly queer-coded in seasons 4 and 5, and I think you could make a case for it being implicitly so in seasons 2 and 3, but I don’t think there’s really any of that in season 1. And, alongside that, while I think reading Amy’s relationship to Willow as queer is illuminating and fertile, reading her relationship to her mother as queer really isn’t?
Like, first off: Amy is already allegorically an incest victim, even without magic being coded as queer or as anything else. Her mother stole her body: that’s enough to make it a story of intimate violation by a parent.
What do we add by applying the label ‘queer’? I don’t really like the implication that Amy became or discovered her queerness as a result of being abused by a parent, let alone the implication that her mother abused her out of queer desire. (I don’t mean to say that we should never tell stories that play into and explore tropes that the right wing uses against us, just… not casually? Like, the bar should be higher for stories like that to justify themselves as good stories and I don’t think there’s much to gain from applying that lens here?)
Most basically, I think that attributing queer desire to Amy or her mother works against what’s most interesting and relevant about how that story is already written. Katherine Madison sees her daughter as an extension of herself, as something she’s entitled to mould into a replica of herself, as something she can justifiably be angry at when it refuses to be that. She abuses her daughter because she can and because she feels entitled to, and adding any explicit sexual desire feels like it dilutes that.
Moreover, she abuses her daughter *in service of better conforming to hegemonic norms*, about thinness and cheerleading and general successful performance of femininity. That aspect gets obscured if her magic use is read as something subversive, marginalised, counter-hegemonic. It's much better, I think, to read the magic here not as symbolising any particular real-world thing, but as a sort of all-purpose fantastic heightener that radicalises the gap between how hegemonic society thinks of itself (sunny and happy and wholesome) and how it actually functions (violence and abuse).
Now admittedly, while the canonical story of why Katharine abuses Amy is fairly clear (and, I think, a pretty good and effective story as it stands), the canon story of how and why Amy copies her and becomes a witch herself is completely absent (!). So it’s not hard to improve on that, and a queer subtext or text might be productive there. But for my money it works better as a subversive reaction against her mother - “she had power and she used it to hurt me in the name of conformity, if I get the same power I can use it for the opposite.”
(And that certainly shouldn’t be uncomplicated: the question of “am I just like her?” should haunt her, I just think… directly linking the events of “Witch” with the later queer coding of magic doesn’t add value and risks making that aspect of Amy's story worse.)
you are reading something into the use of the word queer to describe magic's allegory that i did not intend or to my knowledge say in such a uniform way. referring to incestuous abuse of a mother unto a daughter as queer is not really the point at all.
i am talking about childhood sexual abuse as a point of reference within sexuality because of the ways sexual abuse can impact sexual development, not as an act of queerness. the tool of abuse is not about the desire behind the abuse. that is an assumption that you have applied to what i was talking about. i did not say "amy's mom is queer and her abuse of amy is from queer desire" because that's a much more complicated discussion that i am not interested in having because... what point would it serve?
i am talking about the method of abuse being magical, which is subsequently allegorized to sexual acts. you are talking about a separate issue which you have ascribed to what i was saying. this is apples to oranges.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But you wrote “in the original queer coding of magic in buffy's first five seasons, amy is allegorically an incest victim”, and that seems to imply some link between the two ideas.
Like, I don’t think you’re specifically saying her mother is queer or anything like that, just… there’s some sort of link implied there. and I was saying I don’t think there’s a good way to make that link.
If your intention was to link the queer coding specifically to the “begins to experiment with it in her own terms” and not the other bits of the sentence, then perhaps we’re in agreement and I’m just spelling out at more length something you already had in mind?
Oh great! Then hopefully my commentary can serve as a "yes-and" drawing out the contrasting codings of magic in S1, S2-5, and S6-7. Sorry for the confusion
in the original queer coding of magic in buffy's first five seasons, amy is allegorically an incest victim who discovers magic through her mother's abuse of her and then begins to experiment with it on her own terms. this implies that she has feelings for willow. consequently, the turn in season six from queer coding to substance use becomes amy battling addiction after a years long essential magical binge against her will because a spell backfired. after all, magic is dangerous. the show has always said this, even when magic was queer coded. it can kill people. giles and ethan both knew this after having practiced unsafe magic together, during the aids crisis. then fresh off a breakup with tara over her addiction, willow and amy go on a bender together, when amy has harbored something for willow since they were girls, before she was abused and her relationship with power and control changed.
So... I feel like I actually want to go along with this only halfway.
Magic is very explicitly queer-coded in seasons 4 and 5, and I think you could make a case for it being implicitly so in seasons 2 and 3, but I don’t think there’s really any of that in season 1. And, alongside that, while I think reading Amy’s relationship to Willow as queer is illuminating and fertile, reading her relationship to her mother as queer really isn’t?
Like, first off: Amy is already allegorically an incest victim, even without magic being coded as queer or as anything else. Her mother stole her body: that’s enough to make it a story of intimate violation by a parent.
What do we add by applying the label ‘queer’? I don’t really like the implication that Amy became or discovered her queerness as a result of being abused by a parent, let alone the implication that her mother abused her out of queer desire. (I don’t mean to say that we should never tell stories that play into and explore tropes that the right wing uses against us, just… not casually? Like, the bar should be higher for stories like that to justify themselves as good stories and I don’t think there’s much to gain from applying that lens here?)
Most basically, I think that attributing queer desire to Amy or her mother works against what’s most interesting and relevant about how that story is already written. Katherine Madison sees her daughter as an extension of herself, as something she’s entitled to mould into a replica of herself, as something she can justifiably be angry at when it refuses to be that. She abuses her daughter because she can and because she feels entitled to, and adding any explicit sexual desire feels like it dilutes that.
Moreover, she abuses her daughter *in service of better conforming to hegemonic norms*, about thinness and cheerleading and general successful performance of femininity. That aspect gets obscured if her magic use is read as something subversive, marginalised, counter-hegemonic. It's much better, I think, to read the magic here not as symbolising any particular real-world thing, but as a sort of all-purpose fantastic heightener that radicalises the gap between how hegemonic society thinks of itself (sunny and happy and wholesome) and how it actually functions (violence and abuse).
Now admittedly, while the canonical story of why Katharine abuses Amy is fairly clear (and, I think, a pretty good and effective story as it stands), the canon story of how and why Amy copies her and becomes a witch herself is completely absent (!). So it’s not hard to improve on that, and a queer subtext or text might be productive there. But for my money it works better as a subversive reaction against her mother - “she had power and she used it to hurt me in the name of conformity, if I get the same power I can use it for the opposite.”
(And that certainly shouldn’t be uncomplicated: the question of “am I just like her?” should haunt her, I just think… directly linking the events of “Witch” with the later queer coding of magic doesn’t add value and risks making that aspect of Amy's story worse.)
you are reading something into the use of the word queer to describe magic's allegory that i did not intend or to my knowledge say in such a uniform way. referring to incestuous abuse of a mother unto a daughter as queer is not really the point at all.
i am talking about childhood sexual abuse as a point of reference within sexuality because of the ways sexual abuse can impact sexual development, not as an act of queerness. the tool of abuse is not about the desire behind the abuse. that is an assumption that you have applied to what i was talking about. i did not say "amy's mom is queer and her abuse of amy is from queer desire" because that's a much more complicated discussion that i am not interested in having because... what point would it serve?
i am talking about the method of abuse being magical, which is subsequently allegorized to sexual acts. you are talking about a separate issue which you have ascribed to what i was saying. this is apples to oranges.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But you wrote “in the original queer coding of magic in buffy's first five seasons, amy is allegorically an incest victim”, and that seems to imply some link between the two ideas.
Like, I don’t think you’re specifically saying her mother is queer or anything like that, just… there’s some sort of link implied there. and I was saying I don’t think there’s a good way to make that link.
If your intention was to link the queer coding specifically to the “begins to experiment with it in her own terms” and not the other bits of the sentence, then perhaps we’re in agreement and I’m just spelling out at more length something you already had in mind?
in the original queer coding of magic in buffy's first five seasons, amy is allegorically an incest victim who discovers magic through her mother's abuse of her and then begins to experiment with it on her own terms. this implies that she has feelings for willow. consequently, the turn in season six from queer coding to substance use becomes amy battling addiction after a years long essential magical binge against her will because a spell backfired. after all, magic is dangerous. the show has always said this, even when magic was queer coded. it can kill people. giles and ethan both knew this after having practiced unsafe magic together, during the aids crisis. then fresh off a breakup with tara over her addiction, willow and amy go on a bender together, when amy has harbored something for willow since they were girls, before she was abused and her relationship with power and control changed.
So... I feel like I actually want to go along with this only halfway.
Magic is very explicitly queer-coded in seasons 4 and 5, and I think you could make a case for it being implicitly so in seasons 2 and 3, but I don’t think there’s really any of that in season 1. And, alongside that, while I think reading Amy’s relationship to Willow as queer is illuminating and fertile, reading her relationship to her mother as queer really isn’t?
Like, first off: Amy is already allegorically an incest victim, even without magic being coded as queer or as anything else. Her mother stole her body: that’s enough to make it a story of intimate violation by a parent.
What do we add by applying the label ‘queer’? I don’t really like the implication that Amy became or discovered her queerness as a result of being abused by a parent, let alone the implication that her mother abused her out of queer desire. (I don’t mean to say that we should never tell stories that play into and explore tropes that the right wing uses against us, just… not casually? Like, the bar should be higher for stories like that to justify themselves as good stories and I don’t think there’s much to gain from applying that lens here?)
Most basically, I think that attributing queer desire to Amy or her mother works against what’s most interesting and relevant about how that story is already written. Katherine Madison sees her daughter as an extension of herself, as something she’s entitled to mould into a replica of herself, as something she can justifiably be angry at when it refuses to be that. She abuses her daughter because she can and because she feels entitled to, and adding any explicit sexual desire feels like it dilutes that.
Moreover, she abuses her daughter *in service of better conforming to hegemonic norms*, about thinness and cheerleading and general successful performance of femininity. That aspect gets obscured if her magic use is read as something subversive, marginalised, counter-hegemonic. It's much better, I think, to read the magic here not as symbolising any particular real-world thing, but as a sort of all-purpose fantastic heightener that radicalises the gap between how hegemonic society thinks of itself (sunny and happy and wholesome) and how it actually functions (violence and abuse).
Now admittedly, while the canonical story of why Katharine abuses Amy is fairly clear (and, I think, a pretty good and effective story as it stands), the canon story of how and why Amy copies her and becomes a witch herself is completely absent (!). So it’s not hard to improve on that, and a queer subtext or text might be productive there. But for my money it works better as a subversive reaction against her mother - “she had power and she used it to hurt me in the name of conformity, if I get the same power I can use it for the opposite.”
(And that certainly shouldn’t be uncomplicated: the question of “am I just like her?” should haunt her, I just think… directly linking the events of “Witch” with the later queer coding of magic doesn’t add value and risks making that aspect of Amy's story worse.)
Occurring to me that it’s interesting to track which episodes of BtVS do or don’t pass “the Buffdel test”: are there more than one named characters who 1) are not Buffy Summers, and 2) talk to each other, in Buffy’s absence, 3) about something other than Buffy Summers for a full conversation.
Most episodes do, sure - but some only just. “Revelations” only passes, I believe, because Giles and Post talk about destroying the glove and because Willow and Xander have their guilty kissing scene? But some episodes don’t - the first two episodes of Season 4, “The Freshman” and “Living Conditions”, I think fail this test? Which isn’t automatically a bad thing - she’s a great character, and zooming in on her is often effective. But I think if too many episodes failed the test it would definitely start to feel a bit claustrophobic?
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E07, “Revelations” (3/3): First act of the fuffy tragedy
Faith has a paradoxical role in “Revelations.” On the surface, she is endlessly and entirely the one out of the loop, the one to whom secrets are revealed only too late. Nobody tells her about the secret meetings, about Buffy’s past with Angel, about Buffy’s present with Angel, about Gwendolyn Post’s evil schemes. She begins the episode sharing her own personal history of disappointment, being reassured by Buffy that some people might still be trustworthy, and ends it receiving "a word of advice", namely that she’s an idiot. Her own conclusion is that you can’t trust anyone.
But does Faith Lehane have a secret of her own? She obviously did in “Faith, Hope, and Trick”, namely the secret of her Watcher being dead and the vampire that killed her being in pursuit. But that secret was unearthed by Buffy and Giles within the space of half an episode.
And her villain arc later on in the season is defined by secrets: “I killed Allan Finch”, “I defected to the mayor,” (and, perhaps, “I had sex with Xander”). In each case, the secret in question is 1) revealed within one or two episodes (14-15, 15-17, 13-15), 2) without her willingly admitting it, 3) by Buffy working together with a male character (Giles, Giles and Angel, Xander).
So clearly Faith is both very willing to keep secrets, and absolutely terrible at doing so. But, is there another secret, hiding in plain sight? Joked about in lines like “I am seeing someone, tonight actually.” and “You’ve got the tix, why don’t we go together?” and “if you’re a screamer, feel free,” and “come on then, give us a kiss”, and a heart drawn on a window and the “Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian” shirt that she might as well be wearing? Like the secret that Faith is hopelessly smitten with Buffy Summers?
Since the bit is probably getting a bit old now: yes, this is another post about the heavy gay barely-even-subtext of Faith and Buffy. But I specifically wanted to look at it through the lens of secrets and revelations. The text of the show never comes out and presents us with Faith‘s desire for Buffy, but it constructs that desire out of the way they relate to secrets.
The point of the various examples listed above is that Faith is always at a disadvantage with Buffy. Consider that in “Faith, Hope, and Trick”, they have explicitly paralleled secrets about their “toughest fight” with a vampire, things that they need to open up about and move on from. And they both open up about these secrets… But! Faith opens up to Buffy, and receives support and acceptance for doing so. Buffy opens up to Giles and Willow, and Faith is still actively asking for details about that matter here, four episodes later. Faith’s secrets are exposed to Buffy, but Buffy’s aren’t exposed to Faith.
In and of itself, that epistemic asymmetry isn’t inherently sexual or romantic, any more than asymmetric nudity, or (to use an example the show will woefully under-utilitise in 11 episode’s time) asymmetric telepathy, is inherently sexual or romantic. But they are all latently so, because they involve a salient crossing of normal personal boundaries (epistemic, visual, or psychic). Likewise, mutual crossing of boundaries - being naked together, or telepathically linked, or sharing a secret nobody else knows - is a sort of intimacy, and thus latently sexual or romantic.
Faith is clearly trying to move from an asymmetry to a shared intimacy, to balance things, to say “I’ve shown, and am showing you, mine: can you show me yours?” And in this case I think it clearly does read as sexual/romantic, because 1) it’s specific - Faith always appears asking Buffy questions, not other people, 2) it’s usually about something sexually charged - whether she ever catches kids “doing the diddy”, whether Scott Hope gives her “that good down there tickle”, what it was like to “boink the undead”, and 3) it’s emotionally important: when Buffy refuses to answer, Faith effectively says “alright, I’m done talking to you for tonight, Lagoses be damned”, and when Xander tells her Buffy’s been keeping Angel a secret, she becomes so single-mindedly homicidal that it overrides everything else (like calling an ambulance for Giles).
(It hurts my heart that Faith never got to high-five Kendra about trying to kill Angel the first time they met him (or teach her what a high five is)).
So yeah, that’s the sense in which Faith is symbolically constituted as gay by the way she relates to Buffy’s secrets. It also makes sense in-universe: if Faith is in love with Buffy she’ll be very aware that not everyone will respond positively to this fact, and it becomes imperative to figure out if Buffy feels the same way. Hence she needs to learn as much as possible about Buffy’s secrets. Her secret is one that’s only safe to tell to someone else who has the same secret.
Hence the events of “Revelations” aren’t just a painful denial of her desire to share secrets, but a practical obstacle. They’re an obstacle, obviously, because Angel seems to be a romantic rival, but that’s mirroring the more basic fact that if Buffy won’t tell her things, won’t open up to her, then she can’t figure out if her feelings are reciprocated. And then she faces a dilemma between doing nothing and risking blowing everything up if she reveals a desire that Buffy can’t accept.
(YMMV on how many times you figure she’s been in this situation before, facing that dilemma with some other girl. *slaps roof of Faith* you can fit so much angst in this one's backstory)
So what does she do? Well, textually she disappears for the next two episodes, appears again trying to patch things up in “Amends”, then disappears for two more episodes, seems to be integrated with the group in “the Zeppo”, and then there’s “Bad Girls”.
And Faith is once again symbolically constituted as gay for Buffy in “Bad Girls”, but in a different way. It’s less about secrets and more about temptation, giving in to impulse. “Life is very simple: you want something, so you take me. I mean take it.”
(Obviously Faith is consistently impulsive in all her episodes - but it’s “Bad Girls” where she really tries, and succeeds, at drawing this out of Buffy as well.)
That’s what the text shows us: I’d suggest the following reading of it. Initially Faith does simply withdraw, telling herself she’s better off alone, doesn’t need anybody, can’t trust anyone, and so on. Thinking too much about Buffy Summers just makes her, as Gwendolyn Post says, “an idiot.”
But after reconnecting a bit in episodes 10 and 13, she embarks on a new strategy, what we might call “deniable seduction.” That’s because she’s internalised two lessons from this episode: first, that Buffy holds her secrets close, and won’t ever open up about them. And second, that Buffy will lie to protect the people she cares about.
The first lesson is double-edged: it means Faith might never be able to get Buffy to admit how she feels (maybe she won’t even admit it to herself), but it also means that what Buffy does or doesn’t say isn’t particularly revealing about what she really feels. She has things inside her, dark and dirty desires, that she might never admit to but which might nevertheless be drawn out in action. Hence whatever she says about following the rules and being responsible, she might still be seduced into… stealing from a sporting goods store (if you know what I mean). And the second lesson means that if Buffy can be seduced, if the bond can be forged, if they do bad-girl-stuff together, then that will be enough. Because then Buffy will loyally protect her, just like she protected Angel.
And so when things go bad at the end of “Bad Girls”, and suddenly they have that intimacy of the shared secret, this all blows up in her face. Because Faith has learnt that Buffy will keep secrets to protect someone she loves, but Buffy has learnt the opposite. For her, the lesson of “Revelations” was that keeping secrets is a mistake, they’ll always come out, probably at the worst possible times, and cause more harm to the people you’re trying to protect.
(Which, in the context of “Consequences”, is not entirely wrong - Faith’s efforts to keep her secret don’t work very well, and the results of it coming out involuntarily are worse than if she had just opened up about it in the first place… but it’s also not entirely right (see: Wesley and the plan to ship Faith to an English prison), and arguably does reflect Buffy and Faith’s different class backgrounds and different degrees of social support, but anyway that’s a discussion for another day…)
And so Buffy is trying to do the right thing, trying to do better than she did here, addressing Faith almost the way she might, with hindsight, have tried to address her Episode-7-self. But from Faith’s perspective it’s devastating: she’s tried everything, and been betrayed in a new way every time. She tried to share and connect, and Buffy kept shutting down and lying to protect Angel; now she’s in exactly the same position Angel was in, and suddenly Buffy’s all about honesty and openness.
I think this fuels a perception that Buffy is deeply unreasonable, which in turn strengthens the belief that she’s in denial, dishonest with herself, self-hating, incoherent. And of course this is all, not to keep hammering the point, intensely gay:
“You know exactly what I'm about 'cause you have it in you, too. I've seen it, B. You've got the lust. And I'm not just talking about screwing vampires.”
And all of this provides, I think, necessary context for the final fall at the end of “Consequences.” If you just follow the surface events of that episode, it can seem very sudden, maybe even unmotivated. How does defecting to the mayor fit with any of the actual problems or issues Faith is shown to have in this episode? But if it’s the culmination of a whole half-season of longing and striving, in which Faith has, as she sees it, tried everything and gotten nothing to show for it, thrown herself into connecting with this girl who she should by rights have a special connection with, closer than anyone in the world, and been betrayed in two different opposite ways - if the girl she’s in love with hates herself so much that she’ll find a way to sabotage any chance of them being happy together… well, maybe it makes a bit more sense, as a final “screw this, evil be thou my good”, Milton’s-Satan-esque meltdown.
But that’s all in the future. “Revelations”, as I suggest in the title, is closing the first act of this tragedy. It’s also, I think, the point where Faith having a season-long arc is locked in. The last three episodes she’s been in, she was fun but it still felt possible that they might write her out at any moment, give her a four-episode stint like Kendra and then either have her leave town with her new Watcher, or die dramatically to make the Big Bad seem scarier. But the way this episode ends, she has to come back - there’s no way to end on that mournful bitter silence and not be setting up an ongoing thing.
And just to underline how tragic the tragedy of it all is, I want to note how despite Faith and Angel being in some ways parallels, on the point at issue in this episode they’re opposites. Faith puts up a (bad) show of being cool and unbothered but from her very first episode she’s been exposed, and vulnerable, and open to Buffy, and she’s been constantly trying to lean into and equalise that, to share information that will prompt Buffy into sharing back.
Angel, by contrast, starts out knowing far more than Buffy does (due to being, you know, an adult man who should know better) and spends all his time lurking and brooding and watching from the shadows. He knows more than her and he tries to keep it that way, and when stressed he comes out and admits that he thinks he knows better than her. Things between Buffy and Faith are harder because they’re both desperate traumatised teenagers doing their best, but that fact is also what makes them better for each other than the immortal father figures they both end up attracting, and more capable of a relationship that could be healthy in the long run.
