there's something very fascinating and very Gender to me about how cordelia and spike canonically fill the same narrative niche. james marsters said as much in a 411 interview:
because they don't have a ton in common on the surface except...don't they? they both start out as secondary antagonists (the Anointed being the fakeout Big Bad of s2 until spike takes over) before their role shifts into something more important. they're both presented at the beginning as competent until we get deeper and realize they're just as scared and pathetic as anyone else, if not moreso.
and they are both, narratively, mean girls.
even the way spike treats harmony is closer to how cordelia treats harmony - as an underling, as an annoying second-in-command, as a sidekick - than to how he treats any of his other love interests!
meanwhile, cordelia's hatred for buffy in s3 is ah. misplaced? given that of the three teen scoobies buffy is the only one who wasn't actively involved in cheating on her. but she's still angry at buffy. she still acts like buffy's scorned lover instead of xander's. she wishes for a universe where buffy never came to sunnydale, not one where she and xander never dated even though he's really the source of most of her s3 problems (other than all the damselling. that part kind of is buffy's fault). except the writers don't seem to know what to do with this depth of feeling, so they kill off cordelia in the wishverse and make it so she doesn't even remember it happening, effectively quelling any more exploration of what would drive her to be so furious at buffy so as to rewrite the universe around her.
it's known pretty widely that whedon resisted making spike a love interest for as long as possible, instead pairing buffy off with milquetoast military man riley and trying so hard to make that a big important romance when it failed at every turn to compel the audience. because he didn't want a second broody vampire romance. because spike is the cordelia. and cordelia can't be buffy's love interest! but, well...
to quote eve kosofsky sedgwick (as i am wont to do), queerness can be defined as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning.” feels pretty damn accurate here.
i talked earlier in this post about how spike kind of carries faith's narrative torch in terms of reminding buffy of the darkness in her - with that he also carries her narrative torch of buffy's queerness.
it's this weird double-repression of narrative queerness that nevertheless fails because, well, spike becomes a love interest. arguably The love interest.
and then they kill cordelia in angel and bring spike back in THERE and the cycle begins again. tied together forever. i wish they'd been allowed to interact
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