Ugh Spiffy Bleagh. That whole thing gave be whiplash back in the day. I mean SMG and James acted the hell out of what they were given, but the writing was so atrocious, toxic and just straight up evil just nope all the way. Spiffy was what made me do a 180 on Joyless Whedon and his fakewokiness on top of one of the first BYG instances I saw on TV as a teen. Looking back I have a very conflicting opinion on Buffy as a whole.
Oh, I mean...Buffy absolutely does NOT stand the test of time in almost any way but when you watch it in the context of the period it emerged from it’s still pretty progressive for back then. I hate when people retroactively try to cancel pieces of media or comedians or a random famous person for shit they did years ago when it was perfectly normal and acceptable to still do them. You can’t and shouldn’t hold our current standards to things that happened/were made/were said five, ten, fifteen, twenty, or fifty years ago. It’s fucking nonsensical.
The whole point of society is to move forward so obviously when looking back some things are going to be “problematic” but you can’t judge things from the past by present day standards. When you think about how Buffy started airing in the late 90s and still got away with some of the stuff it did, you have to give Whedon whatever little credit he earned because that show DID help push all sorts of representation on TV forward, including both for female characters and queer rep.
Is he a piece of shit? He is. Did he make many mistakes on the show? Without a doubt. Do we still need to thank him for pushing the envelope A LOT and helping get us where we are today? We should.