Hi! Can you do a meta on Spuffy - what you like and what you don't? I thought I'd love them based on metas and gifsets, but the reality was a lot more toxic, bleak and joyless than I'd expected!
This one is complicated and I’m not sure where to start.
Yes, a lot about this relationship is dark and terrible. But I think the literal details of the toxicity are less important than what they narratively represent. And the layers of what this shows about Buffy.
Buffy enters a sexual relationship with Spike primarily as a way to feel something in the wake of her being dragged out of Heaven and forced to claw her way out of her own grave. Her trauma and depression are at their most extreme and she is more isolated from her friends and loved ones (at least emotionally) than she has ever been. She can’t be honest for fear of hurting them, and her need to protect everyone around her.
And the only one who she is able to be around with full authenticity without constantly hiding aspects of herself is Spike. She can be depressed. She can be angry. She can be violent. She can unleash every hidden and terrible impulse she has and he will willingly take and accept it. And she doesn’t need to protect him, physically or emotionally. He can take the same punches that she can take, and she allows herself to unleash on him verbally because she (partially, although with guilt) justifies it that he’s a vampire. He’s not her friend. He can take it.
I’m hardly the first to say this, but in many ways Spike functions as Buffy’s shadow self throughout the series. His darkness is hers that she hides.
Many of her protestations over certain elements of their sexual relationship as it continues are an element of a purity facade that she curates to show a certain image of herself to others. She feels guilty for having the desires that she does, and Spike is an outlet. She knows that he knows she wants him to push. That she can stop him from doing anything she doesn’t actually want. It’s a kind of Dubcon fantasy. Poorly communicated, and ending horribly, but it’s undeniably an aspect of their dynamic. She wanted him to push her for public sex because she’s into it. She wanted to have rough, violent, marathon sex that left them both bloody and bruised and tore a house down. She wanted him to handcuff her and lets him, even though at first she claimed not to.
We see this many times as an aspect of her character. Awkwardly denying to Faith that slaying turns her on. Pretending to be satisfied with Riley, but leaving post-sex to hunt vampires because she’s so pent up. She is ashamed and embarrassed of her desires, refuses to admit to them, but she knows Spike will push her in a way that permits her to have what she wants while still denying it and retaining that facade.
And then beyond that, sleeping with Spike is a way to punish herself. She’s sleeping with a demon, but worse, she’s abusing him, verbally and physically. Every horrible thing she says to Spike she is saying to herself. And that abuse of her shadow-self is a clear demonstration of where she’s at mentally. She feels dirty and wrong and unclean ever since being dragged from heaven and is taking it out on herself Spike.
But then there’s season 7. Spike went and got a soul. He tried to atone and be a better man. Meanwhile Buffy is coming into her own in a new way, learning about the history of the slayer, accepting herself and all that that entails. As they work on themselves and Buffy comes to forgive him, she accepts herself in the process. They reach an entirely new level of understanding in their relationship, and actual true intimacy for the very first time. Fully frank, but more importantly, emotionally vulnerable. We see the love that they have for each other is real underneath it all.
Personally I love this relationship. Yes, it goes to a dark place, but you have two people who fully accept each other at the end of it, who have truly seen the best and worst of each other, actively decide to be better to each other, and love each other anyway.
