ok back to the ethan and giles element of magic being queer coded: giles grew up knowing about the fate he would inherit from his father, his occupation passed down to him in the english tradition of inheritance per the great chain of being belief that has sat at the center of english society. the stress of inheritance here matters. there is a reason class is restricted by birthright as a baseline in english society; in the uk, being born into wealth always carries more weight than bringing yourself up to it unlike the us american mythos of pulling yourself up by the boot straps to achieve the american dream.
giles rejects this inheritance as long as he can. he turns to counterculture. he changes his name. becomes someone else. ripper. rupert giles studied magic. ripper experiments with it. with ethan and their friends. it's against the great expectations upon him. it's reckless. it's the '70s. live a little. it's fun until a spell backfires, until the danger becomes tangible and someone ends up dead. ripper breaks it off with ethan and their friends. it was never all that well defined. it wasn't exclusive. it wasn't permanent. he makes it transient and goes back to being rupert giles. puts on his tweed blazer and nice shoes. steps back into his duty, his fated inheritance to do as expected of him in theory.
maybe he'll never be assigned a slayer. most watchers never are. he won't have to practice duty, practice fate. he just studies magic now. he knows how dangerous it is because he's seen it. he'll never do that again. then buffy summers is called, and her first watcher dies.
giles lives in sunnydale, california now, working as a librarian and having to practice being a watcher. he can do this, more or less. he won't grow attached to her. he won't view her as more than the slayer. he'll hate her friends too.
he falls in love with jenny, the first woman he's ever loved. there hasn't ever really been anyone since ethan. he doesn't do that anymore. he's afraid of intimacy. afraid he'll hurt someone again, that they'll hurt him, or they'll hurt someone together. he loves jenny anyway. because he loves buffy more than he ever meant to, jenny will be killed by angel as angelus, the consequence of angel finding true happiness holding buffy post-coitus. giles doesn't stop loving buffy. he can't. he hates himself for it so much that he cannot let himself be buffy's father, no matter how much she needs him to be. he thinks this is the most noble thing he could do.
he has to do his duty because the alternate is too horrifying with all the blood on his hands from when he's strayed from his duty. under the influence of band candy, he sleeps with joyce. twice. it's a bad idea, so it can't happen again or else things will become confused for buffy. he can't be her father.
at most, he'll allow himself comfort from olivia. their relationship has never had many strings attached to it. the baggage isn't there. he's told her about magic of course, to woo her first, but he's kept her at an arm's length away from it all this time. he's seen ethan too many times. there's still something there. they both know it.
ethan roofies him. he never has to think about it, not fully. he stops seeing ethan after that. he tells himself it's for the best. olivia came into contact with magic, and it was his fault. he endangered her by getting too close. they come out of it stronger, though. closer. she didn't believe him, but she does now. it was scary, but she comes back in the end. there could be a future there.
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