let's bring back spuffy and spike hate discourse please
yes please why does everyone seem to like it??? it's abusive?? which is like,,,,,,,, the opposite of what tumblr seems to like???
Hey, maybe you didn't mean this either, but to be clear I do not mean bullying people for liking fucked up shit. It's okay for people to like abusive dynamics in fiction.
To be fair there's no way you could know this from my post, but I am not for moralizing. There's specific elements of Spuffy discourse that are just bad readings of the text, and a lot of my issues with Spike and Spuffy have to do with the effects it had on the narrative and Buffy's character arc and her place in her own story. And maybe you can't completely separate those things from morality in one clean slice, but I want to be clear, I do not want to be pearl-clutching.
I'll add more nuance to this later, I'm just at work rn.
Okay
I GET Spuffy. It makes sense why people are into it. At its darkest the ship is about power and control and transgression and these things that twist your stomach and are engrossing and are a part of some people's fantasies. I don't normally read paperback romances but I'm familiar enough to know that Spuffy is built on tropes and traditions that have been around a long time. There's the whole genre of "bodice-ripper" romance. Joss Whedon explicitly said that Buffy/Spike was based on Scarlett and Rhett from Gone With the Wind — and you can see it, two very strong personalities, the man telling the woman who she is and why she needs him, there's even a scene in Gone With the Wind where Rhett carries Scarlett to bed and "makes her love him" (echoed in Seeing Red) — and of course that was a HUGELY popular story in its time. This dynamic resonates with people, and I think we can have very interesting conversations about why, and we can dissect the ways such stories and their appeal are born out of societies swimming in misogyny and sexual hangups, but that doesn't make people bad or wrong for enjoying them.
What is galling FOR ME is how Spike takes over the narrative. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is full of characters I love, Buffy herself not least among them. A foundational concept to the show is that Buffy's friendships make her strong. The show is supposedly about empowerment. Spike in s7 not only pulls focus from these elements, he undermines them. The biggest problem is probably that he is not truly, properly redeemed (I'm not going to go into detail here, but you can compare and contrast with the classic example of Zuko from AtLA for redemption done right). So all this narrative energy is spent justifying why Buffy should love him, and it doesn't work. Trying to justify why this symbol of "girl power" should trust a man who abused her. The story of an abusive man redeeming himself and his victim learning to trust him does not necessarily have to be a BAD story, but man it's hard to pull off, and BtVS does NOT pull it off. It is a kind of story that is so dissonant with what I want and expect from BtVS, and it is very badly executed. And then to top it all off, the way the writers justify Spike's relationship to Buffy is by weakening her relationship to her friends, so that Spike can be her pillar of support. I hate it.
Like I said in the first point, people aren't bad for enjoying Spike and Spuffy. I get it. But, I think ideally we would be honest about the misogynistic (and racist, for that matter) elements of him, both as a character and as his function in the narrative. There can be worthwhile elements despite flaws. Unfortunately Spuffy can often bring out the worst takes from fans. Victim-blaming being the most obvious one. And you can see how the manner in which the show dealt with the s6 storyline encouraged such takes.
#like I love buffy angst when it's earned but it just doesn't feel earned to me#I was talking with someone recently who said the whole season felt almost sadistic#like they thought buffy needed to be put in her place#and that just hit the nail on the head for me#if you're into the fucked up aspects of spuffy fair enough! have fun! I enjoy a good fucked up ship now and then myself#but it's just not fucked up in a way that I enjoy at all.#they try to have their cake (dark unhealthy relationship in s6) and eat it too (saved by the power of a good woman's love! romance! in s7)#and like. no man you gotta pick one and commit.
THESE TAGS
