My brain doesn't go where I want it to
May. 27th, 2003 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI spent quite a lot of the last five days with people who didn’t share my Buffy interests, especially not my Spuffy interests. Even when I was with fans, there wasn’t anyone with the same vested interest I have. At one point, someone did ask me about how I felt, and then I spewed emotional vomit all over her for about a half hour while she would much rather have been over in the corner looking at pictures of her boys from her fandom, I’m sure.
And I found I still couldn’t talk about the ending without getting weepy, especially as regards my impression that Spike went to his death believing Buffy didn’t love him. I’ve heard wonderful explanations, wonderful analyses, wonderful everythings about it, even from people who don’t like Spike or don’t like Spuffy, and yet I can’t embrace any of those thoughts or feelings. I’m stuck with this unending anguish that he died having accepted that she didn’t, would never, and that this was okay with him, this was how it had to be. I just felt like at that point, the guy deserved a little break, a little love, and he didn’t get it. I don’t know, either, what Buffy really believed, if she did believe she loved him. If she comes back on Angel next year for guest shots, I doubt sincerely that it will be to explore the story with her and Spike, which adds to my feeling that this was a heroic, but tragic, death for him, that he died alone. And in a way, thinking about this I realized that lonely deaths are not good deaths to me; as much as I love tragic sacrifice and operatic death, someone dying sad and alone isn’t quite as appealing as something like Angel’s death in Becoming, where he at least knew he was loved, as baffled and terrified as he was.
One of the things all the lovely people who’ve tried to talk me off the suicide ledge have pointed out is that Spike really finally was redeemed in that sense, that he did this of his own accord and to save her and all that. Which, you know, would be cool if I was into redemption, per se. But I came to realize over the course of this year, as I got more heavily involved in Buffy fandom than I’d ever been, that I didn’t even really understand what redemption meant for him, and that it wasn’t what appealed to me about the character. So it’s like all these places (Crumbling Walls, things people have posted here, others’ LJs) people keep talking about this noble sacrifice and how he did it of his own accord and that that is true redemption... and I’m kind of, meh. I don’t know what it means, and it isn’t what I was ever in love with.
A long time ago, I was having a conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
merryish about kinks, and we were bonding over this idea of not liking bad guys for being bad guys, per se, but because they could be changed and redeemed by the love of the hero or the good guy. She called it reverse corruption, and that term made me so happy, because it finally put a name to something I like. I’m rarely drawn to the “bad boy” characters; too often they’re designed to make you fall for them because they’re sexy or cool or whatever, but way too often come across to me as merely one-dimensional prefab bores. The idea of reverse corruption is that the character who is bad, who may be morally ambiguous or downright evil, would, by virtue of falling in love with the hero character, be drawn to the good side because he wanted to be worthy of that person, or do the right thing for that person, what have you (we were at the time discussing slash, so that’s why I seem to be using all male pronouns). And that was what was interesting to me about Spike after he fell for Buffy — that he could be reversed corrupted in order to earn her love.
I was never sure what people meant in terms of Spike’s redemption. On the surface I get it, I mean, I know what the dictionary definition is. But what it meant for him seemed to be variations on making him nice, taming him, removing his edge, or something else that I didn’t fully understand the appeal of. Now, reverse corruption I could get, because it implies that the character keeps the edge, keeps the aspects that make them so naughtily appealing. Reverse corruption feels like it allows more of the character’s personality to shine through; redemption always seemed to be about making Spike a vampire variation on a Sensitive New Age Guy. Not everyone would feel that way, of course, but what frequently bugged me about it was that it took on the form of Buffy-hate because she didn’t see the SNAG in him or whatever. I just didn’t quite get it. And to remind us that Spike couldn’t or shouldn’t be redeemed without having a soul (even though they never really did define what having a soul meant), ME gave us the execrable attempted rape scene in Seeing Red, to remind us he was Bad in a unidimensional way, not bad in a reverse corruptible way, which he’d been proving to us he was capable of since right after Out of My Mind. It was never really something I understood fully, this obsession with souls, and why Buffy, who said she did care for him, couldn’t care more without that damn soul — why he couldn’t just be reverse corrupted by his love for Buffy. It was good enough for me!
I almost wonder at times if they were really saying that Buffy could love only those more typical, more heroic characters, and that even a bad-boy character reverse-corrupted by Buffy still wasn’t good enough for her real love. (And that of course, possibly by virtue of being the bad boy, he somehow magically has the insight to know he’s not worthy of her love.) Angel was very much that classic hero — silent, stoic, enduring, trustworthy. He started out good, and stayed good except when the soul was gone. That was the all-important character device. As long as you had a soul, technically you were okay, you were worthy of the love of a slayer, regardless of whether you were a demon or a human. Even after he comes back from hell, he needs no forgiveness, not really, because he has the get out of jail free card with the soul. This was okay with me, at that point, because I was totally into the whole Buffy/Angel thing in a big way.
And he left in a good manner, he left in a way that made sense not just for the show, but for Buffy and for him. It was his nature to be sadly alone, it was part of his being a champion. When he left, Buffy was on the cusp of becoming a truly adult woman, going to college and changing her life. There was nowhere they could go with the relationship (assuming the curse Willow put on him was the same one; I’ve always wished we knew why they couldn’t have possibly made a loophole), not realistically, anyway. But in his leaving, there was a resolution, and he and Buffy both did know they loved each other, always would, and that it still meant something to them both, equally.
Everything with Riley was a huge mistake (as so many things by Marti Noxon seem to be, at least to my eyes), especially because they were trying so hard to create that perfect All-American college boyfriend of goodness. They seemed to think that by giving him this slightly darker secret agenda, that would give him dimension, but it didn’t. Yet he had a free pass because even though he was doing something unspeakable and being an unquestioning Good German under Nazi leadership (which Willow so rightly pointed out to Buffy in The I in Team), he had that human soul, so he had the ME warranty of okayness. No matter how much of an asshole he was, he got that free pass simply because he was human. It didn’t help that by putting JM back on the show, it pointed out how bland and characterless, though workmanlike, MB was as an actor, and in Something Blue we got a glimpse of just how incredible JM and SMG were together, which probably made them work even harder to convince us that Riley was Perfect so we wouldn’t all start dreaming of Spuffy (hah!). Even if you took away the sins of being blandly heroic and having zero chemistry with other actors, you were left with a character who existed mostly to remind us that Buffy deserved a classic old-skool good boyfriend, one who was on her side and didn’t need to be explained, one where the complications of loving him were mostly on the story end as they tried to evil him up. He had the soul, Angel had the soul, and apparently to ME, that was all that mattered.
But it’s also limiting for stories, and in the case of Riley, really tedious. Most people I know thought the Angelus arc was truly amazing for a lot of reason, but mostly because we got to see complications and tragedy and consequences to this fairly dangerous love of Buffy’s. They’d been playing with fire, and then got burned. That’s a huge part of what appeals to me about reverse corrupting someone — you’re playing with fire. You’re dealing with a volatile, potentially dangerous, always a little iffy character who could go either way. Angel, after we knew what could happen to him, became more interesting because of the duality of his nature, the potential of the threat. Even though there really wasn’t anywhere to go with him after he came back, and it made sense to remove him from this particular corner of the universe where his existence was always attached to loving Buffy, there was still that sense of fear lurking around the corner. While Riley tried to go darker for Buffy, it of course didn’t work, and finally ME seemed to get the hint that people didn’t get into that storyline because being a straight good guy doesn’t often lead to much dramatic tension (and of course, a potentially more dynamic actor would have helped a lot). You need dimensions, you need history. But taking the bad boy, in this case, Spike, and switching him from comic relief/thorn in the side to the potentially tragic reverse corruptee clearly worked for a lot of people. Lots of people really believe that the bad boy is automatically what appeals, that it’s simple; personally, I’ve always thought it was the possibility of love transforming the bad boy into someone more three dimensional that’s the big appeal. Of course, there’s always the folks who mean redemption to be sugary, spineless, and misunderstood (the Krycek fans who insisted he never did anything wrong because he was just a big ol’ swookums), but they’re morons, so I mostly ignore them.
Having Spike run off and get a soul in order to be redeemed (whatever that means) never worked well for me. I’ve loved most of this season, but I was anxious to see what would really become of Spike once he became whole again, and was impatient that it took until Get It Done to find that. Once he got back to himself, and again in Lies My Parents Told Me, we see the full Spike, only with the addition of a soul — an accessory I never believed he needed. It didn’t seem to play much of a part once he got his shit together. To me, the reason it didn’t really mean that much was because he never truly needed it in the first place. In the same way that the Scarecrow and the Tin Man already had brains and a heart respectively, in the same way that Dorothy always had the power to go home again, Spike had already been reverse corrupted into doing good because he loved Buffy. He hung around and fought by their sides even when he thought the woman he loved was gone, we find out in Bargaining, because he was doing a greater good in her memory. He was already there, already “redeemed” in my definition, because he’d been drawn into living life the way it was required by those he wanted to fit in with. It’s why I never bought that lame-ass AR stuff in Seeing Red, that’s why I never saw it as legitimate motivation to make him go get a soul — he was already acting enough like a vampire with a soul because of his feelings and his beliefs regarding Buffy, and that was fine by me. It seemed to bother a lot of people, this notion of doing something to earn someone’s love (that by doing it for someone else, it’s not legit), but it never bothered me. It’s what I live for in fic, in movies, in TV. It’s operatic, melodramatic love, and I’m all over that.
So I never truly needed him to sacrifice himself as he did in Chosen, because I believe he already was “redeemed.” He had already sacrificed himself, what he loved about himself, to be different and better. I believe he had already done the right thing, and that even before the end, his motivations were purer than he was given credit for. Since so much of what appealed to me was his struggle to earn acceptance and love, to be right for her, the sacrificial angle, at least for the purposes of redeeming him, doesn’t help me feel better about his ending. It makes me feel worse, because he tried so hard to be worthy of her, with all his faults and mistakes and errors in judgment, and in the end, believed he wasn’t. He was the one who gave her the possibility of winning, yet he won nothing. So many better, smarter, wittier, and more thoughtful people have posted about why they believe he didn’t mean “you don’t love me,” but rather, “you do, but I need you to go and be safe and have a life.” And maybe someday I might believe that, but for now, all I can see is the sad resignation and sweet affection on his face, something that said to me, “I wish it was true, but it’s not, though I appreciate the sentiment as I go to my noble and fiery death.” I want desperately to feel happier about this, but knowing he’s going to be on Angel without the woman he loves makes me feel even sadder. I loved that Angel’s death was never mitigated — he came back feral, miserable, even more tormented. We don’t really know what happened to him there, but it seemed pretty bad. When and how Spike returns, it will have to be mitigated, and I have a feeling it will be by him accepting that no, Buffy never loved him, and now he’s just going to go on, alone and unhappy.
I wish I could get that thought out of my head. Normally, tragic doomed love thrills me, but I got so wrapped up in the guy’s story and identified with him so damn much (there is so much about Spike I feel close to that it’s scary) that it leaves me feeling just plain sad. I get weepy too often. I’m finding it hard to want to keep going on fic, even though I’m probably the only person not writing post-Chosen stories right now (I can’t see my way there, it just is too fraught for me right now, and I haven’t been able to read any yet even though wonderful writers are tackling it), which may be a good thing, really. I would have loved him going to his death with the sure belief that at long last, he had earned her feelings. Or at least, if he was going to say “No, you don’t,” that she would have convinced him otherwise. It would have been great if it could have been a Han Solo-ish line, like “It’s about time; now get out of here.” At least, for me it would have. That would have felt more like a reverse-corruptee talking; it would have felt less like ME was paving the way to tell us that Spike and Buffy together was stupid.
I know I sound like a complete dork about this, and I’m in a minority of people who just feel sad and depressed about this part of the ending. I loved everything else, but I would have liked to see that all the reversing of his corruption led to at least one tiny sliver of happiness for him, even if it was gone later. I love that he died a worthy death, but I am saddened that he died feeling unworthy. When it comes to love stuff and especially Buffy and Spike love stuff, I am a dork, a total, complete, utter dork. I keep hoping I can go back and watch it again, but it’s going to be a long time before I see positives in that scene, flames of love or no. All I see when I look at it is a man who did a hell of a lot to love a woman, and in the end accepting that he was still alone when he made the ultimate sacrifice. Damn my brain, anyhow.
And I found I still couldn’t talk about the ending without getting weepy, especially as regards my impression that Spike went to his death believing Buffy didn’t love him. I’ve heard wonderful explanations, wonderful analyses, wonderful everythings about it, even from people who don’t like Spike or don’t like Spuffy, and yet I can’t embrace any of those thoughts or feelings. I’m stuck with this unending anguish that he died having accepted that she didn’t, would never, and that this was okay with him, this was how it had to be. I just felt like at that point, the guy deserved a little break, a little love, and he didn’t get it. I don’t know, either, what Buffy really believed, if she did believe she loved him. If she comes back on Angel next year for guest shots, I doubt sincerely that it will be to explore the story with her and Spike, which adds to my feeling that this was a heroic, but tragic, death for him, that he died alone. And in a way, thinking about this I realized that lonely deaths are not good deaths to me; as much as I love tragic sacrifice and operatic death, someone dying sad and alone isn’t quite as appealing as something like Angel’s death in Becoming, where he at least knew he was loved, as baffled and terrified as he was.
One of the things all the lovely people who’ve tried to talk me off the suicide ledge have pointed out is that Spike really finally was redeemed in that sense, that he did this of his own accord and to save her and all that. Which, you know, would be cool if I was into redemption, per se. But I came to realize over the course of this year, as I got more heavily involved in Buffy fandom than I’d ever been, that I didn’t even really understand what redemption meant for him, and that it wasn’t what appealed to me about the character. So it’s like all these places (Crumbling Walls, things people have posted here, others’ LJs) people keep talking about this noble sacrifice and how he did it of his own accord and that that is true redemption... and I’m kind of, meh. I don’t know what it means, and it isn’t what I was ever in love with.
A long time ago, I was having a conversation with
merryish about kinks, and we were bonding over this idea of not liking bad guys for being bad guys, per se, but because they could be changed and redeemed by the love of the hero or the good guy. She called it reverse corruption, and that term made me so happy, because it finally put a name to something I like. I’m rarely drawn to the “bad boy” characters; too often they’re designed to make you fall for them because they’re sexy or cool or whatever, but way too often come across to me as merely one-dimensional prefab bores. The idea of reverse corruption is that the character who is bad, who may be morally ambiguous or downright evil, would, by virtue of falling in love with the hero character, be drawn to the good side because he wanted to be worthy of that person, or do the right thing for that person, what have you (we were at the time discussing slash, so that’s why I seem to be using all male pronouns). And that was what was interesting to me about Spike after he fell for Buffy — that he could be reversed corrupted in order to earn her love.I was never sure what people meant in terms of Spike’s redemption. On the surface I get it, I mean, I know what the dictionary definition is. But what it meant for him seemed to be variations on making him nice, taming him, removing his edge, or something else that I didn’t fully understand the appeal of. Now, reverse corruption I could get, because it implies that the character keeps the edge, keeps the aspects that make them so naughtily appealing. Reverse corruption feels like it allows more of the character’s personality to shine through; redemption always seemed to be about making Spike a vampire variation on a Sensitive New Age Guy. Not everyone would feel that way, of course, but what frequently bugged me about it was that it took on the form of Buffy-hate because she didn’t see the SNAG in him or whatever. I just didn’t quite get it. And to remind us that Spike couldn’t or shouldn’t be redeemed without having a soul (even though they never really did define what having a soul meant), ME gave us the execrable attempted rape scene in Seeing Red, to remind us he was Bad in a unidimensional way, not bad in a reverse corruptible way, which he’d been proving to us he was capable of since right after Out of My Mind. It was never really something I understood fully, this obsession with souls, and why Buffy, who said she did care for him, couldn’t care more without that damn soul — why he couldn’t just be reverse corrupted by his love for Buffy. It was good enough for me!
I almost wonder at times if they were really saying that Buffy could love only those more typical, more heroic characters, and that even a bad-boy character reverse-corrupted by Buffy still wasn’t good enough for her real love. (And that of course, possibly by virtue of being the bad boy, he somehow magically has the insight to know he’s not worthy of her love.) Angel was very much that classic hero — silent, stoic, enduring, trustworthy. He started out good, and stayed good except when the soul was gone. That was the all-important character device. As long as you had a soul, technically you were okay, you were worthy of the love of a slayer, regardless of whether you were a demon or a human. Even after he comes back from hell, he needs no forgiveness, not really, because he has the get out of jail free card with the soul. This was okay with me, at that point, because I was totally into the whole Buffy/Angel thing in a big way.
And he left in a good manner, he left in a way that made sense not just for the show, but for Buffy and for him. It was his nature to be sadly alone, it was part of his being a champion. When he left, Buffy was on the cusp of becoming a truly adult woman, going to college and changing her life. There was nowhere they could go with the relationship (assuming the curse Willow put on him was the same one; I’ve always wished we knew why they couldn’t have possibly made a loophole), not realistically, anyway. But in his leaving, there was a resolution, and he and Buffy both did know they loved each other, always would, and that it still meant something to them both, equally.
Everything with Riley was a huge mistake (as so many things by Marti Noxon seem to be, at least to my eyes), especially because they were trying so hard to create that perfect All-American college boyfriend of goodness. They seemed to think that by giving him this slightly darker secret agenda, that would give him dimension, but it didn’t. Yet he had a free pass because even though he was doing something unspeakable and being an unquestioning Good German under Nazi leadership (which Willow so rightly pointed out to Buffy in The I in Team), he had that human soul, so he had the ME warranty of okayness. No matter how much of an asshole he was, he got that free pass simply because he was human. It didn’t help that by putting JM back on the show, it pointed out how bland and characterless, though workmanlike, MB was as an actor, and in Something Blue we got a glimpse of just how incredible JM and SMG were together, which probably made them work even harder to convince us that Riley was Perfect so we wouldn’t all start dreaming of Spuffy (hah!). Even if you took away the sins of being blandly heroic and having zero chemistry with other actors, you were left with a character who existed mostly to remind us that Buffy deserved a classic old-skool good boyfriend, one who was on her side and didn’t need to be explained, one where the complications of loving him were mostly on the story end as they tried to evil him up. He had the soul, Angel had the soul, and apparently to ME, that was all that mattered.
But it’s also limiting for stories, and in the case of Riley, really tedious. Most people I know thought the Angelus arc was truly amazing for a lot of reason, but mostly because we got to see complications and tragedy and consequences to this fairly dangerous love of Buffy’s. They’d been playing with fire, and then got burned. That’s a huge part of what appeals to me about reverse corrupting someone — you’re playing with fire. You’re dealing with a volatile, potentially dangerous, always a little iffy character who could go either way. Angel, after we knew what could happen to him, became more interesting because of the duality of his nature, the potential of the threat. Even though there really wasn’t anywhere to go with him after he came back, and it made sense to remove him from this particular corner of the universe where his existence was always attached to loving Buffy, there was still that sense of fear lurking around the corner. While Riley tried to go darker for Buffy, it of course didn’t work, and finally ME seemed to get the hint that people didn’t get into that storyline because being a straight good guy doesn’t often lead to much dramatic tension (and of course, a potentially more dynamic actor would have helped a lot). You need dimensions, you need history. But taking the bad boy, in this case, Spike, and switching him from comic relief/thorn in the side to the potentially tragic reverse corruptee clearly worked for a lot of people. Lots of people really believe that the bad boy is automatically what appeals, that it’s simple; personally, I’ve always thought it was the possibility of love transforming the bad boy into someone more three dimensional that’s the big appeal. Of course, there’s always the folks who mean redemption to be sugary, spineless, and misunderstood (the Krycek fans who insisted he never did anything wrong because he was just a big ol’ swookums), but they’re morons, so I mostly ignore them.
Having Spike run off and get a soul in order to be redeemed (whatever that means) never worked well for me. I’ve loved most of this season, but I was anxious to see what would really become of Spike once he became whole again, and was impatient that it took until Get It Done to find that. Once he got back to himself, and again in Lies My Parents Told Me, we see the full Spike, only with the addition of a soul — an accessory I never believed he needed. It didn’t seem to play much of a part once he got his shit together. To me, the reason it didn’t really mean that much was because he never truly needed it in the first place. In the same way that the Scarecrow and the Tin Man already had brains and a heart respectively, in the same way that Dorothy always had the power to go home again, Spike had already been reverse corrupted into doing good because he loved Buffy. He hung around and fought by their sides even when he thought the woman he loved was gone, we find out in Bargaining, because he was doing a greater good in her memory. He was already there, already “redeemed” in my definition, because he’d been drawn into living life the way it was required by those he wanted to fit in with. It’s why I never bought that lame-ass AR stuff in Seeing Red, that’s why I never saw it as legitimate motivation to make him go get a soul — he was already acting enough like a vampire with a soul because of his feelings and his beliefs regarding Buffy, and that was fine by me. It seemed to bother a lot of people, this notion of doing something to earn someone’s love (that by doing it for someone else, it’s not legit), but it never bothered me. It’s what I live for in fic, in movies, in TV. It’s operatic, melodramatic love, and I’m all over that.
So I never truly needed him to sacrifice himself as he did in Chosen, because I believe he already was “redeemed.” He had already sacrificed himself, what he loved about himself, to be different and better. I believe he had already done the right thing, and that even before the end, his motivations were purer than he was given credit for. Since so much of what appealed to me was his struggle to earn acceptance and love, to be right for her, the sacrificial angle, at least for the purposes of redeeming him, doesn’t help me feel better about his ending. It makes me feel worse, because he tried so hard to be worthy of her, with all his faults and mistakes and errors in judgment, and in the end, believed he wasn’t. He was the one who gave her the possibility of winning, yet he won nothing. So many better, smarter, wittier, and more thoughtful people have posted about why they believe he didn’t mean “you don’t love me,” but rather, “you do, but I need you to go and be safe and have a life.” And maybe someday I might believe that, but for now, all I can see is the sad resignation and sweet affection on his face, something that said to me, “I wish it was true, but it’s not, though I appreciate the sentiment as I go to my noble and fiery death.” I want desperately to feel happier about this, but knowing he’s going to be on Angel without the woman he loves makes me feel even sadder. I loved that Angel’s death was never mitigated — he came back feral, miserable, even more tormented. We don’t really know what happened to him there, but it seemed pretty bad. When and how Spike returns, it will have to be mitigated, and I have a feeling it will be by him accepting that no, Buffy never loved him, and now he’s just going to go on, alone and unhappy.
I wish I could get that thought out of my head. Normally, tragic doomed love thrills me, but I got so wrapped up in the guy’s story and identified with him so damn much (there is so much about Spike I feel close to that it’s scary) that it leaves me feeling just plain sad. I get weepy too often. I’m finding it hard to want to keep going on fic, even though I’m probably the only person not writing post-Chosen stories right now (I can’t see my way there, it just is too fraught for me right now, and I haven’t been able to read any yet even though wonderful writers are tackling it), which may be a good thing, really. I would have loved him going to his death with the sure belief that at long last, he had earned her feelings. Or at least, if he was going to say “No, you don’t,” that she would have convinced him otherwise. It would have been great if it could have been a Han Solo-ish line, like “It’s about time; now get out of here.” At least, for me it would have. That would have felt more like a reverse-corruptee talking; it would have felt less like ME was paving the way to tell us that Spike and Buffy together was stupid.
I know I sound like a complete dork about this, and I’m in a minority of people who just feel sad and depressed about this part of the ending. I loved everything else, but I would have liked to see that all the reversing of his corruption led to at least one tiny sliver of happiness for him, even if it was gone later. I love that he died a worthy death, but I am saddened that he died feeling unworthy. When it comes to love stuff and especially Buffy and Spike love stuff, I am a dork, a total, complete, utter dork. I keep hoping I can go back and watch it again, but it’s going to be a long time before I see positives in that scene, flames of love or no. All I see when I look at it is a man who did a hell of a lot to love a woman, and in the end accepting that he was still alone when he made the ultimate sacrifice. Damn my brain, anyhow.
