Because I Want to Believe

[thedeadlyhook]

I've spent more than a little time over the last few of days on fer1213's journal on this thread and then this one. They're a couple of quite large and fascinating dissections of the Spuffy relationship, including Spike's motivation in getting a soul, Buffy's emotional distance, "Seeing Red," and more (go read 'em, great stuff), but I've finally been inspired to spin off a train of thought on my own, partly as an apology for my last post there (I really do try to stay even-handed about all this stuff, really I do!), but mostly because this is one of the little back-burner essays I've been working on anyway and that this discussion gave me the energy I needed to finally get it done. So now that it's become suddenly topical to discuss S6 BtVS again, here goes.


To be perfectly honest, I did see the saga of Spike and Buffy in Seasons 6-7 as a love story - in retrospect, one that had been evolving throughout the entire BtVS series. It was a relationship that seemed - to me anyway - very much the logical outgrowth of the saga of Buffy and Angel, which had most certainly been a love story. But the star-crossed romance of Buffy and Angel also had an inherently fairy tale quality to it, an our-love-will-last-forever earnestness that bears very little resemblance to anyone's real-life experiences... that is, past a certain age.

Buffy's love for Angel was very much a youthful sort of romance, the type most people assign to pop idols, film stars, or agonizing first romance - the yearning, the mystery, the I Would Die 4 U. All of this is intensely recognizable - it's heartbreaking, and true, but not adult. It's a simple truth that, taken in combination with real life responsibilities, this sort of passion "doesn't last," to reference Buffy's oddest quote from "Seeing Red," in response to Spike's assertion that "great love is wild and passionate and dangerous."

But "wild and passionate and dangerous" is, however, a perfect description of the love between Buffy and Angel, a torrid romance that both knew was a fire in constant danger of raging out of control, even before the threat of Angelus entered the picture. It's notable that Buffy initially nixed the idea of starting up a romance with Angel based on the very objections that later came up as per Spike - duh, he's a vampire, she's the Slayer; Angel's "soul" in this context read as no more than a grudging excuse Buffy allowed herself to follow through on something her own instincts told her was kind of a bad idea.

So to my mind, it's entirely possible to read Buffy/Angel as a precursor to Buffy/Spike. There's a continual theme, even during the Angel years, of other characters teasing or outright mocking Buffy for her deviant attraction to the undead, being "drawn to darkness," etc. (Faith's words about Angel, that Buffy was probably still into him "when he went psycho," which provoked a serious oops-hit-a-nerve hostile reaction from Buffy, seemed particulary prophetic to me.)

And it goes without saying that had Buffy and Angel ever become a fixed couple, moved past the starry-eyed romance phase, things between them would have had to have changed - they would have moved into the "ever after" portion great romances never bother to tell. Buffy would have had to have learned to deal with Angel's vampiric nature on a practical basis instead of an idealized one; Angel would have had to have learned to integrate himself more into Buffy's daylight life, deal with her parents and friends and schoolwork and jobs. There would have to be cooperation and compromise, on both sides.

And for awhile, with Spike and Buffy in early S6, it had seemed to me that that's what we were getting - that evolution into a realistic adult relationship. Theirs wasn't an example of Love at First Sight romance, despite the sizzling attraction that played as a constant from the moment of their very first meeting. This was two people coming together from a basis of shared experience, mutual desire, and developing friendship, into a relationship based on negotiation and compromise.

For Spike was, oddly enough, always far more a part of Buffy's daylight life than Angel ever was, even taking into account Angel's general acceptance by her Watcher and gang of friends. Angel, even though treated as Buffy's official love interest and a peripheral member of her gang, was still a remote figure, cryptic and apart. Much is made of whether or not he will appear on any given night or not; Willow harrangues him about not giving Buffy enough attention. He is played as the archetypcally clueless boyfriend who tends to be busy with his own life, and often out of touch with Buffy's needs. Spike, on the other hand, was frequently shown to be deeply involved in Buffy's life, arguing with her friends, talking to her mother, protecting her sister. He knew where she worked, what she wore, what was generally going on in her life, and constantly pushed for access to more. The key difference between the two seems to be that Angel was content with a private relationship; Spike wanted a public one, and continued to push for it. He wanted a committed relationship, like he'd had with Drusilla, where he could exist just for her.

Now, ironically enough, fer1213's post that started all this thinking was a reexamination of "DoubleMeat Palace," a post-"Smashed" episode (thus were are now in the Naughy!Sex portion of the B/S relationship) which seems to have been generally reviled by most. (I'm one of those heathens who actually thought it was funny because I've worked more than one of those jobs - nearly every single oddity of fast food work was brought up in that ep, as if Jane Espensen had gone through a bullet list, although I still insist they missed a trick my not showing the penis-monster-woman getting scalded by hot coffee.)

As a starting point for talking about Spuffy, "DMP" is not as illogical as it might seem - as I look back at my writeup of the time on Just Stake Me, I'd had a similar reaction to the episode, noting that at this point, Buffy and Spike were "stranded in a sort of relationship end zone," that they'd moved past the simplicity of being enemies, friends, or even lust objects to each other and were desperately trying to figure out what came next. fer1213's original observation - that he was talking to her seriously and she was indeed listening at that point, even though she ultimately decides to walk away (only to meet him out back later for sex, so much for complete detachment) - was what got me thinking back.

Now I have a whole other set of thoughts on gender politics in the Spuffy relationship (which I won't get into here), but if I look at S6 strictly from a character standpoint, pushing aside for a moment any metaphorical feminist issues, "DMP," and "Gone" before it, were the points in the season where I'd begun to believe that Buffy really did already love Spike in her own incredibly damaged, fucked-up way.

Because by this point, we'd already seen several examples of Buffy turning to Spike as "the only person I can stand to be around." She's comfortable with him the way she can't be with her friends. And it's not so crazy that she should feel this way, either - the Spike we see in early S6 especially is a really nice guy (not a perfect guy, granted - in "Wrecked," for example, he proved more than capable of behaving exactly like a stereotypical sated male, whose brain can fail to operate in the wake of too many orgasms) - but compared to the chain-smoking Slayer of Slayers, on-Saturday-I-kill-you, blah, blah, blah, of days gone by, Spike in early S6 is practically Prince Charming. He wears his hair differently (touchable curls!). He's decorated his living space into a sort of bachelor den. He's a patient listener. He stayed in Sunnydale after Buffy died to help the Scoobies and protect teenage Dawn. He spurns the attentions of the Buffybot ("I don't think Spike likes me anymore," the poor thing tells Willow mournfully). He does sensitive male crying and wall-punching over and above what we've even seen out of Xander in the likes of "The Body." Aside from playing poker for kittens, for awhile there, there really wasn't much objectionable about him.

So what I saw, in S6 (and yes, this is how I felt at the time), was Buffy actually falling in love with him. It's really the only way to view her hostility in any way that makes sense - Buffy, as we well know from earlier seasons, isn't a one-night-stand sort of girl. No matter how eye-rollingly painful it was to see Buffy hanging over the telephone waiting for poop-head Parker to call her back, it told us something. Buffy doesn't get into these situations lightly. She pursues the relationship because she wants and needs him. Badly.

So it's because she cares that his careless banter hurts so much when it never would have before - since when can't Buffy give back verbally as good as she got? Since "Smashed," that's when. Her morning-after barbs are terse and not very articulate. They're also mean for a reason. When she bounces off the floor spitting "is that what this was about? Doing a Slayer?" she's offended because no kidding, she expected more. She expected him to continue to behave the way he did in "Afterlife" when he held her hands, even if she's already getting dressed and ready to run away. She's expecting him to hold up his end, prove her wrong. She is, in fact, taking the romance-novel approach to the relationship - the onus is on him to prove himself worthy and true, whereas he seems to have been coming at it from a much more modern, Cosmo-girl front of thinking of them as equals. Spike expects Buffy to meet him blow for blow, barb for barb - that's always been how they've related, what reason to think it's changed? - while Buffy, somewhere along the line, seems to have fallen for the "willing slave" that got down on his knees for her.

And this, ultimately, is why I think she's so mean to him, why she pushes away his attempts to talk seriously and restricts their relationship to only sex. Because she's terrified of him, of really letting him all the way into her life and dealing with what that would mean. Not since Angel has someone come so close to having full access to her daylight life of Buffy the normal girl - note how often we see Spike in the sunlight in S6 - and the night life also of Buffy the Slayer.

In early S6, Buffy constantly turns to Spike as a refuge, a sort of confessor to whom she can pour out her troubles (a role which every male friend I've ever had lives in constant dread of - apparently, the worst words in the English language to hear from a girl to whom you're attracted are "you're such a nice guy"). But in "Once More, With Feeling," Spike reminds Buffy through song that he's not her girlfriend with a Y chromosome, but a man in love with her, and asks her to stop using him for an emotional footrest unless she's willing to take the relationship further. (Incidentally, it's this and moments like it that led a lot of the viewership to take such a strong dislike to Buffy in the wake of later events, for going ahead with using him after he'd asked her to stop.)

And it's only after this that Buffy begins to act hostile and withdrawn, as if immediately following their grand, passionate, Gone With the Wind-style kiss, she ran home and drafted up a list of Top Ten Reasons Why I Shouldn't Fall In Love With Spike! He's undead, check! He's soulless! He's evil! He's a big, freaky, obsessive masochist! Check, check, check! That these observations appear as immediate, vicious responses to entreaties like "we need to talk" or "a man can change" tells us exactly what they are - they're talismans, wards, just like the crosses she weilds to "protect" herself in "Wrecked."

Buffy is scared - scared in a way we've seen before. When rebound-boyfriend Riley was outed as a fellow demon hunter in "Doomed," Buffy nearly ended her relationship before it ever really got started because, "it’s just a huge, black pit of a mistake and I can’t go there again." As a "nice, normal guy" who wouldn't "cause her heartarche" she'd been willing to consider him boyfriend material.

Applying this logic to Spike in reverse tells us what we need to know - that she can't consider Spike "boyfriend" material because the risk of causing her heartache is there. It's an interesting refutation of Buffy's relationship with nice, "solid" Riley to realize that Buffy's instincts about her own feelings in "Something Blue" - that real passion "goes hand in hand with pain and fighting" - weren't so far off the mark after all. After all, in "Buffy vs. Dracula," she leaves Riley's bed to chase demons - a near-metaphor for infidelity - because he isn't everything she really needs (e.g., Spike's continual insistence that "girl needs a bit of a monster in her man").

But Buffy tries hard anyway to make herself fit a good-girl box, largely for the benefit of others - her insistence on forcing herself into relationships that are "good" for her even repeats in S7, when Buffy uses nearly identical terms to describe Principal Wood, in "First Date," and even there she's wondering about her attraction to "wicked energy."

One of the most intriguing aspects to me about Buffy and Spike as a couple has always been how alike they are - two intensely passionate people (both bottle blonds, even), both of whose hearts were frankly bigger than their heads, and had a similar tendency to develop unwise romantic attachments. That there was sexual attraction between them was not even a question - for years, we'd seen a running dialogue of banter and innuendo that basically set up these two mortal enemies as the gender-reversed equivalent of Batman and Catwoman - "I'd rather be fighting you anyway" "Mutual", etc. At the most basic level, these were two people who generally enjoyed each other's company - if in an adversarial sense - and clearly considered their opposite number to be a hottie. (The cartoonish obviousness of Buffy's sexual attraction to Spike is one of the few light elements in otherwise bleak S6 - in "All the Way," you can practically see the porn reel unrolling in her head in response to Spike's question about a little "rough and tumble," never mind her reactions to his phone call in "Smashed.") In S7, Buffy even confirms for us that yes, the romantic dynamic between herself and Spike had been the recognizably high school-style one of ruthlessly teasing someone you're attracted to (e.g., Spike hanging out on Buffy's front lawn in hopes that she'll emerge, only to insult her hair when she does). And one of the funniest moments in Season 3 to me was always the scene in "Lover's Walk," in which we see mortal enemies Buffy and Spike arguing in the middle of the street like an old married couple, completely comfortable and in sync with each other, while Twu Wuv Angel trails along behind them like a total third wheel. Buffy and Angel might never be "friends" but Buffy and Spike were. Or could have been, if Buffy hadn't been so terrified, depressed, and outright came-back-wrong miserable to be unable to make that choice.

In "Smashed," just before Buffy gives into temptation, she hurls at Spike that he hasn't "even come close to hurting" her. He responds "Afraid to give me the chance?"

That was exactly it, wasn't it? Exactly.