Everything to everybody
Yeah, you know the drill: not enough caffeine in my system. The usual warnings apply. I identify a lot with Buffy, so....yeah. Recent events have put me more firmly in her corner than ever before, so....yeah. Enter at your own risk. I wrote some of this while I was in Iraq; sue me.

Plus: Supernatural. Yeah, I know.

Watching Supernatural this year has confirmed for me how fucked up the writing was for the last two seasons of Buffy. I never bought her change from almost suicidal to abruptly hostile; I had too much faith in Buffy for that. She and Spike had a perfectly-developing little friendship there, which abruptly turned almost hostile, in a way that took a lot of people by surprise. It's not that Buffy was without anger; it's just that she always managed to deal with it. Sure, she'd come back from the dead, sure, she'd been through a lot, but neither her nor the Spike of Seeing Red made any damned sense to me at all. And whatever else you can say about Joss Whedon, he sure shouldn't be writing about rape without doing a whole hell of a lot more reading and studying and just thinking. My fanfiction was a reaction to what I felt quite strongly had been a rarity in fandom: the betrayal of a flawed female heroine into a character that suddenly, inexplicably, had a mean streak.

So time passed and I wrote fanfiction and tried to find other stuff to snap my socks. However, there was a terrible shortage of werewolves, ghosts, and goblins, and meanwhile, I wound up far away from home, in a land where there was far too many monsters for any person to take, much less fight. When I came home and got out of danger, something very odd happened: I crumbled. You can't do that when there are people actively gunning for you. Your mind waits till you're home and then it happens. Every fear you couldn't admit suddenly rises up in the middle of the quietest of nights and convinces you it's creeping on bloodstained claws through the grass to your window. Just finding relief from those fears---those survival instincts----has taken two years, and the process isn't complete by any means. My dad had nightmares about WWII till Alzheimer's took them away.

What if you spent your formative years fighting scary monsters without relief? What if the worst things that could happen---death and your mom dying---had happened to you, along with betrayal by a boyfriend---the first, no less---and the almost end of the world? Buffy found out about monsters on her fifteenth birthday. She died for the first time when she was sixteen. The writers of Supernatural, example, have taken some trouble to show how weirdly the boys were brought up and trained by their dad. At least they were prepared. Buffy was really not prepared for anything except constant thankless fighting, a lonely life, and an early death. And even soldiers who train for war find an insurgent war---where the enemy can jump out at you at any time----hard to take. Some estimates show that the Marines are going to have 50% of their fighting force show symptoms of PTSD after multiple tours---of six months. The Army and National Guard are expected to do anywhere from fifteen to eighteen months. Not only that, those are soldiers and Marines who have buddies, comrades, and if they're lucky, leaders like some of the ones I've served under. The burden is lessened when there's a lot of hands to help lift it. All Buffy had were her friends.

The writers did a disservice to them, too. How clueless do you have to be to someone's depressed, lethargic, down and out? Instead they focused on Spike, thus guaranteeing that Buffy would not feel comfortable going to them. Buffy's friends had always been supportive, if flawed. Surely there must have been some way to bring her back without turning her friends into the power-hungry junkies or the sort of guy who leaves his bride at the altar. There was little territory in between black and white.

By contrast, look at the writing on Supernatural. Sure, it's early days, but it's the same kind of show, and the show has showed no reluctance to kill off major characters. More than that, the characters have been shown to be flawed early on, which makes portraying them in difficult situations later easier. Even more than that, the flaws have been portrayed as damage resulting from the life they lead. Buffy was flawed, all right, but the writing was unsympathetic to the point of parody. She was still superhero girl, but she had a heroine habit and everybody was whispering about it.

I wish the writers of Buffy had had some of the deftness with their characters that the Supernatural writers so obviously have. It would have been nice to have some recognition of just how depressed Buffy was after the death of her mother and the end of her vacation from Slaying, how shocked she was by the sudden cluelessness of her friends---and how startling she might have found Willow's transformation--and her emotional defection. Willow was Buffy's best friend. All of a sudden, she was blind to anything but her own power and needs. How did that feel to Buffy?

There was a lot of fan hostility to Buffy, but the genuine hatred directed at her was not helped by the writing. Female characters have to be like real-life women: everything to everyone. Buffy was Buffy with everybody, and that was not allowed. She was flawed, screwed up, and damaged, and the resentment to that was complicated. It's like women resent the standards forced on us, but instead of fighting those who impose the standards, we resent the women who dare to fail. Why? Because it scares us, that hostility? Or we do someone else's failure and feel the contempt that society feels for imperfect women? Do we feel the fear that that's our fate? Even fictional female characters aren't safe; Buffy got attacked for her relationship with Spike almost as if she were a real person making real decisions, instead of being Joss Whedon's creation. That was just as personal a reaction to her failure as it would be for the way women are the objects of such contempt in this culture. Can you think of a male celebrity who's been the subject of a 'send him to jail' campaign?

Those last two seasons made no sense to me. Supernatural with its fucked up characters and their wishes and dreams and fears have made sense. Yes, I know that's subjective. But how come Buffy's dear friends never once asked themselves, "Could Buffy be depressed? Suffer from PTSD as a result of constant battles?! Does she miss her mom? Maybe if we live in her house we should give her some space and some rent?! Do some housework? Babysit the Dawnster? Here's a clue: let's try asking!" Instead, they flapped around and did everything but ask.

Buffy's downward spiral made no sense to me when I watching it on TV and makes even less to me now, having experienced what I've experienced. It looks like the whole Season Six was patched together at the last minute in response to fan outrage, with little thought beyond reaction.

I always liked Buffy. I liked that she knew her own self, that she wanted to fit in, that she wasn't unnaturally sophistocated and well-adjusted; I liked that she was plausible. I liked that she had a sense of decency that seemed just as natural as her slaying. Most of all, I liked that she had flaws. When her friends brought her back, I smelled a rat; they didn't bring her back for her, they brought her back for themselves, and as a result, they had to ignore her increasing despair.

There’s something really important that people always miss about Buffy and Spike: their relationship took place in Buffyworld. Not your world, not my world, but their world. That said, you’d have to be stupid to not notice that the world of war bears more than a slight resemblance to Buffy’s.

But it’s still not the same. Buffy’s world was a violent one in which her only real protection was violence. With that she had to protect people. Violence has an effect on mature people; what effect must it have had on a fifteen-year-old girl? And I have to add, too, that I know I’m more violent than I was three years ago. I know this because I've used violence and it's worked. It kept me alive. This was made very apparent to me when I waded into a fight while home on leave and wound up toe to toe with some little methed-out psycho before I realized that my M-16 was approximately eight thousand miles behind me.

And here’s the thing, too---You know what violence really means? It means the tension is over. It has found an outlet. The waiting is over. Everything is going to stream away from you now. You can calm down. The worst has happened. Tension in Iraq is just about un fucking bearable. There have been times I could feel my heart beating so strongly and so frantically I thought I would explode---or it would. You can’t bottle that up for long, and there no one’s soul is at stake, although I have to wonder when I look at Abu Ghraib. “Those who fight monsters should take care that in the process they do not become monsters themselves.” In Buffy’s world, people’s souls were at stake, and their fate was nothing less than damnation---all on her scrawny little shoulders.

Here’s another thing, too---Buffy was terribly, terribly depressed. When you’re in extreme circumstances like she was, like people can get in a war, you jettison all the stuff you can’t defend, all that you can’t carry. When you’re depressed, you do the same thing. It can feel like despair is causing parts of you to atrophy because you’re so exhausted, and so you pitch them aside---all the things that make life worth living. In the process you make yourself more and more depressed, and you wind up fighting yourself as you carve away more and more pieces of yourself till you feel like nothing but your skeleton self is left over.

Depression is an undertow, and its flip side is anger. Anger is an easy emotion because it’s like a chemical---it reacts to so many other things and it creates the impression of energy because it steals their energy. It’s hard to harness, hard to control---and easy to let go, especially if so many things have been carved away by depression.

Buffy faced danger and violence 365 days a year since the age of fifteen. Her personality was stunted by violence just as surely as some cultures bind body parts to distort them and make them ‘better.’

Soldiers get to go home at the end of this experience. Buffy, however, was at home---and she was really its sole defense. No pressure there. Add to that she had to be invisible while she did it. She was like an Iraqi civilian, except with super powers. No place to rest, no place to be safe, all in familiar surroundings. They never said the superpowers included super mental strength to withstand trauma, did they?

Sure, she had Giles. But Giles had his vulnerabilities, too. She had her mom, whom she doubtless hoped would live for many decades. Just as her personality had been stunted by violence, so too had her character been affected. Her mother was the one constant in a life marked by danger. What does danger mean? It means you can’t ever relax.

Her mother died.

Giles nearly died---how many times? As a human without special powers, he was doubly vulnerable: he could be threatened by supernatural and human agencies. Trapped between them, he was probably as close to her as anyone else.

There was Dawn. But Dawn was just a kid, more vulnerable than Buffy herself was.

There were the Scoobies. If, however, they would yank her out of heaven, what wouldn’t they meddle in? There was a genuine gap in her life with them, and Willow’s denial about her magic abuse works as a metaphor for the whole group. They were her friends---she didn’t have to pretend to be normal around them. But that gave them a lot of power over her. She needed them desperately. Did they need her? Not to the extent that she needed them. I think for the Scoobies, Buffy was more useful than genuine friend at a lot of points. There was envy there that was all the more powerful for its being unacknowledged and buried.

That was Buffy and her life.

I don’t think her ego was out of line, nor was she unrealistic in saying she was the law. Who else was there? The Sunnydale police force? She was The Slayer. She had the world’s worst job, no benefits, and the only exit was death. I think she was entitled to some perks.

When you deal with situations that could turn ugly and do it every day, you can get really decisive really fast. Some people don’t have to do that, and that doesn’t happen to them. What’s disturbing is that they’re incapable of imagining it. Problem solving in a war zone can just boil down to figuring out what the problem is and shooting it. Or in Buffy’s case, staking it. Buffy had been doing that for how long? And realistically, she was the only person who could do that. More than that, she had to do that. There was no way out. She had stopped wasting time with niceties; there was too much at stake. I feel for her. Hesitate with mythical creatures? Ho hum. Hesitate when there’s a car bearing down at you at a checkpoint that could be a VBIED? If you’re not there, it’s easy to second-guess, to forget or never know how fast a second is, how fast a minute is, how slow things go when your life seems to be ending and you get that cold feeling in your stomach. Did Buffy ever feel that? From what we saw, she’d stopped feeling. For her, it must have felt like a relief.

Buffy came back from heaven to friends who’d pulled her out because they needed her. For Willow, it was power. I think she just wanted to try it. Her conversation in the kitchen with Giles was chilling and it was all about she had more power than him. The others had different motives, and I’m still not sure what they are.I don't necessarily think that reflects on me. I think some of it's has to be pinned on the writers.

Buffy's friends were genuinely happy to have her back---they had to be. They couldn’t consider that they might not have done the right thing. Buffy couldn’t consider telling them. There’d been a lot of dishonesty for a while. They were now all she had, and there wasn’t a lot there, frankly. It could have been fixed, but that required more strength than she had at the time.

So she couldn’t get rid of those feelings, and there was only one person she could talk to, because he’d always been brutally honest with her. Once they started huge chunks of their relationship, though, he became another problem for her like the Scoobies. It must have been harder and harder to accept her feelings for him. I’m sorry, but the way they wrote that romance just sucked. I have too much faith in Buffy to totally accept the one they gave us.

Buffy was incredibly depressed, and wouldn’t have been had her friends actually acted like her friends and gotten her some therapy. They and their actions were the direct cause of her depression, so in order to help her they would have had to admit just how badly they’d miscalculated. What we saw was her personality withering away under the onslaught of depression. I have to say I have to put Spike in the category here, too, of obligations. He had no business not paying attention to her depression if he loved her as much as he said he did, but a Buffy who was herself might not have been so eager for a relationship. I frankly don’t think they would have gotten together so fast. Buffy was in a very vulnerable condition, and Spike was just eager to get close to her. Frankly, this didn’t make sense for his character, either. Spike was loving and patient with Dru for more than a century---suddenly, with Buffy, he’s a horny teenager. And while that might have been believable had Buffy been at her full strength, in her stressed and despairing condition it was kind of creepy.

When you’re that depressed, you just back yourself in somewhere, put your back against the wall so you have one less side to defend, and get rid of all the stuff that takes energy. It takes too much effort to defend the whole castle, so you board up all the rooms you don’t use. You want to minimize how much of the castle you have to defend. You keep withdrawing and retreating till it’s just you in a little dark room somewhere, and all you have to defend is what’s left of your personality. A lot of things are too luxurious to fit in that little room.

Bullshit is one of them. Game playing is another. It’s easier and quicker to make decisions in that kind of space--what you see is what you get. The whole motive for cutting things off as well as retreating from people is to simplify things.

But here’s the thing---that fortress, that castle---it’s all in your mind. Nobody else can see you retreating, until you’re locked up inside it. If it’s really bad the only person you can fit in there is yourself. In Buffy’s case, there was room enough for her and Dawn and Giles, and her mom. That’s all the energy she had for herself after everything. Spike kept pounding on the door, when what the depressed person really wants is peace and quiet and time to recharge. It used to be his room in the castle, so to speak that she’d retreat to when the battle got bad. Then she booted him and locked herself in.

All emotion starts to feel like assault on that barricade---even genuinely helpful emotion. Violence just batters you away till all that’s left are the survival instincts. Add depression to that and you get someone who’s so frail, dried out and withered away that they just snap.

It’s an existence of small doses and cautious pleasures. Whether the fear and the tension strip it away from you or you do it yourself to lessen the burden you have to carry when fleeing back to your tiny refuge, what’s left is a struggle for anything. Anger is easy, here, again; it requires so little of one’s own energy, and gives the impression of replenishing the sufferer’s batteries. It’s a false glow. It burns them away, yet that’s not apparent till after it’s all burnt away and the damage is done.

As for Spike keep in mind that as an audience we saw things that Buffy did not. If I had been writing that season they wouldn’t have moved as abruptly from friendship to sex as they did---especially kinky sex. Spike idolized her because she was a hero. Idolatry isn’t a good basis for a relationship; it makes one person value themselves too low and the other too high.

We got to see Spike’s background, his reaction to her tossing money at him in the alley and lots of other things. We got to see his motivation, his character. Buffy did not. What she had was her knowledge of his past, and very little insight into his behavior without her. She was a catalyst for him. The two of them were like different chemicals that combine to become something new, instead of remaining separate and inviolable. That can be scary to even an older, more experienced woman; for someone in Buffy’s condition, it could have felt like a complete loss of whatever personality she had left. I also doubt her friends told her of the way he watched Dawn that summer. It’s interesting here to contrast Spike’s definition of love with Angel’s here----Spike’s affections show themselves in real gestures of support: you expect that Angel probably sent a wreath or something to the funeral, then went to Vegas after brooding somewhere so that people could him.

Once Buffy and Spike started having sex they essentially stopped being friends, separated by the disparity of their emotions in the relationship. Buffy had all the power; Spike did not. Buffy clung to that power because she would have been able to feel that frightening alchemy discussed above happening. It’s not something you don’t notice. Each of them had different goals for their relationship, and those goals were essentially at cross purposes. They were more like enemies than lovers. Buffy’s goals didn’t involve Spike at all: he might as well have been an inanimate object. He was supposed to be an escape, not something she had to escape from. For him, she was someone who could validate the way he’d changed himself and isolated himself for her. Had the relationship been healthy, it would have been a maturing process for both. Buffy’s depression, though, served to change the alchemy of it, and even Spike---perceptive as he was---was feeling his own brand of desperation as everything he wanted went terribly, terribly wrong.

In a way, though, the sex was pretty much a continuation of the life anyone lived in Sunnydale. No one there had normal relationships with normal people, though they craved them. Even if they had perfectly fine relationships with demons, werewolves, what have you--- what they wanted was what was a fairy tale in Sunnydale----a life free of fairies, so to speak. One gets the impression that lots of people were sneaking around Sunnydale to meet their demon lovers, instead of just saying, “Hey, I’m dating a demon. Deal with it.” Odd how that coming out happened with the gays on the show but not with, well---what do you call demon-lovers, anyway? Using a pejorative plus the word lover has an interesting history---people have been called commie-lovers, red-lovers, and more offensive things----and the only thing that one is left with is that to love someone different can expose one to hatred. What if what one fears is the final revelation that one’s trusted friends have that prejudice? That would have been a terrible blow to Buffy if her friends didn’t approve of her and Spike. At the top of her game, she could have handled it. Now, though….

Keeping in mind the violence of Buffy’s world causes a bit of a perspective shift. It’s like during all these debates here at my LJ, when someone tries to move from the broad picture to the tiny little corner they occupy----that’s not a shift, really, but a wholesale change. Applying our rules to Buffy may seem like logic, but it’s not. There are similarities that might in fact be deceptive. There are, however, some similarities that illuminate. The violence in Iraq is one thing that I think is very similar to what Buffy faced.

Violence there is almost a relief, because at least the feeling of expectation is over. You can get so tense there that your stomach hurts. Nor can you trust the quiet. The quiet means that something is going to happen, that people might be loading or reloading weapons. Birds sing while you eye the roof tops. None of the rules of logic apply there. Past periods of quiet do not mean that the future is quiet. They might just mean that everyone around you has been temporarily disarmed. It’s always there, like the dust.

Violence in Buffy’s world means that Buffy has encountered a vampire or a demon, probably one that she was stalking. As mentioned previously, violence means the tension is over. Sex also causes the end of tension as well.

People always take Spike’s side in their relationship, seeing only him, and not the context. Buffy and Spike actually had a good friendship before they became intimate, finding small things, small intimacies they could agree on.

In a relationship, though, Buffy and Spike really agreed on one thing and one thing only.

They both loathed Spike.

Spike figured that if she couldn’t love him as he was, he’d become something that she could. This never works. It’s almost like the more she disliked him, the more he adored her and chased after her; and the more he did that, the more she disliked him. They moved from a teasing, cautious friendship to this angry, lonely relationship, and it didn’t make sense. Buffy could barely handle friendship in her condition; the amount of emotion that Spike tossed her way was overwhelming. He wasn’t what he tried to be, and he knew it; while at some level, Buffy knew he was doing this awful thing to himself for her, and while she disliked him for it, she had to dislike herself, too, for not having the guts to put a stop to it. But then again, there’s lots of things about their relationship that just didn’t make sense. For them to have gotten together the way they did there would have had to be lots of buried loathing. I just don’t see that at all. And here’s where I get inconsistent, because I think that Buffy and Spike’s romantic relationship made no sense at all.

You have to accept that Spike’s first thought upon finding out that he could hurt Buffy would be to try and do precisely that. And that he would taunt her with the fact that she ‘came back wrong’ rather than act like the friend he’d been up to that point. Either of those acts would be cruel under the best of circumstances; to Buffy at the time, they could only be perceived as attacks. He was frustrated by her, certainly, but he’d always been someone to seduce rather than attack; Buffy was the one who at that point used the Gordian knot approach. After a couple confusing kisses the perceptive Spike is going to be regress three years in terms of personality?

Buffy seemed more and more normal throughout the season as she put more distance between herself and her return from the grave, but her affect was still different from the Buffy of Season Four. Her mother’s death, her exhaustion, Riley’s utter uselessness as a boyfriend----all these things left scars on her. When she was depressed and dealing with her mother’s illness, Riley used her ordeal to try and get closer to her, to demand that she pay attention to him and his needs, all disguised as being caring and concerned. He demanded that she think of him when her mother was dying. He demanded--all the while acting like it was concern---that she report to him, lean on him, and why? He was trying to control her. At the end of Season Five, just before she basically committed suicide, she had a nervous breakdown. I’m no psychiatrist, but isn’t what happened to her called either a psychotic or catatonic break? She withdrew within. In Season Six, she was still withdrawn.

Spike’s feelings for her had to feel excessive. To a depressed person, emotion is just exhausting, and here was this guy doing this complete change. He keeps coming back for more even though she treats him bad. She was raw. Her friends were deeper in denial than she was. Giles was gone. She was stuck with Dawn, and who could she look to for advice? Spike had been her prop, her friend for a while, and now had changed into someone who was making relationship demands on her. I think a large part of her hostility to that was that she simply didn’t have that much to give. He’d given her an excuse as to why she felt so bad----she’d come back wrong. (Never mind that that was rather out of character for him.) It wasn’t her fault. But he kept reminding her of it, because that was his sole hold on her, even though if he’d just stood silently by her, she’d have leaned on him. The show took the other side---if she believed she was something disgusting, then she’d have no choice but to rely on him. It was always presented as Spike being in love with her, but there was calculation there; if that was the only way he could have her, then that would have to do. Both of them were unhealthy. Both of them only made each other worse.

He couldn’t make her love him while she was in that condition so he pressed for making a sexual impression on her. What she really needed was the friend he’d been----even a ‘friend with benefits.’ However, I suspect there’s no drama in that.

This backed Buffy further and further into the hole she was in. What a person needs when they’re like this is space. Remember that mental fortress I mentioned? Spike was just another voice clamoring to be let in. What’s tragic is, if he’d just stayed the course, she would have let him in, and the scene that we saw in Season Seven where she went to him because there was no one else would have happened then.

Spike tried to assert himself once, after she came to him in Gone and frankly took advantage of him. We don’t know what happened between episodes, but that didn’t last long. When she beat him in Dead Things, the incident was the starting point in a downward curve for both characters. I frankly don’t think that was good writing; I don’t think that that was Buffy-like at all. She would have had to have been much more depressed than she was portrayed in the show to have so retreated from her own personal standards to do that. At the conclusion, she’ s zoned out, and she walks away like a zombie. That at least makes sense. She’s been through a hallucinatory episode, gone back to having sex with Spike, and then had some kind of sexual encounter with him on the balcony of the Bronze while her friends cavort in the light below. Spike deliberately taunted her with whatever was wrong with her, using that to keep her there with him. Once that wouldn’t have been necessary. Spike’s desperation seemed to come after just one or two rebuffs from her, yet this was someone who lived with an insane person for a century.

People simply do not snap one day and become abusive. Buffy was a decent person, and while she’d been through a lot she was recovering. She was decent, too, when people weren’t looking, when it cost her something to be decent. That to my mind makes her more of a hero than does all the butt kicking she did. When she got the Class Protector Award, it was final acknowledgement of what she’d been doing since her early teens: protecting other people.

And here comes the part where I frankly cheat. I know something about violence because I’ve been in a war zone. I know something about domestic violence because I at least read up on it. Marti Noxon does not seem to have done either. Buffy might have gotten a bit cocky, but nothing about the way she attacked Spike made any sense at all. Yes, she’s in Buffyworld, but here at last is the part where I just can’t stand it any more. The writers wanted something shocking, so they tossed that in. Did it fit the characters? No, but it was shocking. Maybe it was shocking because it just didn’t fucking make sense. The writers, too, are trying to have it both ways. What Buffy just did there doesn’t make sense even in Buffy’s World. Buffy just wouldn’t do that. That’s not her style. So they broke their own rules. Now what?

Some people point to that scene and the general dynamic there between Buffy and Spike as evidence that the gender roles are reversed and that Spike is actually playing the part of an abused woman. That’s kind of a curious thing to say, because being a man evidently means--to them--- being in control, being decisive, action-oriented, and not dithering. Being a woman I guess meansone has to love more than one is loved, to be needy, and to be in fact so desperate for a relationship that one will tolerate all manner of abuse and degradation.

I don’t buy those gender role models, thanks. There’s nothing sexist, there, in those sexist assumptions about gender, though. Not at all.

The French have a saying: there is one who is kissed, and there is one who kisses. One who loves, and one who is loved, or who allows themselves to be loved. To be brutally blunt, there is one in control by virtue of being wanted or desired more than they desire the other person. Once one accepts this concept one gets into a very interesting area of ‘why is this person desired?’

So Buffy is all closed off after all the things she’s gone through, and here comes Spike, acting frankly, like a combination predator and prey. He’ll tolerate anything so he can be with her----but he won’t let her alone, except, significantly, when she tells him bluntly that they’re through---and that ‘it’s killing me.’ While he tries to persuade her later to sleep with him again, that moment there, where he appears to recognize that it’s for her benefit, has repercussions for the ‘Spike’s-a-rapist’ crowd.

He asks her to sleep with him again, and then is disappointed when she doesn’t do it, but that’s that. She said no. There’s always been sexual tension there in their relationship, and it goes back quite a ways. This is where all the inconsistant writing came in and reached a bitterly forseeable conclusion; the attempted rape in something red.

Most date rapists view all sex as sex---and that includes rape. Like most rapists, they just have no feeling for the victim at all. The victim in fact is a hindrance to them because she has what they want, she’s not providing it, and therefore she’s not doing her job. They just look at it as rectifying her mistake or her conceit. She thinks she’s too good to provide sex? Oops, she needs to be taught a lesson.

Spike went to Buffy’s to apologize for sleeping with Anya. A vampire? Apologize? To apologize is to recognize that one has done something wrong, yet a vampire is a creature whose conscience no longer exists. In his own way, Spike’s personality had become as reduced as hers, but it was because he consciously did so, and he did it for her. There was some anger there--he changed his identity for her, and she didn’t want it any longer? Who would want him now? He was what he thought Buffy wanted, except she no longer wanted him. Worse yet was the realization that perhaps to give her that had been ‘killing her’. He’d sworn off killing.

It was a painfully complicated situation, and Spike---for all his perceptiveness---still had a lot of his id left, where he got sick of planning and thinking, and just went with the impulsive violence. He knew he was love’s bitch. What he didn’t realize was that there were a lot of other things he could be, too. The truly shameful thing is that the writers were so worn out they had lost sight of that, too. Shock and awe, shock and awe. They betrayed their characters for an easy, controversial, sexist plot twist. The more even keep of the following season was made plausible only by a hearty suspension of disbelief, Spike's soul, and a situation where all differences could be put aside because the world was ending.

What I feel after all this is that Buffy deserved an Eighth Season with writers who liked and understood her, and finally what she deserved was a world where she was not the only outnumbered Slayer, but one of many, facing more even odds. With more Slayers, she could have had more of a life, at least until whatever was going on in Angel concluded.

Moi, bitter?