From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V4 #22 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Friday, February 22 2002 Volume 04 : Number 022 Today's Subjects: ----------------- RE: Responses to Dawn and Don ["Karin Rabe" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 21:00:07 -0500 From: "Karin Rabe" Subject: RE: Responses to Dawn and Don Dawn, We're still in considerable agreement, especially with your comment that Spike's "not willing to settle for a few moments of carefully unacknowledged lack of conflict. He wants to make a case: you belong with me. You later say of Buffy, that "she has always been closer to darkness than she's been able to acknowledge, and while he isn't bringing her closer to the dark itself, I think he may finally bring her to acceptance of it. If nothing awful happens first." I agree with you there as well, but am puzzled by your adding a couple of sentences later, "She's drawn to Spike, but if he keeps insisting that both of them are creatures of the night, she'll keep recoiling." I.e., the two statements seem a bit contradictory. Personally, I think she'll only keep recoiling so long as she fails to come to terms with her dark side, to recognize it as both the source of her strength, and as something subject to the control of her commitment to serving the light, and the power of love. (I'm reminded of Vincent's ultimately victorious internal battle in my other favorite series blending fantasy and realism, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.) It's my hope Spike can help her reach that point by refusing to let her lose sight of what she shares with him. Don said, "Karen: I found much of interest in your comments; but what you were attempting to articulate was such a nested tangle of motivations that it made for a nested tangle of sentences (pot calling the kettle black alert!), especially the paragraph about Buffy battering Spike. I =think= I understand you to be saying that Buffy needs to believe that Spike's love has an ulterior motive (rather than being unconditional), and Spike needs to believe that Buffy is hurting him because she secretly loves him. I invite you to elaborate." Well, tangled sentences or not, you did indeed get my meaning! :) Although I'd go so far as to say she wants to believe Spike's feeling for her isn't "love" at all! I also meant to suggest that Spike is correct in his assessment of why she's hurting him, just as he's so often told her other truths about herself she wasn't ready to hear or accept. Her love of him is not so much secret as something she keeps denying even to herself, but surely we agree that the rage she expressed by beating Spike was really self-directed, like Faith's -- and therefore expressed the same unwillingness to =accept= Spike's unconditional love, that Faith had towards Angel's refusal to give up on her when she had given up on herself. Would you agree with my feeling that when she quotes Spike's words to her friends later, in the discussion of Warren's having killed his girlfriend, that she is indirectly -- because largely unconsciously -- acknowledging the truth of Spike's statement about her? You argue in your latest post that Buffy in fact "never" trusts Spike, whereas I've asserted the contrary: "Remember, the last time Spike tied her up, it was to 1) tell her he loved her 2) simultaneously, to threaten to kill her. And he can now kill her without repercussions, and she knows it." So given that reality, why doesn't the fact that she's nevertheless making herself vulnerable to him with almost nightly encounters of sexual passion, suggest trust? The only alternative I can think of, is her death wish run rampant. You go on to say, "No, she =doesn't= trust him: remember that even after she had entrusted Joyce's and Dawn's safety to him, she =instantly= assumed he had betrayed her (and Dawn) when Glory captured him. (Her exact words, from "Intervention": "Listen, Skirt Girl: we're not going to save [Spike], we're going to kill him. He knows who the Key is, and there's no way he's not telling Glory.") And she felt the need, at the end of the same episode, to go to the length of disguising herself as the robot to go figure out if Spike =had= told Glory. That's trust?" It's clearly not unequivocal trust. But neither does it suggest to me unequivocal =distrust=, as you seem to maintain. To me, her vacillating stance between entrusting him with what's most precious to her and then questioning his reliability, is part and parcel of her larger pattern of denial in her relationship with Spike. She knows on a gut level that a.) he loves her in the full sense of the word, and b.)that this makes him trustworthy, while at the same time needing to deny her instinctive grasp of both realities because she can't deal with their implications for =her=, not on a personal feeling level and not in relation to her role of vampire slayer (hence my "horns of a genuine dilemma" comment in my original post) At the same time, I have no quarrel with your view that "her anger and contempt toward Spike is ... a result of her rage at not being able to protect Joyce and Dawn from Glory herself, and at =having= to entrust them to Spike, the only being in Sunnydale strong enough to put up a fight; also possibly angry at herself for taking advantage of Spike's willingness, i.e. using him." But I don't see how the role played by these elements is inconsistent with "a defensive front." You also say, "And now she's shamed and enraged that she has this irresistible physical compulsion towards him; this vampire that she's hated since he came to Sunnydale the first time, and who has caused her no end of trouble since." I for one would not sum up her past history with Spike as having "hated" him since he came to Sunnydale the first time, with a hatred fueled by his causing "her no end of trouble since." The reality is that except for Angel, Spike is the =only= male vampire Buffy has been in a position to interact with in ways conducive to any emotional response at all, that forced her to consciously choose her response. With virtually every other vampire she's encountered, we've simply seen her go into autopilot slayer mode, staking vampires of whom she and we knew nothing beyond their immediate, aggressive threat to someone as a vampire. Even early in the series, there were times when Buffy chose to yield the field of battle to Spike, and times he yielded it to her: despite her avowed hatred of him, and his of her, it was clear from early on that neither of them was really prepared to finish the other off, however much both insisted they wanted to! For Buffy surely this had to be because unlike the other vampires she encountered, Spike seemed a worthier adversary than the rest while he also projected from the very first a personality, one human enough to make her uncomfortable, however unwillingly or unconsciously, with the idea of killing him. And now, does it really make sense to reduce her attraction to Spike to an "irresistible physical compulsion"?? It seems to me that totally begs the question of what makes it irresistible! Perhaps it is in some sense Buffy's addiction, as Meredith maintains. But even that requires explanation, since Buffy is not a sex addict in the general sense. Why is she sexually addicted to Spike, if not because he represents something beyond sex to her? Or more to the point, offers her something she has long craved but never had, the unconditional love of a sexually available and dangerously powerful male. Actually, she did have it for one brief night, with Angel, but it cost him his soul and destroyed the relationship. No such danger confronts her connection with Spike, since he has no soul -- yet that very necessary condition is what makes her unwilling to return his feelings! (And the only possible way I can see for her to break her addiction to Spike, is to find within the unconditional acceptance of herself that she so clearly lacks and at present is unconsciously getting from Spike. Perhaps that will eventually happen, but I would hope there's some way to do that without Spike ending up feeling even more rejected than he is now, even if he is a confirmed masochist. Of course, you "still maintain that overlaying it [the sexual compulsion] with a romance-trope of original hate = eventual love or external hate = internal love twists the whole thing unconscionably into a Gordian knot." From where I sit, it simply does justice to the complex relationship in the human breast between emotions of love and hate. And as I noted later, I wouldn't even reduce her earlier attitude towards Spike to one of uncomplicated, fully merited hatred. Sorry to be so long-winded, but you did invite me to elaborate. :) - ---Karin ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V4 #22 ****************************