Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2021: Week 27
Origin Stories is a Buffyverse vid. It was released with the tag line, "It's Nikki Wood's fucking coat." Commissioned and conceived by Thuvia Ptarth for Sweet Charity, the vid was made by Gianduja Kiss in 2008 and is about race and appropriation in the Buffyverse.
As aca-fan Henry Jenkins describes it, this commentary is "hung on the fact that Spike's trademark leather coat turns out to be a trophy taken from the body of Nikki Wood, whose son Robin Wood shows up in season seven to avenge her. The vid critiques not only the text, but also the fan response to it, both of which tended to privilege Spike's redemption arc over the stories of Buffy's minority characters."
Origin Stories was immediately popular with Buffyverse fandom and widely recced by fans, reaching a wider audience within and outside fandom. This vid circulated widely through fandom in 2008 as part of a larger conversation about race in both source and fannish texts. In a 2010 interview with Francesca Coppa, the creator Gianduja Kiss described the reception "Origin Stories" received following its release.
The reception was really positive and really overwhelming. There were so many downloads when I first posted it that it blew my site bandwidth after just a few hours. And lots of people started posting long analyses and thoughts about the vid, which was just amazing. I hadn't anticipated any of that - I'm a Buffy fan, obviously, but I hadn't been all that active in the Buffy fandom community, so I hadn't realized how much of a hunger there was for this kind of critique.