Spike/Angel Manifesto
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| Title: | Spike/Angel Manifesto |
| Creator: | Romany |
| Date(s): | early 2000s? |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Angel & Buffy |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Spike/Angel Manifesto, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Spike/Angel Manifesto is an essay by Romany.
It is one of many at Octaves, a Buffy and Angel website.
Excerpt
I didn't come into this fandom looking for slash. I didn't even come into this fandom looking for fic. In fact, I avoided fic for quite a while because I had the same idea that a lot of non-fic fans had, that well, fic was wack--as in not just the deep end but plummeting into the Marianas Trench wack. Ah, these artificial lines we draw. Please forgive me, I was a different person then. What I came looking for was Spike.
And on the boards, all I could hear about from my fellow Spike!fen was the possibility of Spuffy, the possibility of Spred, and they better not make this the season of Spangel. This was quickly followed by a we've-got-nothing-against-slash flurry, but these Spike!fen didn't want to see their boy get beat down--he'd grown beyond that with Buffy, they said. And they said that that said beat down was the inevitability of Spangel. We'd rather have Spander than that, they said.Self, said I, is this true? And I started reading slash: Spander, at first, because by luck of the draw, I stumbled onto eliade and mpoetess and witling. And, by God, it was good--dark, intense, with that splash of humour. The A/S? I found a lot of sire/childe chest-beating, biting, and shouts of "Mine!" With the occasional bubblebath and declarations of "It's you. It's always been you. That Buffy chit? Never cared much for her." So I devoured all the Spander I could find. And I found an equal share of bubblebath there, along with what I term The Fashion Show or Spike and Xander Go Shopping. If that were my thing, I'd be reading Louis and Lestat fic on the sites that Anne Rice's lawyer hasn't found yet.
And funny that I bought the Rice-pires up, because what differs from Riceverse and Jossverse, besides the ability to occasionally laugh at themselves, is the vampire's ability to deliver. No homoerotic celibacy here, folks. And once I was no longer slash-blind and I could get my slashy little hands on the DVDs? I couldn't really see the S/X. Not if I viewed them with an objective eye. But the A/S? Joss was jumping up and down with the semaphore flags on that one. And this was before AtS S5 aired.