Why Spike as Rapist Feels Like Character Rape to Me or, Seeing Red Over Seeing Red
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| Title: | Why Spike as Rapist Feels Like Character Rape to Me or, Seeing Red Over Seeing Red |
| Creator: | Gwyneth Rhys |
| Date(s): | 2002 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Buffy the Vampire Slayer |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Why Spike as Rapist Feels Like Character Rape to Me or, Seeing Red Over Seeing Red |
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Why Spike as Rapist Feels Like Character Rape to Me or, Seeing Red Over Seeing Red is an essay by Gwyneth Rhys.
Author Descriptions
- "Essentially a screed e-mail I sent to a friend on why I hated seeing a great bad guy wonderful character turned into a lowlife rapist scum as a plot device." [1]
- "I wrote this as an e-mail to my friend Olivia, who'd just seen Seeing Red down in Australia. She shared my attitude of "what the fuck?" This isn't a polished essay with nicely aligned points and coherent thoughts; in fact, I realize it's rather incoherent in a way, but that's how I feel. This is basically a screed, I guess, an impassioned screed and one I wrote only recently because I haven't been able to bring myself to rewatch or talk about the episode since it aired." [2]
Excerpts
I like that he's a soulless killer. I like that the vampires on this show are not romanticized and haven't been given the Anne Rice phony luster of Gothic Romanticism and aren't they just misunderstood and beeeyoootiful? Vampires here in Buffyland are cruel, vicious, evil, venal, and vain. They are stone cold killers. They have no redeeeming characteristics except as foils for the good guys. This is a good thing. But I think that if you're going to have the character be semi-redeemed from this description, where he's been slowly bringing the audience with him into this new realm of behavior and feelings, then you bloody well don't get to tell the audience they shouldn't have gone there. When Angel was turned bad in second season, it was wonderfully, tragically Romantic and painful and all the good things. We couldn't believe that this good guy, Buffy's true love, was this evil. That's why it worked so well.
But from the beginning we've known Spike was Bad. And now he's been, slowly, drawn into the Good side, and just as the audience reaches their maximum sympathy point with him, just as we're all drawn into going, you know, I like this guy and I feel like Buffy's a shit for dumping on him and demanding he move on when he's given everything to her and I'd like to see how this will be resolved... they make him her attempted rapist. The lowest form of life in the human race. Knowing, I'm absolutely sure, that there can be no sympathy left for him after that. And I can see the Mutant Enemy staff just sitting around going, hah hah! It's so funny! All those poor little redemptionistas crying in their beer! We pulled a fast one on them.
Most of the time I can't understand the weeping over the whole lesbian = death thing that's been going on with the Tara/Willow fans. The overreaction and the... scathing quality of it, the irrationality of it, has made me run away from them because they don't discuss it in a way anyone can have differences about or want to at least have a back and forth about. But when I think of how I feel about Spike, when I really sit down and try to collect myself (I have not been able to bring myself to watch Seeing Red again, although I know I have to for various reasons, and I can barely talk about it without becoming unglued), I start to understand how... gutted the T/W fans feel. How betrayed. I get it.
I liked Spike as a character the moment he came on the screen, and then I loved him when he became a regular, and when he fell in love with Buffy, I looooooved him. That changed the equation for me drastically, because I like so wrong it's right, doomed and thwarted love stories. Even if they can't be together, there are ways to make Spike so disgusted and fed up that he'd want to change the chip thing. Making him a rapist was flat out unnecessary to the dramatic reasoning of making him leave. You can make him leave, humiliate him, in different ways. This didn't just degrade Buffy, it degraded Spike, and the fans who've endured what was an at times intolerably difficult season. I didn't think it was possible for me to get more upset than the horrible, pathetic sex against the wall in the alley scene in Doublemeat Palace, with Buffy making no eye contact and Spike desperately humping her as if neither of them were there; and then they did the even more horrible catwalk scene in Dead Things, which rang true in no way for either character, but hey -- they did! They sank lower, they were more degrading to the characters! They made Spike a rapist and Buffy a victim. The girl Joss once said was the antidote to all those little blonde girl victims in the alleys of horror movies is now... a victim. So hooray -- now Spike isn't just evil but interesting, wicked but wonderful, he's simply repulsive and worthless, and Our Hero Buffy is no longer heroic. Way to go, guys.
I don't know. I just... I keep wanting to be all open-minded and say, oh wow, I love the dramatic tension, and what are they going to do with Spike with a soul and he'll have guilt and all, but the thing is... he was having an interesting enough time trying to deal with Buffy's expectations of him and live his life to earn her affections, we didn't need that forced on us. I think the ending of the season was a dud -- they're backpedaling, they're saying, oh we meant to have Spike want a soul but ha ha, we tricked you into thinking he wanted the chip out to hurt her (and the truth is, if this was always their intention, they did a terrible, terrible job of writing this, which I don't usually expect from them), and now whee! Spike will have guilt and be angsty and stuff. It was a hell of a lot more fun early in 6th season when he and Buffy were trying to forge some kind of friendship, in shows like After Life, where we saw these tentative threads of who both these characters were becoming, or the musical, where the connection between them was jolted into life because of true, honest emotion.
The attempted rape wasn't true or honest. It was lame and forced and degrading to the characters and the fans. It gave us nothing dramatically that would affect us in the way good storytelling should (and why I didn't feel manipulated by Tara's death, because I felt it was very profound, like with Joyce or Jenny's deaths), it just cheapened a cheap and sleazy season, it cheapened a character we'd been investing our emotions and intellect in, and cheapened a show that is the best thing I've ever seen on TV.