Fanon Element: The Orgasmic Vampire Bite (NC-17)
The orgasmic vampire bite so often found in Buffyverse fanfiction--if you don't know what I'm referring to, Buffy and Spike are only too happy (in the hands of certain writers) to, ahem, illustrate (in NC-17 fashion, should there be any doubt):
( Buffy and Spike illustrate the orgasmic vampire bite... )
( Buffy and Spike illustrate the orgasmic vampire bite... )
Honestly, I think most people (unless they were Xtreem Sensation Junkies to begin with) would have pretty significant barriers to overcome -- I mean, Buffyverse vampires don't just have cute little Dracula fangs, after all! But yeah, that's one reason I didn't go there until I'd written the two of them as being in a relationship for several years. It's not something I think would go over well on the second date. :D If Spike wants Slayer blood, he can just go down on her during her period (talk about kinks not everyone's into.)
I do think that we were supposed to see Buffy's reaction to Angel biting her, and Riley's attraction to the vampire whores, as something dark and unhealthy, however alluring it is. In S3, there is a lot of fairly explicit "Buffy, loving a vampire is BAD NEWS!" subtext, and that's the culmination of it -- even souled vampires destroy what they love; it's the nature of the beast. Of course, fandom does not always take things the way the writers intend them to be taken. Plenty of Bangel fans take Buffy's nightmares about Angel in early S3, and the whole thing where he drains and almost kills her later, as signs of their uber-romantic forever love, and Lord knows that when S6 was airing a lot of Spuffy fans interpreted Spike and Buffy's relationship as something potentially positive, until the writers trashed it utterly.
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Ah yes. I've seen that done a couple of times in fanfic (I'm sure there's more I haven't read). Both stories were incredibly hot. :) Which reminds me of an article I read (in the NYTimes, maybe?) of RL men into oral on menstruating women. One of the men expressed enormous relief at finding out that there were other people into the same kink, that he wasn't alone. I've encountered that same sentiment enough times to come to the conclusion that no matter what you're into, there are other people into the same thing too. We're at once different and so similar it's kind of scary (but reaffirming too).
Back to Buffy. If we're supposed to learn from the show that even souled vampires destroy what they love, the message is lost in later seasons. Why write this huge redemption arc for Spike if that's the ultimate lesson?
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I really think there was this huge ambivalence in the show, a tension between Joss's original conception of vampires as demons that Buffy slays, period, and the fact that, as they discovered in season 1 with the Master, vampires who are just demons are boring. In making Angel and later Spike interesting characters, they made them (for lack of a better word) human, and the audience fell for them... and once the audience falls for a character, they are not easily put off. I am pretty sure that Joss et al. were dragged kicking and screaming into a redepmtion arc for Spike, purely because the character was so popular that they couldn't not redeem him. (It's really interesting reading the shooting scripts for S5 & 6, for example -- there are lots of places where Spike is written much less sympathetically in the shooting script than he ended up coming off in the show as it aired.)
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Speaking of Spike coming off as more sympathetic than in the shooting scripts, JM once remarked that he'd intentionally played Spike as if he'd had his soul to make the character more compelling. So there's definitely something there. On the other hand, the directors could've said, "Stop that!" on set, so, at a minimum...tacit admission that it had made better TV that way?
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My bet is, if the comics go on for another few years, Spuffy will crash and burn there too, just because of the nature of the medium. Or, if the comics stop making money and get cancelled, maybe they'll decide to end the story with either Spike or Angel shanshuing. But probably not, because there will always be hopeof reviving the franchise later, and Spike's popular as a vampire. And now they don't have to worry about actors aging, so... Buffy/Angel/Spike unresolved triangles for eternity!
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Romantic resolutions aside, how boring is shanshu? I can't imagine a powerless human being equal partners with Buffy in their fight for the Mission. Also, the Buffy universe with vampires is interesting because it has vampires. Turning a vampire human directly translates to less interest for me. Sure, it's a curse, and they're still hell-bound (but hopefully not so for a very long time). But turning into a human who'd require Buffy's rescue every step of the way, as in that Angel episode...boring. Angel knew it then. So what's with the obsession with shanshuing?
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I could imagine a story where a human Spike continued to be Buffy's partner in demon fighting -- Gunn and Xander do it, after all. I think Angel was a big weeniehead in IWRY. But damn it, I want my superpowered power couple fantasy!
One of the very first Spuffy/Spike redemptionist epics, Dancing Lessons and its sequels, was going to end with Spike human and Buffy de-Slayered, and the two of them living normally ever after. The group writing it broke up in acrimony before the last novel was finished, and I've never been sure whether to be sorry it was never finished, or glad I can imagine my own ending.
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Heh, I've heard about "Dancing Lessons". ;) I wasn't around when one of the key authors apparently asked people to buy her a year off and a swanky wedding(?), so what I was able to figure out after the fact, piecing together bits here and there on comment threads and LJs not yet purged...was like an archaeological project. Not sure how much was fact, and how much had gotten out of hand and fossilized into myth. I've read some of her shorter fics from archives more iPad-friendly (like EF), which I enjoyed, but "Dancing Lessons" was not archived, and fell towards the bottom of my reading list as a result. (I cranked through a lot of stories on my iPad when I was on bed rest for a while, but reading on LJ was too difficult--no way to bookmark, unreliable service at 2am, etc.)
Totally with you on the "superpowered power couple fantasy, wanting of" part. ;)
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The CousinJean thing was a spectacular train wreck. I was not part of her inner circle, but I had her on my friends list because for awhile, we were both in a writing group founded by a mutual friend. But she never showed any interest in friending me back (she had a group of friends from the Television Without Pity, formerly Mighty Big TV boards, and seldom interacted with anyone else) and gradually dropped out of fandom, so I mostly stopped reading her. According to the mutual friend, behind the scenes she was pissing off her writing partners and generally acting odd long before the final break occurred, so possibly she had Problems. I dunno.
But yes, after a considerable period of complaining about how impossible it was to find time to write and plan her wedding (this while she was holding down only a part-time job and still living with her parents) she did ask her fans to pay her 20$ each so she could take a year off to do both those things. She didn't directly say "pay me to write fanfic," as some versions of the story have it; she just said that if she got the money, maybe in the interstices of getting married and writing her original romance novel, she'd have time to finish Dancing Lessons part III as well.
Cue explosions. I'm of two minds about the whole thing. On the one hand, it hit Fandom_Wank, back when F_W was a force to be reckoned with, and got WAY out of hand. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people who didn't know her from Adam descended upon her journal to flame her. No one deserves that for a relative minor crime of being thoughtless and silly. On the other hand, so far as I know, she never developed a single clue about WHY people were so annoyed with her, even years later.
(The funny thing is, back when DL was being written, I longed for Senpai to notice me and ask me to help write it. In retrospect, I'm rather glad Senpai never did.)
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I mostly feel sorry for CousinJean, outrageous though the whole thing was. Her audacity to ask fans for support is shocking, but after that, my second attitude is that that she sets out a tip jar, nobody has to give anything if they don't have any to spare, or refuse to based on the principle of things. She never made it a mandatory thing for reading her stories, just a suggestion. I don't think she deserved to be flamed by thousands of people. (I probably wouldn't have thought so a few years ago; I've mellowed a bit as I got older, and now hold the opinion that it's far better to be kind than to be right. *shrugs* I think our society has gotten way too critical and self-righteous and just not accepting or supportive enough.)
One thing I do have a problem with, based on what I read, was that she indirectly linked profit to fanfic writing, at a time when the legality of fanfiction was very hotly debated. The fan defense had always leveraged the fact that absolutely no profit whatsoever was made from it, and she crossed that line like it was nothing. Also, LJ (and possibly other sites?) had enforced several rounds of sweeping deletes based on complaints of indecent material (by some religious group?) or copyright violations from content owners. So a legitimate concern by some fans was that if more people followed suit, it would destroy fanfiction as a legal activity and rip fandom apart. I don't know if the fear was real, but it'd make a pretty damning accusation again CousinJean.
Anyway, the last time I checked her blog, she appeared to be doing well, making a living via freelance editing (her ideal job) and (self?)publishing stories. She's married, so presumably she did find the means to buy her dream wedding. I guess she's no worse for wear.
I'm kind of drawn to her writing style because it's so different from my own. Without the editing part of my brain turned on I write like Kafka--with overwrought, paragraph-long, complicated sentences full of sensory overload (just how I experience the world) and punctuated with dashes and semicolons which most Americans shy away from. (For example, I would not have ended that sentence there; it feels incomplete, like half a thought.) CousinJean, on the other hand, is so sparse sometimes I advance to the next page in her story and think I must've skipped a page, because no way could she end the last part there! :) So...yeah, I wish she were still writing Buffyverse stories, but she's probably burned that bridge on LJ. Good for her then that she's moved on.
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Oh, yeah, that was the main reason that the total strangers were angry with her. Her co-writers, on the other hand, were furious with her for A) dragging them into it, and B) behaving as if DL were her personal project rather than a collaborative effort (albeit one in which she had taken a major role.) Almost a dozen excellent writers had worked on DL over the years, but CousinJean, as the coordinator, was always the most visible, and the only one who'd really gone on to become a major fandom BNF for her stand-alone fic. And it's not like she wasn't a very good writer, but I think her BNF status went to her head, rather. I suspect that was both the impetus for her making the money ask -- she really felt she was entitled to be supported -- and the reason that the majority of her former friends dropped her like a hot rock rather than leap to her defense.
Today, of course, she'd just set up a Patreon account or do a Kickstarter, and no one would think twice about it.
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*Nods* True, true. I only catch bits and pieces of fandom history (echoes of the "booms* long past), and sometimes I feel bummed that I missed out on all the "fun", and other times I'm relieved to not have been swept into all that drama. "Exciting" is one thing, but by what the Chinese curse their enemies ("May you live in interesting times..."), it's clearly not all good. :)
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Whaddya know, there *is* a Kickstarter campaign under her name: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1052559271/help-jean-turn-restless-spirits-into-a-series
More power to her. This may be the only way for authors to survive on writing in this day and age.
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Naww, Barb, can I just say - we've all been there :) But also, thank you for the self-directed chuckle on an otherwise dreary afternoon.
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