AWESOME LADIES DO NOT BOW TO YOUR NUMERICAL TYRANNY! day 16
Am I Darla? Is that who I am?: Darla and self
Darla is entirely a self-chosen identity. She doesn’t remember her human name. She doesn’t react to her human self in the way Liam and William do, she makes no apologies about how “I used to do this professionally.” She doesn’t go on a massive crusade against johns the way Angel does against God or Spike does against society, but she does carry over a scornful distaste for men who would have abused her if they’d known her, and takes a particular pleasure in using their misogyny against them. (He was propositioning a streetwalker and dickering over the price - can you imagine? Dear Boy) In some ways, this identity is created by the Master - it’s guessed by Angel that the Master named Darla; it’s possible she named herself - in others Darla is an unfettered expression of her own desires.
Darla has no illusions about anything - particularly not herself - and never has. Do you know what I am? I’m a whore. She doesn’t evade or flinch, or even separate her profession from herself. It’s not what she does, it’s who she is, and that’s fine by her. (I suppose that’s why she and Spike don’t seem to have had much use for each other, quite literally. Only one of them has to be around to see and pinpoint anything or anyone.) Probably because she has no illusions, so there’s nothing to lance, Darla is never deflated by the narrative. It’s not about being high or low as it is for most characters. Darla is always about what is. Because of this, she matter-of-factly speaks of concepts and uses language that would be off-limits or mocked in other characters. Dear girl, darling boy, my love - these terms of deep endearment are far easier for Darla to say than individual names. She’s a deliberately irreligious character, but she casually speaks in the most profound religious terminology.
Having no illusions, seeing and usually telling the unvarnished truth, those things are usually euphemisms for belittling or seeing the down side of reality. But Darla, she sees everything for what it is, and she doesn’t trivialize the things that are huge to her or exaggerate things that are everything to the rest of us. Making and loving another vampire is MYTHIC, dammit. The petty machinations of W&H, though, those things are amusing but unimportant even to the newly-resurrected dying Darla. And because she’s so deliciously self-centered in every way, the things that are huge to her are huge to us as well. Show me your world, that was more accurate than poor simple Liam could have dreamed. It is Darla’s world. We all just live in it. You know, until she gets hungry. Or bored.
And so for her to be resurrected with all her memories and consciousness in a human is intolerable, a shock to everything she thinks and feels and knows. None of us asks to be born human, it’s true but Darla knows that there is another option, and would never choose this one. She was a master of the universe, and a creator of masters of the universe, and now she’s a dying, kept woman once again, helpless even among the trappings of other peoples’ luxury. Those things that are inseparable from humanity - heartbeat; fear; death - they are an illness to her, a cruel reminder of the inescapability and powerlessness of the human condition, and she cannot cure it on her own. She must beg to be sired, first Angel and then the tool teenage vampire in the arcade, and does not get her wish until she has left it behind. She has reveled in being a supercilious queen of the world of others; she is now faced with not only helplessness but galling and unapologetic use by others, and she loathes being used. Darla’s sense of self becomes her own tragedy, as over and over again, it is battered with the cold reality of cruel, uncontrolled circumstances.
I have family here: daughter of Aurelius
Darla isn’t someone who can’t be alone, in the strictest sense. She’s not dependent for anything; yet, she’s never alone. She stays by the Master’s side as his favored child, suggesting that there’s some level of work that went into the relationship, though whether it’s genuine affection, some sort of vamp familial instincts that are particularly strong in the Aurelians, or just that it’s the path of least resistance (and probably all three), but she stays there in a position that’s simultaneously subordinate - he is the Master - and independent, as he can’t go above. Darla craves relationships, but requires the ability to bail if necessary.
Then, of course, she leaves with the stallion, and she and Angel (with the exception of a few minor leaving the other to die instances, and a couple visits home to daddy), they really do seem to have been together for all that time. While the length of the relationship fascinates me - and insofar as I have a ship in the Buffyverse, oh, this is it - it doesn’t actually tell us all that much about Darla herself, to be honest. Eternal life may be too short, but the night is also impossibly long; she and Angel have the whirlwind, and who would let that go?
Then the curse destroys everything. Neither of them ever acknowledges that if it were truly about justice, it could (and maybe should) easily have been, she’s the one who chose and kidnapped the girl, and it’s unclear why she escaped, except maybe Angel was the one in the woods. She throws him out on the street, unwilling to even be under the same roof as a human conscience, but she tries to get him back. She brings the troops, such as they are, to find the gypsy camp. (She doesn’t lack for confidence, that’s for sure - there was no telling before she got there that they wouldn’t have all gotten glowy-eyed and mopey for their troubles. It’s been centuries since she feared a human, but maybe she should have here.)
And yet, even after the disaster, Darla keeps Spike and Dru. Basically, she gets custody of the two kids she never wanted to begin with, but she drags them all the way to CHINA, my GOD. Can you imagine Dru doing the are we there yet song and dance? Spike, not yet a master fighter, swaggering around getting them into brawls all the way across Siberia? I love those two wacky kids as much as anyone, but really, who wouldn’t stake them? Darla, that’s who. Because they’re Drusilla and Spike and they’re better than being alone, and they’re her family.
Once she’s resurrected, the same pattern happens. It’s not too big of a surprise that she goes to Lindsey, particularly while she’s human. He has pretty things, adores her (and is therefore wrapped around her little finger before she gets to work on him), is her most direct route to Angel, and while she doesn’t love him, she does seem to have a soft spot for him. In the end, though, Angel is between them no matter how much neither of them wants him to be. It isn’t me you wanna screw.
Darla really seems to regretfully understand Drusilla. (Dru: The king of cups expects a picnic. But this is not his birthday. Darla: Good point. (FFL)) She puts herself at great risk to get Drusilla back, running into W&H while she’s still confused and somewhat regretful at the loss of her humanity. What pulls her back to her old self isn’t actually killing the jerk. It’s her move to comfort Drusilla.
In light of all this, it’s neither surprising nor trite that her few moments of acceptance at the end of The Trial come not after some conversion or experience of guilt and desire for absolution, but Angel’s open, beautiful promise to her - you’ll never be alone again. It sounds like nothing in the face of imminent damnation or oblivion, but to Darla, this is everything.
God never did anything for me: the anti-cleric
Darla never seems particularly bothered by the truth or falsity of human religion as a philosophical issue, even as a human, it’s about what she gets out of it, and she certainly never sees piety as of any value of its own. She’s not a non-believer any more than she is immoral, though, it’s just a question of not caring. She’s a little surprised and bewildered when wonders aloud “could it be there’s no hell?...Just a great, big nothing.” It’s a curiosity to her, a large one, granted, but nothing more nor less.
Similarly, Darla doesn’t seem to buy the Master’s theology as some kind of meta-metaphysical truth, but she does accept it as the rules for vampire living, and she polices them accordingly. It places her at the top of a society rather than the bottom - she is feared and revered by both the worlds above and below. God never did anything for her, but this does everything. While I can’t remember seeing her in any of the dark Mass type ceremonies in the Hellmouth, she does absorb his twisted purification of their evil, to the point that she’ll use the Master’s appropriated anti-deism long after she’s left him. Filthy soul! No! (It’s a lovely contrast to ex-nun Dru, who speaks in the opposite language of animals and nature. It’s the Angel-beast.)
Vampirism in the Buffyverse is at bottom a ruthless divide between undeniable proof of any number of impossible things before breakfast and morality, and Darla is a gorgeous display of this. Drusilla is outside of conventional morality in that she can’t understand morality anymore. Darla is her opposite, a character outside of conventional morality in that she really does not give a flying fuck about it. Angel and Spike, even before their respective ensoulments, are both still within a human moral framework, in that they set out to defy and oppose that which is moral in increasingly more creative ways. The boys are immoral, while Darla is truly amoral.
The idea of Darla as defining herself thoroughly outside of religion is a crucial one for her strange yet undeniable motherhood. Mothers in heavily traditional societies are supposed to raise their children (especially their sons) to follow the abstract moral codes of their society. The expectation is that she will sire Angelus to sit at the Master’s right hand. While she pays a bit of lip service to this, bringing him back to the London sewers, it isn’t what she wants. She builds Angel as a reflection of her own hedonistic desires. For all the Master’s talk of conquering the human form and bringing forth the Old Ones, what Darla wants is a balcony, with the whirlwind in her hair and a view of the night below.
I made a lot of those strengths and weaknesses: the dark Madonna
And she did it completely purposefully, as well. If she’d wanted just to make a master vampire as a credit to her name, she could easily have brought him out of his village (Galway is a village? we’ll go with it) for baby’s first killing spree. But she doesn’t, she encourages him to destroy his home - symbolically making a void for her to fill - and then solidifies her hold over him by encouraging and then exploiting his Pyrrhic victory over his father. Their frantic tarantella is a combination of her wish to push and shape him further and her drive to keep her hold over him, culminating in the turning of Drusilla, where he finally suggests something that surprises and thrills her. Eventually, human Darla re-makes herself in the mold of her boy when she’s brought back to life, and her influence on him was so sharp and complete that she becomes the same as she ever was.
Contextually, given the other pregnancy issues in AtS, the trilogy leading up to the birth of Connor has more than a few disturbing elements; that said, taken on its own merits, it is fascinating, absolute exploration of motherhood and identity. Everything changes for Darla with her pregnancy, including the key thing about herself, the soullessness of her vampire nature. It forces Darla to confront simultaneously both the powerlessness we have over some things - there is nothing in the worlds above or below that can free her from the pregnancy - and the unknowable power of creation. It isn’t the best thing she has ever done, a thing she ever even asked for, but the only good thing we ever did together. Her self-staking, the only one we ever see, is the ultimate act of sacrifice.
Everything we are; everything we can be: Darla and Angel
Maybe bizarrely, maybe appropriately, maybe both, the pragmatic, sensual, self-preservationist Darla is the character who gives the most poignant, unambiguous display of unconditional love on either series. Love stripped of anything good, of future and past and almost everything present. She and Angel have each betrayed the other, thrown hits and horrible cruel words, even killed the other, and are still drawn together. They don’t bring out the best in each other - they are at their very worst around the other, living or dead, souled or soulless - and yet they love, love without hope of growth or redemption or even, really, happiness, for whatever that’s worth, the space between Angel and Angelus, nothing and everything all at once. Angel rejects this as love because he craves the human construct he thought Buffy once offered; Darla doesn’t offer the word because it’s too prosaic, too human, too limited for what they have; she loves him more than anything, loves him in a way that goes beyond monogamy, beyond simple descriptors, through space and time and more than one death, as a mother loves her child no matter if he has nothing to offer her but ashes.
God doesn’t want you! But I still do.
And that, aside from being the best line ever, is the perfect crystallization of Darla, Darla/Angel, and her amazing and highly uncommon if not unique role as the selfishly loving mother. God doesn’t want Angel, because of what she made him. She knows that eats him up, and she plays on that mercilessly, even as she puts her own judgment above God’s. God is there, and God is wrong. And it’s about wanting, which is sexualized and proprietary all at once. Her boy. Hers. And whatever else has happened, whatever either of them is or has done, the looming pasts and impossible future, she still does want him, and always will.
She is, after all, his mother.
Darla is entirely a self-chosen identity. She doesn’t remember her human name. She doesn’t react to her human self in the way Liam and William do, she makes no apologies about how “I used to do this professionally.” She doesn’t go on a massive crusade against johns the way Angel does against God or Spike does against society, but she does carry over a scornful distaste for men who would have abused her if they’d known her, and takes a particular pleasure in using their misogyny against them. (He was propositioning a streetwalker and dickering over the price - can you imagine? Dear Boy) In some ways, this identity is created by the Master - it’s guessed by Angel that the Master named Darla; it’s possible she named herself - in others Darla is an unfettered expression of her own desires.
Darla has no illusions about anything - particularly not herself - and never has. Do you know what I am? I’m a whore. She doesn’t evade or flinch, or even separate her profession from herself. It’s not what she does, it’s who she is, and that’s fine by her. (I suppose that’s why she and Spike don’t seem to have had much use for each other, quite literally. Only one of them has to be around to see and pinpoint anything or anyone.) Probably because she has no illusions, so there’s nothing to lance, Darla is never deflated by the narrative. It’s not about being high or low as it is for most characters. Darla is always about what is. Because of this, she matter-of-factly speaks of concepts and uses language that would be off-limits or mocked in other characters. Dear girl, darling boy, my love - these terms of deep endearment are far easier for Darla to say than individual names. She’s a deliberately irreligious character, but she casually speaks in the most profound religious terminology.
Having no illusions, seeing and usually telling the unvarnished truth, those things are usually euphemisms for belittling or seeing the down side of reality. But Darla, she sees everything for what it is, and she doesn’t trivialize the things that are huge to her or exaggerate things that are everything to the rest of us. Making and loving another vampire is MYTHIC, dammit. The petty machinations of W&H, though, those things are amusing but unimportant even to the newly-resurrected dying Darla. And because she’s so deliciously self-centered in every way, the things that are huge to her are huge to us as well. Show me your world, that was more accurate than poor simple Liam could have dreamed. It is Darla’s world. We all just live in it. You know, until she gets hungry. Or bored.
And so for her to be resurrected with all her memories and consciousness in a human is intolerable, a shock to everything she thinks and feels and knows. None of us asks to be born human, it’s true but Darla knows that there is another option, and would never choose this one. She was a master of the universe, and a creator of masters of the universe, and now she’s a dying, kept woman once again, helpless even among the trappings of other peoples’ luxury. Those things that are inseparable from humanity - heartbeat; fear; death - they are an illness to her, a cruel reminder of the inescapability and powerlessness of the human condition, and she cannot cure it on her own. She must beg to be sired, first Angel and then the tool teenage vampire in the arcade, and does not get her wish until she has left it behind. She has reveled in being a supercilious queen of the world of others; she is now faced with not only helplessness but galling and unapologetic use by others, and she loathes being used. Darla’s sense of self becomes her own tragedy, as over and over again, it is battered with the cold reality of cruel, uncontrolled circumstances.
I have family here: daughter of Aurelius
Darla isn’t someone who can’t be alone, in the strictest sense. She’s not dependent for anything; yet, she’s never alone. She stays by the Master’s side as his favored child, suggesting that there’s some level of work that went into the relationship, though whether it’s genuine affection, some sort of vamp familial instincts that are particularly strong in the Aurelians, or just that it’s the path of least resistance (and probably all three), but she stays there in a position that’s simultaneously subordinate - he is the Master - and independent, as he can’t go above. Darla craves relationships, but requires the ability to bail if necessary.
Then, of course, she leaves with the stallion, and she and Angel (with the exception of a few minor leaving the other to die instances, and a couple visits home to daddy), they really do seem to have been together for all that time. While the length of the relationship fascinates me - and insofar as I have a ship in the Buffyverse, oh, this is it - it doesn’t actually tell us all that much about Darla herself, to be honest. Eternal life may be too short, but the night is also impossibly long; she and Angel have the whirlwind, and who would let that go?
Then the curse destroys everything. Neither of them ever acknowledges that if it were truly about justice, it could (and maybe should) easily have been, she’s the one who chose and kidnapped the girl, and it’s unclear why she escaped, except maybe Angel was the one in the woods. She throws him out on the street, unwilling to even be under the same roof as a human conscience, but she tries to get him back. She brings the troops, such as they are, to find the gypsy camp. (She doesn’t lack for confidence, that’s for sure - there was no telling before she got there that they wouldn’t have all gotten glowy-eyed and mopey for their troubles. It’s been centuries since she feared a human, but maybe she should have here.)
And yet, even after the disaster, Darla keeps Spike and Dru. Basically, she gets custody of the two kids she never wanted to begin with, but she drags them all the way to CHINA, my GOD. Can you imagine Dru doing the are we there yet song and dance? Spike, not yet a master fighter, swaggering around getting them into brawls all the way across Siberia? I love those two wacky kids as much as anyone, but really, who wouldn’t stake them? Darla, that’s who. Because they’re Drusilla and Spike and they’re better than being alone, and they’re her family.
Once she’s resurrected, the same pattern happens. It’s not too big of a surprise that she goes to Lindsey, particularly while she’s human. He has pretty things, adores her (and is therefore wrapped around her little finger before she gets to work on him), is her most direct route to Angel, and while she doesn’t love him, she does seem to have a soft spot for him. In the end, though, Angel is between them no matter how much neither of them wants him to be. It isn’t me you wanna screw.
Darla really seems to regretfully understand Drusilla. (Dru: The king of cups expects a picnic. But this is not his birthday. Darla: Good point. (FFL)) She puts herself at great risk to get Drusilla back, running into W&H while she’s still confused and somewhat regretful at the loss of her humanity. What pulls her back to her old self isn’t actually killing the jerk. It’s her move to comfort Drusilla.
In light of all this, it’s neither surprising nor trite that her few moments of acceptance at the end of The Trial come not after some conversion or experience of guilt and desire for absolution, but Angel’s open, beautiful promise to her - you’ll never be alone again. It sounds like nothing in the face of imminent damnation or oblivion, but to Darla, this is everything.
God never did anything for me: the anti-cleric
Darla never seems particularly bothered by the truth or falsity of human religion as a philosophical issue, even as a human, it’s about what she gets out of it, and she certainly never sees piety as of any value of its own. She’s not a non-believer any more than she is immoral, though, it’s just a question of not caring. She’s a little surprised and bewildered when wonders aloud “could it be there’s no hell?...Just a great, big nothing.” It’s a curiosity to her, a large one, granted, but nothing more nor less.
Similarly, Darla doesn’t seem to buy the Master’s theology as some kind of meta-metaphysical truth, but she does accept it as the rules for vampire living, and she polices them accordingly. It places her at the top of a society rather than the bottom - she is feared and revered by both the worlds above and below. God never did anything for her, but this does everything. While I can’t remember seeing her in any of the dark Mass type ceremonies in the Hellmouth, she does absorb his twisted purification of their evil, to the point that she’ll use the Master’s appropriated anti-deism long after she’s left him. Filthy soul! No! (It’s a lovely contrast to ex-nun Dru, who speaks in the opposite language of animals and nature. It’s the Angel-beast.)
Vampirism in the Buffyverse is at bottom a ruthless divide between undeniable proof of any number of impossible things before breakfast and morality, and Darla is a gorgeous display of this. Drusilla is outside of conventional morality in that she can’t understand morality anymore. Darla is her opposite, a character outside of conventional morality in that she really does not give a flying fuck about it. Angel and Spike, even before their respective ensoulments, are both still within a human moral framework, in that they set out to defy and oppose that which is moral in increasingly more creative ways. The boys are immoral, while Darla is truly amoral.
The idea of Darla as defining herself thoroughly outside of religion is a crucial one for her strange yet undeniable motherhood. Mothers in heavily traditional societies are supposed to raise their children (especially their sons) to follow the abstract moral codes of their society. The expectation is that she will sire Angelus to sit at the Master’s right hand. While she pays a bit of lip service to this, bringing him back to the London sewers, it isn’t what she wants. She builds Angel as a reflection of her own hedonistic desires. For all the Master’s talk of conquering the human form and bringing forth the Old Ones, what Darla wants is a balcony, with the whirlwind in her hair and a view of the night below.
I made a lot of those strengths and weaknesses: the dark Madonna
And she did it completely purposefully, as well. If she’d wanted just to make a master vampire as a credit to her name, she could easily have brought him out of his village (Galway is a village? we’ll go with it) for baby’s first killing spree. But she doesn’t, she encourages him to destroy his home - symbolically making a void for her to fill - and then solidifies her hold over him by encouraging and then exploiting his Pyrrhic victory over his father. Their frantic tarantella is a combination of her wish to push and shape him further and her drive to keep her hold over him, culminating in the turning of Drusilla, where he finally suggests something that surprises and thrills her. Eventually, human Darla re-makes herself in the mold of her boy when she’s brought back to life, and her influence on him was so sharp and complete that she becomes the same as she ever was.
Contextually, given the other pregnancy issues in AtS, the trilogy leading up to the birth of Connor has more than a few disturbing elements; that said, taken on its own merits, it is fascinating, absolute exploration of motherhood and identity. Everything changes for Darla with her pregnancy, including the key thing about herself, the soullessness of her vampire nature. It forces Darla to confront simultaneously both the powerlessness we have over some things - there is nothing in the worlds above or below that can free her from the pregnancy - and the unknowable power of creation. It isn’t the best thing she has ever done, a thing she ever even asked for, but the only good thing we ever did together. Her self-staking, the only one we ever see, is the ultimate act of sacrifice.
Everything we are; everything we can be: Darla and Angel
Maybe bizarrely, maybe appropriately, maybe both, the pragmatic, sensual, self-preservationist Darla is the character who gives the most poignant, unambiguous display of unconditional love on either series. Love stripped of anything good, of future and past and almost everything present. She and Angel have each betrayed the other, thrown hits and horrible cruel words, even killed the other, and are still drawn together. They don’t bring out the best in each other - they are at their very worst around the other, living or dead, souled or soulless - and yet they love, love without hope of growth or redemption or even, really, happiness, for whatever that’s worth, the space between Angel and Angelus, nothing and everything all at once. Angel rejects this as love because he craves the human construct he thought Buffy once offered; Darla doesn’t offer the word because it’s too prosaic, too human, too limited for what they have; she loves him more than anything, loves him in a way that goes beyond monogamy, beyond simple descriptors, through space and time and more than one death, as a mother loves her child no matter if he has nothing to offer her but ashes.
God doesn’t want you! But I still do.
And that, aside from being the best line ever, is the perfect crystallization of Darla, Darla/Angel, and her amazing and highly uncommon if not unique role as the selfishly loving mother. God doesn’t want Angel, because of what she made him. She knows that eats him up, and she plays on that mercilessly, even as she puts her own judgment above God’s. God is there, and God is wrong. And it’s about wanting, which is sexualized and proprietary all at once. Her boy. Hers. And whatever else has happened, whatever either of them is or has done, the looming pasts and impossible future, she still does want him, and always will.
She is, after all, his mother.