Tomorrow is less than a day away

[rahirah]

Tomorrow I have to go over to Mom's and stand around while the Registrar of Contractors inspects some shoddy porch railings she's made a complaint about. Once that's over, I intend to drop my car off at the mechanics', where hopefully they will discover what's making the 'check engine' light come on, and hopefully it will not require a small

Comments

[quinara]

I don't know about S6. Maybe it's some bizarre shiny optimism, but I do feel like at the end they at least both want things to be better (Spike wants to talk things out; Buffy wants Dawn to be able to go to Spike's), but circumstances + Buffy's attempt to rationalise her way through depression + Spike's confusion and heavy drinking and general fail (by which I don't mean his lack of soul but his occasional blindsiding by complete stupidity, a moment of which came on at a catastrophically bad moment - though the lack of soul almost certainly aggravated it) cause it all to go wrong. I don't think everything that happens and the AR is inevitable at all, so if you take away/change the causes it seems perfectly reasonable to me that things go in a completely different direction.

(What's interesting about S7, of course, is that I think Buffy's much less affected by the soul than by Spike's vulnerability under the First. Though I know you don't like a lot of S7 Spuffy either, so maybe that's the wrong route to go down...)

In general - hmm. Now I want to write some specifically Spuffy-positive S6 reviews. Or at least ones that look forward beyond the quagmire.

[rahirah]

Well, S7 Spuffy is definitely an improvement over S6 Spuffy. *g* But I've never been able to convince myself that it isn't the fact that Spike has a soul now that makes Buffy help him. And it's exactly that relationship fail (which they both have in spades) that makes me think in my gloomier moments that the circumstances don't matter - these are two people who will never do anything but hurt each other.

[quinara]

Well, I mean, it's hard to tell in S7 what with her finding out about the soul relatively quickly, but I think her actions in Lessons are pretty much in line with the rest of the season. The way I see it, the soul makes her feel sympathy for him, but their whole scene in Never Leave Me makes me think that the most important thing it does is let Buffy get a handle on Spike's defensive mouthing off, which up till that point (in Beneath You and all through the previous seasons) she's been taking as is. And the way she talks about how she 'saw' Spike change makes me think that, while the soul crystalised for her that Spike was different, it wasn't actually what set the ball rolling and they could have got to a nebulous relationship stage without Spike getting a soul if other factors were brought in, and then onto a non-nebulous stage (which I don't think we get in S7, but in my head it would have been less than a season away), though it probably would have taken a good while longer.

... Ack, sorry - didn't mean to try and convince you, considering I imagine you've heard this stuff more than enough times before. But Buffy says she doesn't hate herself enough to want to be with someone who hurts her and she still seeks out Spike! Whether Spike can say the same I do not know.

[rahirah]

There was actually a line in an earlier draft of NLM where Buffy says she saw Spike changing even before he got the soul, and if that line had made it to the aired version, I would have far fewer doubts about Buffy's motivation. But it didn't, and I don't take shooting scripts as canon anyhow - or I'd also have to take into account the cut line from "First Date" where Buffy tells Giles that Spike is a person now that he has a soul. Which strongly implies she thinks he was a thing before, and still thinks it was perfectly OK for her to treat him like one.

That's really all I wanted out of S7: some unambiguous acknowledgment that Buffy realized that it was wrong of her to treat Spike like a thing even though he was evil and she was depressed. I never got it.

[quinara]

Yeah. That's a good point... (I don't see shooting scripts/drafts/cut scenes as canon either.) Though no one can take the 'completed past action' grammatical pedantry away from me!