Comics speculation
anonymous asked:
As much as i love Spuffy i have a feeling that they'll drop them like a sack of potatoes as soon as they finish making whatever point they're trying to make with them. I'd like to know where do you think the story will be taking Spike?
Squeeeeeee, I got an anon ask! I have arrived! Or something. :cough: ANYWAY.
If I have learned anything in the last fifteen years, it is that I SUCK at predicting where the story is going. If you’d told me back in S9 that in S10 Buffy and Spike would be in a real live public relationship, I would have scoffed. I did scoff, in fact! I actually made a bet that it would never happen, a bet that, if they stay together until… issue 25, I think? I will have to pay up on. (I have never been so happy to lose a bet in my life, btw.)
I’m going to digress for a minute. Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of characters in stories: protagonists and supporting characters. A protagonist’s central conflict drives the whole story: Buffy wants to be a normal girl, but she’s been chosen to be the Slayer and fight vampires. Angel wants to redeem himself for centuries of murder.
A supporting character, on the other hand, is defined by their relationship to the protagonist. They may have a central conflict of their own, but it’s subordinate to that relationship with the protagonist. They wouldn’t even be in the story if not for that relationship. Spike is a supporting character. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a supporting character; it’s a vital role in any story. But what it means is, Spike’s role in the story is always constructed around his relationship to the main protagonist, whoever that main protagonist is.
There have been some efforts to split Spike out as a protagonist in his own right in the comics. Some of those have been moderately successful in storytelling terms, others less so. I would class Brian Lynch’s IDW Spike comics as the most successful; he managed to give Spike a central conflict of his own (learning what it means to be a leader) and interesting relationships with several supporting characters of his own (Jeremy, Beck and Betta George.) These comics weren’t super popular in my corner of fandom because most of the Spike fans there were Spuffy fans first and foremost, and they hated any story which didn’t have Spike pining for Buffy 24/7 on principle, but I enjoyed them a great deal.
The Spike miniseries A Dark Place from Dark Horse was, in my opinion, much less successful for a number of reasons, but the main one was that they were trying to have their cake and eat it too: they wanted Spike to have a solo adventure, but they didn’t really have a story to tell about Spike. Instead it was all about Spike pining after Buffy 24/7. “Into the Light,” on the other hand, managed to strike a pretty good balance between acknowledging that Spike was still all about Buffy, while giving him a concrete goal of his own to strive for (however minor it was).
So I think it’s possible to write Spike-as-Protagonist, but it’s not easy, because for the vast majority of the character’s existence, he’s been defined by his relationship to Buffy. (And I repeat, that’s not a bad thing.) In order to do so, you have to give him a central conflict of his own that isn’t about Buffy, and so far, the writers haven’t managed to do so in any major way. IDW might have managed it if Lynch had been able to keep writing the arc he’d planned before Dark Horse took the characters back, but that’s water under the bridge now. There’s also the not-insignificant fact that the majority of Spike fans these days are fans because of his relationship with Buffy. (And sometimes only because of his relationship with Buffy.)
And there’s the additional complication that the simplest and easiest main conflict to give Spike would be exactly the same one Angel has. The comics have poked fun at the idea that Spike and Angel are alike, but the fact is, once you give Spike a soul, on a thematic level they ARE very similar. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of making soulled Spike nothing more than Angel Lite, particularly because the writers of both the show and the comics have a vested interest in not making Angel look too bad in comparison, and if you dig into the nitty-gritty of the ways Angel and Spike really are different too closely, Angel DOES come off badly. The only time the show ventured to do this was the Angel/Spike fight in Destiny, and that was in the deliberate context of Angel doubting himself and his purpose. I don’t think the Dark Horse comics have ventured to do it at all, and I will be surprised if they ever do. (The IDW comics did, and I love them forever for it.)
So getting back to where I think the story is going… look, I don’t doubt that the creative team is making an honest effort to tell the best story they can, but at the end of the day, the comics are about money, not great art. I think that at some point, the suits got together and decided that they would sell more issues with Spike and Buffy as a couple than they would keeping them apart. How long that will last, I have no idea; as I said above, I’m still stunned by the fact that it happened at all.
I do think that it’s not very likely that Spike would be split off into his own title. Angel & Faith, quite frankly, does not sell nearly as well as the Buffy title, and I doubt that a Spike series would do that much better. Combine that with the fact that retooling Spike into a protagonist is not an insignificant amount of work, and I think that it’s likely Spike will be sticking with the Buffy title for quite awhile. If they do have him and Buffy break up, they’ve managed to set up enough other relationships for him (with Xander, Dowling, and Dawn) that it would make much more sense for Spike to stay in San Francisco than it would have in Season 9 (when frankly there was zero reason for him to come back once he’d left, saving Dawn being in trouble.)
The problem there, of course, is that we’d just be back to the status quo of Buffy and Spike as prickly exes.There’s one thing I could see the writers doing to really shake things up: turn Spike human. There’s been a number of references this season to Spike being increasingly unhappy with being a vampire. While this is probably my least favorite speculation in the world, because I like Buffy and Spike as physical near-equals, I could definitely see it happening. Especially as a sort of grand finale if the series should ever get cancelled.
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