SPONTANEOUS META COMBUSTION: on Drusilla's role in the Spike/Dru relationship
So, last night penny_lane_42 asked me to justify Drusilla's love for Spike, and as you can expect with me talking about these kids, it spiralled out of control almost immediately. Thus, I come bearing meta. To paraphrase a certain favored episode: this is Drusilla, girls! D'you have any idea what she means?
Nah, course not, that's the problem with her. But it's Drusilla week in my life, perhaps even moreso than usual, so let's get cracking!
"What Possible Catastrophe Came Crashing Down From Heaven And Brought This Dashing Stranger To Tears?":
Analyzing Drusilla's Role In the Spike/Dru Relationship
Fandom has referred to Drusilla's mind as "broken"; it isn't, really-it's just very, very separate. She speaks in a language of image and metaphor, because of her relationship to the future, she exists to a certain extent outside of time. The show often plays this up: I just watched "School Hard" today and was struck by the intensely choreographed way she moves-there is something unsettled about her movement, it's as if she's a beat off from everything else in the room. I said once, when chronicling my favorite scenes and talking about the room in the Boxer Rebellion, that it's as if everything real takes a step back when she walks in: the room gets palpably quieter because she is, more or less, a disturbance, outside of the common wavelength. The only person who meets her there is Spike, and the two of them moving together is very, very deliberate-dancelike, paced, time and again. "Come dance," she says to him in "What's My Line?", somewhat prophetically, for that's a motif they share. He does dance with her. He's literally the only one in all the world who's positioned to do so, who knows the steps. There's something shivery about watching them interact because they are so intricately both natural and careful: he constantly steps into the careful pavanne of movement she walks in, constantly anchors her as she constantly elevates him. Even in their most casual moments-the "I can see the stars" dialogue in "Innocence", for example-one of their movements will always inform the other's, whether leaning in/around each other or mirroring each other or simply filling in a space the other has left empty; again, balance. There's something of the chaos-order dichotomy in them, again a reflection of the out-of-time aspect that their choreography is steeped in. In more than one of the scenes in which they kiss, they stop for a moment, face to face. It's a breath taken by two characters who don't need breath, an ordered pause before something passionately chaotic. The way they move around each other is a physical manifestation of the imagistic perspective in which they live, in which they are both rooted even before they meet.
She sees the world in image, from a perspective outside everyone else's rational thought/linear chronology, and therefore no one sees her. At the very beginning. Dru is drifting along with Darla and Angelus: Angelus, "daddy", has built her and finished with her (as his "finest creation" she's complete and he doesn't have to have anything else active to do with her) and Darla, "grandmum", tolerates her, but neither of them sees her. That's the thing with Dru: she came in precognitive, and that's the thing she brings from her human self (as, say, Darla brings her pragmatism, and William will bring his capacity for love). Angelus breaks her and crafts her in his own (debauched) image around this core of vision and metaphor: thus, the prophetic remove that is her "madness". So when she meets Spike-chooses her knight-she sees him immediately and truly. Naturally: what is William the bloodyawfulpoet but a heart full of metaphors he can't articulate? He is constantly pursuing the visions that surround her, the foundation upon which she is built, whichm while he constantly labors in search of words for it, she does not have to work to create. She sees what he wants because it's where she lives. She comes in and knows him before he knows himself, sees him more clearly than he has ever seen himself, never mind her-"looking at him with total love and understanding," as the script writes, and I've never been one for love at first sight, but she knows him, because she is what he's constantly wanted to write. She sees him as he could be, as he wants to be, as he does not know how to express because he's trapped in the constraints of the identity that his first creatrix gave him (William, mama's boy). The page is already there to be written on-she just writes the story they share over the preexisting one. The patterns of William are never gone, but they are built over because who is he if not that creature building identity upon identity. I've talked about the perfect construction inherent here. I've actually said everything I could possibly say about them in that episode, about how they are established and what they are to each other there-I'm rambling and flailing and loving and probably looping myself into a very inarticulate coil. Point being: the relationship is that of poet and poem, but it turns the process of creation on its head-she's the muse, but she's the one with agency.
That's where the argument of she loves him because he's there breaks for me-she chose him first, chose to make the two of them part and parcel of the same story. "My knight" she says before she meets him; a century later, in "School Hard", she looks at him and says "I'm a princess" because that's what they are to each other-they inhabit the same world and most importantly they were doing so before they met, albeit from opposite ends. They both have been placed beneath-his rejection, her rape-and his brought him to his knees whereas hers ended up pushing her up and beyond. They speak the same language and they embody the metaphors the choose fully. They come to be predicated on the same kind of identity play, and they balance each other perfectly in that: the images she chooses to enact are purely feminine; his, aggressively masculine.
So they become part and parcel of the Fanged Four quadrant. Sleeping around in the Fanged Four is obviously not strange: they've canonically all done so at one point or another, and did not suffer for it. They're deviant vampires; monogamous moral codes don't apply to them. But there is a moment in "Destiny" in which a certain discrepancy between William and Drusilla's perspectives is addressed, which essentially goes like this: "Me and Dru are forever," he says, because he knows the world, is anchored in it-is the one who anchors her even as she exalts him, roles they play-and therefore views time and expectation with a logical chronology in which forever is a present leading into a future; "are we?" she asks, soft and quizzical because she does not know forever, she cannot have a concept of future as different from what happens now, for she barely knows time. (They meet neatly in the middle there: they are both portrayed as creatures of the moment, William predicated on impulse and Drusilla, again, firmly outside of chronology.) In any case: vampire family is incestuous as all hell; siring is and always has been a bond both familial and sexual. Natural casual incest-vibes aside, though, the Fanged Four is comprised of two romantic relationships. Angelus's "fatherhood" is predicated on sexuality, but Spike and Drusilla are still the ones who share a bed for the century, as Spike says in "Crush"; the pair relationships are unchallenged by that flexibility. Angelus and Darla are correspondingly selfish and unromantic, while Spike and Dru are correspondingly intertwined and intensely romantic. The difference between the two pairs: Angelus leaves Darla behind and saves himself because he knows the woman he love will make it out (and she, pragmatist, could believably do the same); Spike and Dru each choose to save each other again and again. Things we are shown on the show. He picks her up and carries her broken body for months after the "idiot mob" gets her in Prague; she picks him up and carries him out of the rubble after "What's My Line?" and subsequently cares for him in the exact same way.
Dismissive people write Dru off as unable to be self-reliant, but that's never shown in the text. They never meet on unequal footing. Their meeting in the alleyway is one of constant connection, and when she reveals herself to be a monster, he does not run or show any indicator of fear. When he kills the Slayer in the Boxer Rebellion, she's joyous and proud of him, and they are giddy together; when she talks about it to Darla and Angel, she is gleefully proprietary-"May I tell? My Spike's killed a Slayer!" She's had agency with him from the beginning, and again, back to my rewatch of "School Hard"-in which our view on the relationship begins and thus is predicated on a situation in which she is ailing and he is taking care of her, so I get on some level where fandom's conception of Dru = perpetual dependent comes, basically incorrect as it is-she's very far from pitiful. I was almost surprised by the extent to which the two of them seem equal-footed and clear-eyed. He tells her to eat, she tells him to go make nice with the Anointed One and his followers, she is solicitous and concerned when he comes back from his failed attempt at the high school. As I said, I've seen this relationship described in a language of unbalanced ability that simply doesn't stand up. She can love him, she sees him very clearly, she can care about him and even actively for him, and she does.
When Angelus returns, two things arise: an emphasis on the strength of the family motif around her-family is what anchors her, a construction that makes consistent real-world sense to her to the point where she can recall her human memories on the subject and articulate them clearly; she's the one within the makeshift family who speaks in the language of familial terms, of "daddy" and "grandmum"-and a revisit to the motif of creation. She is centered on this (living as a poetic work will do that to a girl), and Angelus is her creator. She lost him once and, given the importance of those two roles to her, she has great stake in not doing so again. Furthermore, Darla is gone; to keep the family whole, she and Spike on some level split Darla's roles between her-Spike taking the pragmatism and Dru stepping twofold into a sexual role she's, again, always been positioned in (this is a nice unintentional shadowcast on Dru and Darla's future relationship-when granddaughter becomes mother and grandmother daughter, Dru has had practice trying on Darla's gown before). Angelus doesn't, from her perspective, infringe on the position of prince/knight/other half that Spike occupies. Indeed, with regard to Spike, she is solicitous in exactly the way he was before: they switch roles cleanly, wonderfully, after she saves him.
Spike is threatened by Angelus (as their relationship is, in that nicely queer masculine pattern, predicated on mutual threat), Spike plays the role of knight and saves Drusilla from the apocalypse, Spike breaks from Angelus because Angelus's role in his creation is that of the father to be surmounted, these are the things that get talked about in the reflected light of AtS s5 especially but are there from "you were my sire, man! My Yoda!" (the "sire" aspect is a bit of inconsistency but not far from what the truth ends up being; the "Yoda" stands up). In any case, they leave, but they each leave parts of themselves behind: Dru, ripped once again from the safe identity-place of family, and Spike leaving a Slayer alive. The Slayer is in him, the Slayer's narrative still consumes him as it's left unfinished, and he's terminally going to be stuck in Sunnydale, in part, until she's dead. He doesn't love her then. But his relationship to the Slayers has always been about wanting to possess what they represent-and Dru's precognitive. Dru knows him first, Dru knows him best. So she leaves, he goes back, gets chipped, and lo and behold he's out an identity. Start of being recrafted around Buffy; he's always been a creature of parallel structure.
Except he staked his mother and therefore was able to start new; he didn't stake Dru, and therefore she's in him pretty much all the way to the end-in the amazing identity crisis of "Crush", in which, again, she leaves voluntarily, not chased, pitying, because she gets identity-play better than anyone else and can voice it more directly than he can; in s6/s7, when he has been brought to his lowest and mirrors her language up to the point where it gets addressed in-text, and in which he is broken out of this mirroring when another force tries to mirror her as well. Of course he sees through the First. Of course its mirroring Dru snaps him out of it. He's the only person in the world who sees her clearly, who knows her.
That's why she loves him. Right from the start. They have the same core, and she breaks him down and rebuilds him around what's always been there. They balance each other like crazy, but their vocabulary-image, identity, metaphor-comes from the exact same place. Everything he ever achieves, everything he ever wants, it comes from that-from something effulgent, realized first by her.
Nah, course not, that's the problem with her. But it's Drusilla week in my life, perhaps even moreso than usual, so let's get cracking!
"What Possible Catastrophe Came Crashing Down From Heaven And Brought This Dashing Stranger To Tears?":
Analyzing Drusilla's Role In the Spike/Dru Relationship
Fandom has referred to Drusilla's mind as "broken"; it isn't, really-it's just very, very separate. She speaks in a language of image and metaphor, because of her relationship to the future, she exists to a certain extent outside of time. The show often plays this up: I just watched "School Hard" today and was struck by the intensely choreographed way she moves-there is something unsettled about her movement, it's as if she's a beat off from everything else in the room. I said once, when chronicling my favorite scenes and talking about the room in the Boxer Rebellion, that it's as if everything real takes a step back when she walks in: the room gets palpably quieter because she is, more or less, a disturbance, outside of the common wavelength. The only person who meets her there is Spike, and the two of them moving together is very, very deliberate-dancelike, paced, time and again. "Come dance," she says to him in "What's My Line?", somewhat prophetically, for that's a motif they share. He does dance with her. He's literally the only one in all the world who's positioned to do so, who knows the steps. There's something shivery about watching them interact because they are so intricately both natural and careful: he constantly steps into the careful pavanne of movement she walks in, constantly anchors her as she constantly elevates him. Even in their most casual moments-the "I can see the stars" dialogue in "Innocence", for example-one of their movements will always inform the other's, whether leaning in/around each other or mirroring each other or simply filling in a space the other has left empty; again, balance. There's something of the chaos-order dichotomy in them, again a reflection of the out-of-time aspect that their choreography is steeped in. In more than one of the scenes in which they kiss, they stop for a moment, face to face. It's a breath taken by two characters who don't need breath, an ordered pause before something passionately chaotic. The way they move around each other is a physical manifestation of the imagistic perspective in which they live, in which they are both rooted even before they meet.
She sees the world in image, from a perspective outside everyone else's rational thought/linear chronology, and therefore no one sees her. At the very beginning. Dru is drifting along with Darla and Angelus: Angelus, "daddy", has built her and finished with her (as his "finest creation" she's complete and he doesn't have to have anything else active to do with her) and Darla, "grandmum", tolerates her, but neither of them sees her. That's the thing with Dru: she came in precognitive, and that's the thing she brings from her human self (as, say, Darla brings her pragmatism, and William will bring his capacity for love). Angelus breaks her and crafts her in his own (debauched) image around this core of vision and metaphor: thus, the prophetic remove that is her "madness". So when she meets Spike-chooses her knight-she sees him immediately and truly. Naturally: what is William the bloodyawfulpoet but a heart full of metaphors he can't articulate? He is constantly pursuing the visions that surround her, the foundation upon which she is built, whichm while he constantly labors in search of words for it, she does not have to work to create. She sees what he wants because it's where she lives. She comes in and knows him before he knows himself, sees him more clearly than he has ever seen himself, never mind her-"looking at him with total love and understanding," as the script writes, and I've never been one for love at first sight, but she knows him, because she is what he's constantly wanted to write. She sees him as he could be, as he wants to be, as he does not know how to express because he's trapped in the constraints of the identity that his first creatrix gave him (William, mama's boy). The page is already there to be written on-she just writes the story they share over the preexisting one. The patterns of William are never gone, but they are built over because who is he if not that creature building identity upon identity. I've talked about the perfect construction inherent here. I've actually said everything I could possibly say about them in that episode, about how they are established and what they are to each other there-I'm rambling and flailing and loving and probably looping myself into a very inarticulate coil. Point being: the relationship is that of poet and poem, but it turns the process of creation on its head-she's the muse, but she's the one with agency.
That's where the argument of she loves him because he's there breaks for me-she chose him first, chose to make the two of them part and parcel of the same story. "My knight" she says before she meets him; a century later, in "School Hard", she looks at him and says "I'm a princess" because that's what they are to each other-they inhabit the same world and most importantly they were doing so before they met, albeit from opposite ends. They both have been placed beneath-his rejection, her rape-and his brought him to his knees whereas hers ended up pushing her up and beyond. They speak the same language and they embody the metaphors the choose fully. They come to be predicated on the same kind of identity play, and they balance each other perfectly in that: the images she chooses to enact are purely feminine; his, aggressively masculine.
So they become part and parcel of the Fanged Four quadrant. Sleeping around in the Fanged Four is obviously not strange: they've canonically all done so at one point or another, and did not suffer for it. They're deviant vampires; monogamous moral codes don't apply to them. But there is a moment in "Destiny" in which a certain discrepancy between William and Drusilla's perspectives is addressed, which essentially goes like this: "Me and Dru are forever," he says, because he knows the world, is anchored in it-is the one who anchors her even as she exalts him, roles they play-and therefore views time and expectation with a logical chronology in which forever is a present leading into a future; "are we?" she asks, soft and quizzical because she does not know forever, she cannot have a concept of future as different from what happens now, for she barely knows time. (They meet neatly in the middle there: they are both portrayed as creatures of the moment, William predicated on impulse and Drusilla, again, firmly outside of chronology.) In any case: vampire family is incestuous as all hell; siring is and always has been a bond both familial and sexual. Natural casual incest-vibes aside, though, the Fanged Four is comprised of two romantic relationships. Angelus's "fatherhood" is predicated on sexuality, but Spike and Drusilla are still the ones who share a bed for the century, as Spike says in "Crush"; the pair relationships are unchallenged by that flexibility. Angelus and Darla are correspondingly selfish and unromantic, while Spike and Dru are correspondingly intertwined and intensely romantic. The difference between the two pairs: Angelus leaves Darla behind and saves himself because he knows the woman he love will make it out (and she, pragmatist, could believably do the same); Spike and Dru each choose to save each other again and again. Things we are shown on the show. He picks her up and carries her broken body for months after the "idiot mob" gets her in Prague; she picks him up and carries him out of the rubble after "What's My Line?" and subsequently cares for him in the exact same way.
Dismissive people write Dru off as unable to be self-reliant, but that's never shown in the text. They never meet on unequal footing. Their meeting in the alleyway is one of constant connection, and when she reveals herself to be a monster, he does not run or show any indicator of fear. When he kills the Slayer in the Boxer Rebellion, she's joyous and proud of him, and they are giddy together; when she talks about it to Darla and Angel, she is gleefully proprietary-"May I tell? My Spike's killed a Slayer!" She's had agency with him from the beginning, and again, back to my rewatch of "School Hard"-in which our view on the relationship begins and thus is predicated on a situation in which she is ailing and he is taking care of her, so I get on some level where fandom's conception of Dru = perpetual dependent comes, basically incorrect as it is-she's very far from pitiful. I was almost surprised by the extent to which the two of them seem equal-footed and clear-eyed. He tells her to eat, she tells him to go make nice with the Anointed One and his followers, she is solicitous and concerned when he comes back from his failed attempt at the high school. As I said, I've seen this relationship described in a language of unbalanced ability that simply doesn't stand up. She can love him, she sees him very clearly, she can care about him and even actively for him, and she does.
When Angelus returns, two things arise: an emphasis on the strength of the family motif around her-family is what anchors her, a construction that makes consistent real-world sense to her to the point where she can recall her human memories on the subject and articulate them clearly; she's the one within the makeshift family who speaks in the language of familial terms, of "daddy" and "grandmum"-and a revisit to the motif of creation. She is centered on this (living as a poetic work will do that to a girl), and Angelus is her creator. She lost him once and, given the importance of those two roles to her, she has great stake in not doing so again. Furthermore, Darla is gone; to keep the family whole, she and Spike on some level split Darla's roles between her-Spike taking the pragmatism and Dru stepping twofold into a sexual role she's, again, always been positioned in (this is a nice unintentional shadowcast on Dru and Darla's future relationship-when granddaughter becomes mother and grandmother daughter, Dru has had practice trying on Darla's gown before). Angelus doesn't, from her perspective, infringe on the position of prince/knight/other half that Spike occupies. Indeed, with regard to Spike, she is solicitous in exactly the way he was before: they switch roles cleanly, wonderfully, after she saves him.
Spike is threatened by Angelus (as their relationship is, in that nicely queer masculine pattern, predicated on mutual threat), Spike plays the role of knight and saves Drusilla from the apocalypse, Spike breaks from Angelus because Angelus's role in his creation is that of the father to be surmounted, these are the things that get talked about in the reflected light of AtS s5 especially but are there from "you were my sire, man! My Yoda!" (the "sire" aspect is a bit of inconsistency but not far from what the truth ends up being; the "Yoda" stands up). In any case, they leave, but they each leave parts of themselves behind: Dru, ripped once again from the safe identity-place of family, and Spike leaving a Slayer alive. The Slayer is in him, the Slayer's narrative still consumes him as it's left unfinished, and he's terminally going to be stuck in Sunnydale, in part, until she's dead. He doesn't love her then. But his relationship to the Slayers has always been about wanting to possess what they represent-and Dru's precognitive. Dru knows him first, Dru knows him best. So she leaves, he goes back, gets chipped, and lo and behold he's out an identity. Start of being recrafted around Buffy; he's always been a creature of parallel structure.
Except he staked his mother and therefore was able to start new; he didn't stake Dru, and therefore she's in him pretty much all the way to the end-in the amazing identity crisis of "Crush", in which, again, she leaves voluntarily, not chased, pitying, because she gets identity-play better than anyone else and can voice it more directly than he can; in s6/s7, when he has been brought to his lowest and mirrors her language up to the point where it gets addressed in-text, and in which he is broken out of this mirroring when another force tries to mirror her as well. Of course he sees through the First. Of course its mirroring Dru snaps him out of it. He's the only person in the world who sees her clearly, who knows her.
That's why she loves him. Right from the start. They have the same core, and she breaks him down and rebuilds him around what's always been there. They balance each other like crazy, but their vocabulary-image, identity, metaphor-comes from the exact same place. Everything he ever achieves, everything he ever wants, it comes from that-from something effulgent, realized first by her.