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

[cornerofmadness]

while I never shipped Buffy/Spike I have to admit S6 killed all desire I had to write SPike for a very long time

[rahirah]

It was more Buffy with me. I just don't like her much anymore, which makes me sad.

[cornerofmadness]

yes it is. I didn't like her much any more either

[thisficklemob]

That is annoying. I've certainly gone through my periods of disillusionment with the 'ship.

Have you seen Run, Lola, Run? One of the interesting effects is that we see different plausible futures for the characters she meets along the way in snapshot-like flashes. Depending on what swear word somebody says to her, she ends up winning the lottery or becoming a nun. It's all designed to make us think how arbitrary outcomes can me, and how little things can lead to vastly different lives in ways no one can predict at the time.

So in a way, of course any fic that splits with canon post-"Gift" has to be far away from where Joss took them. It doesn't necessarily mean it's any less plausible for the characters.

(And if I'm wrong, sshhhh, don't tell me. ;-p)

[rahirah]

I do have to see that movie some day - I've heard all kinds of interesting stuff about it!

[rebcake]

Yes, please, to the technically proficient (though I will not agree with the "pablum" assessment)! It's really bad out there right now.

Characterization matters. However, like ficklemob (and countless other fic writers), I also like the "one little thing can make all the difference" approach. You've built a structure that supports the Barbverse's version. I personally think that it could have gone a million ways after The Gift, and the unsatisfactory elements of Season 6 are largely why we have Spuffy fic in the first place. If the writers hadn't left so very much room for improvement, why else would people bother?

[slaymesoftly]

Word

[rahirah]

Ah, but I started writing in late S5. It wasn't a desire to fix canon that drove me, it was that I saw the potential for telling a really, really cool story. (I don't believe you can 'fix' canon. Not a word we write will change canon one little bit.)

Honestly, if I'd seen the whole show at once on DVD, I doubt I'd be writing fic at all...

[jamalov29]

The more S6 rewatch reviews I read, the more I think "Why in God's name do I ship these characters again?" Oh oh, that sounds a bad place to be.

The ugliness going on between the characters on screen killed their desire to write the characters at all, in any context. As hard as s.6 can be, rewatching it led me to more hopeful territories, as odd as it may appear.
I often found more ugliness in some fictions based on season 6 -and especially the relationship between Buffy and Spike- than in the episodes themselves. A few writers had a very dark and gloomy view of the events and that,at times, could have damaged my perception of the characters.One would argue that season 6 was indeed dark and gloomy but sometimes fanfic writers managed to make it darker , more depressing and with no redeeming qualities within the S/B sex affair.

It's always been important to me that no matter how far AU I may stray, there's a line of plausible extrapolation leading back to the point where I broke away from canon. Yes. I completely see where you

[rahirah]

Oh, I'll probably have a completely different view in a week. *g*

[jamalov29]

Somehow I don't believe you would be that fickle, Barb. :-)

[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

[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

[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.