Fanged Four Dynamics revisited
I finally got around to uploading my Alias Dickens pastiche, retitled Visitation, as well as various Jossverse ficlets written in recent months at ffn. This, together with tenyearsofbuffy (where you should leave a prompt because inspiring other people to write fanfic you want to read is the best way to celebrate a BTVS anniversary), put me in a Fanged Four kind of mood. I also checked on the excellent incest post kangeiko wrote a while ago. In one of the newer replies, peasant_ recalls the objection to Drusilla as Spike's sire which came after Fool for Love was broadcast, mainly from Spike/Angel(us) 'shippers, on the grounds of the way it changed the dynamic. (And, of course, jossed a lot of fanfic.)
This got me reflecting on why I reacted differently back then. Which rather started in season 1 of Angel/s4 of BTVS. Up to that point, most backstory fanfiction (based on the information as given in s1 and s2 of BTVS) for our recurring vampires focused on the Angel/Drusilla/Spike triad, with the emphasis either being on Dru/Spike or Angel(us)/Spike, depending on the writer in question. There was a suspicious resemblance to earlier vampire "families" , such as Lestat/Louis/Claudia in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (which, for all their mocking, obviously not just the Mutant Enemy scriptwriters but most of the fans had read) and LaCroix/Nick/Janette in Forever Knight; the male sire of the other two, whose control and general rotten bastardness was resented by the younger male, while there was simultanously emotional dependence and/or a certain erotic attraction; the female used as a means of control of the younger male. The main emotional struggle is between the two males; the female figure is oddly passive. (This, btw, isn't true for Claudia, of course, but certainly of the way Angel/Spike/Dru was written back then.) Someone completely absent in said backstory fanfiction written during the early seasons was Darla. Which wasn't surprising. Though she had been established as Angel's sire in season 1 of BTVS, she had not been nearly as fleshed out as Spike and Drusilla a season later, and the only canon to go on regarding her relationship with Angel was Angel the episode, in which he ends up staking her to save Buffy, and the brief glimpse at her siring him in the first flashback of Becoming. I might have missed something, but I think the only Darla backstory fanfic I saw which was written pre-AtS was about her and the Master. She certainly wasn't in any of the backstory fanfic involving Angel, Spike and Dru I had read; if she was mentioned at all, it was assumed that she and Angelus parted ways soon after her siring him.
Season 1 of AtS, while not bringing Darla actually back until the very end, in a cliffhanger, for the first time gave us a closer look at her via flashbacks, in the episodes Prodigal and Five by Five (which, being set at the very beginning and the end of Angel's 150 years as Angelus before he got souled the first time, incidentally established or at least strongly hinted she was around for all that time). Season 2 then made the Angel/Darla relationship its primary focus, both in the present and in flashbacks, and also gave us dates. As in: Darla sires Angel in 1753. Angel sires Drusilla in 1860. Drusilla sires Spike in 1880.
Forget the who-sired-Spike question for the moment; this alone presented a very different dynamic from what fanfiction had assumed. Spike and Angel(us) were together only for around twenty years; Drusilla had been with him for forty years. Darla and Angel(us), on the other hand, had been together for over a century before Drusilla, and 150 years all in all pre-soul. Even more importantly, Angelus is not presented as the dastardly-yet-attractive Uberpatriarch fanfic had described him as. If anyone has the emotional control in those flashbacks, it's Darla. This broke with previous Ricean and Forever Knight models and for that reason made the whole backstory feel far more original and intriguing to me. (Incidentally, no, I don't think Joss & Co. had it all figured out back when they introduced Spike and Dru in School Hard; it's something that obviously developed in the telling. But I'm talking about the result.) Mind you, fanfic-wise, this meant Darla spent a time being written as ravingly jealous because Angelus was really much more into Spike, but this seems to have subsided and at any rate looked increasingly ridiculous when compared with canon flashbacks wherein the only one throwing a jealous fit is Angelus, over the Immortal. At the same occasion, it's spelled out even to whose who chose to regard Reunion dynamics as platonic that Darla and Drusilla had their own thing going sexually, and that they were the ones who gave the boys permission, or not.
"Boys" is a term Darla uses in the coal mine flashback in Fool for Love when talking to Dru, as in the gleeful "I think our boys are going to fight", anticipating the show as much as any ole' slasher does, and it brings me to why I wasn't the least upset about the Dru-as-Spike's sire retcon/revelation (depending on how you interpret Spike's famous "you were my sire, man, you were my Yoda!" outburst in School Hard). Drusilla siring Spike after being told to make herself a playmate by Angelus and Darla, and the way she presents her new creation in Destiny ("Look what I've made! It's called Willy!" and "Where is Darla? I want Darla to see William!") is about as far from the Lestat/Louis/Claudia or LaCroix/Nicholas/Janette model as it gets. Doesn't mean the slashiness in the Angel(us)/Spike dynamic is lost (the same flashback in Destiny oozes of it, with Angelus' little "does that make me a deviant?" speech), but Drusilla isn't the passive female pulled in two directions by the men here; like Darla, she's the creator who made herself a boytoy. Both male vampires become more than that to the female vampires, of course, but that was the original intention.
The act of creation, of couse, when performed by a woman is coded as maternal and that, I would guess, makes the dynamic more disquieting to a sizable portion of the fandom than the same thing performed by a man. Or to viewers in general. As a journalist once pointed out, Marilyn Monroe singing "My heart belongs to Daddy" is regarded as the traditional epitome of sexiness; but can one imagine a male sex idol breathing "my heart belongs to Mommy" into the microphone without the audience getting squicked instead of thrilled? The Fanged Four as presented on screen sure challenge that. Because say what you want about Angelus and Spike, their hearts sure belong to Mommy. "I'm your son's other mother," says Drusilla to Anne in Lies My Parents Told Me, in case we've missed it so far, and Darla's last "my darling boy", spoken when Angel has his hand on her pregnant belly, could mean either the unborn Connor or Angel himself. And you don't have to go to the end of their relationship; "you made me," Angel insists both when she throws him out immediately after the souling in the Five by Five flashbacks and in the Darla flashback in China where she temporarily takes him back. "I gave you eternal life," Darla says to Angel when she wants to persuade him to turn into a vampire again, and "she delivered me (from mediocrity)," says Spike about Drusilla in Crush, when he replaces her with another powerful female figure to obsess about and be dependent on. In a genre where it's traditionally all about sons and fathers - or brothers, for that matter - I find this coding of the sire/fledgling as female/male instead of male/male or male/female, this focus on a family dynamic that doesn't provide agreeable and familiar frisson but genuinely challenges assumptions immensely captivating.
This got me reflecting on why I reacted differently back then. Which rather started in season 1 of Angel/s4 of BTVS. Up to that point, most backstory fanfiction (based on the information as given in s1 and s2 of BTVS) for our recurring vampires focused on the Angel/Drusilla/Spike triad, with the emphasis either being on Dru/Spike or Angel(us)/Spike, depending on the writer in question. There was a suspicious resemblance to earlier vampire "families" , such as Lestat/Louis/Claudia in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (which, for all their mocking, obviously not just the Mutant Enemy scriptwriters but most of the fans had read) and LaCroix/Nick/Janette in Forever Knight; the male sire of the other two, whose control and general rotten bastardness was resented by the younger male, while there was simultanously emotional dependence and/or a certain erotic attraction; the female used as a means of control of the younger male. The main emotional struggle is between the two males; the female figure is oddly passive. (This, btw, isn't true for Claudia, of course, but certainly of the way Angel/Spike/Dru was written back then.) Someone completely absent in said backstory fanfiction written during the early seasons was Darla. Which wasn't surprising. Though she had been established as Angel's sire in season 1 of BTVS, she had not been nearly as fleshed out as Spike and Drusilla a season later, and the only canon to go on regarding her relationship with Angel was Angel the episode, in which he ends up staking her to save Buffy, and the brief glimpse at her siring him in the first flashback of Becoming. I might have missed something, but I think the only Darla backstory fanfic I saw which was written pre-AtS was about her and the Master. She certainly wasn't in any of the backstory fanfic involving Angel, Spike and Dru I had read; if she was mentioned at all, it was assumed that she and Angelus parted ways soon after her siring him.
Season 1 of AtS, while not bringing Darla actually back until the very end, in a cliffhanger, for the first time gave us a closer look at her via flashbacks, in the episodes Prodigal and Five by Five (which, being set at the very beginning and the end of Angel's 150 years as Angelus before he got souled the first time, incidentally established or at least strongly hinted she was around for all that time). Season 2 then made the Angel/Darla relationship its primary focus, both in the present and in flashbacks, and also gave us dates. As in: Darla sires Angel in 1753. Angel sires Drusilla in 1860. Drusilla sires Spike in 1880.
Forget the who-sired-Spike question for the moment; this alone presented a very different dynamic from what fanfiction had assumed. Spike and Angel(us) were together only for around twenty years; Drusilla had been with him for forty years. Darla and Angel(us), on the other hand, had been together for over a century before Drusilla, and 150 years all in all pre-soul. Even more importantly, Angelus is not presented as the dastardly-yet-attractive Uberpatriarch fanfic had described him as. If anyone has the emotional control in those flashbacks, it's Darla. This broke with previous Ricean and Forever Knight models and for that reason made the whole backstory feel far more original and intriguing to me. (Incidentally, no, I don't think Joss & Co. had it all figured out back when they introduced Spike and Dru in School Hard; it's something that obviously developed in the telling. But I'm talking about the result.) Mind you, fanfic-wise, this meant Darla spent a time being written as ravingly jealous because Angelus was really much more into Spike, but this seems to have subsided and at any rate looked increasingly ridiculous when compared with canon flashbacks wherein the only one throwing a jealous fit is Angelus, over the Immortal. At the same occasion, it's spelled out even to whose who chose to regard Reunion dynamics as platonic that Darla and Drusilla had their own thing going sexually, and that they were the ones who gave the boys permission, or not.
"Boys" is a term Darla uses in the coal mine flashback in Fool for Love when talking to Dru, as in the gleeful "I think our boys are going to fight", anticipating the show as much as any ole' slasher does, and it brings me to why I wasn't the least upset about the Dru-as-Spike's sire retcon/revelation (depending on how you interpret Spike's famous "you were my sire, man, you were my Yoda!" outburst in School Hard). Drusilla siring Spike after being told to make herself a playmate by Angelus and Darla, and the way she presents her new creation in Destiny ("Look what I've made! It's called Willy!" and "Where is Darla? I want Darla to see William!") is about as far from the Lestat/Louis/Claudia or LaCroix/Nicholas/Janette model as it gets. Doesn't mean the slashiness in the Angel(us)/Spike dynamic is lost (the same flashback in Destiny oozes of it, with Angelus' little "does that make me a deviant?" speech), but Drusilla isn't the passive female pulled in two directions by the men here; like Darla, she's the creator who made herself a boytoy. Both male vampires become more than that to the female vampires, of course, but that was the original intention.
The act of creation, of couse, when performed by a woman is coded as maternal and that, I would guess, makes the dynamic more disquieting to a sizable portion of the fandom than the same thing performed by a man. Or to viewers in general. As a journalist once pointed out, Marilyn Monroe singing "My heart belongs to Daddy" is regarded as the traditional epitome of sexiness; but can one imagine a male sex idol breathing "my heart belongs to Mommy" into the microphone without the audience getting squicked instead of thrilled? The Fanged Four as presented on screen sure challenge that. Because say what you want about Angelus and Spike, their hearts sure belong to Mommy. "I'm your son's other mother," says Drusilla to Anne in Lies My Parents Told Me, in case we've missed it so far, and Darla's last "my darling boy", spoken when Angel has his hand on her pregnant belly, could mean either the unborn Connor or Angel himself. And you don't have to go to the end of their relationship; "you made me," Angel insists both when she throws him out immediately after the souling in the Five by Five flashbacks and in the Darla flashback in China where she temporarily takes him back. "I gave you eternal life," Darla says to Angel when she wants to persuade him to turn into a vampire again, and "she delivered me (from mediocrity)," says Spike about Drusilla in Crush, when he replaces her with another powerful female figure to obsess about and be dependent on. In a genre where it's traditionally all about sons and fathers - or brothers, for that matter - I find this coding of the sire/fledgling as female/male instead of male/male or male/female, this focus on a family dynamic that doesn't provide agreeable and familiar frisson but genuinely challenges assumptions immensely captivating.