Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha
Wow! The Borgified Corpse is on the roll!
I agree with you on the nature of vampires. Angel is a very interesting character to analyze and see how what he was as Liam informed what he became as vampire without a soul and then vampire with a soul. Even as a human, he was miserable because he felt he could never earn his father's approval, and his reckless hedonism didn't seem to be bringing him any happiness. As a vampire, he kept the same anger and misery and devoted himself to finding pleasure if causing suffering in most elaborate ways. When his "soul" was forced on him, and he started feeling pangs of conscience, he started denying himself pleasures and devoted himself to helping people - with the same attention and understanding that Angelus showed when finding ways of hurting people.
Think about the way Angelus tormented Giles by arranging for him to find Jenny in the way he did. This wasn't the work of some mindless demon. This was the work of someone who knows human heart, who is quite familiar with traditional/conventional romantic gestures (roses, opera...) and who in particular has an idea of how a man in love would feel hoping to make love to the woman of his dreams - and then having those hopes crushed in the most horrible way, finding her dead. I don't know, could this be perhaps the work of... say, a guy who can only reach perfect happiness by having sex with a woman he is in love with?
Speaking of Liam, I have a theory that one of the elements in the complicated relationship between Angel and Spike is that they both kind of see in each other what they despise in themselves as their biggest weakness - and that's what they used to be as humans. Spike tends to mock Angel's brooding sentimentality, but William was a sentimental poet, and Angel - even as Angelus - has always had a problem with Spike's recklessness and trouble-making, but the Spike persona is a lot like Liam, who was a reckless hedonistic troublemaker. Note also that William and Liam are basically the same name (in English and Irish version.)
One description of vampires that 3DMaster has used is "pure evil." I think this is nonsense. Pure evil can only exist as an abstraction. Vampires are far too contaminated with humanity to be pure anything. There's this idea out there that, when Spike didn't have a soul, he was pure evil and therefore every action he performed had purely evil intentions. Even the good deeds he performed in Seasons 5 & 6 were done with the "evil" intention of getting into Buffy's pants. While that's not the noblest of intentions there's nothing inherently evil about it either.
Which doesn't make any sense - since Buffy was
dead for a significant portion of that time (some 5 months) and he had no idea that Willow was going to resurrect her. So why was he helping the Scoobies or taking care of Dawn during that time?
It just seems like another case of people trying hard to ignore what they see on screen in order to fit their preconceptions. Someone in this thread, for instance, is a real
master in this...
Re: Xander as a romantic match for Buffy: One of the reasons why I think they'd be so right together is because Xander is the only one that knows her well enough to approach her on equal footing. Angel, Riley, & Spike were all too much in awe of Buffy to really know her. (Angel finally started to overcome that in "Sanctuary" but by that time they were long broken up.) Hell, in some ways, even Giles put her up on a pedestal. (I'm always bugged by the end of "The Gift," where Giles tries to maintain Buffy's heroic purity by secretly doing her dirty work for her and killing Ben.) Even though Xander didn't have super strength, he was able to see Buffy as a flawed human being just like everyone else. That's what enabled him to (verbally) go toe-to-toe with her in episodes like "Becoming, Part 1," "Becoming, Part 2," & "Into the Woods." It's what enabled him to be able to give her that pep talk in "The Freshman." While she may have found Angel or Spike more sexually exciting, I think Xander is the only one of the regulars that she could have forged a lasting partnership with.
I have to disagree completely. As I've pointed out in my opening post, Xander constantly puts Buffy on the pedestal, and gets judgmental and patronizing whenever she turns out not to be the "good girl" that he wants her to be. His slut-shaming in season 6 is just one of the examples (although the most infuriating example for me). Xander doesn't understand or relate to Buffy's darkness, the violence inside her and everything that has to do with her Slayer calling. If Buffy was a "normal girl", then maybe Xander or Riley could understand her, but she's not. Riley is even worse than Xander in that respect, he is a very traditional and conventional guy, which is why things could never work out between him and Buffy. He was basically Buffy's attempt at "normal life".
You're right about Angel's feelings about Buffy. He always had a very idealized image of Buffy (and vice versa). He fell in love with Buffy before they even actually met, he was also drawn to her as the Slayer, but also as a pure, innocent girl, the anti-Darla. He says it best himself in the
Angel episode "I Fall to Pieces", talking about a stalker they were investigating, and clearly projecting: "This guy is too messed up to deal with a real woman and he can't stand that. So he creates a fantasy about a girl he barely knows. But eventually even she fails him. So he has to hurt her, because when he looks at her all he sees is how useless he is, how damaged..." And I think that he always tended to be 'mysterious' with her and reluctant to tell her things about his past because he was afraid that she would reject him if she knew all about him.
But I completely disagree about Spike. Of all the men in her life, I think that Spike is the one who knows her the best and could understand her the most (well, except for trying to figure out what her feelings for him are - which is one area where he tends to be very misguided, but Buffy herself was always extremely confused - and often in deep denial - when it comes to that particular subject). Yes, he does adore her, but he's never been blind to her faults, he's always been the one to tell her unpleasant truths to her face, he's seen her at her worst as well as her best, and known all the ugliest parts of her personality, and he still accepts and loves her the way she is. There's a reason why Spike was the only one Buffy could speak to and confide in at the most difficult periods of her life, rather than Xander or another one of her friends. She doesn't have to hold back with Spike, they can relate on a very basic level because he is in some ways her "shadow" self and openly shows many of those things that she has suppressed in herself - which includes her dark, sexual and violent side, but also the emotional openness that she has lost over the years.
It makes perfect sense that, in season 8 comic 37, Buffy fantasizes about telling Spike "You were the guy I told things I wasn't supposed to tell anyone... You're my dark place, Spike". The phrase "
dark place" is interesting because Joss Whedon likes to use it a lot in his interviews, and likes to say that this is where his storytelling comes from. Some people have interpreted it as meaning something bad when the comic appeared, but I don't think that's the case. See
this interview about
Dollhouse, for instance. Joss says: "The storyteller lives in a
dark place, he lives in the urges that people don't want to talk about, he lives in sex and violence on some level... at the very worst, he lives in conflicts between human beings that cannot be resolved. It's not a happy place. (...) When I say dark, I don't necessarily mean painful. I mean the things that people would like to keep hidden.One of my firm beliefs and one of the things that started 'Dollhouse' was the idea that some of
the things that people want to keep hidden do not necessarily need to be hidden. And one of the best things that can happen to a person is when they realize that they're not alone. If they have a certain obsession... perversion... whatever it is... that that's not a thing that makes a person terrible. That the thing that they are ashamed of, that happened to them, is something best come to light."
In another S8 comic, Buffy has a dream that hints at exactly why it would never work between her and Xander:
In her dream, she asks Xander into bed and kisses him... and his head falls off
Buffy: "No, no, I can't go outside, I'm afraid of the dark!"
Xander's head: "Buffy, you
are the dark."
Buffy: "That's what I meant."
So, she is basically terrified of herself, which is nothing new - she spent a lot of the series trying to believe that she was another "normal" girl just doing her "job", rather than that job is something that permeates every part of her personality. And since being a Slayer is not just a "job", but an essential part of her personality, she always related to vampires much better than she could do to "normal" human men, no matter how much she tried to.
If she
is the dark, then the "dark place" is the place where she can be herself (it's not about Spike being "dark" as much as that she feels free to be "dark" with him.) Which can be either scary or comforting, depending on how you look at it - but certainly liberating.
I know some girls have a dislike of bi-curious 'tourist' straight girls flirting with lesbian flings (Buffy/Satsu provoked much debate on the matter) but I wouldn't qualify that as bigotry by any stretch of the imagination
He has no problem with Anya's past crimes, but he starts shaming her and calling her names when she sleeps with Spike after Xander has dumped her at the altar. It's like we were suddenly in a bizarre world based on an exaggerated version of Victorian morality, where women are not held responsible for their actual crimes, but are blamed for their sexual choices, while it's the opposite for men. Xander is called a "demon magnet", he jokes at some point that he should find way to repel those demon women... As if he isn't making his own choices when he dates them. He can't simply say "no"? And many fans seem to have the same kind of mindset, like the poster who wrote on the Buffy season 6 thread that "Buffy lost all credibility when she started sleeping with monsters". Nobody however said anything about Xander dating demons.
