Strange that the attempted rapist would feel more emotional about his action than the victim would – yet given Spike and Buffy’s history, their reactions make complete sense. (After all, that was the one thing he regretted doing before he had a soul.) The guilt tormented him long after Buffy stopped being triggered. Granted, some of this insanity was due to a hundred years of guilt catching up to him, but it was clear that attempting to rape Buffy was the single action he regretted most. Spike, on the other hand, went completely insane after he earned his soul.
Buffy cried during and after the attempted rape, she condemned Spike’s actions in “Beneath You,” and she flinched when Spike put his hand on her shoulder, but by the season’s halfway point, she was in constant close physical contact with Spike without being triggered by the memory. “Seeing Red” and the episodes that follow make it clear that the attempted rape had a much stronger effect on Spike than it did on Buffy, even though Buffy was the victim. No, I rooted for Buffy/Spike in the seventh season despite my problems with the storyline from a social justice lens, because their actions after the attempted rape seemed perfectly in character to me. Besides, I don’t think hand-waving Spike’s actions with “but he has a soul now!” is appropriate when dealing with the attempted raping elephant in the room. never successfully explained what a soul was – why Angel’s missing soul turned him into a completely different person with not even a speck of humanity in him, why Spike and Drusilla were able to love each other even without souls, why Harmony the soulless vampire was the exact same person as Harmony the human (except with fangs). I love what you are.” And he means it.īut I can’t pretend that the existence of Spike’s soul is what made me root for Buffy/Spike in the last season, because in seven seasons, Whedon & co. Spike in season seven, however, tells Buffy, “When I say I love you, it doesn’t mean I want you. He wanted her to be with him, no matter how terrible she felt about herself. Spike in season six would whisper manipulative words in her ear when she was depressed and vulnerable. And their relationship was very different, because Spike-with-a-soul was able to love Buffy unselfishly. It would be easy to say that the Buffy/Spike relationship was fundamentally different in the seventh season than it was in the sixth, due to Spike’s soul.
Buffy and spike series#
I wanted Spike to redeem himself, I looked for clues that Buffy was returning his feelings, and I felt completely swept up in their last moment together in the series finale, when she told him that she loved him. Yet, all throughout season seven, I wanted Buffy and Spike to get back together. Seeing any show pursue a romantic relationship between a woman and her attempted rapist is disturbing, to say the least. Subsequent episodes continue to portray Spike in a sympathetic light, and even attempt to reignite a romantic relationship between Buffy and the man who tried to rape her.
(You can tell that I’m digressing when I write run-on sentences in parentheticals.) “Seeing Red” is such a disturbing episode in the Buffy canon because the male romantic lead/anti-hero tries to rape the protagonist. (Except oops – he actually didn’t rape her because she successfully fought him off, and oops – he wasn’t actually trying to rid himself of his humanity at all, and was in fact seeking his soul so that he would never hurt her again, except the writers tried to hide this through their clever misdirection and make it SEEM like he was trying to get rid of the chip of his brain.)Īnyway, I digress. This is the episode where Spike tried to rape Buffy on her bathroom floor, where he called her a bitch, where he left town in an effort to rid himself of the speck of humanity that stopped him from raping her. The last episode I reviewed was “Seeing Red,” which is probably the most controversial episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I wanted to examine the way rape and consent issues were portrayed in one of my all-time favorite television series – a series that had an explicit feminist vision.
“BtVS and Consent Issues” is a series I began writing over a year ago with the goal to examine episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where rape, sexual assault, sexual coercion, and/or violation of consent were major plot points.