Association meme
Feb. 25th, 2009 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupComment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
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goldenusagi.
Spuffy
I have kind of a strange relationship with this ship. I originally started reading Spike/Buffy because it was the easiest way to find lots and lots of fic about Spike, who was really the part I was interested in. I think the single biggest reason I’m more or less committed to the ship now is because Spike’s whole character arc is so inextricably bound up with Buffy that I have trouble thinking of him separately. This despite the fact that I don’t really ‘get’ Buffy as a character most of the time. (Redacted: a bunch of whingeing about the portrayal of Buffy in Spuffy fic.)
*scratches head* I don’t think I’m much like the average Spuffy shipper. There are moments I love between them in canon; oddly enough, many of the canonical moments I like the most (the porch scene, everything in “After Life,” the last scene in “Beneath You,”) aren’t primarily ship-oriented. At least, that’s not what I like about them. But then, I’m not primarily ship-oriented, either in fic or in real life.
Hmm, that was a fair number of words that managed to convey not at all why I read Spike/Buffy or why I like watching them in canon. It’s all I’ve got, though. Hmph.
Dawn
Blame it on staying in the junior fiction section of the library for too long, but I often relate to the adolescents in fiction better than to anyone else, and Dawn’s a perfect example. She’s one of those characters that instantly made sense to me: her rocky relationship with Buffy (really, who’d want to be second best to the Slayer?) and her outsider status on the show. But she’s also very much her own person and a girl of action, and she’ll do what she thinks needs to be done, consequences be damned. She’s not always wise in her actions, but her strength is in her personality alone, unlike practically everyone else on the show. (One of the very few things I liked about S7 was “Potential,” especially that wonderful conversation at the end between her and Xander, the other person who never did get any superpowers.)
I also love her brother-sister relationship with Spike, partly because they function on basically the same maturity level - on any given day, it’s a tossup which of them is going to be the drama queen and which one will offer the shoulder to cry on. I love the fact that, with the immunity of youth, she can get away with telling him the truth as she sees it, often without even realizing how odd her perspective is. Wisely or not, she actually likes him, and she’s the first white hat to do so with the possible exception of Joyce.
Mpreg
This topic probably deserves its own post at some point, but here’s the short version: I’m fascinated by the exploration of the divide between body and identity, the feeling that one’s body is out one’s control, and the vulnerability that goes with that. Pregnancy is a special case: it’s one of the few situations where having your body doing all sorts of abnormal, uncomfortable things is considered, well, normal.
But it’s hard to get a really good look at this because it is normal, it’s everyday; of course that’s how we get with new people. Mpreg, on the other hand, throws all the extremes into sharp relief. Assuming you’re in a ficverse where male pregnancy isn’t usual, you suddenly have a character that’s facing not only a whole set of radical, possibly unexpected physical changes, but also on one hand a huge number of potentially contradictory social expections about pregnancy and on the other hand the vacuum of a situation for which there are no expectations. Plus your poor pregnant guy is physically vulnerable in different ways than he’s ever been before; he’s more directly responsible for someone else’s welfare than he’s ever been; he has new physical and maybe emotional needs that he may not be able to meet on his own. And when it’s all over, well, he has a baby to deal with.
Given all that, you have a scenario that’s ripe for all sorts of interesting character conflict, development, and growth. It’s like a highly specialized form of physical hurt/comfort, crossed with gleefully smashed gender roles and an optional side of fluff/schmoop. Unfortunately, like most things, mpreg fic follows Sturgeon’s Law (95% of everything is crap), and since there’s so little of it to begin with, that doesn’t leave much that’s any good. Which is why I had to write my own.
Spike
I’m not even sure where to start, because regardless of what I say I’m going to leave so much out. You have to understand, I love a lot of things about this show, and they don’t all have to do with him. This is Whedon, so of course there are tons of characters I get a kick out of watching: Giles and Oz and Dawn and Cordelia and Andrew, and so on. I stuck through S1, cheesy as it was, without any Spike, and I thoroughly enjoyed S3 (Faith!) even though Spike was only in the one episode. I spent most of S4 and the beginning of S5 being irritated with him, and his mid-S5 stalker act didn’t exactly endear him to me. I hate the stink of cigarettes and have no particular affection for bad boys or leather or bleached blond hair or, generally speaking, sharply defined cheekbones. And yet, and yet...
First I liked Spike because he was cocky and brash and, most importantly, because he was nothing like the Master. I liked him because I saw more genuine affection and care between him and Dru than I ever saw between Buffy and Angel (so, yeah, I was anti-Buffy/Angel long before I realized Buffy/Spike was even a possibility). I liked him because he was awkward (“Have we met?” “You hit me with an axe once.”). I liked him because, whether or not he meant to be, he was funny (Let’s pretend we took a break to re-watch “Lover’s Walk”).
And then I saw “Fool For Love,” and I said, “Oh.” That was the turning point for me, both in regards to the character and to the show. Up to then I’d been entertained; at that point I was committed. As I mention above, I still have my doubts about the Buffy/Spike ship, but I love what it did for him as a character. I love a good redemption arc, and Spike gave it to me in spades, with as much passion and angst as the writers could write and Marsters could act - which was quite a lot, on both counts. I love: his crusty vulnerability, his absolute commitment, his flashes of insight, his moments of idiocy, his furtive tenderness, his physicality (and no, that’s not just a euphemism for “he’s really hot”), his adaptibility, his no-holds-barred approach to pretty much everything, his sheer intensity in all he feels and does. In real life I suspect he’d be rather tiring to have around, and I’m not sure I could deal with the single-minded attention he concentrates on Buffy or the emotional neediness, but I’ve never gotten hung up on another character in fiction the way I’m hung up on him.
These topics from
goldenusagi.Spuffy
I have kind of a strange relationship with this ship. I originally started reading Spike/Buffy because it was the easiest way to find lots and lots of fic about Spike, who was really the part I was interested in. I think the single biggest reason I’m more or less committed to the ship now is because Spike’s whole character arc is so inextricably bound up with Buffy that I have trouble thinking of him separately. This despite the fact that I don’t really ‘get’ Buffy as a character most of the time. (Redacted: a bunch of whingeing about the portrayal of Buffy in Spuffy fic.)
*scratches head* I don’t think I’m much like the average Spuffy shipper. There are moments I love between them in canon; oddly enough, many of the canonical moments I like the most (the porch scene, everything in “After Life,” the last scene in “Beneath You,”) aren’t primarily ship-oriented. At least, that’s not what I like about them. But then, I’m not primarily ship-oriented, either in fic or in real life.
Hmm, that was a fair number of words that managed to convey not at all why I read Spike/Buffy or why I like watching them in canon. It’s all I’ve got, though. Hmph.
Dawn
Blame it on staying in the junior fiction section of the library for too long, but I often relate to the adolescents in fiction better than to anyone else, and Dawn’s a perfect example. She’s one of those characters that instantly made sense to me: her rocky relationship with Buffy (really, who’d want to be second best to the Slayer?) and her outsider status on the show. But she’s also very much her own person and a girl of action, and she’ll do what she thinks needs to be done, consequences be damned. She’s not always wise in her actions, but her strength is in her personality alone, unlike practically everyone else on the show. (One of the very few things I liked about S7 was “Potential,” especially that wonderful conversation at the end between her and Xander, the other person who never did get any superpowers.)
I also love her brother-sister relationship with Spike, partly because they function on basically the same maturity level - on any given day, it’s a tossup which of them is going to be the drama queen and which one will offer the shoulder to cry on. I love the fact that, with the immunity of youth, she can get away with telling him the truth as she sees it, often without even realizing how odd her perspective is. Wisely or not, she actually likes him, and she’s the first white hat to do so with the possible exception of Joyce.
Mpreg
This topic probably deserves its own post at some point, but here’s the short version: I’m fascinated by the exploration of the divide between body and identity, the feeling that one’s body is out one’s control, and the vulnerability that goes with that. Pregnancy is a special case: it’s one of the few situations where having your body doing all sorts of abnormal, uncomfortable things is considered, well, normal.
But it’s hard to get a really good look at this because it is normal, it’s everyday; of course that’s how we get with new people. Mpreg, on the other hand, throws all the extremes into sharp relief. Assuming you’re in a ficverse where male pregnancy isn’t usual, you suddenly have a character that’s facing not only a whole set of radical, possibly unexpected physical changes, but also on one hand a huge number of potentially contradictory social expections about pregnancy and on the other hand the vacuum of a situation for which there are no expectations. Plus your poor pregnant guy is physically vulnerable in different ways than he’s ever been before; he’s more directly responsible for someone else’s welfare than he’s ever been; he has new physical and maybe emotional needs that he may not be able to meet on his own. And when it’s all over, well, he has a baby to deal with.
Given all that, you have a scenario that’s ripe for all sorts of interesting character conflict, development, and growth. It’s like a highly specialized form of physical hurt/comfort, crossed with gleefully smashed gender roles and an optional side of fluff/schmoop. Unfortunately, like most things, mpreg fic follows Sturgeon’s Law (95% of everything is crap), and since there’s so little of it to begin with, that doesn’t leave much that’s any good. Which is why I had to write my own.
Spike
I’m not even sure where to start, because regardless of what I say I’m going to leave so much out. You have to understand, I love a lot of things about this show, and they don’t all have to do with him. This is Whedon, so of course there are tons of characters I get a kick out of watching: Giles and Oz and Dawn and Cordelia and Andrew, and so on. I stuck through S1, cheesy as it was, without any Spike, and I thoroughly enjoyed S3 (Faith!) even though Spike was only in the one episode. I spent most of S4 and the beginning of S5 being irritated with him, and his mid-S5 stalker act didn’t exactly endear him to me. I hate the stink of cigarettes and have no particular affection for bad boys or leather or bleached blond hair or, generally speaking, sharply defined cheekbones. And yet, and yet...
First I liked Spike because he was cocky and brash and, most importantly, because he was nothing like the Master. I liked him because I saw more genuine affection and care between him and Dru than I ever saw between Buffy and Angel (so, yeah, I was anti-Buffy/Angel long before I realized Buffy/Spike was even a possibility). I liked him because he was awkward (“Have we met?” “You hit me with an axe once.”). I liked him because, whether or not he meant to be, he was funny (Let’s pretend we took a break to re-watch “Lover’s Walk”).
And then I saw “Fool For Love,” and I said, “Oh.” That was the turning point for me, both in regards to the character and to the show. Up to then I’d been entertained; at that point I was committed. As I mention above, I still have my doubts about the Buffy/Spike ship, but I love what it did for him as a character. I love a good redemption arc, and Spike gave it to me in spades, with as much passion and angst as the writers could write and Marsters could act - which was quite a lot, on both counts. I love: his crusty vulnerability, his absolute commitment, his flashes of insight, his moments of idiocy, his furtive tenderness, his physicality (and no, that’s not just a euphemism for “he’s really hot”), his adaptibility, his no-holds-barred approach to pretty much everything, his sheer intensity in all he feels and does. In real life I suspect he’d be rather tiring to have around, and I’m not sure I could deal with the single-minded attention he concentrates on Buffy or the emotional neediness, but I’ve never gotten hung up on another character in fiction the way I’m hung up on him.
