Oh, wow! Dragon comment! Thanks so much for writing this, because I have to say that it completely made my day when I received it this morning. I value analysis quite a lot more than squee, so it's really a massive gift. I would love to ramble back at you about some things, so I hope you don't mind - I'm so greedy for more of your thoughts and impressions.
I really like the way that my Buffy came across to you, because that's exactly how I see her - while I don't think she's quite got the geeky smarts the that Willow and Dawn have (in Dawn's case somewhat hidden behind slacking), I think Buffy is a very intelligent woman and above all socially intelligent. If you give her the chance, I think she's exceptionally good at reading a situation and working out how to best position herself in it - obviously in battle scenes, but also from what we see of her pre-slayer days as a social butterfly. She sticks out like a sore-thumb when she patrols with the Initiative, but in the meeting about the polgara demon she actually gets all the soldiers on her side. (And in terms of pattern-spotting, I always think about her 'we haven't had B in forever' during SAT prep - sure, it's not a response to the actual question, but it's a fairly savvy way of looking at how tests work.) So I don't actually think she should be doomed to continuously make mistakes about her life (like Joss seems to think?), and given the time, support and resources I think she's fairly set to drag herself out of bad situations on her own with the power of self-assessment and determination. Hence fic!
I mean, I think you're absolutely right about the Buffy half and the slayer half of Buffy, which I would say ties into what I was trying to get at in the broadest terms of what the fic's about, which is Buffy coming back to life. I don't actually think you've missed much of what I was trying to throw around about life and death etc, but this was mostly supposed to be an exploration of Spuffy (what with this being seasonal_spuffy) and kind of a response to recent trends in meta about them. The prequel to this, in broad, sketchy terms, I saw as being about Buffy realising that Spike's love for her didn't come from a bad place, so wanting to be in a relationship with him wasn't necessarily a bad thing, while this fic was more about the nature of Spike himself. Several people seem to go with the idea that Spike represents, to whatever extent, Buffy's sense of being dead (or at least that's how I interpret it) - and I think the show suppports that to a certain degree, especially when they have Spike trying to get Buffy to stay in the dark with him and in As You Were, when Buffy leaving the crypt and her relationship with Spike is all about her walking into the sunlight and basically a priamel to the moment with Dawn in Grave. However, I also think that the flip side to that sort of psychological analysis is that Spike actually is his own character as well, with a personality, and as a Spuffy shipper I tend to think that Buffy's attracted to that personality, and that that comes into conflict with the idea that all he represents is her death.
So where I started with this fic, then, is Buffy waking up at the watershed (though she doesn't explicitly recognise this) of her feeling alive again. I never got her to fully analyse her dream, because I didn't think it would be realistic for her to think about it in that detail, but from my perspective what that dream was about was Buffy, through her aliveness - and therefore heat - finally destroying the idea of herself as a dead body, which dream!Spike was filling in for/trying to convince her of. Of course, Buffy hasn't dumped Spike and walked out into the sunshine this time, so she's left with the problem where, psychologically, she feels at odds with Spike in so far as he represents her being dead, even though the attraction she feels to him as a person is still there. Their reconciliation (ahem) over the course of the fic is about Buffy moving on from the idea of Spike as Death and accepting that he's just Spike (who is dead).
(There's also the continuing motif of time that I carried over from the last fic, where basically Buffy's leavening depression and reintegration into the world is measured by her growing awareness of how time works and being able to keep up with the world. It's not really relevant to anything you mentioned, but it's the other driving theme apart from the life/death stuff.)
I tend to write in response to what I'm reading, so, actually the lack of emotional distance is somewhat about that as well... Heh. I'm still massively interested in communication over differences and distance, but I think the trends in what I'm reading has changed - whereas before there seemed to be a lot of stuff pushing the idea that communication was easy and you can straightforwardly get to a happy ending and Buffy and Spike will go over their whole past and what's happened and end on an 'I love you' etc. etc, what I've been coming across over the last few years is more angst and/or the idea that Buffy and Spike can't communicate verbally, so have to do it through actions, either successfully or not. So, while before I found myseslf interested in pushing for realism and asking the question of how and where and why would communication fail, I've recently been more and more hungry for (a) happy endings, but also (b) actual spoken communication between the two of them where complicated issues get thrashed out in a way that actions could never even attempt to cover them. This series was in fact inspired by the oldskool S6 fics that did use to be 10,000 words of Buffy and Spike discussing the nature of the soul. I miss that stuff! Just like you, I think people tend to write shorter things these days, with most of the actual tension in the fic left for the readers to imagine themselves, whereas I'm finally getting round to writing everything that I couldn't back when it was cool...
Of course, then there's Kate, who was mostly self-indulgence, because if I had my way I would be able to cut Willow and Xander out of Buffy's world with a clear conscience and just write about Tara, Anya and Dawn. But I'm not sure that's realistic, so I just introduce people/crossover with Angel so that there's a reason why the heavy stuff has to be carried by someone other than Buffy's supposed best friends. Heh.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
2012-02-16 18:51 (UTC)I really like the way that my Buffy came across to you, because that's exactly how I see her - while I don't think she's quite got the geeky smarts the that Willow and Dawn have (in Dawn's case somewhat hidden behind slacking), I think Buffy is a very intelligent woman and above all socially intelligent. If you give her the chance, I think she's exceptionally good at reading a situation and working out how to best position herself in it - obviously in battle scenes, but also from what we see of her pre-slayer days as a social butterfly. She sticks out like a sore-thumb when she patrols with the Initiative, but in the meeting about the polgara demon she actually gets all the soldiers on her side. (And in terms of pattern-spotting, I always think about her 'we haven't had B in forever' during SAT prep - sure, it's not a response to the actual question, but it's a fairly savvy way of looking at how tests work.) So I don't actually think she should be doomed to continuously make mistakes about her life (like Joss seems to think?), and given the time, support and resources I think she's fairly set to drag herself out of bad situations on her own with the power of self-assessment and determination. Hence fic!
I mean, I think you're absolutely right about the Buffy half and the slayer half of Buffy, which I would say ties into what I was trying to get at in the broadest terms of what the fic's about, which is Buffy coming back to life. I don't actually think you've missed much of what I was trying to throw around about life and death etc, but this was mostly supposed to be an exploration of Spuffy (what with this being
So where I started with this fic, then, is Buffy waking up at the watershed (though she doesn't explicitly recognise this) of her feeling alive again. I never got her to fully analyse her dream, because I didn't think it would be realistic for her to think about it in that detail, but from my perspective what that dream was about was Buffy, through her aliveness - and therefore heat - finally destroying the idea of herself as a dead body, which dream!Spike was filling in for/trying to convince her of. Of course, Buffy hasn't dumped Spike and walked out into the sunshine this time, so she's left with the problem where, psychologically, she feels at odds with Spike in so far as he represents her being dead, even though the attraction she feels to him as a person is still there. Their reconciliation (ahem) over the course of the fic is about Buffy moving on from the idea of Spike as Death and accepting that he's just Spike (who is dead).
(There's also the continuing motif of time that I carried over from the last fic, where basically Buffy's leavening depression and reintegration into the world is measured by her growing awareness of how time works and being able to keep up with the world. It's not really relevant to anything you mentioned, but it's the other driving theme apart from the life/death stuff.)
I tend to write in response to what I'm reading, so, actually the lack of emotional distance is somewhat about that as well... Heh. I'm still massively interested in communication over differences and distance, but I think the trends in what I'm reading has changed - whereas before there seemed to be a lot of stuff pushing the idea that communication was easy and you can straightforwardly get to a happy ending and Buffy and Spike will go over their whole past and what's happened and end on an 'I love you' etc. etc, what I've been coming across over the last few years is more angst and/or the idea that Buffy and Spike can't communicate verbally, so have to do it through actions, either successfully or not. So, while before I found myseslf interested in pushing for realism and asking the question of how and where and why would communication fail, I've recently been more and more hungry for (a) happy endings, but also (b) actual spoken communication between the two of them where complicated issues get thrashed out in a way that actions could never even attempt to cover them. This series was in fact inspired by the oldskool S6 fics that did use to be 10,000 words of Buffy and Spike discussing the nature of the soul. I miss that stuff! Just like you, I think people tend to write shorter things these days, with most of the actual tension in the fic left for the readers to imagine themselves, whereas I'm finally getting round to writing everything that I couldn't back when it was cool...
Of course, then there's Kate, who was mostly self-indulgence, because if I had my way I would be able to cut Willow and Xander out of Buffy's world with a clear conscience and just write about Tara, Anya and Dawn. But I'm not sure that's realistic, so I just introduce people/crossover with Angel so that there's a reason why the heavy stuff has to be carried by someone other than Buffy's supposed best friends. Heh.