Transgressing with Spike and Buffy

NancyKay Shapiro is a writer who lives in New York City. Her novel, What Love Means To You People, was published in 2004 with Saint Martin’s Press and can be purchased as an ebook for the Kindle and Kindle iPhone app through Amazon.com.

Before I ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I had a history with fandom and fanfic via classic Star Trek, and was certain I’d never return to it again. Not because I’d had a bad experience, but because it felt like a kind of enthusiasm that went with being in my early twenties, never to return.

In the long-ago-and-far-away time before the Internet, before DVDs – before, even, you could buy Star Trek episodes on VHS tape – I watched the show in its 6:00 daily reruns, on a black and white TV. This was against the will of my mother, who wanted to serve dinner sans Spock, and with that of my father, who would stand behind me imitating the whoosh noise the Enterprise’s sliding doors made every time they opened, until I’d turn around and shout at him to Leave Me Alone!

A few years into that, I attended a science fiction convention in Manhattan one summer weekend, and someone who should’ve known better put a fanzine into my 15-year-old hands, and let me buy it. (Ob’zine #1 and 2, my first zines, contained sexually explicit stories and art, most of it slashing Kirk and Spock.) Before my years of obsession with Star Trek were done, I’d written reams of fic that never made it into any zine, and then drifted back to writing novels. “Serious,” “literary” novels.

I missed the Buffy bandwagon by a good few years, only deigning to give the show a try when it first went into syndication in 2001. Even though various friends had recommended it to during the first few years of its run, I thought I wasn’t interested because I perceived it to be campy, or teeny-ish, or sitcom dumb; a perception based on no input beyond seeing a few still photos of Sarah Michelle Gellar and deciding she looked too much like a cousin of mine whose company had annoyed me when I was 14.

The beginning of the show’s syndicated run in New York City occurred at the same time as the destruction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan, an event that left me and everyone else in the city reeling, disrupting all sorts of routines and changing the whole tempo and tenor of daily life for months afterwards. I found myself in a befuddled emotional state – one where, even though I wasn’t personally involved with the violence and destruction and grief, I couldn’t listen to music, had trouble focusing on my usual refuge in books and, other than working, didn’t quite know what to do with my feelings or myself. The early evening showing of Buffy quickly became the event my day hinged on. As if answering some psychic request for More Escapism Please from its New York Metropolitan-area viewers, WPIX soon began running two Buffy eps each weeknight, and I sank into that daily saga with total absorption and rapture. I watched both Season One (in reruns) and Season Six (airing for the first time), even though a number of people suggested I TiVo the new eps and wait until I’d caught up to watch them. I couldn’t wait, and so my introduction to the character of Spike, who was to go on to obsess me for some years, was a little unusual – I saw him first in his gentle guise as Dawn-protector and Welcomer-of-Buffy-Back-from-the-Grave before I ever saw him in his initial Big Bad persona from Season Two.

He at once become my woobie[3]. Spike’s beauty, his grace, his tragic-comic actions and, most of all, his role as a desolate, hopeless and yet unswervingly resolute lover hit my kinks – as we say in fandom – hard.

As his fucked-up anti-romance with Buffy developed on screen in those early episodes of Season Six, my imagination raced ahead, looking for ways to make it functional, to make it all right. Something in my psyche, always attracted to “transgressive” relationships, became intent on inventing a Big Misguided Doomed Romance That Succeeds Against All Odds. That the show’s writers clearly had different ideas imposed an exquisite frustration on me and plenty of other fans who were eager to ‘ship the slayer with Spike – as well as those who were disgusted by the whole subplot.

By the time of the first hiatus of the season, I’d found my way to online fandom (the Buffistas), and, with a freelance gig that left me with a lot of time on my hands at the office and no one looking over my shoulder, I took the plunge into fan fiction. I wanted attention and approbation from the fan community – I wasn’t getting it from that “serious,” “literary” fiction I was struggling with. At the time I was stalled out on my novel-in-progress, so when this inner prompting to write about Spike took hold, I didn’t fight it.

My first foray into Buffy fic was about Spike only, and not Buffy. My job at the time was near Grand Central Station, one of Manhattan’s classic public spaces. I’ve always treasured Grand Central for its stylishness and beaux-arts beauty, and as a sort of portal into New York’s past – suggestive of the work of writers such as John Cheever and John O’Hara, whom I adore. In those raw post 9-11 weeks, I was especially in love with New York City, busted up but unbowed – New York was my woobie too. That love, born out of a sense of how precarious everything was, was at least 50% of the impetus that went into that first Spike story. Starting with an arrival by train at Grand Central Station, I took Spike on a whirlwind tour of Manhattan one cold winter night in 1928, bringing him to some of the spots from that enticing jazz-age time that are most vivid in my imagination – the bohemian streets of Greenwich Village, the public baths that even then were a major cruising spot for gay men, and the segregated nightclubs of Harlem, with lots of slashy, porny, blood-soaked and sentimental Spike-ish doings along the way. “Manhattan Nocturne” was my paean to a precious endangered place, with all its layers of atmosphere and history – as much as to Spike, who, unlike the characters in my stalled novel, was free to do every single appalling thing I could think up for him. I won’t say that writing that fic was cathartic so much as that it filled me with a naughty thrill, not merely that I could put such things down on paper but that I could then post them on the Internet, to be seen by... well, anyone and their grandma. The story was seen, and I was welcomed to the fandom by some active fans who probably thought they were present at the advent of an exciting new dark slash ficcer. Sadly for them, I veered off from that opening gambit straight into the heart of Spike/Buffy, never quite to return so full-throatedly to Spike-as-bad-ass-vampire.

Writing is a lonely business – often I wish I’d chosen a more collaborative art form, though in truth I think the art form chooses the artist – but in the case of fanfic, my readers were wonderfully interactive. On a few occasions we did collaborate, as when I’d revise long fics-in-progress in response to thoughtful feedback received along the way. But mostly I published my fanfic stories in a way that contemporary writers no longer do, but nineteenth century writers did – on the fly, in parts, composing along the way and trusting to the white-hot energy of it to keep the momentum going. Working this way, I was thrilled to find readers who, like those who met the new installments of The Old Curiosity Shop as they came off the boat from England, were eager for each new part. (After the first few stories, I found my way to LiveJournal and began to post my fics in chapters, as I wrote them.) This making-it-up-as-I-went felt like a daring act to me. A big part of the exhilaration of putting out these stories was the showmanship, trusting in my creative subconscious to make the whole thing come together in some unforeseen way at the end. I wrote without a plan or an outline; each tale began from a premise, or a situation, either stemming from the one before it, or in response to some fanfic trope that was going around – such as amnesia, or time travel – but in every case I had to trust to my imagination to give me what I needed when I needed it.

Along with being in dialogue with my readers, I was in dialogue, also, albeit in a one-way fashion, with the writers of Buffy. My long saga about Spike and Buffy, The Bittersweets series, arose from my dissatisfaction with the anti-romance between the two presented on the screen. What if, instead of being a disaster, a shameful secret for Buffy and a big mistake, the relationship between Slayer and vampire could somehow be incorporated into their lives, be out in the open, be challenged continually and coped with? Wouldn’t that be more interesting? I produced a story cycle a couple of novel lengths long out of that idea, because it continually stimulated my narrative kinks. It was no coincidence that my novel was also about a “transgressive” relationship that ultimately succeeds.

While it was Spike who first started “talking” to me in a way that made me want to write, it was that Spike/Buffy romance that fueled most of the subsequent work. I don’t know that I’d have written fanfic about Buffy without that particular spur. It seems unlikely that, had I started watching the show when it first aired, I’d have been moved to write about Buffy/Angel either (though when I did see those episodes, I was 100% bought into the storyline as it unfolded). While I loved watching and thinking about other Joss shows – Angel, Dollhouse, and especially Firefly, which seemed to me to be nearly perfect in many ways – they lacked that unique combination of compelling character and incendiary relationship that made me want to take hold of the characters and move them around myself. I was content to be an observer. Spike functioned for me as a sort of perfect storm of a character, intriguing on multiple levels, irresistible. He came alive in my imagination just as fully as any I’d ever invented for myself. Some of it had to do with his antecedents – he was English (I’m an Anglophile) and a Victorian gentleman (I’m also a nut about Victorian novels). Spike brought me to find a way to write fiction set in the nineteenth century, which was something I’d always wanted to do and couldn’t quite find an impetus for. (The classic Victorian novels are a constant inspiration and re-reading pleasure to me, and I loved a chance to create that atmosphere and play with that sort of language myself). Spike as a character was both extremely strong and extremely malleable – it was possible to make him do all kinds of unlikely things while retaining the essence of his personality, his voice and his manner. I wrote a Spike who was often good, and a human William who definitely wasn’t.

In Buffy, I had a heroine who was so invulnerable and sturdy that I could use her to explore the messiest and most outré emotions. I could make her play out those romantic fantasies that were maybe all the more alluring to me because they came up to the edge of being “Feministically Incorrect” – or occasionally plunged right over.

My stories about Spike, Spike/Buffy, and (in a few cases) Spike/Xander are still available online for all to read[4], so I won’t outline them here. What began as an impulse, spurred by the events unfolding week by week in Season Six, kept burgeoning with each round of attention and encouragement my writings received. The first Spike/Buffy story was a quickie, a sort of inter-episode filler. I thought, having dashed it off, that I was done, but almost immediately I began another that branched off from the first. I’ve been a writer all my life, but I’ve also struggled with avoidance, with feeling stymied, with a tendency to endlessly rework the same patch before moving forward. All of that difficulty evaporated once I plunged into what turned into my fanfic odyssey, a run of some eight years when the narrative impulse around those characters just flowed through me with an ease that was joyful and wildly exhilarating. What made the difference has always had an element of mystery to it, while also being obvious – for the first time as a writer, I didn’t have to importune people to read. My work was in demand. I had an avid audience, and those readers rewarded me with commentaries, responses, recommendations, dialogue, attention. Fanfic brought me camaraderie and community, and friendships that have outlasted my engagement with fandom.

Through this entire wonderful creative period, I didn’t give up on my original novel. A couple of years after I made my online fanfic debut online, I figured out how it needed to end and finished What Love Means To You People, which was published in 2004 with Saint Martin’s Press. The novel was years in the writing and revising, and the publication experience could not have been more different than online fandom – the book received no promotion or critical attention, and was lost in the great sea of unheralded publications. To my great disappointment, my publishers didn’t even give it a paperback edition. It’s no wonder that I continued during this time to put a lot of energy into writing Buffy stories – whenever I finished one, I’d get numerous emails from readers asking me for another. For me as a creative being, there’s nothing more stimulating than the presence of a ready-made audience. I kept on writing as long as the characters kept on challenging me. But once that creative thread unraveled, not even importunate messages from readers could get another story going. I did finish up The Bittersweets Saga with a satisfying and hopeful ending, and, with a strong sense of nostalgia, laid it to rest.

As I write this essay, it seems to me – as it did in those years before I plunged into Buffy – that nothing again could entice me back into writing fan fiction. But among the many self-discoveries I made during my time of Spike-obsession, I’ve learned to embrace never-say-never. Another character (and fictional world) as compelling as Spike may come along, and seize me by the scruff of my imagination. I doubt it. I’m not looking for him. But if such a situation comes along, I won’t resist.

[3]Per tvtropes.org, a woobie, named for a child’s security blanket, is that character you want to give a big hug, wrap in a blanket and feed soup to when he or she suffers so very beautifully. Woobification of a character is a curious, audience-driven phenomenon, divorced almost entirely from the character’s canonical morality.

[4]www.echonyc.com/%7Estax/Buffy/herself/index.htm