For the Spuffy fen...

[elisi]

‘Shadow Puppets’ issue 1 gives us what four issues of s8 haven’t.

Spike is weighing the options for and against going to Japan and taking out the new Smile Time puppets:



See? One line: ‘What if there’s an impromptu reunion with the Slayer while I’m away?’

It doesn’t stop him from going. I doubt she’ll be mentioned *at all* in the story to come. I *expect* Spike to hit on every hot-looking girl he comes across (and sleep with them if he can). But - we know that he thinks about Buffy. He might not imagine that he can actually ever have a future with her, and he might not ever try to look her up, but he does dream. She’s a part of his world, of his hopes for the future, whether those hopes become reality or not.

And none of this in any way compares to Buffy’s threesome fantasy. *That* was about sex - and heck, she had fantasies about sex with Spike before she slept with him. It tells us nothing about what she thinks or feels for either of the vampires in question, beyond the fact that she’d like to sleep with them again (and that she’s horny. That she loves them I’m taken as understood). Does she miss Spike? Mourn him? Does she even know he’s alive? Does she ponder a reunion, even if she’d not actually seek one out? We don’t know.

One line. One line is all it’d take. I don’t need a resolution, I don’t need a meeting or buckets of tears. Actually I'd really dislike buckets of tears. All I want is an acknowledgement that Spike matters(/mattered) to Buffy.

And what have I got? Buffy misses Teh Sex. *sigh* I much, much prefer the Buffy who’s dating The Immortal. At least she's getting some.

Comments

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I totally agree that there needs to be something in S8 that acknowledges that Spike mattered to Buffy. (Like you, I don't need a big reunion. Indeed, I kind of like them both going on with their own lives.) But I'm not totally convinced that we aren't going to get some sort of mention. Spike is *conspicuously* absent. We have that whole page of Buffy's dreamspace filled with pivotal people/moments in her life. Angel, Riley, Joyce, Dawn, the Scoobies, Tara, Faith... Spike isn't there. There's no plausible world in which Spike doesn't figure into Buffy's life in a big way, Spuffy or no Spuffy. So I'm leaving room for the absence to turn out to be significant one way or another.

You could be right about Joss -- that somehow he went from the kind of writer who could create the complex Buffyverse in which characters develop in an intelligible way to a writer who is just mocking the various ships and going his own way regardless of the history of the characters he created and developed -- but I'll need to see more before I can draw that conclusion.

Meanwhile, I get my copy of Shadow Puppets today and I'm excited. Asylum was great!

[elisi]

So I'm leaving room for the absence to turn out to be significant one way or another.
Lord I hope so! But I'm not holding my breath...

a writer who is just mocking the various ships and going his own way regardless of the history of the characters he created and developed
I don't mind mocking particularly ("I signalled her with my eyes" is one of the funniest lines *ever*!), and I can certainly understand wanting to avoid anything that smacks of shipping - it'd just be nice to get a tiny nod.

I'll need to see more before I can draw that conclusion.
Well let's see where we stand in a year's time, yeah? (The fact that the story moves so slowly really is a problem.)

I get my copy of Shadow Puppets today and I'm excited. Asylum was great!
Yay! I loved Asylum too, and this one looks just as great. :D