Bugbear: An object of dread, esp. of needless dread; an imaginary terror. In weakened senses: an annoyance, bane, thorn in the flesh.
I re-watched Lies My Parents Told Me today. This is a very difficult episode for me for several reasons, not least of which is that wretched bloody tune – I was brought up in a household that believes Percy Grainger should have been strangled at birth, and running the risk of having Early One Morning stuck in my head for a month is never a pleasant experience. But as anyone who knows me knows, the main reason I fear Lies is because it was the point at which it finally became impossible to pretend Dru siring Spike wasn’t canon.
It’s funny how much that matters to me – still. It’s three years since I saw Fool for Love, and yet I am still by no means reconciled to the canon change. I reckon I never will be. The show has often tossed out the odd tedious or downright bad episode, but this change of canon was the only thing in the whole run of seasons that ever truly upset me. And I still don’t really know why.
I don’t talk about it often any more, because I am aware that I became a complete bore on the subject, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring – I still care as much as I ever did. I hate them for it. If by some bizarre chance I were ever to meet Joss in the flesh it would be the one thing I would most want to ask him about. (Though whether or not I would dare is another matter.) Why? Why does it matter so much to me? People – brave people since they risk setting me off – have occasionally asked. I feel it is about time I actually examined my feelings on this subject and tried to understand them. I have tried to analyse it on numerous occasions and always failed to pin down what makes me hate the change so much. Let me see if I can do a bit better this time. If you are interested then bear with me.
So, this for me is the crunch issue – the one that mattered most to me in the course of 254 episodes. They changed the canon in a way that was more fundamental and far reaching than any other mistake or intentional change they made before or after. There have been other canon changes that irritated – I disliked them having changed when Spike found out he had the chip for example – but small stuff like that is annoying for a single episode, at most two, and then it doesn’t matter ever again. So undoubtedly one of my big problems with them having changed who sired Spike is that it is so fundamental it then had to be rubbed home again and again and again. The constant repetitions in Angel Season 5 became almost too much to bear at times, although maybe the repeated aversion therapy will eventually be good for me.
But that just makes the problem for me worse, it doesn’t explain why I have such a problem with the whole notion, especially since I had this problem right from the moment the change became apparent, and that was a full two years before the scene in Lies took away the convenient FFL loophole (that we never saw the actual feeding) and meant the siring change was being rammed home irrevocably.
To start, let me be frank and acknowledge my feelings are partly so strong because I am being consistent with a stand I first took when I came on the internet and got involved in some quite vicious arguments with some very unpleasant people about the exact nature of the canon change. A position I have had to defend is obviously one I am going to continue to care about long after the disputes are past. But I arrived on the net with this attitude, it wasn’t something I picked up online so it doesn’t explain the origin of my feelings.
Partly my hatred stems from a strong dislike for the Oedipal implications of Dru being his sire – call me prejudiced, but I find it a huge turn off and just can’t get into enjoying that aspect. I do see that it could be an interesting angle, indeed if they had stated Dru was his sire from the start I might well have learnt to overcome my dislike and find the interest in that side – it is after all I something I occasionally play with in my fic, either that way round or with the ‘Daddy’ aspects of Dru’s relationship to Spike. But to claim that was the real source of the matter would be disingenuous – I disliked the notion long before I even realised there were Oedipal implications
Partly it may be the old business of slash and a feeling that changing it from Angelus to Dru was an example of network-inspired homophobia. But then again, I am not actually that twitchy about homophobia – don’t get me wrong, I think homophobes are prats and the world would be better off without them, but I am not actually very alert to homophobic insults so I rarely notice them unless they are pointed out by a third party. I certainly didn’t spot the homophobic implications in changing the siring until long after I knew I hated the change. If I could be bothered to care about the slight lingering aftertaste of homophobia in as pro-homosexual a TV show as Buffy then I would care, but really life is too short.
Again, partly I dislike the implications for slash of them having changed it. This of course is the thing that affects me most now, since I write fanfic – they changed the canon I write and I do dislike that everything I now write is officially AU. I get enormous pleasure from weaving in strands of canon and I am unhappy that nothing I write from now on can really include any of the flashback scenes in either Lies or Destiny without contradicting my own established ‘Peasantverse’ canon. But yet again, this a recent development – and I hated the canon change long before it applied.
What then is the one consistent thing? What was it that I felt way back when I first got a sniff of the canon change?
The first hint I picked up was back when I read The Watcher’s Guide, which made mention of it long before the change was implemented on the show, and which I read before I even had internet access or knew about fan fic, slash or any of that stuff. Oh and I knew nothing of Fool for Love at that stage, my viewing was somewhere around Season 3. But I can remember my first reaction when I read the problem line:
- [speaking about Season 2 and specifically ] …the audience learns that Angel sired Drusilla, who, in turn, sired Spike – which makes Angel Spike’s grandsire.
Now of course the audience had learnt nothing of the sort – I was there and I watched it, and since Spike had referred to Angel as Sire and we had learnt a few episodes later that Angel was Dru’s sire, what the audience had in fact learnt was that Dru and Spike were vamp brother and sister. So I can remember being very confused when I read that line in the Watcher’s Guide. I can remember feeling cross that the book had been so badly researched. And then I forgot about it. But that must be closest to my true reaction to the whole notion of the sire change – it is nothing to do with Oedipal complexes, or homophobia, or the implications for my writing and slash – because not one of those things occurred to me back then.
So what is it to do with?
I hate it because it diminished the brother/sister pairing of Spike/Dru which I thought of then and think of still as one of the most powerful pairings on the show. I hate it because it changed Spike from someone who cared for his mad, weaker sister into someone who was just blindly following his sire.
I hate it because it changed the hero-worship of Spike for his sire, Angelus, into a naff love rivalry for Dru’s heart. Because it changed Spike from having a strong sire into having a weak one – which was all part of the weakening of the character that happened as the series progressed.
But most of all I hate it because I feel cheated by the writers – I feel that they didn’t think anyone was concentrating enough to notice. That they could slip the change past for their own convenience and it just didn’t matter. That they thought we weren’t fans enough to care.
I care. I cared like mad. Three years after they did it I still care like mad. I have a horrible feeling that I’m never going to stop caring.
It’s a bit daft really, but there you are.