Rants and Reasons

Angelus Sired Spike

I know that this is a big one for a lot of people, so be here due and fairly warned that for most of my fiction it is a basic assumption that Angelus is considered to be Spike’s sire and it may well not be explained. There are exceptions, and sometimes the question is left vague, but generally I do not feel the need to give details.

I of course began writing ASS because that was the canon in those days. Then after Fool for Love there were still sufficient loopholes that I was happy to continue. I prefer the relationship it puts the characters in as regards each other, and besides quite frankly the Oedipal implications of Dru being his sire strike me as gross. However, there is very deliberately room for leeway in my stories, and differing interpretation of the facts.

If you are one of those who gets physically violent at the suggestion that Angelus turned Spike then be reassured that I have never and until Joss Whedon sees sense I will never say out and out that Angelus made him. But in every way that matters, Angelus is Spike’s sire in my stories. And of course what the characters may say is an entirely different question. If you don’t like this then you are in the wrong place, please move along quietly.

Angelus’s

Angelus’s is the possessive of Angelus, because that is what you would say. I don’t care that just about every other fan fiction writer on the planet writes Angelus’. They are wrong.

Aurelius

Is it a surname, is it an order, or is it both, neither or what? Well actually it is the name of a Roman Emperor and several other prominent Roman citizens; however, I doubt that was what Joss had in mind. The Order of Aurelius was first mentioned in Season One when it was simply stated that the clutch of ugly vamps sent to fetch the Anointed One home were members (Never Kill A Boy On The First Date). But the convention quickly sprang up that the Order was somehow related to the Master’s own bloodline and he was its head. This was confirmed much later (Darla).

I have taken the view that any vampire of the bloodline would be called an Aurelian, but that they could only consider themselves as part of the Order of Aurelius after being formally accepted by the head. So the Order is an elite group of selected vamps (possibly including some from outside the actual bloodline), while the bloodline is just the family. Thus I have assumed that Spike knew from an early age that he was an Aurelian, but needn’t have heard of the Order until later. And since the Master once described Angelus as the most vicious creature he ever met, they must have become properly acquainted some time after the unfortunate exchange of insults in a London sewer. So I have assumed that Angelus returned and was accepted into the Order later on, perhaps some time after Darla abandoned him in that flaming barn.

Birthdays and Deathdays

Fanon often mentions a vampires’s ‘Deathday’ as some sort of fanged equivalent to a Birthday. I don’t because it makes no sense to me. Canon is very clear that the night the human dies is not the same as the night the vampire rises, and it seems to me that if they celebrated anything they would celebrate rising not dying.

This raises the interesting question of how long it takes before a vampire does rise. We have seen numerous examples and the only answer seems to be ‘it depends’, but we have no idea what it depends on. Some vampires evidently rise quite quickly – Andrew Borba rose the next night (Never Kill A Boy On The First Date) so did Darla (Reunion). Others stay dead long enough to be buried, and it would be exceptional to organise a funeral in less than a few days (numerous instances, but for example Holden in Conversations With Dead People). But it does appear that vampires themselves understand what makes the difference. Firstly there is the fact that Angel, having watched Dru vamp Darla, knew that she would be rising sometime before sunrise on the next night. Then there are the group of fledglings Spike made which all rose within a few seconds of one another (Sleeper). Now unless Spike worked ridiculously fast (and we saw him hunting slowly and carefully so we know he didn’t) he did not kill all those people on the same night, yet somehow they all rose together. It is in fact not unreasonable to suppose that he had some means of affecting just when they would rise.

As regards my own stories, I settled on a delay of three nights for William. This would give just enough time for an exceptionally fast burial (a week was the norm at that date) without seeming much slower than canon seems to imply. I also had to specify a date. I knew it needed to be early in the year since it must have taken William some time to change into the little firebrand we saw in the mine scene, and I wanted as many months to play with as possible. I also like the metaphor of him being made in the spring. Then by the time I wrote ‘Wild Demonic Fauna’ I had settled on April 1st for his birthday, because it amuses me, which would mean in my canon he died on 29th March 1880. Then, to my enormous satisfaction, in Lies My Parents Told Me Dru mentions that William’s house smells of daffodils, and in the 1880s daffodils would indeed have flowered in late March and April.

Boy

There is much dispute about using the term childe in fan fiction – the purists maintaining that it is not canon (they may actually be wrong, see below). I am happy to use childe, but there is a word that could have a higher claim to be the valid Jossyverse term for a vampire sired by another vampire, and that is boy.

Boy seems to be a fairly common, mildly insulting term amongst the vampires for any other male they consider themselves superior to: for example Angel and Spike have both called Riley boy (The Yoko Factor; Buffy vs. Dracula). But, importantly, Spike has been referred to as boy or my boy on several occasions by both Angel and Dru (Innocence; Becoming, Part 2; Crush); Darla called Angelus my boy, dear boy and darling boy (Dear Boy; Offspring) and Dru my girl (Redefinition); while Spike referred to Lawson as Your new boy (Why We Fight). It has not been definitively proved, but a reasonable case could therefore be made that a vampire is referred to by his sire as his or her boy – or girl – rather than as childe.

Childe and Childer

A childe is the vampire equivalent of a child. Angelus is Darla’s childe. The extra E is a useful device for distinguishing the two words, and a common convention among fan fiction writers. In fact childe is just an older spelling of child and since they are pronounced the same we conveniently can’t tell the difference on a television show. The conventional plural for childe is childer, which again is in fact just an old English grammatical form. The word childer has never been used on the show while children has been, I therefore try not to use childer, although at times it is unavoidable.

It is rather unclear if the word childe is canon. There have been several possible uses of child/e and children, but flaws can be found with all of them. I would say that the balance of probability is that it’s canon, but others will quibble. The Master referred to the Anointed as either child or childe (Angel), but the Anointed is rather a special case since he was a child by normal standards. Dracula promised Xander he would make him ‘A child of darkness that feeds on life itself… on blood.’ (Buffy vs. Dracula) but again this could just be exceptional use of poetic twaddle. The Master once referred to his children (Angel), though he could well have been being ironic. Angelus also called James and Elisabeth children (Heartthrob) and in one shooting script (Sleeper) the young vampires are referred to as their sire’s children – although a shooting script hardly counts as canon.

All of which is all very well, but the fact remains that whatever the theory one needs some word to describe a vampire made by another vampire and childe is the one I have settled on. I am aware this annoys some people.

Clan

Convention, if not Joss Whedon, dictates that clan is the collective noun for demons. For further waffle on this topic see the entry for gang.

A Crying Shame

Right, this has really started to annoy me, if I read another fiction in which vampires cry tears with blood in them I am going to get my pitchfork out. In the Jossyverse, vamps cry perfectly normal tears. We have seen them do so on several occasions: Angel piping his eye when that actress gave him the champagne (must have been a poor vintage), comes to mind as a good example (Eternity). So what idiot dreamt this idea up? It is completely gross apart from anything else. Spread the word: Jossy vamps don’t cry blood.

Darla

Darla may have been dying in the New World, but – as I was surprised to realise when I worked it out – she must have been born in the Old. Jamestown was the first successful settlement in North America, founded in 1607, and the first women settlers did not arrive until several months later, so Darla could have been in America for only a year or so at the most. All previous attempts at settlement had failed very quickly, and there is no record of anyone having been born in the early failed colonies who returned home and lived to adulthood. Darla, then, must have been Old World. And since all the early Jamestown settlers were English it is safe to assume that she was as well. The majority of the early settlers came from London or East Anglia, although at least one is known to have been Cornish.

Life in the early Jamestown was a harsh struggle for survival, and the colonists teetered on the brink of failure until matters were taken draconically in hand some time after Darla died. Indeed the surprise is not that she died but that anyone lived at all. Of the five hundred people who went out in the first ten years only sixty survived. And there are reports that they were reduced to cannibalism to do so.

Darla was Catholic, and the colony was notoriously Protestant, at a time when Catholics were the bogy-men of their day. But intriguingly the latest archaeological finds do include rosary beads and part of a crucifix, so there was at least one closet Catholic amongst the settlers.

Most of the women settlers went out as wives or daughters, so what was Darla doing there as a single woman? Well perhaps she went out as somebody’s wife and after his death turned to prostitution. This would put her status in a new light. Certainly, however she had lived back in England, it is impossible to countenance the notion of a prostitute living and plying her trade in a ‘professional’ organised manner in the colony. Darla would have had to live the life and perform the conventional work expected of any female colonist.

Drusilla

Her name is spelt Drusilla in the shooting scripts. Not Drucilla as some writers have it. A small pet peeve of mine. Drusilla is unlikely to have been her name when she was human though, it was hardly common and the most famous owner of that name – the sister of the Roman Emperor Caligula – had a less than savoury reputation in the nineteenth century, although modern opinion now considers both her and her brother in a better light.

People may tell you that Dru was sired in 1860 – people haven’t been concentrating. We don’t actually know when she was sired, we do know that she was still alive in 1860 (Becoming, Part 1), but consider for a moment what Angelus actually did to her First I made her insane. Killed everybody she loved. Visited every mental torture on her I could devise. She eventually fled to a convent, and on the day she took her holy orders, I turned her into a demon. (Lie to Me). Why assume that this only took a few weeks or months? It seems more likely to me that Angelus spent years over his obsession and that Dru was in fact turned at some later date.

The future vampire Drusilla was English, and her accent is a London one, far closer to the true Cockney than Spike’s, and in her case this was her accent when she was alive (Becoming, Part 1). The glimpse we caught of her family show they were reasonably well dressed, so combined with her accent that would most likely make her father a skilled artisan. Since her vision was about a mining accident he was possibly employed in some skilled work associated with the mine. Which would have given Drusilla a comfortable if not luxurious childhood.

There are mines in Southern England, notably the coal mines in Kent, and nearer still to London the chalk mines at Chislehurst, near Crystal Palace, on the outskirts of London. (Chalk was an important ingredient for many industrial processes in the nineteenth century.) Her father could have easily worked at either of these with the family living close enough to London to explain how Angelus and Darla spotted them there. This was after all the Victorian era – when commuting was invented.

Eternally Young

Vampires stay young and beautiful. They are renowned for it. Things change, Angel said. Not us. Not vampires, Spike replied hotly (School Hard). Except that of course for Jossyverse vamps it isn’t actually true: the Master and Kaikistos both show that a vamp can grow as old and ugly as the best of us, and even Dracula was a little long in the tooth. Which means that for the Jossyverse not even the eternally youthful actually keep their looks – a dry comment from Mr Whedon on Hollywood values, perhaps?

It is worth bearing in mind though that while the Master had apparently lost his looks by the age of two hundred odd (Darla), at four hundred Darla still hadn’t developed a bat nose yet. There is clearly no hard and fast rule for how vampires age.

Fanon or Canon

First off, I consider the canon of the show to be what we have seen on the show, not ‘what we have seen on the show plus all sorts of random facts picked up from interviews and books’. But throughout this list you will see me explaining terms that are not canon to the Jossyverse, but which I insist on using anyway. Some are common to many fan fiction writers (and hence known as fanon) and some are my own invention. But why do I use them at all? Well quite simply because I need to. Discussions about the acceptability of childe and the like are fine in theory, but when you are sitting down to write a story about vampires you need to use some word. And since, for example, I am averse to writing out ‘Those I have sired’ quite every time, I have had to settle.

Fledgling

Fledgling is the term for a young vampire. This is another of those conventions that everybody except Joss Whedon seems to know about. However, the interesting question of how long a vampire would be considered a fledgling for is more open to dispute. Most of my writing is based around the premise that it would take a very long time to become a skilled vampire, so I consider fledglinghood to be quite lengthy. Many, many years in fact. In many ways, one might consider Spike’s killing of his first Slayer as a useful point to call the end of his fledglinghood. When Angelus agreed that he was now ‘One of us.’ That was in 1900, when he was twenty, which feels about right to me, though presumably most fledglings would come of age in a more mundane fashion; I don’t think we have some sort of vamp equivalent of killing your first elephant here. At least I hope not, for Buffy’s sake.

From the Diaphragm

In Bring On The Night the Ubervamp attempted to drown Spike, and while it obviously didn’t kill him, it did cause a lot of distress. This is interesting because common sense would tell us that vampires, who don’t need to breathe, shouldn’t mind a little drowning between demons. However, closer observation has also shown that vampires do breathe (mainly because actors need to) and fortunately human physiology provides a convenient explanation for this. Breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system – in other words it occurs regardless of conscious control, so that while we can make an effort and stop breathing we don’t need to make an effort to breathe. It all just happens.

And it appears that vampires make the same distinction. When they need to, they can not be breathing oxygen and it doesn’t hurt them (Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight, Why We Fight) but as a matter of course they will breathe continuously and even pant when ‘out of breath’ from exertion (Intervention). And from the evidence of Bring On The Night we can now say that it is distinctly painful to them to have insufficient air in their lungs, even if that air needn’t necessarily be fit for a human to breathe. This, incidentally, puts paid to all those ‘unnecessary breaths’ that vampires will take at interesting moments in fanfic, since the breaths are actually occurring all the time anyway.

There remains the interesting question of why Spike was so silly as to let out the air he initially had when the Ubervamp stuck his head under the water. Spike, who smokes and at least in some senses can sing, should have had the control to not let it out. But then we never did see the start of that playground bullying, so perhaps one of the Ubervamp’s kicks deliberately drove the air out of Spike’s lungs before they started.

One final thought. If breathing is autonomic then it might explain the effectiveness of the neck-hold which vamps seem to use as their domination grip of choice both amongst themselves and on humans. A behaviour which is clearly pretty ancient since Ubervamp did it no less than three times in the course of Bring On The Night.

Gang

What is the collective noun for vampires? This is one of the small but impenetrable mysteries of the Jossyverse. The word that seems to have been mentioned the most is gang, but what exactly constitutes a gang? Is it a sire and his childer and their childer; a group of unrelated vamps who happen to live together; a sire, some childer and other unrelated minions… The possibilities are endless. The closest we have had to a description was Harmony’s gang, which contained one childe of hers and a bunch of presumably unrelated other vampires. But was that typical? Harmony is hardly the epitome of vampire normality.

As usual with these problems, when I don’t know the answer, I make it up. (That’s why it is called fiction, after all.) So I use family for the blood relations only (Aurelians in most instances), and gang for the family plus its wider group of minions. Unless I’m feeling poetic or bludgeoning a metaphor to death, when I sometimes use a word like pack. Clan I tend to use as a more pompous alternative to gang, for formal situations, and especially when referring to demons other than vampires.

Grandsire

Logic tells us that if vampire A, who made a vampire B, is B’s sire, then the vamp who made A must be B’s grandsire. Then Joss Whedon got involved.

They never admit it of course, but the problem arises because they changed who they wanted as Spike’s sire from Angelus to Drusilla. Only Spike had already been heard to refer to Angel as his sire, twice. Fortunately for them the term grandsire had never been used on the show, so to try to clear up the mess he had made of the canon Joss announced that sire referred to any vampire senior in the blood line, as vampires had no such term as grandsire. Yes, Mr Whedon. Of course, Mr Whedon. Pull the other one, Mr Whedon.

Now, this raised an important point for fan fiction writers, because grandsire became not merely fanon, to be used according to whim (as is the case with terms such as fledgling or childe) but actively disapproved of by the powers that be. And as such could never be used of Angel with regard to Spike since you either bought the rewrite, in which case the term ‘doesn’t exist’, or you didn’t buy the rewrite, in which case Angel was his sire in the normal sense. In either case the word grandsire shouldn’t be used.

That was the situation until Just Rewards when, you guessed it, Spike blandly said grandsire. At which point I screamed. And apart from revealing that nobody at Mutant Enemy has read this page (I’m gutted), quite where this leaves us all is anybody’s guess. If any sane person can come up with a logical explanation that covers all bases I will be pleased to hear from them.

A Grave Conundrum

Here is a puzzling thing. In When She Was Bad the vampires being forced to dig up the Master’s bones complained that their hands were catching fire because the ground was consecrated. Since all the ground in any cemetery or graveyard is consecrated, why do vampires not burn up when they dig themselves out of their graves? Or, for that matter, why doesn’t Spike go up like a torch every time he touches the floor of his crypt?

Informed pedological opinion (Indri) has revealed that if the grave were saturated with holy water at the time of the Master’s burial and it rained very little over the summer and the soil type were, say, thick clay of low porosity, then this could explain why it still burnt the exhuming vampires.

Informed thaumaturgical opinion (Helen) has revealed that the associative nature of magic is such that a deliberate act intended to keep vampires away from that grave might well produce results whilst the more general consecration did not.

Ferreting in obscure reference books (Peasant) has revealed that not all the ground in a graveyard is always consecrated, the north side of a churchyard frequently being left as unconsecrated ground. And American cemeteries may not be consecrated at all in the normal run of events.

Hairy Questions

Do vampires need to shave? Ah, the eternal mystery… Well there are at least two small pieces of evidence which show that for the Jossyverse, the answer is yes. The first is that in the 1838 flashback scene Angelus was shown with a rather egregious moustache, which he most certainly did not have on the day he died. The second is the mysterious ponytail that Spike was sporting in China. (Why? The best minds can only suggest that he did not trust Chinese barbers.) Of course, this does not answer the question, which Angel once refused to respond to, of how vampires shave, but it does prove that not only must vampires’ hair grow, but also that they have no common sense regarding its styling. Mind you, Angel has been demonstrating that last fact for two hundred and forty years straight.

Jossed

Jossed: verb, intransitive – to have an established fact of a TV show’s canon yanked from under ones feet by the uncaring writers. Named after Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I used to take great pride in how closely my stories dovetailed with canon, but the inevitable result of writing fanfic for a show that was still airing new episodes was that sooner or later my guesses of how the gaps were filled in were bound to be proved wrong. I can feel pleased that I got some things right, but the fact remains that my stories have been seriously jossed. This left me with the decision of whether to try and ignore my own early canon to try and incorporate Joss Whedon’s, or to plump for internal consistency and follow my own furrow. The later is of course what I have decided to do, and while I am aware that several things now jar with later episodes of the show, it is not a decision I regret.

Jossyverse

The world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, so named in honour of its creator, the all-powerful Joss Whedon, before whom we must bow down in awe. Remarkably similar to our own world, except that they have vampires, demons, Slayers, and magic. Chocolate probably tastes nicer as well.

Keep the Noise Down

In my stories vampires growl, snarl, purr, and generally sound like a wildlife documentary on acid. I have been accused of making this range of sounds up, but they have all occurred at some time on the show. Especially in the early seasons when the vamps were heard making such noises all the time. Angelus snarling and growling at wolf Oz is perhaps the clearest example of the beastly side of our fangy friends (Phases).

For some reason that I have never grasped, people frequently claim that purring is not canon to the Jossyverse. Well it is. They don’t always do it of course, but on occasion Jossy vamps can and do purr. Human actors obviously can’t purr, but vampires have made purring-like sounds numerous times, usually to indicate sexual arousal or contentment (e.g. Lie to Me; I Only Have Eyes for You). But the best example of purring in pleasure can be found when the Three Dracula Sisters are purring away nineteen to the dozen as they seduce Giles (Buffy vs. Dracula). In this case the sound having been added by a kind engineer to save the actresses throats. Generally though, a vampire purr can be said to be a short rumble of satisfaction, the continuous cat like drone only being reserved for the most sexually charged situations.

Lair

Foxes live in earths, pigs live in sties, and vampires live in lairs. Dunno why, it’s just one of those things. A vampire does not need an invitation to enter another vampire’s lair, according to Angel. The matter of good manners has clearly never occurred to him; no wonder he was called the Scourge of Europe.

Little One

There are a few things to note about the relative heights of Angelus and William. Not that we’re entirely sure what their relative heights actually are – male actors being notoriously cagey about such things – but the best estimates put Angelus at 6′2″–6′3″ and Spike at 5′8″–5′10″. Which in modern terms make them moderately tall and average to smallish respectively – the past, however, is another country

In the Ireland of the 1750s, 6′2″ would have been unusually large, so Liam would have always stood out in a crowd and been considered tall. It may be worth remarking that the typical English caricature of an Irishman was as a big, hulking fellow with wild hair – presumably because most of those they actually met were navvies: work which tended to be self-selecting for well-built types. Despite Angelus fitting this cliche remarkably well, the truth was that the Irish of the period tended to be smaller.

It is harder to guess what William’s sense of his own height was. People in nineteenth century England were on average several inches shorter than nowadays, so on the face of it William would have been above average. However, the matter is not that simple because then, as today, the average height was very variable depending on class. The lower classes were considerably smaller than the upper and middle classes, and apparently getting even shorter at this period – a cause for some concern amongst those responsible for recruiting the Empire’s soldiers. And during the 1870s and 1880s the upper middle classes happened to be going through one of their periodic bursts of breeding particularly tall individuals (just as they are today). The satirical magazine Punch makes frequent jokes about it. So for example in a photograph of Oscar Wilde and some friends, taken at Oxford in 1874, Wilde even at 6′3″ does not particularly stand out from his contemporaries. Thus, given his class, even in the 1880s William could have been thought of as an average to moderately small man.

Madam

When I was looking for a fitting term of address that Spike might use for Darla, I settled on Madam as a suitable equivalent for Sire. It sounds similarly old fashioned, and has a pleasant hint of brothels that I felt was apt for Darla. I didn’t want to use Grandsire because of the reasons given above, and also because I sometimes wanted to fudge just who his Grandsire was. As far as I know I’m the only writer who uses Madam, and there is no precedent for it on the show. But feel free to copy if you agree with my reasoning.

Master

The Master was the bat-eared chap who was Darla’s sire and head of the Order of Aurelius, before Buffy killed him. However, in the Jossyverse any senior vampire may be referred to as a master (Disharmony; Faith, Hope and Trick), from which by extension comes the term a master vampire, and presumably he or she would be addressed as ‘Master,’ by their minions. This would hardly be exceptional in the nineteenth century when master was a perfectly common form of address amongst humans. Though the term might well be considered a bit old fashioned by some modern vampires: I somehow can’t see Spike insisting on it all the time. I occasionally use Mistress as the female equivalent.

I have decided that the minions would use the terms of address Master or Mistress, with a qualifying name for junior members of the blood family, as in ‘Mistress Drusilla’; while Sire and Madam were reserved for childer of the family addressing their blood superiors. There is no precedent for this on the show, so it is simply a slight variant on the system used in formal British households during the nineteenth century.

Minions

A minion is a junior vampire, but it is not entirely clear who would be considered a minion in the Jossyverse. I have assumed that young vampires without families to look after them might seek employment with a master, but also minions could well be related to the master vampire, or even have been directly sired by him. The difference between a minion and a childe is therefore rather fuzzy around the edges. Generally I consider minions to have a lower status than childer. Since Joss has stated that he sees relations between vampires as being largely feudal, I have taken this one step further and assumed that they adopt the old feudal method of taking on younger relatives and other dependants, who would work for them as minions and receive some training until they can become masters in their own right. We have seen repeated instances of master vampires treating their minions with total contempt, and even killing them on very little provocation, so there must be a very good reason why any vampire would stay as a minion. Just what those reasons might be is something I am exploring in my stories.

Nest

Nest is a possible alternative to Lair for a vampire’s residence. However, it is noticeable that it is mostly Slayers and Watchers who use Nest, the vamps themselves nearly always saying Lair. I therefore stick with Lair. Besides, I happen to have an irrational dislike of Nest.

Penn

Despite the common belief to the contrary, Penn stated that he waited for Angelus in Italy until the nineteenth century; i.e., some time in the eighteen hundreds, not the nineteen hundreds. In other words they didn’t meet for nearly two hundred years. And Dru and Spike wouldn’t have met him in Angelus’s presence at all. Angel did of course make the slightly misleading remark that he hadn’t shown up in Italy because he got held up in Romania. We can assume either that he went to Romania twice or, more likely, that he was being flippant. Certainly Angelus must have abandoned Penn long before he got a soul. (Somnambulist)

The Royal London Hotel

In Destiny, the caption says the flashback scene is set in the Royal London Hotel. Well because I’m that sort of person, I looked it up. There was no such place as the Royal London in 1880, so far as I can find out, but there was The Royal Hotel. And it turns out that that was on the corner of Blackfriar’s bridge and the Embankment – in other words bang in the middle of the area I’ve always described as Angelus’s territory back in the day.

Hee. Sometimes things just work out neat.

And The Royal had excellent accommodation but moderate class prices – thus proving that Angelus was indeed as near with his cash as Angel.

Scourge of Europe

Everybody knows that Angelus was called the Scourge of Europe. And I wrote ‘Chevachee’ to provide a possible explanation for how he achieved the title. However, I started to wonder who first decided to call him that and when. A search of the show transcripts revealed that the word isn’t canon although most people assume it is. One of those fascinating little mysteries that the Jossyverse throws up from time to time. But since nobody else seemed to know I have done a little digging and found a possible answer. In The Watcher’s Guide, Vol. I the section on Angelus includes this sentence: …the Irish lad Angel becomes Angelus, “the one with the angelic face,” the scourge of Europe. So there it is folks, the origin of the term. But note the lowercase S on scourge – it was originally intended as a description, not a title.

A Sinister Vampire

Why do I keep saying Spike is left-handed? Simple: James Marsters is; hence, Spike is by default. The time we saw this most clearly was when William was writing his bloody awful poetry with his left hand (Fool for Love). That was actually a bit unusual, since in those days most people would have been taught to write with their right hand whether they were left handed or not. But then he was also using a fountain pen. The fountain pen, or reservoir pen as it was often known then, was invented as long ago as the seventeenth century; but they were rather bad technology, inclined to leak, and not at all common until the late eighteen nineties or even well into the twentieth century. William was clearly a gadget geek.

Sire or Sir

Just in case you don’t know, a vampire’s sire is the vampire who made them. The process in the Jossyverse consists of draining the victim to near death, and then feeding them some of the sire’s blood. The word has been used frequently in such phrases as ‘you were my sire,’ and ‘she sired me’. However, ‘Sire’, as a mode of address, is not something that we have ever heard on the show. I use it though; firstly because I like it and the word play one can make with it; and secondly because I believe Angelus would have insisted on some formality from his juniors.

Recently however, the observant will notice I have started using ‘sir’ as Will’s normal mode of address for Angelus. There is a long explanation and a short explanation for this. The long explanation involves the gradual development of Will’s relationship with Angelus as I see it, my own deeper preferences and motivations for writing, and a change in my attitude to continuous puns. The short explanation is that it’s Coquette’s fault.

Some writers use the term dam for a female sire. There is no use of this on the show, and in fact several females have been referred to as someone’s sire, so the word sire can be considered as asexual.

Sobering Up

There has long been a fanon convention that vampires have a strong head for alcohol, such that it takes far more to get a vampire drunk than a human. This was yet another of those traditions that I was quite happy to go along with whilst acknowledging that there was absolutely no basis for it on the show. And then lo and behold Spike announces that a vampire constitution prevents him getting drunk on miniatures (The Girl In Question) which only goes to show that somebody somewhere was reading fanfic!

It is worth noting though that vampires do get drunk on alcohol if they take enough, even Spike (Lover’s Walk). They also have the same reaction to at least some drugs as humans do (Eternity; Damage), and coffee makes them jumpy (The Prom), so presumably the vampire’s bodies are trying to process all these substances in the normal way.

Somewhat Blue

It has been pointed out to me that the language in my fiction is atrocious. All I can say is it is a lot better after my friend Noone has been at me. However, in the cause of historical veracity I do actually try to check that all terms used would have been current at that date. This is a task beyond most thesauri, so I use two invaluable books. The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang, which is a marvellous source of obscure gems. And the Oxford Dictionary of Slang, which is most usefully arranged like a thesaurus, and can actually provide period alternatives for some of our more colourful descriptive terms. I also use the complete Oxford English Dictionary as an ultimate arbiter of the date of introduction for a term.

Spike

Possibly the most irritating thing about the character I chiefly write about is his nickname. To be honest, I can’t stand it. Which I’m afraid is why I tend to refer to him as Will. Of course, when I’m writing early stuff in pre-The Initiative canon then he shouldn’t be called Spike anyway, since he was supposed to have got his name by torturing his victims with a railway spike. And since the railways didn’t come in until the eighteen twenties he was presumably known as William the Bloody up to that point. (Yes, I know there were other sorts of tracks and tramways before Stephenson, but what would a vampire be doing in a coal mine? Oh, hang on…)

As a nickname Spike or Spiky has a long and heterogeneous history. In the late nineteenth century it was used for a High Church Anglican clergyman of uncompromising beliefs (one of several reasons why I made his father a clergyman), it was frequently used by tramps in the workhouse, was the name for the workhouse casual ward and later the workhouse itself, and was given to anyone called Sullivan.

Sullivan

We do not know what William’s human surname was, but I have made several references to the name Sullivan in association with Spike in my fiction. There is a very simple reason for this: in the army or navy in the late C.19 all men with the surname Sullivan would be given the inevitable nickname ‘Spike’ or ‘Spiky’, just as in ‘Dusty’ Miller, ‘Chalky’ White etc.

I have not been able to establish why the nickname Spike should have become associated with the name Sullivan. The most famous holder of that name was the boxer William ‘Spike’ Sullivan at the turn of the last century, but the sources disagree as to if other Sullivans were called Spike because of him, or if he was just yet another Spike Sullivan.

The Navy in particular has a great fondness for these clan nicknames.

Twenty-Seven

A brief history of how old Spike is and how old William was when he died…

The simple answer is William was twenty-seven and died in 1880. Why? Well for starters, he had to be some age, and anyway I rather like the idea of him being a year older than Liam was. But there is more to it than that. The calculation goes something like this:

• In School Hard Giles described Spike as ‘barely two-hundred’.
• School Hard was screened in 1997.
• 1997 - 200 = 1797
• Some time after School Hard was screened, they decided to plan Spike’s back-story.
• Using Mutant Enemy’s normal approach to arithmetic and scrupulous consistency with existing canon, they decided he had been turned in 1900.
• In The Initiative, Spike duly announced he was 126 years old.
• The Initiative was screened in 1999.
• 1999 - 126 = 1873
• Come the time to write Fool for Love they remembered that (according to School Hard) he had to have known Angelus for long enough to consider him as his sire and yoda.
• So they changed it to him having been turned in 1880.
• And brushed under the carpet the bit about him being ‘barely two-hundred’.
• Or the notion of trying to be consistent by having him turned in 1873.
• But the maths still could be said to stand as regards his age.
• And since 1999 - 1900 = 99.
• And 126 - 99 = 27.
• He must have been twenty-seven when he died.

On a good day I can even follow this argument.

This calculation was first performed by Hostile-17 on the message board at the late lamented JamesMarsters.com. I will admit it took me almost a week to grasp the implications, but I trust her ability with numbers and knowledge of Buffy details completely.

Vampiress

This would be a female vampire. There is no instance of the word’s use on the show, as far as I am aware, all vampires, male or female, being simply called a vampire. Hence I don’t use it.

William and Will

Spike’s name as a human was William, he was also known at some stage in his career as William the Bloody, for reasons that may or may not have had to do with his poetry, depending on which canon you are following. There is a strong convention amongst fan fiction writers to sometimes call him Will as well, but this has never been heard on the show, where ‘Will’ usually refers to Willow. However I normally call Spike ‘Will’, because it’s useful for him to have a family name that they might have used in intimate moments, when his rather brutal nickname ‘Spike’ was inappropriate. I also happen to like the name.

Yeh

I am going to admit to a historical fudge. The pronunciation of yes as yeh did not really become common until the twentieth century, and was certainly only found in the nineteenth at the very end. However it is a frightfully convenient way to distinguish between Spike minding his manners, and him playing the little ruffian, so I have stretched the usage back a bit in date. I have used the older English spelling, instead of the modern American one, to try and make up.

Sorry.