In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, girlsown- [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes >Still on Buffy but totally unrelated to Girlsown I am dying to know what >peoples' opinions are on the whole Buffy and Angel or Buffy and Spike >relationship question. Am I the only one who prefers Spike to Angel? (Happy >to go off-list!)
I think Buffy is a GO text, even though it's a. tv and b. often teen romance. The first three series are set at school, and many of the themes-and-issues are VERY GO - friendship and its limits, popularity and its price, public duty versus private pleasure. School stories often have Gothic elements - many of Brazil's do, and there was The Silent Three. As well, the adventure/detecting aspect of Buffy also drives many a GO plot. And finally, Buffy is an entirely GO girl - ringleader, tomboy and chum to the weak. (Rather silken, too, but let that pass.) Hence Angel and Spike are GO too, and as such very, very recognisable. Am I the only one to see a passing resemblance between Angel and Patrick Merrick - not just in the sense of being hotties, but a kind of structural resemblance? Both are the outsider that anchor the group (The Marlow Family, the Scoobies), male where the group is (predominantly) female, though in both groups the masculinity of the outsider is emphasised because there is one male who struggles to seem masculine enough in both groups (Peter, Xander). Both Angel and Patrick are somehow doomed figures from the getgo, both are morally ambiguous, and both are potentially deadly. Both also carry a weight of cultural memory, a knowingness from the past. Spike, otoh, is straight from another kind of literature altogether, the realist novel of the Angry Young Men, and the whole point of him is that he really has no proper place in the Buffyverse socially, which is why he carries such a strong sexual charge of alienness and difference. So after all that faffling, I liked both relationships and thought they both worked superbly in different ways. -- Diane Purkiss -- ________________________________________ Girlsown mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] For self-administration and access to archives see http://home.it.net.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/girlsown For FAQs see http://www.club-web.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/girlsown/faq-0.htm
