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30 Days of Buffy Meme — Day 6
Jun. 20th, 2014 01:47 am( The list of days... )
Favorite Male Character:
Spike. This turned out to be a hard one, and not because it's hard to pick a favorite. It's just hard to come up with something to say that will encompass all of why he's a favorite without just echoing things that have been said better by a heckuva lot of people.
So many facets! He's loyal, funny, smart, inventive, observant, emotionally fluent, and interested in sex. He likes to dance. He gets along better with women than with men. He has a heaping truckload of "manly" defense mechanisms to keep other (usually male) people from seeing his perceived weakness. Like many other BtVs characters, he loves language and has an enormous amount of fun playing with it.
Most of those features fit Xander as well, however, so I don't feel I've really put my finger on what makes Spike unique.
Um, he fears very little, aside from bears. He's up for a challenge. He's pugnacious and stirs up trouble for fun. If he doesn't care about something, he really doesn't care about it. Conversely, if he cares, he cares a lot. He's got buckets of joie de un-vivre. He's gleeful, bless 'im.
Lest we forget, he's also a notorious vampire, a killer, a predator, and an unrepentant (until much later), violent criminal.
Okay. So here's something I've been musing on for a while and it's bound to come out wrong, but here goes: Spike works as a sort of metaphor for awful people, a window, if you will. Here in the USA, we have an increasing tendency to respond to horrible, terrible behavior with, "That's inhuman! What a monster!" But really, the scariest thing is that it is humans that are responsible for all those things we wish to call "inhuman". By demonizing the perpetrators, we give ourselves a convenient, but inaccurate, narrative that "we" are nothing like "them". But if you dig a little, you'll find that most of these "monsters" loved their mamas, or their dogs, or Bach, or they were really good at parcheesi, or something. It's not easy to accept that horrible people are, well, people. So much easier to write them off. Spike, started off as a terrifying, dangerous threat and then developed into a complex person, eventually becoming a hero vital to the good of humanity. His is a fun story, but also a tremendously deep, complicated, and thought-provoking one.
****
Went to see the Afro-Cuban All Stars perform at SF Jazz on the weekend. Once the gals in the band kicked off their heels, the party really got started!
Coming up: the Frameline LGBTQ Film Festival leading up to Gay Pride Weekend at the end of the month. There are five films I want to see this Saturday, many of them in conflicting time slots. Talk about first world problems...
Favorite Male Character:
Spike. This turned out to be a hard one, and not because it's hard to pick a favorite. It's just hard to come up with something to say that will encompass all of why he's a favorite without just echoing things that have been said better by a heckuva lot of people.
So many facets! He's loyal, funny, smart, inventive, observant, emotionally fluent, and interested in sex. He likes to dance. He gets along better with women than with men. He has a heaping truckload of "manly" defense mechanisms to keep other (usually male) people from seeing his perceived weakness. Like many other BtVs characters, he loves language and has an enormous amount of fun playing with it.
Most of those features fit Xander as well, however, so I don't feel I've really put my finger on what makes Spike unique.
Um, he fears very little, aside from bears. He's up for a challenge. He's pugnacious and stirs up trouble for fun. If he doesn't care about something, he really doesn't care about it. Conversely, if he cares, he cares a lot. He's got buckets of joie de un-vivre. He's gleeful, bless 'im.
Lest we forget, he's also a notorious vampire, a killer, a predator, and an unrepentant (until much later), violent criminal.
Okay. So here's something I've been musing on for a while and it's bound to come out wrong, but here goes: Spike works as a sort of metaphor for awful people, a window, if you will. Here in the USA, we have an increasing tendency to respond to horrible, terrible behavior with, "That's inhuman! What a monster!" But really, the scariest thing is that it is humans that are responsible for all those things we wish to call "inhuman". By demonizing the perpetrators, we give ourselves a convenient, but inaccurate, narrative that "we" are nothing like "them". But if you dig a little, you'll find that most of these "monsters" loved their mamas, or their dogs, or Bach, or they were really good at parcheesi, or something. It's not easy to accept that horrible people are, well, people. So much easier to write them off. Spike, started off as a terrifying, dangerous threat and then developed into a complex person, eventually becoming a hero vital to the good of humanity. His is a fun story, but also a tremendously deep, complicated, and thought-provoking one.
****
Went to see the Afro-Cuban All Stars perform at SF Jazz on the weekend. Once the gals in the band kicked off their heels, the party really got started!
Coming up: the Frameline LGBTQ Film Festival leading up to Gay Pride Weekend at the end of the month. There are five films I want to see this Saturday, many of them in conflicting time slots. Talk about first world problems...