Angel & Faith #20 Reactions

I have a lot feelings about the latest issue of Angel & Faith. This post discusses the issue in depth, but I’m not going to post any of the interior pages, because it’s a really amazing book and you should buy it. I'm sorry it's taken me four days to get this written and posted.

(To the left is the fantastic variant cover by Rebekah Isaacs, poking fun at Archie.)

(Some of those feelings are about the Buffy series as a whole and are brought up by, though not necessarily directly related to, the issue itself. Trigger warning: part of this post references, in very general terms, the scene in which Spike attempted to rape Buffy during the TV show.)

Faith has always been my favorite Buffy character, and AaF as my local comic book store likes to call it, is easily the most enjoyable for me out of all the canon Buffy books. 

There’s a conflict for me, and I don’t think it will come as a surprise to those of you who know me in real life that I’m not sure if I’m supposed to like Spike anymore.

Spike’s attempted rape of Buffy hasn’t been directly discussed in the season 8 & 9 comics at all, and was generally smoothed over by the writers in season seven with the explanation that he has a soul now. That’s apparently good enough for Buffy to be able to trust him and for her to refer to him as "her dark place" while fantasizing about jumping his bones. That explanation was never good enough for me (nor was it, apparently, good enough for James Marsters who once during a panel I attended described filming that scene as the worst day of his professional career,possibly his life.)

I’ve been divided in my feelings about Spike since that episode. I feel like we’re expected to pretend either that the rape happened but it's okay now, or pretend that it never happened at all.  I think it was the worst mistake the show ever made in seven years it was on the air. I think it was indefensible. I think it is indefensible to act as though everything is magically okay just because Spike has a soul.

In my head, there are two versions of the Buffy universe. One in which Spike’s attempt to rape Buffy happened, and one in which it has been retconned out of existence and Spike is still basically a good guy who fights the good fight but is royally screwed up in ways we are still able to like him for. I therefore have two sets of reactions to this issue, because I have to judge Spike differently depending on whether or not he tried to rape Buffy.

If we’re pretending the attempted rape didn’t happen:

The scene in the otherwise unmemorable episode “Dirty Girls” in which Spike and Faith shamelessly flirted felt like a bright spot in an otherwise thoroughly lackluster season, particularly as I had been waiting for Faith and Spike to meet properly ever since “Who Are You”. (After that episode, it almost seems as if, with the exception of Faith beating the crap out of Spike, the writers deliberately kept them apart, possibly so they could sell the audience on Faith’s connection with Robin or Spike’s already much belaboured connection to Buffy?)

With Angel doing a lot of breaking down off panel, I was looking forward to seeing Faith and Spike interact, particularly because I think I, like a lot of other people, were wondering if they were going to hook up. It’s not that I ship them exactly, it’s just that I like both characters a lot and I don’t see an interesting romantic partner arriving for either of them in the future, so a hookup between them wouldn’t be completely out of left field. The Buffy season 9 comics haven’t instilled a lot of faith in me that the writers can create a character that fits into this already very detailed universe that feels as real to us as anyone we’ve seen on screen portrayed by an actor. In the TV series itself, Faith and Robin never seemed interesting at all (despite the undeniable hotness of D.B. Woodside) and Spike in his own, thoroughly lackluster comic book series just gave a hot evil wish-granting demon a lengthy speech about why Buffy is The Only One for Him Even If It Hurts.

One of the best, most original things about Angel and Faith as a series is the simple fact that the male main character and the female main character aren’t just on equal footing: they’re friends. In a real life world in which even Superman and Wonder Woman are making out, groin to groin, Angel and Faith are not a couple. Some part of me was expecting Christos Gage to write Faith and Spike in a romantic situation, and I really should have known better. It would have subsumed all the other character work that’s been done by both of them since the end of Buffy. It could be written well of course, but that’s a task better left to fanfiction. Faith and Spike’s potentially chemistry is acknowledged, and then in the same breath made it clear that it wasn’t on the table.

Remember when Faith wanted to fuck Buffy’s boyfriends just to hurt her (and to experience what it was like to be her as much as humanly possible?) Having Faith firmly say no to Spike, and to assert that she’s not okay with Spike hooking up with her just to get over Buffy, that’s a big bright milestone of the more positive, emotionally present path she’s walking now.

Faith calling Spike on the fact that he won’t get over Buffy by getting laid (and probably won’t meet someone else without getting over her first) is a really good point, and it's advice I donmt think the other characters. Well played. We’re not going to resolve Spike anytime soon, and that’s good. That’s right. If you lose that tension, you lose what’s left of the character after all the maudlin “Spike praises beatific Buffy” monologues they focused on (almost exclusively) during seasons six and seven.

If Spike DID attempt to rape Buffy:

Angel obviously doesn’t know about it. Neither does Faith. Spike, who never stops talking about his relationship with Buffy, hid it from Angel for the time that they were at Wolfram and Hart together, and he’s hiding it from Faith now. He eludes to the fact that he thinks that the fact that he was abusive of Buffy made him more attractive to her. That’s not a theme I wanted in a show/series that’s supposed to be all about female empowerment, but if we’re going to have it there, I wish the writers of the TV show AND the writers of the comics would deal with contextually and not just accidentally brush up against it periodically. Then again, given that Spike was allowed to cuddle Buffy all night before the Battle of Sunnydale, it seems a little late for that.

Spike freaking out when Faith implies he might have a fair amount in common with Angel actually reads to me as defensive overcompensation for his guilt- he knows that what he did was on parr with the worst of what Angelus did. The luxury of Angel’s split personality is that half of him is decidedly trustworthy after the fact. Spike, even with a soul, does not have a morally blank slate.

I'm a little disturbed by Spike talking to Angel in the basement. If Spike didn't try to rape Buffy, his speech about Buffy wanting the monster not the man sounds like Spike is whining about how he's the victim of emotional turmoil because Buffy doesn't want him. This is a thing that happens in real life a lot - that men who are rejected feel that they have a right to feel persecuted by the woman who doesn't want them. There's no acknowledgement of the fact that Buffy has the right not to want Spike, no matter what hell he went through to get his soul back. We're supposed to feel sorry for him, and I don't. I don't know if Christos Gage put Spike's speech about "respect and sensitivity" not being desirable for "typical women" in order to criticize it, but even with Spike admitting that he's always been a mess in ways that have nothing to do with Buffy, there wasn't enough contextual dealing with of the problem for it to read as anything other than Spike being a self-entitled prat.

In the universe with the rape retconned out entirely, it's a little awkward but sort of sweet to see them bonding over not getting over Buffy. The defining quality of Angel and Spike's relationship is that they bring out the most immature aspects of themselves in each other (which is where all that homoerotic tension Faith hinted at comes from.) It's a nice parallel to the aspects that Faith and Angel bring out in each other- loyalty, redemption, frankness in the face of horrible things that Buffy and her friends would likely spend three issues talking around rather than talking about.

All in all, even with the problems I had with it, I liked this issue, because it gave me so much to think about. According to the letters page, we only get another ten issues of Angel and Faith before it's over. If that's true, I'll be very sad to see it go.