~~ loving to hate....

ethrosdemon just raised some issues in her latest post, on fetishizing of sexual violence in people's reactions to the Buffy/Spike pairing.

This concerns me mostly because it rings true. The appeal of Buffy/Spike (and Harry/Draco in many ways) to me has always partly been the violence inherent in their attraction. It's not the power-struggle dominance/submission angle-- it's purely the emotional underpinnings of this-- the anger, the rage, the need to lash out. A power struggle would imply a struggle for control, whereas the appeal of this fetishized violence is the -loss- of all inhibitions and control for both parties. Both Buffy and Spike were losing it when they attacked each other (though really, Buffy attacked Spike) in `Smashed'. There is a parallel here to my own interest in the Harry-Draco fight in `Order of the Phoenix' and my own perception of it as `sexy', as cathartic, as... a sign of H/D, of some sort of twisted potential.

I don't write H/D with them physically attacking each other, usually, but ever since I've felt I'd gotten a "handle" of sorts on their characterizations, I've written them as increasingly visceral and violent (emotionally) with each other. And yet to call it "fetishizing" seems to suggest a sort of... singular fixation upon anger itself which seems problematic. It my mind, it's merely an emotional valve, a release of tension, two people with roughly comparable physical strength venting their frustrations with each other in the most natural way for them.

I'm unsure where I'm going with this, only that it concerns me. If it's the violence itself that's being fetishized, then it sort of makes the characters' full selves less than important-- beside the point, even. It reduces things to basic drives-- anger, fear, lust-- and seeing it that way, I can see someone's objection to Buffy/Spike. This is still a couple with a lot of potential (as is H/D), but to establish it using violent emotions is basically wreaking mental violence upon them. They may invite it or welcome it, but fact remains, writing them that way strips them of their full selfhood.

Something about both B/S and H/D seems to be about the annihilation of self-- that dance with death, maybe-- simply because it really strains the very basis of the character to act in this way towards the other. I see it in a more abstract way, I guess, but it is also frequently an actual sense of people's reactions to Spike/Buffy relationship (possibly) constituting destructiveness. I tend to hope that creation comes from destruction, but that's ideal more than reality. Maybe this is close to the Christian idea of Sexual Love as Original Sin-- wanting/needing the Forbidden, the dark and twisted and -wrong-.... Although I see the exile from Eden and the fruit of knowledge as being positive, life-affirming. To me, this basic conflict of unconscious urges and their conscious consequences is at the root of being human. From folly, wisdom follows. Well, one hopes....?
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( Meme: 10 Unpopular Fannish Opinions, just because. )