What If: Spike did stake Harmony

[hoponlilmama]

I like season 4 too. Once it gets going it's a laugh. Very light and funny and enjoyable. I can't believe anyone would say s6 is better than it? 6 is just soft porn, mixed in with edge lord crap about darkness within us, kills the most genuinely likable character they ever had and has the most ridiculous parodies of villains in the form of the Trio.

I nominate you to write up a summary for each season of the series because that just made me laugh. 🤣

I dislike Anya meanwhile because she's one of the most evil characters in the entire show and is treated like a comedy character. She's basically Warren and Caleb, evil person who wages war on the opposite sex. Only difference between them is she's worse, as Warren killed 2 people, Caleb what, like 14? She killed millions! Granted that's probably only because they didn't have the means to do as such, but still.

Sadly Anya is the one way in which Buffy and Angel's gender politics have dated horribly from a misandristic point of view (well that and Faith and Riley.) I've always said how Buffy and Angel approached female and minority characters is for the most part brilliant, and certainly better than modern shows as they build women up without shitting on men and I stick by that.

However sadly Anya is the one exception as I guarantee you if we had a character who had gone around killed slutty women for thousands of years, and who fondly went over killing women, and who wanted to make a woman's vagina explode on screen we would NOT be viewing him as a jokey, light, lovable character.

Never thought of that, good point.

Look how seriously Spike and Angelus' horrific crimes against women are portrayed, even though they weren't targeting only women, or expressed a hatred for women. (They were equal opportunity killers who slaughtered men just as much, and loved the women in their lives as much as a vampire could, Darla and Dru.) Also neither had a say in becoming vampires and both as soon as they got their souls back, became good guys who felt bad about their crimes every day. FFS Angel and Spike after being ensouled both let a guy who was gunning for them live out of guilt for killing the women in their lives, whilst Anya jokes about her past crimes fondly like in the Dracula episode whilst she is an ensouled human.

Spike without a soul meanwhile fought for one, yet Anya chose to be a demon twice and apart from ONE episode in s7, it's not treated as a big deal that she killed all of those people.

I don't think though like modern shows the writers set out to do this big misandristic story with Anya. I think it happened by accident. They only intended her for one episode, but they liked Emma who is bubbly, cute and likable, so they kept Anya around and just skirted over her past. They'd have been better casting Emma as a new character, or having it that when the amulet was smashed, Anya was reborn as a new person with no memories of her past, like reincarnation and was horrified to learn who she'd been and was determined to make up for it (also make it that she had never been a human before her amulet was smashed either.)

I also think Anya didn't really fulfill a role in the series either. She is a symptom of a problem with Joss' writing, cramming in too many characters. Most episodes she just says something sarcastic and that's it.

Here's the thing: they sorta shot themselves in the foot, when they brought in two characters as a Cordelia replacement. Spike and Anya were delivering snarky and comical remarks to fill that void.

They needed to work on giving more layers to Anya once they decided on keeping the character, or give one of them the boot. She was a 1100 year old demon - maybe she could've helped Giles with his demon database, helped more with tactics on how to fight them (I recall she did that once during Something Blue when demons were attacking Xander and she told him how to kill it).

She was newly human and powerless - trying to find herself and find her place in the world would've been interesting to see.

 

[nightshade]

I'm not entirely sure how Anya has anything to do with staking Harmony?

 

[hoponlilmama]

Apologies, we got a bit sidetracked off the topic!

 

[ILLYRIAN]

What ! someone on the boards got off topic !! Yea gods, now that is bloody amazing.