Buffy at Play - Tricky Characters

Once all these little details of construction of the text come together, the trickster spirit manifests itself most apparently in the evolution of the characters themselves. Each character emerges from the mix as both recognizable and new. In creating characters, both the writers and performers realized that, as actor James Marsters (Spike) puts it, “People are more interesting when they’re fallible and funny and dear” (Buffy “Action Heroes” 5.3). If Buffy herself was merely a standard mythic hero, or if, as a feminist icon, she played the part as, “I am woman, hear me constantly roar,” as Whedon speculates, she would be very dull indeed (Buffy “Interview” 1.1). Hyde comments that “actual individuals are always more complicated than the archetype” and designates the trickster as the “archetype that attacks all archetypes” (14). Buffy’s characters consequently elude precise labeling.
Furthermore, nearly all the characters in the Whedonverse experiment with what Hyde defines as the trickster’s role of shape shifter at one time or another, some shifting many times throughout the series (36). Sometimes the shifts are subtle, as with Buffy’s transitions between insecure teenager and powerful super hero. More often, they are drastic, and rife with metaphorical implications, as when Willow changes from good witch to bad witch as a result of her drug-like addiction to magic (Buffy 6.1-22). In “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”, a shy girl named Marci becomes invisible when no one pays attention to her (Buffy 1.11). Giles, when feeling useless in “A New Man”, becomes a red, curly horned demon who can‘t speak comprehensibly (Buffy 4.12).
The vampire characters themselves are expressly and visually shape shifting, their faces changing from human to monster every time they are about to feed. In the episode “Innocence”, about midway through season two, Angel, who has already shifted from evil vampire to good vampire by means of a Gypsy “curse” which restored his soul, changes back to being evil after making love with Buffy for the first time (2.14). The clear metaphor of the potential for a lover to change after having sex with him or her takes on monstrous realism. When he later regains his soul and returns from death in season three, the potential for him to again shift if he and Buffy consummate their love becomes the impetus for him to leave the show and start his own series, Angel.
Oz, Willow’s boyfriend from seasons two through four, is a werewolf who at one point encounters a Dr. Jekyll-like character in the episode “Beauty and the Beasts” (Buffy 3.4). All three of these characters (vampire, werewolf, Mr. Hyde) explore the “metaphor of uncontained, raw male aggression,” as writer/producer Marti Noxon calls it, and it’s shape-shifting capacity, both literally and figuratively (Buffy “Oz Revelations” 4.3). In “Wild at Heart” , as Oz also prepares to leave the show, he tells Willow, “I don’t know where that line is between me and [the werewolf]” (Buffyology 4.6). Apparently, for the actors who played the characters, shape shifting also at times involved shifting actual acting roles and shifting series, evoking an image of the trickster “on the road” to somewhere else (Hyde 6).
The characters of the various villains, or “Big Bads“, most often designated as demonic in some way or other, are catalogued as shape shifters in the featurette “Demonology: A Slayers Guide” (Buffy 5.3). This humorous piece separates the demons into five categories as follows:
1. “Dead Things That Aren’t Really Dead Until Buffy Kills Them” Demons
[eg. Vampires, Zombies, Frankenstein-like characters].
2. “Oh God! Does Someone Know a Good Dermatologist” Demons
[ie. Demons with really ugly facial distortions].
3. “I Bet You Thought I Was Human When in Actuality I’m This Really Pissed- Off, Hideous […]” Demons [This category includes many shape shifters, such as vengeance demons, who appear as human initially, and werewolves].
4. “You Summoned Me So as Long as I’m Here I Might as Well Rampage and Kill” Demons [Indicating such characters as a Troll God, a Snake Demon, and a slug-like creature called a Quellar demon].
5. “I’m So Hideously Deformed I Couldn’t Possibly Be a Man in a Rubber Suit” Demons [A nod to the complex arts of both animatronics and computer graphic imaging (CGI) used extensively in the series]. (Buffy 5.3)
Although this list is limited, and some creatures cross over between definitions, fitting into more than one simultaneously, this only further illustrates the way that Buffy slips the “trap of bafflement” created when we try to categorize anything (Hyde 49).
The character who probably most aptly demonstrates the art of characterization married with the trickster mythos is Spike. From his debut in the episode “School Hard” to the series finale, Spike proves himself to be the “consummate survivor” (Hyde 43). Originally situated to be the “Big Bad” of season two, Spike comes on the scene as a less orthodox vampire than the villain of season one, The Master. He announces, while killing The Master’s protégé, The Annointed One (who Spike refers to as “The Annoying One”), “From now on, we’re going to have a little less ritual, and a lot more fun.” When another vampire claims that he was at The Crucifixion, Spike observes:
Oh, please! If every vampire who said he was at The Crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock. […] I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flowerperson and I spent the next six hours watchin' my hand move. (Buffy 2.3)
From the outset, Spike establishes himself as a “situation inverter” and a disruptor of the status quo (Hynes 37).
Furthermore, Spike’s sexual exploits, a feature of any trickster character, are implied from the outset when he licks blood from Drusilla, the vampire who is both his lover and creator, a mixture of roles which evokes a breaching of taboos, another trickster trait (Hynes 43, 66). When, after breaking up with Drusilla, he returns in season four, he takes up a relationship with popular-girl-turned-vampire Harmony which is obviously based purely on sex (Buffy 4.3). After being “neutered” shortly thereafter by means of a computer chip placed in his brain by a government agency called “The Initiative”, Spike needs to throw himself at the mercy of the Slayer and her friends to survive. He finds himself in the role of “wacky neighbor”, whose job it is to drop in on “The Scoobies” and say, “Can I borrow a cup of sugar and insult you?” (Buffy “S5 Overview” 5.6). Spike’s subsequent infatuation/obsession with Buffy throughout seasons four and five casts him in the role of “courtly lover” at times, but Buffy repeatedly expresses her disgust with him (“Ain‘t“). In addition to repeatedly telling him he’s disgusting, or a pig, in “Out of My Mind” she says, “I just saw you taste your own nose blood […] I’m too grossed out to hear anything you have to say” (Buffyology 5.4). It seems his “love” for her will remain unrequited indefinitely.
Yet, ever surprising the viewer/reader, the characterization of Spike in Buffy takes a significant turn in season six. After Buffy is resurrected following her death at the end of season five, she finds that the only person she can relate to is Spike. She realizes that he is her “counterpart”, that his experience is “closer to her[s] than any of the other characters” and that he knows what it is like to feel like you don’t fit in anymore (Buffy “S6 Overview” 6.6). The resultant sexual relationship is still largely a matter of lust and power play, but Spike has clearly moved to a place beyond pure appetite (Hyde 62).
The resultant outcome of Spike’s surrender to “fate” in season seven, like Buffy’s death in season five, evoke the principle of self-sacrifice which “goes fairly deep into several mythologies” (Buffy “S6 Overview” 6.6). Though often associated with heroes, Hyde equates sacrifice with the trickster on several points. From Hermes to Eshu and beyond, the ways that trickster sacrifice has benefited humanity, often unintentionally, indicates a “reshaping”, a “reallotment” which promises “the chance that the links between things on earth and things in heaven may be loosened” (Hyde 257). Buffy and Spike each have their turn at unhinging the door between life and death.