Spike... master manipulator?
Mar. 28th, 2007 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxAnd, out of nowhere, a rant on issues long dead:
As these things tend to happen, a discussion on TWOP (not on a BtVS thread because you couldn't pay me to go to that thing) ended up with Spike being dissed (because we all know Spuffy destroyed television and shows they were never on). The gist of the diss was that big bad Spike was "manipulating" poor helpless Buffy and the Scoobs.
I've seen the argument before, but it never rings true to me at all. I mean, I know Buffy liked to say "Why do I let Spike make me do these things?" But I never see that as actual evidence of Spike the manipulator. I tend to see that as Buffy not wanting to have to own that she chooses to do these things. It's far easier to say that he "makes" her than it is for her to admit that she chooses to do something. And, I suppose if one views the series exclusively through Buffy's eyes and take Buffy's word as fact, you come up with Spike the manipulator. It's just that when I look at Spike, I find the accusation somewhat ludicrous.
Spike is a lot of things, many of which aren't good. He was tempermental, reckless, angry, at times petulant and childish, and he -- like anyone -- could be myopic and self-serving. I'm not saying he never would have manipulated anyone for anything ever. I don't think that can ever be said of anyone. But the concept that Spike was a skilled manipulator who manipulated Buffy on a regular basis and warped her will just doesn't work for me. Buffy was no where near dumb enough or vulnerable enough for Spike to manipulate her for more than a minute or two at best.
When I think of manipulation, I tend to think of someone who thinks ahead, someone who clearly sees action and consequence and has some degree of patience in doing the first to anticipate the second. There's a certain gamesmanship to it. Even when it's unconscious manipulation, there's the sense that someone has a 'knack' for it and thus a talent and tendency toward it. If they didn't have the knack of it, they wouldn't be able to fall easily into it even subconsciously.
It's not even a matter of using or not using someone. Buffy -- by her own admission -- was "using" Spike a great deal in Season 6, but I don't consider her to be particularly "manipulative". Oh, there were instances (*cough*Gone*cough*) but, like Spike, Buffy's character wasn't about gamesmanship or forethought. In a pinch she could come up with a plan (a plan that usually sucked and amounted to 'let's go kill things with blunt and/or sharp instruments') but she didn't have the 'knack' for ongoing manipulation. Holtz was a master manipulator. He saw how action X would spin off into result Y. He could think about how people's natures would lead them to react in a certain way. Angelus also had a lot of manipulative power in him. It was in his pursuit of Holtz and in his pursuit of Drusilla. Xander could occasionally be manipulative, from his soul-lie to Buffy in Becoming to his staving off Anya's legitimate questions about whether he really wanted to get married, to his deciding to reveal to Dawn what had happened in Seeing Red.
And I'm not saying that Spike couldn't be manipulative. He was deliberately trying to manipulate in the Yoko Factor. It's not that he has no understanding of cause and effect. It's that in the Yoko Factor we see he really isn't capable of maintaining the effort even when he thinks he should. So how/why would such a person regularly fall into the habit of using it as a method of dealing with issues (much less, as argued in the post that inspired this rant, did he 'get off' on it likening him to a character who gets off on having all the other characters on the show dancing to his tune simultaneously.) ? I argue this isn't really Spike's character.
Spike is the definition of impulsive. He does it because he feels it. He does it because he thinks it. He does it because he doesn't think it through. He does it because it's fun. He does it because he promised. He does it because what choice does he have? He does it becase... oh, what the hell. He's direct in that way. He's not totally a walking id, but he's very id driven. He'll punch you in the face and tell you what he wants in preference to trying to manipulate someone into doing what he wants. But he's not big with gamesmanship.
To me, things which are quite illustrative to Spike's method of problem solving are the scenes such as In the Dark where he brained Angel with a 2X4. He tells Angel that he had a plan -- a great plan -- but he got bored. Same thing with School Hard. He knew what the plan should be, and he got impatient and didn't follow through. There was Lover's Walk as well, where his whole intention to use Xander and Willow to solve his problems turned into a shrug and "they're at the warehouse" when another plan that appealed came along.
It's not that Spike is incapable of planning, manipulation, or forethought, it's just that it's really not his thing. That's not a tactic he readily resorts to, and it's not one that he successfully employs. To think that somehow in Season 6 he went from being the guy who told Adam that it was stupid to leave him [Spike] to plan the whole thing, and who in the space of a single episode all the Scoobs figured out what Spike was trying to manipulate them into, to being a master Svengali who could manipulate Buffy into all sorts of things against her will for months on end strikes me as absurd. Spike could mirror and mimic whatever Buffy communicated she wanted or needed. He could play the dance of dysfunction like no one's business (and so, for that matter, could she). But I don't see Spike as having any actual power to make (or even to convince) Buffy to do much of anything.
It's terribly convenient to say that when she did something that hurt Spike or was against everything he wanted or desired that she was just exercising her own free will, but when she did something that happened to intersect with what he wanted or desired, suddenly he manipulated her into it.
Spike didn't manipulate Buffy in any significant way, IMO. I'm not saying he never said or did a self-serving thing, but to say he managed to play emotional chess enough to get her to do anything of any significance is really giving him more power over her and in their relationship than he ever had. There may have been moments when Spike wished he could manipulate her, but as a way of explaining Season 6, Buffy saying "Spike made her to do things" doesn't even begin to fly with me.
Buffy chose to dance the dance of dysfunction. She got Spike to do things ("Tell me you love me" , for instance) that were painful and terrible for him, but she wasn't particularly manipulative in any ongoing way. Giving someone the chance to act on their dark desires doesn't equal manipulation. Buffy occasionally used Spike's desires for her emotional needs. Spike occasionally did the same to Buffy. But, for all the massive dysfunction, wrong, and hurt, manipulation didn't seem particularly signficant to me. There are a hell of a lot more important issues in the Season 6 madness than that, and not only do I tend to scoff at the "manipulation" excuse, I tend to be a tad contemptuous of it as it seems to be saying that the characters weren't really responsible for their own choices and actions. I think that's the part Season 6 and its aftermath that drives me most crazy.
As these things tend to happen, a discussion on TWOP (not on a BtVS thread because you couldn't pay me to go to that thing) ended up with Spike being dissed (because we all know Spuffy destroyed television and shows they were never on). The gist of the diss was that big bad Spike was "manipulating" poor helpless Buffy and the Scoobs.
I've seen the argument before, but it never rings true to me at all. I mean, I know Buffy liked to say "Why do I let Spike make me do these things?" But I never see that as actual evidence of Spike the manipulator. I tend to see that as Buffy not wanting to have to own that she chooses to do these things. It's far easier to say that he "makes" her than it is for her to admit that she chooses to do something. And, I suppose if one views the series exclusively through Buffy's eyes and take Buffy's word as fact, you come up with Spike the manipulator. It's just that when I look at Spike, I find the accusation somewhat ludicrous.
Spike is a lot of things, many of which aren't good. He was tempermental, reckless, angry, at times petulant and childish, and he -- like anyone -- could be myopic and self-serving. I'm not saying he never would have manipulated anyone for anything ever. I don't think that can ever be said of anyone. But the concept that Spike was a skilled manipulator who manipulated Buffy on a regular basis and warped her will just doesn't work for me. Buffy was no where near dumb enough or vulnerable enough for Spike to manipulate her for more than a minute or two at best.
When I think of manipulation, I tend to think of someone who thinks ahead, someone who clearly sees action and consequence and has some degree of patience in doing the first to anticipate the second. There's a certain gamesmanship to it. Even when it's unconscious manipulation, there's the sense that someone has a 'knack' for it and thus a talent and tendency toward it. If they didn't have the knack of it, they wouldn't be able to fall easily into it even subconsciously.
It's not even a matter of using or not using someone. Buffy -- by her own admission -- was "using" Spike a great deal in Season 6, but I don't consider her to be particularly "manipulative". Oh, there were instances (*cough*Gone*cough*) but, like Spike, Buffy's character wasn't about gamesmanship or forethought. In a pinch she could come up with a plan (a plan that usually sucked and amounted to 'let's go kill things with blunt and/or sharp instruments') but she didn't have the 'knack' for ongoing manipulation. Holtz was a master manipulator. He saw how action X would spin off into result Y. He could think about how people's natures would lead them to react in a certain way. Angelus also had a lot of manipulative power in him. It was in his pursuit of Holtz and in his pursuit of Drusilla. Xander could occasionally be manipulative, from his soul-lie to Buffy in Becoming to his staving off Anya's legitimate questions about whether he really wanted to get married, to his deciding to reveal to Dawn what had happened in Seeing Red.
And I'm not saying that Spike couldn't be manipulative. He was deliberately trying to manipulate in the Yoko Factor. It's not that he has no understanding of cause and effect. It's that in the Yoko Factor we see he really isn't capable of maintaining the effort even when he thinks he should. So how/why would such a person regularly fall into the habit of using it as a method of dealing with issues (much less, as argued in the post that inspired this rant, did he 'get off' on it likening him to a character who gets off on having all the other characters on the show dancing to his tune simultaneously.) ? I argue this isn't really Spike's character.
Spike is the definition of impulsive. He does it because he feels it. He does it because he thinks it. He does it because he doesn't think it through. He does it because it's fun. He does it because he promised. He does it because what choice does he have? He does it becase... oh, what the hell. He's direct in that way. He's not totally a walking id, but he's very id driven. He'll punch you in the face and tell you what he wants in preference to trying to manipulate someone into doing what he wants. But he's not big with gamesmanship.
To me, things which are quite illustrative to Spike's method of problem solving are the scenes such as In the Dark where he brained Angel with a 2X4. He tells Angel that he had a plan -- a great plan -- but he got bored. Same thing with School Hard. He knew what the plan should be, and he got impatient and didn't follow through. There was Lover's Walk as well, where his whole intention to use Xander and Willow to solve his problems turned into a shrug and "they're at the warehouse" when another plan that appealed came along.
It's not that Spike is incapable of planning, manipulation, or forethought, it's just that it's really not his thing. That's not a tactic he readily resorts to, and it's not one that he successfully employs. To think that somehow in Season 6 he went from being the guy who told Adam that it was stupid to leave him [Spike] to plan the whole thing, and who in the space of a single episode all the Scoobs figured out what Spike was trying to manipulate them into, to being a master Svengali who could manipulate Buffy into all sorts of things against her will for months on end strikes me as absurd. Spike could mirror and mimic whatever Buffy communicated she wanted or needed. He could play the dance of dysfunction like no one's business (and so, for that matter, could she). But I don't see Spike as having any actual power to make (or even to convince) Buffy to do much of anything.
It's terribly convenient to say that when she did something that hurt Spike or was against everything he wanted or desired that she was just exercising her own free will, but when she did something that happened to intersect with what he wanted or desired, suddenly he manipulated her into it.
Spike didn't manipulate Buffy in any significant way, IMO. I'm not saying he never said or did a self-serving thing, but to say he managed to play emotional chess enough to get her to do anything of any significance is really giving him more power over her and in their relationship than he ever had. There may have been moments when Spike wished he could manipulate her, but as a way of explaining Season 6, Buffy saying "Spike made her to do things" doesn't even begin to fly with me.
Buffy chose to dance the dance of dysfunction. She got Spike to do things ("Tell me you love me" , for instance) that were painful and terrible for him, but she wasn't particularly manipulative in any ongoing way. Giving someone the chance to act on their dark desires doesn't equal manipulation. Buffy occasionally used Spike's desires for her emotional needs. Spike occasionally did the same to Buffy. But, for all the massive dysfunction, wrong, and hurt, manipulation didn't seem particularly signficant to me. There are a hell of a lot more important issues in the Season 6 madness than that, and not only do I tend to scoff at the "manipulation" excuse, I tend to be a tad contemptuous of it as it seems to be saying that the characters weren't really responsible for their own choices and actions. I think that's the part Season 6 and its aftermath that drives me most crazy.
