selenak | Fanged Four Dynamics revisited

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Fanged Four Dynamics revisited

I finally got around to uploading my Alias Dickens pastiche, retitled Visitation, as well as various Jossverse ficlets written in recent months at ffn. This, together with

tenyearsofbuffy (where you should leave a prompt because inspiring other people to write fanfic you want to read is the best way to celebrate a BTVS anniversary), put me in a Fanged Four kind of mood. I also checked on the excellent incest post

kangeiko wrote a while ago. In one of the newer replies,

peasant_ recalls the objection to Drusilla as Spike's sire which came after Fool for Love was broadcast, mainly from Spike/Angel(us) 'shippers, on the grounds of the way it changed the dynamic. (And, of course, jossed a lot of fanfic.)

This got me reflecting on why I reacted differently back then. Which rather started in season 1 of Angel/s4 of BTVS. Up to that point, most backstory fanfiction (based on the information as given in s1 and s2 of BTVS) for our recurring vampires focused on the Angel/Drusilla/Spike triad, with the emphasis either being on Dru/Spike or Angel(us)/Spike, depending on the writer in question. There was a suspicious resemblance to earlier vampire "families" , such as Lestat/Louis/Claudia in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (which, for all their mocking, obviously not just the Mutant Enemy scriptwriters but most of the fans had read) and LaCroix/Nick/Janette in Forever Knight; the male sire of the other two, whose control and general rotten bastardness was resented by the younger male, while there was simultanously emotional dependence and/or a certain erotic attraction; the female used as a means of control of the younger male. The main emotional struggle is between the two males; the female figure is oddly passive. (This, btw, isn't true for Claudia, of course, but certainly of the way Angel/Spike/Dru was written back then.) Someone completely absent in said backstory fanfiction written during the early seasons was Darla. Which wasn't surprising. Though she had been established as Angel's sire in season 1 of BTVS, she had not been nearly as fleshed out as Spike and Drusilla a season later, and the only canon to go on regarding her relationship with Angel was Angel the episode, in which he ends up staking her to save Buffy, and the brief glimpse at her siring him in the first flashback of Becoming. I might have missed something, but I think the only Darla backstory fanfic I saw which was written pre-AtS was about her and the Master. She certainly wasn't in any of the backstory fanfic involving Angel, Spike and Dru I had read; if she was mentioned at all, it was assumed that she and Angelus parted ways soon after her siring him.

Season 1 of AtS, while not bringing Darla actually back until the very end, in a cliffhanger, for the first time gave us a closer look at her via flashbacks, in the episodes Prodigal and Five by Five (which, being set at the very beginning and the end of Angel's 150 years as Angelus before he got souled the first time, incidentally established or at least strongly hinted she was around for all that time). Season 2 then made the Angel/Darla relationship its primary focus, both in the present and in flashbacks, and also gave us dates. As in: Darla sires Angel in 1753. Angel sires Drusilla in 1860. Drusilla sires Spike in 1880.

Forget the who-sired-Spike question for the moment; this alone presented a very different dynamic from what fanfiction had assumed. Spike and Angel(us) were together only for around twenty years; Drusilla had been with him for forty years. Darla and Angel(us), on the other hand, had been together for over a century before Drusilla, and 150 years all in all pre-soul. Even more importantly, Angelus is not presented as the dastardly-yet-attractive Uberpatriarch fanfic had described him as. If anyone has the emotional control in those flashbacks, it's Darla. This broke with previous Ricean and Forever Knight models and for that reason made the whole backstory feel far more original and intriguing to me. (Incidentally, no, I don't think Joss & Co. had it all figured out back when they introduced Spike and Dru in School Hard; it's something that obviously developed in the telling. But I'm talking about the result.) Mind you, fanfic-wise, this meant Darla spent a time being written as ravingly jealous because Angelus was really much more into Spike, but this seems to have subsided and at any rate looked increasingly ridiculous when compared with canon flashbacks wherein the only one throwing a jealous fit is Angelus, over the Immortal. At the same occasion, it's spelled out even to whose who chose to regard Reunion dynamics as platonic that Darla and Drusilla had their own thing going sexually, and that they were the ones who gave the boys permission, or not.

"Boys" is a term Darla uses in the coal mine flashback in Fool for Love when talking to Dru, as in the gleeful "I think our boys are going to fight", anticipating the show as much as any ole' slasher does, and it brings me to why I wasn't the least upset about the Dru-as-Spike's sire retcon/revelation (depending on how you interpret Spike's famous "you were my sire, man, you were my Yoda!" outburst in School Hard). Drusilla siring Spike after being told to make herself a playmate by Angelus and Darla, and the way she presents her new creation in Destiny ("Look what I've made! It's called Willy!" and "Where is Darla? I want Darla to see William!") is about as far from the Lestat/Louis/Claudia or LaCroix/Nicholas/Janette model as it gets. Doesn't mean the slashiness in the Angel(us)/Spike dynamic is lost (the same flashback in Destiny oozes of it, with Angelus' little "does that make me a deviant?" speech), but Drusilla isn't the passive female pulled in two directions by the men here; like Darla, she's the creator who made herself a boytoy. Both male vampires become more than that to the female vampires, of course, but that was the original intention.

The act of creation, of couse, when performed by a woman is coded as maternal and that, I would guess, makes the dynamic more disquieting to a sizable portion of the fandom than the same thing performed by a man. Or to viewers in general. As a journalist once pointed out, Marilyn Monroe singing "My heart belongs to Daddy" is regarded as the traditional epitome of sexiness; but can one imagine a male sex idol breathing "my heart belongs to Mommy" into the microphone without the audience getting squicked instead of thrilled? The Fanged Four as presented on screen sure challenge that. Because say what you want about Angelus and Spike, their hearts sure belong to Mommy. "I'm your son's other mother," says Drusilla to Anne in Lies My Parents Told Me, in case we've missed it so far, and Darla's last "my darling boy", spoken when Angel has his hand on her pregnant belly, could mean either the unborn Connor or Angel himself. And you don't have to go to the end of their relationship; "you made me," Angel insists both when she throws him out immediately after the souling in the Five by Five flashbacks and in the Darla flashback in China where she temporarily takes him back. "I gave you eternal life," Darla says to Angel when she wants to persuade him to turn into a vampire again, and "she delivered me (from mediocrity)," says Spike about Drusilla in Crush, when he replaces her with another powerful female figure to obsess about and be dependent on. In a genre where it's traditionally all about sons and fathers - or brothers, for that matter - I find this coding of the sire/fledgling as female/male instead of male/male or male/female, this focus on a family dynamic that doesn't provide agreeable and familiar frisson but genuinely challenges assumptions immensely captivating.

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Very interesting read! And a very good point indeed about the female/male power. *gives you Joss points*

Thank you!

Very interesting. I know that I remember the early backstory fanfic had a very different feel to it, but I've never considered it in terms of gender dynamics before. (I was mostly aware of it in terms of time period, because so much early Aus/William was set in the late 18th or very early 19th century)

As a fic writer, my ongoing problem with the fanged four as you are describing them - where the females have more power - is that it is very hard to write the women that way whilst still having them as convincing historically. The show itself always settled for the vamps being hugely anomalous in terms of their gender dynamics. I dislike that, mainly because any historical inaccuracy grates for me and would negate the point of writing such stories at all. But also because, if you think about it, to have a modern gender dynamic present in these soulless, evil creatures, in a story where any deviation the vamps show from the normal morals of that time is by default presented as evil will result in the story saying something about modern gender roles that was actually never intended.

If that makes sense! I admit I have a stinking cold at the moment and what I just said may only be intelligible to someone high on cold meds.

Anyway, the result is that when writing I find myself trying to find a new model for the women. Something that can be both historically believable and yet doesn't degrade them to the role of angel or whore. I don't think I have fully solved it yet, although in my most recent writing I am feeling my way there. It seems to involve concentrating on the 'frozen' nature of the vampire's nature (I don't mean the old cliché of Darla as Ice Queen) whereby their development as individuals is halted. So Dru is stuck as the unmarried woman who cannot grow up - in Victorian terms that made her incomplete, defective. That is a very apt metaphor for Dru I think. Darla, perversely, I see more as having the role of a widow - another 'imperfect' woman - one whose prime has passed because she has lost her husband (the Master in this case), and although she has more independence she is also perceived as lacking something, and thus all her focus, her energies, fall on her 'son'. Having thus established their 'roles' as Victorians, I can then let them have frustrations at these roles but also using their powers within them in a way that neither consigns them to fainting fits on the sofa nor has them striding through the streets burning their bras.

Neither model is perfect, both have significant flaws and annoyances. But they do allow me to achieve a better balance, I hope, and write something that is convincing both in terms of the Buffyverse and the period. And I hope that I am gradually learning to write them both as real people, not cyphers.

Ah, but before the Victorians - who, I do agree, fit for Drusilla not just date-wise but because she very much is the Victorian daughter in her behavior - there were the Georgians, and before that, the Restoration, and before that, the Jacobeans, Elizabethans. Though she was born (as a human, not a vampire) into the Elizabethan period - wherein, of course, we have a Queen - I always saw Darla as more of a Restoration type, if we're talking frozen-in-period. Some cross between Barbara Castlemaine and Nell Gwyn, if you like. And of course the Restoration offers quite a lot of dominating women, and a very different attitude towards sexuality than the Victorian period.

That's really interesting. We so often look at period pieces and assume that the social mores are Victorian, and that those mores were the norm for all relatively recent history. As you point out, women's roles and attitudes were not static, and there are many examples of powerful dominating women who would find Darla something of a kindred spirit.

Exactly. The 19th century, specifically the Victorian epoch, was hardly typical for the rest of even English history, let alone the rest of Europe, and leaving aside completely the rest of the world. And it's often overlooked that Darla was much older than the rest of them, with her 400 years spanning very different eras. We often don't get the sheer bawdiness of Elizabethan drama because of the language, and probably would be shocked wandering through Restoration London...

No I don't mean frozen in period. I never got the impression the Jossverse vamps are behind the times in any way, they all of them (and I do include the Master) seem to be very much up-to-date. I meant frozen in terms of their own personal development - they are stuck at the age they died at. I know that in some sense that contradicts the whole point of the stories I personally try to tell but I was using it as a way in to writing the women, who I have big problems writing.

So I was looking for a way to interpret both women as Victorians because that was the period when I am writing them and I don't want them to seem out of time by being either too modern or too old-fashioned.

Having said all of which, yes, Darla does indeed fit more as a Restoration woman than her own lifetime or later. I have a very vague memory of once reading a rather good Darla fic set around then, I don't suppose you know it by any chance? (Of course, if it turns out you wrote one I am going to be very red faced!)

I did write a short Darla during the Restoration ficlet (http://selenak.livejournal.com/258399.html#cutid2), but I doubt that's the one you meant. I know

rozk wanted to write something about her during the period, which would undoubtedly be fabulous beyond belief, but she hasn't written it yet!

in a story where any deviation the vamps show from the normal morals of that time is by default presented as evil

That's also a problem in the frequent Jossverse "all vampires are bisexual" thing. The only way round it I can see is to simply declare that evil moral deviation does involve throwing away the bathwater (pointless cultural taboos) as well as the baby of morality.

Interesting. I've never thought of the bisexual thing in those terms, but you are of course right, that interpretation could be a danger. I know I have always found fics that make the blunt statement 'all vamps are bisexual' to be tiresome but that is mainly because I dislike the simplification and imperative implied.

The only way round it I can see is to simply declare that evil moral deviation does involve throwing away the bathwater (pointless cultural taboos) as well as the baby of morality.
I think it is impossible to write the vamps and suggest that every single thing they do is evil, so one has to have a more fluid approach to morality and the meaning of their actions. Most fic does this without thinking about it by simply representing them in entirely human terms. It is very rare to read fic that deals with the vampires behaving towards outsiders in a vampiric fashion, all unpleasantness (and pleasantness) being entirely within-family. But then most historical fic doesn't try to achieve period morals either so the original dilemma I mentioned is rare.

But when it comes to the bisexual thing that is a concept found in modern fic that the vamps can reasonably be expected to have and that is also part of modern morality so it isn't being presented as a deviation in that sense but just something the vamps may have absorbed from the culture around them. just as female emancipation in modern vamps won't come across as deviant.

So you only get the bisexual thing being a moral problem in a historical fic that aims for period morals and also states bisexuality is a vampiric thing. Offhand I can only think of one writer who has done that and she did it in separate stories and is a good enough writer for it not to have bothered me anyway.

For my own writing I don't think it's a problem because I have never seen vampire sexuality as equivalent to human bisexuality. For me vampire sexuality is something very different, rather animalistic. Based more on power dynamics than attraction or sexual requirements. This just happens to be the way I write it but it does coincidentally remove the moral dilemma.

That's also a problem in the frequent Jossverse "all vampires are bisexual" thing.

Fanfic or canon? Because if the later, then we do have counter examples, to wit, Harmony (who tells Spike if they ever have threesomes it would have to be boy/boy/girl, because she won't have sex with another woman, except Charlize Theron).

Maybe Harmony's still too conventional in a humans ense?

From the moment Drusilla regained her strength and carried Spike from the flames, I loved the dynamic of the quartet, especially with "cool" Spike as the youngest, the weakest and by far the most in thrall to his emotions. Every episode that showed their "family" dynamic made me extremely happy, particularly when Drusilla rebirthed her own grandmother, but I couldn't work out why - thank you for explaining my own tangled thought process to me! I do enjoy the (male)/female/male/female/male dynamic which is so rarely seen. The Master I placed in brackets because he is never shown as part of the family.

The only problem I have is that the women don't have the same redemption arcs as the men do - Darla is weakened, then horrified by her pregnancy, then kills herself. Drusilla never truly changes. Once out from under Darla's supervision, in the case of souled-Angel - or Drusilla's supervision, in Spike's case - the male vampires change and grow closer to the humans, becoming more than monsters. The female vampires don't.

The only problem I have is that the women don't have the same redemption arcs as the men do - Darla is weakened, then horrified by her pregnancy, then kills herself. Drusilla never truly changes.

Ah, but in killing herself, Darla doesn't just create life but also manages to pull off what neither of the boys can (see also: Angel waiting for the sunset in "Amends" and Spike trying that incompetent self staking in Xander's basement in "Doomed"); no muss, no fuss, she just does it. And not as a nihilistic gesture, either.

As for Drusilla: she doesn't change, true, but in being what she is, ironically enough, she completely foils Angelus' original intention in her creation. Remember, Angelus created her to extend the torment of human Drusilla for the rest of eternity. Instead, vampire Dru is about the most angst free vampire we ever see on a long term basis (well, excepting the Master, but he doesn't count in this context)... and the one member of the Fanged Four who makes it through the centuries intact.

I'm checking my f-list from work so I don't have time for anything deep and profound, but just wanted to give a quick nod in agreement.

You've pretty much explained here why I find the idea of Dru as Spike's sire and the mother/son relationships of the Fanged Four far more interesting than any Spike/Angel daddy issues. The "Darla is jealous of Angel liking Spike more" and Spike as Angel's "favourite childe" (which both do still are quite popular, btw, at least from what I've seen) are among my least favourite bits of fanon in A/S fic because canon doesn't support it at all.

Also, re: Spike's mommy issues, have you ever come across the speculations (based on Dru talking about 'Little Anne' in "What's My Line") that Dru's real name might also be Anne, like Spike's mother's (and Buffy's)? :)

Also, re: Spike's mommy issues, have you ever come across the speculations (based on Dru talking about 'Little Anne' in "What's My Line") that Dru's real name might also be Anne, like Spike's mother's (and Buffy's)? :)

No, but I'd be perfectly willing to believe it. (My fanon about Darla btw, is that her original name is some derivative of "Elizabeth", because many girls born when she was would have been named after the Queen, but if her mother was also a streetwalker, it would have been something like Bess or Lizzie. Of course, "Buffy" also hails from Elizabeth, though our Buffy has the derivative in her birth certificate.)

The "Darla is jealous of Angel liking Spike more" and Spike as Angel's "favourite childe" (which both do still are quite popular, btw, at least from what I've seen) are among my least favourite bits of fanon in A/S fic because canon doesn't support it at all.

*headdesk* Quite. Tell me at least the exclamations of "Mine!" are gone?

Tell me at least the exclamations of "Mine!" are gone?

Hah. I wish. If anything, I'd say that mine, favourite childe and daddy sire are coming back with a vengeange - I've been reading a lot of A/S since I finally finished AtS last summer and in my experience they seem to be far more common in new fic than in fic written a year or two ago.

You weren't there in Ye Olde Days, lass. Never mind "one year", think "six years"!

I like a suggestion I saw recently (can't remember where to credit it, unfortunately) that Dru's name as a human was Agnes, on symbolic/mystical grounds and the repeated use of the "lamb is caught in the blackberry patch" rhyme.

Oh, I like that one, too!

As far as I know I was the first person to point out that Dru's human name presumably wasn't Dru and as part of that meta I suggested Anne as an alternative, for the reasons you give, at the time. But of course this is fandom, different people are always having the same ideas independently :oD

Great post! Thanks. I think she twists every dynamic. I think Darla is one of the most compelling characters ever written for television. I see her as a twisted Virgin Mary of sorts, the Mother of the greatest vampire of them all. Mary brought us Jesus and Darla produced Angelus and later Connor. The Master, Darla's almighty father, wants her son Angelus to sit on his right hand (of the father). Darla comes from a Virgin/ia colony. The Master is almost an Angel Gabriel figure coming to Darla singing in the night when he vamped her. The psychic split between human/Darla and Vamp/Darla shown in Reunion, echoes the split in the human Mary and the mother-of-god-Mary while she retained her "virginity" after conception and birth. Darla encourages Angelus' role as evildoer like V-Mary encourages Jesus' role as savior. Whedon twists everything about her and dynamic is just great.

You know, the twisted Virgin Mary image struck me, too, hence Buffy finding a portrait of Darla as Mary in City Girls (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1723301/1/).

...and speaking of twisting Marian imagery, there is also Cordelia as the Transcendant Mother, Jasmine works as a reversed Jesus, the divine giving birth to herself via using Connor and Cordelia and becoming one flesh with her followers not via being consumed by them but by consuming them, and if Michelangelo's pieta juxtaposes an impossibly young Mary with Jesus who seems older than her, there is Jasmine who of course doesn't just look older than Connor but is older, by millennia, and yet is his daughter...

Oh, I just read City Girls! I really loved your Buffy and Dawn. The sister dynamic is wonderful in it.

Buffy and Dawn's relationship became one of my favourite things of the show, and so I was glad to use it.

That's fascinating; Darla as the Vampire Virgin Mary..the dark mirror of Christianity.
Great post and discussion!

Oh, fascinating. You know, even though I watched all these eps as they aired since btvs s2, I was completely removed from fandom until about Buffy s7, and then not so involved. It took NFA to get me interested.

So, wow, this is so very interesting. Hmmmmmmmmm, Darla. (I'd take her over Dru any day.)

*loves Darla more than any other Jossverse character, except Connor*

I remember the Angel's Soul message board back when the shows were originally shown, and all the Darla complaints during the first half of season 2. Ha!

Is it bad that I'm often pretty glad that I didn't really get into Buffyverse fandom until 2004? I know I missed a ton of awesome discussion and probably a lot of fic, but ... yeah. :)

At the same occasion, it's spelled out even to whose who chose to regard Reunion dynamics as platonic that Darla and Drusilla had their own thing going sexually, and that they were the ones who gave the boys permission, or not.

Hahaha, so THAT'S why people complain about that episode, REALLY, isn't it? And that's the part that's not going to be Jossed.

Nothing deep to say here, but great observations.

Naturally.*g*

And thanks!

One of the more interesting things about vampires are the families they form and the dynamics within that family. When I first read this post my first thought was that Janette from "Forever Knight" wasn't a passive person; for the most part her angst free attitude towards vampirism served as a direct contrast to Nick's. Like Darla, Janette had been a prostitute as a mortal and becoming a vampire for her was a liberation; she couldn't relate at all to Nick's quest to become human or his hatred for Lacroix. All this was changed of course on her farewell where she unintentionally became human due in part to having fallen in love with one. Before this Janette's role in the family seemed to be that of the well-adjusted older child who kept out of the fights between her brother and father; if that's what you meant as passive than I agree.

The Fanged Four are uniqe not just for having female sires but also for being multigenerational; the other two examples consist of a sire and his fledgelings. The only relationship in their group that's not really defined is Spike and Darla; near as I can figure she mostly saw him as her granddaughter's boyfriend.

Because say what you want about Angelus and Spike, their hearts sure belong to Mommy. "I'm your son's other mother," says Drusilla to Anne in Lies My Parents Told Me, in case we've missed it so far, and Darla's last "my darling boy", spoken when Angel has his hand on her pregnant belly, could mean either the unborn Connor or Angel himself. And you don't have to go to the end of their relationship; "you made me," Angel insists both when she throws him out immediately after the souling in the Five by Five flashbacks and in the Darla flashback in China where she temporarily takes him back. "I gave you eternal life," Darla says to Angel when she wants to persuade him to turn into a vampire again, and "she delivered me (from mediocrity)," says Spike about Drusilla in Crush,
Nods. Great meta and as you say, Joss turns the traditional male vampire as leader role, such as Dracula, and makes the women the important characters. And they are indeed the ones with the power.

After reading this post, I'm happy that I came to Buffy/Angel after canon ended and therefore took Darla and Dru's agency and importance as given. Although I certainly can't claim to have had as eloquent thoughts about the situcation as you have done. :)

Your placing Darla and Dru in both the context of B/A fandom as well as vampire lore at large made for an interesting read, thanks!

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Fanged Four Dynamics revisited

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