Recently I understood why: they belong to high tragedy; or, since their story ends reasonably well, to classical moral drama. They are deadly serious – in bliss and sorrow, in trouble and everyday life. Humour doesn’t exist in their universe.
Wow. That's really a good way of putting it, and it really sums up some of the issues I have with that particular series.
I though it was wonderful in the beginning, when it was set in S6. She really nailed Buffy's bleak despair and Spike's rather selfish love, and I still like to go back and read the first few sections -- up until Jem is born, and then I have to stop.
As quite a few people mentioned above, everything becomes so unbelievably bleak after that that reading is a chore rather than a pleasure. And what gets me is that Spike and Buffy stagnated in their S6 roles and pretty much stayed the same way (with minor variations) for something like the next thirty years.
And maybe it's because she kept Spike soulless, until the most recent installment -- I can buy that, actually, and the one thing I'm very glad about is that she finally gave Spike a soul and put the two of them on a more equal level. But that doesn't explain what she did with Buffy, and I can't really forgive that. Not that Buffy doesn't have her share of damage, but I hated seeing her constantly portrayed as a monster who only mistreated poor Spike. (And I know her stories only focused on the crises between them, but I would have loved seeing some of the everyday stuff that gave some evidence for why these two stayed with each other. It couldn't possibly be that bad for them all the time, right?) I can understand that she went AU from Wrecked, but the thing is that in canon Buffy went through plenty of bad stuff in the rest of S6 and S7 -- the AU, Willow going bad, etc. -- and she never turned into some kind of abusive bitch as a result. If the "real" Buffy could make it through, why not her Buffy? It hurts me to see her treated that way.
(And I have to agree with swsa in having no love at all for Jem as a character.)
Heh. I kind of feel funny saying this. I've given feedback to her most recent installment (although some of the Buffy-hate in the comments made me furious). She's an incredible writer, and I could never approach her skills in a million years, but something funny happens when I try to read her stories. I become lost in them very easily, up until the point when I try to actually picture the Spike and Buffy I know on the shows saying the dialogue she writes. And at that point there's some kind of mental block. I think she lost, or froze, the characters somewhere along the line. (I'm not even sure -- did she watch S7, or S5 of AtS? It might explain something -- some writers focus only on where they fell in love with the show.)
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Wow. That's really a good way of putting it, and it really sums up some of the issues I have with that particular series.
I though it was wonderful in the beginning, when it was set in S6. She really nailed Buffy's bleak despair and Spike's rather selfish love, and I still like to go back and read the first few sections -- up until Jem is born, and then I have to stop.
As quite a few people mentioned above, everything becomes so unbelievably bleak after that that reading is a chore rather than a pleasure. And what gets me is that Spike and Buffy stagnated in their S6 roles and pretty much stayed the same way (with minor variations) for something like the next thirty years.
And maybe it's because she kept Spike soulless, until the most recent installment -- I can buy that, actually, and the one thing I'm very glad about is that she finally gave Spike a soul and put the two of them on a more equal level. But that doesn't explain what she did with Buffy, and I can't really forgive that. Not that Buffy doesn't have her share of damage, but I hated seeing her constantly portrayed as a monster who only mistreated poor Spike. (And I know her stories only focused on the crises between them, but I would have loved seeing some of the everyday stuff that gave some evidence for why these two stayed with each other. It couldn't possibly be that bad for them all the time, right?) I can understand that she went AU from Wrecked, but the thing is that in canon Buffy went through plenty of bad stuff in the rest of S6 and S7 -- the AU, Willow going bad, etc. -- and she never turned into some kind of abusive bitch as a result. If the "real" Buffy could make it through, why not her Buffy? It hurts me to see her treated that way.
(And I have to agree with
Heh. I kind of feel funny saying this. I've given feedback to her most recent installment (although some of the Buffy-hate in the comments made me furious). She's an incredible writer, and I could never approach her skills in a million years, but something funny happens when I try to read her stories. I become lost in them very easily, up until the point when I try to actually picture the Spike and Buffy I know on the shows saying the dialogue she writes. And at that point there's some kind of mental block. I think she lost, or froze, the characters somewhere along the line. (I'm not even sure -- did she watch S7, or S5 of AtS? It might explain something -- some writers focus only on where they fell in love with the show.)