Not much to say today.

I might, in my newfound lust enthusiasm for Spike Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, have forgotten to mention that, in addition to the uncle's heart attack and the aunt's broken hip, we were dealing with my foolish mother's head-first plunge off of her porch last weekend.

Turns out that she cracked a bone in her finger, had to have 14 stitches in her hand, and bumped her head badly enough to make the E.R. folks shove her down the hall to get an MRI, but nothing worse, thank goodness. The MRI showed that her brains were unscrambled.

Some weeks you're almost afraid to answer the phone.

Lust Random unconnected thoughts

And, speaking of Spike, although I know I wasn't actually, I was favored, in yesterday's re-runs, with two non-Spike episodes, confirming me in my opinion that it's Spike and not the show that fascinates me.

I was reading Metablog last night, a thing I like to do from time to time, and stumbled across a link to an LJ post by elynross about Spike. I agree with her take on the character.

I like seeing him evil, seeing him having to do the 'right' thing only because he's made a temporary truce with 'the side of good', and seeing him conflicted between his homicidal impulses and the chip in his head. I neither want nor expect to see the character all redeemed and "good" because he's obsessed with Buffy. Character development is one thing but that would be character assassination.

It wasn't out of character for Spike to attempt to rape Buffy, either, when he was so frustrated at her dumping him. It was, in fact, quite typical of the way Spike reacts to problems with his love life. (Remember when he was going to go find Drusilla and torture her until she loved him again? Remember the whole, "love is pain" speech?)

Love doesn’t make you into someone new. It might make you act differently, but underneath is all you're the same person and under stress you'll react like who you are and not who you're pretending to be.

The entire relationship between Buffy and Spike was sick and twisted. She was, as she told him, "using him." I wonder if there's any history of slayers becoming so attuned to the evil they're supposed to be fighting that they sort of "go over"?

Spike isn't a "nice" person. He may have been a tortured poet before he was a vampire, but where is it written that a poet can't have a wide streak of brutality in their nature? I'd say that the fact that he survived, and grew stronger, as a vampire indicates that there's a part of his nature that isn't at all at odds with the violence.

He's also incredibly emotionally unstable. I think it's something that, at his most evil, he was able to sublimate to a certain degree, but with the chip in his head, it keeps causing him more and more problems. That's what the whole "love's bitch" speech was about, after all. It's not just Drusilla or Buffy, it's love. Most of Spike's precarious emotional balance is rooted in whatever "love" relationship he's in at the moment. He's not good alone, even as a vampire he's not very functional when he's alone, which is why he bounces from relationship to relationship and why he usually goes for very strong women. He's looking for a strength in them to bolster up a weakness in himself.

He's not, as elynross points out, a likeable person. He's vain, weak, insecure, untrustworthy, and has violent, even homicidal tendencies that are only tangentially linked to vampirism.

(I figure I'm about two sentences away from talking myself out of being in lust with the character.)

In a side note, I'm not that crazy about the Buffy character, either.

She's one of those impossibly virginal, pure characters that is very hard to empathize with, but she may grow on me as I watch the show.

In the admittedly few episodes I've seen so far, she's very self-absorbed, and emotionally shallow about everything except her own needs. She did use Spike, she treated him like some kind of object that she could pick up and drop, like a puppy dog she could kick around whenever she got mad at the world and it serves her right that he attacked her*. That either has to be an incredibly shallow person, based on what she knows of the emotional capacities of some vampires or bad writing.

*I'm not in any way, of course, excusing rape or attempted rape. But the character said it herself, "she 'forgot' what he was." Why did she forget? Because she was so tied up in her own wants and needs that she didn't consider him as an individual. Again, in the few episodes I've seen, the character seems to frequently 'forget' to consider other people as people, even her friends. So, while Spike was "wrong" to try and rape her, he wasn't acting like anyone other than himself. She was just as "wrong" to treat him like a toy she could throw around when she was in a bad mood and then stuff in a drawer when she got tired of it.

I wonder how I'll be viewing the characters once I've actually seen more than about ten episodes of the first six seasons?

One thing I'll say for this show is that they don't hesitate to offer unusual characters. I'm hoping some of the others will grow on me.

I'm also hoping that no one jumps out of the bushes and tries to slay me if I say that I think Angel was an annoying, mouth-breather whose posture of brooding angst wore thin on me about five minutes after I first saw him. At least Spike does lighten up from time-to-time, even if it's usually because he's just killed something.