Buffy’s most hated episode gets fanfiction rewrites 20 years later

[Ed note: This article discusses attempted rape and sexual violence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 25th anniversary is this year, but this May presents another, darker milestone. Twenty years ago this month, UPN aired the 19th episode of season 6, “Seeing Red,” in which a beloved queer character is murdered. In a similar but unrelated incident, Spike the vampire, who allegedly wanted to ignite the spark he shared with Buffy earlier in that season, sexually assaults Buffy inside her bathroom. Spike is horrified at his actions and decides to seek a soul. This development will be key for the seventh season. We don’t learn how — or even if — the assault affects Buffy. Shows move on, and we are expected to follow their lead.

It’s safe to call “Seeing Red” the show’s most hated and hurtful episode, to its fans and even its actors — a hurt that takes on even graver significance in light of allegationsJoss Whedon was the creator of this episode. He displayed a pattern for abuse. The episode has been condemned in Vice, Slashfilm, Syfy, CNN, Salon, and Vulture for being irresponsible, harmful storytelling, and incongruent with Spike’s character besides. To make the vampire’s soul-seeking plausible, the episode inflicts trauma on a woman — “a very cheap and overdone plot point” in television and fiction, in the words of Holly Atkinson, a writer and one of five founders of Elysian Fields, the internet home for fanfiction about Spuffy (the Spike/Buffy ship). And the episodes and season that follow make no space for the Slayer’s experience of trauma, propelling the pernicious myth that it is “strong” for Buffy to ignore it.

BuffyThe show had always dealt with trauma in a inconsistent manner, only focusing its attention on it when plot development was possible. At the same time, the show treated Sunnydale citizens’ pathological amnesia, as murder after demonic murder occurs, as a perpetual punchline. But the show’s writers devoted ample time to Buffy processing her mother’s death in season 5, for example, and Buffy’s magical resurrection at the start of season 6. The inconsistency around an attempted rape calls into question whether the creators understood the seriousness of what they’d written into being.

“The entire point of that was not to tell a Buffy story,” noted Atkinson. “It was to tell a Spike story, and they did it by assaulting her. I will never forgive them for that.”

Image via Hulu: 20th Century Fox Television

Buffy is a favorite of mine And Spike, watching “Seeing Red” for the first time made me feel like I’d been chopped in half by hands that, until that point, I’d mostly trusted. For many fans, “Seeing Red” irrevocably destroyed the Spuffy ship and any affection for the Spike who’d come before — valid and understandable reactions. For some, it was only workable to enjoy the show by avoiding “Seeing Red” on rewatch, to the extent that such a blind spot is possible. Here is what I currently do. In my personal “canon,” there is plenty to love about the first 106 episodes, and the show “ends” after season 5, with a short coda through season 6’s seventh, cathartic musical episode. In it, the ensemble cast aptly sings “Where Do We Go From Here?” (and Buffy kisses Spike, with consensual romantic intent, for the first time). I watch with a knot in my gut, wishing for an alternate universe where this is a show I’d want to keep watching.

So if “Seeing Red” felt like an amputation, fanfiction has become a kind of triage. It’s in the Spuffy fanfiction community where fans continue to grapple — often with far more emotional intelligence than the show displayed — with one of the most fascinating relationships in television history. “I think we strive to provide a supportive, healthy environment for authors, readers, artists, and beta readers to engage in the community,” one moderator, who has been part of Elysian Fields for seven years, told me.

This community is highly active, especially considering that it’s been a quarter century since the series debuted on The WB. It provides a space both for Spuffy fans who want to spend time, for pure pleasure, in situations and worlds where Spike never assaulted Buffy, and for those who want to thoughtfully reimagine what happened through “stories which attempt to properly handle the fallout from that incident in ways the show could not,” as the EF moderator put it.

It was started by five Spuffy authors around 15 years ago. The goal of the site is to preserve Spuffy stories that have been lost or were endangered. It quickly became an online space to share new fics. The serial format allowed authors to upload chapters in real time as they were completed. This format reflected the anticipation of each new episode dropping. Both authors and lurkers could leave comments, which was a great way to receive immediate feedback. “We’re bouncing ideas off of each other, and we’re discovering new what-ifs,” said Atkinson of the experience.

Pandemic bingeing behaviors, coupled serendipitously Buffy streaming on Hulu, have “made the community explode,” said Atkinson. The site had more than 900 authors and close to 25,000 members as of April, and attracted Gen Z fans who’ve also fallen hard for Buffy. Atkinson, an older fan and self-described feminist who’d grown up as more or less a contemporary of the Slayer, said she finds the influx of new voices about the show’s characters, tropes, and poorly aged conventions “refreshing.” Many of these “meta conversations” happen in the Elysian Fields Discord, which launched earlier this year. The day before I spoke with Atkinson, she said, there’d been a long discussion there about the way in which the show inconsistently acknowledged consent violations, which often went so far as to frame them comedically.

Spuffy stories are a bit like slash. They use trigger warnings, a rating system (G to NC-17), and range from lighthearted fluff and epic fantasy. I’ve read steamy one-off scenes, madcap road trip fics, and veritable novels, which take place as far from Sunnydale as Scotland. I’m new, having joined during the pandemic, but it seems that over the years, the moderators — some departed, others new — have managed to foster a unique, largely supportive culture of feedback: Several stories have garnered more than 2,000 comments. They’ve also maintained seasonal “challenges” (writing prompts), fiction awards, banner art exchanges, and an annual Secret Santa where the gift is a fic.

I’ve found in EF a robust community of fans engaging in critical conversations. They are using a site whose LiveJournal-like design is stuck somewhere in the mid-aughts — I note this with affection — to move Spuffy, and BuffyForward, asking questions about friendship, love, sexuality, death, trauma and morality. These are all heavy subjects that the series raised — in ways often underappreciated — but at times mishandled. By creating fanfic, writers can make space for Buffy’s erotic pleasures, and pay tribute to other parts of the series. This includes one particular bleach-blond vampire for EF members.

Image via Hulu: 20th Century Fox Television

Season 2 saw Spike literally crash into Sunnydale. Britpunk vampire. Always draped in boots-length leather, like a Shakespearean Queen, Spike was beautiful and captivating. He was also an unusual vampire for the show: intelligent, irreverent, sensitive, and crafty, positioned as the Slayer’s worthiest adversary. He was to be killed off by his creators after just five episodes. But Spike was delicious, magnetically fun to watch, and that was due entirely to the talent of James Marsters, the actor who played him across all the character’s contradictory registers from humor to pathos. Spike was there.

I’ll admit that Spike’s aesthetic appealed to me. But I was also fascinated by the character’s complexity. As a mixed-race, queer only child of an immigrant, who had grown up straddling worlds, I found aspects of myself in Spike’s blurred identities and seemingly incompatible desires. He lived with me in the same way. Sometimes he was alone. I also experienced overlaps. From the vampire’s earliest scenes, we see a character fluent between worlds, smudging the line between good and evil, hapless poet and probably bisexual monster, Slayer accomplice and creature of the night. It’s this switchiness, this genre defiance, this agility in navigating multiple realities, that helps Spike evolve and come into his power.

It’s also, in my mind, what gave the character his ineffable queerness. In his backstory, mixed-up identities, tenderness, and posturing, “I do think that there’s a queer reading to Spike, whether it’s subtext or text,” said Ian Carlos Crawford, host of the self-proclaimed queer, Latinx Buffy podcast Slayerfest 98. Spuffy’s flirtations with power play, kink and gender expression were also queer.

Spike is most complicated. Buffy’s black-and-white concept of good versus evil. Show slayers killed the vampires, while soulless vampires were viewed as evil. “It was supposed to be binary — I think that was the intention going into season 1,” said Atkinson. “The problem is, that by itself is not very interesting.” But Spike’s feelings for his lover, the vampire Drusilla, and the truce he forges with Buffy in the season 2 finale, shook up that simplistic framing.

Image via Hulu: 20th Century Fox Television

“The more I know, the more confused I get,” Buffy laments in one season 2 episode. It’s not easy, she asks her Watcher. “It’s terribly simple,” he quips. “The good guys are always stalwart and true [and] the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats.” “Liar,” she replies. To me, this scene contains the show’s best, truest thesis: There is no black and white, only gray. This was the reason I loved the show in all my multi-identities, despite its flaws and whiteness.

“Seeing Red,” in recasting Spike as having been mere evil all along, seemed to trash this thesis — not because people who do good deeds can’t also be rapists, but because his quest for a soul returned a soul good, vampire badA show with such straightforward ideas has lost its ethos. Spuffy fanfiction often challenges my binary thinking using the lens that is most healing to me: desire.

Elysian Fields has more than 6000 Spuffy fictions as of April. Many of these fics are still in development. I’ve read a number that are set before “Seeing Red,” that rework events, fill in gaps in the narrative, or create alternate timelines and realities. It is a Spuffy Space, so many readers and writers come to this place for the best parts. Many stories deal with this topic. Ellie Rose McKee, a writer and EF moderator who has been a member of the site since 2013, said they’ve read “dozens of stories” that rewrite events so the attempted rape never happens, or that address Buffy’s experience afterward more responsibly. “I’ve written both myself, and I’m not done exploring the topic,” McKee said. “It means that much to me.”

Atkinson, who is currently rewriting season 7 to address “the massive amounts of trauma that season 6 heaped on us,” brings her experience as a published novelist to her Spuffy fanfic, and is working with a sensitivity reader for this project. She’s also integrating feedback from EF members who are survivors.

“Since I’m not a sexual assault survivor, I want to make sure that when I’m presenting Buffy’s narration, that I’m doing her justice, that I am getting into her thought process, because the show didn’t give us that,” she said. “I want [my fics] to be as — I mean, we’re talking about vampires — but as realistic as possible and as sensitive to the subject matter as possible, without exploiting it, which I feel the show did.”

As many as possible Buffy fans, I would prefer not to think about “Seeing Red” at all. Elysian Fields community has allowed me to envision Buffy and Spike in a different light than the one that their creator gave. It has been regenerative to witness fans sew new layers of pleasure and compassion — and often deep sensitivity to trauma and recovery — into these characters through their own varied stories. That’s what any creative work is: a living thing. All these years later, the surge in popularity of a Spuffy fanfic site is evidence enough that you can no more control the things you make as predict what they’ll mean to someone else. That Spike’s character has helped me think more critically and joyfully about how I inhabit my fluid identities is proof of that.

“The beauty of fan fiction is that it gives those most invested in the narrative the power to control it,” said McKee. “And that’s where the fans have stepped in and written their own endings. Their own resolutions.”

Fanfic writers are like television producers. They are involved in serial stories, are responsive, loyal to the past, and recast events, deepen characters, and open up new possibilities. This is how you can retell a story with love. In Spuffy’s case, it’s still a story worth retelling.