Hi, I read a post where you mention that you were aware of spoilers during the last seasons of Buffy, if I remember correctly you said, that Joss&Co weren't happy of the Spuffy shipping in S6, but in S7 they definitly play with the idea of Spuffy, do you know why they decided to do this, or if it was just fanservice?also, have you heard anything of why the writers of s10 decided make Spuffy canon? is just that i'm disapointed that B never told S that she love him and now they are supposedly over
OK, this gets complicated.
Yes, during S6 and 7, I was friends with people who had access to scripts and sometimes (rarely) writer’s notes early. There were also a lot of interviews with the writers published while S6 and s7 were airing, and there was a radio show, The Succubus Club, which regularly featured BtVS and AtS writers to discuss the episode which had just aired. And lastly, several of the writers (Jane Espenson in particular) did a number of Buffy Q&As at various conventions and writer’s groups.
You have to keep in mind a couple of things here: One, this was all fifteen years ago, and the relevant interviews are no longer available on the net, if they ever were in the first place. Take anything I say with a grain of salt; it’s only my possibly inaccurate interpretation. Two, the writers themselves disagreed on a lot of things, so their statements about the characters often contradicted each other. There was one Succubus Club show I remember in particular where Drew Goddard and David Fury were discussing Spike’s motivations, and it was obvious that Goddard was of the opinion that even an evil vampire could choose to do good things even if he couldn’t be ‘good’ in an absolute sense, while Fury was visibly struggling to reconcile Spike’s actions with his own belief that evil vampires could only do evil things, finally coming up with a Spike-exceptionalism theory that Spike must have kept part of his soul or something like that. It was fascinating to realize that the writers had the exact same sort of arguments that we do, and Joss never seems to have felt the need to sit down and codify or clarify any of this stuff.
Thirdly, the writers will cheerfully change their message depending on what story or character agenda they’re pushing at the time. And the story or character agenda they’re pushing can change in the course of a season. So you’ve got Marti Noxon interviews early in S6 where she seemed to be pushing Spuffy, and Marti Noxon later in the season saying stuff that seems anti-Spuffy.
There were two sets of leaked episode notes that I know of. One was an outline of the episodes for the first half of the season. From that, we know that Normal Again was originally supposed to be Episode #10, and the turning point of Buffy’s depression. Tara was supposed to die and the rest of the season would have been devoted to fighting Dark Willow. That one is pretty straightforward.
The second set of notes is one I know much less about, because I missed the chat where the person who had it did their Q&A about it. And it kills me, because I would give a kidney to see what they actually said. This is the set that fractured the BAPS mailing list so badly. It was a rough outline of the second half of S6, not broken into episodes so far as I know. The only things I know for certain about it was that it said that Buffy and Spike would have an “S&M relationship,” and that by the end of the season, Spike would be “barely reformed.” To the best of my knowledge, there was no mention of the attempted rape (which we know from an interview with Stephen DeKnight was a relatively late addition to his script by Marti Noxon to up the drama quotient of Spike’s conflict with Buffy), and no mention of the soul.
So keeping all that in mind, this is my interpretation, based on the interviews, notes, and other stuff:
Originally, Spike and Buffy’s relationship was only going to last into the middle of the season, and it wouldn’t get nearly as abusive and awful as it eventually did. And I truly don’t think that the writers expected it to become a shipping juggernaut. So I think that in the beginning of the season, they pushed it in a sort of joking way. The popularity of the ship caught them totally by surprise, and they were shocked that so much of the audience thought it would be perfectly OK for Buffy and Spike to be a real couple. That’s when we started seeing interviews backing off the Spuffy. And that’s about when Joss got cold feet about killing Tara, and kept pushing it back, and they had to do something, so they filled the plot holes with more Spuffy, which they made worse and worse in an attempt to make the audience go off the pairing. The writers were again shocked that so much of the audience sympathized with Spike rather than Buffy, and their continuing attempts to make the audience react they way they felt that the audience ought to react culminated in the attempted rape.
More writer’s interviews: Marti Noxon was visibly surprised when an interviewer compared Buffy beating Spike up to domestic abuse. Spike was evil. Why would anyone see him as a victim? Buffy was supposed to be the victim. Jane Espenson and Steve DeKnight argued against doing the attempted rape, but were overruled by Joss and Marti, who honestly didn’t seem to think it was that big a deal. Once again, the writers severely misjudged the audience’s reaction. Fandom melted down. It didn’t help that they finally killed Tara in the same episode. As I recall, ratings, which had been falling all season, plunged. The show had just gotten too dark for an audience which had enough real-world darkness to deal with an a post 9-11 world.
I don’t know for sure when the writers decided that Spike would get a soul. I also don’t know if they always intended for him to get it on purpose. I wouldn’t be awfully surprised if they had left it up in the air til the last moment, and that’s why they didn’t tell JM what his character’s motivations were. But I think it’s very likely that the enormous backlash to Seeing Red (which they would have been getting around about the time they were writing and filming “Grave”) influenced their decision. After that, I think they felt that the only possible solution was for Spike to deliberately seek out a soul.
Once Spike got a soul, I think they were still up shit creek without a paddle. They had never bothered to create the same kind of distance between souled and unsouled Spike that they’d always been careful to preserve between Angel and Angelus. I think – and this is pure speculation on my part – that maybe Joss had wanted to do Spuffy for real in S7, but with the attempted rape, they wrote themselves into a corner. No matter what, a huge part of the audience would always see souled Spike as the same guy who tried to rape Buffy, and putting Buffy together with Spike would be difficult.
(Now, I’m going to take a minute and say that it wouldn’t have been impossible, because the S10 comics FINALLY took the bull by the horns and addressed that problem, and did it in a sensitive and nuanced way. But it definitely would have been hard, and in S7, I think the writers just wanted to hurry on past the whole issue as quickly as possible.)
But anyway – at the same time… ratings were tanking, and Buffy/Spike shippers were one of the few groups of fans still grimly watching on. So I think they tried to please everyone. No real romantic relationship for Buffy and Spike, because that would be seen as anti-feminist. But they kept teasing romance to keep the shippers watching. And of course even though SMG had telegraphed her intention to quit when her contract was up, they were hoping not to be cancelled, and kept sneaking ideas for a revamped show or a spinoff into S7, which is one reason the plot is a mess.
So basically, I think the story of Spuffy was a story of the writers being at odds with the audience and to some extent with themselves, and Joss being distracted by Firefly, and things spinning out of control and being imperfectly patched up. It’s notable that over on AtS, the widely hated Cordelia/Connor plotline was going on at the same time.
As for why the comics writers decided to do Spuffy in S10, I don’t know. I don’t have any connections there. Nor do I know for certain that it’s over between them there. Probably, but nothing’s over till the Chirago demon sings, you know?