How the hell did Buffy-the-show equate redeeming problematic power with putting it squarely in the hands of the epitome of young white womanhood and undying, white manhood provided it's subordinate to white womanhood? I never saw Spike’s arc on Buffy or even on Angel as redeeming all his sins, just those committed in the name of love. On both shows all he gets in the end is death and glory (oh the irony). But returning to Robin I was being unfair if I implied that he was solely on the watcher’s side. He very clearly sees himself as his mother’s son, when Buffy uses her words against him he absolutely takes that on board, he even flings them right back at her in the next episode. At that point in the story all of them Buffy, Robin, Giles, Nikki herself are in thrall to the patriarchal injunction that it’s the mission that matters.
Nikki is only part of the story of how characters of color get fucked over in the Buffyverse - the past framed by the present. I can’t argue with this. I think things did get a little better in season S7, Robin’s complexity being a large part of that but coming from a very low base. I was clipping Kendra’s S2 story recently for a slayer vid of my own and quite apart from the whole ‘Tragic Mulatta 101’ aspect Buffy’s attitude to her is incredibly dismissive and quite unremarked on. It’s only one remove from Cordelia’s treatment of her foreign exchange student, which was played as a big joke in one of the early episodes of the season.
Re: "Origin Stories," part 2
I never saw Spike’s arc on Buffy or even on Angel as redeeming all his sins, just those committed in the name of love. On both shows all he gets in the end is death and glory (oh the irony). But returning to Robin I was being unfair if I implied that he was solely on the watcher’s side. He very clearly sees himself as his mother’s son, when Buffy uses her words against him he absolutely takes that on board, he even flings them right back at her in the next episode. At that point in the story all of them Buffy, Robin, Giles, Nikki herself are in thrall to the patriarchal injunction that it’s the mission that matters.
Nikki is only part of the story of how characters of color get fucked over in the Buffyverse - the past framed by the present.
I can’t argue with this. I think things did get a little better in season S7, Robin’s complexity being a large part of that but coming from a very low base. I was clipping Kendra’s S2 story recently for a slayer vid of my own and quite apart from the whole ‘Tragic Mulatta 101’ aspect Buffy’s attitude to her is incredibly dismissive and quite unremarked on. It’s only one remove from Cordelia’s treatment of her foreign exchange student, which was played as a big joke in one of the early episodes of the season.