Ghost Ship

‘Taxi…?’

Based on this:

@paleoleigh I know this is super late (and perhaps someone else has made it) but I hope this is to your liking ^^

20 years late is still fashionably late, right? So I just finished season 1 of Supernatural and dare I say I have a favourite brother 🫣

That's true on both a metaphorical level (Joyce does not react well to finding out that Buffy is a vampire slayer; she wonders out loud if it's because Buffy "didn't have a strong father figure" and asks her if she's "tried not being a Slayer"; she -- at least initially -- treats being a vampire slayer as a kind of phase she expects Buffy to grow out of when she gets older) and on a more literal level (Joyce's role in the narrative is often to discourage Buffy from pursuing relationships that Joyce thinks aren't good for her; she encourages Buffy to go to college in part because she thinks Buffy "belongs at a good old-fashioned college, with keg parties and boys"; depending on the writer Joyce doesn't seem to realize that Willow and Tara are dating even months after Willow has come out to all her friends).

I don't think it's the only possible reading of Joyce's character (you could argue, on the contrary, that Joyce is much more sympathetic to Faith -- metaphorically the side of Buffy who embraces 'being a Slayer' and everything that means -- than any other adult figure; that she's the one to spontaneously bring up 'marching in the Slayer Pride parade'; that she's ultimately much more accepting of Buffy's status as the Slayer and the unique position that puts Buffy in than basically anybody else in Buffy's life; that she prides herself on having "read all the parenting books" and tells Buffy that she "can tell me anything [...] you cannot surprise me"; that she explicitly reassures Buffy that she won't "meddle in your [clandestine night-time activities with Faith] as long as you're careful").

And I think it's pretty clear that the identification of being the Slayer with being queer was never fully intended or embraced by the narrative and that it therefore isn't the definitive or only possible reading of the show (Joyce not liking the idea of her daughter being killed by a monster in a cemetery one night isn't actually inherently unsympathetic! Joyce wanting her daughter to have a good education does not automatically make her a bad parent! being surprised to learn a secret about her daughter that has been actively kept from her is clearly not her fault!).

I mean, to be clear about what prompted this post: I don't think that an out-of-context screenshot of Buffy misremembering the details of an argument she had almost six months ago -- taken from a almost universally agreed to be badly written episode, one in which we are not even meant to agree with Buffy! -- is particularly good or compelling evidence of this reading. But, sure, in isolation it's a pretty natural interpretation to have and I get why people want to talk about it.

Except, well. The wider context of 21st century Buffy fandom is pretty hard to ignore. And that context is that the fandom has seized on the least sympathetic reading of Buffy's mother -- the only recurring adult woman¹ to appear in more than thirteen episodes of the show -- while also embracing the most sympathetic reading of ... well, basically every adult man in her life, but in particular her surrogate father figure.

A man who constantly questions or second-guesses Buffy's judgement (something he keeps doing every season of the show: there is no point, except perhaps the very final episode, where Giles accepts that Buffy has the right to make decisions that he doesn't agree with and won't try to reverse). A man who thinks nothing of lying to her or keeping important secrets from her, who insists on maintaining strict boundaries between her and his personal life while refusing to let her do the same thing for him (compare his reaction to Buffy showing up at his house in The Dark Age because he missed a scheduled meeting with the way he shows up unannounced at her house as early as mid-Season 1, for example). A man who profits from the fact she constantly risks her life fighting demons (at least, if you accept the retcon from Checkpoint that Giles is paid at all). A man who was happy to leave her teenage sister to be raised by two untrained college students after she died, while he ran away to the other side of the world to feel sorry for himself. And -- of course -- a man who once secretly drugged her so she'd lose her Slayer powers, then lied to her face when she came to him in tears for help, all so he could send her to risk her life fighting a vampire while defenseless in the interests of a "test" he himself described as "an archaic exercise in cruelty".

And, yeah, with that context in mind: it does kind of rankle to have the most common fandom reading of Buffy's mother be a reduction to "bad mother, probable homophobe" when the same fandom's most popular take on the man I described above is "perfect dad who did nothing wrong ever and if he did it's bad writing we can all agree to ignore".

I mean, you can wave away the most egregious of his actions above as just bad writing or as uncharitable misreadings of the text or as just symptoms of the writers not really knowing what to do with him after a certain point, sure. But why is that a courtesy that gets extended to Buffy's father figure but not to her actual mother? Why do we have to pretend Joyce reacting badly to her daughter being wanted for murder by the police is evidence of some deep-seated prejudice on her part, while Giles being raised from the age of ten to encourage Buffy onto a path that in all probability will lead to her early death is solid proof he is a faultless ally? Why is Quentin Travers telling Giles he has "a father's love for [Buffy]" something the fandom accepts as simple fact about Giles's feelings for Buffy, while the repeated instances of Joyce telling Buffy she loves her (or vice versa) are something that the fandom insists on constantly caveating or questioning?

(That's a rhetorical question, to be clear; I know full well why and I think you all know it too.)