my little prince!

A line that still runs through my head when I cook eggs

the guy spends seasons 5 and 6 repeatedly ignoring buffy's boundaries and consent. in season 5, he stalks her, steals her panties, and chains her to a wall and threatens to kill her if she doesn't say she has feelings for him. and in season 6, many of their sex scenes prior to seeing red involve spike initiating sex and buffy resisting until she gives in. in some of these scenes buffy explicitly says "no" and "stop" but she's not screaming and crying like she does in the bathroom scene so i guess you could be generous and describe them as dubcon.

and i know that the point of a lot of these encounters is that buffy does actually want to have sex with spike. but for a variety of reasons she believes that it's wrong for her to do so so she tries to stop herself before ultimately giving into her desires. i'm not saying that that's a misreading of these scenes (although i do think their dynamic is somewhat more complicated than that). what i am saying is that spike is very consistently shown to be a guy who refuses to take no for an answer. and we've also seen him get violent when he is rejected in several instances prior to the one in seeing red. so i genuinely do not understand how you could argue that his behavior in that episode is not supported by his characterization up to that point.