Volatile and frivolous

Problem 1 So first, the woes of Xander Harris. The connecting thread that links the every first scene to the very last is that he wants him and Cordelia to have a relationship - a real commitment, publicly affirmed and acknowledged, not just lots of furtive making out. But she's reluctant. If you asked him what his problem is, he would say: “I have feelings - real genuine feelings - for this girl, but she doesn’t care about that, she only cares what her friends think.”

I think the writers (I’ll stick with the plural here, because I don’t know how much of this is Marti Noxton and how much is Joss Whedon and how much is anyone else’s influence) expect us to find this pretty sympathetic. I think on some level we’re expected to see Xander’s desire for a more committed relationship as intrinsically sweet and noble, at least compared to either “tawdry teen lust”, or Cordelia’s concern for her social standing. His desire is “deep” and “real”, whereas both of those would be “shallow”.

I want to resist this idea. Partly that's because I’m inclined to think that more committed vs more casual is actually morally neutral in itself. But that’s not really the main point. The main point is that surely the value of any sort of desire for someone is conditional on respecting and caring for them.

And by that standard it becomes very significant that Xander literally cannot say a single nice thing about Cordelia.

His friend asks why he can’t date “someone more… better”, and his response is, basically, “there’s no-one else to date, if it wasn’t her I’d be alone.” (I mean actually his response is to say “the only other person I’m interested in is unavailable” while pointedly looking at Buffy, like some sort of fusion of creepy incel and stroppy 2-year-old… but that’s not the issue here.)

He prepares a speech about why they should be together and he still can’t actually think of anything nice to say, beyond the perfectly generic “Maybe something in you sees something special inside me. And vice versa.”

He is in the act of blackmailing someone into casting a love spell on her, and he shoots down the idea of them loving each other forever, because “a man can only talk self-tanning lotion for so long before his head explodes.”

And on one level, yeah I get that this is the comedic bit they are committed to. And I think we’re meant to look past his words and see that he really does respect and care about her… because he has romantic feelings for her (as per the operative idea that feelings like that are inherently self-justifying). But I don’t think we have to do that. I think it’s just as reasonable to take him at face value: he doesn’t respect Cordelia now any more than he did before they started making out. He doesn’t even like her. He holds her in contempt and finds her annoying.

(A season and a half later, in “the prom”, he does go out of his way to do a nice thing for her, and that’s character growth, but that’s not what we see in this episode.)

And to be clear, you don’t have to like or respect Cordelia! She’s written to have a lot of very obvious flaws. But you have to like and respect her if you want to have a relationship with her! It’s sort of a murkier issue if you should even make out with people you don’t like or respect, but setting that aside, the desire to move from hate-kissing to hate-dating is not an inherently noble or sweet desire. It’s actually kind of a scary desire. Because if you’re drawn to this person not because you like or admire them, it’s natural to worry that you’re motivated instead by some sort of possessiveness or drive for status.

And notice that when Amy asks him what he wants: he doesn’t say anything about Cordelia. He says: “What do I want? I want some respect around here. I want, for once, to come out ahead. I want the Hellmouth to be working for me.”

Which really sounds as if his desire for a deeper relationship with Cordelia is tied up with his own resentment and insecurity, his desire for status and respect, his perpetually wounded manhood. Which is about as sympathetic a motivation as Angel’s is.

Let me be clear, since I know I have mutuals who are Xander fans or Bandillow fans. I’m not saying that Xander is in fact an abuser-in-waiting (though no less an authority than Xander Harris will express that fear later on, in “Hell’s Bells”). I think a serious reading of this character, taking into account both his actions across many episodes and the way that other characters perceive and relate to him, would probably have to be that he’s a basically decent kid who’s just very stupid and riddled with unhealthy feelings and desires. My claim is that this episode doesn’t work well because the writers think they can take that for granted, so they don’t show us it: they show us someone who’s attracted to a woman he neither likes nor respects and feels entitled to a relationship with her because they’ve been making out a bunch.

Was this necessary? No. Suppose we grant that the writers want this Valentine’s Day episode to be about a love spell gone wrong. There’s no need for Xander to be responsible - you could easily find a reason for Willow to attempt this (she virtually does in S3, just with an “anti-love” spell instead) for some sort of quasi-altruistic reason. Or have Amy cast a love spell on Willow (because she’s dying inside about the whole Oz thing…). Or have a rando try it (Jonathan basically does this in S4), or one of the antagonists (Spike will try to have a love spell cast in Drusilla in season 3).

Or if it has to be Xander and Cordelia, then show us that he likes her. Have him actually stick up for her with Buffy and Willow. Instead of him complaining “When are you guys gonna stop making fun of me for dating Cordelia?”, have him complain “When are you guys gonna stop making fun of Cordelia?”, and list nice things about her, including ways she’s helped, or the very fact that she keeps helping them out without having to, or whatever. It would be growth! It could be really sweet.

But it wouldn’t solve all the problems, because there are four more.

Problem 2 The writers could have shown Xander going to Amy after a scene of him sitting despondently, showing some sign of thinking about Cordelia. They could have shown Amy actively offering to help him! (It’s not like they’re trying to maintain some coherent canon of who she is as a character.) They could have shown him hesitant - or seeing references to love spells in some book that Giles and Willow are reading, and then wrestling with the decision, and finally giving in. That would at least have conveyed some sense that this is a normally decent person giving in to their worst impulses in a moment of weakness.

Instead what they show is him being taunted by Harmony and other randos, establishing not any sort of feelings about Cordelia as a person, but a general sense of social inferiority and low status. Then he approaches Amy, blocks her way threateningly, blackmails her, comes up with the idea of a love spell by himself, and says his plan is specifically to make Cordelia love him so he can dump her and break her heart in revenge. This way, we are led to think, he will finally get “some respect around here”. Start to finish, it’s his plan, driven by his determination to humiliate the woman who hurt his social status. If it requires threatening an unrelated girl, that’s fine: he’s been treated unfairly by life, don’t you see, so he’s justified in being a dick to anyone and everyone. To me, this doesn’t read like “decent person gives in to temptation”, this reads like “I really hope there are no guns in this guy’s house because this is terrifying.”

And I don't really get why the writers pick the specific way of getting from point A to point B that paints Xander in such an unflattering light, if the rest of the episode is going to keep following his wacky antics and eventually reward him - i.e., if they expect him to carry at least some modest amount of audience sympathy. My best guess is that they think that sympathy can be taken for granted, either because of his plight (socially excluded and mocked, just like… most of our other characters at one time or another?) or because they’ve established him as a nice sensitive man by showing him worrying about whether Cordelia will like his gift, i.e. because he wants a girlfriend. The bar, as they say, is in hell.

(There’s one line later on where Amy says “I liked spending time with you. You're so sweet” and… I know that she is under a love spell at that point, but surely there are more plausible rationalisations that her magic-addled mind could come up with? Literally every word Xander has said to her this episode has been some manner of threat or accusation or him spewing bile about Cordelia. And it almost feels like we’re expected to treat “having emotions” as in and of itself making a man sweet? Because at least he’s not Larry Blaisdell or some other hyper-masculine caricature… except that Larry also has emotions, just hidden, so maybe he’s sweet too, and maybe all men, just by virtue of having a rudimentary emotional life, can count as “sweet, sensitive, men” underneath it all? Maybe this is an ideological system that functions to endlessly excuse men’s behaviour even while claiming to criticise it?)

Problem 3 In the final scene, Buffy seems to grasp the essence of what happened: Xander “invoked the great Roofie spirit”, i.e. attempted to use magic for something close to rape. (Her affect in that scene is wildly discordant with what this should imply but that’s problem 5). But most of the episode seems to have a much less clear-eyed view of love spells.

Note three particular lines:

Amy says “intent has to be pure with love spells”, suggesting that there is some sort of “pure-hearted” way to magically and non-consensually alter someone’s feelings.

Giles reacts to learning what Xander did by emphasising what a “fool” he was, because people under the influence of love spells are “deadly”, again sort of suggesting that if the spell did something more subtle and moderate, it might be ok.

Later, while in the midst of victim-berating, Giles says that what the spell produced is “not love. It's obsession. Selfish, banal obsession”, again suggesting that the problem is that love spells don’t really work as intended.

All of these statements suggest that there’s a sort of ideal version of what a love spell is supposed to do, namely make someone feel genuine love, and that the criticism and problems we see Xander facing result primarily from the fact that this love spell failed to do that, and perhaps that love spells in general can’t do that.

But look: if love spells worked as advertised, and made someone feel something indistinguishable from real, organic, love - made Cordelia want to be to Xander with her full rationality and emotional complexity, just the way she would if she really loved him - that would horrifying.

That would mean that someone’s deepest feelings, and possibly a life-altering commitment, could be conjured by hostile actors at any time. That your heart can be hijacked and your life derailed and even if the person who did this to you admits it, you’ll forgive them, because you love them.

And I think what’s going on here is, again, connected to the idea that the desire for a romantic relationship is self-justifying: that if Xander’s intent was “pure”, if he really wanted to be with Cordelia forever, then the exact way that he “wins her heart” is less important than his devotion to that noble ideal. Which is 100% abuser logic.

I think there’s also, perhaps, the following line of thought subconsciously at work: love is already cruel and it’s already outside of our control. We don’t consent to fall in love with someone, we don’t control it, and it may very well make us miserable. It’s like being shot full of Cupid's arrows, and you know, arrows kill people. Given this, autonomy and consent are just not relevant values - in the domain of romance, control and self-determination are impossible (or perhaps only possible by killing your openness to passion, and thus undesirable), and so the only thing we can hope for is to end up in love with someone who loves us back, living happily ever after. It doesn’t really matter how that happens - divine intervention, love spell, arranged marriage, whatever. “All is fair in love and war.”

I don’t think this ethos is correct, but I do think it's present pretty strongly woven into our culture, partly because it’s the natural counterpart to the historically dominant type of social order, where at least half the population, and often more than that, weren’t expected to exercise choice or self-determination in their romantic lives (or elsewhere).

I like to think a different, autonomy-based ethos is possible, corresponding to a different type of social order, and in that ethos it makes a huge difference whether someone’s feelings arose organically within them or were imposed by magic, gods, drugs, brain surgery, or social pressure. Even if the person themselves has no more conscious control in the one case than the other (because organically arising feelings aren’t consciously chosen), the act of someone else intervening to take control of their feelings is a profound sort of violence.

But the episode seems to see it as basically forgivable, just an extreme case of doing stupid things to impress someone or try to “win their heart”, and wrong mostly because it’s hubristic and stupid and overshoots in dangerous ways. The result is a constant level of uncomfortable dissonance for viewers who are partisans of autonomy.

Problem 4 I don’t know why the writers decided to make the love spell go wrong. It seems like it working as planned could still hit a lot of the same plot beats. Cordelia becomes irrationally, dangerously, violently obsessed; Xander realises he’s in trouble, appeals to Giles for help, gets yelled at, etc. The threat level is definitely dialled down somewhat if Buffy etc. are helping rather than menacing, but you could balance that by having Amy get spooked and start to hide, requiring more effort to locate her.

(You might also have the gang discover that they can’t reverse Amy’s spell without her participation, for some mysterious reason, which would actually fit really well with how they mysteriously can’t reverse her rat-self-transformation next season…)

And if you do really want the spell to go wrong in some interesting way, there are lots of options. One obvious one would be for it to misfire and affect Amy instead of Cordelia. Or misfire and affect Xander instead of Cordelia, so they have to tie him up when he starts trying to break into her house or something. Or if you really want it to be one of those episodes where some spell changes everyone at once, make it more of a character study: everyone in Sunnydale is suddenly unable to restrain their sexual and romantic feelings, and hunts down all their secret crushes to insist on declaring their love. Tense scenes with Giles and Jenny, Willow and Buffy, Cordelia and Buffy, Amy and Willow, etc. (or whatever unsupported headcanon you may have).

But it feels like anything would be better than the actual way they do it. First off: why does it affect all the female characters? Do women feel love with a different body part than men? It’s not even “people attracted to men”, because Larry’s not chasing Xander, and Wilow is. It makes what happens feel extra degrading, that it’s not just “you’re altered by a spell” but “you’re altered by a spell because you’re a woman”.

(The season 7 episode “Him” does confirm that Willow is affected the same way as straight women despite not being into men; this is redeemed only by her immediate and joyous decision to magically forcefem the target.)

It also annoys me for how total the effect is: none of the women get to recognise or resist what’s happening, even imperfectly. The only exception is Amy, who is successfully browbeaten into breaking the spell by Giles. It essentially means that the only characters with agency are Xander and Giles.

Jenny and Amy are especially galling: they know enough about magic that they either should be able to notice, or do in fact know, what’s happened. Have they never considered magical countermeasures or Odysseus-tied-to-the-mast type failsafes? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to show people who haven’t lost “all capacity for reason” wrestling with new and confusing feelings?

(Sure, that might require more screen time per character. Maybe a good reason to not make this affect so many characters!)

Anyway, I am belabouring these points to underline that the particular way the spell goes wrong is not obvious or forced upon us. It’s specifically chosen. So I have to assume that the writers thought this would be the most fun and entertaining thing to do.

And I guess YMMV. Maybe some people find “all women are suddenly brainless minxes obsessed with Some Guy” fun and entertaining. Probably they are the same people who enjoyed watching Xander’s extended fantasy scene where Buffy needs him to rescue her in S1E04.

I don’t enjoy it. It feels a bit like I’m watching a softcore porno tailored for people who identify with Xander Harris, with all the characters I like suddenly and humiliatingly reduced to titillating caricatures.

And I don’t want to be a hypocrite here, as someone who is currently posting, you know, my own hardcore porn about those same characters, at times with humiliation themes involved. But (even setting aside that I think I still give them a lot more agency and interiority in said porn) the big difference is that I’m posting it to an archive to be found by specific kindred perverts, with a whole load of tags and warnings, not broadcasting it to the entire viewing public. Because sexual fantasies are generally pretty uncomfortable to watch/read if they don’t hit your specific buttons. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be included, because showing a character's fantasies can be a good way to explore them, but you should surely keep it to short snippets, right? Not make it last for half a whole episode?

Problem 5 Suppose you have, against my advice, written this episode exactly as it aired, up until the final scenes. The spell has been broken, the danger has passed, now what?

Surely we should expect this whole affair to have negative consequences? And “How much groveling are we talking here?”, “Oh, a month, at least”, isn’t consequences in the sense I mean. Grovelling is the term these characters use for something they know in advance will be temporary, because they know in advance they’ll be forgiven and things will go on as before. This should be a thing which doesn’t get forgiven, or at least the forgiving of which is genuinely in question. Xander should be genuinely asking "do you think Willow will forgive me?", or ideally even "should she?", not complaining that he's "back to being incredibly unpopular."

(And “almost dying” isn’t meaningful consequences because that happens to all of them every few weeks anyway.)

And I know the show mostly likes to re-set things at the end of each episode, but it’s doing lasting consequences for other people! Buffy is still grappling with the consequences of Angel turning, Jenny is still being snubbed because of [insert supposed crime here]. When Willow and Xander are caught cheating, it permanently breaks off one relationship and suspends another for a few episodes. In Season 6 Tara leaves Willow for half a year!

So it’s pretty unimpressive that, as far as we see, the only person actually holding this against Xander is Willow, and 1) she’s not on-screen to tell him off, 2) she seems to be completely over it by next episode, and 3) it’s explained in terms of her idiosyncratic feelings about Xander, not in terms of his actual actions.

But it gets worse: not only is there barely any negative consequence, there’s a major positive one: Cordelia is so touched by Xander trying to mind-rape her that she publicly tells off all her friends and gets back together with him.

Spinoza famously claimed to “have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” So in that spirit I’m going to push past the impulse to scorn and bewail, and try to understand. Because I think this way of ending the episode does flow pretty clearly from the idea we’ve already seen, that wanting a committed relationship is “deep” and “real” in a way that makes it morally self-justifying. Because Xander’s actions flowed from “real” and “deep” feelings, he still somehow has the moral high ground over Cordelia’s friends, who are shallow and frivolous, and so Cordelia realises she should be sticking with him and not them.

Which, again, is just a scary mindset. Oh sure, he might be controlling and invasive and constantly put you down and ignore your consent, but that’s just proof of how much he loves you, so you should give up your independent support system if they’re telling you to ditch him. Sorry to be melodramatic but urgh.

(And I think for this to make sense even on its own terms, we need to think that Xander’s real motivation was to re-start his relationship with Cordelia, and not, as he tells Amy, to humiliate her through rejection. The latter, we’re meant to have assumed, was just a face-saving deflection, a lie to avoid the vulnerability of admitting his real motives. If you take his stated motivations at face value then this ending is horrifying even within the love-justifies-all value system, because Xander tried to hurt Cordelia, lied by omission about this, and she took him back based on that lie. You see how the awfulness is fractal?)

This idea also helps explain the truly stomach-churning exchange where Buffy congratulates Xander on only violating her mind, not her body. “It meant a lot to me… You came through.”

Like, Buffy, please - you made the roofie comparison just seconds ago. Would you really be so impressed with someone who roofied you if, when they had dragged your unconscious body back to their bedroom, they realise this isn’t what they wanted, and decide not to go any further?

But I think it does sort of make a twisted kind of sense if you’re working with a framework that ranks types of desire rather than caring about autonomy. If he had gone ahead and had sex with Buffy, that would be “tawdry teen lust”, sexual and therefore degrading. But as long as his actions stay at the level of “love”, they just can’t be degrading in that same way. Because sex degrades, love elevates, and consent is an afterthought.