#insect reflection

Faith Lehane never had a chance.

Put yourself, if you will, in Faith Lehane’s shoes. You are seventeen years old. You have no friends, and in fact never seem to have had any. You grew up poor, neglected, and physically abused by your mother. Said mother dies when you are still a child, but you are taken under your wing by another woman: your Watcher, who reveals to you that you are a Chosen One - granted the power to fight vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness. She then also dies; violently murdered in front of you. 

So you move across the country to another town, where you meet someone just like you. Like, freakily like you. As if you are her mirror image somehow. She is exactly like you, except she has friends, a loving mother, a living Watcher, and a warm three-bedroomed home to return to every night. You have none of these. You live in a run-down motel that you can’t afford. You have to feed, house and clothe yourself, and none of the adults in your friend’s life make any attempt to rectify this situation, including the one that’s meant to be acting as your Watcher. Again, you are seventeen years old.

But you carry on. You become good friends with this mirror-girl. Perhaps you even have a bit of a crush on her. You think you are inseparable, until you find out she has been secretly keeping her ex-boyfriend in a mansion. At the same time, you get another new Watcher who promises to take care of you, and you start to look up to her. Then she betrays and tries to kill you. And then dies. You spend Christmas Eve with this girl, but again she disappears to look after her ex who’s trying to kill himself. You carry on getting closer with her, finally feeling in tune with another human being who’s coming around to your way of thinking. Then a strange man basically runs into your stake and, oops, you’ve taken a life and might be facing manslaughter charges. It feels like everything in your life other than your freedom has already been denied you, and now you might lose that as well.

What I’m saying is: you wouldn’t have reacted that great either.

In 1872, a full twenty-five years before the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu published Carmilla. This story depicts the relationship between the young and innocent protagonist, Laura, and the confident and mysterious title character, Carmilla. A friendship blossoms between Carmilla and Laura and the two become close, but over time Laura becomes suspicious of Carmilla’s strange behaviour. She flees from her, and it is revealed that Carmilla is a vampire who has been preying on Laura – feeding on her nightly and attempting to turn her into a creature of darkness. Carmilla is confronted, killed, has her head removed and body burned, and the ashes of both are thrown into the river. 

A simple story and much shorter than a true novel, Carmilla’s historical impact outweighs its length. Not only is it one of the earliest and most notable pieces of vampire fiction, and a great influence on Dracula itself, it is also the origin point of one of the most controversial tropes in this genre of fiction: the Lesbian Vampire.

The vampire myth as constructed by Dracula and its compatriots positions vampires as a corrupting sexual influence upon women. Older men sneak into the bedrooms of virginal young women, penetrate them, and therefore transform them into something tragic and ungodly. They personify a threat to patriarchy; a threat perceived in the form of female sexuality. The idea is that an unmarried woman having symbolic sex will irrevocably twist them into some kind of monster.

The Lesbian Vampire exists as an extension of this idea, focusing on one of the most diabolical threats to patriarchal ideology – a woman who sexually desires another woman. Carmilla’s victims are exclusively female, and her pursuit of Laura is very visibly romantic in nature. She kisses Laura, confesses love for her, the two take walks in the moonlight and embrace each other. This is what leads to Carmilla feeding upon Laura and threatening her death. Symbolically, there is no separation between the two. The danger Laura is in is caused by same-sex desire. Carmilla’s villainy is her lesbianism. The trope does not have to include vampires in a strict sense, but more generally the link of sapphic seduction leading to corruption.

I have, in essays past, referred to Xander Harris as one of the most controversial characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After spending more time in the current fandom landscape, I need to correct that statement. He’s simply one of the most disliked characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A lot of people hate him, and given his appearances up until now, it’s not entirely difficult to see why. Xander is an archetypical example of what I will call the Mild Nerd Guy; a trope born out of the 1980s and its Revenge Of The Nerds-led championing of geek culture. A trope that unfortunately came to dominate genre television throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

This is a character who is defined in opposition to more typical Dashing Action Hero archetypes. Where the Action Hero is strong and muscle-bound, the Mild Nerd Guy is physically weedy. He is often shy and lacking in self-confidence. He will appear creepy when he means to be charming – but in an innocent way that encourages us to feel sympathy with this helplessly befuddled young man. He has interests coded as “nerdy” – comic books, science, maths, Dungeons and Dragons. He will be unsuccessful with women, and more often than not will concentrate all his sexual energy onto a single desired target: a popular and attractive woman. This woman will - at least at the beginning of the story – neglects his silent pining in favour of clearly undeserving Bad Boys and Popular Jocks. This is where you get is your Scott Pilgrims, your Ross Gellers, your Tom Hansens, your Every Character Anthony Michael Hall Ever Played… and yes, your Xander Harrises. 

In essence, the Mild Nerd Guy is an alternate model of masculinity, one that certain types of men (shy, nerdy, physically weak) may relate to more than the Dashing Action Hero archetype. Unfortunately, while the trope often presents these men as more respectful towards women than their counterparts, the reality is that female autonomy is a secondary concern in both cases. These are competing models that men can use to Earn Women. Neither is actually concerned with the desires and goals of the women involved at all. 

The Mild Nerd Guy has obvious parallels to the sociological concept of the Nice Guy, a term that most in feminist circles should be comfortably au fait with by now. The Nice Guy feels deserving of the attentions of women solely because of his lack of overt hostility towards them, and resents them when this “niceness” is not immediately rewarded with sexual favours. While the two concepts should not be conflated – one is a writing trope while the other is a social phenomenon – they are inextricably linked. Media informs the way we interact with the world, and the world informs the way we interact with media. Male entitlement engorges itself with stories of men winning women through inaction - the implication being that men deserve the attentions of women by default, and should be upset when it is not automatically bestowed upon them.

Meanwhile, women who have firsthand experience of this entitlement and the behaviour it encourages will naturally be fed up with it, and will bring that frustration into their consumption of media. They will take one look at a Scott Pilgrim or Xander Harris and be immediately, justifiably repulsed. While the more fantastical crimes of Angel or Spike can be easily forgiven, everyday crimes cannot. Most women have never met a serial killer. We’ve all met a creepy nerd. 

This is not a criticism of viewers who have reacted in that way. The common accusation of Xander being a “Nice Guy” I believe an inaccurate read on his character and a misuse of a term meant for the analysis of reality and not fiction. However, I can’t blame anyone who makes that instinctive leap. In fact I would say that bringing one’s own experiences to the consumption of media is the only correct way to watch television. And yet, I can’t count myself truly among that crowd. Despite my distaste for the simpering entitlement this trope has encouraged in male nerd circles, and despite the times I have been disgusted by a line Nicholas Brendon has been made to deliver thus far, I can’t say that I don’t like Xander. In fact, I would say I like Xander, and this episode is a big reason why.

The test that Buffy undergoes in this episode – in which she is stripped of her powers, locked inside a house, and forced to fight a mentally unstable vampire – is named in the script as The Cruciamentum. Giles describes it as “an archaic exercise in cruelty”, and it’s difficult to think of a description that could be more accurate.

The word Cruciamentum is an invented declension that roughly translates from Latin as “result of torture”. Quentin Travers – making his first appearance here as the Head of the Watcher’s Council – defends the practice as a necessary rite of passage, meant to make a Slayer stronger, but this reasoning falls apart under scrutiny The scenario is so heavily weighted against the Slayer, robbing her not only of her powers but the knowledge that she is being robbed at all, that it makes more sense to view the Cruciamentum not as a test, but as a method of control, designed to kill off Slayers that reach adulthood and so gain more independence from the Council. At the very least, it demonstrates the Council’s control over the Slayer, holding the implicit threat of taking away her powers again over her head for the rest of her life. As is the case with many unjust systems, the cruelty is the point.

The Cruciamentum is the Council’s most clear and obvious cruelty, but it is not by any means their only one. Cruelty is their origin story, as we see in Get It Done how they forcibly created the first Slayer through metaphorical rape. It is baked into the central idea of One Girl In All The World – a system which relies on the deaths of an infinite chain of young women. Its current setup, with one Watcher in the field and apparently dozens sitting safely away in England, leads to an inevitable cruelty of indifference that Giles calls out in this episode. There are cruelties of incompetence – failing to alert the field about the firing of Gwendolyn Post, sending the underqualified Wesley to Sunnydale. But perhaps their most impactful cruelty is also their most subtle. It came the moment that Buffy Summers, sitting outside her school in 1997, was called to be a Slayer. This act not only changed Buffy’s life, but caused an irreparable crack in her psyche. It splits her perceived self into two component parts – The Girl and The Slayer – twin selves that she spends seven seasons trying to reconcile.

It’s April 2004; the sunset days of Web 1.0. A new website has just been created: a cross-media wiki known as TVTropes. It’s a site for fans of all manner to identify and record common storytelling conventions as they recur throughout different pieces of media, and it will grow to become a dominant knowledge-base for fandom over the next decade.

A little-known about TVTropes is that it was originally created to focus on one show in particular, and that that show was, of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The site was born from the petri dish of Buffy fan debates. For better or worse, both this site and the works of Joss Whedon were an incredible influence on this era of nerd culture, and even two decades later, we can see their impact. The post-Avengers hegemony of superhero blockbusters and cinematic universes, as well as the increase in spoiler-phobia and efforts to subvert expectations among creatives, can all be traced back in part to this site, and this show. There may be no more succinct demonstration of what 2000s nerd culture was like than this particular intersection of media history, and if we zoom in a little further, there is one trope that is of particular interest to this episode. The page for Badass Decay has existed for over a decade, and has three separate pages of examples, but older readers may recognise it by its original title - Spikeification.

The concept of Spikeification presupposes two things. Firstly, that from the point he is introduced in the show until the point he leaves, Spike becomes less “badass”; secondly, that this is a bad thing. I am introducing TVTropes into this conversation because I think it’s demonstrative of how dominant this line of thinking was in fan culture of the time. This was a presumed fact about Spike’s character, and the only debate was whether his “badass decay” began with his chip, his soul, his love for Buffy, or some other point in the show. It became such a piece of received wisdom that it gave the trope its name, and still today, he is referenced in the page’s headline quote. This received wisdom escaped the confines of Buffy fandom to influence nerd spaces far beyond the show itself.

It’s also, of course, a load of bollocks.

On the 24th May 1988 the Conservative government of Great Britain, led by Margaret Thatcher, passed a law known officially as the United Kingdom Local Government Act 1988. This Act had many effects, but by far its most famous and influential section was the part that has come to be known as Section 28. Section 28 outlawed any school or local authority in the United Kingdom from “promoting homosexuality”, “publishing any material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”, or “promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Given that the act (intentionally) made no effort to define “promotion”, the effect was clear and predesigned: from 1988 until its full repeal in 2003, queerness was illegal in British schools.

This justification for this discrimination was the same one that is always trotted out - the protection of children from predatory influences. Homophobic attitudes were rising in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, whipped up by an entrenched conservative government and a vulturine news industry. The likes of The Sun, Daily Mail, and The Telegraph ran regular scare pieces about the homosexual lifestyle and its apparent attempts to indoctrinate children. The most benign depictions of queer acceptance were accused of being pornographic, of being propagandic, of “glorifying homosexual intercourse”. One book - Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin - was described by The Sun as “vile” and Today as “gay porn”[1], and was deemed controversial enough to kickstart the movement that resulted in Section 28. It depicts a girl with a gay father, engaging in such salacious events as going to the laundrette, and planning a birthday party.

The accusations leveled at these books were lies, and easily revealed as lies to anyone concerned enough to engage in actual research, but their purpose was not to be true. Their purpose was to combine latent homophobia in the general population with the instinctive human desire to protect the young. Together, these elements create a powerful boogeyman. This boogeyman was then paraded out during the general election of 1987, in which the Labour Party was attacked for their (claimed) promotion of such offensive materials. This was an imagined threat cooked up by bigots and seized upon by political actors most interested in protecting their capital. It worked. The Conservatives won the election with 42% of the vote, and remained in power until 1997. 

It is into this cultural landscape that Buffy airs the eleventh episode of Season Three, Gingerbread. The plot revolves around the deaths of two young children, and how those deaths spark a wave of anti-witch paranoia among the townsfolk of Sunnydale; a paranoia that escalates into censorship, persecution, and eventually a literal witch-burning. The dead children are eventually revealed to be an evil demon exerting some kind of mind control on the population, which is standard practice for Buffy hijinks. The important aspects are the real-world parallels that this storyline is intending to highlight.

There are few demographics more underrepresented in Buffy the Vampire Slayer* than Adult Female Characters. As a coming-of-age story, the bulk of Buffy’s cast is understandably made up of Adolescents, who carry on their stories as Young Adults as the show moves on past high school. Beyond these characters though, the show finds time and space to develop many beloved Adult Male Characters. Giles is the first obvious example, but Angel and Spike both also add to this roster, as does Robin Wood in the show’s final season. These are major characters afforded a lot of focus and narrative perspective. Our list of Adult Women on the other hand extends as far as the late Jenny Calendar - a character with a personality and hastily-constructed backstory that could charitably be described as “fascinating”, and uncharitably as “messy” - and Joyce Summers.

Joyce comes into an interesting position this season. She has been a part of the show since the beginning, but the first two seasons positioned her primarily as an obstacle for Buffy, whose ignorance of the supernatural kept her firmly external to the narrative. She is pointedly absent from much of Season Four, and while she gets a lot of screentime with her illness and eventual death in Season Five, it is not her struggles that the show is interested in, only how those struggles are affecting Buffy. Her position is always that of the archetypical Mother. The nagging, obstructive force of Seasons One and Two, the voiceless absence of Season Four, and the sanctified near-Madonna figure that she becomes in Season Five and then posthumously. These comprise nearly all the roles ever afforded to the most thankless of narrative roles - the Hero’s Mother. The Mother can be a nuisance, unmentioned, or tragically dead, but very rarely are they permitted to be a person.

Holiday episodes are a dying art form in the televisual world of 2023. With the domination of on-demand streaming services, the exact airdate of an episode has come to matter less and less. Modern shows might still centre episodes around certain holidays, but rarely can they be considered true Holiday Episodes. By virtue of being easily available outside of one specific date and time of airing, they cannot have the same inherent link to a specific temporal point that the Holiday episodes of years past did.

Things were different in 1999. Episodes were tied to specific points in real time, which affected the fiction. Buffy is no exception. The show progresses at a linear rate of one in-universe year to one real-world year, and all on-screen events occur within the nine-to-ten months we would recognise as an academic year. Buffy herself notes the hellmouth’s tendency to become extra-apocalyptic each May in Get It Done. The show moors itself in the chronology of our world, a choice which benefits television’s personable nature. 

As far as traditional holidays go, Buffy is slightly more indifferent. The closest thing to an annual holiday the show has is Buffy’s yearly birthday disaster. Outside of that, we have three Halloween specials, one Valentine's Day episode, one wildly misguided Thanksgiving story, and this - Buffy’s first and only Christmas episode. This episode has no shame in wearing its Christmassiness on its red-and-white sleeve. Everything from the advertising, to the carol singers that open the episode, to the saccharine snowfall of the climax, to the Santa hat placed on the Mutant Enemy demon during the credits, all screams Christmas. ‘Tis the season, screams the Buffyverse, and of course that means that this is a time of warmth, community, and coming together with the people you love - for other people. For the inhabitants of the Buffyverse, it is a time for demons, loneliness, and seasonal depression.

The Scooby Gang discuss their plans for the holidays, and each of them seems progressively more bleak. Buffy has probably the best time of it - a low-key Christmas with just her and her mother. Willow is alone, still flagellating herself over the Xander incident, and trying to make things up to Oz. Xander is planning an escape from his abusive family’s violent arguments. Cordelia claims she is going skiing in Aspen, but given that we are now in the mystery zone where Cordelia’s father may or may not have been arrested yet, there’s a good chance she’s lying and is spending the Christmas penniless and friendless. She would have this in common with Faith, who is stuck hanging a sad single string of lights in a dingy motel room, inventing fictional parties that she can claim to be invited to so as to not lose face in front of Buffy. And then there is Angel, who, in addition to being a vampire stuck in a Christian holiday, and having recently been dumped, is also being tortured by the incorporeal manifestation of pure evil.