Fandom Snowflake Challenge #11

[aadler]

Taking on the meme/challenge here.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge #11

In your own space, create a fanwork. Leave a comment here saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Usually for the ‘create a fanwork’ challenge, I turn out a drabble. This time, however, I’m taking a different direction.

Meta: the Riley Debate

I’m going to go ahead and say it, and damn the consequences:

I liked Riley. More than that, I liked Riley and Buffy.

I don’t deny that the two of them had severely limited audience appeal. Buffy and Angel? intense star-crossed drama. Buffy and Spike? massive train-wreck, driven by massive fan demand.* Buffy and Riley? uh-h-h … ‘bland’ is pretty much the nicest thing you can say about it.

But that’s looking at it from the standpoint of entertainment. What about the relationship itself?

I’ve been in intensely exciting relationships. Want to know something? They SUCK. By and large, excitement comes from conflict, and conflict is not fun when you’re dealing with something so personal, that means so much to you.

Buffy and Riley were involved together in exciting activities, but once the first (and major) one was resolved, the relationship itself settled into something much more even. More comfortable. More … well, very nearly domestic.

More boring. For audiences. For the two people involved? Pretty sure they weren’t bored. When they weren’t fighting evil, they could relax with each other. Given Buffy’s other relationships, I have to believe she welcomed not having to be on high alert all the time.

The complications that came into the relationship? Another contrast here. Her involvements with Angel and with Spike were bad situations — come on, be serious: a Slayer, romantically coupled with vampires? — that were really well told as stories; the difficulties that arose between her and Riley were artificial and unconvincing, growing not out of anything grounded in the relationship itself but because the writers were ready to send the character away and didn’t bother to put in the work to sell it properly. (The best comparison that comes to me is where, in Back to the Future II, Marty McFly can suddenly be compelled to take on any stupid dare if somebody calls him ‘chicken’, which had never been part of his character before and had obviously been grafted on purely for the purposes of the story.)

I’ve expressed the opinion in the past that Xander deserved Buffy — and that Buffy needed someone with his loyalty and focus — but that he didn’t necessarily deserve the baggage she would bring with her. That baggage included the disastrous relationships with Angel, Riley, and unsouled-Spike. Spike wouldn’t have happened if she’d remained with Riley, and (I’m still convinced) Riley wouldn’t have left if not for the deux ex machina of the writers making him do so, with a half-assed job of providing a reason for it.

Making established couples interesting isn’t easy. It’s well known in entertainment that when the plot is driven by Will they ever get together?, it tends to founder once they DO get together. There’s also the fact that it’s by no means certain whether Riley was dispensed with (by the writers) because he — or he and Buffy together — had limited audience appeal, or he was never properly developed because the plan was always to make him the rebound-guy before she moved on to somebody else.

All the same, there is a substantial difference between whether a couple is good entertainment, or just a good couple. Buffy and Riley, once they got past the Walsh/Initiative complications, started out as a good couple. We never got the chance to see whether they would have continued as such. I believe they could have, and if they didn’t work out, it would have been for natural reasons, rather than the feeble excuses offered by a writing staff who did such good work elsewhere when they put their minds to it.

*And I never understood the fan demand itself. Spike was deeply interesting as a character, but him and Buffy as a couple? They were enemies, and he was evil, zestful and enthusiastic about being evil, and Buffy and Spike together HAD to be either a bad story or a bad relationship. The writers chose to tell a good story about a really bad relationship. (My previously-expressed opinions on Spike and Spike/Buffy can be seen here.)

Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

I agree with you about all that 😎