The cast in season 5.

Two weeks ago I finished watching the fifth and final season of Angel and then read all the canonical Buffyverse comic books in a day. I’ve been struggling these two weeks to come up with a way to accurately describe everything I think and feel for this universe.

I’ve decided to split this into three parts: Buffy, Angel, and the comics. So here goes Buffy. This is absurdly in-depth about plot detail, but you have to understand: once you get this far into the Buffyverse it devours your brain and you can never again get free.

Season four is the first season without Angel. Angel goes off to Los Angeles and gets his own show devoted to his L.A. exploits. Buffy goes to college at UC Sunnydale, engages in some amusing exploits, but mostly annoys the ever-living bejesus out of me. Willow suddenly discovers that she’s gay, Buffy gets a boyfriend named Riley who could not be more annoying, and Giles has nothing to do for the entire season and sits around in his apartment drinking alone. The big evil of the season is a covert military operation to fight demons housed in an underground facility beneath the University. I detest military bad guys, for one thing, because they are always so poorly done, and “the Initiative” was no exception. When I was watching season four, I wanted it to go away forever so I could keep watching Angel (which was fantastic at that point. You will hear more on this from me later). There was one saving grace, however, and one thing that kept me coming back to Buffy with at least amusement if not glee: Spike.

This is Spike.

This is about to turn into a Spike lovefest. I am warning you ahead of time. Buffy the Vampire Slayer seems to have some seriously sharp delineations in its fan base. One of those splits is between the people who hate Spike and say he ruined the show and the people who adore Spike completely. Through seasons four and five, he was seriously the only thing that kept me from abandoning the show altogether. Spike is that awesome. He had to take up the void left by numerous amazing and dynamic characters and he did it fully, admirably, and with panache. He made up for the hole that Angel left as the vampire, the hole that Cordelia left as the confrontational team member, and (later) the hole that Giles left as Buffy’s support. And mostly he managed to overtake all three of them in my heart by a large margin (ok, well, he eked out Giles–the other two he destroyed.) Spike started his fictional existence as a fairly ineffectual villain in season two. Fan reaction kept him around (he was originally slated to die after only a few episodes), and in his one guest appearance in season three he caused so much conflict that Joss Whedon decided to bring him back as a series regular. And thus saved his show from the trash heap of my fickle, fiction-loving heart. Spike throws himself into the calmly puttering lives of the rest of the characters like throwing a box of nails in front of an on-coming car with predictable results. I love his snark, I love his evil, and I love his obsessions. And season five sees some obsessions.

Let me talk about season five. See, when this season starts, they throw a character at you who by all rights should not exist. Buffy gets an insta-sister named Dawn who it takes five episodes for them to explain at all. I was so incredibly pissed off by this egregious betrayal of my watcher-ly trust that I wasn’t just tempted to stop watching Buffy this time. The show had to prove to me every episode why I should not turn it off. And it’s dandy, once they explained where Dawn came from and why she was there. But she was the most annoying creature I’ve ever had the displeasure of suffering through. The beginning of season five had Dawn and Riley, and there was nothing that kept me from turning it off except Spike. Good on Spike, for keeping me watching. By the penultimate episode I was so into it again that I forgot that there were bits that annoyed me to the point of hatred. And then there was the season finale and I was so offended by it that I was honestly ready to quit watching. (The only reason I didn’t quit was because I was six episodes away from the infamous musical episode. Which is fantastic by the way.)

Buffy and Dawn the insta-sister.

This next paragraph is a SPOILER (although it’s hard to not know this already, even if you know nothing about the show.) See, Dawn–who never justified her existence and seemed to go out of her way to make me hate her–Dawn is in trouble and Buffy kills herself to save her sister. Ok, Buffy. Kill yourself to save the world, that’s fine. Kill yourself to save your friends–that’s ok too. But killing yourself to save your sister above and beyond all other thoughts and considerations? Your sister who is not truly your sister but a magical violation of your mind and body to make you think she is your sister? HOW IS THIS OK? When people whine at me about certain occurrences of season six I just want to stare at them dumbfounded and ask how anybody could possibly violate Buffy more than the mere existence of Dawn does.

The irony is that season five is considered one of the best seasons of Buffy’s seven season run. This is yet another one of those divisive things within fandom. The end of season five is supposedly “Joss Whedon’s ending” and then (so fan lore goes) the show got renewed and no one knew what to do next. I assure you that if this show had ended after season five I would have renounced the entire thing as a load of trash and been resolutely Not a Fan. But then I got glorious season six.

Seasons six and seven are very widely panned, hated, and otherwise denigrated by a vast majority of the Buffy fandom. Seasons six and seven are my absolute favorite. I don’t know if it’s because I myself often struggle with depression, or maybe because I’m at the point in my life where Buffy is in these seasons. But season six is full of depression, apathy, cynicism, and human struggles. Pretty much every character does horrible things and has to live with the consequences. The “Big Bad” is a group of geeks who aspire to be comic book super villains. Everything about season six screams with pain, loss, ostracism, and depression. Which is probably why I love it so much and why everyone else seems to despise it. Season seven is much of the same, but in a different way, and is also widely despised.

Here’s the thing: I love Buffy. It’s very rare that I will actually adore a main character in an ensemble piece like Buffy. But Buffy I love. And I didn’t love her this much until the seasons where it seems that everyone else starts to hate her. I maintain that the seasons everyone hates the most are the ones that I adore the most, largely for the same reasons. A lot of the love (and hate from others) is due to the expanded role Spike plays in each episode. A lot of the love (and hate form others) comes from Buffy finally being a character that I could relate to on a very personal level and who I finally liked watching. But mostly? I don’t really care what everyone else says. I’m a confirmed Buffy-obsessee at this point, and I’m just glad there are people to fight with. It means there are people who are just as passionate about this fictional universe as I am.