The Angelus Retcon

[itsnotmymind]

I have heard some complaints, over my years of exploring Buffy fandom, of the retcon that Drusilla was Spike's sire. That it contradicts previous canon.


It's not a retcon that bothered me. When I saw Dru turn Spike in Fool For Love, it immediately clicked with me. It felt right with the dynamics between Angel, Spike, and Dru is S2. That it contradicted a one-off line from Spike in School Hard did not bother me - I had been a hardcore fan of Marvel Comics a couple years earlier. Marvel comics have been rife with continuity errors since they were first called "Marvel" - and probably before, but I haven't read much of the Atlas or Timely days. I had at that time, and to some extent still do, a high tolerance for continuity errors.

(Oddly, in my days of exploring comic book fandom I found many Marvel and DC fans who took minor continuity errors as a sign that a writer of a title was unworthy. As if the writers they respected never made errors like that. I've seen this attitude again in Supernatural fandom, where major continuity problems in the earlier seasons are ignored, while even minor continuity problems in the later seasons are presented as proof of sucktitude.)

However, the oddest thing is that while the Fool For Love contradicting a single line from an earlier episode has gotten a great deal of discussion, a far deeper, more subtle, and in some ways just as long-reaching retcon made sometime during Buffy S3 or AtS S1 is usually not even noticed. In fact, I'm not even sure I can point out exactly when it happened.

In Innocence, when Dru realized that Angel has lost his soul, she doesn't exclaim, "Angelus". She exclaims, "Angel". And Angel replies, "Yeah, baby. I'm back." As if it were perfectly naturally and normal for his soulless self to be referred to as Angel. Throughout S2, the Scoobies call Angel "Angel", whether souled or not. In Becoming Part 2, Spike talks about wanting to stop Angel from destroying the world - not Angelus. Never at any point in S2 is the name "Angel" treated as a name only for for souled "Angelus" - it's just a shortening of Angel's more formal name, usable for either souled or soulless.

As I said, I am not sure when this retcon first happened. I didn't notice it at first - in fact, I still have a moent of surprise when I watch episodes and read transcripts, and see that S2 "Angelus" was not "Angelus" at all. All I know is that in BtVS S2, Angel didn't go by a different name when he was soulless. In AtS S2, he most certainly did. When and where exactly that change happened I couldn't tell you.

The retcon that Drusilla was Spike's sire is a change of physical fact. Angel/Angelus is simply an act of naming. The former does at first glance seem far more significant, even if we had no evidence for this fact aside from a one-off line by Spike.

But the Angelus retcon affects more than just the way characters word things. AtS S4, which treats Angel and Angelus as two separate beings, demonstrates how a simple matter of name can extend to physical facts. If Angel was only called Angel, that portrayal would have been difficult if not impossible

Angel is most believable as a character when he is aware that there is no undeniable line between who he is with a soul and who he is without. Angel/Angelus makes it easier both for him and those around him to deny it. One of the most frustrating things about Angel for me was the way the writers would let the horror of the full implications of Angel's dual identity out of the box...and then firmly stuff it back in again. Buffy S2, especially Passion, made a lot of the similarities between Angel and, uh, Angel. S3 promptly proceeded to put it on the backburner for Angel's own show, which meant his romance with Buffy throughout the season became repetitive, offering nothing new to say. AtS S2 dealt directly with the reality that Angel is Angelus, but that, too, was dropped, and two seasons later we have a storyline where Angel actually loses his soul for the first time since Innocence - and it ends with Angel stating as an accepted fact that he is not responsible for Angelus' actions, which flies in the face of the one of the few consistent themes of the show: Angel's redemption.

With Spike's arrival, S5 does a better job of addressing Angel's soulless self as, in fact, himself. But it's not enough to make up for years of inconsistency and cop-outs.

Referring to souled and soulless Angel by the same time would not solve all the problems of how the character was portrayed, but it would, at least, have made cop-outs more difficulty. It would have made it harder for Angel, those around him, and the narrative itself to deny what he is.

And oddly, it's a retcon that is not treated as one - not by the show, and not by most of the fandom. I took a silly quiz once asking you to identify whether certain quotes were made by Edward Cullen and Angel. One of the quotes I recognized immediately as spoken by soulless Angel in season 2 of Buffy. I chose Angel as the answer - the quiz told me I was wrong. The correct answer was Angelus. In season two. Where everyone called him Angel. This is par for course in my experience for how fandom talks about Angel.

Comments

[lokifan]

I do agree it's odd how that retcon gets ignored. Honestly I suspect part of the reason is that AtS fans often talk about how it's more ~sophisticated than Buffy because it doesn't separate demons from humans in the same way, and the reality that BtVS in its naming convention recognised that Angel is always Angel messes with that.

I think the Angelus retcon dates from AtS S1, maybe? Doyle or Cordelia? I wanna check that out now. If it's Cordy who starts it, I'm plumping firmly for "it helps her deal with the ongoing worry, because she saw soulless Angel and knows he could come back".

Agreed on the sire retcon, btw. Especially given that I think it doesn't feel like a retcon within the story - given Angel's sometime-mentor role for Spike and what Spike is actually saying ("you were my Yoda!") I think it makes total sense. And even adds to the weird messed-up-family vibe.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I got so frustrated with AtS supposed sophistication, because for all the shades of gray about demons, I don't remember it ever strongly questioning the idea of demon life being less valuable than human life. I was thinking, okay, maybe all our main characters are bigots. Plausible, right? And then Lorne reminded Angel that it was wrong for him to torture some horrible Wolfram and Hart lawyer because the guy was human and not a demon. And I lost most of my ability to take Lorne seriously as a character. It didn't seem like this was supposed to be a self-loathing demon remark, either. It felt like Lorne was supposed to be voicing the moral voice of the show.

It might have been AtS S1. I'm checking the transcript for Enemies (BtVS S3 episode where Angel pretends to lose his soul), and Angel refers to his soulless self as "the true Angelus". But the mayor calls supposedly soulless Angel "Angel" at one point, so I don't think the different names had been fully retconned in yet.

The conflict over Dru in BtVS S2 works for me better when Spike is competing for his sire with her sire, than he if he competing for his sister with their sire. The dynamics just made more sense. It is technically a retcon, because Spike specifically said "sire", but it's a little one. And easily fanwanked, I would think.

I understand more the frustration with Normal Again - even though that doesn't bother me, either. But it does make all of Buffy's early seasons vampire jokes seem odd.

[rahirah]

Yeah, I've always felt that the supposed split between the two is basically a coping mechanism Angel came up with to deal with unendurable guilt (and sadly, for me, they're starting to have Spike do kind of the same thing in the comics.) But it makes the characters so much richer and more nuanced if they're considered one person, not two...

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

Definitely. At least, I wish the show had been consistent whether they were one or two. The inconsistent way they dealt with it left me feeling like they wanted to have Angel be same being souled or soulless, but didn't actually want to deal with the full consequences and implications of Angel being the same person of Angelus. So the dual identity is there as a handy cop-out when needed.

And I still can't remember when people started calling soulless Angel by a different remember, or which character started it.

[spikesjojo.livejournal.com]

I actually just assume we will never know who did the physical work of siring Spike. I like the Fool For Love mythos, but I don't find it all that reliable. But who actually drained and refilled Spike has very little importance compared to who trained him.

The Angel(us) split came from AtS - along with Cordy's refrain of 'you're not him.' I think that Angel went along with it because it made the others around him feel safer. He maintained the fiction that he had two states of being - souled and unsouled, and that these states had specific predictable personalities.

IMO, the fact is that Angel walks a tightrope - and it is that tightrope walk that makes him interesting. As Darla said after being set on fire - Who was that? Angel and Angelus are the names of two points on the ends of a long continuum. and he tends to move all over the place along that continuum. That's why I find it frustrating to talk to Angel fans who see Angelus as a separate being who has no influence, and no real knowledge of Angel's life. Huh?

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

Could you elaborate on why you don't find find the Fool For Love mythos reliable?

I did like that moment when Darla said that the Angel who had just said her on fire was neither Angel or Angelus...AtS S2 was the best season of the who for the handling the Angel/Angelus divide, in my opinion. Lots of interesting stuff there.

[spikesjojo.livejournal.com]

Because he lies directly to the audience as he tells his story. Spike always exaggerates - and we actually see him exaggerate to the point of lying more than once.

I've always been bad.
I had to find myself a gang.

There are more - but the main point is that he is an unreliable narrator. He wasn't always bad - he was an ineffectual poet. So did he really tell Buffy all about his humiliation, and being told by Cecily he was beneath her? He didn't find a gang - he was taken in by Dru's family, and he was at the lowest spot in the pack.

He starts out by telling Buffy he'll kill her on Saturday - then he attacks on Thursday and says he was bored. Was he bored, or did he just want to chose a time and place rather than inviting her to set him up? He was gonna pay for the burba weed. He wasn't telling scary stories to Dawn. He actually told the visiting council members that Buffy let him drink from bleeding accident victims - and this was when he liked her. Once he decides he want Buffy to love him he crafts all their interactions - not all that successfully - and Buffy keeps busting his chops over the lies she keeps catching.

The real question is how much of what he say is braggadocio - and what parts? What does he actually say? Does he directly contradict himself as he tells the actual story? What really happened? What parts are embellished? I suspect - given what we have seen of Spike's casual disdain for the truth - that he has a turning story for every occasion.

Did Dru turn really him - and it's possible she couldn't so Angel finished the process. If so Spike might not even know. If she did, did he get a demon that was in some way tainted by her insanity, or her being a nun? Is this why he didn't want to kill his family?

Part of why I like spike is that he is an unreliable narrator. As the seasons pass, you get to see more and more of his innate truths. But I really think he wanted to both impress Buffy, and to scare her into not getting killed so he chose a version of the story that would best achieve his purpose. It might be true, or mostly true, or partially true, or selectively true - I assume it would be the last. He's still evil - lying and manipulating are probably a point of pride on a lot of levels.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I agree on Spike being an unreliable narrator, but I take the flashbacks we see in Fool For Love are literally true. I do agree that what we see in the flashbacks is not what Spike told Buffy.