Buffy the Vampire Slayer & The Art of Bad Things Happening in Basements.

CW: Detailed talk of rape, misogyny, and male violence against women in general.

I originally set out to write about Andrew, because technically he’s one of my favorite characters in the show. But I also started thinking about how sad & cruel I find Jonathan’s story to be, and how it’s impossible to talk about Andrew outside of the context of Warren in general, and how meaningless I think it is to analyze any member of the Trio individually because the point is that they present a united front of shitty boy-ness. It is integral that they’re presented as three pathetic little boys in the basement. And so I’m not going to talk about Andrew, or Jonathan, or Warren. I don’t have the energy for that right now. Instead, I’m going to talk about basements.

There are two characters besides the Trio who are most heavily associated with basements. These are, of course, Xander and Spike. Smarter people than me have written about Xander/Spike parallels, but I’m going to talk about it anyway! In the context of Xander and Spike, the basement represents a holding pattern. Xander spends most of his time in the basement in Season Four, and Spike spends most of the time in the basement in Season Seven. Both of these seasons, incidentally, are about new beginnings, which Xander and Spike are, for whatever reason, unable to participate in. Xander is not allotted the privilege of moving on to the “next stage” of his life — the prototypical beginning of Proper Adulthood — the same way Buffy and Willow are. He doesn’t get to go to college. Instead, while they attend their studies and enter emotionally significant new romances (Season Four — all about birth and new things, baby.) Xander does not have the money, nor the means, nor the motivation, and so he remains enmired by the basement and what that means to him is isolation. He fails to communicate properly with his friends or his girlfriend. (“You don’t need me. All you care about is lots of orgasms.” -Anya) He lives like a fucking moleman in the cellar while his Mom and Dad play at being a family above him, or Xander’s perception of a family, anyways. There’s a lot going on here, all this messiness about beneathness. Xander is enmired beneath the social structure of the home (which is Self, in Buffy — Buffy’s house is her Self, etc) which shows to us that Xander’s not in a position where he can openly and meaningfully engage with said home. He cannot make a home; not with Cordelia and later, not with Anya, either.

Spike, on the other hand, is in the basement of a school — the rebuilt Sunnydale High, which is metaphorically enshrined as actual hell. Spike, too, waits in the dark while the people above him play out a life he’s incapable of engaging with. Both Spike and Xander are in situations wherein they should be able to break out of holding patterns via the nature of personal development on both of their parts — Xander in the form of graduating from high school, and Spike in the form of getting his soul back — but for various reasons, this authenticity and upward movement is inaccessible to them. Xander is still in the shadow of his father (who, for various reasons, makes Xander believe that building a home is impossible). Spike, meanwhile, has the First’s trigger — he should have advanced to an entirely moral being, that’s supposed to be the natural stage of development for him — but exterior manipulation makes it so that he’s trapped between his former monstrousness and his current desire to do good by Buffy specifically. Xander cannot be a husband/father/man of the home, Spike cannot be this swooning romantic hero. And thus, here they are, in the basement. Unfulfilled expectation. Stagnancy.

It’s meaningful, then, that the Trio is introduced to us as being in the basement, in their first scene in Flooded. (Here’s something else that’s notable: Buffy’s first scene in that episode is also in a basement. Basements all around! Blah blah blah Buffy as associated with Spike/Xander/the Trio Buffy in a place of emotional stagnancy blah blah.) Their positioning as being beneath the upper layer of society points to them as being in a holding pattern of their own. The Trio will not grow up. They seem violently incapable of it. All of the things we associate with like, growth and adulthood, are things they spurn. Personal responsibility? Not taking shortcuts? Acknowledging the internal realities of others? There’s nothing seductive, nothing romantic about that, it’s unpalatable (and difficult to execute, otherwise) compared to mustache-twirling, comic-book villainy. But there’s nothing romantic about the Trio, either — they’re just looking for this sort of dramatic fulfillment. They want the same irony and emotional development we do. (“It’s like she’s completely without focus.” -Warren.) Life’s a story, and what role is more attractive to someone than unprompted villainy?

But the issue is, these games must be, by necessity, a holding period. Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan are humans. They don’t have access to the power/gothicism/romanticism of the previous trio supplanting them in the form of Angelus, Spike, and Dru. So when they try to put on these costumes, they fit badly — they refuse to grow up. They’re little boys playing dress-up, and there’s no catharsis in that. There’s no beauty in that. Of course they’re in a basement. Where else would the antagonists of a story about becoming an adult be?

And stagnancy isn’t even the most obvious pattern that links Xander, Spike, and the Trio — It’s a warped understanding of masculinity and women. Xander, Spike, and Warren/Jonathan/Andrew are all textually misogynists — albeit in different ways. Xander’s misogyny is something he’s allowed to grow out of. It’s meaningful that he confronts Warren first, gets bloodied by it, and meaningful that his relationships with other women are them saying, hey Harris, at some point you’re going to have to give lip service to the fact that we’re stronger than you. It’s a long road from yelling at Buffy for emasculating him in front of Larry to simply nodding and acknowledging when Buffy tells him he’ll never be the hands that do the work, he’s her heart, and needs to open himself to this position, as feminine as it may be. Xander moves from association with destructive masculinity (the swim team) to constructive masculinity (his job as a construction worker.) He gets to grow up, because as a person with moral agency in Buffy, growing up is the only real option. Move or die. Now breathe, Buffy says to us as we flail, drowning. Now breathe. Now swim.

Warren’s misogyny is different from Jonathan and Andrew’s, too. This is sort of hard to talk about, because in the process we run the risk of failing to acknowledge that Jonathan and Andrew are attempted rapists, and so I’m saying that up front — that Jonathan and Andrew, regardless of any moral self-flagellation on their parts, are attempted rapists. But there is the point of intent, which, as we all know, is three fifths of the law. Jonathan and Andrew aren’t open — to others, yes, but also to themselves — about their misogyny the way Warren is. When Katrina yells at them that they’re raping her, here’s what Jonathan and Andrew say: No, no, that wasn’t what we meant to do. They have a long list of internal justifications they’re happy to explain to the girl in a maid costume in their basement.

And Warren says, so what? Who cares? This is what she was made for.

(You know that tweet that’s like I’m a male feminist I have a fleshlight just to eat it out? That’s Spike’s brand of misogyny.)

So what is a basement? It’s not growing up. It’s playing cards around a shitty poker table and figurines of comic book women painted with uncomfortable cumshots. It’s chains on the wall, it’s stagnancy. Not making a home with Anya, not making a home with Dru or Buffy, not with Katrina. It’s about killing these women, on purpose or otherwise, successfully or otherwise.

I have conversations, sometimes, in my head that never really happened, and in one of them I’m this shitty ingenue fiction-queen, talking about what motivates my writing. And someone will ask — why do you keep a boy chained up in your basement in all of your novels? What does it mean? What’s your fixation with this dark underbelly, this seedy holding pattern?

And I’ll say, okay, there was this show I watched when I was fourteen.