Covering
“Phases” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” in which the boys and their
relation to the girls get some focus.
A
brief dive into the fandom experience, and an Oz story: In the days before big
time Comic Cons came to town, there was a much smaller and more game-focused
con, that reserved some time to demo more obscure titles in the midst of the
D&D competitions and Vampire LARPs, and so on a whim while I was attending
and because I’d perused the rules but they didn’t make much sense, I signed up
to play the Buffy RPG for an hour or two.
The GM had created an adventure
taking place somewhere in this back end of season 2, and we were all playing
established characters—the first player grabbed Buffy, obviously, the second
grabbed Giles, so I, wishing to throw a curve ball, picked Oz. This proved to
be a big problem, because the two others, who had the proactive characters who
should be driving the action, seemed constitutionally unable to do anything but
sit and wait, while I was playing someone who, in the form of Willow, had a
very strong character reason to not care about events. Compounding this, the
adventure involved being displaced in time and meeting the Kalderash princess
Angelus was soon to kill, so, I observed, I really should have been playing
Xander. Instead, Oz inexplicably became less of a wry punch-roller and more of
a hard-charging leader for a little bit.
I share this because “Phases” seems
like the perfect time—it’s the one where Oz becomes a rather horrible rubber werewolf.
And that’s basically it, he’s the werewolf, Willow is assertive, and it’s
pretty good, but with nothing too remarkable. Well, except for Larry, who is
introduced here and, notable given where the show would go, becomes its first
out gay character. Does his coming out scene veer too far into gay panic? It
may well, though the joke mostly stays on Xander’s befuddlement as he thought
he’d extract a dangerous secret from Larry, not expecting to receive an earnest
one. But Larry seems, at least to my thinking, to reflect an aspect of being
closeted in high school in the 90’s. My class, which had graduated the year
before “Phases” aired had one out and proud gay kid, and while he wasn’t a
hulking bully like Larry, he had been, previous to his coming out, known for
some overly-piggish and leeringness which, it obviously turned out, was all
performative. Surely, there are still kids out there that still feel the need
to put on a Larry show of straightness, but gayness seems so much more
normalized in our society now, I wager there are many more out and polite
Larrys than rude and crude Larrys these days, and BtVS contributed to that.
I’ve been pretty harsh on Xander,
primarily because for most of the first season, he was a real overbearing
jackass. So it may seem strange for me to give him some praise in an episode
where he meddles with the dark arts and ends up eliminating consent throughout
the entire town. Yeah, using a love spell is pretty scummy and stupid, as Giles
is quick to point out. But at the same time, there’s some sympathy and universality
afforded Xander’s impulse—he gets dumped, he’s hurt, and he finds himself
asking not “How do I make this person like me?” but rather “How can I get this
person to like me again?” Compound his hurt with the humiliation that
accompanies it, and there’s much more sympathy for Xander’s plight than when he
was futilely negging anyone Buffy showed interest in.
Still, while there may be some
sympathy, Xander’s spell is horrendously wrong, aligning him firmly with the BtVS tradition of idiots who employ the supernatural
to handle their pain and end up in over their heads. But to Xander’s credit,
and what makes him one of our immature protagonists and not a skeev, is he
stops digging right away. As soon as he realizes that the spell went wrong, he’s
uncomfortable and tries to reverse it, and as soon as his efforts to do so don’t
work out, he confesses all to Giles to make things right. And he does all this
before he’s in any real danger, or has to face any ramifications. Most
importantly, he instantly realizes that exploiting this circumstance would be a
violation, and, to him, false.
There can be a pretty strong
temptation to read this episode very literally, and the episode doesn’t exactly
dissuade that reading when Buffy tweaks Xander over “invoking the Roofie
Spirit,” but even though the consent aspect must be kept in mind, there is also
an undercurrent of adolescent wish fulfillment—“I wish all the girls liked me.”
As Xander discovers, well before Willow is swinging an axe at him and Dru is
offering him dark immortality, the wish actually sucks. Despite what a bunch of
greasy MRA warriors will claim, unwanted attention is actually quite
uncomfortable. We all, at times, dish out unwanted attention, and, unless you’re
a greasy MRA unwilling to change your basketball shorts I guess, we receive it,
too, and after this, Xander probably understands what it’s like to receive enough
to dish it out less.
Also, the episode is really damn
funny.
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