Claiming Spuffy: 20 years after its most hated episode, fanfic moves Buffy forward

polygon.com:

[Ed note: This article discusses attempted rape and sexual violence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 25th anniversary is this year, but this May presents another, darker milestone. Twenty years ago this month, UPN aired the 19th episode of season 6, “Seeing Red,” in which a beloved queer character is murdered. Unrelated but equally devastating, the vampire Spike, ostensibly hoping to reignite the flame he and Buffy had shared earlier that season, sexually assaults Buffy in her own bathroom. Afterward, Spike, horrified by his actions, goes to get a soul, a development that becomes key to the final, seventh season. We don’t learn how — or even if — the assault affects Buffy. The show moves on and expects us to do so, too.

It’s safe to call “Seeing Red” the show’s most hated and hurtful episode, to its fans and even its actors — a hurt that takes on even graver significance in light of allegations that its creator, Joss Whedon, exhibited a pattern of abuse. The episode has been condemned in Vice, Slashfilm, Syfy, CNN, Salon, and Vulture for being irresponsible, harmful storytelling, and incongruent with Spike’s character besides. To make the vampire’s soul-seeking plausible, the episode inflicts trauma on a woman — “a very cheap and overdone plot point” in television and fiction, in the words of Holly Atkinson, a writer and one of five founders of Elysian Fields, the internet home for fanfiction about Spuffy (the Spike/Buffy ship). And the episodes and season that follow make no space for the Slayer’s experience of trauma, propelling the pernicious myth that it is “strong” for Buffy to ignore it.

Buffy had always treated trauma inconsistently, focusing on it when it advanced character development