Reading While Black

Via the POC in SciFi Carnival No. 9:

I had the line “It’s Nikki Wood’s fucking coat” long before I had a song or a vidder or a title.

Spike wears the long black duster from his first appearance on Buffy, but we only find out its history in S5’s “Fool for Love.” Spike relates his history to Buffy (in, it’s strongly implied, somewhat unreliable terms) and the viewers see how he came to adopt his Johnny Rotten persona in a series of flashbacks.
…Two of Spike’s physical identifiers — the scar through one eyebrow and the coat he wears — are souvenirs of the Slayers he’s fought and killed: the Chinese Slayer slashes his face during their final battle and he steals the coat off the body of a black Slayer in the ’70s subways of New York after he kills her. Spike responds, ultimately, to rejection by a woman by the murder of other women and by stealing their identifiers–their identities, their stories–for his own.

…Even in “Fool for Love,” it’s clear that Spike misunderstands the Slayers he’s fought as he misunderstands Buffy: he thinks that the Slayers’ lives and thoughts center on him, that they are as obsessed with his Romantic conflation of sex and death as he is. He argues that they died because they didn’t want to live enough; he argues that Slayers are as in love with death as he is….His denial that Nikki’s maternal feelings were as important as her role as Slayer once again erases her personhood–and it’s notable that the only personal aspect of Nikki Wood we ever see is another relational role defining her, that of mother.

Robin strips his mother’s coat off Spike before beginning the fight, but Spike wins and reclaims Nikki’s coat as his own, as a symbol of his defeat of Robin and of his triumph over his own unpleasant memories…the return of the coat by the head of the Italian office of Wolfram & Hart as an acknowledgement that wearing the coat represents the evil Spike’s done: but most of the time I just feel like the show is fucking taunting me, holding justice just out of my reach. And this is the problem, this is where I can’t speak in the detached academic tone anymore, this is not where the understanding of the character breaks down but where the understanding of the text does. Because ultimately the text argues what Spike does: that it’s Spike’s story that counts.

And Spike goes out of the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer like he came in: wearing Nikki Wood’s fucking coat.

He might as well be wearing her flayed skin.

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