What's a Sire?
when joss changes the rules
by
Anonymous

He hurls his shotglass into the fireplace with a determined gesture. "I WAS NOT A FUCKING POET! I WAS WILLIAM THE BLOODY, GODDAMNIT! I WAS, AM AND SHALL ALWAYS BE A BADASS AND I NEVER WROTE NO SODDING POETRY!!!" 

I think he's slightly drunk. 

Funny thing is, I *clearly* remember turning him. In an alley. A lot. And there was sex. A lot. 

-Donna and others, "Days of Our Unlives"

"How bad is it?" Donna asked me as I stared forlornly at the early-bird review of "Fool for Love."

"It's bad," I said sadly.  "Very, very bad." 

"She fucking sired him, didn't she?" she snapped, and then remembered her spoiler-virgin status.  "No, don't tell me."

"That's not the worst part," I replied, scanning over quotations of William's bloody awful poetry.

"Is my canon fucked?" 

"Your canon is fucked, my canon is fucked," I answered.  "Everyone's canon has just been fucked."  I paused for consideration, recalling Saber ShadowKitten's Tanner of the "Faded Photographs" series.  "Except Saber's.  But everyone else just took it up the ass."

Joss can't seem to stay of the same mind for two minutes running where Spike is concerned, and it's difficult to construct a history that's at least a hundred and twenty years old (and possibly as much as barely two hundred) when the rules change so often.  Some writers adjusted well to the paradigm shift; others, S/A 'shippers in particular, remain in rampant denial.  This isn't surprising; S/A writers were the ones hit hardest by the change, since not only is the siring connection that so much S/A fic is based on now gone, but the friendly Spike/Angelus camaraderie hinted at in "School Hard" and "Innocence" is nowhere to be found in "Fool for Love."  And since many of us assumed that human Spike wasn't all that different from vampire Spike ("He was known as William the Bloody..."), most pre-FFL flashback fic is now laughably innaccurate.

The purpose of fanfic, essentially, is to make things happen that haven't or won't happen on the show.  I don't see a damned thing wrong with altering a few things, but you can only make so many changes before your fic becomes alternate universe.  Some of us might not be happy with the events of "Fool for Love," but we can't, in all honesty, deny that they occured, and giving a character a different sire or altering their entire human history is a big change.  Fic in which Angel is Spike's sire, or in which the human William more closely resembles Spike than he does the nerdy retro-Wesley we saw in "Fool for Love," is now AU and (I think) should be labeled as such.

For those of us who choose to march bravely on in the face of such change, there are a few things to consider.  For Spike/Dru writers, knowing that Dru is Spike's sire now adds all sorts of new levels to their relationship that I think haven't been adequately explored yet.  Spike/Angel writers, on the other hand, are faced with the challenge of trying to link the two vamps with some bond other than the Sire/Childe one.  (I recommend Te's "Killing Will," which does the job nicely.)

resources:
unilateral rejection of spike revisionist history