#Lies My Parents Told Me

[herinsectreflection]

And while I'm complaining - part of why this episode doesn't work is because of how the trigger plot steamrolls everything and so characters end up talking about two different things, and the show doesn't seem to notice? Like Giles will be like "Spike has an active trigger which makes him a tactical risk" and Buffy will be like "Spike has a soul now and is a good person", and the show acts like these are two opposing viewpoints in a debate and not like. Just two facts that do not contradict each other.

Which is why you end up with the end of the episode saying two things simultaneously. Giles says that Spike should die for the greater good and Buffy says that Spike should live for the greater good and like... both can be argued to be true but the episode doesn't seem to notice that. Buffy's choice is presented as "can she do hard things for the greater good?" but that's a meaningless choice when any option can be argued to be the "greater good". And rather than that being the point and Buffy ending the episode wondering if she made the right choice or not because in war there are no good choices, the episode comes firmly down on Spike and Buffy's side, which is as stupid and boring as if it had come down on Giles and Robin's side.

[moonah-rose]

Having Buffy stroke Dawn's forehead after saying "the mission is what matters" and how she said she would sacrifice her to save the world now.....I have no idea what it's trying to say.

[i-want-chips]

Thoughts on Giles’ betrayal in 7x17 “Lies My Parents Told Me”

So, just to refresh everyone’s memory: Giles decided he’s had enough of Buffy being patient, forgiving and taking Spike’s part and defending him. So he teams up with Principal Wood and sets a trap for Spike so that Wood would get a chance to kill him while Giles is stalling Buffy.

We know Giles has a dark past and always wants to do what’s right for Buffy but this thing with trying to kill Spike is the one that takes me over the edge. He’s always done the hard things, like killing Ben to get Glory definitely out of the way. But that was something he had to do because nobody else would, nobody else should have had to do it and he took the burden. The killing Spike move is a whole other thing. It’s personal.

The thing is that he doesn’t have power and control over Buffy (or anybody else for that matter) anymore, he’s just a soldier now. He left so that Buffy could grow and become an actual leader, learn to trust herself and her instincts. She definitely did that, she’s the one in charge now and I guess Giles realises he doesn’t actually like that idea so much. Buffy doesn’t need him for decision-making anymore, she doesn’t listen to him and she goes explicitly against what he’s suggesting ALL THE TIME. Especially regarding Spike. Giles thinks Buffy’s biased towards Spike because of their history and doesn’t trust her reasoning when it somes to him. Add the fact that Giles hates Spike, he’s worried about him being The First’s bitch and pissed off because Buffy doesn’t follow him anymore and you get this awful betrayal. I hate him so much in this episode I can’t even describe it. It’s one of the ugliest and most hurtful betrayals I’ve seen on tv. I’m not even ashamed to say that I’ve truly felt this one.

[storyofmorewhoa]

Robin Wood: That's so sad. Alexa play "Early One Morning."

[apocketfulofeeveelutions]

Story time guys!

So there was once a post (or click bait. One or the other) floating around about lies your parents told you as a kid and you believed until an embarrassingly older age. Today I realized what one of mine was.

So as a kid, my mom always got me a chocolate cat for Easter every year. And every year, I'd refuse to eat it because I love cats and it was blasphemous to do so. To try to get me to not waste perfectly good chocolate, she'd always tell me it'd get worms if I didn't eat it.

I believed this UNTIL. COLLEGE. A friend finally set me straight when I asked her if this was true (she was a bio major, so I knew she'd know!)

I've wasted perfectly good chocolate because I forgot about it or put it somewhere and found it some months later and thought it wasn't any good to eat because I honest to god thought it'd have worms in it.

[hamiltonsunnydale]

[dykeroot]

ok lemme get this straight... in “lies my parents told me” apparently joss was gonna add a scene where giles tells buffy that he killed ben.... but because joss didn’t have enough screen time he threw that out for more of the fucking flaky ass redemption (if you can call it that) story for sp*ke? 🤔

[forwardwithoutseeing]

07x17 - THE FIRST CAN TAKE ITS CONTROL AND BLOODY SHOVE IT. IT’S A BATTLE OF INTENSE WILLS AND A FEW FLASHBACKS ON THIS ALL NEW EPISODE OF BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.

“Lies My Parents Told Me” - Spike’s chip may be gone, but his troubles aren’t over. As he struggles to remove the hold The First has over him, Robin Woods makes his move with the help of an unlikely ally. It’s a good thing Buffy’s on Spike’s side, less good that she seems to be going out for some very distracting remedial training looking to improve her slayer skills. In the not Spike department, Tara makes an observation about Rona and Dawn’s relationship. And Dawn finds herself confessing to what she saw back in the High School. Meanwhile a call from L.A. sends Willow and Tara far afield.

Cast: Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy; Alyson Hannigan as Willow; Marc Blucas as Riley; Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn; James Marsters as Spike; Amber Benson as Tara; Emma Caulfield as Anya.

Special Guest Starring: Anthony Stewart Head as Giles.

Guest Starring: Tom Lenk as Andrew; Iyari Limon as Kennedy; Indigo as Rona; Caroline Lagerfelt as Anne; K.D Aubert as Nikki; Juliet Landau as Drusilla; D. B. Woodside as Principal Wood.

[hesperie-s]

I was convinced for more than a decade that tornadoes couldn't go over hills.

Pretty soon after we moved to PA, there was a tornado warning for a town nearby and my siblings and I were terrified. Like, would not sleep in our own beds terrified even though this was a piddly little F0 storm. If three's a crowd, then five is beyond unbearable, so my parents sent us packing and told us we would never be in danger of a tornado because they couldn't go over hills.

To my seven-year-old brain this made perfect sense. The tornadoes in the Midwest were so much stronger because of all the flat areas! Wind couldn't travel through solid ground, and so lots of hills would scramble it around, obviously.

It wasn't until I was in college, right in the Great Appalachian Valley, and I was herded to the basement of my residence hall with everyone's cell phones squealing with emergency alerts because of a visible tornado that I realized I'd been lied to.

I kept my mouth shut because I was at that point in my goddamn twenties.

[herinsectreflection]

Listening to people shit on Lies My Parents Told Me gives me strength.

[moonah-rose]

"It was the demon talking".

I wish Spike acknowledged the irony here. His mother's love wasn't enough to overcome the demon in her the same way his love for her reached him after he became a vampire. Should be a parallel for how Nikki's love for her son couldn't stop her being the Slayer.

[youkilledthecar]

30 Day Buffy Challenge Day 20

Best Spike-centric Episode: Lies My Parents Told Me

[millennialslayer]

a rewrite of Lies My Parents Told Me

Buffy & Willow are called to LA as soon as the objective to bring back Angelus is made and are gone an entire episode or two.

With Buffy out of the way, Giles plots with Wood to murder Spike. Dawn finds out in s5's The Gift Giles was angry Buffy would not vocalize murdering her as an option and she thought he might try to preemptively do it himself as the quickest way to prevent future danger so took Spike aside and asked him to protect her if she couldn't.

Dawn realizes Giles is going to try to murder Spike and confronts him. She brings up how she's not originally human, has existed less than 3 years, doesn't know if her soul is real, is held together by magic, etc. She brings up how he sent Willow back to Sunnydale before she finished her rehabilitation just 4 months later (tortured him to an inch of death, tried to strangle Anya to death, threatened to turn her back into Key form, conjured demons to try to kill Buffy, started an apocalypse) they worked with Anya when she was a vengeance demon, there was a time Angel was the souled vamp everyone feared and now he's some big hero, and Andrew stabbed a guy to death to open the Hellmouth the same month they found out about Spike's trigger.

Spike tells Dawn he sired his mom because she was dying of an illness. She thinks of when her mom died and he helped her to try to resurrect her. He staked his mom and she tore up the photo of hers to undo it. She tells him she still feels uncomfortable around him knowing he tried to rape her sister.

Dawn tells Wood the FE appeared as her mom too and wanted her not to trust Buffy. He still thinks Spike should die for killing Nikki in the 70s so Faith (Buffy retrieved her post BOTN when they realized The FE was attacking the Slayer line) confesses 3 years ago she tried to kill Buffy's mom out of jealousy. She says she regrets the bridges she burned when she wanted the world to pay for her crappy childhood.

[tomfooleryprime]

When you grow up in Texas, you’re taught to believe if you stand with the door open and the air conditioning running, after several seconds, a portal to hell will open. 

[conversationswithmyrabbit]

Vampire Sla-yer-very

Whilst this episode is stunning for it’s narrative, depicting the climax in the tension between these two characters as Robin tries to kill Spike as an act of vengeance for killing his slayer mother, it also has deeper interpretative depth. Perhaps being burdened with too much post-colonial anxiety, Biscuit found it impossible to shake the racial subtext of this conflict between Robin and Spike and felt that the episode was trying to communicate contemporary dialogue about the relationship between slave-owning ancestors and slave ancestors. On the surface, the episode is Spike vs Robin Wood and a lot of obstreperous blows to the face, which we’re unused to in BTVS where the audience has been conditioned to expect kung-fu over brute force. But interpreting what each character represents, rather than how each character appears, reveals a different conflict. I think it’s important to first point out the obvious; Robin is black. In contemporary television, this wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, but BTVS is a show that has often been criticised for its ethnocentric cast, so it could be argued that for writers to make a U-turn here was essential to the message they wanted to convey. Moreover, the audience is already aware of Robin’s desire to kill Spike, but in this episode it is clear he wants something more too. For example, he doesn’t try to murder Spike swiftly, which would be easy having fought side by side with him – instead, he makes the conflict personal demonstrating that he wants an apology. >Now, the singular experience of this character fighting against a white male would not be corollary to any racial message, but place him in a room with a 19th century English Romantic; the epitome of cultural superiority and imperialism and the racial tensions should be unbearably obvious. This is what Spike represents in this episode, and to make it obvious to viewers who may have forgotten, the episode has flashbacks of Spike’s past as a Romantic poet! So, maybe there’s a racial element now, but is it slavery the show is specifically referring to? Enter: Nicky Wood, Robin’s mother, who also appears in flashbacks. She is presented as some combination of proto-Punk and fallout from the Black Panthers, both movements inundated with subversive angst and a desire for civil equality. Moreover, she is the Slayer and a particular theme throughout the season, but particularly one that returns in season seven is that being the Slayer is a curse; it’s something that the person does not choose, but is forced to do. For example, Robin says in the episode “You know I love you, but I’ve got a job to do. The mission’s what matters right?”. In this sense, slaying here can be related to slavery. Nicky is forced to perform a duty for others at the expense of her liberty. This is really important to the episode too because Robin feels that he is personally affected, psychologically so, by this. He, too, suffers from slavery, despite never having experienced it, and he blames Spike for his role in this too. So the characters fight – in a room full of crucifixes I might add – important because both slaves and slave owners used Christianity to justify their claims. But the subtext is striking if the characters are understood in this way. Robin is fighting with Spike because he blames him for the things that happened to his slave mother. He wants Spike dead, but really he wants recognition, apology, maybe even some sort of compensation for the wrongs that his ancestors have felt. He feels that they have affected him also, transmuted to him by some hereditary osmosis. When Spike argues that Nicky knew what she was ‘signing up for’ when she fought a vampire, his riposte is that ‘I didn’t sign up for it’. He later complains that Spike ‘took his childhood’. Interestingly, Spike has a soul in series 7. This makes the battle so much more ambiguous in these terms because he is technically not responsible for the crimes of his past. The crimes were committed by a vampire in his body that he had no control of. When describing how a demon usurped his mother’s control when she was made a vampire, Spike demonstrates how vampires are absolved of responsibility once turned. He says; ‘When I sired her, I set loose a demon… but that was the demon talking, not her’. What is more interesting is that Robin seems to understand this on some level – he refuses to fight ‘Spike’ and uses his trigger to awaken his primitive vampire side before fighting him. Perhaps more interesting is that Spike displays very little sympathy for Robin’s suffering during the fight. This is consistent with Spike’s monochrome views on history – in Pangs he describes imperialism as a relationship between superior Invaders and those Invaded, and here he justifies what happened between himself and Nicky as a natural destination of their roles. He plainly retorts; “I don’t give a piss about your mum. She was a Slayer. I was a vampire”. The conflict strongly parallels the dialogue between post-colonial countries against their previous masters. Caricom countries such as Jamaica and the Caribbean have called for compensation to help them recover from the scars of slavery, both politically, economically and psychologically. The response from Imperial counties has been varied. Some, like Spike, denounce any ongoing impacts of slavery and even argue that the Paternalism received in the form of culture and infrastructure outweighs any damage caused by slavery. Softer views that acknowledge the evil of slavery are louder, but still contain disdain for being asked to bear the financial brunt of paying compensation for the actions of one’s ancestors. If we agree slavery was wrong and acknowledge that some still suffer, then surely something should be done to help? If so, who should be the one to help? These are the same complex moral questions that are being screamed in the subtext of this Buffy episode. The episode doesn’t provide an answer. It leaves Robin, broken and bruised on the floor, as Spike leaves carrying Nicky’s coat; the trophy of his kill. There is no resolution or panacea. Only the silence in which to speak.

[hamiltonsunnydale]