Spike couldn't walk away because he was in luv. Buffy couldn't walk away because he was the only relief in mind-numbing pit of despair and crushing responsibility that was her life. I think they were about even up, honestly. I gave Buffy a slight edge for reasons which may not be rational.

Hmm. I tend to think that Spike had most of the power, but that's only because Buffy had abdicated it to him because making decisions for herself was too hard. Once she recovered from the worst of her depression she took the power back again. So I really need to tick multiple buttons on your poll, or else just tick the middle one as an average.

At the nadir of her misery, Buffy asks Tara 'Why do I let him do those things to me?' and then when Tara tells her its OK if she loves him, she asks 'What? [it's OK] that I'm using him?" This is her most exposed moment of the season. The whole of the sexual relationship is trauma-management -- Spike's the only one who recognizes that she shouldn't be under the rules that she had to live by before her death: she SHOULD be free & she's not. He offers what, to him, seems freedom, and Buffy goes to escape the cruelty, the pettiness, and the sheer lack of awareness of her suffering on the part of the Scoobies. The brutal thrashing she gives Spike outside the police station as she scapegoats him, using him as the object for her own frustration with herself, is very revealing. When Spike does try to gain power over her, she instantly throws him off -- if Buffy had felt herself a victim at any point prior to "Seeing Red," she would've acted as she did there.

Buffy definitely had the edge to me. At first Spike tried to pull her into the dark with him but it never really took (you could make a good argument for such in Dead Things though). By Entropy you could feel his utter desperation about the whole situation, and when he tried to assert himself in the next episode it led to much bad. The whole 'bad boyfriend' metaphor they were going for just never worked for me because throughout I always saw Buffy as the one to set the boundaries and deal out the punches if Spike tried to overstep them.

I think that Buffy had a slight edge. In some ways, the person who is most in love is the most powerless. But that said, I think that Spike knew what he was doing, and he had control over his actions, if not his emotions.

Well, here's the thing about Spike--

Back then, any woman he was in love with, he abdicated power over to her, and molded himself to be who she wanted him to be. If Buffy wanted dinner dates, picnics in the shade, flowers, and group time with her friends, then that's what she would have gotten out of Spike. He wrote poems, brought flowers, and gave sensible gifts like heart lockets. But that's pretty much the opposite of what she wanted. Spike's a romantic who enjoys being in the light and social activities, so this whole "he wanted her in the dark" business doesn't work for me--he gave her exactly what she wanted out of him, doormat that he was.

Spike was more than willing to change to whoever Buffy wanted him to be, and he was fully capable of doing the standard boyfriend routine, and even wanted that--to be a part of her world (for instance, the wardrobe change and gentlemanly attitude in "Crush" before it all went south). But alas, I suspect I'll be in the minority.

I think they were both effectively powerless. Neither had the power to make the other do what they wanted. Spike couldn't make Buffy love him, Buffy couldn't make him stop. Spike couldn't leave, Buffy couldn't stop him coming after her. The idea (expressed above) that if she really felt victimised she would have physically thrown him off earlier is uncomfortably close to the personal responsibility argument in the recent kerfuffle. Also this is the guy who wanted Drusilla to kill him to show she cared.

There's a bit of a misdirect in that Buffy doesn't always (in fact frequently does not) employ the power that she has. She has her reasons for doing so, but the power is there regardless of whether she chooses to utilize it.

Spike really has no support system anywhere, regardless of whether he would choose to utilize it or not. It's not there. He doesn't have a soul to make moral choices or to recognize the degree to which its become a self-destructing cycle.

So Spike has far less of a support system to turn to or to emply simply as a jumping off point.

Then we kind of get to where there emotional dynamics are. Spike is in love with Buffy and desperate for her attention/approval/acceptance. Buffy isn't operating under any of those perameters. By her own words, she's using him. This gives her something of an upperhand emotionally. She again has resources elsewhere. She has friends that love her who would be there for her if she reached for it. Spike only has the desperation for Buffy's acceptance/approval/attention. He's the one in love. She isn't. This gives her most of the relationship cards.

Which isn't to say that Buffy isn't incapacitated by her own depression. But her depression isn't granting him power. It's her having lost it due to her own emotional issues. So, yes, she is incapacitated (which is why I don't rank this as a 1. It's not like she is in full possession of her own empowerment. She isn't.) But still she had greater access to a system of support and she was far less emotionally involved or emotionally dependent on the relationship than Spike was. For all her isolation, she had a hand in creating that isolation in that she had people she could have reached out to and didn't. Spike -- of course by right of who and what he was so it's not like his own choices hadn't contributed to his situation because it did but still Spike -- didn't have access to the same sort of support.

So on a teeter-totter of power, I think she had more -- or at least reasonable access to more -- than he did.

They were both screwed up like whoa though. It was co-dependent city there for a while.

How do you do polls like this? The only ones that I've figured out are the vertical ones. Not horizontal 1-10.

Thought about and decided it was a 3 - which apparently puts me in the majority at the moment. Interesting.

Reasons?

When you are desperately in love with someone, to the point that you would literally die for them, and they do not feel the same way about you - that person holds all the power. You've given them the power. Spike gives Buffy the power the moment he tells her that his is her slave, that he is devoted to her, that he would do whatever she wished.

She gives him a little power back, when she lets him know that she does care about him, that he does turn her on.
That she wants him and craves him, like a drug. That gives him leverage. It means she won't stake him or sacrifice him and she needs him. It also means that while she doesn't necessarily want him in her life or sees that he can be part of her life as he'd like, she does want him.

He tries to build on that ...on the craving, her addiction to their sex and her ability to lose herself in him physically. But, realizes with mounting frustration that he can't. It's not enough.

His power, the little that he has, is her need of him, both physical and to a degree emotional. It is why he isn't dead (staked) and it is why the Scoobies tolerate him. But it is not enough...

Buffy makes the moves nearly always, even in DMP, so I give her the edge at all points. Except for , when he sends her away - and look how outraged she is. I think that proves how used she is to calling all the shots.

It's a voluntary relationship. Neither one has any power except to leave. And either one could do that.

But you chose a 1 to 10 scale -- an even number of choices. There's no radio button right in dead center, so I can't vote.

I'd have went with 5.5, but I gave the slight edge to Buffy if only because she had the power to end it. Spike was in love but he wasn't powerless in it. He is the one who threw her out in Gone, he wasn't helpless to Buffy and could assert himself when he wanted to. I think throughout the series, Spikes goes to Buffy more than she does to him. Smashed, they meet in the middle. He definitely is calling the shots in Wrecked. Gone, Buffy goes to him, but he throws her out. DMP, he goes to the diner, but she goes outside. DT is DT, they're kind of even in OAFA and in AYW the each go to each other once. Buffy ends it, but he still has the power to tell her friends...

Seeing laid out like that, I'd change my vote to the Spike side.

I would just say a teeny more power to Buffy simply because when it all came crashing down she could walk away and Spike couldn't.

I gave Spike the edge at 6, because in my mind, even though both chose to participate in a mutually abusive relationship, Spike was the predator and Buffy was the victim. Sure Spike suffered too, but he was the one preying on Buffy in the first place, he triggered her when he wanted to fight her for real in whatever that episode was, and he was threatening her. By the way, to me the word victim describes a person in a situation, not a personality. So when I call Buffy a victim here, I'm not forgetting that she could have staked him or walked away or whatnot. The way I see it, she felt cut off from the rest of the group, she went treated Spike like a confidant, he didn't like it, and when he realized that her messed up psyche was vulnerable enough for him to take advantage of, he not only continued the relationship he also tried to convince her that her current isolated, miserable, in the darkness self was where she was meant to be, which to me is way more abusive than the fact that she used him knowing he loved her. I hated season six Spike. If I watched season six right now, I'd hate him all over again. Dead Things was painful because of how bad off Buffy was, but I didn't see her beating then as domestic abuse as some have called it, just how horribly bad off she was psychologically to do that, not that he didn't deserve it. In the context of midseason six, I think of Spike as a monster who deserved that beating and worse, soft loving side or no.

Given all the time I've spent in the Spuffy section of fandom, I'm not surprised more people give Buffy the edge than not here. I'd be curious to see a fanfic written by a person who would give Spike the edge, since I've yet to see a Spuffy fic addressing season six that didn't give more focus to how badly Buffy treated Spike than vice versa. I'd probably find it more palatable that way.

This doesn't seem to be a popular interpretation, but Spike, definitely. Physically they're equals, once his chip stops working on her, but Spike is a gifted manipulator who not only knows exactly how messed up Buffy is, but is the only one who really knows. And he doesn't want her getting better. She belongs in the dark, with him, and he's going to keep her that way. He knows how to exploit her shame and unhappiness - most notably in DT, in which he deliberately tries to make her feel even more alienated from her friends than she already is - and he does it.

Aside from which, Spike is fully aware that he has this power. I'm not entirely sure he's right in FFL that every Slayer has a death wish - more that every Slayer has moments where she's slightly less able to fight as hard for survival - but he can suss out when someone is giving in. Whereas Buffy is absolutely not in a space where she can recognize any power she might have over someone. She does influence Spike, but she isn't setting out to get what she wants from him the way he is her.

Spike is a fun and interesting character, but he does NOT come off well this season. *hugs Buffy*

I said an even 5. I think there's a distinction to be made between 'power' and 'control', interestingly. Like eowyn_315 said, both of them have *power* over the other by merely existing. But neither of them have true control because of their respective handicaps. So, they have influence over the other person, but never true control because that would entail completely comprehending their own desires and making the other person fulfil those desires. And I don't believe either Buffy or Spike have a firm grasp on what they really want that season. Take the balcony scene - Spike seems to crave total possession of Buffy, to have her submit to him... Except that's not the thing he really wants at all. And Buffy seems to want that escape from life, to sink into the abyss... Except that's also not what she really wants.

I'd also argue that Buffy doesn't have as much power in the relationship as it would seem. Spike being trapped because he's in love is obvious, but I don't think the balance of feeling is that unequal at all. (Note that I say 'feeling', not 'love'.) She's able to walk away from him, but she can't control her feelings, no matter how much she might want to. (As Entropy demonstrates.) Admitting that she even has feelings is a pain, because the whole thing between them is built on pain. The feelings don't feel *good* - they're not based on the other person making them feel good (like, say, Willow and Tara), because, let's face it, 90% of the time, Buffy and Spike made each other miserable. The feelings go completely against reason, hope, happiness, etc. And they both just "want it to stop". And they can't make that happen. So yeah, in a nutshell, powerless.

Also, just to rant a bit: I'm not understanding the blaming of Spike for his lack of sensitivity or whatever about Buffy's situation. Not that I *disagree* that he was a manipulative dickwad, but - the guy doesn't have a soul at this point. That's not a matter of interpretation. Spike does pretty well for his situation sometimes, but that doesn't change the fact that he is still hugely and helplessly deficient. He's not even remotely capable of understanding, to pull out an example, why Buffy would flinch at being called 'an animal'. It just *ain't there*. This is part of why Buffy flies off the handle at him in Dead Things - "You CAN'T understand why this is killing me, can you." The fact that he CAN'T, as opposed to just WON'T, means (from her perspective) that she really does have all the power in their relationship - power she doesn't want. And it's what motivates finally breaking up with him in AYW. "That's just you - I should have remembered" sounds real condescending at first, but the point is that she's exempting him of all responsibility in the relationship. She's walking away *because he can't*. (Though, admittedly, all of this *is* a matter of interpretation.) I think what she's also attempting to do is abdicate her own power, which is why she loses all patience when Spike Doesn't Get It. Anyway, bottom line here is - Spike cannot possibly bear this huge responsibility for the badness of their relationship when he can't even comprehend why it's bad. No more than Buffy can bear responsibility when she's mentally ill. My stance is that either they're both equally to blame, or they're both equally blameless.

(Sorry for the reposted comment; I accidentally made the first one anonymous.)

This is hard. I think they were roughly matched in vulnerability and ability to cause damage (he knows which buttons to push and where to strike; her words/actions matter more because of his love). They both had no sense of self-preservation: Spike was in love; Buffy was depressed. I don't think they realized the power they had over each other because they figured the other couldn't really be hurt: For Spike, Buffy was larger than life as the object of his unrequited love and as the mythical Slayer who monsters have nightmares about. For Buffy, Spike's the only person who can bounce back after she throws all of her strength at him, and can dish it back to her physically and verbally. (She may not respect his feelings, but she does respect his strength.)

I think I'm in the minority because I think Spike's love was both a disadvantage and an advantage. I agree that Spike was willing to do anything for her--as long as it didn't put distance in the relationship. But I also think that Spike was willing to force a connection whether it hurt her or not. IMO the worst harm he did to her in S6 wasn't when he was angry and lashing out, it was when he was trying to get her to love him. It's the creature of the dark spiel from LS to NA, which was supposed to be about how similar they were but ended up increasing her sense of alienation and self-loathing. I think the DT balcony scene was about him telling her how he would always accept her unlike her friends who'd spurn her if they knew the real her; but for her it was a mindfuck on all her insecurities. Whether he intended to or not, knew better or not, he was manipulating and exploiting her vulnerabilities and making things worse for her.

I think the same thing about Buffy's depression, impaired judgment, and self-destructive impulses. She's more vulnerable, he's her sole support system (the Scoobies were having their own breakdowns and caused her problems, professional help wouldn't believe her), and she'd let him hurt her just to feel. At the same time, I think she was self-destructive enough to be cruel to him because he could hurt her. S6 Buffy is hard to figure out but I think it was about comfort, and a safe outlet for her suicidal impulses: suicidal because of the association of his love/seduction to danger to her (FFL, Crush, stalking, Smashed/Wrecked, sex with the ex-Slayer serial killer soulless vamp); safe because he wanted to save her and was comforting (AL, LS, OMWF, life affirming sex with the only person who makes her feel). I also think she was developing feelings for him despite herself. So that gives him a lot of power over her. But in the end all of her self-destructive impulses hurt him instead of her, because she used him to work out her live or die conflict, and he didn't really want to hurt her, while hurting him proved him right about how she came back wrong. Instead of hurting herself, she ended up hurting him. (All that, and she did want him to go away.)

I give Buffy the edge in the power balance, but I hold Spike more accountable because I think he gets an Anything is Justified and Sympathetic in the Name of Love get out of jail free card. (Or maybe that's just fanfic!Spike.)