ship_manifesto

Title When You Girls Are Older You'll Understand (Rupert Giles/Joyce Summers/Ethan Rayne)
Author Sadbhyl
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Spoilers: All of BtVS, minor for BtVS:Chaos Bleeds videogame
Email: sadbhyl at yahoo dot com
Personal website: Responsible Adults
Disclaimer No academic prowess was harmed in the writing of this essay. Any injured copyrights were unintentional
Notes All quotes and episode references come from the database at Buffyworld. Enormous thanks go out to mydeira and trkkr47, who read each piece as I slugged it out, and to eurydice79 who was my objective outsider and gave me good points to make it stronger. And greatest thanks of all to Kristine, Robin and Tony, for creating such complex, nuanced characters for us to enjoy and play with.



It started as a joke.

My writing cohort was looking for new odd pairings to write (and since she wrote Cordy/Lyle Gorch, she knows from weird), so I threw out a bunch of combinations. After a few minutes, she says to me, “You know, Joyce seems to be involved in a lot of these.”

“After everything she’s been through, she deserves a lot of sex. What about two guys at once?”

“Yeah, but who?”

“Well, what about Giles and Ethan? They’re hot together.”

“ . . . Why the hell not?”

It is my belief that characters and relationships wait in the fringes of the collective creative unconscious for someone to come along and say “what if?,” at which point they move into that person’s brain and take up residence. Jo Rowling has said in a number of interviews that she was riding on a train, letting her mind wander when she had the what if of a young wizard riding the same train. By the end of that train ride, she had in her head the plot and major characters for the entire Harry Potter series. He had just been waiting for someone to think of him.

This is how it was for us with Joyce, Giles and Ethan. It was as though they were just waiting for someone to think of them so they could have an outlet for the stories they had to tell. It took my partner two weeks to write the first tale of their relationship. Two weeks after that, we had four more stories done. By the end of two months, we had completed an entire season. The three of them seemed to us a natural, obvious relationship and they had found their mouthpieces.

But feeling the truth of a relationship and proving it are two very different propositions. By understanding the individuals and the characteristics each possess and the interrelationships between each couple, we can see how a strong and lasting relationship between all three is possible.

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