Woman of the Month: Drusilla

Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel

As soon as I decided that 2025 would be the Year of the Villainess, I knew that Drusilla would be my choice for October. A Cockney Victorian psychic vampire who dresses like a Goth princess and talks to her dolls? That’s a perfect Halloween aesthetic.

On consideration, there were surprisingly few female villains in a show that was all about strong female characters. Glory is the standout for being the only female Big Bad, and of course we had Darla and Drusilla across the seasons… but that’s about it really. The First could take on feminine form, but was essentially genderless. Amy Madison eventually broke bad, but in a rather confusing way. There was Harmony as well, I suppose, though she was never taken particularly seriously as a threat.

The likes of Faith and Dark Willow always had redemption on the cards, while over on Angel there was Lilah Morgan and Jasmine. Apart from all that, any other female villains were just one-shot guest stars: Catherine Madison, Gwendolyn Post, Vanessa Brewer, Sunday… do you even know who I’m talking about?

But I digress, let’s get back to Drusilla. I’m happy to say on the record that Drusilla is the show’s most tragic character, bar none. Born some time in the Victorian Era, she grows up a pious Catholic girl who believes her psychic abilities are the work of the devil. This is something her sire Angelus is all too happy to take advantage of. To quote him: “It was over the moment I saw her. She was my opposite in every way. Dutiful daughter. Devout Christian. Innocent and unspoiled. I took one look at her and I knew. She’d be my masterpiece.”

After the murder of her entire family, Drusilla flees to a convent for safety, though the church ultimately offers her no safety: Angelus and Darla break in, kill all the nuns, and turn her into a vampire. Just for good measure, they have sex on the altar in front of her while she suffers a complete mental collapse.

Yeah, there are no happy endings here. In a twisted sort of way, turning her into a vampire is almost a kindness after the torture Angelus inflicted on her, as at least the loss of her soul frees her from the burden of her religious guilt. Interestingly, her psychic abilities pass with her into her new existence as a member of the undead, and between her madness and her precognitive gift, she’s one of the most captivating, terrifying and (like I said) heartbreaking characters of the entire franchise.

Although most of her history is presented to the viewer via flashbacks (most notably how she came to sire Spike), she first appears in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in quite a vulnerable state, having been badly injured in Prague. Spike has brought her to Sunnydale for mystical treatment, and the viewer is initially presented with a vampire who is certainly eerie, but not a huge physical threat – at first.

Once recovered, she’s a force to be reckoned with, and as a player in the show’s mythos, is best remembered for killing Kendra the Vampire Slayer and re-siring Darla over on Angel. Sadly, her last chronological appearance was in season five of Buffy, trying and failing to bring Spike back into the fold, after which she just disappears (though I’m led to believe she turns up again in the comics).

What Juliet Landeau brought to the role is a vibe. She’s a Gothic lady and a Victorian child, a spooky seer and a deadly monster. She’s guileless, deranged, coquettish, driven, unpredictable – truly, a compelling performance from start to finish, and given the impact she had on the show, it’s rather astounding that she appeared in only seventeen Buffy episodes and seven Angel ones (and some of these were entirely in flashback, or as a guise the First took on). She was a force to be reckoned with...

Reading/Watching Log #118

This month can best be described as one-thing-leading-to-another month. I wanted to finish the second season of Atlantis, and that reminded me of 2012’s Sinbad. Having watched that, I naturally had to watch the animated movie of the same name from DreamWorks, which reminded me of their other early animated projects. This meant rewatching The Prince of Egypt, which then put me in mind of other Biblical retellings, like Samson and Delilah. And so on and so forth.

It reminded me of just how connected our multitude of stories are; how one can inform all the others; how it all trickles down. Superman’s origins are just a variation of Moses in the Bulrushes, while his superstrength is matched in that of Samson. Then there’s the progression of his story, in which he learns a devastating truth, runs away and returns a changed person, and is then charged with righting a great wrong. It forms the backbone of so many modern stories.

Meanwhile, so many of our Femme Fatales are the progeny of Delilah, while the star-crossed element of her love affair with Samson (she’s Philistine, he’s of the tribe of Dan) reminded me a little of what they’re going for in the upcoming Robin Hood, in which Robin and Marian are Saxon and Norman respectively. Atlantis is filled with ancient tropes that are all muddled up in order to create a new story, while Sinbad’s best episode involves a run-in with the personification of death, who has been promised a young woman as a bride, but can ultimately be outwitted out of his prize. How many times have we seen that one before?

Anyways, I just find it fascinating to connect everything, like there’s a giant fishing net inside my mind, and this was a good month for it. 

Links and Updates

I haven’t done one of these posts since June, so a lot of things under the cut have already been updated (or even released) while I was busy accumulating them over the intervening months.

The good news is that SPRING is here in the southern hemisphere, which means an end to the dark evenings and cold mornings (for the most part, anyway). I’m still super-busy and I’ll be working all the way through Christmas until I get some more annual leave in February, but hopefully I’ll be able to bump up the amount of posts for 2025, as so far it’s been at its lowest since I started this blog back in 2014.

Angela Barrett: The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet

That Angela Barrett would illustrate a book of ballet stories seems inevitable, as her style perfectly matches the nature of ballet: delicate, elegant, and with a fairy tale-like ambiance. The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet has no less than four original covers, so the publishers certainly got their money’s worth.

This compilation includes ten stories in all, from the most famous (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker) to the more obscure (La Sylphide, Petrouchka) and all those in-between (Giselle, Coppelia, The Firebird). Interestingly, Barrett makes the call to depict the events of these stories as non-diegetic – that is, real events – no matter how magical – as opposed to a ballet enacted on the stage. For a comparison, Francesca Crespi illustrated her firebird in A Little Box of Ballet Stories as a person dressed as the firebird, whereas Barrett depicts it as an actual bird. The title is Stories From the Ballet, not Ballet Stories.

Aside from the cover art, the frontispiece and a few tiny images of ballet shoes and masks and other paraphernalia strewn throughout the pages, these stories are illustrated in a rendering of the real world, not as a theatrical illusion. I’m making a point of this, because there’s one exception, and that’s naturally going to be the subject of this post...

Meta: Rebecca and Rowena; Part I: Introduction

Note: I have been working on this post for several months now, and it just keeps getting longer and longer. As such, I’ve decided to break it down into four parts: the introduction, the novel/parody novella, the films, and the television adaptations.

Every now and then I come back to this article in The Toast about The Unified Theory of Ophelia, in which the author half-jokingly claims that they once believed everything there was to know about womanhood could be discovered in the character of Ophelia.

I had a similar revelation last year on reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and watching its assorted film and television adaptations (plus, William Makepeace Thackery’s parody novella). Everything about how female characters are portrayed across media, how fandom responds to them, and even how Love Triangles and Fan-Preferred Couples form in the imaginations of readers/viewers, can arguably be found in media’s collective portrayal of Rowena and Rebecca across the centuries.

Source

I would go so far as to say that the genesis of all fandom’s discourse and harassment and cross-examination and hypersensitivity and preoccupation with female characters and the role they play in any given narrative can be traced back to these two fictional women. Is that too broad a claim? Yes, of course – but as the linked article points out, every now and then certain theories and concepts that interest you can occasionally seem to magically coalesce into a single, shining, straightforward example. It’s like discovering the unifying theory of the universe.

Woman of the Month: Eris

Eris from Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

For this month, I am allowing myself one semi-obscure female villain.

Of course, the goddess Eris is hardly unknown: she’s a major player in Greek mythology and the deity who kicked off the Trojan War when she threw the Golden Apple of Discord into the crowd at Peleus and Thetis’s wedding (and by doing so, making herself the progenitor of the evil fairy that curses Sleeping Beauty at her Christening, for whether she’s called Maleficent, Carabosse or the Fairy of Red, that character also sows discord after not being invited to a party).

But this particular take on Eris might count as obscure, as she’s from an animated movie released in 2003 that bombed badly at the box office. Yet for all that, she is easily its highlight, and reason enough to watch Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas at least once.

Michelle Pfeiffer lent her silky voice to the manipulative, chaos-loving goddess who has an elaborate plan to strew havoc throughout the known world, but what really gets your attention is the stunning animation that brings her to life. She slinks and glides across the screen, shifting in and out of ink-black smoke, with serpentine hair that undulates around her with an underwater fluidity. Sometimes she’s the size of a mortal woman; other times she expands to frighteningly large proportions, with glowing eyes and elongating fingers. You can’t take your eyes off her whenever she’s onscreen

Truly, she’s a marvel of animation; demonstrating that even a not-great movie can be elevated by a truly great villain.

Reading/Watching Log #117

It is the first day of spring in the southern hemisphere, and I reach it like a castaway onto an island full of fresh water and fruit. Damn, that was a gruelling winter. I hate the cold and the dark at the best of times, but there was something in the air this year that made absolutely everyone sick – continuously and relentlessly.

I suspect I caught more than one thing at once, which ended up playing havoc on my immune system, and after five whole weeks of feeling like absolute crap, my doctor finally prescribed me some antibiotics just to help fight whatever the hell was going on in my Petrie dish of a body.

My blog has been so quiet lately because I honestly haven’t had the energy to write anything. By the time I got home from work, I just wanted to crawl into bed and fall unconscious, but now – well, hopefully I can start plumping up these entries again.

And yes, I will eventually post my reading/watching list for July.

This month’s theme: PIRATES!