“wahh i only like enemies to lovers if it’s gay bc i don’t want men to be mean to women” what about a woman doing heinous shit to a man and that man (who also sucks) being pathetically psychosexually obsessed with her. you people have no fucking vision. if you were willing to read & write women doing actual wrongs this wouldn’t be a problem. let that female character commit atrocities with the sole goal of ruining one guy’s life while they have weird sexual tension about it
The secret sauce that makes Spuffy work so much better than most newer Enemies to Lovers is that that Spike is weird little freak who shows in painstaking detail the embarrassing growing pains of developing as a person. He’s not some ~secret good guy~ who’s just misunderstood, he was actually an evil little shit with just enough charisma to be too human to stake so the main characters let him stick around. He had to claw his way to humanity and it was that growth, and the slow development of Buffy’s affections in response to it, that makes it so compelling.
YES. This is why I love enemies-to-lovers but hate “enemies to lovers” as a trope generally, because no one does it like they did it. It’s only fun when they’re ACTUALLY enemies and bonus fun when they’re enemies because one of them is an ACTUAL bad boy (or girl).
Most stuff labeled “enemies to lovers” featuring a baddie character is actually “two people who argue the first few times they meet” and “guy who is rough around the edges but secretly very kind and goodhearted”. It’s just cheap and doesn’t hit the same but it’s also way easier so I get why it’s done so often. Also fandom nowdays has a LOT of young fans who can’t seem to handle like…moral and emotional complexity?
Enemies to lovers works best when writers don’t chicken out on making them proper enemies and fans don’t throw a fit about them acting like enemies instead of pseudo enemies who don’t go beyond bantering with each other.
This is why Spuffy stays elite. They genuinely wanted to kill each other at some point and would have done so but didn’t bcs circumstances kept preventing it and, once the connection was forged, the banter that followed was like icing on the cake which we enjoyed thoroughly because we had lived through their bloodlust for each other.
