Parade Magazine Buffy Quiz - BtVS

Fun quiz but I got the Spike name question "wrong." They got the answer wrong in the quiz!

I was surprised after 50 questions they dont give you a tally at the end. They tell you to add up your correct answers. Also got the "How many times do we watch Buffy die" question wrong...I immediately started humming, "Hey I've died twice" and without thinking chose 2.

alexreager | December 27, 19:30 CET

Lol, had some time to kill and did it... I really didn't know the answers to questions 24, 34, 41 and 50 (but, DO YOU remember those??), plus few others that I got right on second guess...
all in all it was not a bad one ;-)

JotheCat | December 27, 19:31 CET

Wow, I only missed 3 questions, with is WAY too many to know!

embers | December 27, 19:53 CET

Huh, I wonder why I did better on the allegedly more difficult questions? I think my brain remembers more random lines than actual facts or plot...

skittledog | December 27, 20:25 CET

I got nine wrong. I was doing so well up until the end.

Nolan | December 27, 20:27 CET

alexreager... well, that is a tricky question. We are first told of course that Spike earned his name by torturing his victims with railroad spikes, but in "Fool for Love," a man says that William's poetry is so bad it makes him want to drive a spike through his head. Whether that is actually the origin of his nickname or not is left ambiguous, I think. So the question isn't really fair. Although I did answer it "correctly."

I got 3 questions wrong... is that sad? haha

[ edited by fortunateizzi on 2008-12-27 20:50 ]

fortunateizzi | December 27, 20:50 CET

Eh. I think some of those questions were more ambiguous than the quiz seemed to acknowledge.

We never really do learn exactly how/why Spike chose that name, we're just given the random facts about the torture victims, about his poetry, and that he's using the name at about the same time he adopts a snazzy new accent.

Scraggles | December 27, 21:17 CET

Yeah, some of those questions are indeed ambiguous...
But I believe that if you know that it's been said that Spike's name comes from torturing his victims with railroads spikes, and you also know that he was probably doing this as a kind of poetic revenge after hearing the man in "Fool for love" saying it was better to be tortured with railroad spikes than listening to William's poetry..well then it doesn't really matter what you answer to the quiz, you just know this one...;-)

JotheCat | December 27, 21:30 CET

I missed a lot of the questions about names at the end.
Some of those were really vague and only mentioned once in the series. That being said I only missed about 8 questions. If only they would rerun Buffy as much as they do Angel I would know this stuff better. :)

Jayne's Hat | December 27, 21:48 CET

i got 47 right. though to be honest i completely guessed on 3 of them. Xander's car, the music Giles played in Hush and Xander's blood pressure. total guesses that i got right lol.

nameless savage | December 27, 21:58 CET

William the Living wasn't called Spike ; presumably, the vampire got the idea from remembering what said society bigmouth had compared William's poetry to. And ran with it.

"Like a dark-winged virtue...Strangely familiar and familiarly strange...."

DaddyCatALSO | December 27, 22:33 CET

Okay, I am geekier than season 1 Willow because I got them all right. The only one I guessed on was the Mayor's schedule and I guessed right on that. I think I need a life.

Giles'chainsawchick | December 27, 22:58 CET

I suck...I got four wrong.

josswhedonaddict | December 28, 00:16 CET

Seemed a little season 1-4 intensive, but fun all the same!

FiveBy5 | December 28, 00:31 CET

I missed the question about Xander's blood pressure. Xander's blood pressure? That doesn't seem like the best test of knowledge to me, it's uber specific while being easily forgettable. I also missed the number of times Buffy died. I didn't really count The Wish as one of Buffy's deaths, but ah well.

That was fun! There need to be more Buffy quizzes.

Emmie | December 28, 00:39 CET

I am a bad bad fan. :( I guess I remember more the emotion of the story than the picky little details, never been one to remember movie or song lines either.

cabri | December 28, 00:51 CET

Think I may be in the lead right now, or in joint first place with Emmie, at least. Two wrong, although at least four answers were entirely lucky guesses and I would have got the Spike question wrong if I'd not had a little advance warning from alexreager's comment above. The fact is that there were two correct answers for that question and neither one could really be considered less accurate than the other.

Ah well, other than the fact it proved that my knowledge of the random potential slayers is slightly lacking, fun quiz.

The Arcane | December 28, 01:13 CET

Emmie — There need to be more Buffy quizzes.

There need to be more Buffy movies!

Then there can be lots more quizzes.

(c;

filops | December 28, 01:22 CET

I missed 3 questions. And I agree with alexreager. The correct answer to #8 was wrong.

menomegirl | December 28, 02:07 CET

I'm pretty sure this has been posted here before and that #8 sparked a debate about the origin of "Spike."

ETA: Previous post.

[ edited by Sunfire on 2008-12-28 04:05 ]

Sunfire | December 28, 04:04 CET

Whoa. Good memory! I was at a con that weekend and so missed the original.

cabri | December 28, 04:13 CET

I remembered because the questions are kinda odd.

Sunfire | December 28, 04:46 CET

This is a little embarrassing. I got 49 out of 50, without cheating once, and hardly pausing (almost caught me with the Buffy and Billy Fordham one, but I remembered the pertinent dialog pretty quickly). And my only "wild guess" was Xander's blood pressure. The one I missed was "Lyle and Tector", I choose Hector.

I'm firmly in the corner that the answer to the Spike question is accurate, and not even that ambiguous (um, at least not if you've watched Fool For Love about 50 times ) ;)

The original "because he tortured his victims with a railroad spike" came from one of Giles' reference books. I've always thought that the revelation, in FFL, of the real origin of the name (which Spike gave to himself) was part and parcel of the entire episode's many revelations about Spike.

I'll sum up the argument with the conversation between Spike and Angel at the end of Damage (AtS), where Spike talks about "never looking back" at his victims, of being in it for "the rush and the crunch", while Angel admits that to him, "the destruction of a human being" was "art'.
Spike's statement was not something he would have said if the "torturing with railroad spikes" story had been true.

Shey | December 28, 12:39 CET

It's also worth remembering that the same book that told us that Spike earned his name the torture way also told us that he was "barely 200," so why did anyone trust it? Why did I trust it? 'Cause I totally got that one wrong... although in my defense I may have been assuming there was no way the quiz makers could be that good. I learned.

I got four or five wrong -- I missed the crucial "watched" phrasing on the Buffy deaths question, and I couldn't pull down Xander's blood pressure or the Mayor's to-do list. However, I realized that while I don't know my parent's address, I do have Buffy's memorized. Although Buffy's lived in Sunnydale a lot longer than my parents have lived in their new house.

A much better -- and tougher -- quiz than I expected.

(Also, sudden revelation: why on earth did Xander think he could become Car Guy for the gang when they already had Oz as Van Guy?)

ManEnoughToAdmitIt | December 28, 15:59 CET

I guess I thought that Spike's nickname WAS "Spike" - "William" being a more, you know, conventional name...

qui_ca | December 28, 18:09 CET

I just realized that this Spike question is really inaccurate and confusing.

8. How did “Big Bad” vampire Spike get his nickname?

a) From his spiked blond hair
b) Because he wrote poetry so bad it made listeners want to drive a spike through their foreheads
c) From crucifying a Slayer
d) From torturing his victims with railroad spikes

Spike gets his nickname because he told Angel to call him "Spike". It was a nickname he created for himself after he killed all the aristocrats (didn't he torture them with railroad spikes, thus the name "Spike"))who mocked his bad poetry. He got the nickname "William the Bloody" because of his awful poetry when he was human, so it wasn't a Big Bad nickname for the vampire, but rather a mocking nickname for the human. The question doesn't specify which nickname they're referring to - Spike or William the Bloody - since both are technically nicknames for him.

"D" would be the correct answer for his nickname 'Spike' because it relates to how he tortured his first victims. "B" would be the correct answer for his nickname 'William the Bloody'.

Emmie | December 28, 18:30 CET

Exactly, Emmie. That's what I was meaning with my comment further up thread. Depending on how you read the question (or on what nickname you assume they mean) either answer is correct.

Damn quiz writers trying to stop me getting 100%. Total conspiracy, I tell you!

The Arcane | December 28, 21:32 CET

They should give a tally at the end! I went through all this trouble and then they were too lazy to even give some way of determining your points!
Also: They forgot the 'Nightmares' time where Buffy dies.
And they seem to have forgotten that Giles CLEARLY states that Spike got his name by torturing victims with railroad spikes! Was that supposed to be a 'joke' answer??? I'm not laughing! |:(

The Gremlin | December 29, 03:49 CET

Spike gets his nickname because he told Angel to call him "Spike". It was a nickname he created for himself after he killed all the aristocrats (didn't he torture them with railroad spikes, thus the name "Spike"))who mocked his bad poetry. He got the nickname "William the Bloody" because of his awful poetry when he was human, so it wasn't a Big Bad nickname for the vampire, but rather a mocking nickname for the human.

I totally disagree. In the flashback scene you're referring to, all he says is "It's Spike now", no one says anything about him creating the name for himself "after killing the aristocrats", or even makes any reference to him killing them at all.
In the same scene, Angel says "...... all because William the Bloody likes the attention". So that was obviously another nickname he took for himself, as a vampire, although the snooty aristocrat used it first.

But I still think the question is perfectly clear .... "How did 'Big Bad' vampire Spike get his nickname?")

.....Giles CLEARLY states that Spike got his name by torturing victims with railroad spikes!

Not really. He reads it in one of his reference books, which are not exactly infallible.
The major revelation in the Fool For Love flashbacks is that Spike, as a human, was a very different sort of person than anyone would have assumed. And there is nothing in the flashbacks to suggest that Giles' reference book was correct. The impression I got was rather that the flashbacks were illustrating that Giles' books contained "urban legends" as well as facts, since nowhere in the very detailed flashback sequences is it ever stated that Spike actually did this.
The aristocrat's statement that he's rather have a railroad spike shoved through his head than listen to William's bloody awful poetry, and that they called him William the Bloody because of it, was obviously a clever play on words as well as yet another glimpse into Spike's personality (which is what FFL was all about), illustrating that by turning these mocking words to his own purpose, as a vampire, he was mocking the mockers.

My take on "Spike 101". ;)

[ edited by Shey on 2008-12-29 12:15 ]

Shey | December 29, 12:12 CET

I think the point is, Shey, that the question is based on an awful lot of speculation and fan guess work. The fact that we are coming up with differing versions of how Spike's names came about seems to suggest that it's far from clear and as such the question asked isn't clear either.

We don't know for sure whether Spike killed the aristocrats at all, let alone by using railroad spikes. We obviously assume that he did based on what Giles told us in School Hard, added to what we hear them saying in Fool For Love. We don't even know for sure when the scene where we first heard him refer to himself as Spike happens. At least not exactly. Could have been a day later or it could have been a month. Impossible to say what happened in between the various flashbacks.

So although I'm not saying your version of "Spike 101" is incorrect, it might not be a completely accurate version of events either. Then when you throw in the question of whether the nickname we are being asked about was 'Spike' or 'William the Bloody', you have additional problems in knowing which of the multiple choice answers were correct.

So, basically not as clear as it could have been.

The Arcane | December 29, 16:09 CET

I think it's more likely that he got it from torturing his victims. After all, he was the one insisting that 'It's SPIKE now' in the flashback in Fool for Love. He probably wouldn't push for a nickname that was actually a mockery of him. He might have gotten the idea, but he would not be called 'Spike' just because of that one nobleman. In my opinion, the answer which makes the most sense is the answer which Giles read.

The Gremlin | December 29, 18:20 CET

Well, 115 is barely 200, kinda-sorta-ina-roguh-sense....

Seriously, Spike never said he didn't torture anybody; he was contrasting his view of kills with Angelus's. Wheteher or not he killed any of the twits from that party, it doesn't mean he didn't, at some point use railway spikes to torture some victims at times. Having the Gang of 4 so seriously hunted they need to hide in an abandoned mine indicates Spike-wikey did more than murder a bunch of folks in whichever of the many incidents in his career they are shown as running from.

DaddyCatALSO | December 29, 22:47 CET

The Gang of 4? What do you mean?

The Gremlin | December 29, 23:39 CET

Angelus, Spike, Darla and Dru.

Simon | December 29, 23:43 CET

I'm not sure it actually matters if Spike really tortured people with railroad spikes or if that was just an urban legend that he did. He got the name because he was rumoured to have done it, and for someone like Spike, that's good enough for him. Hence, where he got the nick name is correct, even if inaccurate. (If that makes sense.)

NYPinTA | December 29, 23:55 CET

It seems unlikely that Spike would have the patience the torture anyone with railroad spikes. It does seem entirely like him to repurpose an old nickname and feed any existing rumors about his own badassery.

Sunfire | December 30, 00:05 CET

Why wouldn't Spike have the patience? He is, in truth, a thug. To quote:
"Some people find pain...very inspirational."
Spike enjoys pain, like man vampires. If the victims were those who mocked him, he would be particularly motivated to torture them.

The Gremlin | December 30, 00:13 CET

Spike enjoys fighting and killing. He'll torture if it serves an ultimate goal, like getting information he needs out of someone. But he gets bored easily, and he'd rather be fighting someone who can fight back or getting to the kill already. Torturing for fun was Angelus's hobby.

Sunfire | December 30, 01:13 CET

Sunfire; good analysis of the choice of nickname, altho eprsonally I think Spike was open to experiemnting with anything evil, even torture, if for no other reason than to see if it suited him.

NYPinTA: Right, what counts in discussing the effect of soemthing is how it, or he, is perceived. Dan Quayle isn't stupid, he's really actually something much, much scarier, but that's how the stories about him were presented, and thus how he was seen.
And so, Spike's nickname gets re-spun by later hearers.

DaddyCatALSO | December 30, 02:03 CET

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December 27 2008