Did Spike care about Joyce?

[zobothehobo]

I was just scrolling through my tumblr dashboard, and then this post came up http://welcome-to-sunnydale.tumblr.com/post/38657018471/i-believe-that-spike-has-a-certain-amount-of and I have to say, I think there's a lot of validity here. I honestly hadn't thought much about it... I mean... I've always enjoyed the relationship between Spike and Joyce, but I hadn't really thought about it. But this person suggests that Spike cares about Joyce because she reminds him of his own mother... We don't know too terribly much about Spike's mother, but we do know she was the most important thing to his human counterpart... and even as a newly sired vampire, she was still the most important thing to him. He didn't want to start a life with Dru until he had his mother with them.

So did Spike really care about her? Did she remind him of his own mother? What was it about Joyce that got to Spike?

 

[tec]

I think he did he respected her after School Hard and never once scemed or try to hurt her after that also when she died he was decent enough to bring her flowers.

Plus they both loved "Passions"

 

[Robb Stark]

I think he did, to a certain extent. I think, as he said, he liked her. I mean, he delivered unsigned flowers to the Summers' home after she passed away. It's pretty tough to see any sort of ulterior motive in that gesture. He's shown multiple times to really enjoy her company and advice, and I don't think he ever had any real desire to harm her after getting to know her.

That being said, I don't think he felt a great degree of grief for her when she died. Spike and a few other vampires (Harmony, Holden Webster) seem to have more of a degree of normalcy than most vampires, or at least to a certain extent. Holden was more than willing to talk with Buffy for ages about her life's problems because he found her interesting and liked talking about it. I think Spike was in the same way. I think he found Joyce interesting and liked her. But if he was hungry and didn't have to deal with Buffy, would he have fed on her? Totally.