It doesn't matter if Spike was right or not, it's the message the show sends that counts in this case.
I don't think that the show is sending this message. I think that Spike's words raise a question, and this question is related to the main question of season 5: Is Buffy going dark because of her slayer role, or will she be able to keep her humanity? In 'The Gift', we see the answer - Buffy sacrifices her life to save her humanity. So I think that the overall message is that Spike was wrong about that.
In Chosen, both Spike and Angel acted like 12 year olds about Buffy starting some sort of love triangle in the last episode which continues in season 5 - Spike and Angel use Buffy to further their competition. I know Buffy chooses neither guy, that she's not in AtS S5 and that The Girl in Question was retconned. That doesn't matter. The end result is that, to this day, we are still debating Bangel vs Spuffy and that part of Buffy's legacy is now: she dated two vampires, which one should she end up with? This one my initial points, that the show turned Buffy's one time fling with a vamp into a pattern and now it's all about how Buffy loves vampires.
Well, I think that it's mostly the fans who create this legacy. The show itself never had a love triangle between the three, and in 'Chosen' Buffy's reaction to Angel and Spike's petty reactions was to mock them ("Are you just gonna come here and go all Dawson on me every time I have a boyfriend?" "You know, one of these days I'm just gonna put you two in a room and let you wrestle it out"). I always saw it as the show MAKING FUN of the idea of love triangles, not portraying one. Buffy is NOT Sookie.
How is Dawn the Joyce of later seasons?
Ooh, I could write an freakin' article about this... For now, I'll just say that Dawn and Joyce both seemed surprisingly fond of Spike, even when they shouldn't have. So, the early seasons had Joyce friendly with Spike, and the later seasons had Dawn friendly with Spike (until 'Seeing Red', that is).
Buffy thought she was wrong for sleeping with Spike and Tara pointed out that he loved her. She was trying to comfort Buffy, make her actions more justified, but the fact that everyone believed in Spike's love for Buffy - a real, selfless love - means he wasn't a monster in their eyes at all.
1) She never said that his love was"real" or "selfless", just that he loved her. That could mean a lot of things. Maybe she meant that Spike loved Buffy the way I love ice cream?
2) As you said, Tara was trying to comfort Buffy. So, what she said wasn't necessarily her honest opinion.
3) "he wasn't a monster in their eyes at all" is not the same as "they accepted him into the group".
It's very different. Look, this is going nowhere. I'm just replying to what you say, but we lost the thread of this conversation. All of this started as a reply to
@Fuffy Baith:
Right now, we're just arguing back and forth aimlessly and you know we're never going to agree on this subject.
True. I was just enjoying the debate, I'm sorry if this annoyed you. Cheers.
Yes, but "Prophecy Girl" was S1 and Buffy defeated the Master supposedly because dying made her stronger. Not a good reason, but it was the first seasons and it's a minor quibble I have with the episode. You would expect better however from the seasons 5 and 7 finales - one is the end of Buffy on WB and the other one is the end of the show period. They were also the end result of a lot of buildup. Joss should know better by now. It wouldn't take much to rectify some of these plot points.
I don't know... At those points ('The Gift' and 'Chosen'), I really wasn't expecting a brilliant plot, I was expecting an emotional climax and satisfying ends to the character arcs and thematic arcs, and I got it. It would have been even better if the plots were more impressive, but the imperfect plotting never bothered me... YMMV.