Do you mean the AR? If so, in fairness I don't think that soulless Spike's actions needed to be addressed that extensively, given that he didn't actually commit what he intended to. Yes, it should have been addressed a bit more from Buffy's POV, but I actually wouldn't want Buffy's story to be all about 'trauma' because, a)she stopped it, and therefore the impact is not the same as it would have been had it actually happened and b) Buffy is incredibly mentally strong and I would have been really depressing to watch her become a victim on top of everything she had already been through. I just needed to see anger and distrust, and a better exploration of all of S6 from her point of view.
The AR is a sore point in particular, but it's not the only horrible thing Spike ever did, even just to Buffy. The way she interacts with him in S7 is just weird. In "Lessons," before she even knows he has his soul, she isn't angry or horrified to see him, just kinda surprised, and she actually stands there and lets him touch her face. ??? Her reactions in "Beneath You" make way more sense, but shouldn't she have been pissed at him for pretending to be soulless and being super gross with her once she found out the truth? And then in "Him," she flinches when Spike grabs her arm, and then SHE apologizes. He's the one who should be apologizing, but I suppose that would require him to understand boundaries, which he clearly does not or he never would've come back to Sunnydale in the first place once he had his soul, let alone constantly mentioning his feelings for her. She also at least somewhat buys into the idea that he got his soul in penance for the attempted rape, and tries to persuade Dawn of that. (Um, no? He got his soul because he had finally gotten it through his head that she didn't love him, and he believed that was the only way he'd have a shot with her. It wasn't about penance, it was about entitlement, objectification, and being incapable of understanding what it truly means to have a soul.) Also, Buffy telling Spike he was useless unless he was being the version of himself who chainsmoked and strutted around in his murder trophy coat is insane.
I'm not saying I wanted Buffy to have a victimhood arc or something, I just don't like that Spike got one instead or that Buffy ever let him make her feel responsible for him. You're right that more anger and distrust would've ben better. There's a lot of unwarranted parallelism between the way she deals with Spike and the way she dealt with Angel in early S3, when she was secretly helping him recover. S3 Buffy should not have felt like Angel was a secret she needed to keep, and S7 Buffy should not have felt any obligation to Spike (because unlike Angel, she and Spike didn't have any positive history together, he's just the villain-turned obnoxious reluctant ally-turned creepy stalker-turned convenient object she used in a super dysfunctional attempt to cope with her crushing depression-turned attempted rapist). Spike seems to view Buffy as his savior or something, and I wish Buffy had set him straight instead of awkwardly going along with it to not hurt his feelings. She's too compassionate for her own good, but mostly only with Spike, not people who have legitimate reasons to rely on her, like the Potentials.
I disagree with the first part of this, but agree with the second. I don't need Spike to have markedly different soulless/soulful selves like because that would mean his story is just a rehashing of Angel's (which, at some points it did feel close to becoming). I just need him to be different enough to be consistent with the metaphysical rules they'd established earlier and for there to be clearer moral distinctions between his actions (which is basically what you said in the rest of the paragraph🙂)
Note that I only said those things were necessary for romantic Spuffy in S7 and beyond to make sense.
😛 I don't actually want that to happen. However, despite all that "iconic character" stuff, I do think that Spike (pre-comics) is a consistent character, just...not a particularly admirable one. I think that soulless and soulful Spike are similar for two reasons:
1) "Spike" is almost entirely a performance and defense mechanism against ridicule and rejection, and this performance can be done whether the soul is there or not. He wants to be perceived as this tough, snarky, punk who is immune to criticism, so that's what he pretends to be. I have no idea who he really is underneath that performance, except that this person has some pretty serious issues with women and struggles to accept responsibility for his own problems.
2) Because soulless Spike got the soul on purpose, his soul and demon naturally get along better than Angel's. The soul wasn't forced on the demon, and there's a kind of internal continuity. Neither Angel's soul nor his demon were prepared to be forced together, so they can never be reconciled to each other's existence. Thus, while Spike can maintain some of the same goals and many of the same preferences and attitudes as he did while soulless, Angel's personality skews farther away from that of Angelus than we might expect, having met the hedonistic Liam, and Angelus, when free of the soul, attempts to destroy everything that mattered to Angel.
