Angel as souled demon, as a champion for good, is a different person than Angelus.
Actually, I'm beginning to doubt it ever was that clear cut.
Would people have rather Angel do nothing than do what he thought he needed to do in order to ensure the survival of many more people?
As far as I'm concerned, yes. Inaction is better than mass murder in the name of the greater good, no matter what happens due to inaction.
Angel gave Buffy reason to believe that he's telling her the truth. Either she believed him or she didn't; it just so happens that she believed him.
"Look, I'm glowing! It's destiny!" and "I'm a nice guy, I kill people so others don't kill them" are absolutely no reasons for me to believe Twangel is anything but a Big Bad on a par with the worst of them.
Why should she treat Angel differently, especially when she believes he's telling the truth?
Believing he tells the truth is her main shortcoming here, of course. I definitely hold that one against her (unless she's just a pawn of The God Of Evolution pulling her strings, see below).
Buffy having self-destructive sex with soulless Spike, one of her mortal enemies, someone who she didn't love at the time (someone who she detested and used) might have been why some people found their relationship disturbing.
I find the self-destructive S6 Spuffy sex disturbing and painful, too, and that's coming from a devout Spuffy. The big mistake many Bangels make, of course, is to think that this were what Spuffy "is about".
I'm not sure you're grasping the distinction that people make between Buffy's sexual relationship with a souled demon (who the Buffy character loves) and Buffy's sexual relationship with a soulless demon (who the Buffy character did not love at the time).
I don't see the love in Bangel, in general; and I'm starting to disbelieve the huge distinction between souled "Angel" and unsouled "Angelus" is anything else than Angel's personal psychological instability (Angel = Angelus + denial). The more I see of that guy, the more I think the remorse thing is a hypocritical act he puts on. Then again, he's clearly psychologically unstable, maybe we should give him lenience for that... but there's a point where "I'm sick" stops being an excuse. When you think killing hundreds is an ok collateral in the name of good is where the "I'm a good guy" alibi definitely stops working for me, sorry.
Buffy isn't boinking the universe. Buffy is boinking Angel. Angel isn't the one who is bringing about this Armageddon and evolution by artificial means. The universe is doing this by "natural" means.
Angel seems pretty well informed about the consequences and happy with them as long as he gets to boink Buffy in the process. There's more evil in that than I can see in Spike making a tragic but understandable mistake in "Seeing Red".
Whether you kill every human on Earth with your own hands, or allow a grand plan to be set into motion with your help that will kill off every human without you getting your hands dirty in it is a moot point. To my knowledge, Hitler never in his life killed a single Jew, and still, he's
most definitely the one responsible for six million Jews dying in the Holocaust. Same applies to Angel.
And as I recall, the universe isn't a sentient being. Buffy evolved naturally and the universe is responding naturally to that evolution. It's a scientific concept (merged with supernatural concepts).
It obviously
is a sentient being in the Buffyverse if it has a "plan" for evolution and cheers people on to fulfill it. You don't get much more "Hand Of God" like. Every natural scientist in the realverse will confirm that there is no such plan in evolution, just random mutation and dying out of those mutations that can't fill their niche well. All in all, the happenings in this comic are
much more on a par with Creationism than with Darwinism. (Which is mighty strange for a cosmos conceived by a someone calling himself a humanist atheist, come to think of it.)
The universe once wiped out all forms of life on Earth, are there people out there arguing that that was so totally mean of the universe to do?
If we're talking about a universe that "cheers on desired mutations", then yes, it's a cruel deity. Dinosaurs dying out or the dying off of 99% of life forms equals genocidal ethnic cleansing by Will Of God.
If you're going to abandon canon for the sake of your argument, then we'll abandon canon. Buffy never loved Angel. Buffy never loved Spike. Buffy never loved Giles, her mother, Dawn. In fact, Buffy loves no one. I'm pretty sure the Buffy boinking Angel now is actually the Buffybot.
There's no way canon even comes into play in the "Did Buffy love Angel?" question. Exactly where is it "fact" that you love someone because you think or say you love someone? (From my own experience, neither is any worthwhile indication for love, and thinking it were one leads to Many Bad Things.)
There is nothing in canon to
prove there was love between Buffy and Angel. Neither you nor me can know whether or not she "objectively" loved him; all I'm seeing convinces me she did not, all you're seeing convinces you that she did.
I love that you use the word bitch to describe Buffy and yet bring up the feminist argument in the same breath.
A woman who boinks a mass murderer and allows that boinkage to cause the death of billions as collateral definitely deserves worse monikers than "b*tch". I see nothing anti-feminist in that, instead I see anti-feminism in styling said very feeble and deluded woman as a female empowerment role model.
Leave the feminist argument out of this. Being a feminist does not mean you make perfect decisions every single time. It does not mean that you don't love or trust people you shouldn't necessarily trust. It does not mean that you don't make mistakes. Feminism doesn't render a being with human emotions and human thoughts a completely faultless person.
We're not talking "completely faultless".
Yes, it's always been a fault of Buffy's that she turns pathetically weak when her emotions for Angel come into play, but as she showed in "Becoming", she's capable of outgrowing it and do what's necessary. If she can't make the same decision anymore now, she's become worthless as a role model. I hope she's gonna kick Angel's ass big time before this season is over, and tells him that there won't be any cookies for him, anymore, ever. (
That's what would return her into a strong feminist icon, with a vengance. At the moment, she's a stupid bimbo who needs a man in her life - be it the Lover (Spike), the Father (Giles) or the Brother (Xander) - to sort out the mess of her emotional weakness in the form of foolish romance to the darkly handsome stranger. It all makes her a poster child for patriarchal wenchness.)
If Buffy and Angel are somehow bring controlled by something more powerful than they are, what do you suggest they do? The character can't just say "oh, I think I'll stop the universe from toying with me right now because I'm all powerful."
How about stay away from each other as far as possible? In universes like that, good ol'fashioned
chastity is indeed a virtue of true heroes.
For all the bed calisthenics we've seen of Anya, S6 Spuffy, and S8 Bangel, I'm starting to see a big pattern of "sex is bad, true love says no" undertones in Joss' work. And the "sex makes bad things happen, but procreation is a way to justify it" message that can be read out of the current comic would sit very well with St. Augustine and several current hardliners in the Vatican, by the way.
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She has reason to believe that he's being truthful and her emotions are playing into that.
I could not disagree more about her having any reason. Her judgment is clouded by none-too-sane, immature emotions when it comes to Angel. Ture, her emotions and attachments may have been her strength in many battles; but they're also her Achilles heel and her most tragic flaw. I hope she overcomes that and reaches the truly
heroic point of "What I feel for you does not matter. I need you to leave my life, forever, and if you don't agree to leave, I will kill you to make sure of it." with Angel. (Funnily, turning on its ear Angel's decision to leave SD at the end of S3... and hopefully, without the pathetic stalking and refusal to let go and move on afterwards. Bangel needs to finally
end, for good.)
She can't kill Angel and he's certainly not the one who needs to die. Buffy is the catalyst for what is going on and if anything, Angel should kill Buffy so that mankind can survive...not the other way around.
Whoa, that's a screwed up way to look at things. It wasn't Buffy who sought out Angel to talk him into having genocidal sex, now was it? It's as it always been - Angel is
still the creepy, possessive stalker who decides where the Bangel ship is to be sailing or not. And she should by all means tell him where to pike that attitude. It may have "merely" be creepy back in S1, by now it's endangering all human life itself. If he won't respect the need to stay the hell away from her, he must be stopped from ever getting the chance to get near to hear again,
by any means necessary. I'm afraid she won't be free to regain her power before he's dusted; Angel is too selfish to take no for an answer. (Gawd, would I love a line of Spike to Angel before the season is through: "Nobody ever told you that No Means No?" That'd be
epic. 😀 )
Frankly, this isn't about Bangel versus Spuffy or about Spike, stop making it out to be.
It's not about Spike, indeed. What it is about, though, is that anyone who thinks Spuffy ever caused discomfort (and boy, did it have its share of disturbing scenes, even - perhaps
especially - for a Spuffy like me), but doesn't see how Bangel has by now reached a depth of depravity at least as bad as (and probably much,
much worse than) Spuffy ever had in its darkest moments, seems to be wearing blinds of a size that, frankly, scare the bejeezus out of me who's worn such blinds for far too many years and is infintely grateful to have cast them off.
If Bangel (
all of Bangel; S8 is just more in-your-face about its dysfunctionality than in previous years) is a "beautiful love story", then so was S6 Spuffy. It's people who think this is a "true love story" but keep calling S6 disturbing in the same breath who make it necessary to bring some sense into the discussion by pointing out the
screamingly obvious parallels there. It may look like a ship war thread because of it; howeverm, the true intention is to make it into the "Why Bangel is disgusting depravity, and must be stopped at all cost" thread, with or without Spike getting any mention it, and I'll make sure that'll be a good sized chunk of the discussion.
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Bangel started off immature, and it keeps descending into ever darker places... and I prefer to watch a couple becoming better persons due to their relationship (like Spuffy, Tillow, Cangel), not make each other ever more depraved, sick, and despicable (like Bangel). I prefer love to mutual (ab)use, hope for personal growth to deluding oneself that one's shortcomings are virtues.
And that's where I see no hope for Angel - Spike had the chance of improving to the next stage of his already pretty decent (for unsouled standards) development and go out to get the one thing missing, his soul; Angel, however, has his "soul" is already in place, but he's a self-righteous, hardened jerk nonetheless who hardly seems to make use of this conscience,
especially (but not only) when Buffy comes into play. There was hope for him with Cordy, who had enough spunk to kick his sorry ass and not take his shortcomings as the final word, but then Cordy died, and Angel chose to regret towards the mopefest of Bangelism.
It's probably the difference of personalities - where Spike is an integrated, solid character, Angel is psychologically unstable (clinical depression, bordering on schizophrenia at times), so he does what many insane people do and designs a black-and-white cardboard persona for himself. With the whole Twilight thing, I feel like he's gone off into full-blown psychosis now.
In short, Angel is everything I hate about my (past) self, while Spike is a lot of what I'd yearn to become (and I think I've come pretty far away from where I started at). So it's no wonder I retch at the "love" of Bangel (been there, done that, glad I survived and grew out of it) and want the guy killed dead, for good. It'd be very kathartical for me to see you can eradicate the psycho stalker "lover", at least in fiction.
So, what do I hope to see in the coming issues? Angel
finally getting killed of permanently, by any means it takes to reach that end.
