Watcher Propaganda

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Pagan

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A couple of threads i've been reading today got me thinking about the nature of a vampire, what the creature actually is specifically, both physically and psychologicaly.

To begin with we were given the impression that the vampire was a different being to the human being it took over. Giles made it very clear to Xander in The Harvest that Jesse was dead and that the thing you now saw was the creature that killed him. It may have kept Jesse's body and his memories but it was now pure demon.

However we soon learned that this situation was far from being as cut and dried as that. With the revelation of Angel a few episodes later that he was a vampire with a soul the entire issue became much less clear. If the only difference was the addition of his human soul back into the mix then surely that meant that a vampire was not just a demon with it's host body's memories.

In fact the very nature of "becoming" a vampire suggests that there is more to it. To become a vampire you have to be something else first, in this case human. You start as human then you become a vampire, that doesn't suggest two seperate beings to me, it suggests one being in two different forms.

The conversation and flashbacks in Fool For Love make this even clearer to me. Spike absolutely considers himself to be the same being as he was when he was human. He doesn't refer to his existence as William the human as being a different thing to his existence as Spike the vampire. As far as he is concerned it was merely a transistion from one state of being into another. Same goes for Harmony, as you heard her describe in Not Fade Away briefly, as far as she is concerned she used to be human.

Now Angel is the one possible exception in that he tends to compartmentalise his actions from when he was a soulless vampire into the "Angelus" box. Although he often admits that it was he who carried the actions out he still blames "Angelus" for them. He talks about Angelus as if this is a totally seperate being who possesses him whenever he loses his soul when the truth is it is just the person he is when his demonic essence is in control.

What i mean by that is this. When you become a vampire you aren't taken over by some sentient demon who takes your memories and body, you are physically and emotionally changed into a demon, similar to the way a human can be changed into a Vengeance Demon. Your soul, along with your humanity and morality is expelled and the demonic nature of your personality takes it's place. Basically the same being but "brainwashed" by a demonic essence so that your basic nature is altered towards evil.

The very best proof of this is Darla as she has been turned twice and yet both times she was a vampire, not to mention the human period in between, she maintained the same personality, if not the exact same nature.

So what does any of this have to do with the thread title? Well my question is do you think that the Watchers Council were aware that this was the case and that Giles' speech to Xander in The Harvest was just the propaganda that the Council told all slayers so that none of them had any issues with slaying beings that were just basically "evolved" humans. Making certain that the slayers all thought that the human was long dead and that vampires were merely demons would certainly avoid any of the moral ambiguity that a slayer may have if they thought a vampire could possibly be restored to it's human self, or at least have it's humanity returned somehow. Any doubt like that would obviously make the slayer much less effective.

So did the Watchers always know that vampires were more than just demons in a human corpse? What do you think?
 
well at least now there's no way my parents would tell me i didn't marry a genius 😉

lol i totally agree with every word honey. and to your conclusive question, i'd like to answer yes. the watchers have always known and we've been given to understand that on more occasions than one. first being "the harvest":

Giles: The books tell the last demon to leave this reality fed off a
human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed, infected by the
demon's soul. He bit another, and another, and so they walk the Earth,
feeding... Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of
their kind. Waiting for the animals to die out, and the old ones to
return.

giles here basically says that the original vampire was a demon that had left our realm together with the old ones when the world changed and the demons were expelled to other dimensions to make room for men. the demon infected a human being and thus the vampire we know today was created. from that already we're given to understand that the vampire is *not* pure demon at all. and the speeches later given in "the harvest" to xander and in "angel" to buffy are irrelevant and like you said - are a form of propaganda.

other examples i can give will be the scourge - they treated vampires the same as humans because they were tainted.
angel in the pylea dimension - his true demon surfaced, once again to stress that a vampire is in fact a combination of two beings - demon and human, while our dimension shows the vampire in its human form, other dimensions might not.
angel's poisoning in "graduation" - that doesn't prove that directly, but it certainly does prove the council has been withhalding important information from the slayer in regard to vampires.

also, judging by buffy's behavior, we can easilly understand why giles (well not *understand* understand, but come close to) and the rest of the council would choose the approach of dishonesty. the girl that happened to be chosen to kill vampires has been chosen to fight evil, not kill humans or what once used to be human (perfect example - "haloween"). buffy herself has been in more than one position when she had personal connection to the "vampire" (ford, angel, eddie, holden, spike) and refused to kill it on account of the person it once was. angel is an entirely different case alltogether and i won't even go into that.

another thing that's worth mentioning - just take a look at the way vampires die: the sun, the cross, holy water, whichever force of good, it burns the demon out of them. what's left is ashes. why ashes? because that is what's left from our bodies eventually after we die, even our bones don't live forever. to quote a famous say - from dust to dust. so the demon that takes over the dead human host in a sense gives it life, but only for as long as the host is capable of holding the demon within it. once the demon is expelled, the host dies.
 
Interesting theories, but I think there is more to the demon aspect that what has been said.

If the demonic aspect just augments a person's normal nature, than why do Angel and Spike become such bada**es? As a human, Angel was just a drunken lout and William was a simpering, awful poet. As a vampire, Angel becomes a sadistic butcher and Spike a rough-and-tumble street fighter.

Some theories hold that when you become a vampire, the demon unleashes a hidden part of you. You basically become uninhibited all the time (like being drunk for eternity). This would explain Willow's remark that her vampire self was 'kinda gay'. That still wouldn't turn William into raise-hell-kill-everything-in-his-path Spike. The demon aspect must also erase any shread of morality the person has, assuming they have any (like Zackary Kralik from season three's 'Helpless'. Already a serial killer, the only thing being turned into a vampire made him was a better serial killer). This would also explain kind Willow enjoying torturing Angel when she is a vampire in 'The Wish'.

In short I think the demonic aspect plays a larger part in making someone a vampire than just animating a dead body and giving it enourmous strength. It does make it a different person.

As for Watcher propaganda, since the third season we knew that, except for Giles, these were not nice guys.
 
Well that is pretty much what we already said Phoenix.

When you become a vampire your humanity, your morality, your soul is lost and replaced with the nature of a demon. That basically being evil and morally unrestrained.

The basic aspects of who you are remain the same but now you are guided by a different set of values. One where the scale is tipped towards evil rather than having the balanced human values that come with a soul.

That is why i originally emphasised that there were both physical and psychological changes upon becoming a vampire.
 
I used to think of the vampire thing as being more like what Orpheus suggests with Angelus as a kind of Id thing that lives within Angel.

But the truth is Angelus is two things. He is both a human Id presence - impulse without conscience or fear of consequence, and an aspect of the demon - a malevolent force attracted towards chaos.

It's easy to forget that whole "vampirism is an infection" concept put forward in Buffy (the giles quote you just gave), Angel (the pylean demon) and Fray (the ep 3 origin myth).

Once it sinks in though, it makes a lot of things make sense.

For example in the context of what the watchers say, it is kind of true. Once the human body dies, the soul is gone, and the demon infection takes over and starts to drive the human body.

If the soul returns though, it appears to take charge. At least that appears to be what happened in the 2 cases of souled vampires we know of.

In those cases the infected human core becomes sublimated to the will manifested by the demands of the soul. It is no longer the case that the demon is in control, so the watcher thinking on the subject then becomes false.
 
Yeah, that makes sense.

I suppose a lot of this will depend on what the individual person believes the soul represents. By that i mean is the soul the entire sum of what you are or is it merely what makes the knowledge and information that is stored within your brain human?

If it is the latter then it becomes a little easier to explain the process of what happens when a human becomes a vampire. In that alternative the basic being that you are could be described as the vehicle and the soul you are born with and the demonic nature you take on when you become a vampire would be the drivers. The soul being the careful, thoughtful driver who always tries to follow the speed limits but is still capable of having the occasional accident and the demonic nature being the drunk joyrider, not caring about where it goes or who it kills in the process.

Leaving that analogy behind however in truth neither the soul nor the demonic essence have any actual awareness of their own, they merely control the behaviour of the being that they inhabit.
 
I think we have to consider the sources of information we have. Demons consider vampires to be lame ass demons, not empowered humans.
 
Well yeah, in fact in the Buffyverse that seems to be a thing demons and humans have in common. Neither seems to think too highly of vampires. I'd guess the human sees the demon in the vampire, and the demon sees the human. Neither side is impressed.

Whedon himself though describes vampirism as a disease. Doesn't Giles at one point say something like "the demon takes your body". So it's a disease where demon power infects a human host body after death. The human soul has moved on.

Now what the human body, mind, and soul are by Buffyverse definition that's another question.

I remember an old thread that asked the question "When Buffy and Faith switch bodies in This Year's Girl, which one would have to die for the slayer line to be passed on". It went into that whole question of separating Body, mind, and soul by Buffyverse rules.

Wanna see it. It's called "Brainbuster from This Year's Girl".

https://www.buffy-boards.com/showthread.php?t=7845&highlight=year's+girl
 
Thanks for the link N4H, i haven't had chance to read it all yet (pesky work stuff keeps getting in the way of my posting! 🙂) but the little i have read is very interesting and add quite a lot of weight to this thread's secondary debate.

One thing i would love to have officially clarified within some form of canon mythology source material, be that an episode, a comic or just an official reference guide, is exactly what it is that infects the human when he becomes a vampire. Just what is the demonic disease/essence that takes you over and replaces your soul? Is it actually a form of sentient being with a will of it's own that takes on your personality as well as your body, as originally suggested by the Watchers Council? Or is it more akin to a drug that changes you physically and effects you psychologically the way that we are assuming here based upon the majority of the evidence from the vampires we have become familiar with?

The Angel/Spike/Darla examples previously given all suggest very strongly that the drug theory is more correct whilst only two or three spoken references from Giles, and one in Lie to Me from Buffy, would seem to support the former option. It would be very interesting to have the facts made known as far as Joss' position on this is concerned.
 
Yeah, I made a bit of an oops when I said previously Joss Whedon calls vampirism a disease.

We were talking about demon perspective. What I meant to say was Joss Whedon speaking through the demon Urkon refers to vampirism as a disease.

When Giles says, "the demon gets the body", it kind of suggests to me that both Giles and Urkon are speaking about the same thing only different.
 
Not canon, but a possiblility.

In the Sonja Blue novels by Nancy Collins, when a human is made a vampire, like in Buffy, a demon takes up residence in the person's body. But the demon is with out identity or much sentience. So it seizes the only thing it has to create a template from; the host's mind.

Since we know that in Buffy the host's soul is lost, the demon becomes the controlling intelligence for the new entity created. Should the soul be returned, it is stronger than the demon and takes control, but the demon still remains (as seen in 'The Dark Age').

Sound like a valid theory?
 
Sounds very close to what i tend to believe at least.

The demon part of a vampire has always seemed to me to be non-sentient. If it has any intellect at all it is of a purely beastial, animal like nature, with no ability to think for itself, beyond pure instinct. All the intelligence and personality that is part of the vampire remains from when it was human. This was shown very clearly in Pylea when the demonic entity within Angel managed to take over fully and became the savage creature we saw.

Certainly you could not suggest for one second that this creature was Angelus. It may have been the driving force behind why Angelus was the evil being he was but the majority of what we saw in him came from Liam, the human part of the equation.

Now the human soul, when returned to the vampire form, is clearly able to press the demon into submission so that the vampire, in this case Angel, is able to reassert his humanity and morals, no longer being guided by the demon inside. But as you say, the demon remains, just below the surface.

So yeah, definately a valid theory!
 
I do have a few questions:

1) Why does one need to become a "vampire" or "demonic" to unleash the darker side of one's nature? Neither Willow, Warren or Wesley had to become demonic to unleash the darker side of their nature. And there was the vampire, Dalton, who seemed more interested in scholarly studies than in wrecking havoc. In fact, he seemed to regard feeding from humans as a matter of acquiring blood for his survival.

2) Why are vampires the only "demons" who are classified as souless in Jossverse?


The demon part of a vampire has always seemed to me to be non-sentient. If it has any intellect at all it is of a purely beastial, animal like nature, with no ability to think for itself, beyond pure instinct.

Even animals are sentient beings. And how would one describe demons like Lorne, Merle and Clem?
 
easy. they're not vampires, they're demons. different types of demons, in fact, there are various types of demons as there are various types of humans, also don' forget that all the demons that walk the earth (well most) are human hybrids in a sense). but still, we are not discussing demons now, we are discussing vampires and i will just add to the pylea example - the vampire-demon that surfaced in that dimension was in no way angelus. angelus was the result of combining between that demon and liam. the demon behaved as an animal, he answered *exactly* all the characteristics pagan mentioned. while angelus was intelligent and cunning, heelevated kill to a level of art.
"a real kill, a good kill, that's pure artistry. without that, we're just animals." (pardon me if it's not the exact quote but that's not the point)
 
Good questions LL. I say that because I wonder about the same kinds of stuff, and being a big fan of me, I naturally think it's pretty wise when someone else wonders about the same kind of stuff I do. 😀

And here's another one. If all a vampire is, is a human imbued with demon energy, then how is a Slayer any different from a souled vampire?

I can only speak for me and tell you I have to resort to outright speculation to make this kind of stuff make sense to me.

What works for me is I think of it in the framework of that whole Freudian, Supego, Ego, Id thing.

You know, like the human psyche works on three levels:

The Id - Pure animal impulse, and desire. It's like, "Me want cookie.

The Ego - Contol of the Id based on real world considerations. It's like, "You can't have a cookie, because if you take one, Mom will slap your hand and yell at you."

The SuperEgo - Sits over the other 2 and tries to reason with them both, on a more spiritual (for lack of a better word) consideration of abstract concepts like right and wrong. It's like, "Also that's the last cookie. It would be wrong to take it. So and so hasn't had one yet, and you've had two. It would be unfair and wrong for you to take it."

For Buffyverse purposes you can replace SuperEgo with "Soul". The only thing we know for sure about the way the Buffyverse soul works is that it manages questions of conscience.

OK, so a vampire sires a human. The human body dies. The demon energy reanimates the body. The human brain (Ego) being part of that body also fires up. The physical impulses (Id) built into the design of the body kicks in.

The soul/superego has left the body.

So what you have now is Id, Ego, and some kind of demon sub-Id will replacing the Superego/soul.

But what exactly is the demon energy of the vampire. Is it the same thing as the demon energy Get it Done told us exists in Slayers?

The only model we have for what it is, is the Pylean demon which we can assume is meant to show us what Angel's demon energy looks like when given full mastery of it's physical form.

It is malevolent. It's priority is to seek destruction.

Now Get it Done never suggested the demon energy in slayers contains the same kind of malevolence, so I'm going to choose to think that, that part of the demon energy equation can be distilled out, leaving undiluted physical demon power.

Vampire's however do have the malevolent psychological element.

So why is Spike the Bloody so much more malevolent, than say Harmony.

In my personal little theory for me it's because the demon energy or what I will call the demon sub-Id has to imprint itself on the physical matrix it's given.

So Harmony doesn't have that same need to kill and destroy for it's own sake, because the impulse was never in her at a basic physical level. Remember how even with vampire strength she couldn't handle Xander.

Spike would have had those impulses, but as William they would have been controlled by the superego/soul.

The vampire also seems to be influenced at the Ego level. In Destiny we see Spike became the blood-lusting killer he did partly as a result of Angelus's real world manipulations.

What the real world taught Harmony as a vampire in Buffy season 4 and Disharmony on Angel, was there were consequences to being too blood-thirsty, and it didn't work to well for her anyway. On an Ego level she was able to at least partially control the demon sub-Id.

So what about demons like Pyleans? Do they have souls. What the Hell. Why not?

The thing is they would also have the demon sub-Id. It would take a super-evolved demon soul like Lorne's to control it.
 
LadyLavinia said:
The demon part of a vampire has always seemed to me to be non-sentient. If it has any intellect at all it is of a purely beastial, animal like nature, with no ability to think for itself, beyond pure instinct.

Even animals are sentient beings. And how would one describe demons like Lorne, Merle and Clem?
Click to expand...

Not exactly. Animals are not sentient as they do not understand the nature of being alive. Sentience, strictly speaking, goes beyond basic awareness, it relates more to the concept of understanding that you are alive and what that means. Sentient beings such as ourselves have fully developed intelligence whereas animals rely more on instinctual behaviour.

Demons such as Lorne, Merle and Clem are a totally different concept to the type of demonic entity we are assuming inhabits the vampire so the comparison is irrelevant. Entirely seperate issue.
 
Pagan said:
Not exactly. Animals are not sentient as they do not understand the nature of being alive. Sentience, strictly speaking, goes beyond basic awareness, it relates more to the concept of understanding that you are alive and what that means. Sentient beings such as ourselves have fully developed intelligence whereas animals rely more on instinctual behaviour.
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I'm sorry, but I don't agree with your assessment of animals not being sentient. To quote the following:

A sentient being possesses a mind, whereas an automaton does not. Any animal whose survival strategy and behaviour appears to depend on the avoidance of suffering (rather than mere reflex actions) should be assumed to be sentient.

A sentient being experiences its inputs (perceptions) and outputs (actions), in contrast to an automaton where no subjective states occur, and all meanings have to be assigned to inputs and outputs from 'outside the system'.

There is a Western school of philosophy known as dualism which claims that only humans experience qualitative mental states, and animals are automata with no subjective experiences, so it doesn't matter what you do to them. This view originates from the old Christian dogma that humans are qualitatively different from all other animals (because only humans have immortal souls).
Click to expand...

This statement from - http://kwelos.tripod.com/Sentientbeings.htm - says it all for me. Despite their "lower intelligence", I do believe that the behavior of animals includes a tendency to avoid suffering of any kind.
 
Hm, just because we've never seen a vampire that has good intentions (with the exception of Angel, Spike and Darla of course) does not mean we can not automatically say that vampires are an exception to sentient.

This is kind of going into the whole stigmatism where humans are above all other species and forms of life, which is highly debatable. Just because we have evolved does not mean that we are superior in every facet. In the human world and to other humans, yes our lives may matter more to us and et cetera, but there is a big picture involved when discussing this.

Though the question about morality is really tilting towards our side. But we have no pure justification that vampires rely solely on instincts. Which is perhaps why some of them have actually been able to lead the most normal life that an unsouled vampire could lead. Look at the Master in the Wish, he was a manufacturer/business man/entrepreneur if I ever saw one. I believe that goes beyond animal instincts.

(Sorry if my post makes no sense what so ever, I'm in the midst of finals madness and doing fifty other things at the moment)
 
I think there is some confusion here.

When we are talking about the sentience of the vampire demon we aren't talking about the whole vampire package, just the demonic entity that makes up part of the creature.

Clearly the vampire as a whole is sentient and not acting purely on instinct but the sentience comes from the human part of the creature. The demon that inhabits it does not have that same level of intelligence being more akin to an animal, as seen when the demon took full control of Angel in Pylea.

Now we can debate what sentient really means all day and still not get anywhere, basically that argument is a philosophical one that is best left to people with a lot more time on their hands than we have. The above article extract that LadyLavinia posted is all well and good but it is only one persons interpretation of sentience. Equally valid but no more correct that the definition i was taught at school.

With that in mind let's simplify this because we are going off on a tangent that has little or no relevance to the topic theme. Basically what is being suggested is the vampire is made up of two beings, one is the human host body that provides the physical form, intelligence, memory and basic personality traits (sentience for the sake of a better term). The other is the demon entity which provides the enhanced strength, healing and so on, mystically maintaining the body despite it no longer being alive, but as far as the personality is concerned only effects the vampire being on an instinctual level. The demon does not have a seperate intelligence of it's own, all it adds is the morality and instinct towards evil.

So whilst the vampire is sentient (again for want of a better word), the demon itself is not.
 
Pagan said:
I think there is some confusion here.

When we are talking about the sentience of the vampire demon we aren't talking about the whole vampire package, just the demonic entity that makes up part of the creature.

Clearly the vampire as a whole is sentient and not acting purely on instinct but the sentience comes from the human part of the creature. The demon that inhabits it does not have that same level of intelligence being more akin to an animal, as seen when the demon took full control of Angel in Pylea.

Now we can debate what sentient really means all day and still not get anywhere, basically that argument is a philosophical one that is best left to people with a lot more time on their hands than we have. The above article extract that LadyLavinia posted is all well and good but it is only one persons interpretation of sentience. Equally valid but no more correct that the definition i was taught at school.

With that in mind let's simplify this because we are going off on a tangent that has little or no relevance to the topic theme. Basically what is being suggested is the vampire is made up of two beings, one is the human host body that provides the physical form, intelligence, memory and basic personality traits (sentience for the sake of a better term). The other is the demon entity which provides the enhanced strength, healing and so on, mystically maintaining the body despite it no longer being alive, but as far as the personality is concerned only effects the vampire being on an instinctual level. The demon does not have a seperate intelligence of it's own, all it adds is the morality and instinct towards evil.

So whilst the vampire is sentient (again for want of a better word), the demon itself is not.
Click to expand...


But as you had pointed out Pagan, isn't it a matter of opinion whether the demon aspect of a vampire (the animal) is or isn't sentient?

What about beings like Lorne, Clem and Merle that are clearly demons and not hybrids? Are they simply animals that are "not sentient"?
 
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