I don't hate Spike, I don't like him...it is different.
I can explain to you why but I'm afraid of an endless discussion in this forum and I really don't want to start it. It already occurs in another forum, only because I have wanted to defend Angel against the fans who needs to dispise him for Spike's sake. And I'm really tired of it. So, if you want I can say to you, but...try,please, all of you, not arguing too much, because no offence is intended.
For me it is very important the word 'redemption'. And you have it when you are forced -by yourself or by external events - to rethink your past actions, when you ask yourself what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil and when you areready to sacrifice what is important for you for other's sake.
---------- Post added at 09:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:22 PM ----------
This means first of all understanding that your vampiric self is alive and in you, that its destructive characteristics can always affect the world around you.. Simply getting your soul back is not enough. Nor is the mere fact of helping others. These will not effect the sort of internal regeneration that is required. That regeneration necessarily involves doing things to help others because that is the right thing to do and in acknowledgment must undergo an internal "moral regeneration" to free yourself from these destructive tendencies. And this is what seems to me to be notably absent in Spike' character.That and that alone is the real antidote to the evil inside him, because his demon is perfectly alive.But to the extent that he helps someone because they are emotionally important to him, he's acting for essentially selfish reasons. . Showing us a Spike whose motivation derives from his own emotional ties with Buffy is certainly not to show us a character who is trying to change his self-centered orientation.
Chapter I:
The Dangerous Antagonist
William the Bloody
Angelus was intended to be the big bad for season 2 of BtVS. But that particular shock was to be reserved for the last quarter of the season. It must have seemed to the writers, therefore, that with the disposal of the Master at the end of season 1 there was a need to have an interim antagonist who could preoccupy Buffy’s attention and set the scene for the re-appearance of Angel’s own demon. That was where Spike came in. Everything about him from the way he crashes his car into a "Welcome to Sunnydale" sign to his:
"You've got Slayer problems. That's a bad piece of luck. Do you know what I find works real good with Slayers? Killing them."
was intended to suggest that here indeed was a worthy opponent for Buffy. Again and again we see emphasized throughout the episode how much of a threat he would be:
"Our new friend Spike. He's known as William the Bloody. Earned his nickname by torturing his victims with railroad spikes. Very pleasant. Well, here's some good news: he's barely two hundred. He's not even as old as Angel is. Oh."
Indeed his very image seemed intended to reinforce this picture. The Master had been a quasi-religious figure. In contrast Spike is an anti-authority figure who respects nothing and no-one, owns no better:
Spike: "How's the Annoying One?"
Drusilla: "He doesn't wanna play."
Spike: "Figures. Well, suppose I better go make nice."
The Anointed One: "You failed."
Spike: "I, um... I offer penance."
Vampire: "Penance? You should lay down your life! Our numbers are depleted. The feast of St. Vigeous has been ruined by your impatience!"
Spike: "I was rash, and if I had to do it all over again...Who am I kidding? I would do it exactly the same, only I'd do this..."
[Spike sticks The Anointed One in the nearby cage and starts pulling a chain, lifting the cage up from the floor]
Spike: "From now on, we're gonna have a little less ritual... and a little more fun around here."
[the cage is lifted into the sunlight. The Anointed One screams as he dies]
Yet, at the same time we also see a very different side to Spike – a genuine affection for, perhaps even love of Drusilla. The pair of them arrive in Sunnydale shortly after Drusilla is seriously weakened by an angry mob in Prague. Spike initially hopes that the Hellmouth's energy can help restore her strength but when these hopes are disappointed he remains a devoted caretaker for her in her weakened condition, always solicitous and even tender.
The way in which these two seemingly conflicting traits - the rebellious killer and the caring lover - are married in Spike is the key to his characterization and to help us understand this we must look at the way in which Spike’s story developed over a series of flashbacks both in BtVS and ANGEL. The first flashback occurs in BtVS Season Five's "Fool for Love", and reveals that William, before he was turned, was in fact a struggling poet who lived in London, England in 1880. The time and place seem to me to be significant. The dominant cultural force at the time was the Romantic Movement. Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment (especially its prevailing rationalism) and partly a reaction to the increasing urbanization and industrialization of the world. The movement, therefore, elevated emotion and feeling above rational analysis. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition and feeling. The movement preferred folk custom and medievalism (hence its taste for Gothic) above the classicism which lay at the heart of the Enlightenment. And it also embraced the exotic, unfamiliar and distant (for example in the fashion for Chinoiserie). In doing so it sought to harness the power of the imagination (whether expressed as a concept of the past or of distant and unfamiliar lands) to escape the prosaic realities of population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism. So, in literature, in particular, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation of the past, the cult of "sensibility" and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature free from societal norms and constraints.
Chapter II:
The Romantic Hero
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
And it is against this background that we get the phenomenon of the Romantic Hero. The Romantic hero is a literary archetype referring to a character that is defined by his individuality and sense of self - especially what he feels. Because he has the self not others as the center of his or her own existence he is someone who rejects established norms and conventions and in turn has been rejected by society. As one critic put it, the Romantic hero is often
"placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting".
Perhaps the most influential development of the Romantic hero – the Byronic hero - was created by Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, in the early nineteenth century. A Byronic hero exhibits several characteristic traits. The Byronic hero does not possess "heroic virtue" in the usual sense; instead, he has many dark qualities. Often he is characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed, often sexual, crime. At the same time the Byronic hero is moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue. He also has emotional and intellectual capacities, which are superior to the average man. These heightened abilities force the Byronic hero to be arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive and extremely conscious of himself. In this sense the Byronic hero is "larger than life". He is usually isolated from society as a wanderer or is in exile of some kind. It does not matter whether this social separation is imposed upon him by some external force or is self-imposed. In many ways ,therefore, he can also be considered a rebel. Because of this inner darkness, these “larger than life” qualities and his sense of isolation, in one form or another, the Byronic hero rejects the values and moral codes of society. He is accordingly often a figure of repulsion, as well as fascination.
In Byron's poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" the main character is portrayed as a dark, brooding man who doesn't like his family background or indeed society generally and wants to escape from the world because of his discontent with it. In the third stanza of the poem we learn that Childe Harold is the product of a long line of nobility:
"Childe Harold, was he hight-but whence his name and lineage long."
But he is bothered by his family ties.
"But one sad lose ruins the name for ay."
This line shows that Childe Harold is upset with the reputation that he has inherited from his family. We are told of Childe Harold's dark and secret past in stanza eight:
"Often times in his maddest mirthful mood strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold's brow, as if the memory of some deadly feud or disappointed passion lurked below",
although the nature of his past is never directly stated. In the fourth stanza we are also told that Childe Harold is unhappy with the society around him.
"Then loathed he in his native land to dwell, which seemed to him more lone than Eremite's sad cell."
He feels so isolated that he compares his life to that of a hermit's. So, he strives to break this mold of his past and become someone who isn't associated with the likes of his ancestors as well as to separate himself from society. In Childe Harold's case he does this by running away from his father's castle and exploring nature to seek something better there in its wildness and purity.
"And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below. The Childe departed from his father's hall."
Stanza ten reads
"If he had friends, he bade adieu to none."
This proves that Childe Harold did not have many friends, and if he did their friendship was not highly valued. There is however a woman in his life.
"Had sighed to many but though he loved but one, and that loved one, alas could ne'er be his."
This woman, as explained in the passage, is the only woman that Childe Harold will think about. Although he has had the chance for many others, one woman will always win his affection. The one problem with this love is that the woman for whom he strives can never be his.
There are many parallels between Spike, the child of the Romantic Age, and a Byronic hero like Harold. The first thing to note was that Spike as a human was a gentleman. We can see this both from the fact that he has the leisure time to pursue his interest in poetry and from the circles in which he moved. Secondly he was a poet, an artist, albeit not a very good one. In other words he was upper class and possessed of higher intellectual and artistic sensibilities. Thirdly – largely though his dogged though fruitless pursuit of an aristocratic woman called Cecily - we see how central to his existence was the idea of romantic love. William’s ordinary conversation was extravagant enough:
“Oh, quickly! I'm the very spirit of vexation. What's another word for "gleaming"? It's a perfectly perfect word as many words go but the bother is nothing rhymes, you see.”
But when he tries to capture what Cecily means to him his language takes flight:
"My heart expands
'tis grown a bulge in it
inspired by your beauty,
effulgent."
Love is therefore the dominating passion of his life. Interestingly this isn’t a description of a real woman or the feelings of an ordinary man for a woman. But then William isn’t someone who loves a woman in the conventional sense. He is someone in love with the idea of being in love. Indeed the giveaway here was that he was completely unconscious about what Cecily really thought of him. Not only did he not notice her discomfort; he couldn’t conceive that any woman would find his ostentatious protestations embarrassing. Somehow you get the feeling that for all his fine feelings it’s far more about William than it is about Cecily. His passion is not only larger than life but essentially self-centered. In other words it is his feelings and his desires that are the center of his own existence.
Spike, as a vampire, embodies basically the same qualities. Beneath his working class dress and accent, Spike remains someone of superior insight. Throughout BtVS he is portrayed as the character who can see though the superficialites of a case and get to its heart, as when in "the Gift" he explains the (somewhat dubious) metaphysics behind Dawn:
Xander: "Why blood? Why Dawn's blood? I mean, why couldn't it be, like, a lymph ritual?"
Spike: "'Cause it's always got to be blood."
Xander: "We're not actually discussing dinner right now."
Spike: "Blood is life, lack-brain. Why do you think we eat it? It's what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead. 'Course it's her blood."
But in contrast to the single-minded viciousness of the reputation he brought with him to Sunnydale, Spike in this human form was weak and ineffectual. He is even patronized by servants and for class conscious Victorian society there could be no greater humiliation. He was mollycoddled by his mother who would often sing the folksong "Early One Morning" to her son when he was a baby, right up until the time he was turned into a vampire. He is mocked ruthlessly by his peers. Even his nickname was given a different spin. Whereas in season 2 of BtVS "William the Bloody" was a symbol of his fearsomeness, in “Fool for Love” it was representative of the way he was mocked by his peers because his poetry was so "bloody awful." He was therefore rejected by the very society he wished to be a part of.
But worst of all he is roundly rejected by Cecily herself:
Cecily: “Your poetry, it's... they're... not written about me, are they?”
William: “They're about how I feel.”
Cecily: “Yes, but are they about me?”
William: “Every syllable.”
Cecily: “Oh, God!”
William: “Oh, I know... it's sudden and... please, if they're no good, they're only words but... the feeling behind them... I love you, Cecily.”
Cecily: “Please stop!”
William: “I know I'm a bad poet but I'm a good man and all I ask is that... that you try to see me…”.
Cecily: “I do see you. That's the problem. You're nothing to me, William. You're beneath me.”
The reaction of the others, William could afford to ignore. He could tell himself that they do not understand what he is trying to say. But it was Cecily to whom he had opened his heart and her words bore the sting of rejection – final and absolute. It was a rejection not do much of his poetry but of everything he felt and thought and tried to say through his poetry. That was what hurt because that was the real William. Rejection of those things was rejection of him. Drusilla saw this. When she follows him he points to his heart and head in succession and says:
“Your wealth lies here... and here. In the spirit and... imagination. You walk in worlds the others can't begin to imagine.”
As a human his feelings and the “spirit and imagination” they engendered in him were the things he valued most but he was shamed and humiliated because of them. He was in short a loser. By recognizing this and by turning him into a vampire who could defy society’s rules and live life as he defined it, Drusilla gave him the recognition he had vainly sought in human society. And once made he could ignore that society’s values and its opinion of him:
“Becoming a vampire is a profound and powerful experience. I could feel this new strength coursing through me. Getting killed made me feel alive for the very first time. I was through living by society's rules. Decided to make a few of my own.”
Drusilla therefore became his “destiny” as he said in the season 5 Angel episode of that name. But the very same night he uses this word to refer to Drusilla he finds that Angelus has taken her for himself simply because he could. Perhaps more to the point it was to demonstrate to William that he could do what he wanted. William’s claim to a special interest in Drusilla was something Angelus could not tolerate. He had to show his pupil who was boss. In the face of William’s enraged sense of betrayal he explains the facts of vampire life:
“Well, you're new... and a little dim. So let me explain to you how things are now. There's no belonging or deserving anymore. You can take what you want, have what you want... but nothing is yours.”
In the end he arrogantly offers William the chance to win Drusilla back from him, in effect throwing down a challenge to fight him for her. And we may also assume that this was a fight that William lost. For Angelus there is no destiny, nothing that was meant to be and certainly nothing that belongs to anyone else. An ambassador and his wife coming to London to take up a position, a young couple about to be married or William besotted with Drusilla - they all came alike to him. They had no future they could count on, no destiny. If he wanted something from them, something that they thought was their own – even their lives - he could take it from them and there was nothing they could do about it.
The lesson for Spike was a bitter one but it was evidently very well learned. William had no control over his life. Equally Spike when newly turned found his destiny in others, Angelus his mentor and above all Drusilla, his great passion. But he became someone for whom the touchstone was strength and power because that gave him the self-respect and sense of control over his own life he craved. The point is best illustrated by the dripping contempt with which he surveys Angel helping a girl at the beginning of "In the Dark":
(girly voice) "How can I thank you, you mysterious black-clad-hunk-of-a-knight-thing?"
(manly voice) "No need little lady. Your tears of gratitude are enough for me. You see, I was once a bad-ass vampire. But love, and a pesky curse, defanged me. And now, I'm just a big fluffy puppy with bad teeth. No! Not the hair! Never the hair."
(girly voice) "But there must be some way I can show my appreciation."
(manly voice) "No, helping those in need's my job. And working up a load of sexual tension and prancing away like a magnificent poof is truly thanks enough."
(girly voice) "I understand. I have a nephew who's gay, so..."
(manly voice) "Say no more. Evil's still afoot. And I'm almost out of that Nancy-boy hair gel I like so much. Quickly! To the Angel-mobile! Away!"
Here helping others is equated with weakness. And throughout “Destiny”, for example, we see how different Spike’s attitude had become compared to William’s. As soon as he becomes corporeal and realizes he can taste blood again he grabs Angel’s cup from his hand – without so much as a by-your-leave – and drinks deeply from it (thus nicely foreshadowing the way he will take the Cup of Perpetual Torment from him). His next move is to seize Harmony. In the face of Angel’s refusal of permission he simply says:
“I wasn't asking.”
and even throws someone out of his office. When he wants something he will go for it and won’t let anything stand in his way. This was a Spike was not going to appear respectable only to kill in secret. He now felt the power of being a vampire:
“Come on. When was the last time you unleashed it? All out fight in a mob, back against the wall, nothing but fists and fangs? Don't you ever get tired of fights you know you're going to win.”
This was a Spike who wanted to show the world that he was now someone to be reckoned with. And the way of course to show your power, to show you owned no master is to refuse to recognize constraints and limitations. This was, I think, the key to Spike's impulsiveness:
“I never did think that much about the nature of evil. No. Just threw myself in. Thought it was a party. I liked the rush. I liked the crunch.
Delaying gratification is an admission of limitation and constraints. By embracing an impulsive violence, he rejected not only the moral conventions of his times but more than that the power of society to control him. Moreover, by adopting a working class English accent and latterly the dress of a rebel, Spike also rejected the social customs and sensibilities of the age into which he was born. Both shunned by and shunning society he terrorized Europe and Asia for years, first in concert with Angelus and Darla and then with just Drusilla to whom, as we have seen, he was devoted.
Undoubtedly here we can see elements of the Byronic hero present in Spike, especially his arrogance and self-confidence as well as his “individualism” that is to say his refusal to identify himself with a group or an organization; his disregard of the common beliefs or values within society and chooses to act or think in his own way and the use of his own thoughts and ideas. He -
rebels against convention or society and has a low tolerance for societal norms and social institutions;
is isolated or has chosen isolation from society;
has larger-than-life abilities and larger-than-life pride and passions, including a strong romantic attachment to one woman; and
has committed a crime or has been cursed
above all remains defined by who he is and what he wants.
But until season 5 of BtVS there was one difference which overwhelmed everything else. Spike was still a soulless killer who revelled in violence and destruction. Even his name was symbolic of this. One of his acquaintances had insulted his poetry by saying:
"I'd rather have a railroad spike through my head than listen to that awful stuff"
So, as we have seen, Spike developed the habit of torturing people with railroad spikes. Now, a Byronic hero may defy conventional morality, his own moral sense may be deeply flawed and he may have a dark side but he is certainly not without a moral sense. Childe Harold is himself a good example of this. His whole decision to reject society and his own family and to seek something better in nature is itself a moral judgment. So, while the emphasis on Spike as a brutal, violent, soulless killer remains he cannot really be regarded as a Byronic hero.
Fool for Love
But in season 5 of BtVS we see changes to the character of Spike that do seem deliberately intended to fit him into this mold. And the central catalyst for this new identity was Spike’s relationship with Buffy. And here we have to start with “Fool For Love”. For the most part this was a wonderful exploration of why Spike came to be the character who killed two slayers and became obsessed with a third. When Spike hears about slayers from Angelus in that episode he wasn’t interested in them as such. As he said himself:
“I mean, to most vampires, the Slayer was the subject of cold sweat and frightened whispers. But I never hid. Hell, I sought her out. I mean, if you're looking for fun, there's death, there's glory and sod all else, right? I was young.”
Instead of a romantic love for an unobtainable woman he became obsessed with the girl who, in each generation, was the mortal foe of Vampires. He wanted the slayer just like he wanted Cecily. But this time he did not admire her “effulgent” beauty. This time it was her power that he admired:
“The first was all business but the second, she had a touch of your style. She was cunning, resourceful... oh, did I mention? Hot. I could have danced all night with that one.”
And it wasn’t to live with the slayer as husband and wife that he wanted. It was to kill her. Only he didn’t put it quite like that. Spike was still a romantic at heart. Only as a vampire his concept of romance was very different. And let’s face it there is nothing quite so romantic as death. As a man he had been rejected by a woman. Now he has the strength and power of a Vampire, he could “dance” with the slayer and possess her. Never again would he be humiliated.
But this story of how a hopeless ineffectual with an obsession with romantic love became someone who was determined to prove his worth and his power of strong women was transformed into something totally different in the last scene where he comforts Buffy. The first clue that something was going to change comes when we see Drusilla in effect abandon Spike in South America:
Spike: “I haven't said a word about the bloody Slayer since we left California. She's on the other side of the planet, Dru!”
Drusilla: “But you're lying! I can still see her floating all around you, laughing. Why? Why won't you push her away?”
Drusilla had been established as Spike’s great love, the center of his concern and affection, his very destiny. Now she is being pushed out of his life by memories of the slayer. If all Spike was concerned about was proving himself stronger than the slayer then why would Drusilla feel threatened? Then Buffy rejects Spike using very same words as Cecily had so long ago. He was “beneath” her. After that earlier insult Spike had vowed that he would be the master of his own life and had asserted his power over everyone he could, including two slayers. So his reaction to Buffy's stinging words – arming himself with a shotgun and aiming to kill Buffy no matter what the cost – was entirely in keeping for him. But when he sees her vulnerable, just when he should by all counts want to assert himself, to show who was master, all he wants to do is comfort her. The contrast to the earlier scene where he killed the slayer in New York and swore he would do the same to Buffy seems deliberate. Here the writers are establishing that Spike’s feelings towards Buffy were very different from those he held towards the other slayers.
Of course the writers are at pains to show that darkness is at the heart of the relationship between the two of them. There is a nice piece of foreshadowing in the season 5 premier, “Buffy vs Dracula”. In this episode Buffy feels isolated from her friends and family because of her role as slayer. Then Dracula appears to tell her that she too a creature of darkness. She denies this of course but the vampire seems to have some sort of hold over her or attraction to her and the two of them have a couple of almost sexual encounters in which they literally feed off one another. Eventually it is when Buffy embraces the darkness within her that she regains the upper hand, becomes true to herself and prevails. And here essentially we have the Buffy/Spike relationship. When, at the start of season 6, her friends magically bring Buffy back to life we discover that she was not suffering in Hell as they had believed, but was actually in a place of peace which we may take as a sort of Heaven. As a result of being wrenched from this place, Buffy is depressed and detached from everyone. She is in particular too afraid to hurt her friends by telling them the truth about where she was. But after digging her way out of her own grave, the only person she feels she can talk to is the only person in her group who has also died and come back to life – Spike. The central idea here is that the two of them share a connection – one which the members of the Scooby gang (who had until now been the core of the show) cannot share. And it is probably no co-incidence that from the point when this connection between Buffy and Spike begins to develop the roles of others, especially Xander, diminishes. And the nature of this connection lies in more than just the circumstances of their rebirth. In “Life Serial” Spike tells Buffy that she will only truly be happy in life when she realizes she is like him - a fighter, a "creature of the darkness." And when in “Smashed” Spike discovers that he can hurt Buffy (although not other humans) their “relationship” goes to a new level. He taunts her - telling her she has come back "a little less human" - and attacks her. Buffy for her part refuses to accept what he says, and taunts him right back with his inability to be fully vampire or human. Again we have the idea of a link between them - a non-human one. And its darkness is hinted at when their physical blows turn into rough sexual foreplay and finally, sex.
Of course the idea of a relationship involving characters with "something of the night" about them is integral to the very concept of a Byronic hero. Indeed Lady Caroline Lamb described the poet himself as ''mad, bad and dangerous to know'' after their first meeting, when the publication of ''Childe Harold'' made him the literary and social lion of London. Byron’s sexual excesses and attitude to women were the very stuff of gothic literature and may well have been conditioned by early experiences: a dissolute father, who deserted wife and young child; a violent-tempered mother; a sexually abusive nursemaid and homosexual attachment to a college classmate; the agony and sense of inferiority over his crippled leg, and the spell his extraordinary good looks cast over women. So it is interesting that here too the writers take some pains to suggest that Spike also suffered early trauma which affected him. For example, whereas new vampires in the Buffyverse often delight in killing their families once they become evil, Spike was a notable exception. Having always been very close to his mother, he turned her into a vampire to prevent her from dying from tuberculosis. Unfortunately, his mother, as a vampire, taunted William insinuating that William had always had a sexual fascination with her. He was forced to stake her because he could not bear to see his mother in such a twisted form. As in the case of Childe Harold, therefore, the writers emphasis is on Spike too harboring a dark secret. And there is obviously a world of difference between someone like Childe Harold (or impliedly therefore Spike) on the one hand and someone who would brutally kill his own family just for the fun of it on the other. Making Spike the victim of his own mother's abusive behavior and showing the parallels and connections between him and an ensouled human being like Buffy is much more in keeping with the idea of someone haunted by a tragic past who runs away from it to forge a new life for himself. It minimizes the idea of Spike as an irredeemable, soulless killing monster and emphasizes the idea of someone driven to do wrong by past psychological baggage but someone who can change.
Take “Crush” for example. When Drusilla kills the girl in the Bronze so that Spike can feed from her, we see a situation where on the one hand he could have stopped her but didn’t. On the other Spike did not kill. In fact he was hesitant almost unsure that this is what he really wants to do. Was he influenced by his memories of what it was like to kill and feed, was he unsure of whether he could bring himself to hurt Drusilla? Again the impression being created is that here was someone haunted by a dark past rather than an irredeemably evil killer. In contrast when Spike lost his memory in "Tabula Rasa", he immediately assumed that he was good. He believed that he has a soul, and announced that he is a "noble vampire on a mission of redemption." With no memories holding him back, we see Spike's inherent desire to be good. The evil (the suggestion seems to be) is not fundamental to his nature – it’s the result of his past.
And from season 5 of BtVS onwards Spike's story is one of escape from that past through his need for Buffy’s love and trust. At one point he tells Buffy:
"Now, you listen to me. I’ve been alive a bit longer than you. And dead a lot longer than that. I’ve seen things you couldn’t imagine - done things I’d prefer you didn’t. I don’t exactly have a reputation for being a thinker. I follow my blood. Which doesn’t exactly rush in the direction of my brain. I've made a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong bloody calls. A hundred plus years and there’s only one thing I’ve ever been sure of. You."
From the point when he puts the shotgun down in “Fool for Love” he symbolically rejects evil not for good - he remains a morally ambiguous figure - but for love. It is to help her (and indeed slake his desire for violence) that he becomes a more active participant in the Scooby Gang, jumping into several of Buffy's fights to provide assistance whether she wants it or not. When Buffy rejects his advances in the episode "Crush", Spike attempts to prove his love by kidnapping her to witness him killing Drusilla for her. When Buffy rejects him again he goes into a rage about women being so difficult. But when Drusilla breaks free and goes after Buffy while she is still chained up, Spike saves Buffy. When Spike has Warren Mears make a robot in Buffy's likeness that is programmed to love and obey him, he could have made Buffy in any image he wanted – even an evil one. But he didn’t. The Buffybot was still recognizable Buffy, again emphasizing that this is not just some sexual obsession. It is rather a matter of his genuine regard for her.
And because of this regard for Buffy Spike himself behaves with honor, decency and self-sacrifice. In “Intervention” he refused to reveal the identity of 'The Key' (Dawn Summers) to Glory, even under intense torture. Buffy is moved by his loyalty and kisses him, telling she will not forget what he has done. In the final showdown with Glory, Spike fights by Buffy's side, earning her trust. After Buffy dies Spike honors her memory by remaining loyal to the Scooby Gang, fighting at their side and serving the role of a protector and almost father-figure for Dawn. As we have seen, in season 6 when Buffy is struggling to cope with her return to Earth and to learn her origins and what being 'less than human' means, she gets Spike to help her as a guide. In “Life Serial” she trusts him enough to become very drunk with Spike at his crypt and Buffy goes with Spike to a bar where he plays poker (using kittens as currency). After the poker game ends badly, Buffy rants to Spike about the new low her life has reached with her inability to understand school or get a decent job. It seems almost as if she has come to count on him:
"You were gonna help me. You were gonna bust heads and fix my life."
When his actions fall short of her expectations, she says,
"The only person I can stand to be around is a neutered vampire that cheats at kitten poker."
What we have here is a sense of someone whose actions are being driven by love rather than the darkness within him. And for the sake of that love he ultimately turns his back upon the darkness. In the episode "As You Were", Buffy tells Spike that she is using him and ends the relationship that began so brutally in “Smashed”. Believing he still has a chance with Buffy after seeing her reactions of jealousy and hurt when he has a drunk sexual encounter with Anya, Spike corners her and makes aggressive sexual advances. When she refuses him, he grows desperate and unsuccessfully tries to rape her. But he is horrified by his own actions and intentions. It is then that Spike heads to a remote area of Africa, where he seeks out a legendary demon shaman and undergoes the Demon Trials, a series of gruelling physical challenges. Proving his worthiness by surviving the trials, Spike asks the shaman:
"So you'll give me what I want. Make me what I was, so Buffy can get what she deserves."
And thus he gets his soul back. Driven on by a reaction against of his dark past and a determination to change Spike decides that wants to be "a man" rather than "a monster." In “The Gift”, he told Buffy that he loved her because she treats him "like a man”. He tells Buffy in “Smashed” that "a man can change," identifying himself as a man, but Buffy tells him that he is a “thing”. By “Seeing Red" he has become convinced that he "can't be a man" as he is. So, in order to become a man, Spike gets a soul. In other words we have someone who was cursed by a darkness from the past. That darkness cuts him off from normal society. He owes it no loyalty and indeed only has contempt for it. But at the same time he is unhappy with his situation. He is also a man of larger than life passions and these exhibit themselves in the form of a romantic love for a woman. Yet because of his past and who he is this woman can never be his. In the end, however, he goes on a quest to change himself. There could be nothing more typical of a Byronic hero.
The problem with this is that first of all it turns the mythology of BtVS on its head. For five years up until this point, the plotlines revolved, to a greater or lesser degree, around the fact that soulless creatures are different to human beings and are irredeemably evil. That does not always mean they will act in an evil way or that humans will always act in a good way. Take an example. A and B are brothers. A is human and B is a vampire. If A comes across an elderly woman trying to cross the road against difficult traffic he helps her and that makes him feel good because he has done something good. If B had come across the same scene he would have thrown her in front of the traffic and that would have made him feel good because he had done something evil. Suppose, however, the elderly woman was A and B’s mother who had just fallen out with A and was on her way to change her will in favor of B and cut A out. To stop her A threw her in front of the traffic. That made him feel very bad but hey she has a lot of money. On the other hand B would then be forced to save her. That would make him feel bad because he was helping a human. But hey she has a lot of money.
But this difference does mean that the way humans and vampires always look at the universe is fundamentally different and from that flows everything else. If this were not the case then firstly it implies that the nature of vampires is not immutable and that accordingly Buffy really is a murderer. She's spent the last six years killing beings capable of being good people. And it follows from this that the human soul is irrelevant – there is really no necessary difference between humans and vampires, even though the latter does not possess a human soul, except that vampires are much stronger and live forever. There are no “monsters” at all. There are monstrous acts but people do monstrous acts too.
And there is another point too. In Spike’s case the writers have put forward the idea of love of Buffy as the reason for Spike's willingness to help her and her sister and ultimately redeem himself. But there is no attempt to address what if any differences may exist between the human concept of love and a vampire’s. Regardless of Spike's ability to change it is established that when Spike fell in love with Buffy he was a soulless killer - albeit a neutered one. For humans the ideal of love is that you put the other person first. You are not interested in what you can get out of the relationship but rather what you can give. Of course we messy, imperfect humans don't always live up to this ideal and even when we do we can't seem to stay true to it. But if we do love someone this is what we all try to aim for in a relationship. In a way it is like the Whedonverse ideal of the soul. The soul has an instinct to do good; but it doesn't always stay true to that instinct. In that sense human love is a reflection of the nature of human beings. There are of course many kinds of love of which a vampire would be capable. An individual can feel affection for a prized possession and can care for it, want to protect it and keep it safe accordingly. But he does so essentially because he enjoys the possession. Alternatively an individual can have many emotional needs – insecurity, vanity even lust – satisfied by a relationship and want to preserve the other person. But none of this amounts to love in the same sense that human love is meant. So, does it not follow that a vampires must have a different idea of love to humans? The relationship between Darla and Angelus certainly could not be described as love in the human sense that I have described. And if vampire love can be essentially unselfish, how does that relate to the fundamentally different view that a vampire has of the world? Nowhere do the writers evidence any interest is this issue
But perhaps worse than any of that is the way the writers' treatment of Spike confuses and indeed undermines an issue that is central to ANGEL as a series - redemption. Spike's journey from an inhuman killer to someone who fights evil, makes sacrifices in that fight and finally seeks to regain his soul so that he will no longer be a monster seems on the face of it the very definition of a journey of redemption. But for me, it is a superficial one, lacking in real meaning. Inherent to any idea of a person being truly redeemed is internal change. Redemption is not the same as feeling guilty; nor is it the same as being forgiven. It is not even the same as behaving differently in the sense of doing good when you were formerly doing evil. Redemption means being freed of something. And in Spike's case that "something" must be his past. As I have already said, the writers' own thesis for the character is that Spike's evil is a product of his cursed past - his ineffectuality as a human, the frustrations that caused him, his transformation into a vampire and the way he sought to assert himself in reaction to those frustrations. It was this past that shaped him into someone who was prone to impulsive violence for the sake of it, who had a desire to prove himself master even if that means killing. The way in which he harbored feelings of resentment against Buffy and resorted to violence as a result of those feelings is but the latest example of this general characteristic. But if that is true, then - whether or not he has a soul - in that damaged state he is as capable of evil as he ever was. Circumstances may arise when the toxic cocktail of self-centeredness, frustrations, insecurities and violent tendencies within him can reassert themselves. It follows therefore that Spike cannot really be delivered from that evil (that is to say cannot be redeemed) without taking responsibility for changing these very characteristics. This means first of all understanding and acknowledging these destructive characteristics and the effect that it had on him as well as their evil consequences. Above all it means accepting that he must undergo an internal "moral regeneration" to free himself from these destructive tendencies. And this is what seems to me to be notably absent from the writers' treatment of the character.
Simply getting your soul back is not enough. Nor is the mere fact of helping others. These will not effect the sort of internal regeneration that is required. That regeneration necessarily involves doing things to help others because that is the right thing to do and in acknowledgment of their common bond of humanity. That and that alone is the antidote to the evils within Spike. All those evils derive from Spike's preoccupations with himself - things which make him feel insecure, which frustrate him and the ways in which he compensates for those feelings - the violence in particular. As I have pointed out several times in these Reviews, acknowledging a connection with others by virtue of a common humanity is the only way to deal with this self-centered view of the world because doing so replaces self with others as the central motivating factor. Equally doing something because it is the right thing to do replaces the satisfaction of subjective desires with obedience to objective rules of morality; something that Spike like any good Byronic hero finds especially difficult. Doing things for others because he has an emotional attachment to them does not negate these evils in the same way. There is necessarily a degree of oversimplification here because we all have mixed motives. But to the extent that we help someone because they are emotionally important to us, we are acting for essentially selfish reasons. The implication is that, if it was someone else, we would not help. Showing us a Spike whose motivation derives from his own emotional ties with Buffy is certainly not to show us a character who is trying to change his self-centered orientation. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with it. Nor is it someone who seeks to uphold objective moral rules. Any emotion, including love, is a morally neutral force. It can lead you either to do good or evil. When Spike kidnaps Buffy or tries to rape her his basic motivation is no different from when he fights Glory or endures torture because he will not betray Buffy. From neither point of view is there any redemptive value in the sense discussed above in Spike's actions. This brings us to season 7 and the return from Africa.
Spike regained his soul in Africa not because it was the right thing to do but in order that he could be the sort of man Buffy deserves. Everything he does is because he wanted something for him. And for me it's not real redemption, it is not face your past and try to amend for it.
Sorry, this is a two part leter because I pushe the wrong botton
---------- Post added at 09:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:41 PM ----------
This means first of all understanding that your vampiric self is alive and in you, that its destructive characteristics can always affect the world around you.. Simply getting your soul back is not enough. Nor is the mere fact of helping others. These will not effect the sort of internal regeneration that is required. That regeneration necessarily involves doing things to help others because that is the right thing to do and in acknowledgment must undergo an internal "moral regeneration" to free yourself from these destructive tendencies. And this is what seems to me to be notably absent in Spike' character.That and that alone is the real antidote to the evil inside him, because his demon is perfectly alive.But to the extent that he helps someone because they are emotionally important to him, he's acting for essentially selfish reasons. . Showing us a Spike whose motivation derives from his own emotional ties with Buffy is certainly not to show us a character who is trying to change his self-centered orientation.
Sorry, this is the second part,of my post.I pushed the wrong botton.
---------- Post added at 09:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:45 PM ----------
I don't hate Spike, I don't like him...it is different.
I can explain to you why but I'm afraid of an endless discussion in this forum and I really don't want to start it. It already occurs in another forum, only because I have wanted to defend Angel against the fans who needs to dispise him for Spike's sake. And I'm really tired of it. So, if you want I can say to you, but...try,please, all of you, not arguing too much, because no offence is intended.
For me it is very important the word 'redemption'. And you have it when you are forced -by yourself or by external events - to rethink your past actions, when you ask yourself what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil and when you areready to sacrifice what is important for you for other's sake.
---------- Post added at 09:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:22 PM ----------
This means first of all understanding that your vampiric self is alive and in you, that its destructive characteristics can always affect the world around you.. Simply getting your soul back is not enough. Nor is the mere fact of helping others. These will not effect the sort of internal regeneration that is required. That regeneration necessarily involves doing things to help others because that is the right thing to do and in acknowledgment must undergo an internal "moral regeneration" to free yourself from these destructive tendencies. And this is what seems to me to be notably absent in Spike' character.That and that alone is the real antidote to the evil inside him, because his demon is perfectly alive.But to the extent that he helps someone because they are emotionally important to him, he's acting for essentially selfish reasons. . Showing us a Spike whose motivation derives from his own emotional ties with Buffy is certainly not to show us a character who is trying to change his self-centered orientation.
Sorry, I push the wrong botton...again. This is my real post. what I inserted is an introduction to Spike character by Chiefseattle. I was reading that. Sorry.
---------- Post added at 09:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:56 PM ----------
I don't hate Spike, I don't like him...it is different.
I can explain to you why but I'm afraid of an endless discussion in this forum and I really don't want to start it. It already occurs in another forum, only because I have wanted to defend Angel against the fans who needs to dispise him for Spike's sake. And I'm really tired of it. So, if you want I can say to you, but...try,please, all of you, not arguing too much, because no offence is intended.
For me it is very important the word 'redemption'. And you have it when you are forced -by yourself or by external events - to rethink your past actions, when you ask yourself what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil and when you areready to sacrifice what is important for you for other's sake.
---------- Post added at 09:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:22 PM ---------
This means first of all understanding that your vampiric self is alive and in you, that its destructive characteristics can always affect the world around you.. Simply getting your soul back is not enough. Nor is the mere fact of helping others. These will not effect the sort of internal regeneration that is required. That regeneration necessarily involves doing things to help others because that is the right thing to do and this acknowledgment must undergo an internal "moral regeneration" to free yourself from these destructive tendencies. And this is what seems to me to be absent in Spike' character.That is the real antidote to the evil inside him, because his demon is perfectly alive.But to the extent that he helps someone because they are emotionally important to him, he's acting for essentially selfish reasons. . Showing us a Spike whose motivation derives from his own emotional ties with Buffy is certainly not to show us a character who is trying to change his self-centered orientation.
Sorry, I push the wrong botton...again. This is my real post. what I inserted is an introduction to Spike character by Chiefseattle. I was reading that. Sorry.
