It would be difficult for me to innumerate all of the reasons why I dislike Spike, but I'll try. The first time I watched the show, I liked him a lot in seasons two through four, but for every subsequent rewatch, my opinion has been informed by what I know is going to happen later. Despite not having liked him since the first time I watched season five, it used to be easy for me to find him entertaining anyway. Ever since I got into online fandom and read stuff by the Spike fans who think he's so wonderful and that people like me who don't like him and feel extremely justified in that opinion "just don't understand him" or some other dismissive crap like that, though, my already strong dislike solidified into something much closer to outright loathing. I hesitate to actually call it loathing, however, as I reserve that term for Kennedy.
This one might just be me overthinking things to a ridiculous level, but I can't help imagining how horrible he must smell all the time what with how much he smokes. Ew. I have zero tolerance for that smell, and I always find it weird when the other characters fail to comment on how gross it is, considering that, with the exception of Giles in his Ripper days, none of them has ever smoked. And I'm not too fond of the drinking either, but I don't remember that being quite as regular as the smoking. Either way, the result is that I don't like some of his defining personal habits, so we're already off to a bad start.
Okay, moving on to the stuff of more substance now. Spike is a jerk, with or without his soul. And considering how intuitive he seems to be, there's no excuse for it. His insensitive remarks aren't made carelessly like Cordelia's or cluelessly like Anya's, they're deliberate. He phrases his comments in a blunt and insulting way, even when the point he makes with them is insightful (or perhaps especially then). This may be entertaining, but that's only from the perspective of an audience member. To the other characters (who, unlike Spike, are the actual protagonists), it isn't so funny, and I'm surprised they were all able to take his crap for so long without staking him. The endearing moments weren't enough to make up for it and generally made everything else seem worse by comparison. Also, does he ever treat anyone he's meeting for the first time in a non-hostile fashion? I can't recall a single time that he didn't open with hostility.
Now, in seasons two through four, I don't mind that he's a jerk, because he's a villain, so, yeah. Not every villain can be like the Mayor, nor would I want them to be. The snark makes Spike very amusing to watch and stops me from getting too annoyed at the good guys for failing to stake him. But after a while, it gets old, and yet the Scoobies still aren't staking him. Being harmless against his will makes him neither innocent nor human, nor is it the same as having a soul. There is no logic to not staking him, and harboring him is the Scoobies' first step in the direction of moral bankruptcy (not that I think they made it all the way there--or, not all of them, anyway). Once Spike has a soul, he is no longer eligible to reapply for his Free to Act Like a Jerk pass from me.
At the same time that the snark starts really getting old for me (season five), other aspects of Spike's behavior start to seriously freak me out. His "love" (and I use sarcastic quote marks) for Buffy manifests in sabotaging her relationship with Riley (not that I was sorry to see it end) and several varieties of intensely creepy stalking. And while I'm on that subject, since someone else brought it up and I don't want to let it go unaddressed, I don't think his stalking compares at all to whatever Angel(us) did. Angelus was stalking her as a predator stalks his prey for the purpose of messing with her head, and Angel's "lurking" was out of a desire to make sure she was okay and, occasionally, to pass information to her. Spike, on the other hand, goes sneaking around nicking her knickers, making a creepy shrine, and using Harmony to indulge in creepy fantasies (I can't stand Harmony either, but I still felt awful for her during those scenes). And then he surpasses all previously known definitions of creepy by threatening Warren into making a robot version of her, and having sex with it. I cannot express my horrified disgust strongly enough.
And then there's season six. I can't even watch this season unless I disengage from my emotional reactions (horror, outrage, etc.) and attempt to be objective, while alternating it with episodes of Angel season three. Every character, with the possible exceptions of Buffy, Giles, Tara, and Jonathan, becomes less likable for me in season six. Buffy's downward spiral at least has a legitimate cause that was beyond her control: being ripped from heaven. Also, she knows perfectly well she's in a downward spiral, hates herself for it (unlike Willow, who eagerly jumps headfirst into her own and rides it like a slide on a playground), and then pulls herself back together and soldiers bravely on with a smile on her face, having conquered her demons and learned to love living again. Buffy is *awesome*.
...No thanks to Spike. He takes advantage of her alienation from her friends and her fear that she came back wrong to drag her into the darkness with him, because he knows he can only get at her when she's alone and vulnerable. All while calling it love. Last season he tried to make her admit to some tiny speck of feelings for him by threatening to sic Drusilla on her if she didn't. This season he tries to convince her that having sex with him means she loves him. He doesn't care if she hates herself, so long as she loves him. If she *has* to hate herself in order to love him, that works too. And he can't accept that she doesn't. He doesn't want her to be happy, he wants her to be *his*. Once again, he's soulless, so it's not like it would be logical to expect better of him, but it's still appalling, especially when he claims to have changed.
The AR is in a league all on its own. Sufficeth it to say that it does nothing to improve my opinion of Spike, and that I don't think "despicable" is a strong enough adjective for him in that scene.
Then comes the soul quest. I don't believe for a second that he wants to get his soul back because he feels remorse, because you *can't* feel remorse without a soul, dangit! What I do believe is that he feels frustrated to his wit's end that nothing he tries with Buffy works and all he's succeeded in doing is making her hate him and possibly even be willing to kill him at last, but he does know that having a soul worked for Angel (and continued to do so even after a period of soullessness), so he thinks that it must therefore also work for him (never considering that there may have been many other things about Angel that worked for him apart from the mere fact of soulfulness). He still wants to force Buffy to love him, but now he knows that he's crossed a line, and the only way to get around that is to get a soul. He knows she won't hold him responsible for what he just did anymore if he has one.
The entire series of attempts to force Buffy to love him or to admit that she loves him is strongly reminiscent of his attempts to do the same to Drusilla in the earlier seasons, with *forcing* the woman in question to feel something they don't necessarily feel being the recurring theme. Why he expected it to work on a Slayer who has hated him for years when it didn't work on a crazy soulless vampire who'd already been with him for over a century, I will never understand.
And now we get to season seven, and Spike has a soul. I do not dislike him while he has a soul for the reasons I dislike him when he doesn't have one, unless they carry over (the jerkiness certainly does), nor do I blame him for anything he did pre-soul, because that wouldn't be fair--I don't hold Angelus against Angel, after all (though, as Angelus is my favorite villain of all time, it wouldn't necessarily have the same effect if I did).
But soulful Spike gives me his own reasons not to like him. I heartily agree with whoever said they don't believe he feels remorse, he just feels sorry for himself. Now that he actually *has* a soul, he realizes that he had no idea what he was signing up for by getting one, and clearly regrets it for a while. But then he slides from that back into the attitude of the old Spike and denies responsibility and guilt. If this is just his way of dealing with the guilt he really does feel, then he needs a new way of dealing, because this one is immature, something a being well into his second century of existence has no business being as often as Spike is.
What he says to Wood about Nikki is beyond horrible, and I was astonished to see Buffy defend this unapologetic creep against the son of a fellow Slayer he murdered and Giles, to the extent of threatening the former and creating a permanent breach in her relationship with the latter. Spike has successfully manipulated her into feeling responsible for his soul. Ugh. She picked a terrible reason to finally start standing up to her friends. No, soulful Spike does not deserve to die for soulless Spike's murder of Nikki Wood or anyone else, but Robin at least has as much reason for hating Spike and wanting to avenge his mother's death as Giles had for hating Angel in season three, and Buffy wasn't objecting then, even though Angel was extremely remorseful but Spike isn't at all.
Okay, "Chosen". Spike gets hailed all over the place for his heroic sacrifice in this one. Why? This is probably a case of where the fandom's interpretation annoys me more than Spike does. He had no idea what the amulet was going to do. None of them did. If they had, they could have just sent Spike into the Hellmouth by himself and not risked anyone else dying. (That's why I hate plot devices like the amulet. They make the efforts of everyone else seem pointless.) All Spike thought he was signing up for was certain death in battle, just like the others. Points for that, of course, but no more than Buffy and Faith get, and less than non-superpowered humans like Xander and Dawn get. Once the amulet fires up, can he even move? Every time I watch that scene, it looks to me like he's kind of immobilized. Dying to save the world was never what he chose to do at a point when he actually had a choice. He merely accepts what's unavoidable, so"¦whatever. He goes on to undermine his own sacrifice in "Just Rewards", when he tries to blame Angel for his death and delivers that "I don't give a piss about atonement" line. Which means that even *he* is far from considering it a selfless act of heroism, so I don't understand why so many fans insist that that's what it was.
The fight in "Destiny" might be my least favorite soulful Spike moment of all. He not only rejects responsibility for his actions while soulless (only the evil ones, mind you, because he can totally take credit for just the good ones without being a hypocrite), but he actually blames them on Angel. By his own logic, this doesn't make sense. If he isn't guilty of his soulless actions (which he isn't, I agree), then Angel darn well isn't responsible for the actions of Angelus, let alone the actions of Spike. He also says some extremely disrespectful things about Buffy, shoving his season six "relationship" with her in Angel's face. So is he only sorry about what he put her through when she's actually present? This is how he talks about the woman he supposedly loves? I never believed he really loved her before he got his soul, but I did think that changed once he had it. This scene would suggest otherwise.
The first time I can really believe he's sorry for what he did pre-soul and not attempting to shove the blame onto someone else doesn't come until the end of "Damage" when he's talking to Angel. It shouldn't have taken getting his hands chopped off to get him to that point, but I was glad *something* could.
I've always been a huge Angel fan, to the extent that I tend to view lots of aspects of the Buffyverse the way he does. If something annoys him, it annoys me on his behalf. Angel finds Spike an irksome hindrance most of the time, and I agree. I actually sympathize with Angel so much that I can't even see the humor in most of his conflicts with Spike, even though I know they're meant to be funny. Mostly, they just annoy me and make me want to smack Spike for bugging Angel.
Another thing I don't like about him (with or without a soul) is that chameleon personality that others have mentioned, and the way it seems like he uses it to mask how needy, insecure, and pathetic he really is underneath. I'd probably feel sorry for him if I found his façade likable, but I don't, so I mostly just think he's weak, false, and immature. So, pretty much, at the end of the day, all he has going for him in my book is his comic relief value in seasons two through four (and, sure, the occasional zinger from the later seasons, whenever they don't just annoy me), his willingness to die fighting the good fight beginning in "Chosen" and restated even better in "Not Fade Away", and the actual maturing he does from "Damage" on--which is then negated somewhat by that charming "as long as it's not you" parting shot to Angel.
And that's all directly from the character, not the actor or the writing. I actually have a great deal of respect for James Marsters, and even when I have strong objections to the writing or the plot for whatever reason, I still try to judge the story for itself. I didn't really notice all that stuff others have pointed out about Spike crowding some of the Scoobies out of the story, because, like bad acting (unless it's *really* bad, otherwise I just assume that's how the character is supposed to be) that's not the kind of thing I generally notice anyway.
