I don't quite know where to begin. Essentially as I see it, we've got two vampires with souls. First we've got Angel, who got his soul back thanks to a gypsy curse. Said curse got lifted briefly during the second season, and he went all evil (poor Jenny). Anyhoo, he gets cursed again, and he's the big broodin' vamp we all know and love. "It's not really him," is the term often applied to his actions as uncursed Angel.
But then we've got Spike. Spike shows up early in season two, and he's one mean vampire. Two slayer kills under his belt, and he is a truly terrifying antagonist. But then he gets this little chip put in his skull and it hurts him to attack humans. From the middle of season four through season five we see a change of character as far as Spike goes - it's not that he can't hurt or kill people (he does punch Tara in the nose, and as he tells Harmony after saying he's going to shoot Buffy, "My head'll hurt like hell for two hours, but she'll be dead forever.")
So what's to be made of Spike? Is he proof that even the most evil of Vampires still retains some small shred of their soul? Or that vampires are not inherently evil, and can become more than just a blood-sucker in need of a wood stake through the heart? Also, what does this say of Angel, that there was no hesitation on his part after he became Angelus again? At this point in season five, Spike has just been tortured by Glory for refusing to reveal the identity of the Key. If Spike had his chip removed at this point, would he immediately revert to the same evil character he was when he first arrived? Somehow, I doubt that.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Perhaps the longer a vampire goes without hurting people, the more likely they are to develop a non-evil personality? The whole curse thing could have included some way around that, like specifically making him revert to his old personality. Which, for varying definitions of "soul", might be another way of saying he lost his soul again.
Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :
Not quite ... because that would imply that if you locked a vamp in a cell for fifty years, when you let them out, they'd be nice and sweet (and I ... uh, don't really think that would be the case). Besides, Spike CAN hurt people, we've seen that he can (and will) still strike humans *despite* the pain chip.
What I'm saying is that Spike is making a concious choice to choose "good", *despite* the fact that he's a bloodsucking vampire without a soul.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Hm. I need to watch this show.
I'd say there's a difference between causing someone pain if they hurt someone and otherwise leaving them free, and simply locking them in a cell. They'd have very different effects on your personality. So why did Spike decide to be good? Was it because of the chip, or something else?
Posted by Spike (Member # 322) on :
quote:So why did Spike decide to be good?
To get into Buffy's pants? Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
More like Spike is proof that "demons = evil" was replaced in the writers' minds by "demons = supernatural alien species who may or may not be evil." (Alien in the sense that they are not part of the "native" ecologies of Earth, for the most part.) I don't think it pays to think too much about it, really.
(Though, demonic or not, Spike and Angel are very different people. And also...but then, you aren't at that season yet. Suffice to say that the issue of souls only gets more cloudy as time goes on.)
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I suspect trying to pin down the nature of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's vampires would be as difficult a task as explaining every little thing we saw in The X-Files that might have something to do with the great central conspiracy.
Most vampires are, well, grunts. But some of them seem smarter than others - The Master, Trick, Angelus and of course Spike. I'd also include Drusilla in that, but not, say, Darla. Or maybe I should: in the pilot she was basically another grunt but ever since then has had this massive amount of backstory added.
The grunts just get created, then generally prey on humans until dusted by Buffy or whoever. But you have the others, who think bigger - the Master wanted to escape his confinement and open the Hellmouth, and in the alternate reality planned to mechanize feeding on humans, turning them into battery animals (the question I always had with that ep was, why not just open the Hellmouth since there's no slayer to stop him, just a librarian and a couple of teenagers?); Angelus we all know about; Trick and a couple of others (like the one played by Brian Johnson in the pilot, not sure if he ever had a name) seem to be capable of organising vampires for their own protection; Drusilla was plain loopy even before she got made into a vampire, and really didn't seem to change all that much; and then there's Spike, who'd happily kill humans (when he could anyway) yet on the whole preferred it if the world stayed undestroyed.
I gave up watching BtVS a long time ago, but I know to what Sol alludes. Might be difficult to continue along this discussion too long without spoiling Snay. 8)
So, yeah, I want to know as well - what happens when people are vampirised? They apparently don't have souls anymore, we know that from Angel. Are we to believe that all the sould does is keep us being nice people? Because Spike is capable of that without a soul. Yet is personality distinct from the soul? Can we say that Angel is exactly the same as Angelus, just minus the bloodlust etc? Some eps of Angel show that he can be a bit of a bastard, like the ones after Darla's return, or that one where that actress gives him PCP or LSD or whatever and he thinks he's had a moment of genuine happiness and temporarily becomes Angelus - what, so drugs remove your soul, or make you think that?
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I think, essentially, it comes down to this: Buffy, the character, is essentially a soldier, and so her antagonists tend to be like the bad guys in war movies. Angel is essentially a detective, and so his antagonists have the shades of gray found more often in noir.
Thus the villain from the Buffy pilot is trying to raise an army and take over the world, an action that is relatively simple, in terms of ethics (turning the Earth into a hell is clearly bad, assuming we accept the idea of hell in the first place), while the villain in the Angel pilot is busy making money and abusing the affections of young women, and while the second part of that earns him an impressive response from Angel, nothing is inherently wrong with being a businessman.
Which is all a long and I suspect not entirely clear way of saying that, in order to make vampires and assorted other demons fit into the genre framework chosen for Angel the show, they had to be given more earthly (and thus morally ambiguous) ambitions. In order to be good, Angel required some special plot-related dispensation, but on his own show the narrative is such that no dispensation is required, and the moral standing of any particular character becomes dependant on their actions. Or more dependant, anyway. Even Buffy meets a nice demon eventually (Unless Clem hides some dark secret I, having not seen season 7, am yet unaware of, and which I don't want to know. ((Though at the rate things have been going the odds of anything being a mystery to me by the time I finally do see it are quite slim.))). Yet she doesn't alter her policy of delivering pointy death at first sight to all vampires, even when they are just newly reborn. (Admittedly, these vampires usually make attacking her their first action, suggesting that, as I believe was mentioned earlier, that a "soul" in these shows is in fact some form of impulse control, rather than an animating spirit or essence. It wouldn't be just to hold Angel repsonsible for things his body did when he wasn't in it. Though the people who cursed him seemed singularly dismissive of justice as their motivation. So, I don't know. But Angel certainly seems to claim all of his unsouled activities.)
Posted by Flying Minister (Member # 1177) on :
Just a quick take on this whole subject. Not so good with eppy names so bear with me here.
This year Angel said, and I quote, "A vampire can control itself, if it wants to." We've even witnessed this twice with Spike and now Harmony. Admittedly, Spike was only doing it to get into Buffy's good graces. Before this revelation of Angel's it was widely suggested that without a soul a vampire is just demon killing machine. It's the soul that keeps Angel and Spike from killing.
If you think back to season 5 of Buffy, you might remember there was a time when Spike believed his chip stopped working. What's the first thing he did? He tried to kill an innocent woman he found in an alley. It wasn't until after he fought for and received his soul that he completely laid off the killing thing. Angel also only stopped killing after he received his soul. Well after as he was still killing and feeding on criminals for a while after he was cursed. And even in the late fifties he was still feeding on human blood as seen in the eppy Are You Now or Have You Ever Been. Admittedly it was stolen, so he didn't have to kill anyone to get it.
However, this brings us back to Harmony who is now no longer killing people to feed. She is doing this for her job, and so that Angel won't give her the stake.
I know I haven't really cleared up anything. Just thought I'd toss a couple things out there for you all to think about. The moral implications of all of this are kind of scary. All about Buffy not giving vamps a chance to be good before she kills them. And Angel as well for that matter. Or if vamps can actually be good without a soul. We have yet to see how long Harmony can last before the craving for human blood takes over again.
Now I'm really confused.
Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :
Oh fucking great, can't we just stake that bitch Harmony and get it over with? Please?!
Posted by Spike (Member # 322) on :
quote:He tried to kill an innocent woman he found in an alley.
Yeah, but he was hesitant to do it. He had to convince himself first.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
My take on it, which could easily be invalidated because they keep changing the nature of vampires.
I looked at vampirism as a blood disease. Prehaps when a demon's blood mixed with a human's it created a hybrid, a vampire. So when a human feeds off vampire blood they become one too. But the vampire constantly needs fresh blood to feed off of.
I don't think the soul or conscious is gone, merely surpressed by the demon so that person would feel no guilt or remorse about killing another person.
So when Angel's soul was released the vampire was then surpressed but not gone. Which is why when he lost his soul he went nuts because the demon in him which had been repressed for so long was back in control.
In the case of Spike. With the chip he couldn't go around killing everyone he wanted. Without the violence and death the demon fed off it's control was lessened and how Spike acted the way he did in season 5, such as willing to die to protect Dawn.
That's my original take on it though.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
That's a good point - if the vampires are demons, and Angel is still a vampire but with a soul, what happened to the demon in him? If it's not gone, just suppressed, then that explains how the drug incident could temporarily release Angelus. . . And, of course, we know there are such things as good demons, so why shouldn't Spike's demon become effectively good, especially when it already had leanings in that direction (not wanting the world destroyed or turned into hell) - although the concept of a demon liking Manchester United makes me question how good it really is. 8)
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
I recently watched the arc where Angel and team go to Pylea, a dimension where Angel can go in the sun and has a reflection. I also liked the wolf, ram, and hart books which I hoped would have some interesting explanation.
Anyway, in Pylea Angel and his demon are basically separated hense his reflection and sun exposure. When he changed into a vampire though it completely altered his appearance and had no little control. The sorcerers called him a 'vamptar' I think. A vampire in pure form. Made me think that prehaps it got to our dimension long ago and infected humans, mixing the blood and creating the hybrid we know of.
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