Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Harris

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

This is one of the top 5 biggest mistakes the series made, IMO. (Right next to Xander leaving Anya and the Magic=Drugs Season 6 crap) Obviously people get to college and "expand their horizons" or experiment and that's totally believable. And it's even more believable given how Oz left that she might be inclined to hook up with Tara. 'm good up to that point........however, when it's just arbitrarily decided that Willow has "decided" that she's just plain gay and no longer attracted to men at all, it seemed wholly contrived and completely forced, not to mention completely unrealistic.

She was clearly and naturally attracted to guys up through Season 4...this wasn't her pretending or trying to fit in.....there were no hints of secret longing for Buffy or any other signs that Willow was anything but a straight female. To all of sudden throw all that history out the window and claim that she's just now exclusively gay just reeked of the authors saying, 'Well, who should we just randomly make gay."

I understand that need to portray individuals who sexual preferences differ than the mainstream.....there's good story material to be told there. However, to basically just have the character go on screen and say, "I'm no longer interested in men" is doing a disservice to all parties involved as any gay person will tell you, they don't have a "choice" to be gay, they simply aren't attracted to people of opposite genders.

If that's the case, then Willow, who clearly was attracted to men (and later in the series at least some women) then the realistic (and more interesting) choice would have been to show her as bi which I think would have been more honest and not nearly as "been there, done that" as what we got.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Yeah, I think they should have made her bi if they wanted one of the Scoobies to be a LBGT person. It would have been more believable. As I said, I can buy Willow being gay more easily than I think I'd buy Xander being gay, but it's still a bit of a stretch.

Until season 7, I thought Willow was bi while Tara was gay... Or at least, Willow was gay in the sense of being predominantly interested in women (which is why she identified as lesbian), but could still be interested in men, too.

I don't understand why they thought they needed to make it look like she was completely uninterested in men to the point that, even under a love spell, she had to make a guy into a girl so she could be with him. (Yet another reason why I'd prefer that "Him" didn't happen, besides the fact that it's just a really bad and pointless episode.) How did this happen? In season 4, she was still torn between Tara and Oz when Oz came back.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

I can only guess that the decision was made because perhaps the gay community would have felt slighted the Willow wasn't actually "gay", but bi or maybe Willow's character was just wishy washy and was committed to whatever gender of person she was currently dating. I dunno. I can't make any sense of the decision and it certainly flies in the face of 4 years of character history almost like we're supposed to forget that she's actually being a very straight heterosexual up to that point in the series......like I said, it's one of the top Joss mistakes from Buffy that just can't be rationally explained.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

No, it keeps confirming they are completely different entities and beings, all the way up to and including Buffy S7, where showing the waking vampire to the potentials: sweet, still corpse --> wake up and instant killing machine.

Oh, that one is brilliant. It's a completely different personality, (and thus person), but no, I just claim it's the same person after all, despite the fact I just said differently. That's a level of sticking your head in the sand I have rarely if ever seen.

No, that makes perfect sense if taken literally when you see the difference between Angelus and Angel. It's bleeding obvious the two are night and day, and completely different beings/entities. I refuse to use the term "people" as Angelus isn't "people".

No, the exact opposite was blatantly obvious.

Nope, they didn't. As the S4 episode with Faith Angel and Angelus in the dreamscape rather further exemplifies. Where Angel would remember fondly saving a puppy, Angelus is absolutely horrified and in physical pain just reliving the event from a different perspective. Angelus, the demon, as is shown to you there, isn't gone. He's trapped, caged beneath the soul, and it is forced to live through Angel's life as a passenger. And anything good that Angel feels and does, is literally torture to Angelus. Which makes his memories very different from Angel's. But he still remembers all the same events happening.

Further, allow me to repeat the same quote: "Buffy, I feel like I haven't seen you in months."

Once again: THAT'S BECAUSE HE HASN'T SEEN HER IN MONTHS! Angel is not Angelus, and Angelus is not Angel.

Which incidentally shows that there aren't just two different sets of memories, but three:

1. The memories of Angel, the ones in the soul.

2. The memories of Angelus, the demon, remembering being trapped unable to do anything but whisper an attempt to influence Angel, and being tortured by every good thing that Angel feels and does.

3. The physical memories in the brain. The average day RNA patterns that make up our memories. While Angelus is in charge, his memories are stored there, while Angel is in charge, his memories.

This explains how Angel can remember the stuff Angelus did as if he did it, but only after a while of accessing the physical memories Angelus left behind, and at the same time, can NOT access the demon's own memory of being trapped beneath Angel and tortured with every good act and feeling.

Which of of course, makes them totally NOT the same person, but two completely different beings and entities. One who hates Buffy with a fiery passion, and one who loves her.

No, he was too much of a coward to face Buffy and the Scoobies head on; as usual. One thing both Angelus and Angel have in common: they're both cowards.

No, it gets reconfirmed over and over and over again.

You're right, and you're completely wrong. Indeed, the personality of the vampire, is a pure evil, twisted everything good into a sick evil, and make everything bad worse caricature of the person that once housed the corpse that the demon is now animated. The demon that gets born into this corpse, using the remaining physical brain to mold itself a personality.

However, THIS MAKES THEM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BEINGS/ENTITIES.

The vampire is not the person it was before, apart from the fact the demon was born into that person's corpse, and uses what is left to mature, the two have nothing in common. In fact, more often than not, the two are night and day in their difference.

But are not the same being. The demon is there after ward, is a completely different entity/being that the person. And in fact, Vampire Willow once more shows this perfectly. Vampire Willow and Willow have nothing in common. While Vampire Willow is a pure evil, enjoying torture, fully confident blight upon the world, Willow is a weak-willed nerd.

And still, they are completely different beings and entities, who have nothing in common. For one thing, Vampire Willow is as bisexual as they come completely free to do as she pleases, while Willow is either a completely repressed bisexual claiming to be gay, or just plain gay.

The "Bored now" phrase is actually a beautiful illustration of how the vampire and the person are different. The vampire is a pure evil caricature of the person that once inhabited the corpse it's animated - having twisted all the good into pure evil, and made everything bad worse. The result, is the demons you see.

But this means, the less difference there is between the person and the demon afterward, the less good, the worse, the evil that person was. The potential to go "Bored now" being one evil thing inside Willow, that the vampire retained, and made worse by putting it straight up on the outside, and not something to come out only when Willow has been, essentially, broken in half.

And Angelus is the one who is right here, NOT Darla. That makes the S1 and S2 to S3 arc of Darla/Angel so magnificent. You see, that vampire Darla, can't understand love, doesn't even know what it is, or how it works. In fact, her being prostitute before her turning living a harsh life, she probably couldn't even understand it before she turned into a vampire, which makes her statements here so much more obviously false.

Now go to a Darla who is made to feel genuine love because of the soul of her son growing in her womb, and then she tells us how completely she incapable of feeling or understanding love as a vampire. And by extension, how completely she does not understand anything about what she's saying right here.

But, funny thing, Darla still says, even now, that they are something else altogether, than what they were. They are not the same beings, even if the things that the person felt and did became part of them, when the demon they are took over the meat-suit / corpse. After all, if they were simply the same person, she wouldn't be talking about what they were, she'd be talking about them as they are and always have been.

Which actually shows that Willow is a bisexual repressing her straight side. The love spell only affected her emotions, it made her in love with the guy. There's no way in hell, that just those emotions would say; I love him, lust after him, but I'm not lusting after him, because he's not a girl. This doesn't make sense. This shows it is her intellect that demanded she turn him into a girl, in fact it's only her intellect that came up with the ploy to show she loved him the most when Buffy, Dawn and Willow are trying to convince each other they love him most.

It is thus her intellect that has decided she can't be with guys, NOT her emotions. You see people are born a certain sexuality, they can't choose it, but what they can do, is choose to repress their sexuality, or parts thereof.

Indeed, we see multiple girls around the guy, who are not affected by the jacket at all. It seems you need a pre-existing attraction to the one wearing the jacket, before it can work its mojo on you. Being in love with someone else, seems to also be a protection against the jacket's magic. Thus Willow is indeed bisexual, repressing one part of her sexuality.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Magnificently showing that the gay community is bigoted toward bisexuals and bisexuality.

And that to be truly progressive, Willow should have been bisexual.

The irony.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

D.E., he just made some of the same points I was going to make. Mostly that I think the main reason we see the Buffy and Angel relationship differently is because I did indeed think of Angel and Angelus as completely different people. Angel's line you provided as evidence to the contrary (when he's about to start arguing with Buffy saying a person's personality has nothing to do with how they are as a vampire) was clearly meant as a joke. It was a throwaway gag line. I don't think it should be taken seriously as proof to support your point.

I think further proof against it is in season seven. My memory of the season's episodes is vague since I hate that season and haven't watched the whole thing in years, but I clearly remember the episode where the principal of Sunnydale high tries to torture Spike with a song that reminds him of his mom. At the end, Spike thanks the principal for helping him realize that he shouldn't feel bad about his mother because when she said horrible things to him, it wasn't her, it was a demon. I think a similar thing can be said for vampires, at least in the Whedonverse. Now I don't necessarily think nothing of the vampire's original personality is retained when they are turned, but I think for the most part, they change so drastically that almost an entire new evil person emerges.

In response to your suggestion that Angel and Buffy's relationship wasn't that deep because they never saw each other as more than ideals and didn't really truly know each other because they didn't see each other's bad sides, I agree that Angel didn't see too much of Buffy's bad side, but I would argue that this shows how good for each other they were. Angel didn't see as much of Buffy's dark side as Spike did because Angel didn't piss her off and make her hate herself the way Spike did being with her. So how does that make Spike more compatible with her than Angel? And Buffy definitely saw the worst in Angel and loved him in spite of it. I think that's what made the end of "Amends" so powerful. Angel wants to die and Buffy is pleading with him not to let that happen. He insists that he should die because he's a terrible person after all the things he's done, and Buffy says, "I know all the things you did...because you did them to me".

To those in awe of how passionately people discuss a show now dead for seven years...keep in mind some of us are just catching up. When this show was on the air for the first time, I either didn't have the Internet or barely ever used it. I also couldn't have written about it as well as I can now since I was significantly less articulate back then.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

I have no idea how the gay community feels about bisexuality, or what Joss thinks the gay community feels........as it says in my post above - and I'll bold the important part here - I can only guess that the decision was made because perhaps .....etc. etc. etc.

I'll reiterate. I don't know why the decision is made or how individuals in the gay community would have felt about Willow if she were portrayed as Bi...when it happened I had some discussions with a few gay members of this board and they didn't care for the idea of her being Bi at all, so I can only operate from what very little information I have.

I didn't say "progressive", I said "realistic". You may want to try actually reading my posts next time rather than just sticking words wholesale into my mouth....makes for a much more interesting (and honest) discussion.

There's certainly several things that are ironic about your response, however, in the interest of keeping this on track, I'll simply say that you might want to re-read my original posts for reference so your not commenting on imaginary things I never said.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

I don't have time to read or respond to all of this tonight, but I just need to quote this :

Took the words right out of my mouth.

This coming from a guy who actually claims things like "Spike is not a person".

Oh, the irony.

I have a fuzzy memory of arguing with you a long time ago, was it maybe about BSG? Were you the guy who kept insisting that Cylons were not people? I'm having a deja vu here. I remember it was a loong, pointless debate and that I realized that no amount of arguments will convince you of what should be blatantly obvious...

...Such as, you know, that beings who are clearly sapient, have a mind, emotions, personality traits... are people.

That's something that is so damn obvious that I find it ridiculous that anyone would even dispute it. And, in my experience, when someone is so damn adamant in sticking his head in the sand, I could spend weeks arguing that water is wet and get nowhere.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

There's nothing ironic about it. Spike is a demon, not a person.

Nope. I've never argued that Cylons weren't people, quite the contrary.

Except that the vampires are not sapient. Darla without a soul's idea about love, and what she realizes is actual love with her son's soul enabling her to feel it, and what it meant once the soul comes out: that she was not only incapable of feeling it, but was so completely incapable of understanding it, that she wouldn't even be able remember, shows that quite handedly.

They're broken, and are completely unaware that they are. That means they are not sapient, and incapable of at least one emotion.

Vampires aren't people, they aren't human, they're nothing but a blight upon the world that need dusting.

You guessed right. It's the same reason that Cally on Grey's Anatomy had an entire arc with her first female lover and her male sex friend that there was no difference for her between sex with a man and sex with a woman and thus that she was bisexual, gays got upset, and the next season she was suddenly gay, without any explanation whatsoever.

It's nice that you said realistic.

I said progressive. Me. I. That is the one that is posting here: progressive. To be progressive (and incidentally also realistic) Willow had to be bi.

I can write my own stuff. I don't need to use your terms and words. I've got my own things to say/write.

Right back at ya.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

I think this is actually pretty obvious in the episode where Cordelia finally gives birth. She definitely believes that "good and evil" and "right and wrong" are very subjective terms. I think the line goes something like, "Right and wrong? By whose definition?"

I actually thought it might have been neat at the end of Season 4 to have Jasmine join the team instead of having her face smashed in by Connor.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Quoted for truth. Few people would dispute that Pinocchio is a person. You don't hear kids saying that they have problems relating to Woody from Toy Story because he's just a lump of non-sapient wood. They're much too smart for that. The characters are protagonists and therefore are also people in the context of the invented world. This is a separate issue of course from the concept of a non-human person existing in reality. Some of Star Trek's aliens bear more than a passing resemblance to the Buffyverse's demons, of course, and yet the issue of their personhood doesn't seem to arise too often.
I do think that in this thread the Buffyverse is being taken a little more seriously than its creators intended. The show was arguably at its best when it wore its myth-as-metaphor colours proudly, eg with Angel's loss of his soul (Girl finally sleeps with boy, boy becomes a b*st*rd) or the pre-soul Spike (Bad boy, bad news but has a certain magnetism). In the case of Spike there's an obvious parallel with real-life psychopathy. I'm reminded of this dialogue from Crush (Thanks to TwizTV!):

"BUFFY: Please! Spike, you're a vampire.
SPIKE: Angel was a vampire.
BUFFY: Angel was good!
SPIKE: And I can be too. I've changed, Buffy.
BUFFY: What, that chip in your head? That's not change. Tha-that's just ... holding you back. You're like a serial killer in prison!
SPIKE: Women marry 'em all the time!"

So it would seem that although some demon species have souls/consciences (eg Lorne, maybe Clem), vamps have a psychological makeup that resembles that of a human with clinical psychopathy. This doesn't mean that they don't have thoughts, feelings, emotions; it just means that they appear to lack the mental wiring necessary to fully understand that (firstly) others do too and (secondly) treating others as they would like to be treated is a sound course of action. Spike, seemingly like many a real-life psycho, is often the hero of his own story. Is his lack of empathy with others a barrier to personhood? The same logic would seem to categorise real-life psychopaths as humans who aren't quite people.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

A few more things:

Affection doesn't mean lust at all. I hate to be smug about it... (oh, who I am kidding? I love to be smug about it )... just look in a dictionary.

And what exactly makes Angel's word weightier than, say, Spike's? Why are Drusilla, Harmony, Buffy, Tara, or the Judge, wrong, but only Angel is right?

Besides... people have different definitions of love. It's a matter of semantics. What people argue about someone being or not being able to love, or whether they think someone's love is "real" or not, what it really means is "does it fit my idea of what love should be like".

Oh, and what about demons? Did Anya have a soul when she went back to being a demon? Did she love Xander then?

Again, just like you say you're arguing that vampires are not people but you are in fact only stating reasons why they should be considered evil people, you are not really making any arguments that vampires cannot love. You are really just arguing if vampires can love in a pure and unselfish way.

But how many humans love in that way? Was Warren capable of love? Was Willow loving unselfishly when she violated Tara's mind so she could make her forget their arguments and stop her from leaving her? And how many people do you know in real life who love in a pure, unselfish way?

Exactly. Which means that being human is no badge of honor. What a human does choose is whether to do good or evil. And many humans are in fact as bad as worse than vampires (as Xander and Dawn observed in season 6, Warren was worse than any vampire). And they don't even have an excuse of having a 'demon' or being soulless.

Yes, dying to save the world is one of the best examples of selfishness.

Of course I see the difference. You like Anya, and you hate Spike.

But see, it's one thing to hate a character, and it's a completely different thing to claim that he is "not a person", which doesn't even make sense. If he weren't a person, you wouldn't hate him in the first place. I don't hate my vacuum cleaner, and I don't spend time arguing about whether it is selfish or selfless. If he weren't a person, the issue would be completely irrelevant.

Really, there are lots of things to hate about Spike, and one can say a lot of things about him, but one thing that you certainly can't say with a straight face and mean it is that he's not a person. If anyone believed that vampires are all the same and without individuality or human emotions, Spike proved otherwise the moment he appeared on the show.

Forced her? Maybe you need to rewatch "Smashed", she was the only who initiated that sexual relationship. And really, saying that Buffy was "forced" into it is ridiculous. She was an adult with her own free will. Didn't you claim that she is a "strong woman", too? Or do you find her mentally incapacitated or so weak that someone can manipulate her?

And in case you didn't notice, getting into her pants was not all he was after - far from that. In fact, he was no less miserable than she was. He was the one who wanted to talk about their relationship, he wanted for it to be a real relationship, and he was clearly frustrated because she kept hiding it and acting ashamed of him - and because he started feeling the opposite of what he told her in "The Gift" - that he wasn't being treated like a man rather than a monster. He kicked her out when she came to him for sex while she was invisible because "The only reason that you're here, is that you're not here." "Cause if I can't have all of you, I'd rather..." Buffy believed at first that sex was what he wanted, but eventually she couldn't keep telling herself that. Why else did she feel she was using him? He hoped she would love him, and she wasn't able to give love, not just to him, but to anyone, she said as much in "Conversations with Dead People" - "I didn't want to be loved, I wanted to be punished". And yeah, he went a very wrong way about it. But saying that it was all his fault is as wrong as saying that it was all Buffy's. I don't know what I find more frustrating, the "Spike was manipulative bastard who dragged poor little Buffy into a destructive relationship" crowd, or the "Buffy was a heartless bitch who abused poor little Spike who loved her so much" crowd. What I saw were two unhappy and desperate people who clung to each other like two drowning people dragging each other down, abusing and hurting each other because they were both so messed up. It was the worst case scenario.

But, no matter how much it all seemed destructive, a few things to consider here: 1) before they started their relationship, she was uninterested in living, and even suicidal (in OMWF), he at least made her interested in living again, 2) whatever happened between them, nobody else got hurt (there were no dead Jennys as a result), 3) Spike realized his mistakes and actively sought a change so he could be a better man, 4) they were able to come back from all the awful stuff that had happened, put it all behind them and be extremely close to each other in S7.

Only if by "no different" you mean that he didn't have a complete personality transplant and lose every character trait that made him who he was. (Fortunately.) Or maybe you needed him to mope around and talk about guilt and redemption in every episode, so you could say "oh see, he's different!"

The difference, however, was huge. Soulless Spike was already quite human-like in many ways, he was capable of love and loyalty, but he lacked an internal moral compass. (Just like many humans do, BTW.) Besides himself, he only cared about a few people he cared about - first it was Drusilla, later Buffy, Dawn and to extent Joyce - and didn't have a moral compass beyond trying to please them. He still didn't realize that killing humans to feed on them was inherently wrong. Soulless Spike casually referred to eating a decorator once, and thought that the first thing he should do without a chip is try to bite a stranger to prove himself that he can still be a monster. Souled Spike knew about right and wrong without having to be told by Buffy, and asked her to stake him when he was afraid he would continue killing people (telling her honestly about his past crimes in no uncertain terms, instead of being silent about them or only reluctantly admit to them once she asked about it). Soulless Spike was aggressively pursuing Buffy and desperately trying to get any kind of sign of love out of her. Souled Spike was not only not trying to force anything, but was very restrained and not even asking anything out of her unless she made the first move; he offered to leave before she said she wanted him to stay. Souled Spike was able to express his love only for her sake and without asking anything in return. In season 2, Buffy told him he was pathetic because he only cared if he got his girlfriend, Drusilla, back, instead of being concerned about the world. At the end of season 7, Spike was dying to save the world not in order to gain Buffy's love - he didn't even believe her when she finally told him she loved him and didn't seem too concerned about it - it wasn't about pleasing Buffy or anyone anymore, he was doing it for its own sake.

Angel/Angelus makes even less sense if you take it in metaphysical sense. What is Angelus then? A demon? Where does he/it come from? Does every human have some sort of demon double that takes over their body once they are sired? How come those demons happen to have so many of the personality traits of the original human, only twisted? It's not surprising that this particular concept of soul was pretty much abandoned after S2, because, well, it never made any sense. And it was contradicted by all those episodes, before and after "Becoming" (both on BtVS and AtS), where it was made clear that Angel remembers everything he did while he was Angelus (before he was cursed by the Gypsies) as well as his life as Liam.

And it's not like Spike had a motive to believe that the demon had nothing to do with his mother...

I'm sure that his mother loved him. But she might have also thought deep inside, while she was alive, that he was a little bit too attached to her and that he should find a woman and get married instead. And maybe she also didn't want her son to live an eternal un-life as a momma's boy. Maybe the 'demon' in her only gave her strength to force him to finally cut the umbilical cord for once and all. He came to the right conclusion, but for wrong reasons.

If anything, this scene is the proof of the opposite, since William still wasn't that different in personality right after he was sired, and more importantly, it is something that souled Spike remembers as having happened to him, not to some strange demon who came out of nowhere and took possession of his body. He clearly thinks of himself as having been the same person all his life and un-life.

I can't make any sense out of this.

What are you talking about? Straw man argument. Are you confusing me with hyzmarka?

I believe Willow said it at some point about staking Spike: "It's icky. We know him." I've seen people wonder why Buffy didn't try to stake Harmony or Drusilla in season 5 when she had the chance, and I thought it was the same reason (in-universe reason, of course - apart from not wanting to lose a character on the show, that is...). Dusting vampires becomes a lot more difficult when you know them - they stop being faceless vamps and you start seeing them as people. You don't have to like them, it's enough to see them as individuals, and it suddenly feels like killing a human, even if you tell yourself it's not - unless they are posing a clear and immediate danger to a human.

In other words, you can't deal with any complexity or moral ambiguity. You must have really hated the show after season 1.

The last scene of "Lie to Me" sums it all up (this was, BTW, the episode that made me change my opinion of the show from "fun, witty, entertaining" to "great show!")

BUFFY: Does it ever get easy?
(casually stakes Ford who rises from a grave behind her)
GILES: You mean life?
BUFFY: Yeah. Does it get easy?
GILES: What do you want me to say?
BUFFY: Lie to me.
GILES: Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
BUFFY: Liar.

(Here's an interesting recent LJ discussion on the subject:
http://2maggie2.livejournal.com/31293.html#cutid1
http://2maggie2.livejournal.com/31544.html#cutid1

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Exactly my thoughts.

Regarding the earlier discussion about racism: vampires in Buffyverse tend to objectify humans and refer to them as things and food - the way that a human would refer to a cow. Early seasons Spike is an excellent example of this: he refers to humans as "happy meals on legs"; in "School Hard" he says he is a "veal guy" so the middle-aged school teacher is too old for him to eat (but not too old to kill); he tells Drusilla, just like any normal human doting boyfriend would, to "eat something" so she could get better, but the "something" is Sheila, the girl that he seduced at the Bronze and lured away in order to bring her as food for his girlfriend.

The way that vampires refer to themselves is not always consistent. I rewatched "Lie to Me" the other day, and Drusilla says to a human boy "Well, I am not a person..." But Spike in the same episode says to Dru "Sorry, baby, I am a bad, rude man." Spike refers to himself as a man a lot of times during the show. Also, Buffy's attitude to vampires in the same episode is very inconsistent, she refers to anonymous vampires as "it" and claims that "You die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and it walks, and it talks, and it remembers your life, but it's not you" but then she contradicts herself by constantly referring to Drusilla as "she". And she later defeats Spike by taking Drusilla hostage - because she had guessed that he would care more about saving his girlfriend than about feeding on the people there, which is a human motivation.

That "serial killer in prison" speech is one of my favorite quotes. I think that the serial killer/psychopath metaphor works much better when it comes to the vampire characters in Buffyverse (though it is problematic if you take it too far, since it would make the Slayers vigilantes). Buffy always criticized Spike for his lack of morals and his character flaws - even back in season 2 (when he offers her alliance, she calls him pathetic for having a selfish motive for it rather than caring about the fate of the world: "The whole earth may be sucked into Hell, and you want my help 'cause your girlfriend's a big ho?!"), which confirms that she always thought of him as a person. You don't criticize a "thing" for its lack of morals, you criticize someone that you see in human terms and consider capable of making moral choices and being better.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Lust is a form of affection, and guess what, that's the only thing you've seen of them.

Angel is the only one who has both perspectives; none souled, and souled. The humans too often project their own emotions on others, assume that they act the same. Buffy, in turn, well, she's Buffy.

It does seem she kept her soul, or rather, that her soul didn't drown underneath the demon and fought back.

Bullshit; I've shown how vampires can't love several times over, especially with the Darla bit. You refusing to accept it, is not my problem.

Humans have the possibility of being good. Demons, and especially vampire demons, do not. There's nothing there but black blight.

Except of course, that he didn't choose to do so at all.

Nope.

I'm not the one who claims it. The show claims it.

And you're wrong. Plenty of diseases, viruses, bacteria that aren't persons that I hate.

Except he didn't. He proved to be just as pure evil a creature as any other vampire; worse, in fact.

Maybe you should rewatch it, and watch what Spike is doing before it, and the episodes before.

No, I don't think I have claimed her to be a strong woman. Don't consider her particularly strong at all, in fact. In that point, however, she was especially weak, vulnerable, and suffering from...

Here it comes again:

A psychological trauma: SHE THINKS SHE'S LITERALLY IN HELL!

Eternal torment and torture, every waking moment of every day.

That is Buffy's existence at the time, and Spike knows it, because she told him.

Except of course that you miss the whole bit, where Spike spent his time hounding, WHILE SHE TOLD HIM TO LEAVE. And in case you hadn't noticed - THERE WAS NO RELATIONSHIP. All that Buffy did was tell Spike something she didn't want to tell her friends because she didn't want to hurt them and didn't think they could handle it - and there's that superiority complex again, ugh. And in one defeated horror weak moment kissed him. And he realized, she was ripe for the picking. And he went for it. First break in, and then spend his time dragging her away from her friends. Notice that on multiple occasions in the past, he showed that he knew that she wasn't dead yet, that she hadn't given in to the death wish yet, that she had friends and family, that she had bonds.

You know, the very bonds his trying to convince her she should break throughout their "relationship".

Interesting you noted the invisibility episode. Notice how Buffy is walking annoyed afterward that she didn't get what she wanted? Aka; after Spike said no, and obviously repeated the request, she left as requested. Notice how often Spike accepted that request: not a once.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Nope. Her bonds with her friends is what made her interested in living again. It's her bonds that allowed her to resist the pull of both him trying to get her to break them, and the utter despair that she was feeling.

The orgasms is just what got her through the day.

Wrong. There were multiple dead Jennys. Do remember the demon eggs Spike was selling "for a friend". We just didn't see them.

And he STILL didn't get dusted; got did Buffy keep going further down in the dumps.

Nope, he didn't.

Which of course, was one of the many reasons why S7 wasn't only horrifyingly bad, it was also just plain disgusting. I've seen many a things on tv, from operations to death and destruction, hell, I work in a meat-processing plant, I've seen, smelt, and picked up some disgusting things.

There's been only one thing that ever gave me urges to hurl that wasn't a disease or alcohol poisoning, from just watching something: Buffy S7.

Except of course that he got no personality transplant, and kept all character traits that made him who he was. From over dramatic lying bullshit, to happily stand back and let humans die in a fight - until Buffy tells him that's a bad thing, to threatening to kill people, to continuing to want to go back into Buffy's pants, and being overall a grade A dick, douche and bastard.

He's the exact same guy pre- and post-ensouling.

No, he wasn't.

No, he wasn't.

Interestingly, he had that problem even before he got turned into a vampire. Remember that bit about the more evil the human, the less different the vampire?

Oh, and no, it isn't so much caring, as being obsessed by.

Post-soul he had the same problem.

And if it Buffy didn't care about such things, he would be claiming the very same things when he had a soul.

Except of course when he had to be told by Buffy, you know, when he was going to let Wood die in a fight, and Buffy had to tell him to go help Wood. Or the time when he had to go get his Slayer-killing trophy after Buffy told him he needed a killer. Wow, what a souled guy; spends his time with the trophy of one of the women he killed, or he can't be man enough. Then there's that whole thing about happily willing to kill Wood - and continuing to wear the man's mother's coat as a trophy, right in front of his face, you know, the mother he killed.

Such knowledge of right and wrong, truly.

Overacting bullshit to get her to believe him, that he's sweety good guy now, and really does have a soul. Of course, his surprise about having a soul through the amulet shows he was lying about that after all. Okay, it turned out to be true after all, but as far as Spike was concerned, he thought he was lying.

Except that's where you're wrong. Spike didn't change one bit about getting into Buffy's panties, and he was doing it just as aggressive before and after his soul. It's just that his approach changed.

Except of course for that annoying problem that he was pinned to the floor, he, a vampire, by a massive column of concentrated sunlight. In other words: he wasn't going anywhere. He didn't choose to die to save the world, the choice was taken away from him. He just spent his time spinning it as if it was his choice to... a, oh yeah, impress his obsession.

One-trick-pony there.

[qutoe]Angel/Angelus makes even less sense if you take it in metaphysical sense. What is Angelus then? A demon? Where does he/it come from? Does every human have some sort of demon double that takes over their body once they are sired?[/quote]

From the siring, the blood of the other demon. Think of it like cellular mythosis, blood of demon goes in corpse, and a new demon is born from it.

Once again; because the corpse that's there, has a brain, that has the chemical, biological brain patterns there. That is what it uses to mold itself its own personality.

Once again, that's because the soul gets to access the third set of memories, the chemical, biological, physical ones, that is the brain. The demon lays those memories there, the soul gets back, and gets to access them.

So no, it was not contradicted, in fact, they spent their time hammering down how completely different the two are.

AGAIN: "Buffy, I feel like I haven't seen you in months." THAT'S BECAUSE HE HASN'T SEEN HER IN MONTHS.

AGAIN: there's Eyghon. Remember Eyghon? Demon takes over sleeping people and corpses. Remember him jumping in Angel? Remembering two demons fighting it out inside angel while he was just along for the ride, and showed completely separate emotions on his face from fighting it out against a vicious creature? That second demon would be Angelus, and the fact that Angel himself wasn't fighting and was just sitting there along for the right proves: they are two separate entities.

I'm sure that his mother loved him. But she might have also thought deep inside, while she was alive, that he was a little bit too attached to her and that he should find a woman and get married instead. And maybe she also didn't want her son to live an eternal un-life as a momma's boy. Maybe the 'demon' in her only gave her strength to force him to finally cut the umbilical cord for once and all. He came to the right conclusion, but for wrong reasons.

If anything, this scene is the proof of the opposite, since William still wasn't that different in personality right after he was sired, and more importantly, it is something that souled Spike remembers as having happened to him, not to some strange demon who came out of nowhere and took possession of his body. He clearly thinks of himself as having been the same person all his life and un-life.[/quote]

Oh, so wrong. You see, Spike is the exception that states the rule. Remember that bit about the demon twisting everything good into evil and making everything bad worse? Remember that bit about the worse the human, the less difference there is with the vampire afterward?

Let's see: female obsession 1; mother, female obsession 2; Drusilla, female obsession 3; Buffy.

I'm noticing a pattern here, notice the first obsession being before Spike got turned.

And remember how Spike is no different after the ensouling, and after the turning. Remember Spike's surprise at having soul? Proving he could never tell the difference between having one and not, despite it means he's a completely different entity?

That's right; here we've got a guy so twisted and evil, the demon could not change him.

Teach your kid that lying is good, and telling the truth is bad, punish them when they speak the truth and reward them for lies, and they will be feeling guilty when they speak the truth, and good when they lie.

Angelus is similar to this, only it's a lot more than just lying. Give him a conscience, and he'll get one that drives him to torture and kill more.

What are you talking about? Straw man argument. Are you confusing me with hyzmarka?

Except of course, it didn't keep Buffy from dusting her friend from Hemery when he rose out of his grave.

Of course, the fact that Willow and Buffy started looking at Spike as people instead of something to be annihilated shows the problem. You don't ever let yourself look at them like that, look before that happens: dust. Aka, the moment he didn't have any more intelligence to share, in that bathtub: dust. That's he where really he should have been dust.

Of course, your reasoning doesn't work with Xander; he said he never forgot what Spike was.

I can handle complexity and moral ambiguity just fine.

But the demons are still demons. Just because humans can be bad as well, doesn't mean the demons aren't still demons, and especially the vampire ones.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

First :

and then

Ok, I'm unclear what you're trying to communicate. (one of many issues with communicating via the internet)

At first I thought you were offended that I suggested the gay community would have been upset by Willow being "bi", but your follow up leads me to believe that you're agreeing with my assessment of the gay community. So, in that light, I'm going to assume you were expressing frustration at the decision to make willow gay-only and that the gay community is in part to blame?

If so, I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about?

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Possible spinoff threads from this thread:

1) Douchebag characters considered bad guys
(features an essay by 3 D Master on the evilness of evil Spike and his evil ways and the 100 reasons why he is evil);

2) Are vampires people?

3) Are Slayers racist? (an essay by hyzmarca on the similarities between the the Watcher's Council and Ku-Klux-Klan)

4) Is Willow a lesbian?

5) Argue about your favorite and least favorite BtVS ships

6) What is a soul?

7) Gay community and its influence on BtVS

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Not clear what this question means?

Well, that completely depends on how you define the word person. That being said, by definition of the show, no, their soul has been replaced by a demon so they are demons walking around in the body of a human. Angel is a person because his soul has asserted itself and so even though he has the physical "benefits" of vampire strength and such, he's essentially a person.

Clearly not exclusively. Unless you buy the convoluted crap that Season 7 Willow tried to sell us. (Look at the hand, look at the hand, just ignore the first 4 seasons of Buffy)

Anya/Xander favorite. Perfect fit.
Willow/Kennedy -> I, like many, many others loathed that relationship.

The eternal you that has nothing to do with your body.

It's bad. (It's influence.)

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

^

Spoiler: my previous post

It was a joke post.

 

Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha

Yeah, the number of topics/discussions that this thread has exploded into is amazing, and again, a testament to how incredibly fertile this show is as a catalyst for discussion on a immensely vast range of topics. I was just going to say I can't remember the last time there was a post actually related to the original point about Xander.