On season 4 of Buffy...should I be watching Angel?

[RoJoHen]

If you wanna feel old, Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn, turned 30 on Sunday

That makes me feel young actually! At least in comparison, though I'm not too far behind her.

I guess that's one reason I liked Dawn as well, since we were close in age. Also may have had a bit of a crush on her.

I didn't realize she was that old. We're about the same age, but I didn't actually watch Buffy until I was about 25, so she still feels like a little kid to me.

 

[DonIago]

I was utterly disconcerted to later see her in Six Feet Under.

 

[JD]

I always liked the new dynamic Dawn brought to the show.
If you go into the Season 8+ comics, she's got a fun little arc in Season 8. She's still in the first stage of the arc where I last left off, but I know about the second part of it.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

So weird to see future A list actors in bit parts. I see 'Amy Adams' in the credits and I'm like, 'Buh?'

I like Dawn so far. The juxtaposition of thinking she's a normal teenager with the fact she's a weapon in a supernatural battlefield.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

So weird to see future A list actors in bit parts. I see 'Amy Adams' in the credits and I'm like, 'Buh?'

That's me on an Angel episode listing Jeremy Renner!

 

[theenglish]

So weird to see future A list actors in bit parts. I see 'Amy Adams' in the credits and I'm like, 'Buh?'

I like Dawn so far. The juxtaposition of thinking she's a normal teenager with the fact she's a weapon in a supernatural battlefield.

I was thinking the same thing recently as I was watching some old X-Files episodes.

 

[Kemaiku]

If you wanna feel old, Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn, turned 30 on Sunday

*shrugs* that makes her less than a year younger than me. I don't feel all that old.

 

[theenglish]

If you wanna feel old, Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn, turned 30 on Sunday

*shrugs* that makes her less than a year younger than me. I don't feel all that old.

She is now the same age I was when her character first appeared on Buffy--I feel old.

 

[Forbin]

Hey, she's only 28 years younger then me!

 

[JirinPanthosa]

So I just watched the episode where Spike tells Buffy how he killed the two slayers.

...Spike doesn't have a soul, right? I don't know how they could possibly make him sympathetic without giving him a soul without violating established precedent. If soulless people are allowed to have sympathy for people and have moral value it contradicts their excuse for Angel being the only good vampire without Buffy having to second guess her decision to kill vampires.

 

[DonIago]

I don't think it's ever established that vampires need to have "human souls" to feel human'ish emotions. Certainly Spike and Dru always seemed among the most human of the vampires we've seen.

 

[RoJoHen]

Monsters or not, they still have feelings.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

So I just watched the episode where Spike tells Buffy how he killed the two slayers.

...Spike doesn't have a soul, right? I don't know how they could possibly make him sympathetic without giving him a soul without violating established precedent. If soulless people are allowed to have sympathy for people and have moral value it contradicts their excuse for Angel being the only good vampire without Buffy having to second guess her decision to kill vampires.

Which is a a plot point later in Angel.

Spoiler: vampire souls

Angel and Spike fight over the Shanshu prophecy which promises the reward of becoming human to the vampire with a soul. Since both at that point have one, Spike argues that he deserves it more because he actually fought to get his back while Angel's was forced on him and he is basically a beast on a leash. Angel wins the fight, but signs his claim away to W&H to infiltrate them

 

[Christopher]

The thing is, most of Whedon's career (at least up until he started doing Marvel) has been a steady movement away from the fairly basic good-evil dualism we saw at the start of Buffy. Over the course of Buffy, we came to see the good in demons and the evil in humans. Over the course of Angel, we saw the lines between good and evil become progressively blurred and the very nature of an apocalypse called into question. Firefly was about criminals and outcasts just trying to get by, and about the corruptions within a nominally benevolent society. Dollhouse was about flawed characters just trying to do what they thought was right but generally doing immense harm in the process, and its most heartless and destructive characters at the beginning turned out to be the most noble and heroic ones at the end. Even Agents of SHIELD has spent most of its run deconstructing the good-evil paradigm, having the most conventional clean-cut hero character turn out to be the show's main villain and having the benevolent title organization turn out to be corrupt at the core (though that part came from the movies).

So it's not surprising that the initial, simplistic "People with souls are good" formulation got eroded away in favor of a more ambiguous interpretation.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Yeah, we've seen demons with emotions but it seems like they're contradicting their own established mythology here.

I interpreted having a soul to mean having free will to choose between good and evil, and creatures who lack that free will aren't able to make the choice to contradict their nature.

It seems like if they wanted all vampires to be able to make this choice they shouldn't have established the soul as the reason for Angel being the one exception. Seems now they only cling to that so the viewers can let Angel off for his demon phases.

 

[DonIago]

Given that the majority of vampires we see are pretty much cookie-cutter evil, perhaps being non-cookie-cutter evil is simply a...for lack of a better term, mutation. I.e. it's not supposed to happen, it just -does- sometimes.

To borrow from other vampire myths, perhaps there are at least two bloodlines, leading to the "generic" vampires and the ones like Angel, Spike, etc. In fact, given that all of the more emotional vampires (I'm recollecting) we see are also "related", that would kind of make sense.

While it's an overly-romantic notion I suppose, in my own world the process of becoming a vampire was more of a sliding scale than a binary transformation, and if one had the will to cling to their humanity, it was possible...just difficult, and ultimately not something most of those who became vampires were capable of doing.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

They established Spike as being different than other vampires in his very first appearance when he defied every cliché about vamps (as far as the Buffy-Verse is concerned) and did away with the Annoying One.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Yeah, we've seen demons with emotions but it seems like they're contradicting their own established mythology here.

I interpreted having a soul to mean having free will to choose between good and evil, and creatures who lack that free will aren't able to make the choice to contradict their nature.

It seems like if they wanted all vampires to be able to make this choice they shouldn't have established the soul as the reason for Angel being the one exception. Seems now they only cling to that so the viewers can let Angel off for his demon phases.

The point of Angel's soul isn't that it automatically makes him good and other vamps' lack thereof automatically makes them evil. It's that Angel and Angelus are two different people. The person (soul) leaves the body and is replaced by a demon which just has the same memories/mannerisms. Though this was also contradicted by Spike being basically the same pre and post soul, but at least there he's the only actual exception, and he's always been rather exceptional anyway.

At the end of the day, all vampires can have feelings for each other which can vary just as widely as human feelings (although most will abandon even their loved ones to save themselves) and all have the potential to be good if that's what they really want to do. But only 0.00001% ever have enough motivation to do anything with that potential.

So, actively hunting vampires just because they're vampires can be a bit morally questionable, but Buffy generally gets a pass on this because 99 times out of 100, when she kills a vamp/demon, it was already established as trying to kill someone else. And there were other times shown where Buffy was capable of making the distinction between a demon with evil intent and one without it on the fly and choosing not to kill when appropriate.

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah, as the franchise went on, we learned there were a lot of good or neutral demons (Clem, Lorn, etc.). I figure the demons that possessed dead people and turned them into vampires were generally among the more predatory and ruthless species of demon, but in any population there are bound to be variations.

Anyway, one thing that Joss Whedon has never been particularly strong on is worldbuilding. He pretty much made up the cosmology of the Buffyverse as he went, changing the rules as needed to serve the story. So there's not a lot of logic or consistency to it.

 

[gblews]

Yeah, we've seen demons with emotions but it seems like they're contradicting their own established mythology here.

I interpreted having a soul to mean having free will to choose between good and evil, and creatures who lack that free will aren't able to make the choice to contradict their nature.

From what I can tell from Buffy is that having a soul means having a conscience, feeling remorse for evil deeds. Creatures without souls feel no remorse no matter how evil the deed. Frankly, sometimes a conscience is the only thing that keeps creatures with souls from doing evil.

No reason to believe that vamps don't have free will. I think they do but most choose evil most of the time, knowing they won't be troubled later on.

On the other hand, one could also argue that Spike felt remorse after his little incident with Buffy in her bathroom. But whether his post incident behavior was actual remorse or simple logic (what I did was bad in Buffy's eyes, so if I want her to love me, I can't do stuff that is bad in her eyes), is open to debate.