Post by Sweet on Jun 15, 2016 10:26:25 GMT
If one claims that Spike isn’t responsible for the bad he did without a soul, then he isn’t responsible for the good he did, either. It's a blanket proposition - it's not fair to erase his evil and allow his good.
But Spike is capable of doing good - because of the chip. We’ve never dealt with a chipped vampire - and Angelus was never chipped. Tat doesn’t mean he had any sort of moral compass - the good things he did were pretty much from self interest. But chipped Spike was able to care about a few humans in ways that unchipped Spike wasn’t interested in.
Angelus was either demon or souled demon - Spike has a state of being where his demon was throttled and latent personality traits were forced to the top in order for him to adapt to the chip and survive. In that area any comparison between the two of them is false.
God, I don't know how many times I've read this complain lol
ok, my take is very simple: I expect evil soulless vampires to do evil things. It's in their nature, which makes them once souled not responsible for those acts (even if they feel they are). While it's not in their nature to do good selfless things, therefore I think that it's logical and fair to be surprised, pleasantly surprised, IF they do. This is the official position in the Buffyverse, this is how Buffy views the issue and this is how I view it.
Those who complain? Well, I honestly think that it's because soulless Spike doing good selfless things makes Angel look bad. No, I stand corrected: it's the bad things that souled Angel does that make him look bad, Spike (soulless AND souled) makes Angel look worse. So to me it's just a petty and childish complain from Angel and his fans.
About the chip, my stance is Dawn's: the chip and the soul... "same diff". They work much the same. Both chipped Spike and souled Angel want to go on with their evil life, they both try but are physically incapable of doing it, they both resent that hindrance that was forced on them, they both try to get rid of it, they both still can and do bad things, they both eventualy come to terms with it and try to adjust to their new situation. And during all that they both have the opportunity to live among humans and learn to care for them.
That's why I have no issue in comparing the two and I believe that Angel comes out very very bad from the comparision (hence the complains). Because there aren't only similarities, there are also many differences. The biggest one is that chipped Spike does learn to care and keeps that ability even whithout the chip while Angel just switch to his evil counterpart once he loses his soul, erasing in one second everything that happened during the time he was souled. This big difference is evidence of the fact that ultimately Angel without the soul has no hope whatsover to change and become a better man while soulless Spike was already on that path.