deird1 | (Reply)

From:

THIS is everything I feel about Spike, and I am a huge Spike fan and shipper of Spuffy. Besides that one line, there were actually several others 'cut' from S7. So I personally don't believe Spike said it just to push Buffy's buttons, even if you could interpret it that way based on what made the final cut. In the scene in the church, where Buffy discovers he has his soul, they ended up rewriting quite a bit (if you compare the transcripts to the shooting scripts). And one thing specifically left out is Spike talking about how he raped and murdered for over a century.

There were other signs of his 'evil' nature that got left out of previous seasons. In Smashed, I think it was, he prepped his crypt with whips and chains for what he hoped would be a 'romantic' encounter with Buffy. *Shudders* I suspect the writers often cut some of these more potent reminders in order not to lose sympathy for such a popular character. Just my personal suspicions, however.

Spike obviously enjoyed a different brand of evil than Angelus... but does that make him less evil? I can't buy into that.

I suppose one could say that he is less evil than Angelus in that he WAS redeemable (maybe) when soulless, whereas Angelus was evil through and through. But that doesn't negate Spike's previous evil in any way.

I love Spike because of his redemption arc, and because he chose redemption, even when soulless. Minimizing his evil takes away from how powerfully different Spike is, to me. In a sense, his ability to choose to turn good means that it was a choice to be evil... and you might say that makes his evil worse. This leads into whether or not vampires have free will or not, and is *that* what makes Spike different, and we could get very metaphysical and philosophical here. Which would make my brain hurt.

You wanting to scream that he's the worst person ever when people turn him into a fluffy evil vampire - OMG I not so long ago wrote a similar post due to the exact same feelings. You're more coherent than I, though. :)

*Shameless self-promotion* I wrote an entire story for this last round of Seasonal Spuffy due to that line of Spike's, and the others that were cut from the same scene (such as "You never met the real me").