evil vampires are not so nice

[deird1]

So, over on Mark Watches, the comments are discussing Angel. And someone just said this:

Vampire Spike was never as evil as Angelus (considered one of hte most evil vamps ever) he just does the killing bit because he truly enjoys it. He's not a good guy, doesn't try to be, doesn't pretend to be, but he isn't so evil as to actually want to tear someone mentally to pieces.

Hmm.

I responded by pointing out this line of Spike's:

Do you know how much blood you can drink from a girl before she’ll die? I do. You see, the trick is to drink just enough to know how to damage them just enough so that they’ll still cry when you… ‘cause it’s not worth it if they don’t cry.

...and the answer I got? "Yeah, but he's just saying that so Buffy will kill him."


Allow me to get my ranty pants on for a minute or so.


Spike is a vampire. An evil vampire. A VERY evil vampire.

HE IS NOT A NICE GUY WHO JUST "HAPPENED" TO KILL PEOPLE.

I am, admittedly, a pretty big Spike fan. The guy is awesome. BUT - that doesn't mean glossing over the utterly appalling stuff he did for over a century. HE'S EVIL.

When you start deciding that the evil vampire guy is so cute and fun just a big softy, and didn't really do anything so bad because it wasn't actually on screen, and actually, when he mentioned raping/killing/torturing people, he was probably just lying or exaggerating or something, because he never really wanted to be evil, he just kinda liked violence, and really, can you blame him? it's not like he's actually a bad guy.
...when you do that, I want to scream and write meta on how SPIKE IS THE WORST PERSON EVER. Which I don't actually think, so I'd appreciate it if you could stop motivating me to write it.

It minimises Spike's redemption arc, dismisses murder as irrelevant if you don't know the victim, and also gives the more vindictive Bangel fans lots of ammunition of the "rapist lover" variety, which I'd really like to never hear again.


In short? A character can do awful, evil stuff. And still be your favourite character. And you don't have to gloss over one to keep the other.

Let me leave you with a fanfic that addresses this. Because if I could write that fic, I wouldn't have to write this rant instead.

Comments

[timetravellingbunny]

I'm not so sure about this distinction. For most people, being a hedonist means enjoying food and fine wine and comfort etc. But if the thing you're deriving pleasure from is killing people (or torturing them with railroad spikes)... you're a sadist, and not in a nice consensual-BDSM-sex kind of way.

Saying that Spike was a hedonist is as true as saying that Angelus was an artist because he enjoyed the artistry of torturing people.

[quinara]

The way I see it, Angelus seeks the pain of others (specifically weak and innocent humans while soulless) in order to find pleasure, while Spike seeks pleasure and most often finds it in the pain of others (while soulless and unchipped). The outcome is the same but I think the outlook behind it is slightly different: Angelus is fairly stable in his desires, but we see Spike not only getting sadistic pleasure, but also masochistic pleasure (when Dru cuts his face in School Hard), a sense of comfort from luxurious food (with Joyce in Lovers Walk) and enjoying violence for the sake of violence (with the mobs and the slayers in the FFL flashbacks, where there was risk of pain to himself as much as others). He's more flexible about his source of fulfilment, which I would say allows him to adapt to chipped life and get on the path to good much more readily than Angelus would have been able to.

And I would say Angelus is an artist - a massively Baroque one, who missed out on the main movement by being born too late and living over in Ireland. I would also say he is seriously, seriously warped and evil. But I don't think the two are incompatible.

[timetravellingbunny]

Well, my point was that he is an artist as much as Spike is a hedonist (Angel/Angelus also likes to draw, enjoys watching ballet and apparently has collected artefacts from different parts of the world, so he found pleasure in more conventional types of art as well), but they are also both sadists. Getting pleasure out of snapping people's necks is as much sadism as enjoying the mental torture they feel when you're leaving them creepy messages and watching their reaction to having someone else's neck broken, it's just a different type of sadism. Spike quickly loses patience and he'd be too bored with it. Basically it's like the difference between a kid who gets a kick out of tearing off cat's legs and snapping its neck, and a kid who first tears off its leg, watches it for a while, pretends to give it a chance to run away, lets it wobble and try to run away and then catches it again and snaps its neck.

As for masochism, it's really common to have it go together with sadism (Marquis de Sade would've been more accurately considered a sadomasochist, though more on the sadistic side). Angelus was the one who thought of sticking his hand out in the sun to burn and taunting Spike to do the same.