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Lots of Spoilers for season 5 of Buffy and season 2 of Angel ahead...
I reckon the bit in 'Crush' where Drusilla breaks the woman in the Bronze's neck and tosses her corpse to Spike to drink from is really telling: the look he gives her is appalled. And then he goes ahead and bites in, because he thinks it's what he's supposed to do at that point. Equally, in 'Triangle' he happily tells the troll where he might find some babies to eat - because it obviously doesn't really occur to him that this is wrong.
Spike has no moral compass. He has people he likes (any Summers woman, and secretly I think most of the Scoobies as well), and he'll often do what he thinks is the right thing because he's trying to make an impression. The funny thing is, this makes him one of the most human characters in the series. The supposed metaphysics of the show don't matter anymore: Spike has no human soul, but it's been shown that non-human, demonic creatures aren't always evil. If and when he gets over the chip thing, he won't just go back to his old ways. Let's not forget that Angel had a period at the turn of the century when he was feeding off murderers and stuff even though he had a soul, just to try and stay with Darla (retroactively revealed in series 2 of Angel, with the implication that he lied to Buffy about this).
One of the interesting things about the BUffy world is that at first, it was established that humans were good and needed protecting, vampires were bad and needed slaying. The later series have shown that it isn't quite that simple - even that these roles must sometimes be reversed (see: the Knights of Byzantium). |
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