On being a monstrous person.
I’m very glad I waited so long to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because as much as I knew
Spike would be one of my favorite characters - as it turns out, not
just the show, but pretty much anywhere - I wouldn’t have easily been
able to articulate my attachment to him. I know in middle and high
school, I’d have fallen for him hard, and I might even have been glad
for that, and even now I’m happy to see him. Maybe I’d have used him
when I was younger, that I can’t say. What I can say is how much of what
I love about him is due to him being a vampire, being very much a
product of genre fiction. The things I love most about him are pretty
much impossible to find outside of genre fiction.
Beyond him
being a monster whose ability to express his feelings was deliberately
broken - he had the feelings but no way to act on them without being
hurt, and even if they were some of the most horrible feelings possible,
they were still his.
Beyond him never not wanting to be a
monster, someone who reveled in that even while he knew it cut him off
from things he wanted and people he wanted to be with, because he was
genuinely happy with what he was.
Beyond him being something
everyone, including him, agrees is a monster who’s done terrible things
and deserves terrible things done to him but still has the chance to
make himself better, to be accepted, even if he doesn’t want to change
his fundamental nature, because he wants to be a better person without
stopping being a monster.
Spike is a demonstration that monstrosity isn’t a prohibition against being a person.
Because Spike is one of three characters I know of - the other two are Shadowchild from Digger and Chava from The Golem and the Djinni
- who developed a sense of morality through deliberate work and
conscious intelligence. Without any innate awareness of right and wrong,
without an intuitive grasp on the subject, he still managed to piece
something together, with the kicker being he never denies his emotions.
Spike is consistently a deeply emotional character, even before getting
ensouled, and it’s those emotions which pushed him out of his amoral
state into a place where he wanted to do better, and be better, so he
struggled to change himself. Even in genre fiction, most characters who
come to morality consciously aren’t necessarily emotional. But Spike is.
And Spike stays emotional, even while trying to figure out what’s
expected of him, what he’s supposed to do. Even without that innate
grasp on the concepts involved, he still tries to understand them.
His
emotions are never denied or repressed; they’re always present and
intense. He decided to become moral because of his emotional ties to the
people around him, without his emotions being able to tell him how to
be a good person, and he figured that out through deduction,
observation, and conscious intelligence.
It’s the internal
division of morality, emotion, and intelligence without any of those
parts being ignored or denied, but all of them allowed to remain, and
inform each other, as he develops and changes. The decision to behave
morally before developing the internalized sense of how to do so is a
very compelling narrative, and one that doesn’t happen much outside of
fantasy.
I wouldn’t have had the words to say how much seeing it would have meant to me.
deepintheshadyglen