What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Oh god, this moment KILLS me. This episode - S5’s Intervention - is a perfect encapsulation of everything that both wrong and right with Spike: wrong, because he made the Buffybot, and right, because he’s still willing to risk his life for the real Buffy’s happiness. More importantly, though, it really hits home the question we’re always made to ask about Spike: is he a monster, or is he a man?  

In S5’s Into the Woods, he says of Buffy, “The girl needs some monster her man” - a way of both taunting Riley as inadequate and suggesting that Spike himself would make her a better partner for her. But later, in S5’s The Gift, he says to Buffy, “I know you’ll never love me. I know that I’m a monster. But you treat me like a man” - a noble Spike acknowledging his own wrongness.

In S6’s Life Serial, however, when Buffy is at her lowest, he tells her, “You’re a creature of the darkness, like me” - a poorly-concealed wish that it’s her who needs to change, not him. Yet in S7, when Spike returns with a soul, he says, “Why does a man do what he mustn’t? For her, to be hers. To be the kind of man who would nev- to be a kind of man- because, after everything that’s happened, he knows that he’s been a monster.

It’s a question that reiterates throughout Spike’s arc, both on Buffy and in Angel. In the S6 flashback episode of Buffy, Fool For Love, we see him tell Cecily, "I know I’m a bad poet, but I’m a good man” - a sentiment unknowingly echoed by Buffy in S7’s First Date, when she tells Giles, “He can be a good man.” And then, in the S5 episode of Angel, Destiny, he tells Angel, “Drusilla sired me, but you, you made me a monster.” 

And this moment sits right at the middle of all this. Because the great tragedy of Spike is that he genuinely WAS a good man, before Angelus made him a monster, and even at his worst, Spike has never really forgotten this. As his love of Buffy steadily nudges him towards redemption, these two facts come into conflict; because Spike can never be a truly good man again - not a human man, and not a good person without any blood on his hands - but he tries to be. That doesn’t mean he always succeeds - the Buffybot, as Buffy herself tells him, is obscene - but still, he tries.

Spike will never be a good man. But he can be, and is, a good monster.

(Source: williampratts, via lucia-amy)

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