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Metaphors.
I see people in the Buffy fandom look at Spike and try to split up the various aspects of his character - separating his demonic aspects from him as a person, saying things like "his demon" and whatnot, and every time I see it, I think - I think how allistic it is. How neurotypical an approach. That there's some deep, true person hiding behind all the vampirism that can be freed, somehow, and the real Spike can emerge.
The real Spike is the one we see on the show. There's no hidden humanity to him, because we see it. There's no additional demonic aspect to him that can be neatly separated from the rest of himself, because as a vampire, he's got the demonic aspect woven through him entirely without any way to get rid of it without fundamentally changing who he is. There's an unbroken continuity of self from his human life to his soulless vampire existence to his soulful one. There's no breaking apart his character into neat little bits.
That's why he works as a fictional character. He's a vampire through and through.
You can't change that.
You can't try to separate and remove pieces of him and still have the same person left over when you started. You can't take out one part of him and treat it differently than the rest and still think you're taking his entire character into account. Because you're not. That's not how it works. That's not how he works. That's not how good fiction works.
I know it's a fantasy, and within the rules of the fictional world he comes from, there's ways for him to stop being a vampire. He wouldn't be a demon-possessed corpse. And he'd still be Spike, and William, and the new person he becomes, on account of the continuity of self. To purport that because the fantasy allows for this, his demonic aspect can be separated, is to ignore the admittedly hazy rules of that vampiric state. Hazy or not, there's rules within the text.
And those rules are that he's a vampire, through and through.
The real Spike is the one we see on the show. There's no hidden humanity to him, because we see it. There's no additional demonic aspect to him that can be neatly separated from the rest of himself, because as a vampire, he's got the demonic aspect woven through him entirely without any way to get rid of it without fundamentally changing who he is. There's an unbroken continuity of self from his human life to his soulless vampire existence to his soulful one. There's no breaking apart his character into neat little bits.
That's why he works as a fictional character. He's a vampire through and through.
You can't change that.
You can't try to separate and remove pieces of him and still have the same person left over when you started. You can't take out one part of him and treat it differently than the rest and still think you're taking his entire character into account. Because you're not. That's not how it works. That's not how he works. That's not how good fiction works.
I know it's a fantasy, and within the rules of the fictional world he comes from, there's ways for him to stop being a vampire. He wouldn't be a demon-possessed corpse. And he'd still be Spike, and William, and the new person he becomes, on account of the continuity of self. To purport that because the fantasy allows for this, his demonic aspect can be separated, is to ignore the admittedly hazy rules of that vampiric state. Hazy or not, there's rules within the text.
And those rules are that he's a vampire, through and through.
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