By Chris Snellgrove
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer followers usually debate which characters are the funniest, the saddest, and so forth. Nonetheless, the most important query about these beloved heroes and villains is one which few followers by no means hassle to ask: which character has the most effective arc? In response to Buffy creator Joss Whedon, the stunning reply to that is Spike, the villainous vampire whose arc within the present ended with him sacrificing his life to save lots of your entire world.
Spike Will get The Finest Arc
Contemplating the superb journey that Buffy herself undergoes, it could sound a bit stunning that Whedon thinks Spike has the most effective arc of all of them. His logic, although, is kind of easy: because the showrunner instructed Sci-Fi TV, Spike went out of his option to earn his soul in an try to change into a greater man. Whedon contrasted this immediately with Angel, who he claims “had a soul thrust upon him for 100 years and moped about it.”
The Buffy creator’s comparability is fairly inevitable. Angel and Spike had very comparable narrative arcs, making it practically inconceivable to not evaluate them. Angel’s entire deal, in fact, is that he was cursed with a soul by the Kalderash individuals after he killed their most beloved daughter. The curse was meant to make Angel really feel immense guilt over everybody he had killed as a vampire, forcing him to expertise a neverending lifetime of distress and disgrace earlier than his arc had him meet Buffy and change into a champion in opposition to evil.
Whereas he was round since Season 2, it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season that arrange Spike’s major arc by revealing the character at his lowest. This was the season the place he and Buffy (newly resurrected from the lifeless) had a poisonous however bodily passionate relationship, full with tough intercourse that fairly actually introduced the home down. However close to the top of the season, Spike tries to rape Buffy, an ethical occasion horizon that, for a lot of followers, meant this character was past redemption.
Certainly, it appeared that Buffy the Vampire Slayer might by no means redeem Spike after this, however Joss Whedon gave him an arc in Season 7 to just do that. We discover out that Spike took on a sequence of inauspicious trials as a way to get a soul, his love for Buffy motivating him to change into the type of man who finally sacrifices his life to save lots of the world. It was an arc that took the fandom without warning, but it surely actually shouldn’t have as a result of Whedon had been laying its groundwork for years.
For instance, Buffy has at all times offered Spike as a personality whose arc pivots round love. Again in Season 2, Spike truly helped Buffy save the world largely as a result of he was sick of his girlfriend Drusilla hanging throughout Angel. This weirded Buffy out (“you want my assist ’trigger your girlfriend’s a giant ho?”), however this incident cemented that Spike, within the parlance of Meat Loaf, would do something for love.
Talking of which, the Season 5 episode “Idiot For Love” revealed that when he was nonetheless a human, Spike (or William the Bloody, so named for his “bloody terrible poetry”) was an enormous simp for a woman named Cecily. She was successfully his muse, inspiring poems that she later rejected together with Spike himself, declaring that the middling poet was beneath her. This units up his conversion at Drusilla’s fingers, but it surely additionally proves that Spike was at all times…properly, a idiot for love lengthy earlier than he was an immortal bloodsucker, and he’s at all times been motivated extra by romance than anything.
For the entire witty sarcasm Buffy the Vampire Slayer is thought for, Spike’s arc reveals the earnest, emotional core of your entire present: the revelation that love actually does conquer all. Love convinces a soulless rapist of a mass-murdering vampire to change into a hero who offers his life within the remaining episode to save lots of the world. By going from the bottom depths to such dizzying heights, Spike unexpectedly achieved the most effective character arc within the Whedonverse, as expertly deliberate by none apart from Joss Whedon himself.
