This view around the science club guy who reanimates his brother kind of strikes me as autistic?
I do this too, a little bit. Spike in particular has a lot of traits that strike me as ADHD-like - impatient, impulsive, easily bored, etc. But I'm probably just projecting.
This is the episode that gives you "love makes you do the wacky", but that isn't love. Like the photographer's creepy porn selection and showing a menu of faces to choose one for the new zombie girlfriend, that's 100% objectification fail.
This is exactly what bothers me when people take Spike's statement that he "loves" Buffy at face value, and it's why I was really glad about the direction his character has gone in the Season 10 comics (not sure if you're caught up with that yet and I don't want to spoil it if you're not.) I find Spike to be a really interesting character and he's definitely my favorite, but for most of the series he's operating on a really screwed-up definition of "love". He sometimes does things for Buffy that are exactly what someone would do for a person they love, but that's sort of the broken clock (or in this case, the broken/absent moral compass) being right twice a day. You then have the rest of the time where he's stealing her underwear and kidnapping her and generally being creepy, right up until "Seeing Red" when he finally goes so far that even he understands that being "good by vampire standards" isn't good enough. And even then, I sometimes suspect that even in getting his soul he was mainly motivated by selfishness - he knew he didn't have a chance with Buffy otherwise, and wildly underestimated how much it was going to change him.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2015-08-12 04:12 pm (UTC)I do this too, a little bit. Spike in particular has a lot of traits that strike me as ADHD-like - impatient, impulsive, easily bored, etc. But I'm probably just projecting.
This is the episode that gives you "love makes you do the wacky", but that isn't love. Like the photographer's creepy porn selection and showing a menu of faces to choose one for the new zombie girlfriend, that's 100% objectification fail.
This is exactly what bothers me when people take Spike's statement that he "loves" Buffy at face value, and it's why I was really glad about the direction his character has gone in the Season 10 comics (not sure if you're caught up with that yet and I don't want to spoil it if you're not.) I find Spike to be a really interesting character and he's definitely my favorite, but for most of the series he's operating on a really screwed-up definition of "love". He sometimes does things for Buffy that are exactly what someone would do for a person they love, but that's sort of the broken clock (or in this case, the broken/absent moral compass) being right twice a day. You then have the rest of the time where he's stealing her underwear and kidnapping her and generally being creepy, right up until "Seeing Red" when he finally goes so far that even he understands that being "good by vampire standards" isn't good enough. And even then, I sometimes suspect that even in getting his soul he was mainly motivated by selfishness - he knew he didn't have a chance with Buffy otherwise, and wildly underestimated how much it was going to change him.