does anyone wanna hear my unsolicited opinions on spike? cool!
spike is a vampire, as in, he is without a soul. he is not a human being. he is biologically evil and has no soul to counteract that. when people consider spike's character, they should not judge him as a human being.
villains in media typically goes two ways. there is the pure evil villain and the villain with trauma. the pure evil villains typically have no motifs and are just monsters. the “traumatic past” villain has a backstory that is meant to make the audience empathize with the villain’s actions.
as an soulless vampire, spike is meant to be the pure evil villain. what makes his character so fascinating is that, despite his soulless nature, he manages to feel human emotion. he is a monster with absolutely no morality, yet still has powerful feelings that should only be able to come from a soul. this is why judging spike’s character as if he were a soul-having being eliminates anything that made his character fascinating in the first place.
