spuffy truly is just… unbelievable. i think the reason this ship gets me is that it goes so far beyond what a ship usually does, it’s what it encompasses, what it represents, what it’s ABOUT. the struggle between good and evil. the nature of love. being alive. humanity.
on one hand you’ve got buffy the vampire slayer, the chosen one in her generation, she alone who will stand against the vampires. on the other hand you’ve got spike, william the bloody, one of the most evil vampires of his time, named after his favourite torture method, the slayer of slayers. and then the show goes what if… he fell in love with her?
but that wasn’t supposed to happen. spike was supposed to be killed off, buffy’s great love was supposed to be angel. according to the show’s soul lore it shouldn’t even be possible. yet it does happen… turning everything upside down in the process. the show is forced to redefine what it previously established, redefine the way it understood vampires, the way it created them.
it’s forced to raise the question of how much, in a vampire, there is left of the human they used to be, and to what extent the kind of person they were before affects their personality as a vampire (william being first and foremost someone who loves), and really by asking what makes a vampire it’s asking what makes us human. obviously the answer is love.
and so you end up with this beautiful, tragic struggle between a girl whose entire purpose in life is based on the belief that a soulless vampire is an evil being who can’t feel anything real and who’s not capable of love (‘you’re dead inside’), and a soulless vampire who loves her with the utmost devotion despite his twisted ways and longs to be loved in return (‘and he will be loved’) even when he knows it’s impossible.
no matter how she feels she cannot let herself love him, because he doesn’t have a soul. he’s the undead and she comes back to life, but she feels dead inside (this isn’t real/but i just want to feel) while he feels a little more alive (i died so many years ago/you can make me feel). in order for them to meet she has to lower herself down to his level (beneath her), which she does for a time, or he has to raise himself up to her level (to be a kind of man), which he does eventually. they both have to face the monster inside of them, which they see reflected in the other person. she goes to heaven and back, losing a piece of herself, not fitting in anymore, and falls into the darkness with him (i touch the fire and it freezes me/i look into it and it’s black); he goes to hell and back, finding the missing piece that would make him fit, and rises into the light with her (they put the spark in me and now all it does is burn).
spuffy is about how treating someone with dignity and respect, believing in their ability to do good, to be good, to be better than they were, will make even the most evil, unredeemable monster want to change (‘i know that i’m a monster, but you treat me like a man’). will make something want to become someone, will make a man do what he musn’t, will make a vampire get his soul back despite the agony of it. it’s a love so great it makes a character fight and change his own nature, a show rewrite its own lore. idk… i think that’s pretty neat.
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