Humans are monsters if they act monstrous. They’re really no different from your garden variety creature of the night kind that look monstrous but don’t always act monstrous. It’s the Quasimodo thing. Hiding themselves away in their tower of shame that the only humans they personally know have conditioned them to believe is where they belong because humans will never love them or look at them as if they can be loved. Of course they’re going to believe they are a monster eventually. They’ve never been treated otherwise. They’ve never been viewed as a man. And even as a man, they’ve never been accepted for it. They’ve always been beneath the worthiness of love. So they’ve come to believe it about themselves even if it is not the truth of their nature. So then they act out and perform the kind of behaviour that makes it true. Because what else do they have to live for? What’s the difference between being perceived as evil and being it? Nothing. Not to them. It becomes an internalised behaviour. A pattern of performance. Their perception of themselves becomes how others have perceived of them because they either look in the mirror all too often or never at all. And they become the monster even if they never were in the first place because it’s all they see and they’ve been taught to perform as it. And this learned behaviour becomes the way they cope. The way they escape from their true nature which is neither in the one extreme or in the other. If they can’t be the monster and they can’t be the man… what else is there to be and where else is there to go? The act ends up being the only thing they ever really do because the act makes sense. The act is familiar. The act is comforting. The act is all they’ve known. And somehow, through it all, they’re always them no matter how they appear, no matter how they behave. The self slips through when the defences are down like some kind of Trojan horse designed to disguise itself as victory and reward - but is there to conquer.
You are the monster or act the monster? Same deal.
SPIKE: “It didn't work. Costume. Didn't help. Couldn't hide.”
BUFFY: “No more mind games, Spike.”
SPIKE: “No more mind games. No more mind.”