(Forgive me but I didn't screenshot the third ask; every time I try to answer one of these it disappears. So @twotothenth here it is, my third attempt at answering these asks. Now I have an invisible draft instead of one of the previously invisible asks, and one of the asks is invisible again! A twofor! From here on is what I wrote in my second attempt at answering this, which luckily I decided to copy and paste following the disappearance of my first attempt, and the continuation thereof.)
This is what I would like to call a major L for myself and Tumblr as a website, because these asks are from goddamn April 2024, but they only showed up in my inbox on Thursday. And I sat and typed up most of an answer, but it was very late in the am and I wanted to go to sleep, so I went to save the draft… and it fucking vanished. Just poof, gone. It's like I never touched the ask. I don't fucking know. So here I am again, it's 1:18 am, and I will be attempting to answer your question, which I would have gladly answered in 2024, and am very happy to answer now, I promise, Tumblr just likes to make asks I get invisible. (I genuinely have a minimum of 25 invisible asks in my inbox.)
We need to start by establishing what the fuck we're talking about when we're talking about "the soul canon". Well, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when it debuted in 1997, set a very clear boundary between humans and vampires - beyond the "one is mortal and eats food and one is immortal and drinks blood" thing. That is, humans have souls - but once a human is turned into a vampire, they are possessed by a demon, and the soul is gone.
You also need to understand that season one of btvs - really the whole show, but especially the high school years and the first season is most explicit about it - posits slaying as a metaphor for growing up. The first season is only a half season, and while it employs the monster of the week format to varying degrees of success, the throughline is a combination of that slaying metaphor and "high school is (literally) hell". It's a lot of fun, but doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance. In this context, vampires - the creatures a slayer is meant to fight against - are representative of perpetual childhood, and the soul represents the developing moral compass of an adult, a person's ability to make selfless choices. Vampires, as soulless creatures, are capable of emotions and even complex motivations, but they are ultimately selfish, unable to see others as complex and worthy of taking into account, constantly acting on impulse. (Please note I am borrowing heavily from both Passion of the Nerd and Mark Field here.)
Angel in season one fits into this framework to a T, and his namesake episode showcases that very well when he attempts suicide by cop, tempting Buffy into killing him. Wanting to die isn't necessarily a selfless impulse, but in this case it is motivated by guilt over the genuinely horrible things he did when soulless, an emotion other vampires are (seemingly) incapable of.
Season two complicates matters a little with the introduction of Spike and Drusilla. Their dynamic isn't inherently at odds with the existing mythology; one can love selfishly, obsessively, or as Drusilla puts it later, "quite well, but not wisely". Passion is the theme of the season, and it is very clearly not always a positive quality. The problem is the Judge. I understand the purpose of the scene in which the Judge is unable to burn Angelus; we, the audience, need to be convinced that the Angel we know is gone, and this scene is a very effective tool to that extent. That is not the problem. No, the problem is that he is the only vampire not at risk. I can't name the vampire that the Judge kills - the one who "stinks of fear" - but it's very clear that his fear alone was enough of a connection to humanity to be burned out of him. Spike and Drusilla, by virtue of their connection, "reek of humanity", and have to remind the Judge they're the ones who brought him back just so he won't kill them.
And this is... kind of weird, right? What makes it so Spike and Drusilla have humanity to burn, but Angelus doesn't? Aren't they all equally vampires? Angel was in danger last episode when he had a soul, but now that he doesn't have a soul he's completely humanity-less?
This is not really ever addressed, but it stands at the center of what I would like to call The Angel Issue. There are very few vampires we get to see before they turn into a vampire, as soulless vampires, and ensouled after their turn. In fact, they number at a total of three: Angel through his curse; Spike through his trial; and Darla over on AtS during her brief stint being human again. In fact, beyond the Fanged Four and Harmony, I don't believe there's any characters we spend a notable or considerable amount of time with both when they have souls and when they don't. And during the high school years all we have is Angel/Angelus to look at, and honestly he's just a weird case!
We have to address the name thing, right? Like, okay, getting renamed as a vampire does seem to be a thing. Not everyone goes through with it, but I'm 100% sure the Master wasn't called that before he was turned. His name was probably Ye Olde Geoff or something. We don't know Darla's name before she turned, but we know that the Master is the one who named her. Angelus was Liam in life; Spike was William. But only Angel gets a separaten ame when he has a soul post turning and when he doesn't; the narrative treats them not as two sides of a whole, but as two separate characters sharing a body. That's made pretty much literal in season four of AtS.
And well, the Issue is that Angel is the only one who's like that. Darla when she does and does not have a soul still acts, sounds, and looks more or less the same; Spike still have the same swagger and cooler-than-thou attitude. Hell, even when you look at the vampires who don't get souls during the course of the series. Drusilla as a human may have been more tethered to humanity, but she sounded and acted quite similar to her more "crazy" self; and Harmony, well, she was just as pathetic and likely to join a cult as a human as she turned out to be as a vampire.
But really we should be disregarding the happenings over on AtS for the simple reason that AtS doesn't give a shit about the metaphorical meaning of the soul. Unlike Buffy, where vampires-as-eternal-children is a critical elements of the show, Angel consistently muddies the water, and whether Angel has a soul or not is purely a source of drama (or comedy). Angel isn't a show about growing up, it's a show about being an adult (and about addiction, and about the road to redemption, but that's not relevant right now), and as such demons are not necessarily evil, and humans are not necessarily good. That isn't to say that Buffy is not complex, God forbid, I actually think Buffy does far more when it comes to subtext and metaphor and is far more consistent about its use thereof, but all through to the very end there is no question in Buffy that a soul is what allows one to be a good person.
But disregarding AtS doesn't really solve the problem at all, because the problem posited in Surprise with the Judge is an underlying conflict for Spike in seasons five and six. "I know that I'm a monster," he says, "but you treat me like a man." Which one is he?
The easy answer is, well, monster. That's why he had to go get himself a soul, right? Specifically because he had proved himself to be a monster. Except the whole framework kind of falls apart when you realize he had to feel true guilt - the thing that separated Angel from Angelus above all - in order to want to go get a soul. And like... Again, Spike (soulless) and Spike (soulful) are the same guy except one wears a little bit of color sometime. I can't discount the Doylist aspect, which is that Spike was an extremely popular character and changing him completely would've been disastrous, but they certainly could have done more with it if they wanted.
So like... What does all of this mess come out to? Because we don't have to have a unified answer to "why is this like this" from an in world perspective. We can satisfy ourselves with the Doylist perspective in which the show grew up and the metaphor did alongside it, and that watching a truly stagnant character the way vampires were originally designed to be is just kind of boring, so Spike also had to go through character development. But I think it's worth examining from a Watsonian perspective as well. Given the facts - most vampires have some humanity in them, most vampires have some sort of continuity between themselves with and without souls, most vampires aren't treated as two separate characters with and without souls, and yet Angelus doesn't have any humanity, doesn't have continuity with his ensouled self, is treated like a completely different character from Angel - what can we learn about the soul?
I would like to posit that a soul carves itself a space to inhabit. It's a mold! If your soul has a distinct shape, then the demon that makes you into a vampire is going to take that shape, even if the soul is gone. And like a container that recently had cumin or tomato paste in it, the soul leaves a residue. That residue, the mold the demon is trying to fit into, isn't just personality - it's a kind of essence. The stronger the personality, the more complex your inner world is, the more that essence is going to shape the demon, rather than the other way around.
Fool For Love demonstrates this perfectly. William, as a human, was a pathetic simp; Spike, as a soulless vampire, is also a pathetic simp. I'm saying this not to be mean - Spike is my second favorite character in the show, one step below Buffy and just above Tara and Dawn. But that episode is meant to illustrate pretty much that exactly as I said. William was a bad poet, but a passionate man. He fell in love with a woman who didn't want him, and his confidence wouldn't recover until he fell in love with Drusilla, who did. And then when Buffy rejects him, he once again finds himself sad and alone. This is a pattern of behavior that is based on his life as a human.
Angelus, on the other hand, is significantly less based on the pattern that Liam set, mostly cause Liam didn't have a personality. AtS explores his daddy issues a little more - I know I said we should disregard AtS in this conversation, but I might as well bring it up. Listen, Darla can say as much as she wants that Angelus will never be free of his father, it basically never comes up again outside of gags. I truly don't think that Angelus is shaped by Liam in any meaningful way. Instead, Angel is shaped by Angelus. But because a soul, even on AtS, can never truly be contained in the static shape left behind by a demon, and Angel is capable of growth and change, Angelus does not fill the shape that Angel leaves. They're two different shapes in the same container, which originally was just a big empty box, but now has both a flat circle and a three dimensional hexagonal prism in it.
In short, Angelus is not a reaction to Liam; he is about as pure a demon as a vampire, as a half-breed, can get. Angel is a reaction to Angelus, but he grows and changes in a way that leaves Angelus as a distinct creature. Spike and basically every other vampires is a reaction to his human self; when he is ensouled, he fits into the mold not cause he hasn't had time to grow yet - I would argue that soulless Spike grew a lot, but also ensouled Spike does a lot of growing in a very short time - but because he isn't a reaction to the demon, but a reemergence of William.
Tl;dr I'm probably overthinking this and it's now 2:34 am - scratch that, 2:35 - and I would like to go to sleep, Liam had no personality and William had that sadboy energy and that's why Angelus/Angel and Spike are Like That. Thanks for coming to my ted talk
