I'm pretty much in it because of the grey zones, and while I love the early seasons, I think I would have loved them a lot less if the show hadn't gone on to become more complex and subvert its own ideas.
So that makes at least four of us!
I think the Angelus arc, as originally defined by Joss, was brilliant, and if he could have ended it there – with Buffy sending him and his big rock to hell – it would have been fine. The vampire slayer in love with a soulless vampire, or at least her first major high school crush, because I just have a real hard time believing that at age 16, one knows who one is going to be ten or even five years from then, so how could you be in forever love?) has a definite poignancy to it, and Joss also got to do the “You sleep with a perfectly nice guy and after he gets what he wants, he turns into a monster”. Joss has admitted that he didn’t really think the soul thing through, and to top it all off, it got tied up in many peoples’ minds with sex-as-perfect-happiness, rather than perfect-happiness-including-sex-as one component, which really screwed the pooch! They were still trying to dance around that one in AtS, S4!
As to Angelus and the concept of souls - yes, that is tricky; it's pretty much a s1 invention, and becomes something of a problem when it turns up later (especially when a soul turns out to have a much less apparent effect on Spike than it does on Angelus). On a whole, though, I thought the show did a pretty good job - especially on Angel - with subtly retconning much of the extreme difference between Angel and Angelus as depending on Angel/us's personality.
And I also thought they did a pretty good retcon, by frequently insisting that Spike fought for his soul – it was something he wanted, while Angel was cursed with his as punishment. Let’s face it, they didn’t have a whole lot of options there, especially with people continuing to believe that vanilla sex with virgin Buffy was the total cause of perfect happiness for the Scourge of Europe, rather than feeling needed, having a mission (even if at the time, it was only being mission’s boyfriend), developing friendships with the Scoobies, and seeing the possibility of doing some good combined with the “plot twist” that Spike was really going to get the chip out, so that he could hurt Buffy – which he apparently could do with the chip so I never understood that particular argument.
But yeah, I think more than one Mutant Enemy writer has spent a good deal of time cursing Joss for introducing the Soul concept... :-)
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So that makes at least four of us!
I think the Angelus arc, as originally defined by Joss, was brilliant, and if he could have ended it there – with Buffy sending him and his big rock to hell – it would have been fine. The vampire slayer in love with a soulless vampire, or at least her first major high school crush, because I just have a real hard time believing that at age 16, one knows who one is going to be ten or even five years from then, so how could you be in forever love?) has a definite poignancy to it, and Joss also got to do the “You sleep with a perfectly nice guy and after he gets what he wants, he turns into a monster”. Joss has admitted that he didn’t really think the soul thing through, and to top it all off, it got tied up in many peoples’ minds with sex-as-perfect-happiness, rather than perfect-happiness-including-sex-as one component, which really screwed the pooch! They were still trying to dance around that one in AtS, S4!
As to Angelus and the concept of souls - yes, that is tricky; it's pretty much a s1 invention, and becomes something of a problem when it turns up later (especially when a soul turns out to have a much less apparent effect on Spike than it does on Angelus). On a whole, though, I thought the show did a pretty good job - especially on Angel - with subtly retconning much of the extreme difference between Angel and Angelus as depending on Angel/us's personality.
And I also thought they did a pretty good retcon, by frequently insisting that Spike fought for his soul – it was something he wanted, while Angel was cursed with his as punishment. Let’s face it, they didn’t have a whole lot of options there, especially with people continuing to believe that vanilla sex with virgin Buffy was the total cause of perfect happiness for the Scourge of Europe, rather than feeling needed, having a mission (even if at the time, it was only being mission’s boyfriend), developing friendships with the Scoobies, and seeing the possibility of doing some good combined with the “plot twist” that Spike was really going to get the chip out, so that he could hurt Buffy – which he apparently could do with the chip so I never understood that particular argument.
But yeah, I think more than one Mutant Enemy writer has spent a good deal of time cursing Joss for introducing the Soul concept... :-)
*nods nods nods*