This is not new, I know
Apr. 25th, 2010 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupOne of the things that's reeeally bugging me about early S7 is this whole Scooby attitude of "Spike has a soul, so we should treat him like a person now." For the sake of argument, I'll grant that one needs a soul to be a 'good' person (whatever that means in the Buffyverse), but the idea that one needs a soul to be a person at all is, well, quite obviously silly and also extremely dangerous. In what sense is Spike (or Harmony, or Dalton, or Holden Webster, or, heck, even Angelus) not a person? Evil, without conscience, inconsiderate, yes, but hardly lacking in personality or agency or sentience or even emotion. There's a reason Buffy is called a warrior, not an exterminator; hyperbole aside, one does not actually make war on vermin.
I wouldn't mind this so much if I thought the soul/person vs. unsoulled/non-person distinction was just the Scooby mechanism for coping with killing things that look human. From Jesse forward, our Scoobs have needed some way of dealing emotionally with what they do. But so far as I can tell, it's the writers' line, too, and they have no similar excuse.
And yes, I know this is an old, old complaint; I've seen way too many fanfics in which some authorial mouthpiece tells one or more of the characters what idiots they are about it. "Hitler had a soul, and look what he did!" (This line of reasoning actually only proves that souledness does not necessarily imply goodness - it says nothing about soullessness one way or the other.) And I hate bald editorialization in my fic. But you know, in this case I surely do understand the sentiment.
I wouldn't mind this so much if I thought the soul/person vs. unsoulled/non-person distinction was just the Scooby mechanism for coping with killing things that look human. From Jesse forward, our Scoobs have needed some way of dealing emotionally with what they do. But so far as I can tell, it's the writers' line, too, and they have no similar excuse.
And yes, I know this is an old, old complaint; I've seen way too many fanfics in which some authorial mouthpiece tells one or more of the characters what idiots they are about it. "Hitler had a soul, and look what he did!" (This line of reasoning actually only proves that souledness does not necessarily imply goodness - it says nothing about soullessness one way or the other.) And I hate bald editorialization in my fic. But you know, in this case I surely do understand the sentiment.
