On Buffy and Angel, it was common for characters to claim that, when a human is turned into a vampire, naught is left of the mortal that was. The person’s soul is considered identical to the person’s identitity, and that, it is claimed, is removed from the person’s body by death. A demon then takes up residence–a demon that existed before the turning and is unrelated in all senses to the person that was.
That’s what the Watcher’s Council says, anyway. Anybody buy it?
After seeing what happened to Spike’s mother, I buy it.
Possibly. Most demons seem to be lazy, and would use the “pre-packaged” personality template as a starter. If the personality was a dominant one, it would have a stronger initial effect on the vampire. But something of the original person has to remain, otherwise how do you explain Spike, and Dru, and Darla, and Holden, and “glasses-vamp”, and many others?
I buy it, for the most part.
Some small part of that person might still exist once they turn vamp, but it takes something extraordinary to bring it back into control, like Angelus being cursed with a soul, or Spike falling in love with Buffy. Or Harmony, after Cordelia becomes friends with her again despite Harmony being a vampire.
Well, in the case of Harmony Kendall, there’s little difference in personality pre-vamp and post-vamp. Angel is also pretty much the same. Spike, however, is quite different once he was vamped.
The trouble is that the Whedonverse isn’t consistent about it.
Liam was a drunken, lazy, whoring layabout before he was turned. Presumably he had a soul then. After Darla turned him, he became the bad-ass Angelus. Say what you will about Angelus, he wasn’t lazy. When the gypsies cursed him, he didn’t revert to be Liam, he became Angel. To me, Liam, Angelus and Angel each are distinct people with distinct personalities.
One problem is that the vampires have complete memory of the person whose body they use, and the self can’t be totally separated from memories. That’s an idea Whedon also explored in Dollhouse.
Another problem is that Whedon likes to pose interesting questions, more than he cares about complete internal consistency. Sometimes the vampires were just soulless killers as needed for monster of the week stories, but at other times they were subject to many of the same needs and emotions as their human victims.
True. There was also that vampire in “Conversations with Dead People” who was pretty much the same guy that he was when he was in high school… it’s just that now he’s a vampire.
That was Holden. You also have to consider the guy with part of a soul that Angel turned on the sub.
Yeah, I don’t buy the “its no longer your friend, its the demon that killed your friend” argument. Giles said that in Season 1 Episode 1, but that was just kindly old Giles lying to the Slayer and Scoobies so that they would not hesitate to stake their turned friends. The biggest evidence of that for me? The people that were important to the human are still important to the newly-turned vampire. Both Spike and Angelus *cared *about the families of William and Liam, just in different ways. If the vampire was a different entity why should it care about the ex-family?
The opposite of love is not hate, by the way–the opposite of love is indifference.
I’m not sure what they tell us. They’re clearly exceptional, having been made by ensouled vampires.
I went with your second option, though it’s not quite what I get from the series.
As I said in Olives’ thread, vampires are a perversion of the humans they were - they have mostly the same drives and desires, simply filtered through a demonic, predatory lens. We can see this in Liam/Angelus (Hedonist), William/Spike (Romantic), and Harmony (Bully).
Angel says as much…or almost does, until the looks from the rest of the Scoobies make him think better of it…when they use the ‘oh, vamps aren’t like the people they were’ line on Willow, who was freaked after meeting Vamp-Willow.
I never found the claim that vampires are entirely different people from the original to be credible. They’re certainly changed - they’re given a new set of goals (feed/kill/hurt), they lose a lot of their capacity for empathy, and so on. But the scale of these changes doesn’t seem like anything far outside of normal human experience. Puberty, for example, brings on a whole new set of behavioral imperatives - I’ve certainly changed since elementary school, but I’d be loathe to say that elementary-school Mr. Excellent was killed and replaced by me. And medical history is replete with folks who’ve suffered brain damage that impaired that capacity for impulse control, caused inappropriate sexual behavior (even a propensity for sexual assualt), and so on. Again, these people are certainly changed - but they’ve not been killed and replaced by dopplegangers.
Further, it’s clear in the Whedonverse that cognition takes place in the brain, whether one is a human or vampire - the Initiative neutered Spike by putting an implant in his brain, and if his brain had been damaged during a botched effort at extraction, he would have risked becoming a vegetable. When Angel was trapped underwater for a summer, Wesley feared that starvation would cause brain damage - which would turn him into a vegetable.
Finally - the vampires themselves seem to believe that there is continuity of consciousness between the original human and the vampire. Angelus tortured Dru before turning her, specifically so that she would remain crazy after she was turned.
Vampires in the Whedonverse are people who’ve been drastically changed - given powerful and dangerous impulses, and stripped of most of their capacity to control them. But they’ve clearly retained continuity of consciousness with their human selves - they’re the same people - changed, but with (as we’ve seen) some residual capacity to control their changed behavior.
Which raises an interesting ethical problem: One of Buffy’s primary modes of operation is to wander graveyards, staking newly raised vampires. In so doing, she’s often killing people who have never done anyone any harm in their lives, nor tried to do so. (Consider the cases in which she’s “helped” a vamp out of his coffin, only to immediately stake him). One could argue that many or most of these vampires will inevitably go on to kill people - but that clearly isn’t so: When faced with situations in which they know that transgression will lead to their death, both Spike and Harmony were capable of controlling their behavior. In fact, once Angel took over Wolfram and Hart, it seems like soul-less vampires were routinely employed on that basis. Vampires may not have much of an intrinsic moral impulse, but they can be deterred, and they then lead fairly normal and harmless lives.
In short, there’s a fine argument to be made that Buffy is a particularly appalling sort of monster.
An even better example might be the season seven incident in which she killed an older woman (older to her, anyway) who had just been truend and was only just then raising: She apologized and said she was doing her job. I think that, by that point, Buffy knows that what she is doing is ethically iffy. Part of that probably comes from her general distrust of the Watcher’s Council at that point. She likely thinks that the fact that the WC holds any given position is prima facie reason to be suspicious of it.
How does Buffy effect this deterrance without routinely killing vampires?
Well, Buffy herself (and all the other Slayers) are Powered by Demon™ - “It just keeps killing, and killing, and killing…” The only way to stop the slaughter is for both sides to decide not to kill. That ain’t gonna happen very soon, so the Slayers keep at the job. They are kinda like the Strategic Air Command was designed - stay out of trouble and don’t threaten the peace and get to continue to walk the planet. Start acting up and you get nuked. Most of the vamps in the world don’t cause problems. Otherwise Sunnydale and environs wouldn’t be so “special,” Hell-Mouth or no.
Well, that’s the problem - she can’t, not all by herself. We know what’s required to inculcate a respect for the law even in those who might otherwise be inclined to flaunt it: A comprehensive educational and criminal justice system, that people enter at birth, leave only at death, and is capable of consistently rewarding good conduct while punishing the bad.
In other words, the only way to really solve this problem would be to bring vampires under the control of the State. If Buffy were both smarter and less morally wishy-washy, she’d only slay when necessary, and as a stopgap, and devote the bulk of her efforts to bringing the vampire problem into the light of day (so to speak). The State could then work to ensure that new vampires would rise in supervised facilities, or be captured quickly, and socialized to prevent violence. If vampires offended, well - they’d be tried, just as with normal criminals.
Of course, all this would make for very boring television. 
I voted for the in-between option.
My own theory, which I really have never seen anything to disprove, is that the vampire is a new individual, but has access to the memory and character of the old human to draw on in its search for an identity.
The vampire psyche also has a sort of instinctive sense of evil, which affects the way it uses the personality of the prior human self - everything goes through the evilness filter, as it were.
For sure the soul of the human is gone; the quintessence of what makes that person who they are, is not there. Otherwise, the “ensouling” of Angel and consequences thereof make no sense.
However, the brain retains its memories and so on. When the demon take residence in the human body, it retains the memories and something of the original personality, except that both are twisted–sometimes as completely unrecognizable, sometimes a lot less so–by the demonic force now inhabiting the body in place of the original soul.
I didn’t vote.
I say it’s a confusing muddle in which Joss contradicts himself.
When Spike gets his soul back, he feels horrible remorse for all the people he’s killed. Why? If it was a demon that did it, and not him, why should he feel personally responsible? When ghost Spike starts fading away, he learns he’s going to hell. Why? William was by all indications a good man, who doted on his mother, and whose worst sin was his poetry. Why should William be condemned to hell for something a demon who is a completely separate entity did?
Well, then that’s what’s option three covers.
I don’t think that’s a contradiction. When Spike & Angel are ensouled, the vampire-demon doesn’t go away; rather, a human element is added. The Spike of Angel Season 5 & Buffy Season 7 is not absent his demon part; he simply has an added perspective on it.