It’s complicated. In “Doppelgangland”, when they meet up with VampireWillow, they’re all confused by how slutty she is. And Buffy says something like, “Well, after all, the vampire’s personality has nothing to do with the human personality”, and Angel says “Actually that’s…uh…true. Totally, totally true.”
In other words, the vampire takes on some fraction of the personality of the former human, as well as their memory. But this could be a part of the human personality that was well hidden or repressed. Like, you know, Willow’s slutty side she keeps under wraps and prefers to hide under a mask of innocence.
Angel (and, to a lesser degree, Spike) feel remorse because they remember all the people they killed, and they remember enjoying it. True, they weren’t actually responsible, but it’s an emotional reaction, not a logical one.
Spike being dragged to hell was, iirc, nit a function of cosmic justice, but a plot by a malignant ghost to prevent his own descent into the fiery pit.
As for the OP, I say it’s both nature and nurture. Vampires are inherently evil, but their personalities are shaped by the memories of the person they used to be. Kind of like how some people are born sociopaths. They’re predisposed to evil, but how that evil is expressed is dependent on the environment they were raised in.
I disagree that they are not responsible. Angel is not Liam with a vampire’s body but minus the “essence” of Angelus. Angel is Angelus + Liam’s soul (whatever the latter us).
I disagree with this analysis. Soul is the essence of individuality. Angelus is not part of Angel’s identity - his soul, (Liam’s soul,) and Angelus’ essence do not add up into anything. They fundamentally cannot be combined.
They may both be in the same body at the same time, but in terms of moral responsibility they are distinct.
Angel was not there when Angelus committed crimes. Angelus may be there inside Angel’s body, but that does not make Angel responsible for his deeds.
Which makes the escape clause of the curse a little pointless, but here I’ll assume that the gypsies didn’t think it through entirely. Angelus was ‘cursed’, not with guilt which he’s pretty much incapable of feeling, but by having a human soul take over his body, leaving him imprisoned inside, unable to do anything but rage even if Angel makes him help the hopeless.
The fact that the human soul would also be tormented is not something that the gypsies should get any satisfaction from, though I can imagine them not being too concerned about it either. But for the vampire to be set free just because the human soul becomes happy for a moment, is not the best plan. (Of course, maybe they just had to pick some exit condition and thought this was the least likely to ever happen.)
I remember reading in a Whedon interview that he considered the loss of the soul to be the loss of a person’s conscience. In turning, you basically become a sociopath.
It allows for the completely twisted love Angelus showed the women in his life. Who knows, maybe the reason Angelus was such a go-getter compared to Liam was because being turned removed all those awkward moral impediments to getting what he really wanted (especially chainsaws, they didn’t even have chainsaws the last time around). Angel is significantly different from Liam because while his conscience has been returned, he now also has - what? - 200+ years in which he came to understand the human condition and the consequences of his action. If that isn’t enough to infuse a little empathy into a person, they’re beyond hope.
But Joss also showed really didn’t care about plot and character consistency or about utterly derailing and destroying the themes he created in his work. I hate hatehate the canon origin of the Slayer line. For a series that’s supposed to be about female empowerment, to have the original Slayer get her abilities because a group of men basically kidnap a teenage girl, tie her up, and allow a demon to thaumically rape her? Fuck you, Joss.
(bolding mine) I disagree. I think Angel and Liam are different people, but not in the sense that they’re actually separate beings - more in the sense that you can look back at the person you used to be and think “Man, who are you?”. Like phouka said:
The way I see it, Angel is Liam forced to grow the fuck up (plus with a demon in his body).
This is probably truer than you think. For all the joking that Buffy and Riley would run off and fuck at the drop of a hat (Joss devoted a whole episode to it after all), it was implied (although rarely shown) that Willow/Oz and Willow/Tara were having pretty regular sex too, possibly more than Buffy/Riley.
For that matter, it was also pretty well established that anytime Xander and Anya weren’t on screen, they were off doing as rabbits do as well. But Xander’s vampire self was more of a cool, detached leader. Which we’d get a glimpse of in “The Zeppo.”
Buffy: “It was exactly you, Will. Every detail. Except for your not being a dominatrix… as far as we know.” Willow: “Oh, right, me and Oz play Mistress of Pain every night.” Xander: “Did anyone else just go to a scary visual place?” Buffy: “Oh, yeah.”
Btw, the same confusion comes up in Stoker’s DRACULA- Van Helsing assures Holmwood & the rest that Vamp Lucy isn’t the woman they love but a demon using her body, BUT tells Holmwood that “his feet must walk in paths of thorns for a time so that the feet you love need not walk in paths of flame forever”- in other words, in doing the painful task of hunting/staking Vamp Lucy, he’s keeping Real Lucy from earning eternal damnation.
The way I took it was the soul is like an animating force, maybe without any memories or whatever, but it included things like your conscience and innate morality. When the demon soul gets put in, it doesn’t have any memories of its own, its a version of a human soul that animates, but instead of a conscience, it comes with a predatory and hateful set of emotions.
The person is the same, in that if you ask it a question it would answer factual information the same way, but the “you” that sits behind your eyes and uses that information is different.
I would assume that the vamps who get their souls back get their original consciences put back in place and either drive out the demon soul or dominate it, like a possession.
Best I can tell it turns you into the person you would be, if you were evil. That person can be radically different from the person you were as a human in a multitude of ways, maybe even different enough to count as a different person altogether, but it’s still generated from the same seed, so to speak.
We only know of two that have gotten resouled, and they kept the demon. After all, they’re still vamps, right? That is ipso facto proof that the demon is still there.
Actually I could see them being changed into magical beings from the demon’s presence and once it was driven out they retained the powers.
But on reflection you’re certainly right, because when Angel loses his human soul the vampire soul re-asserts dominance immediately. So I would say it is similar to a possession, with the poor demon watching helplessly as the human soul is selfless and sacrifices for others… the horror… the horror…
Option 3. All characteristics of WhedonVerse vamps (e.g., tolerance of sunlight) are malleable enough to fit the story requirements of any particular episode or arc.
True Blood would beg to differ.
OK, so it’s not your scenario in all the details, but vampires have been outed and are at least nominally subject to civil laws. Still seem to be a lot of exsanguinated corpses turning up, for some reason…
Well, sure - we still have all sorts of crime, even though the organs of the State do their damnedest to prevent it. But civilization endures, because the State does a sufficiently decent job to protect most people from crime, most of the time. So too could the Buffyverse State control (though not eliminate) violent crime by vampires.
That part of it DID work. Excepting for what he did while under the influence of the First Evil, Spike never killed another human. Walsh’s error was being too ambitious–going from control to exploit.
These are vampires we are talking about.