A small little hijack…I missed most of Season Seven, but I did catch one episode where the Hell Mouth was sorta openned, and all the highschool students were becoming crazed and violent. In that episode, Spike is seen beating the crap out of a couple of them as the crew made their way to shut the mouth. How was he able to do this without getting one serious migraine?
As for Buffy being able to kill humans…there’s absolutely nothing that would prevent her from doing so. If she wanted to kill an innocent person, there’s no mystical force that’s going to stop her hand in mid air just before she shoves a knife into a little kid’s temple. The rules on not killing are “You’re mankind’s defender against the darkness.” If the biggest threat to humanity is other humans, then they have to be dealt with. It was simple when every week seemed to be a monster, but as stories became more in depth, and the seedy underbelly of evil was revealed, it didn’t become so cut and dry as “humans good, demons bad.”
I think the argument could be made that killing the brothel vamps was morally wrong because the vampires weren’t killing anybody. They had brought up that very issue with Spike. he was a vampire. he had killed people. He couldn’t kill people anymore, therefore, he remained non-dusty. The precedent for not killing “harmless” vampires were set…shoot, it was set before Spike with Angel, the mitigating factor of the soul not withstanding.
Giles knew about the brothel and admitted as much as never told Buffy because he never thought they were dangerous. If the Watcher who wanted to kill Spike post-soul thought the brothel vamps weren’t dangerous…well, maybe they weren’t. They were parasites, not murderers. All of a sudden, she’s killing them in a rage, not because they were picking off teenage girls late at night, but because one of them sucked on her boyfriend.
It’s sorta like when Angel locked the lawyers in the cellar with Darla and Dru. The lawyers were evil. The lawyers probably deserved to die. Holland Manners was definitely evil without a doubt–yet Angel’s actions were not seen as those of Champion, but rather those of “holy fuck, what the fuck was he thinking?!” I think in the Buffyverse, motives play a big role in the fight…
Also, in Dead Things, Buffy didn’t turn herself in because she thought she killed Katrina. That was just a handy excuse. She turned herself in because she didn’t want to be a part of the world anymore. It was the exact same problem as in Gone when she finally did whatever she wanted because nobody could see her. No interactions, no consequences–as Spike said, there’s another word for that—“Dead”. Buffy repeatedly tried to duck out of her life throughout S6–just a few episodes later she did it again in Normal Again. Katrina’s death had nothing to do with anything–certainly isn’t pertinant to this discussion–because it wasn’t meant to reflect Faith’s situation. It was meant to be a plot point to show Buffy’s increasing depression and desperation.
As for Xander, I think he was absolutely guilty for those deaths, and the way the writers treated him after that colored my perspective of the character permanently. Several people died because he personally summoned a demon–several people who probably wouldn’t have died if he didn’t summon the demon. Those deaths are on his head and I’m sure he never felt a twinge of conscience.
In episode 7.13 Killer In Me, the chip was killing Spike. Buffy called Riley who sent some commandos who could either remove the chip, or fix it–but if they fixed it, it would just fail again and probably kill him. At this point, Spike was unconscience, so Buffy decided to have the chip removed, trusting that the soul would keep everybody safe.
Sorry, Gam; while it’s not as black-and-white as you’re trying to paint it, it *is * however very simple: Buffy never killed any redeemable creature–human or otherwise–if she thought there was any alternative. Period. Pretty simple.
In the midst of a murderous pursuit, there is often no alternative but to kill your pursuer. In dealing with irredeemables–most vampires, most demons–imminent danger is not necessary, when eventual danger is such a given. This is where Faith screwed up: she killed a human because she thought he was a vampire. Her readiness to jump to that conclusion might have been mitigated by her subsequent actions, but that was not the case; her subsequent actions were just as questionable, if not more so, and so served only to exacerbate her initial mistake.
I’m not sure which episode it was you caught, but Buffy had the Initiative remove Spike’s chip in “The Killer in Me,” episode 13 of season 7. It was malfunctioning, firing off randomly, and she was given the choice to either fix it or remove it. She decided the Platinum One’s soul was working well enough that he didn’t need a bionic conscience anymore.
If the standard is “no active harm,” then isn’t every vamp Buffy dusted right after it popped out of its grave just as morally wrong? They hadn’t killed anybody yet, either.
I think Faith would be an exception to that. Faith’s survival of the attempt not withstanding.
I think when Buffy tried to kill Faith, she’d come to believe that there was no alternative; that any redemption that Faith might someday achieve was entirely theoretical and would, furthermore, not happen before Faith had caused a lot more death and damage. I don’t think there was any question that Buffy was justified in reaching the decision she reached when it came time to kill faith.
Giles said he hadn’t seen a vampire brothel since his Ripper days and had no idea it was going on in Sunnydale. To be fair to your point he did indicate that he thought anyone who died was complicit in their own deaths, but most people probably wouldn’t excuse, say, a drug dealer who sold tainted drugs if they caused a death because of the drug-taker’s complicity in it.
Re Buffy’s trying to kill Faith, it was to prevent Angel’s death. No different than if Buffy had found Faith on the roof before she shot Angel to begin with and stopped her with lethal force there. No immorality there.
I can agree with that. By “no alternative,” I was thinking more immediate danger, like being attacked by the knights, not just “She’s never going to be a good guy, might as well go and off her.” But I do think that killing Faith at the point was the best decision she could make, especially right before going up against the Mayor.
He wasn’t with the pack when Principal Flutie was killed. All Xander’s guilty of in that case is killing the mascot.
But I wouldn’t be so quick to let Xander off the hook for the combustion deaths. He knew people were burning to death and he knew that the deaths started at roughly the same time as the singing and dancing caused by the spell he cast. He pumped Giles for information about it and Tara indicated that they had a lead on a Lord of the Dance (not the evil one, just a demon) but Xander didn’t say anything about it. So I would hold Xander somewhat complicit at least in any deaths that happened after he had an idea that his spell was possibly having undesirable side effects.
It wasn’t the killing. IIRC, Giles even said that Slayers had killed humans before, it happened, and the Council had taken care of it (which I took to mean that they’d covered it up, made things alright with local law enforcement, swept it under the rug, etc. - not that they locked up the Slayer).
It was Faith’s reaction to the killing. She seemed to have no conscience at all about having killed someone…she seemed to have no conscience at all about anything. She tried to frame Buffy for it, she lied about it to herself, and to others…the end problem was that she was a completely amoral person with superpowers. That’s a bad combination, one you stop if you have the means to do so.
I still think Xander did not summon the demon and he was covering for someone, perhaps Dawn, when he “admitted” to it.
No, no. Don’t try to argue me out of that stance. It is my position and I like it. I steadfastly refuse to consider that Xander summoned Sweet. Not even if Joss himself called my house to tell me it was so will I accept that Xander would summon a demon on purpose.
Honey, I agree with you that Xander’s casting a spell on his own is about as completely wildly out of character as it is possible for him to be, but there is simply no getting around the fact that in S7 Xander is shown (in Anya’s flashback song) asleep muttering about wanting to be sure he and Anya got a happy ending, and that this was before he would’ve had any reason to cover for Dawn or anyone else. There is, however, no reason to think that Xander deliberately summoned a demon; he said in OM,WF that he didn’t know what would happen, that he just thought there’d be singing and dancing. He also clearly didn’t know about the “go back to Hell and be his queen” part of it because, as entertaining as you and I would find watching Xander be Sweet’s bitch (hey Joss, spin that off!), he wouldn’t have done the casting with that as a known consequence.
So to sum up, Xander summoning a demon is 100% out of character but Xander casting a spell without understanding that a demon was a “gift with purchase” is only 95% out of character.
I suspect that Xander didn’t so much cast the spell as read it, think it would be cool, read it again aloud and then get disappointed that song didn’t break out right away. Despite the warning Giles gave him I suspect Xander still speaks Latin around the books.
He wasn’t eactly innocent. He did call upon the Queller demon, after all, and did actively consider killing Dawn in order to stop Glory, but for selfish reasons.
Again, I say pish-posh. Withholding information from the other Scoobs? That’s the primary hobby of the entire Scooby Gang. Willow’s done it. Buffy’s done it. Dawn’s done it. Tara’s done it. Giles has done it. Anya … maybe she hasn’t. Can’t recall specifically at the moment, and she is a rather forthright lass. It’s a mistake, and not at all the same as just killing someone.
