And Spike was always a fool for love. Cicily, Drusilla, Harmony, Buffy. The vamp had issues.
Spike: “I may be Love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.”
Ah well, I was hoping for something more complicated, but this is as good an explanation as any. I forgot the line that silenus quoted. It’s a good one.
See the bigger question is “Why was souled Spike in love with Buffy”. They established that Angel/Angelus were two separate individuals. Spike with a soul should have been a different person.
What I really wanted from Season 7 was for Spike to come back with a soul and be William the Bloody, not Spike. A huge part of season 6 was that ‘just because you have a soul doesn’t mean you are a good person’. I wanted William to have really liked it when Spike was evil and a killer. And now that William is back in the driver’s seat of his own body, he becomes the Big Bad (well atleast for the first half of the season). He wouldn’t just be Spike turned bad again, he’d really be played like a different character.
They addressed that in the last season of Angel:
*SPIKE: Ha ha ha ha! Oh, yeah. Look at you. Thinking you’re the big savior—fighting for truth, justice, and soccer moms—but you still can’t lay flesh on a cross without smelling like bacon, can you?
ANGEL: Like you’re any different.
SPIKE: Well, that’s just it. I am. And you know it. You had a soul forced on you—as a curse. Make you suffer for all the horrible things you’d done. But me… I fought for my soul. Went through the demon trials. Almost did me in a dozen times over, but I kept fighting. 'Cause I knew it was the right thing to do. It’s my destiny.
ANGEL: Really? Heard it was just to get into a girl’s pants. *
…I don’t think that addresses it at all. Or is it suppsoed to imply that since Spike went through what he went through he got some kind of special “rules don’t apply here” soul?
It is easier to nitpick things I didn’t like about this show that I absolutely adored, but to me I didn’t like the way they treated Buffy after they brought her back from heaven. They made her into a milquetoast in her dealings with the Scoobies who brought her back. I didn’t mind the season six villians at all, and Once More With Feeling was great, but it just seemed like Buffy would’ve had a confrontation with her friends over ruining her afterlife well before that point.
Yep. It about drove him crazy at first, but because he wanted it, (and because of his love for the Buffster :rolleyes: ) he managed to merge the two personalities.
Seems to me that Angel just couldn’t deal with the stress of the soul and his vampire-ness, so he developed split personalities as a sort of defense (disclaimer: I am not a psychologist, this is entirely bullhockey psychology on my part here). This way, he could compartmentalize all the bad parts of him away as Angelus, and keep that shoved in the back of his head while Angel ran the show.
They talk about it in Damage:
SPIKE: No. I did. The lass thought I killed her family. And I’m supposed to what, complain ‘cause hers wasn’t one of the hundreds of families I did kill? I’m not sayin’ you’re right… 'cause, uh… I’m physically incapable of saying that. But, uh… for a demon… I never did think that much about the nature of evil. No. Just threw myself in. Thought it was a party. I liked the rush. I liked the crunch. Never did look back at the victims.
ANGEL: I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I was only in it for the evil. It was everything to me. It was art. The destruction of a human being. I would’ve considered Dana a masterpiece.
The only gun he had access too? Rarely is the only gun one can access a high powered sniper rifle, usually it would end up being a cheapo pistol or something.
I mean, let’s say it belonged to his parents. OK, but the type of people who own a sniper rifle are not the type of people who only own one gun.
Ok, so he bought it on the street. Yeah, why spend just $100 for a gun to kill yourself with when you can spend $500. :rolleyes:
But the crazy lunchlady scene still more than made up for the bad choice of firearm. 
But *what * rules? There were only the two of them, right? They were just different. They were different when they didn’t have souls, and they were different when they did.
Vampires were always shown to have personalities. Vampire Harmony, for instance, was certainly without conscience, but so was human Harmony, and even as a demon, she was, as Spike said “evil for dummies”.
Spike’s souled and unsouled personas weren’t that different largely because his demon didn’t change his personality, it just unleashed William’s id. Angelus’s did the same. Angel is a far better person than Liam was, and I find that much more suspect than I find William/Spike’s relative consistency.
I hated the “Angel and Angelus are two different people” business. The second it’s introduced it completely destroys the whole point of the curse. Angel is cursed to suffer for what Angelus did, but why feel guilty over something someone else did? Stupid.
Umm… the ‘a vampire is a completely different individual from the person whose body it takes’ was introduced first, before we had any idea that Angel was a vampire. The human soul dies, demon spirit takes up shop. Thus, if it’s possible to restore a soul to a vampire, that involves restoring a different identity. That seems clear to me.
I always liked the idea that the gypsies who wrote the curse didn’t really grasp that notion. (Of course, to punish Angelus as much as possible, they should restore Angel’s soul, and then have him do as much good as possible and actually be as happy as his circumstances permit. THAT is torture for the demon trapped inside.) 
Umm… not quite sure what point you’re trying to make or why you’re kicking off with the patronizing “um” but you’re pretty much agreeing with me here. Angelus was a bad guy, Angelus was cursed by Gypsies, Angel suffers. Which makes no sense. Do you feel guilty for the actions of, say, Charles Manson? I don’t, because he’s not the same person as me. Angel’s not the same person as Angelus, so the idea that Angel feels guilty for stuff that someone did while he, Angel, was dead, makes very little sense.
Well, actually it does make sense. Angel realizes that he isn’t Angelus, but he also realizes that he is. So he feels guilty. (I didn’t say it was logical.) The fact that Angle does good torments the demon inside, and the actions of the demon torment Angel. It’s a win/win for the gypsies.
The curse isn’t just “He’s got a soul.” It’s also “He’s got a soul AND if he is ever truly happy he’ll lose it.” THAT’S the part that is the punishment.
I just love it when this board just fucking decides it doesn’t feel like posting my stuff…
I’m sure the first time I wrote this it was better, thank you board! Anyway, no, the way it’s been stated in the series, Angel and Angelus are completely separate and distinct entities. The split is total. Angel, by the way the show is structured, simply can’t be Angelus. Angel is taking on guilt for the actions of another. Which makes him a chump.
No argument there. He is a chump. He is also human. He feels the need to atone for what “he” has done. He may know it wasn’t him, but nobody really cares. They’ll punish Angel if they can’t get ahold of Angelus. So will Angel.
Angel is all about redemption. Whedon has said (well maybe it was Greenwalt) that Angel’s story is that of a recovering drug addict. He’s not the same person as he was when he was did those terrible things. He’s changed, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to atone for them. But this is a metaphor. The same way that Angel losing his soul after sleeping with Buffy was a metaphor for the guy who gets you into bed and then doesn’t call you again, its turned around and tailored to fit the genre and the story. So Angelus and Angel are separate entities but the same essence and body.
Another bit of Buffy lore that seems to get forgotten is that vampires are not pure demon – in fact, very, very few of the demons on the Earth are, according to Anya – but rather they are contaminated by humanity. There’s some weird blend of demon and humanity going on in vampires; they are hybrids. This is never explained in detail, but it’s all mythical anyway, so why should it be?
My fan wank is that some vampires are more contaminated by their human essence than others, which helps to explain Spike. Remember the Judge? He felt human taint in Drusilla and Spike in their affection for each other, and of course felt humanity also in the book worm vampire minion, whom the Judge roasts.
Spike’s chip was a behavior modification chip, and it worked. By neutering (to some extent) the demon, Spike’s lingering humanity became more potent as a motivator of his priorities and choices. This is made clear in the development of his character over seasons 5-7 (and into the last season of Angel).
Angel cannot successfully remove or disassociate his souled self (the soul is never fully or distinctly personified in a human being anyway) from the memories which he retains of the atrocities committed by him and the demon within him. It is inevitable that he feel guilty; as far as he can remember, the demon is him. What the demon did, he did. For the gypsies, the distinction is also immaterial. They are not after justice, according to Jenny Calendar’s uncle: it is vengeance they serve. Vengeance against the demon/human hybrid Angelus, specifically. One might conclude also that they do not believe in some innate innocence created by the presence of a soul: to them, Angelus is one entity, an entity that must be made to suffer. The presence of his human soul is a vehicle for that suffering, no more.
Also, the Powers That Be ordained it. The gypsies were pawns in their grand plan of action. 