I only saw Buffy once through about 6 or 7 years ago. A buddy wanted to see it so I’m rewatching it with him. And damn if a lot of it isn’t better the second time round. Some of the idiot character stuff isn’t nearly so annoying when you realize “No–this is how it is. It’ll never be corrected.”
But there’s one thing that puzzled me on my first watching and now that I’m on my second time through it makes even less sense. I just got the “Buffy boinks Angel and now he’s become an interesting character rather than a whiney-douchebag-molester type” episode (like s2 e15 or so–“Innocence”?) and the Gypsy curse has just been explained. But…I don’t get it.
For our purposes there are three people involved in the curse
Angel: Good for nothing Irish nobleman(?) killed circa 1750. When he died his soul went to heaven (or hell. Or somewhere else. It wasn’t in his body)
Angelicus: Demon who possessed Angel’s body. Fun character, if lacking in subtlety and in bad need of a quick perusal of “The Evil Overlord’s Handbook”.
Whiney-Angel-Bitch: The character we’ve seen for the first 1.5 seasons that has poor innocent Angel’s soul, pulled out of heaven (or wherever) and stuffed into Angel-Body alongside Angelicus.
So…if I understand right, Angel was snuffed by someone, Angelicus was crammed in Angel’s body. Angelicus did SOMETHING BAD to the Gypsy clan who decided that their revenge on Angelicus was to…torture Angel by A) pulling his soul from heaven/wherever and B) make him all wangsty for stuff Angelicus did in Angel’s body (and as a side effect turning both of them into kiddie-diddler*)? and then C) if Whiney-Angel-Bitch has a moment of perfect happiness, they’ll…um…send Angel’s soul back to heaven (or wherever) and let Angelicus run amok again?
Bwah?
So–to punish Angelicus the demon, they torture Angel, the Irish guy? This makes no sense, even by the…um…totally incoherent…universe that is Buffy/Angel. I honestly don’t get how this is supposed to work. I mean–the…metaphysics of Buffy never really made sense in any case, but unless I’m missing something this plan is just…weird.
Any explanations or fanwanks or guesses about how torturing (mostly innocent) Angel’s soul somehow punishes Angelicus the demon?
*She’s 16 when they meet, he’s 200+ and he looks to be mid 30s–and he’s hitting. Ew.
First off, Angel’s alter is named Angelus, not Angelicus. And before being vamped, his name was Liam (no last name was ever specified). So Angel is the human; Angelus is the vampire without a human soul; and Angel is the vampire with Liam’s human soul restored, and coexisting with and mostly dominant over the vampire spirit.
Which is the nature of the torture. Angelus, being sadistic, malevolent, and repulsed by humanity, is trapped inside Angel and tormented by Liam’s spirit, as the Liam element was strong enough to prevent Angelus from indulging in its vicious nature. From the point of view of someone in the physical world, it seems that Angel is the one being tormented, but from Angelus’s POV, he is trapped in an inescapable cage and unable even to scream. That cage is Angel.
Also, Angel is not equivalent to Liam. Angel is the combination of Angelus and Liam. Angel only came into being when the gypsy curse dragged Liam’s soul out of whatever netherworld it was inhabiting, just as Angelus only came into being when the vamping process expelled Liam’s soul (i.e., killed him), dragged a vampire spirit from wherever they reside pre-vamping, and used that spirit to reanimate and mutate Liam’s corpse.
So the Gypsy clan was mad at Angelus, cursed him, and now Angelus is trapped inside of Angel’s body and tormented by Liam’s soul, and unable to do anything. I can go along with that.
But why the stuff about the moment of perfect happiness letting Angelus loose? That only torments Angel/Liam, it’s great for Angelus.
Angel is hardly a kiddy-diddler. Ephebophile, maybe. But only in the case of Buffy, who is “special” in oh so many ways. But from Angel’s perspective, everybody save another vamp is an infant.
The “moment of perfect happiness” clause is the one that still bugs me a bit. It might just be a catch in the original spell that the gypsy elders couldn’t do anything about. That’s why Jenny (and others, presumably, over the years) were watching Angel, to make sure that didn’t happen.
I’ll fanwank it. It’s not so much that the gypsies wrote the curse so that a moment of perfect happiness would undo it. It’s that, in the Whedeonverse, all magic spells must have a condition that undoes them. Since Angel is a combination of Liam and Angelus, his being perfectly happy means that the curse is no longer accomplishing anything; so the spell-writer wrote it so that that condition would be the escape clause. There had to be SOME escape clause; might as well have it be the one that meant the curse was no pointless, rather than, saying, “Liam’s soul shall be expelled and Angelus restored if ever the hybrid eats a chocolate eclair.”
ETA:
And silenus is right when he says that the typical rules about age and relationships simply don’t apply to Angel, or any ageless creature. I don’t think he considered Joyce appreciably older than Buffy. There’s an Angel episode when he’s out with his LA crew (Cordelia, Wesley, and Gunn) and they accuse him of being cheap; he replies that he’s simply much, much older than they are, and sometimes he gets hit by future shock.
Almost all the magic in Buffyverse has some kind of flaw. Every prophecy can be beaten, every prison can be escaped from, every bad guy has a weakness. Willow even becomes addicted to magic. I’m not familiar enough with the background material to know if Whedon ever stated it this way, but it’s certainly a pattern.
If you see it that way, then this part of the Gypsy curse was put in either because 1) they figured no one is ever perfectly happy and therefore this flaw will never trigger or 2) the nature of the spell required that particular flaw whether they liked it or not.
(As a PS, going back to the original question: I’m not sure that I ever saw Angel/Angelus like two separate people. Angelus is the vampire version, without a soul, and Angel is when you have the soul. To me, the idea of torturing Angelus separately doesn’t make much sense because Angelus is just the lack of a soul. Maybe I’m wrong about that… but in any event, allowing the soul to come back at all is a rare second chance. Yeah, it may not be the perfect life, but most people who live with injuries or disabilities are just happy to be alive. It’s certainly more than most vampire victims are ever offered.)
I’m assuming spoilers are okay since the OP has already seen the whole series.
I always figured it was just a Gypsy thing. Spike’s reensouling (what an…interesting word) doesn’t have a similar clause, or at least one was never mentioned. That might be because he fought to get his back, or maybe demon magic just works differently.
The Buffyverse has always been a little unclear as to whether a soul is a separate identity/personality, or just something that can be added to a person to give them a conscience. If the soul is truly a different person, then Spike questing to get his soul back makes very little sense, for instance.
It doesn’t have to be a gypsy thing. As you point out, Spike wasn’t being cursed; he was getting something he was seeking for. Since the demon had no special animus for him, he probably set the “undo” condition to something else (and something uncommon) and simply told Spike exactly what it was. “Your human soul will be resident in your form until you stand on this exact spot on the day of the winter solstice and say my name thrice.”
I suspect that’s because the official line about vampires – that they have no connection to the person who was vamped – is bullshit. Obvious bullshit to anyone who fights them on a regular basis, but also necessary bullshit if you’re going to survive doing so. You have to tell the newbies that there’s no real connection for their own good, and by the time they have enough experience to realize it’s untrue, they also know that they’re better off pretending.
First, note that the way souls appear to function in regards to vampirism is different than the way souls appear to function in other contexts in the Buffyverse. A newly risen vampire doesn’t have any memories, except of it’s previous life as a human. And Angel doesn’t have any memories of being anywhere else while he was Angelus, either of the times he’s resouled. But everywhere else the show deals with the concept of a soul, the person’s memory exists intact (more or less). Cordelia’s ghostly roommate seemed to remember his past life, as did Cordelia herself after she ascended. The deceased lawyers at Wolfram and Hart certainly remember theirs. And Buffy, after being resurrected in season six, had vague memories of being in heaven.
So, why are vampires different? My theory is that a soul has three basic components: the record of memories and experiences, a capacity for good, and a capacity for evil. When a vampire turns a human, he’s draining his victim of that capacity for good, and infecting him with a similar fragment of a demon soul, which is what transforms the corpse into a vampire. To the Gypsies who cursed Angel, the “person” is the gestalt of those three components, and removing one component of the gestalt doesn’t absolve the other two components of their complicity in Angelus’s crimes.
Note that this theory of vampirism is what the Watchers believe, and Giles teaches it to Buffy, and Buffy believes it.
But in the “Alternate reality vampire Willow” episode, Buffy explains to Willow this theory of vampirism, to explain why her alt-vampire-self is all slutty and kinda gay. And Angel is all like, “Well, that’s not exactly…yes. That’s totally how it works.”
The demon-soul that inhabits the vampire has the same memories of the human host, many of the same personality traits, the same habits, and so on. When Darla turned Liam she didn’t expect the resulting vampire to be such a raving psychopath, she thought he’d be a worthless vampire just like Liam was a worthless human. Most of the mook-level vampires in the Buffyverse are small-time losers, because most humans in the Buffyverse are small-time losers. Then you get exceptions like Angelus and Spike, who were losers as humans but epic as vampires.
It’s not how old he is, it’s how young she is. She’s 15(!!!) when the series starts and he’s still lusting after her. Even if he was only as old as the actor (David Whatshisname) it’s still a 30-ish year old guy after a 15 year old kid. Ew. If she was 25 and he was 50? No prob. If she was 25 and he was 250, no prob. But she’s 15 when the show starts and he claimed he was following her around before the show opened (IIRC).
Sorry–Angel is a creepy stalker pedo. Also a whiney bitch.
(You might be able to tell–I’m not a Buffy/Angel shipper. )
The question of whether we are more than just our memories is a recurring one in Whedon’s work. It came up with the issue of vampire souls, with the Jasmine plotline in Angel, in Toy Story (seriously!) and of course, it was the main theme of Dollhouse. His conclusion, it seems to me, is that yes, there is another element there that makes us human. Vampires don’t have it, which makes them monsters.
Ok—I get that, but Liam is stuck inside Angel with Angelus and A) Angelus is much cooler than Liam or Angel, but is a raving psychotic and B) Angel is also a whiney wangsty bitch (when he’s with Buffy–when he gets his own show, he’s actually a decent character as long as his kid’s not around). I still don’t see how torturing Liam is all that fair to Liam. Or is the idea that the Gypsies were evil as well as stupid? (which I can buy, given the " The Judge" ep.)
Ms Calendar: Hey old Gypsy guy–the world’s about to be destroyed and messing with the slayer’s emotions right now? Not a good idea.
Old Gypsy Guy: Bah! He must suffer now! If the world ends, at least he’ll have suffered.
Ms Calendar: :rolleyes:
The age of the actor is irrelevant. David Boreanez and Sarah Michelle Gellar weren’t lovers; Angel no-last-name and Buffy Summers were. And I think Angel was turned when Liam was in his early-mid-twenties. Anyway, as I said, Angel was not a human being.
Also, even by your interpretation, Angel wasn’t a pedophile. Pedophiles are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children, which Buffy clearly was not.
I know my pretend supervillainy is a running joke, but I’ve never understood this connecting of evil and cool. Angelus is a fucking monster who began his vampiric career by murdering an entire town, including his younger sister; killed and ate at least one infant; and jokes about raping women to death and after. Doesn’t fit my definition of cool.
But then Spike of course always retained some important characteristics, too. He loves. And he would do anything for those he loves. It’s like his superpower.
So yeah, some parts of the personality stay the same, some memories remain. In “Conversations with dead people” Buffy hangs out with her old class mate, now vampire/psychologist. He’s still a lot like himself, but just with added evil.
We can only speculate, since nothing was ever named. If he were reensouled by magic, perhaps there was an unnamed condition. Alternatively, perhaps it was just his reward for surviving the trials with no catch.
On a related note, I’ve never been clear on whether or not the curse still applies to Angel after he gets reensouled by Willow during the Jasmine storyline. He slept with werewolf girl, but arguably he wasn’t in love with her as he was with Buffy or Cordy, and therefore wasn’t quite perfectly happy. By this point, Willow isn’t just trying to copy the gypsy spell like she had the first time, she was a bonafide witch. I always liked to think that she had figured out a better way of doing it, but I have nothing to go on except my own fanwankery.
But there’s clearly added evil, too - in “The Dark Age,” Ethan Rayne shows up again, this time trying to ditch a demon he and Giles raised in their wild youth. The demon is ultimately defeated by tricking it into possessing Angel, and letting Angel’s captive demon soul devour it.
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