Hmm… I’m not sure I remember anybody (who wasn’t obviously unreliable) saying ‘no connection.’ There’s a lot of people who have said ‘not the same’, but that’s not the same as saying ‘no connection.’
Obviously there’s a connection between the vampire and the person who was vamped. They look very similar, that’s a connection, and one starts in the place and time that the other ended, which is another. They share memories, which is a third connection, and often share noticeable personality traits. But none of those connections mean that they are the same individual. There are a lot of obvious connections between identical twins, for instance, but most people wouldn’t say that they’re the same person in two bodies.
The official Watcher party line is that the vampire that is has no connection to the person that was. But multiple vamps (Angel, Spike, Buffy’s school buddy in “Conversations With Dead Things”) refute that. It’s just one more of the Council’s lies.
Do you have a cite for that ‘party line’? The line that first comes to mind for me doesn’t go that far:
Giles: “You listen to me! Jesse is dead! You have to remember that when you see him, you’re not looking at your friend. You’re looking at the thing that killed him.”
He doesn’t say that there’s no connection, he just says that they’re not the same.
Huh–not exaggerating: guessing completely wrong. She turned 17 halfway through S2, so I figured she turned 16 halfway through S1, which would have made her 15 at the time of the opening of the series. I’m wrong…but that’s what my logic was.
Boreanaz, I’ll stand by. He doesn’t look anything like 27 to me, to me he really did look like he was in his mid-30s.
What was the name of the sort of vapid valley-girl bimbo vamp. Harmony? She refutes it to. She’s exactly the same person before and after…except for the whole “monster-face/blood drinking” thing.
I think part of what threw you off was that season 1 wasn’t a full year. The show was a mid-season replacement, and though it’s not completely clear what timeframe in-universe the season was supposed to span, Buffy did arrive in Sunnydale somewhere in the middle of a school year.
I think the main point the Watchers Council was trying to make was that there is no way to get the person back. They’re gone. So far as we know, there have been only 3 exceptions to that, and two of those involve co-existence of both the soul and the demon. This is excluding Lawson, who never completely lost his soul when Brooding Angel vamped him on the sub.
I couldn’t remember either. That’s why I made my post a bit ambiguous. There are two scenarios: either they did tell him, and it obviously didn’t stop it from happening, or they should have told him to prevent it from happening.
Thus I don’t think knowing about the escape clause is sufficient to make it not work.
BTW, one thing I always found odd about Angel the series was how much older he looked on that series. I thought he looked young enough in Buffy, but over 30 in Angel. It messed with me seeing him for the first time on Buffy after having seen Angel.
While I’m clearing up misconceptions, I might as grab this one too. In life, Liam wasn’t a “loser” or “worthless.” He was, in the parlance of the times, a ruffian and a stubborn loudmouth. So when he got vamped, that amplified his already present tendencies and turned him into a killing machine with a quick wit.
I think it actually makes sense to look at Freudian psychology.
The id is all the baser desires and the superego is the sort of conscience, with ego left to sort of resolve the demands that the two make. As others have said, a soul in Buffyverse often seems to be discussed interchangeably with the idea of conscience.
So if a vamp essentially removes the superego from a person, then you have a demon that’s just living out the unfiltered desires of the original person. The vamping process seems to add a few evil desires that weren’t there originally (drinking blood in particular), but most of them do seem to be a version of the original person’s desires.
But drinking blood isn’t, in itself, an evil act, any more than eating a hamburger is (shut up, vegans!) The killing and torturing and general destruction I’ll grant you. But vamps need blood to “live.”
Just saw two more episodes–the “Oz the Werewolf” one (and good lord, that’s a terrible costume. It makes the costumes on “Land of the Lost” look like masterpieces by comparison) and the Valentine’s Day ep which was really funny.
However, it reminded me of something: the writers are just throwing deities name’s around kinda randomly. Because if you’re going to choose a Roman goddess to appeal to for a magic love spell, you might go with Juno (marriage) or Venus (love) or (ok, he’s a guy but) Eros (lust) or hell, Ganymede for gay-love/lust (sorta). The one goddess you wouldn’t pick? Diana. The untouchable virgin goddess who turns people who oogle her into deer (I think) and sends hounds to tear them apart. This strikes me as just really, really sloppy. 10 seconds with a copy of any basic book on Greek/Roman myths would have solved this.
Also, it’s interesting: I didn’t catch that Xander started Amy the Rat on her path to the dark side. Before he blackmailed her into summoning dark forces of eeee-vil, she was content to do Obi-Wan, non-ritual, Jedi mind tricks. So when Amy the Rat turns bad later on, Xander’s the one who gave her the first taste of black magic. Boo Xander.
One last thing: There seems to be (in these early, pre Angel’s solo show, days) a limited amount of villain-cool to go round. Now that Angelus is being a fun, kick-ass baddie, Spike (for the only time in the show that I can think of) has turned into a whiney ball of suck. Once Angel-The-Wimp is back, Spike gets cool again.
Most of what I would have to contribute has already been covered. Magic in the Buffyverse usually has some kind of undo feature, so the “moment of perfect happiness” clause falls into the category of “hey, no spell’s perfect, and that’s probably never going to happen anyways, right?” The gypsies probably just shared Wesley’s philosophy that pretty much no one is ever going to really have such a moment. In truth, we should be honest with ourselves and recognize that the clause was written because Buffy the show is largely an allegory for growing up, and the explanation for the magic was written in such a way as to accommodate a story of “girl falls for guy, guy turns into colossal asshole once he gets what he wants, which is sex.” The fact that it happens to be mostly fanwankable is mostly happy circumstance.
And souls in the Buffyverse generally seem to be interchangeable with the idea of a conscience, which is why vampires tend to have a similar personality to their host, just without much in the way of restraint. My personal fanwank is that the vampirism process somehow births a new demon. Like, vamping someone typically expels their soul and shoves in some raw demon ether into the body. Vampires are pretty low on the demonic totem pole and don’t seem to have any preexisting memories, after all, so it kinda makes sense that they’re pretty much demon babies not yet strong enough to overwhelm their host. It also kinda leaves open the question of whether personality is stuck in the human meat shell while the completely separate soul flies away, or whether a person’s soul and personality are intertwined, but what’s left in vampire body is just an imprint or an echo of the now departed person. I kinda wonder if that topic would have been explored more in a hypothetical season 6 of Angel re: Illyria, but alas we shall never know.
One thing that does interest me, though, is how that “moment of perfect happiness” fits into the overall character arc of Angel. In his early days on his own show, he believes that one day he’s going to fulfill the prophecy, become human again, and live happily ever after. As time goes on, though, he seems to realize more and more that that isn’t how redemption works. There’s no single moment where you finish atoning for what you’ve done and put it all behind you. Redemption is about coming to terms with what you’ve done and who you are and using those experiences to become a better person. The Angel we saw on Buffy and the beginning of his show was naive enough to think he could complete that journey, while the one we see at the end seems to realize he can never finish that journey.
And on a more lighthearted note, I’m glad to see some other people share my view that Angel was a boring, overly melodramatic, mopey character when in the vicinity of Buffy, but much better when off with his own group of friends who called him out on his endless mopeyness.