He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. Angelus isn’t stupid, he knows how quickly a fight can turn even against a normal human.
Most vampires in the Buffyverse are so bloody-minded, they’ll just charge into a fight they can’t win (e.g. against Buffy when she’s ready, alert, and armed.). Vampires that survive more than a year or two have to be a bit a more clever.
Also, even though he puffed himself up to make it look otherwise, Angelus was obviously afraid of Buffy. As well he should be!
That’s a good point. Angelus was legitimately afraid of Buffy, and for contrast Spike was legitimately NOT afraid of her.
Spike knew when to fight and when to RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! But he also had a thing for Buffy that was pretty obvious to fans long before he realized it himself. Overall, he was far more reckless than Angelus.
So his evil plan was to keep on surviving for the next fight he could run from? I mean, if you keep giving up on your plans because they, entirely predictably, end up involving fighting, you’re in the wrong business.
Angelus is a bully, coward, and sadist. He’d rather let his enemies live so that he can watch them suffer.
No point in picking a fight you don’t think you are going to win (ETA: unless you’re a Hero, like Angel at the end of Season 5).
Captain Amazing is right about the sadist part. Anyway, Angelus killed plenty of people, demons, and vampires, more than he could count, and tortured plenty of others just for fun. He was not weak. Just weaker than Buffy.
Making Liam (rather than the demon Angelus) suffer is more or less explicitly the case. They seem to consider them one and the same. From the penultimate episode of Buffy Season 2 (Becoming Pt 1) about 17:45 in:
Angelus’ eyes flash as he becomes Angel for the first time
Old Gypsy Guy (OGG): It hurts, yes? Good. It will hurt more.
Angel: Where am I?
OGG: You don’t remember. Everything you’ve done for a hundred years. In a moment you will. The face of everyone you’ve killed. Our daughter’s face. They will haunt you, and you will know what true suffering is.
Angel: Killed? I… I… no… no (etc)
He rarely even manages that, that we see.
The point is he does pick the fights, then runs from them. It’s rarely him reacting to Buffy, but her reacting to his plans. He sets the time and place, and still loses. Watching him is like watching Wile E. Coyote.
Characters tell us that he has killed lots of people and concocted various outrageous trolls just to fuck with people and cause them despair. They tell us he was a legendary, fearsome character. But that’s not what we see, and that’s my problem with him. Yeah, he kills a few random nobodies, but in all his time on the loose, during which messing with Buffy was seemingly one of his top priorities, he didn’t get very far at all.
I just found the episodes with him in less fun. Angelus could kill all of Buffy’s friends and family in a single night, and yet he only just manages to kill a secondary character we don’t miss terribly. And Buffy knows this, but is supremely unconcerned with more than token efforts to kill him before one of his plans succeeds, which just makes the episodes even less interesting.
Angelus isn’t a badass, he’s a cartoon villain who should consider joining M.A.D. for a few pointers.
Haha, I won’t deny you have a point.
Being Human (the UK one) did a better job showing that Mitchell really was someone to be feared.
Angel is just way better as a character once he was away from Buffy. Everyone says it, but it’s completely true.
They showed some of his more gruesome turns in the many Angelus flashbacks.
And really, what he did to Ms. Calendar should move him out of the ineffectual range.
Certainly it was effective as emotional terror. Poor Giles. As a means of weakening the slayer (Giles could have bought it that night), it wasn’t a bad plan for the diabolically minded.
I suppose it’s not just showing it, but making it have a real effect on the plot and having the characters react appropriately. To me, that didn’t happen. Or at least, not enough. Yeah, he killed Jenny (in about as nice a way as you can murder someone), and showed Giles some extreme sadism, that’s not what we were promised, in my opinion. I don’t remember specifics at the moment, but I believe he had several opportunities to kill one of the Scoobies, as well as Buffy’s mother. As in, they were in front of him and Buffy was nowhere near. But he never did. If he was as bad as we’re told, he would likely have killed everyone Buffy cared about, and she and the Scoobies should have been working 24/7 to find him and kill him, or at least re-ensoul him.
I only see two explanations for this. The obvious one is that it’s hard to write about evil villains when there’s only so much evil they can do in the world you’ve created, and the challenge was, on this occasion, too much for the writers. The other is to fanwank that Angelus was deep down so afraid of Buffy that he always found excuses not to kill her friends, even when she wasn’t around, for fear of facing her full wrath. Angelus probably knew Buffy rarely gave it 100%, and yet it always seemed to be enough for her to win. Killing a loved one would obviously change that. But that would bring me back to my original assertion: Angelus was kind of lame.
The thing with Angelus is that he has no interest in killing Slayers, he has a thing for tormenting marks, regardless of who that mark is. The thing we know is that the purer they are the better. They never mentioned Angelus killing a slayer, unlike Spike.
Angelus is a ruthless killer, and knows how to just get the job done. We’ve seen it with Calendar and others. He fucks with people because he can, and he likes to – his undoing is that his marks usually don’t have vampire killing superpowers. Screwing with someone is fine when it’s Drusilla, who was psychic but not much else.
If Angelus’ mark had been Willow, Buffy probably would have died in two minutes, with her corpse hung up in Willows closet for her to see when she got dressed the next morning; because she was a direct danger to his plans and killing her would have broken Willow’s spirit. But his mark was Buffy, and none of her friends were a direct danger to him, so in his hubris he thought he could get away with fucking with her. This includes breaking her friends, rather than killing them. He wanted her to be paranoid. Knowing that he could have any of her friends. Killing them takes away that paranoia and gives her little to lose. You can’t threaten to take away what they don’t have anymore. This is all more or less explicit, the Scooby Gang use the fact that he won’t directly kill Buffy without breaking her first in their planning.
I don’t think Angelus is in any way a bad or incompetent villain, he just had a single fatal flaw. Sure, he could have been a perfect villain who acts perfectly rationally, but that would have been… well… rather boring.
This is a marked difference from Spike, who makes it a personal goal to kill Slayers, and thus he doesn’t screw around – he just seeks, fights, and kills. I don’t believe, if Angel wanted to, that he’d be any more or less incompetent than Spike at it.
And I think my thing with “if he was targeting Willow he would have killed Buffy” thing is backed up by killing Calendar. Outside of Buffy, she was the only direct threat, knowing how to re-ensoul him, so he took her out. As far as he knew, nobody else could do anything other than ineffectually read books or slap him hard enough to tickle him.
I thought Angelus was pretty badass the second time he showed up on Angel. At least, during his time locked up in the basement when he was messing with everyone’s mind was satisfyingly evil.
Yes, I was going to add that he only killed her because he was in a corner with no secret tunnel to escape through. Putting it that way, of course, works in favour of my fanwank, too - he was too afraid to kill people that mattered to Buffy, unless not doing so would present an even more immediate threat.
I disagree that simply breaking Buffy’s friends and killing none of them would be the most effective way to achieve his goals. Surely, killing Willow or Xander and leaving the other alive would be far more devastating and paranoia-inducing. That way he would really show he’s not pulling any punches and he can and will kill her friends if he wants, and reducing the three to two would make the hole left by the unlucky one painfully conspicuous for a long time. And he could throw it in her face whenever he wanted, to remind her he had the power and she was at his mercy. That would have to be especially hard for a person so invested in being powerful.
Yeah, he was better in Angel. And when he was faking.
ETA: In Angel, I think I liked Angelus more partly because the other character reacted more appropriately. They knew their enemy, were smarter tactically and actively hunted him.
That’s fair, but I kind of thing I have to bring up the meta argument that, as much as we talk about Joss killing characters we love, I’m skeptical that he would have offed any of the core four.
Even without resorting to real world reasoning, I always got the sense that that was Angel’s long game. He may have started doing it after his “destroy the world” plan failed. He was keeping it in his pocket, but he wasn’t quite ready to use it yet. I would also argue that killing Jenny was his “I can kill your friends” message.
I was always bothered quite a bit by Angelus’ first appearance on Angel (Eternity) for exactly that reason. He was knocked unconscious and bound in chains by…Cordy and Wesley? Oofa.
Let’s not forget Wesley was a rogue demon hunter!