azdak

Morality in the Buffyverse


This is a theory that dalmeny encouraged me to develop, about the Scoobies’ moral standards and Jossverse vampires as cultural Others. I think it’s fairly striking in BtVS that the Scoobies assign a different value to those in their own inner ring than they do to people outside it. To put it bluntly, the Scoobies are more important than the people they’re protecting. The most blatant example of this is the crazies who get mind-sucked by Glory. Willow takes time out at the start of the battle to restore Tara’s sanity, but none of the other crazies is helped in this way, and moreover it’s assumed that the audience won’t be interested in their fate either. We do get to follow the fate of the nice security guard who gives Buffy the glowy ball thingy – he gets mindsucked, taken home by his caring family and is then killed by the Queller demon. End of story. His fate is not of interest in its own right, he’s only important as a victim. Further examples of the Scoobies privileging their own group over outsiders (and of the audience being expected to agree with them) are Buffy’s refusal to swap the Mayor’s box for Willow; her refusal to contemplate sacrificing Dawn in order to save the world; sending Vamp!Willow back to her own dimension instead of dusting her (a decision apparently motivated solely by the fact that this is in some sense Willow and therefore she’s untouchable – it doesn’t matter if she murders ansd tortures people in her own dimension as long as it doesn’t impact on the Scoobies); not bothering to find out which of the students who took part in the Graduation Day fight were killed or turned (they don’t know that Harmony was turned, so presumably we can extrapolate from that that there are others they don’t know about either); and allowing Anya to function as a vengeance demon until she oversteps the line by killing twelve people (yes, she wasn’t killing up till then, but she turned a guy into a giant worm, which really isn’t acceptable, and Buffy and Xander don’t know what else she might be up to).

The Scoobies thus draw a fairly clear distinction between Us and People Like Us. People Like Us are the humans that Buffy is called on to protect. They are valuable because they have souls, and this characteristic also puts them outside Buffy’s jurisdiction (although she’s allowed to beat up muggers), but they are not valuable as individuals. Buffy has no interest in what happens to the victims she saves, or fails to save. Her energies are wholly focused on fighting the demons that threaten them, not on the clean-up work afterwards, and when there is a conflict of interest between Us and People Like Us, the in-group will win every time. Now, what I find interesting about this is not the way the Scoobies behave, because in evolutionary terms it is adaptive to privilege the welfare of your own tribe over that of neighbouring tribes, and it’s also a commonplace of social psychology that the more similar people are to us, the better we can identify with them. Much of the thrust of modern morality aims at overcoming this in-built bias, by teaching that even people who aren’t Us, indeed even people who aren’t at all Like Us, are just as valuable as Us. But it isn’t a comfortable lesson for us to learn, it sits at odds with our inherent evolutionary biases in favour of our own in-group. And what I find interesting about Buffy is that it doesn’t often challenge these biases. BtVS offers us a morality of loyalty to kin and friends that overrides any other loyalty and which is very comfortable for the viewer. It would be extremely difficult for the audience to accept a storyline in which, for instance, Willow wassacrificed to stop the Mayor’s ascension; it would also be difficult for the audience to accept that Buffy should sacrifice herself if the girl on the tower wasn’t Dawn but some random member of the general populace that they neither knew nor cared about (I suspect this in-group loyalty on the part of the audience is what underlies the not infrequent TWoP complaint that characters like Riley and Kennedy, who pop oup out of the blue and immedaitely have sizable storylines, have no “right” to so much screen time when we don’t “know” them.) Yet a developed morality would challenge these cosy assumptions, would ask the viewer to struggle against their own natural inclination to put the welfare and lives of their fictional in-group above the needs and lives of outsiders.

But what saves BtVS from being irritatingly smug in its endorsement of a comfortable but primitive morality of Us First is its treatment of a third group of characters, People Not Like Us At All. These, of course, are the vampires. Jossverse vampires are so clearly coded as Other that it’s no surprise that some people have attempted to identify them with specific social minorities that function as Others in real life, although personally I think this is a mistake. The vampires do display a bundle of characteristics that have been associated with various minority groups throughout history (Jews, Roma, Blacks etc): they're sub-human, they don't have souls, they're murderers and thieves with no conscience, they prey on People Like Us, they’re constantly on the move, they’re sexually deviant, they’re not subject to social constraints etc etc. The same processes which encourage us to identify with people who are similar to us also encourage us to deny similarities with people who are very different, and the more different they are from us, the less we think of them as human. And, of course, in conditions of war the enemy is immediately presented as sub-human – Germans in WW1 ostensibly ate babies, Islamic men hate women and blow up little children and so forth. It’s very comfortable to be able to think of the enemy as not human and therefore not covered by the moral claims that apply to People Like Us, but deep down inside most people know that it’s not true. The enemy, however painful it may be to acknowledge this, is in fact made up of People Like Us (which is why Shylock’s great speech about “If you cut us, do we not bleed?” is so powerful). Fantasy literature has long dealt with this discomfort by inventing enemies that really aren’t human and really are irredeemable – the reader doesn’t need to start worrying about whether the Orcs were press-ganged into Sauron’s army and would really much rather be at home reading bedtime stories to their kids, because they’re Orcs, they are by definition evil, and even a half-Orc/half-human will inevitably be a baddie because that tainted Orc blood does it every time. Buffy’s vampires start off like that – they’re not real people, they’re walking corpses occupied by demons. The implication is that nothing of the person that originally inhabited the body survives the transition. Killing a vampire is a moral act, and they even conveniently turn into dust once they’ve been killed, so there is no body to dispose of, no consequences to the killing. It’s to the show’s credit that this attitude to the Other doesn’t last long, and the treatment of vampires becomes much richer and more complex (albeit only of Vampires Like Us, the characters we’ve come to know and care about – generic background vamps don’t get this special treatment. It’s the “some of my best friends are Jews” mentality – individuals are special cases and don’t change the attitude to the group as a whole). But by bringing vampires into the Scooby gang (or at least onto the fringes) the show challanges its own assumption that Otherness automatically equals being sub-human. It’s difficult to read Xander’s attack on Spike in Entropy in terms other than those of a member of mainstream society rejecting miscegenation. His objection is that Anya has betrayed him not by having sex with another man but by having sex with the despised, impure Other.

XANDER: (to Anya) You let that evil, soulless thing touch you. You wanted me to feel something? I look at you ... and I feel sick. 'Cause you had sex with that.

Significantly, the audience sympathy in this scene is clearly meant to lie not with Xander or with Buffy, whose silence in the teeth of Spike’s quiet observation “It’s good enough for Buffy” comes across as cowardice, but with Spike (the fact that he can’t defend himself, and spends much of the scene half-leaning against the wall clearly sets him up as a victim of bullying). He may be dead, he may be evil, but the show denies that this means he is not a person. Even non-humans can be human.


On a different topic: over on TWoP the question has been raised as to whether there’s any significant difference in Spike’s character pre- and post-soul. I haven’t joined in because, rather to my surprise, when I started thinking about it I realised that my firm conviction that there is a huge difference is actually based on some pretty subjective evidence. The most obvious change is that he goes to help Cassie, not because he fancies a fight, and not because he wants to impress Buffy, but because he thinks “hurting the girl” is wrong. But this is a one-off (he does help Xander steal RJ’s jacket and stops Buffy from shooting Principal Wood, but it’s pretty hard to argue that he doesn’t have a vested interest here – he’d definitely have done the same thing pre-soul). If we look not at actions but at minor details of behaviour then I’d say that while S6 Spike was very in-your-face with his demands and needs, S7 Spike is extremely hesitant and careful not to impose on Buffy in any sense. When she comes round to Xander’s flat in Sleeper he has a tentative conversation with her and then disappears into his bedroom. Even when he finally decides he can’t tackle his problems on his own and needs Buffy’s help, he doesn’t demand it, the way the old Spike would have done. Instead he says “I’m in trouble” and lets her offer to help. There is also, of course, the fact that for a while at least he doesn’t relish the thrill of the fight as much as he used to, but it’s strongly implied that this is a matter of him repressing a side of himself he now finds frightening rather than an actual change in character. So my question is, can anyone point to hard and fast evidence of a character change in Spike between S6 and S7?