1.I'd add that there's a meta question floating around about what demons are supposed to be metaphors for. I've argued this before in my meta on Lie to Me. If demons stand in for our various traumas, dark emotions and angst, then a story about a girl slaying them is really a story about a girl struggling with life's darkness. But once demons become persons, the question is raised about what distinguishes a slayer from a killer.
I think they can be both. It works that way for the human characters. Dawn can be said to represent Buffy’s human side but is still her own person and often quite unlike Buffy personality wise. Giles is her wisdom (it says so in Restless) but does some very unwise things, Xander is her heart but can be both rational and cruel. I’m not sure quite what the opposite of spirit is but I’m sure Willow’s been pretty mundane on occasion.
That aside I think the implicit rule that demons are only staked when actively threatening works rather well and goes back to at least S3 when Buffy and Faith attacking a sleeping nest of vampires in the daytime is depicted as not a good thing even though it would be a more effective strategy if the idea were simply to eliminate all possible threats. Slayers may be killers but they’re not terminators. As to not staking Spike specifically, I think the more difficult question is why she doesn’t stake Harmony, who isn’t chipped and (we the audience know) is actively killing and turning the citizens of Sunnydale. I think to some extent the reason she doesn’t is the same as for Spike, she just doesn’t take Harmony seriously. As she actually says about Spike in AYW, Harmony (in Buffy’s mind) is too incompetent to cause a significant problem even if Harmony has the intent to do so. With Spike it’s a little more complicated because not only is his ability to do evil compromised but he is a source of information etc that can work for them whether he intends it or not. He tried to betray them all to Adam but ended up alerting them to Adam’s plan. He tried to get his chip out but failed and was wrong about the Doctor’s ability to perform said operation so even were he to try again the result would be the same. Shortly after that we have the FFL scene and whether she recognizes the actual cause or not it’s pretty clear that Spike has his reasons for not wanting to cross her.
2.I think I agree about the non-contact. Partly because I don't much care for AtS so nothing that happens in S5 really matters. Partly because Spike became less interesting to me after he left Sunnydale - I don't really care about him becoming his own man. And partly because I'm post-Spuffy because when push came to shove Spike showed himself not ready to relinquish his idea of himself as the unrequited lover and accept that the effulgence might actually love him back. Which is scarier in some ways, as long as they don't care you can't hurt them, you're in complete control of the emotional landscape.
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I think they can be both. It works that way for the human characters. Dawn can be said to represent Buffy’s human side but is still her own person and often quite unlike Buffy personality wise. Giles is her wisdom (it says so in Restless) but does some very unwise things, Xander is her heart but can be both rational and cruel. I’m not sure quite what the opposite of spirit is but I’m sure Willow’s been pretty mundane on occasion.
That aside I think the implicit rule that demons are only staked when actively threatening works rather well and goes back to at least S3 when Buffy and Faith attacking a sleeping nest of vampires in the daytime is depicted as not a good thing even though it would be a more effective strategy if the idea were simply to eliminate all possible threats. Slayers may be killers but they’re not terminators. As to not staking Spike specifically, I think the more difficult question is why she doesn’t stake Harmony, who isn’t chipped and (we the audience know) is actively killing and turning the citizens of Sunnydale. I think to some extent the reason she doesn’t is the same as for Spike, she just doesn’t take Harmony seriously. As she actually says about Spike in AYW, Harmony (in Buffy’s mind) is too incompetent to cause a significant problem even if Harmony has the intent to do so. With Spike it’s a little more complicated because not only is his ability to do evil compromised but he is a source of information etc that can work for them whether he intends it or not. He tried to betray them all to Adam but ended up alerting them to Adam’s plan. He tried to get his chip out but failed and was wrong about the Doctor’s ability to perform said operation so even were he to try again the result would be the same. Shortly after that we have the FFL scene and whether she recognizes the actual cause or not it’s pretty clear that Spike has his reasons for not wanting to cross her.
2.I think I agree about the non-contact. Partly because I don't much care for AtS so nothing that happens in S5 really matters. Partly because Spike became less interesting to me after he left Sunnydale - I don't really care about him becoming his own man. And partly because I'm post-Spuffy because when push came to shove Spike showed himself not ready to relinquish his idea of himself as the unrequited lover and accept that the effulgence might actually love him back. Which is scarier in some ways, as long as they don't care you can't hurt them, you're in complete control of the emotional landscape.