[ SECRET POST #2283 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2283 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 032 secrets from Secret Submission Post #326.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[aubry]

Those are completely fair points.

My reason for lighting on Spike and Snape (beside the fact that they're from big fandoms and are famously divisive) is less to do with the consistency of their own character arcs, and more to do with how their redemption plots effect the wider moral landscape of the text.

In both cases they start out as antagonists. Snape's not a (known) murderer like Spike, but he's unjust, closed-minded and a bully who abuses his power. A quintessential villain for a child protaganist. As Harry matures he learns more about Snape. However, I'd argue the books, having humanised Snape, then avoid ever addressing the implications of his bad behaviour in earlier books. When we're left with Snape on a posthumous pedestal in the epilogue the implication is that Harry learned to see the bigger picture. But ought all sins be forgiven like that? (Your own answer might be yes to that - it's just that I think that it's a niggling discord rather than a deliberate question on which the book closes.)

With Spike, I think the fallout is markedly worse. By the time Spike gets his soul back, there's so little difference between souled!Spike and chipped!Spike that it raises the question of whether the distinction between human and vampire is morally sustainable at all. If any vampire could potentially go on a Spike-style redemption programme, should we review our opinion of Buffy's habit of sticking stakes through them? Again, the last two seasons run shy from tackling this sudden looming question head on.

In both cases I'm inclined to think that rendering "baddies" more sympathetic came at the expense of clarity in the hero's moral arc.

[(Anonymous)]

While you make a reasonable enough point about Snape's unfair and hurtful behavior as a teacher, I'm not sure how the narrative could have gone any other way. From the first book, Snape is set up as the grudging ally who would eventually make the Heroic Sacrifice so that the protagonist could succeed. It would be really hard for Harry to have said, "Wow, this guy made the ultimate sacrifice to help save us and defeat the Pureblood Supremacists... but he used his authority to mistreat the kids he supervised, so fuck him and his heroic death." I think the better message there is that a person doesn't have to be perfect in order to do the right thing in the end, and that you don't need to like someone personally in order to respect what they've done. I thought the books at least touched on those ideas a bit, but I last read them about five years ago, so YMMV.

With Spike, I was actually really interested in the way Spike's redemption brought up the question of the nature of vampirism and the morality of the Slayer. How morally culpable are vampires for their actions -- can they choose to do otherwise? The conclusion I came to is that it very much depended on who and what the person was in life; as a mortal, Spike had a deep capacity for selfless love that was not entirely eradicated by becoming a vampire (see his devotion to Dru). Thus, his period of enforced pacifism and socialization with humans allowed him to re-develop some rudimentary moral reasoning within a very narrow in-group, and when that in-group had a strong moral compass, he was able to stumble along in that general direction with only vague prompting. It was a specific confluence of factors that would be impractical to replicate for any significant number of vampires, and probably wouldn't work on the majority of them anyway (for instance, it would never have worked on Angelus), so I don't think that it wholly undercuts the work of the Slayer -- but I like the fact that it removed the hard binary of human/monster. It made the setting richer, and I think it complemented the other themes of the later seasons well (for instance, Season 6 was all about how humans could be just as monstrous as any demon -- so why can't a demon go the other way, and become more human?).