Is Buffy a massmurderer?

[liliaeth]

And yet another post...
I seem to be on a roll

X-men 3, just came back from watching it and loved it.
Could give you a thesis on why and which characters I liked and so on, but that'll have to wait due to me not feeling like it right now*g*

I followed another su_herald-post and jgracio came up with the old chestnut: "If there's a chance for a normal, nothing too special about him/her, vamp to not be evil, then any time Buffy kills a new one, heck, any time she kills a vamp without first checking it's background, she might be commiting murder. You're watching a show about a mass murderer. Joss Whedon's empowered female icon is a mass murderer."


And I got thinking, what's wrong with actually dealing with that? What's wrong in daring to actually make things complex instead of just hinting at it and then ignoring it when it really comes down to the point. What's wrong with instead of just having Buffy refuse to be called a killer, that someone actually confronts her with the idea that what she's doing might well be wrong.

Yes, it would mean that Buffy has killed vampires who might, someday in the future, not be evil. But then is it right to stay stuck in the black and white perspective of good and evil, humans good, vampires evil? Doesn't it ruin the show that this issue is never truly dealt with?

Is Buffy wrong to stake a vampire who comes fresh out of the grave?
In my opinion, no.
Would Buffy have been wrong in staking Spike in s4, even with the chip, actually, no. She'd have been well in her right, seeing as even harmless at that point, he's still a potential threat. She didn't know enough about the chip to know about its effects on Spike. In fact, had Buffy staked Spike in Pangs, I could have fully well sided with her doing what at that point seemed to be the right thing to do.

Of course, looking back, with what we now know about Spike, it most probably would have ended with the destruction of the world, due to Spike's lack of being there. But the fact is, with the information she had at that point in time, it would have been the right thing to do.

Buffy's like a soldier, fighting a war in the frontline. She's the first line of defense. So yes, she could give every vampire a chance, she could go on assuming that every vampire ought to have a chance to prove him or herself, before she does something. But if she did that, then those vampires, even the ones with the eventual potential for good, would have killed innocent people.

Much as I love Spike, he killed thousands, tenthousands, hell possibly hundreds of thousands innocent people. He spent a 120 years killing innocent people. And every vampire that gets out of its grave, that gets past Buffy, could end up killing the same amount of innocent people if they aren't stopped.

Is a soldier a massmurderer or someone who protects the innocent?
Soldiers too make mistakes, soldiers, like Buffy, are likely to kill hostile fighters that if left alive have the potential to be good men and women who could go on to bring peace and hope. But if that soldier doesn't do his or her duty, those hostile soldiers will potentially kill him or her and all the people that he or she is defending. And that's why a soldier shoots.
Not because the enemy is evil, but because there are people who need to be protected.

Showing that vampires have a potential for good does not make Buffy a massmurderer, neither does it do that for Willow, or Xander, or even Riley. It just makes it more complex, it makes it clear that every vampire she slays was once a victim, an innocent person who got turned into the enemy. And personally I much prefer the complexity over the childish simplicity of good and evil with nothing in between.


To put it in the words of Whedon himself:

Buffy: Does it ever get easy?

Giles: You mean life?

Buffy: Yeah. Does it get easy?

Giles: What do you want me to say?

Buffy: (looks up at him) Lie to me.

Giles: (considers a moment) Yes, it's terribly simple.

They start walking out of the cemetery.

Giles: The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are
easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we
always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody
lives happily ever after.

Buffy: Liar.

Comments

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

No.

Buffy is a soldier in a war.

[liliaeth]

Exactly. Too many people depend on her being the first line of defense for her to take a risk by not stopping vampires when she has the chance.

[bogwitch.livejournal.com]

No.

They are already dead.

[liliaeth]

Well if it was just that, she wouldn't have the right to kill them, what does give her the right, is that she can't take the risk of giving them a chance at being good, and being wrong (aka them killing people after she lets them go).

[bogwitch.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. But Vampires, being a perversion of life, have no place in the natural order of the world.

[liliaeth]

ah, but by what standards?
Is a parasite a perversion of life because it lives of feeding and causing harm to other beings?

Is a slayer a perversion of life because she has strenght and abilities beyond what should be humanly possible and does that give people the right to kill them?

Being a demon in a dead body only makes a vampire a perversion of life because it's weird to us. Because it's ... wrong.

Buffy doesn't slay vampires because they are dead, she slays them because of what they may do if they aren't stopped.

[bogwitch.livejournal.com]

>>Is a parasite a perversion of life because it lives of feeding and causing harm to other beings?

No, because it's alive. It has a place in the order.

>>Is a slayer a perversion of life because she has strength and abilities beyond what should be humanly possible?

Not a perversion of life, no. But quite likely a perversion of humanity, i.e. a freak. And evolution comes from freaks. As she has life, she has a right to it.

>>Being a demon in a dead body only makes a vampire a perversion of life because it's weird to us. Because it's ... wrong.

That's a weak arguement, and you know it! The traditional arguement here would be that God created life and a creature that doesn't die but walks the earth undead is corruption of God's creations. I am an athiest, so that arguement doesn't sit well for me, but it holds true that Matter can only be living or dead, it can't be both.

>>Buffy doesn't slay vampires because they are dead, she slays them because of what they may do if they aren't stopped.

Yes, but what they are dictates that.

[liliaeth]

Ah, but by what standards do we count something alive?

Let me see if I well remember this, it's been years since I was in high school.

To be counted as a living being, one needs three things:
-to eat: which vampires do
-to reproduce: which vampires do, no matter how they do it, it's still reproduction
-now I can't remember the third right now. Think that might be the one thing that they fail on.

But the basic facts remain, a vampire eats, reproduces, moves, talks and thinks, so who are we to say they aren't in some way alive. Maybe not in the way a human is alive, but still...

[bogwitch.livejournal.com]

>>Maybe not in the way a human is alive, but still...

No, they're not, therefore proving they aren't life. They are corpses animated by demons, which are magical beings, not living ones. To 'live' they have to die. Nothing about their bodies is alive and working to keep that body in existence. It's magically driven.

To say the they reproduce is stretching the definition a bit, I think. It's a ritual exchange, a blood ritual, and therefore also magically driven.

And the simple answer: if they were alive, why would they be called 'undead'?.

[liliaeth]

Why?
Is a plant any less alive, because it does not breathe oxygen and doesn't have babies, the way a human is?

And isn't all reproduction a form of ritual.
Like with humans, males and females get together, the male donates a part of his body that enters the females body and joins with a part of her body to create a new life.

Isn't magic by nature, something that isn't yet explained by science?*eg*

And the term undead was coined by humans, does that make it the only truth possible.

Not that I'm entirely disagreeing with you*g*, just saying that life is relative from the point of view of the person calling something alive or not.

Take a plant during winter, by all notions of life it is dead, yet given spring it comes up again, it's still alive though burried.

[kantayra.livejournal.com]

The answer is, really, entirely dependent upon which side you're on. To a vampire: Yes, Buffy is a mass-murderer. To a human: No, she's a necessary defense. One side's soldier is often the other side's mass-murderer. I mean, by the 'defending your own' logic, vampires would have the inherent right to try to kill the Slayer, because she's trying to kill them and their kind.

The show, of course, always wanted the viewers to look at everything from Buffy's and a human's perspective, which is fair enough. So the show writers certainly wanted the answer to be 'soldier' rather than 'mass-murderer'. I do find that graying that up is much more interesting to me personally, but it's clearly not what the writers intended. Which is one of my major problems with the show, actually, but... *shrug* It is what it is. But that doesn't mean you can't try to look at it from another viewpoint, or even find that viewpoint more interesting. It's pretty much a matter of preference, I think.

[liliaeth]

True, it's why I loved the viewpoint expressed in 'doomed' (at least I think it was in that ep) about the slayer being like a bogeyman for demons.

And it's one of the reasons why I don't get people who see Spike as more evil because he killed slayers. From his viewpoint, he's as heroic fighting slayers, as a slayer is heroic from a human viewpoint.

And it's why I understand him not showing more guilt in LMPTM because of all the people he killed, at least the slayers went in, with the intention of killing him as well.

[sp23.livejournal.com]

He might not have shown in LMPTM that he felt guilt, but, of course, he did. We saw that in Beneath You when he tells of all the voices. Also, in the Angel S5 episode Damage, he wasn't the monster that hurt Dana, but he well knows the horrors he did commit, and he feels pain over them. It's just that Spike, unlike Angel, knows there's really no redemption to be had, although the idea of being a Champion is quite appealing to him. *g*

[liliaeth]

Oh I'm not saying that he didn't feel any guilt about it. Just that ME kept bringing up the fact that he'd killed slayers, like in say Damage, as if it was his worst sin, which just plain isn't true.

But yep, Spike isn't in it for atonement, it's like in that scene with Lindsey, Spike doesn't go save people to make up for the past, he does it to prevent people from dying in the future.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I never see that killing Slayers as "more" evil because Slayers are slayers. By definition if a vamp is in a fight with a slayer, it's the vamp is fighting for his/her 'life.' And, in that case, they don't have a supernatural advantage.



What creature doesn't fight for its life? Vampires are evil, but even then fighting for one's own continued existence is morally corrupt, it's a biological imperative.

[liliaeth]

Oh definitely agreeing on this one.

[sp23.livejournal.com]

Not only is Buffy a soldier, but I think Joss did a good job in showing that after a while, all the soldiers (ie, slayers) in this war reach a point where the constant killing becomes too much and that's when they get their death wish. Spike spotted that wish twice, and bagged two Slayers. Buffy reached that point at the end of S5 when she'd lost just about everything - her parents, her boyfriends, her connection with the world - and now her sister was doomed to die to close the portal. It was then that she chose to die rather than continue to live in a world where her life was one of constant death and loss.

I think it is a specious argument to say that by Buffy killing all vampires, she could possibly be killing a non-violent or good vampire. I don't think the history of vampires shows that in any way to be true. Vampires kill humans. They're demons, and it was only extraordinary circumstances that changed Angel and Spike - Angel's soul and Spike's chip. Now I could argue - and have - that Spike could have maybe refrained from evil if the chip had been removed at the end Season 6 without him getting a soul. I'm a redemptionista. He had human ties in the world - not just Buffy but also Dawn and to a lesser extent the Scoobies - but he still didn't have a conscience. I think he had to see everything through a 'what would Buffy want me to do' prism, and even then he screwed up royally. But he tried, I think, and I don't think any other vampire would have or could have done what Spike did. He was unique, and the definition of unique is: Being the only one of its kind.

[liliaeth]

Uhuh, hell, imagine going back in time and telling the slayer of the 19th century that she can't kill Spike, because he's going to be a good guy in a century or so.
She'd laugh in your face, because that's a century of innocent people dying because of a change in the vampire that may or may not happen some time in her future. Understanding that vampires may, under very specific circumstances change, some time in the future does not mean you can just let them go free, because like all slayers, Buffy has to live in the now and she'd feel responsible for all the lives lost because of something she didn't do.

[sp23.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

The old "If Buffy kills a vamp and ANY of them can be redeemed" is sad and specious. That's like saying when you're in a war you can't kill the enemy because he just might not be 100% committed to the cause he's representing. It happens all the time. Most rebels in the civil war weren't slave owners. And lots of Nazis had been raised as Hitler Youths and didn't know any better (and were only foot soldiers who never participated in 'the final solution') That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be shot on the field of battle! Nor does it mean that when soldiers reached the machine gun nests on the cliffs of Normandy they should have stopped to ask whether the guy on the other end of the machine gun might like to change political affiliation.

But, hey, we know people are never going to give up this sad line of argument. They need it to help support their hatred of the concept of redeeming Spike.

[liliaeth]

Exactly,

[kcarolj65.livejournal.com]

I agree that Buffy is a soldier in a war.

Actually, practically up until Willow's big Scythe-spell, she's the only (unincarcerated) soldier in the war who has the power and strength to fight demons on a relatively equal footing. Calling her a mass murderer is to completely miss the point, which was that probably the least likely person in the world - a tiny little California blonde - was the only one empowered to actually save it.

[liliaeth]

yep, accepting that vampires can be good, doesn't stop the fact that Buffy has no choice but to stake any vampire she meets, because she just doesn't have the resources to keep an eye on every vampire to make sure they don't go killing people when she isn't around.

[lilithbint.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call Buffy a mass murderer but if you use the soldier argument then there were things she did that would have had her in front of a court marshall. (firstly consorting with the enemy and secondly torture)

Whether you judge vampires to be evil or acting according to their nature they are sentient beings, killing them in battle is one thing but capture and torture is another (season two female vampire, Buffy shoved a cross in her mouth to get her to talk)

But the consorting with the enemy should have had her struck off the slayer register *grin*

[redeem147.livejournal.com]

More of a serial killer, until she activated the Potentials. Then she was a mass murderer.

Or possibly a fictional supernatural character with no precident in the real world. Or is that too silly?

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Pshaw! You're using that logic-thing and that's not fair!

[shakatany.livejournal.com]

Yes vampires clearly are a potential danger to humans (though it's never clear how much blood they really need to consume or how often) so to save humans she must kill the possessor demons that inhabit the dead human bodies. But then she also kills other demons with out discerning their intentions - how many are like Clem or Lorne? She could be considered a speciesist (?) killing anything that appears non-human. Recall how gung ho she was to kill the Fyaarl demon in "A New Man" without knowing for certain that it had anything to do with Giles'disappearance. Luckily she saw Giles' eyes but in another fight situation she might not have seen them in time and she would've killed Giles. It's a moral dilemma not made clear by ME.

Shakatany

[liliaeth]

The problem isn't that vampires need to kill, it's that they do. So far Buffy has seen little proof of vampires that don't kill. Even the vampires that bite people for money, will occasionally kill people.

And Buffy is actually willing to give demons, other than vampires a chance. Just look at that demon that was selling the books of ascension.

The Fyarl thing... She believed this particular fyarl had just killed Giles, is it any wonder she wasn't about to go listen to the demon that in her mind had murdered her father(figure)

[shakatany.livejournal.com]

I still think she tended to stake/kill first and ask questions later but that may have been the fault of the Watchers who clearly wanted an unquestioning demon-killing machine like Kendra and so made the world appear to be so very black and white at least in BtVS - AtS was far more complex in its (demon)world-view.
ME never was explicit on how much blood or how often vamps needed to consume it (I once wrote a post on that here (http://shakatany.livejournal.com/49951.html)) which leaves it to the fans to fill in the gaps.

Shakatany

[jgracio.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have a problem with a show that treats vampires as possibly being good and the human hero that kills them as being possibly evil.

Buffy was not that show. Much as you might have preferred a more morally grey show, where the roles weren't so clearly defined, where vampires aren't evil just because, Buffy wasn't that show.

BTVS is a show where Buffy, our hero, kills vampires while on a date. She has fun doing it. She never even pauses to consider if she should kill a vampire. That's not the behaviour of a soldier.

You say that if unsouled vampires could be good that it wouldn't matter because Buffy would still be a soldier, and without knowing if they were good or bad would still be forced to kill all of them. Those good vampires she kills are civilians.

Because if vampires can be good, then Spike wouldn't have been the first. And some of them would have been good from the start, right out of the grave. Baby vampires really.

I would've hated a Buffy that kills without asking, without making sure just a little bit, if only just a little bit, that she isn't killing an innocent.

I stand by my words. The possibility of redemption for a souless vampire couldn't exist in a show where the hero killed them without worry or questions, not without ruining the hero.

It's a pity that that conflicted with what you wanted from the show. If the show's name had been Spike the Vampire, then he could have won the redemption without a soul, but Buffy, at least the kill happy, kill em' all and let God sort em' out Buffy would've been a villain.