Spike's Soul: What Does it Mean?

and daring in an effort to elevate himself up to the level of his Lady Love, so that he will no longer be beneath her. That's exactly what I saw Spike doing from "Intervention" through "After Life".

In "After Life" and again in "Life Serial" Buffy came to Spike just to spend time in his company. At the time, it seemed that all the good deeds he did in the final few days before Buffy's death and over the summer while she was gone were starting to pay off. She was starting to treat him as someone she could go to for companionship and not just when there was a job she needed done.

Spike should have been encouraged by this. It seemed like Buffy was starting to give him the very thing he had been begging for in "Crush" --“a crumb, the barest smidgen.” She was starting to treat him with more respect and was spending time with him. He should have seen it as a sign that, by doing good things, he was proving his worth. Instead, Spike seemed to take it as a sign that Buffy wasn't as good a person as he had originally thought. He seemed to think the very fact that she could look to him for companionship brought her down to his level, rather than raising him up to hers. Spike began insisting that Buffy was a creature of darkness. It became easier for him to encourage Buffy's darkness than it was for him to try to emulate the goodness within her. The fact that Buffy was coming to him for company should have encouraged him that there was a chance he could someday be good enough for her, but instead it seemed to make him doubt that she was really all that much better than him.

That's where I saw Spike's foray into the art of courtly love come to a crashing halt. He stopped trying to become a better person. Instead, he tried to make Buffy a worse one. I don't think that this was a conscious decision on his part. I just think he had become convinced that he would always be a monster, that he was “dirt”. When Buffy made him start to question whether he was still beneath her, he couldn't imagine that it was because he was becoming a more worthy person. The only way he could conceive of

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