Tomorrow is less than a day away

[rahirah]

Tomorrow I have to go over to Mom's and stand around while the Registrar of Contractors inspects some shoddy porch railings she's made a complaint about. Once that's over, I intend to drop my car off at the mechanics', where hopefully they will discover what's making the 'check engine' light come on, and hopefully it will not require a small

Comments

[quinara]

Well, I mean, it's hard to tell in S7 what with her finding out about the soul relatively quickly, but I think her actions in Lessons are pretty much in line with the rest of the season. The way I see it, the soul makes her feel sympathy for him, but their whole scene in Never Leave Me makes me think that the most important thing it does is let Buffy get a handle on Spike's defensive mouthing off, which up till that point (in Beneath You and all through the previous seasons) she's been taking as is. And the way she talks about how she 'saw' Spike change makes me think that, while the soul crystalised for her that Spike was different, it wasn't actually what set the ball rolling and they could have got to a nebulous relationship stage without Spike getting a soul if other factors were brought in, and then onto a non-nebulous stage (which I don't think we get in S7, but in my head it would have been less than a season away), though it probably would have taken a good while longer.

... Ack, sorry - didn't mean to try and convince you, considering I imagine you've heard this stuff more than enough times before. But Buffy says she doesn't hate herself enough to want to be with someone who hurts her and she still seeks out Spike! Whether Spike can say the same I do not know.

[rahirah]

There was actually a line in an earlier draft of NLM where Buffy says she saw Spike changing even before he got the soul, and if that line had made it to the aired version, I would have far fewer doubts about Buffy's motivation. But it didn't, and I don't take shooting scripts as canon anyhow - or I'd also have to take into account the cut line from "First Date" where Buffy tells Giles that Spike is a person now that he has a soul. Which strongly implies she thinks he was a thing before, and still thinks it was perfectly OK for her to treat him like one.

That's really all I wanted out of S7: some unambiguous acknowledgment that Buffy realized that it was wrong of her to treat Spike like a thing even though he was evil and she was depressed. I never got it.

[quinara]

Yeah. That's a good point... (I don't see shooting scripts/drafts/cut scenes as canon either.) Though no one can take the 'completed past action' grammatical pedantry away from me!