By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans often debate which characters are the funniest, the saddest, and so on. However, the biggest question about these beloved heroes and villains is one that few fans never bother to ask: which character has the best arc? According to Buffy creator Joss Whedon, the surprising answer to this is Spike, the villainous vampire whose arc in the show ended with him sacrificing his life to save the entire world.
Spike Gets The Best Arc
Considering the amazing journey that Buffy herself undergoes, it may sound a bit surprising that Whedon thinks Spike has the best arc of them all. His logic, though, is quite simple: as the showrunner told Sci-Fi TV, Spike went out of his way to earn his soul in an attempt to become a better man. Whedon contrasted this directly with Angel, who he claims “had a soul thrust upon him for a hundred years and moped about it.”
The Buffy creator’s comparison is pretty inevitable. Angel and Spike had very similar narrative arcs, making it nearly impossible not to compare them. Angel’s whole deal, of course, is that he was cursed with a soul by the Kalderash people after he killed their most beloved daughter. The curse was intended to make Angel feel immense guilt over everyone he had killed as a vampire, forcing him to experience a neverending lifetime of misery and shame before his arc had him meet Buffy and become a champion against evil.
While he was around since Season 2, it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season that set up Spike’s primary arc by revealing the character at his lowest. This was the season where he and Buffy (newly resurrected from the dead) had a toxic but physically passionate relationship, complete with rough sex that quite literally brought the house down. But near the end of the season, Spike tries to rape Buffy, a moral event horizon that, for many fans, meant this character was beyond redemption.
Indeed, it seemed that Buffy the Vampire Slayer could never redeem Spike after this, but Joss Whedon gave him an arc in Season 7 to do just that. We find out that Spike took on a series of difficult trials in order to get a soul, his love for Buffy motivating him to become the kind of man who ultimately sacrifices his life to save the world. It was an arc that took the fandom by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have because Whedon had been laying its groundwork for years.
For example, Buffy has always presented Spike as a character whose arc pivots around love. Back in Season 2, Spike actually helped Buffy save the world largely because he was sick of his girlfriend Drusilla hanging all over Angel. This weirded Buffy out (“you need my help ’cause your girlfriend’s a big ho?”), but this incident cemented that Spike, in the parlance of Meat Loaf, would do anything for love.
Speaking of which, the Season 5 episode “Fool For Love” revealed that when he was still a human, Spike (or William the Bloody, so named for his “bloody awful poetry”) was a huge simp for a lady named Cecily. She was effectively his muse, inspiring poems that she later rejected along with Spike himself, declaring that the middling poet was beneath her. This sets up his conversion at Drusilla’s hands, but it also proves that Spike was always…well, a fool for love long before he was an immortal bloodsucker, and he’s always been motivated more by romance than anything else.
For all of the witty sarcasm Buffy the Vampire Slayer is known for, Spike’s arc reveals the earnest, emotional core of the entire show: the revelation that love really does conquer all. Love convinces a soulless rapist of a mass-murdering vampire to become a hero who gives his life in the final episode to save the world. By going from the lowest depths to such dizzying heights, Spike unexpectedly achieved the best character arc in the Whedonverse, as expertly planned by none other than Joss Whedon himself.
