History Headscratchers / BuffyverseVampires

* There is doubtless some FantasticRacism/WhatMeasureIsAMook involved, but the main point is that brainwashing a villain to make him good is generally considered more evil than straight-up killing him (it is orwellian, as it involves a more complete erasure of him than killing). This is true in the buffyverse - that's why ensouling a vampire is a "curse" and it's the whole point of The Initiative plotline. And if the idea is the heroes should be expected to take affirmative measures to take opponents alive just in case they should reform spontaneously, that's generally reserved for fiction with no-kill rules stronger than the buffyverse has.

** I suspect that, if they didn't kill her dead dead dead, that super fast slayer healing would take care of something as small as an entry wound and a few broken ribs pretty quickly. (A machine gun or the infamous rocket launcher would be a better bet). Also, stealth would have to be involved - Buffy's usually a pretty fast-moving target once the surprise round is over.

*** Actually, it's not contradicts itself, they're just wrong. The way a vampire works is a demon possesses a body and the soul leaves it. Each demon is an individual who bases their personality on the person they are now in control of, normally taking it UpToEleven. For example, Willow, while not knowing it, is bi/gay (whichever it is) and has a mean/sadistic side. Vampire Willow takes the sadism and bisexuality to 11, as well as her innocence at the same time. Spike was a hopeless romantic in life. Take that up to 11 and combine it with over 100 years of evil and modern Spike is easily explained. Liam was a hedonist in life. Angelus was essentially the same, but with douchebaggery substituted for sadism because vampires enjoy pain. So on and so forth.

I think the show doesn’t make it clear but it seems that just take a vampire bite to turn into a vampire, not to drink the vampire’s blood.

*** I've read frequently over the years that Whedon dislikes guns. He probably considered them a necessary evil with Firefly; you can't really have a shipful of space cowboys without having guns!

** Darla used two guns in season 1 episode 7. Buffy hid, Darla kept firing like a moron and Angel snuck up on her and staked her. So not for lack of trying, but the gun thing isn't foolproof, you still have to be a competent combatant to fight the Slayer even in season 1.

** The show does actually say that the vampire personality is related to the human personality - explicitly in one case, in Doppelgangland, when Willow is freaked out about Wishverse Willow being so evil and skanky and gay. Someone tells her not to worry because the vampire personality has nothing to do with the human personality, and Angel goes, "Well, actually..." Buffy shuts him up, but it's actually been pretty clear from the first episodes. If vamp!Jesse has nothing to do with real Jesse, why does he go out of his way to get Cordelia? Vampire personalities are shaped by the personality of the body they get stuffed into, just with extra added evil and a rejection of social norms that allow them to express repressed elements of their personality. For people who are basically good, this involves a rejection of their despised previous persona (Jesse, and Spike, although it takes Spike awhile). For people who are already evil or borderline bad or just plain mean, like Liam or Harmony, they just get extra more so. Wishverse Willow is a lot like real, souled Willow after she becomes dark. "Bored now", anyone? With Drusilla, she's already crazy when Angel finally kills her, and she's not repressing anything. So Vamp Drusilla is still crazy but with extra bonus obsessing over dead things, blood, etc. -- This is all basically FanWank, I guess, so YMMV.

*** Beyond that, Spike has been like this from ''day one''. In School Hard, he switches from "cocky badass BloodKnight" to "extremely doting boyfriend" the second Dru steps into the room. Spike is and literally ''has always been'' a diehard hopeless romantic who'd do anything for his love, this has been a consistent part of his character since he was introduced. When it was Dru, "anything" was forgiving cheating and giving up the opportunity to kill the Slayer when he had her in his grasp because Dru was threatened. When it was Buffy, it was behaving himself and getting a soul when he realized he couldn't ever be right for her without one.

*** He was. Remember the first and second episodes of Season 6?
*** And I thought the reason Buffy trusted Spike to protect Dawn is because just a few episodes prior to the big blowout, Spike almost gave his unlife against Glory's interrogation in order to do exactly that. Not because "Oh, he's evil, so he's cool with the apocalypse," but because he's already PROVEN he'll die for her.

*** The idea that Spike wanted his chip removed was an intentional RedHerring. This is confimed in season 7, and there's not a single line of dialouge in S6 that contradicts it -- Spike's lines are just phrased ambiguously until the reveal. The earliest hint is in the little speech he gives at the end of "Seeing Red", where stresses that Buffy "has no idea" that he "wasn't always this way"; Buffy knew Spike before he was chipped, but never knew him when he had a soul.
*** Right, Spike says outright in season 7 that he purposely got his soul. He tells Buffy, "This chip, they did to me. I couldn't help it. But the soul, I got on my own, for you." Crazy!Spike, who is too unhinged to know how to lie, backs this up by saying he did it "to be hers". He had no intent to get rid of his chip, he wasn't tricked, he knew exactly what he was signing up for. The show just wanted the fact he was doing so to be TheReveal, so they deliberately made his dialogue ambiguous.

** Vamps are actually pretty flimsy as demons go. Sure, they can only be killed by a handful of specific methods, but they are ridiculously vulnerable to those methods - the sunlight is, itself, a huge vulnerability that few (if any) other demons have. Stakes? As soon as something pointy and wood touches their chest with the pointy end mostly pointed at the heart, they suddenly completely lack a sternum and the soft tissue has the structural integrity of an overfilled water balloon. (And this isn't a 'Slayer Strength' thing, since we've seen ordinary mortals do it on more than one occasion.) Beheading? As soon as something sharp hits the neck, again, bye-bye bones, hello water balloon. (And again, normal people have been shown vorpalizing vamps, instead of hacking away, so not just Slayer Strength...though that trick with the cymbal at the Bronze in season 1 is probably something only a Slayer could pull off.)

* In Surprise, Angel says that airline flight isn't an option because there's no way to guard against the sun. In the Spike comics (don't know which) it shows Spike catching a flight, with a sword even, on a plane full of supernaturals, clearly illustrating and stating that there is at least one airline that caters to supernaturals. When exactly was it established, is what I'm wondering.

** Rumor has it that Creator/JulietLandau refused to appear in anything other than flashbacks or illusions after Buffy Season 5 to prevent her character from being killed off.

** Angel set Dru and Darla on fire fully intending to kill both of them. And then Drusilla never showed her face in ''Angel'' again. In the ''Buffy'' episode following, Drusilla literally just walked away while Buffy was acting all disgusted.

** Riley states that Buffy felt sorry for him in "Buffy vs. Dracula". While it may not make complete sense, that's her stance. And actually, they've never killed harmless vampires before. Really, the only vampires that are harmless were Spike and Angel. All the others actually kill and eat humans.

*** Actually, in the season 2 episode ''Lie to Me''- just a few episodes before Angel lost his soul- Buffy flat out says that a vampire is a demon walking around in a human corpse. It has all of their memories, and seems to be a blank slate of sorts otherwise, but it isn't the same entity. Angel just has a GuiltComplex, probably in part stemming from the fact that the only reason he is a vampire is that, in life, he was a useless drunk with a weakness for the ladies, and the black sheep of the family as a result. That and killing said family. Basically, he blames Liam for Angelus.

* First, it's because they're trying to find out about The Initiative from him. Then, it's simply because he's helpless and for all his big talk, he can't touch them. Spike may have ''tried'' to kill them before, but by season 4 he's never been successful so there's no serious bad blood there. Buffy can justify stakings if she's literally being attacked, but it's going to feel a little [[BuffySpeak murder-y]] when the guy can't fight back. Eventually, it's because he's extra muscle and an asset. Remember, in season 4, they've lost Oz, Cordie and Angel all in pretty close concession. Willow and Tara are still relative newcomers to magic, so they don't have much combat utility yet. All of the fighting falls squarely on Buffy's shoulders now without Faith or Angel around, so Spike's fighting skills (which are even better than Angel's, and thus nothing to stick their noses up at even if everyone hates him) make him worth keeping around. It's implied they probably ''would'' have staked him for "The Yoko Factor" if he hadn't stepped in to save them last minute.

*** Apparently the water Spike was tortured with in season 7 was intended to be holy water (probably supplied by Caleb), but the sfx team forgot to add the smoke effects.

*** In the episode of ''Angel'' where he fights a blind MonsterofTheWeek, it's shown that vampires create heat when they move.

* In the season 7 episode "Potential", Dawn says that vampires 'feel pain, but don't let it deter them'. If this is true then how come Spike's chip can stop him from killing people.

* It seems like the length of time it takes for someone to turn into a vampire depends only on the necessities of the plot. Sometimes they rise after they're buried (Ford, Holden, and many others). Sometimes it's when they're in the funeral home (Theresa, that one woman in early S7). Sometimes it's in the hospital (like in "The Body"). Sometimes it's within minutes (Jesse and the watcher sired by Zachary Kralik). But it's always because someone rising then serves the plot in some way. It's annoying.

* I get it. Buffy the Vampire Slayer wouldn't be the same show if we had to figure out exactly how evil each vampire is prior to them being staked. If we accept the original story that a vampire isn't a person, everything you were goes to the afterlife and a demon high jacks your body. By about season three we know that simply isn't the case, apparently the only thing that goes away is the ability to know the difference between right and wrong. The thing is my ability to know the difference right and wrong doesn't by definition make me chaotic stupid. For starters there should be a certain amount of vampires who simply like being on the low down not drawing undo attention. We know there are humans who want to be bitten. I know if I was a vampire I would have found that cult of stupid kids and feed just enough and let them go mostly unharmed. It's simply logical.

*** This was explicitly stated by Giles in the pilot episode. Something about how Buffy should "just ''know'', without looking, without thinking about it". One possibility is that Buffy is just really bad at using the mental parts of the Slayer Power Package. The potentials in S7 are pretty much ''all'' shown to be better than Buffy was at drawing on the collective instincts and skills of the Slayer heritage.

* Okay, so after Buffy drowns in Season 1, Angel says he can't perform CPR because he has no breath. However, there are times when vampires are shown to be breathing, Spike in particular. He breathes hard after he and Buffy are done screwing, and the Ubervamp is able to enact drowning torture on him, both of which shouldn't happen if he doesn't breath. I can live with it, it's just kinda weird...

** And then there is Becoming Part 2 where Spike renders Drusilla unconscious by putting her in a choke hold...

* In the wishverse, one of the White Hats says that "Everyone knows vampires are attracted to bright colors." So why do they all wear black?

* Why doesn't a person's bedroom qualify as a residence? In Angel we learn that clearly a hotel room can satisfy the spell since it prevents Angel from entering Fred's room without her express permission. So why doesn't an individual bed room? It doesn't seem to be legal ownership (like in Vampire Diaries) because Angel owns the hotel. If it's simply spending enough time then your average teens room should fulfill that requirement. For that matter is Xander's basement considered separate from Xander's parent's home for the purposes of the magic?

* This is a point I wondered about quite a lot. How is it that a newly risen vampire is shown with, apparently, a Matrix-style martial arts program installed? Dawn lampshades it in one episode I think. I mean it makes sense for Spike and Angel, they've been alive for a very long time, Spike in particular blends several different styles. From what we've seen of the vamps, there's a fair amount of fighting involved, so it makes sense for them to learn after a while. But for the ones who've just popped out of a grave, how are they throwing kicks and punches like the ones they are? That's not just brawling, that's fairly decent technique. Just wondering

Why some vampires want to destroy the world and bringing up the Apocalypse? The Master in season one wants to open the Hellmouth and then in season two Angelus, Spike and Drusilla want the world to be absorbed into a hell dimension (even when Spike changes his mind at some point). Why? Vampires need humans to feed and to reproduce, if all humans get killed by demons then they won’t have human blood to feed and starve and they can’t create new vampires. Besides it’s establish that vampires aren’t popular among demons so in a hell dimension and/or a post-Apocaliptic Earth rule by more powerful demons they’ll be exterminate or enslave.

We see several examples of people turning into vampires with no clear indication that they ever drank blood from the vampire turning them:

Harmony is bitten in The Graduation, did the vampire biting her had time to make her drink her blood in the middle of a battle?

We see Buffy patrolling in the Cemetery and basically at least one vampire wake up every night. Yet, siring someone seems to be not only something painful (as a vampire you’ll have to harm yourself in some way to make you bleed) and psychological meaningful (sired vampires have some sort of family relationship as shown in Darla-Angelus-Drusilla-Spike group), so, it’s seems that every vampire feeds of a random victim and then sires him/her no matter or the above said and the victim is then buried and rises.

In Lie To Me, Ford asks to be turn into a vampire in exchange for delivering Buffy to Spike and co., yet Buffy escapes and Spike is angry, it is implied that Spike just want to kill him now, not just turning him as he promessed, yet we later saw that Ford is dead and that he did wakes up as a vampire, so are we suppose to believe that Spike did fulfil his part of the deal even when he didn’t get what he wanted?

And of course, the big question; why would vampires want to sire someone? Bringing more vampires into existence will cause more competence and reductions of the food source, something problematic especially in a small town. Is understandable that they sire someone once in a while for different reasons but they seem to sire everyone they bite.

Do vampires grow hair and can they build up more muscle mass post-transformation? It's fairly common vampire mythos that they either don't, or their bodies try to maintain what it looked like when it was turned. Neither seems to be the case here, however. There's an episode in season 3 where Angelus is shown with a moustache, but Liam was cleanly-shaved when he was turned, which means he's either wearing a fake (which is something I absolutely doubt Angelus would do) or it grew out after his transformation. Spike likewise is clearly shown to have his hair grown out in the first episode of season 7, as you can clearly see his dark roots are showing under his bleached hair--which implies he used to be maintaining it, and recently stopped due to going insane.

Where muscle-mass is concerned, well... seeing as they both fill out the MrFanservice role, we're all very acquainted with the fact that Angel and Spike are both pretty dang cut. However, I find it hard to believe drunken hedonistic Liam or dorky upper-class William would have been secretly shredded underneath their period-appropriate attire. And before anyone says it: Yes, in reality they ''were'' because the actors were, but realistically there's no reason men of their era and station would have physiques like that. They weren't physical labourers; one was a drunken party boy, and the other a shy nerdy poet. That suggests they built the muscle-mass post-transformation instead, which leads to the question of if vampire muscle atrophies? Could they get fat if all they did is drink blood and sit around?

Spike is shown repeatedly eating actual food from seasons 4-7 but... how does his body even process that? Do vampires still have bodily functions like digestion? Does it even offer sustenance? Does Spike have the vampiric equivalent of pica?

In season 6, upon seeing Buffy's bloodied knuckles, Spike is quickly able to surmise that she'd clawed her way through her coffin as he's a vampire and thus had to do the same thing when he was turned. However, in ''"Lies My Parents Told Me"'', William's mother expresses that she's been worried sick about him for disappearing for a few days--meaning she wasn't aware he'd been killed, and thus held no funeral. Even back in the 1880's, the authorities would have at least ''tried'' to identify bodies found before burying them namelessly, so it seems far-fetched that William would have been buried before either rising or being identified first. Vampires clearly don't require burial in order to rise, as we've seen several rise while in morgues and funerals, and even Spike's mother herself seems to have been simply left in the house to rise. As such, Drusilla/Angelus/Darla have no reason to bury him and on the contrary, it's easier for them not to bother. So how exactly could he have ended up clawing his way out of a coffin?

*** No he isn't. Spike is only similar to himself when soulless on the superficial level of retaining the demon's bad boy style. There's tons of differences in how he presents himself post-soul; [[note]] his once-genuine confidence is a smokescreen to hide a ''raging'' InferioritySuperiorityComplex; he's capable of genuine selflessness; his obsessive qualities are replaced with CourtlyLove. [[/note]] Angel ''really'' isn't as different from Angelus as you say; Angel also shares Angelus' personality and mannerisms, Angelus is just ''so unyieldingly malicious'' (and his mannerisms aren't as distinct as Spike's in general) that it doesn't seem like it. Angelus is evil Angel, Soulless!Spike is evil Ensouled!Spike. The two entities are but aren't the same, because they share memories and personalities but the ensouled versions are legitimately ''incapable'' of the things their soulless counterparts have done. Seeing Red wouldn't have happened any more with ensouled!Spike than Jenny's death would have with Angel.