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herinsectreflection · 3 years

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Before a vampire is born, they are buried. One creature is put into the ground and another climbs back out of it. The old dies and a new lives, both a mirror of what came before and something completely new. They wear the face of the person that died, and their memories and personality shape who they become, but something at the core of their being has changed. Something in their brain has snapped and created a new creature.

When William dies, he is buried in the ground, and Spike climbs out. He is the same man, a fool driven by romance and devotion - but now twisted sideways. Where he was devoted before to his mother and to his crush in Cecily, those two people are now the same - Drusilla is his lover but also the woman who created him, who consistently refers to her sires and those she sires with familial terms. He was driven by gentle poetry before, and now revels in the art of violence and sex. He constructs a new style, a new accent, a new name. He is his old self, and something new.

When Spike is taken by the Initiative, he is buried underground. His brain is experimented on, and irrevocably changed. The person that climbs back out is Spike, but a Spike that will never be the same as they were before. They were driven by violence, and that has been taken from them. He is still his old self, but now is forced to become someone new. In Something Blue (again evoking the something old/something new idea), he desperately claws at the ground, trying to find a way to go back, like he's trying to climb back into his grave and be reborn again. But there is no going back - we cannot undo the things in life that shape us. This marks the turning point in Spike's arc, where his path is shifted onto the one we see going forward.

(Credit to toshsato)

This scene is kind of a light-hearted mirror to S6, with the roles inverted. In The Gift, Buffy is buried in the ground, and in Bargaining she climbs back out. She is the same person of course, but she is permanently changed by her experiences. In a way, a different Buffy climbs out of her grave, her trauma making her new, but completed shaped by the old. And she doesn't want it - the first thing she tries to do is recreate her jump from The Gift. To climb back into her grave and be her old self again. And in S6 (specifically Once More with Feeling and Dead Things), Spike is one of the people stopping her, pointing out that there is no going back. There's no point, there's "nothing there" - because life is just living, and you have to go on living.

By the end of the season, Spike realises that he must become a different person, to be reborn again. And so in Grave, he descends beneath the ground again, into the underground caves, and there, the Spike dies. The old, soulless Spike is gone, and a new ensouled Spike climbs back out - again, completed shaped by who they were before. They are the same person and also kind of not, old and new. Buffy too climbs out of a literal grave in this episode, and in doing so affirms her commitment to living, to experiencing life in all its forms, to show it to and share it with Dawn. The grave is not a static place of death, but a place of change and rebirth, where old identities can be shed and new ones can form, for better and for worse.

The Spike we see in Beneath You (another reference to the grave, being literally beneath), is a new man, with a new outfit, eager to leave his old self behind and insist that he's changed. But it doesn't work. Just because he is something new, that doesn't mean he's not also the old. It's not as easy as that. He has to reckon with what he has done and find a way to make amends. And so in Chosen, he again goes beneath the ground and dies.

When he is reborn on Angel, it is as a new man, quite literally on a mystical level. His death made him a "champion", and so when he comes back to life, the difference in his being is of massive, prophetic, cosmic importance. He is still the same Spike we saw in S7, and the same Spike we saw in S2, the same Spike that always bickered with Angel, and the same William that composed poetry in his spare time. But he is also so fundamentally different that even the fates themselves recognise it.

Spike's arc is one of constant death and rebirth. Of constant statis and total change. He returns beneath the earth again and again, going back to the grave, to the womb, to die and to be reborn over and over, shaping him every time, and every time there is no going back. Once the body has climbed out, a grave is just a hole in the dirt. There's "nothing there" anymore, and the only way is forward.

#spike #btvs #meta #william the bloody #buffy summers #s4 #something blue #beneath you #ats #grave #theme:change

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