He hasn’t earned the right to speak up like that. Spike in ‘Normal Again’ has earned that right and more besides. If he’s right or wrong is beside the point - he knows Buffy.
I agree that Riley hadn’t earned the right but I really don’t think Spike had either in Normal Again. He’s always had good instincts for people’s weak spots, not necessarily what’s true but what will hurt them. Often as in Fool for Love he seems consciously or not to be projecting his own issues, he’s empathic in the limited sense of recognising those feelings he has himself. That’s not the same as knowing Buffy, as she told him in NLM he doesn’t. He can wax poetical about her weaknesses but even with a soul, when he first comes back he doesn’t comprehend the good in her. He characterises her as addicted to misery and martyrdom and completely misses the part of her that suffers whatever she has to in order to protect her friends.
I think while soulless he also underestimates her much vaunted darkness because it’s actually quite different from what he’s familiar with. When he talks about the dark he seems to mean some version of the passion for destruction that he as a vampire has given himself up to, an amoral realm of the senses where nothing matters beyond your own pleasure. Buffy on the other hand seems to be struggling with a much more negative form of darkness, emptiness, self-loathing and despair. When he tells her to put it all on him in Dead Things I don’t think he has any idea what he’s let himself in for.
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I agree that Riley hadn’t earned the right but I really don’t think Spike had either in Normal Again. He’s always had good instincts for people’s weak spots, not necessarily what’s true but what will hurt them. Often as in Fool for Love he seems consciously or not to be projecting his own issues, he’s empathic in the limited sense of recognising those feelings he has himself. That’s not the same as knowing Buffy, as she told him in NLM he doesn’t. He can wax poetical about her weaknesses but even with a soul, when he first comes back he doesn’t comprehend the good in her. He characterises her as addicted to misery and martyrdom and completely misses the part of her that suffers whatever she has to in order to protect her friends.
I think while soulless he also underestimates her much vaunted darkness because it’s actually quite different from what he’s familiar with. When he talks about the dark he seems to mean some version of the passion for destruction that he as a vampire has given himself up to, an amoral realm of the senses where nothing matters beyond your own pleasure. Buffy on the other hand seems to be struggling with a much more negative form of darkness, emptiness, self-loathing and despair. When he tells her to put it all on him in Dead Things I don’t think he has any idea what he’s let himself in for.