I like villains. Bad guys. Well, not bad guys, exactly, but guys who've screwed up royally and are trying to redeem themselves. The most recent one to catch my interest is the character "Spike" on the television show Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I've spent some time trying to figure out why it is that I find his character arc on the show so compelling, and I think I've figured it out. I like redemption plots. Spike is only the most recent in a long list.

Take Mark Darcy, for example, in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. At the start, he seems like a complete pompous prick, everything our heroine and the reader should despise. But as the novel progresses, we not only come to understand him better, but he also undertakes a series of actions that redeem him ... and we come to see him, at last, as a very noble, heroic sort of fellow. Not at all the "proud Darcy" of the novel's beginning.

Or Han Solo, in the Star Wars trilogy. At the start, he's a "scruffy-looking" mercenary, but he grows and changes, becoming increasingly noble as the original trilogy progresses. By the end, he's an honest-to-goodness, self-sacrificing-for-the-common-good kind of hero.

And both Mark Darcy and Han Solo have something else in common with Buffy's Spike. No, they aren't vampires (though that would be interesting). They are also, in their own ways, outsiders. Mark Darcy, though wealthy and surrounded by "friends" (or, at least, his social equals, and one or two true friends) nevertheless feels himself ill-qualified to "recommend himself to strangers." When presented with a crowd of unknown folk — even country folk whom he considers socially beneath him — he is self-conscious and assumes himself excluded from their society. Han Solo — like Spike — fashions himself a voluntary outcast, a rebel, even as he feels the longing for acceptance.

Now, Spike, for those of you unfortunate folk who do not watch Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, is a vampire. But, unfortunately for him, he's a vampire with an experimental government chip in his brain which prevents him from harming humans ... which leaves him in a bit of a bind, since he can't really act like a vampire anymore. Since getting his chip installed, Spike has been on a slow journey of redemption: fighting evil instead of hurting humans, protecting the innocent, performing selfless act after selfless act ... and longing, all the while, to be accepted. Now that he fights demons instead of humans, other vampires want nothing to do with him. And humans all treat him like dirt because he is — by definition as a vampire and because of his past actions — "evil." He's the ultimate outsider. But anyone who's watched Buffy since the beginning knows that the central "Scooby Gang" is made up of former outsiders who have banded together to create their own inner circle. And so I can only hope that Joss Whedon (Buffy's creator) has not led all of us poor outcasts to identify with Spike in his exclusion only to leave him there. I can only hope that this is all leading to a redemption of some sort.

I suppose there's something in my past, something in my feelings of not fitting in while I was growing up, that draws me to plots involving the redemption of outcasts, that makes me take them a bit personally. If nobody on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer ever accepts Spike, if he remains the eternal outsider and never finds redemption, I'll be hurt. I know that's silly, but it's true. I've come to identify with him, and — gosh darn it — I want redemption! I want to be accepted, to be welcomed, to have my past sins forgiven, to be loved for the good I do and be absolved of the bad I've done.

And I think that wanting those things for myself causes me to be drawn to stories in which others seek them as well ... and, hopefully, find them. Maybe it helps me to believe in my heart that someday I'll find them, too.

— Kimberly A, 14 January 2002