I think... My own personal 'ideas' about souls is that you *are* your soul. Your soul is you. When you die, your soul is free of the body and is the essence of who you are and can, in my mind, then go off to travel the cosmos or be reborn.
The essential you will always be there and shine through, and thus you are recognizable to people you once knew.
I loved the scene in Buffy when Spike offers up his help to get rid of Angelus. He says that he 'likes this world'. Which gives me a mental image of the demon, being pulled from the dimension it lives in into a human body, exploring all the memories stored in the body it now inhabits and discovering it *likes* beer or dog racing or whatever. An alien in a human body, pushing out the 'soul' and taking over. I think that the strong memories of William's love for his mother - the strong *feelings* - impressed the demon rather like a duckling impresses on the first thing it sees. I think that the demon absorbs a lot of the characteristics of the human it takes over if the human had a strong character and if the demon is amenable. I think really headstrong demons can ignore this mostly, but others don't mind.
Now the Jossverse 'thing' is that the soul is conscience and that all that happens when Angel gets his back is that he's sorry, guilty, and apparently able to 'love' again.
Which is weird, considering that Spike loved Dru, and Buffy, quite handily without his soul.
Ummm. I may have lost the thread and totally confused myself here. Monstrous had me helping her with something... Any sense at all?
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The essential you will always be there and shine through, and thus you are recognizable to people you once knew.
I loved the scene in Buffy when Spike offers up his help to get rid of Angelus. He says that he 'likes this world'. Which gives me a mental image of the demon, being pulled from the dimension it lives in into a human body, exploring all the memories stored in the body it now inhabits and discovering it *likes* beer or dog racing or whatever. An alien in a human body, pushing out the 'soul' and taking over. I think that the strong memories of William's love for his mother - the strong *feelings* - impressed the demon rather like a duckling impresses on the first thing it sees. I think that the demon absorbs a lot of the characteristics of the human it takes over if the human had a strong character and if the demon is amenable. I think really headstrong demons can ignore this mostly, but others don't mind.
Now the Jossverse 'thing' is that the soul is conscience and that all that happens when Angel gets his back is that he's sorry, guilty, and apparently able to 'love' again.
Which is weird, considering that Spike loved Dru, and Buffy, quite handily without his soul.
Ummm. I may have lost the thread and totally confused myself here. Monstrous had me helping her with something... Any sense at all?