Yeah, I agree with all this. Willow and Spike have similar journeys in season seven, though Willow gets a little more material in the first few episodes and Spike gets a little more in the second half of the season. I think one can argue that the big things holding the two back in season seven ultimately have to do with the way a painful loss has defined them. Willow in "The Killer in Me" confronts the part of her that was keeping Tara alive inside her, and blames herself for her being gone -- either having killed her, or having betrayed her memory. And she has to move on. Spike has to do something similar with his mother. In a sense, they are both reacting to the first person who really gave them the love they wanted -- and to the way in which they became toxic when that love was threatened by death. I think that Willow did feel loved by Oz, Buffy, and Xander, but Tara helped fill some of the holes left by her mother's unloving parenting, and Tara's death left her hollowed out -- with Xander only barely finding her. Similar with Spike, and his mother's death, and eventually Buffy patching him up. The fact that the time scales are completely different -- Spike going through a long period of monstrosity, Willow being a brief, nearly world-ending flame-out -- isn't that important, partly because in a sense Spike has been stuck since his/ his mother's death until he went back and got his soul. What's important is finding it within them to fix it. It's very optimistic, but it's also frightening as well -- because BtVS says, yes, people can be redeemed, but the corollary is that some people who are loving, sensitive, and perhaps have a "good heart" under all else, can still become evil and monstrous. It's frightening because that implicates anyone -- that under the right circumstances, etc., etc. In some ways, AtS' nihilism is actually more "comforting" in a weird way -- because then one can, as Angel does, point at someone like Lindsey and simply say that he is broken, that there is something wrong with him, to give up on him and not view him as potentially similar to oneself.

I think with both Willow and Spike/William, there is an additional level, which is that neither "geek Willow" nor "nerdy poet William" were the full story of who they were "deep inside" either. William was reserved, bashful, and afraid of people -- he had real anger lurking beneath the surface. And also, I think, a bravery that he was not accessing. Similar for Willow. It's not that the evil persona is made up, because it ends up expressing things that they have mostly been denying. Spike basically goes full-tilt evil within a day or two of being turned by Dru. Willow tries to hold on to her goodness, and her non-threatening-ness, while still remaking herself as cool (and ultimately dangerous) -- until she eventually gives that up after Tara's death. They come to believe that their conscience wasn't real -- and maybe no conscience of any human is. With Spike, the soul loss really helps there, though it turns out that he does still like the world, and for a very small number of people very close to him he can still care. With Willow, I think that she recognizes that she doesn't really, in her heart of hearts, believe in these rules that have been imposed on her, by her parents, or Snyder, or Giles or even Buffy or Tara, and I think she begins to suspect she's a monster deep down. But I think what it really is is that she can sort of see the falseness and hypocrisy -- sometimes also seeing hypocrisy that isn't there, it's not that her perception isn't skewed, either -- and can't bring herself to care, deep down, about rules that don't seem to have any purpose, that don't seem to help people, or seem to help others more than her.