So this obviously has an obligatory Spoiler Alert warning for anyone who hasn’t watched an over 20-year-old anime, but if you don’t want to see me discuss the ending, I suggest you skip today’s challenge if you want to watch it first.

If you don’t care, please: read on!

I know that there is a faction out there that thinks that Spike dies after falling 300 feet through a church window in “Ballad of Fallen Angels” and that the rest of the series is Spike imagining what he wanted to happen if he survived, but honestly, I don’t hold to that. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, but it just doesn’t fit for me.

One of the reasons I’ve heard supporting the idea of “it’s all in his head” is because of the exchange between Julia and Spike when she dies; she says, “It’s all a dream.” Which … I mean, fine, maybe. But it’s more likely that she meant their plans to be together were foolish. The same goes for when Spike says that he wanted to see if he was alive by going to face Vicious; again, he’d been living in the past and just kind of going through the motions of existence, so actually facing his past would be a way for him to reclaim who he is.

Now, I could definitely be projecting here. As someone who has recently started going back into my past to really see the darker sides of me, I’ve discovered a lot about myself and realized what actually makes me happy. What drives me. What hurts me. What makes me … well, me. That’s being alive, not constantly living as if you’re on auto-pilot and avoiding your mistakes. Sometimes it means we lose things; in Spike’s case, he loses Julia and probably his own life. But he wasn’t hiding anymore, and I think that’s the point of this series: the past is going to find you. Are you up for it?

Art Credit: PennLive