ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the romantic love between a male vampire and a female human initiates a love-based ethics. The moral vampire acts justly because he loves and is loved. This right action often translates into protection of his beloved and, at times, her friends and family. The chapter suggests this romantic love also models right action to and for a larger community. It discusses not only Buffy's actions but analyzes primarily the actions of moral vampires, all of whom choose to shun their individual vampire impulses in order to act justly for a larger good, in other words, to sustain a state of right. The three series present this action as both epic and personal. Each series represents love—romantic that expands to include the familial and communal—as worth protecting from an outside force that threatens to annihilate this love. Romantic love does not exist for itself only, however. Rather, it represents a way of life worth defending.
