But... despite Giles's Watcher ideology, which is the only argument that those commentators are using, the first 2 seasons of the show are constantly treating the souled and soulless version of Angel as one and the same guy. They didn't even use the "Angelus" moniker for soulless Angel - Jenny does it once, but everyone else keeps calling him "Angel", including himself, and he constantly talks about having done the things that, in this scenario, he should be saying the other guy did.

I wrote two big posts this evening proving that they're one and the same, and apart from one rot23ed paragraph, I just used the evidence from the show up until "Innocence". ("Angel", "Lie to Me" show him talking about the things *he* did when he was soulless, "Innocence" has him talking about the things that he did or that happened to him when he was souled.)

Since it was not the topic, I didn't even mention that "Angel" and "Halloween" also prove that he considers himself the same person as when he was human. ("I killed my parents", and when he says that he despised the noblewomen of his time as "simpering morons".)