Vatruska

and when he gets his soul and she still rejects him, he takes it. He says okay and is there to help her whenever she needs him. And eventually he is hers. Because he fought against all odds to be good. To be exactly what she needed. To be her champion.

over 700 years of european history:

As someone who has worked at a job sorting things into categories, I'm always aware that a typology like this can say more about the time and place it was created, and about the person who created it, rather than about the historic truths it purports to convey.

The biggest sin of that pole arm chart is how lines are drawn between forms in a way that clearly suggests that one form evolved into another. This is typical of late 19th/early 20th century typologies, post-Darwin.

But objects don't evolve. They're not alive. They don't have genes. Human beings choose to change the designs of objects for a wide variety of reasons, from functional to fashionable, due to an arms race, changing resource availability, or the dictated whims of an authority figure or bureaucracy.

Unlike the classical male hero —who usually embraces his destiny with stoic detachment or egotistical bravado— Buffy resists it. She doesn’t want to be the Slayer. It’s not a romanticized quest for glory. It’s a burden. And that resistance, that refusal to glorify suffering or noble sacrifice, is profoundly political. Because Buffy doesn’t accept her role out of fatalism or legacy: she accepts it as a conscious ethical position. She chooses, with full awareness of the cost, to save others. Not because it makes her exceptional, but because she refuses to let anyone else carry the pain she knows too intimately.

What’s even more radical is how she does it: without amputating her emotions, without repressing her pain, without adopting the affective coldness that stories have historically rewarded in male heroes. Buffy doesn’t perform strength through detachment. Her power is explicitly emotional. Her vulnerability is not a weakness to overcome: it is a weapon. She continues to love, to feel, to break down, to rage, to mourn and all of that is framed not as a flaw, but as a source of power. She is not strong despite her emotions, she is strong through them.

This is where Buffy directly confronts the patriarchal foundation of the “hero’s journey.” She doesn’t just challenge the damsel-in-distress trope (though she absolutely obliterates it) she also rejects the masculinized “girlboss” fantasy that demands emotional sterility as a precondition for leadership. She is not a woman in a man’s role. She reshapes the role itself. And she does it while never losing sight of what matters: not honor, not destiny, not recognition, but people. Buffy is not guided by ego, nor by duty to abstract ideals. Her compass is rooted in care, in community, in love.

Thats it, that's the show