SortaMadWolves

Another thing I thought about is the way Dru got in his head and how that must have affected him afterwards. I feel like there must have been a lot of moments of feeling like his escape was all an elaborate scheme and illusion created by Dru and Angelus and him thinking he was still there in the castle. A lot of ptsd induced panic, but he kept it all a secret from everyone so that no one would know how much he was dealing with and searching for Buffy kept his mind off of everything. At the end of the day though, he was still struggling through.

I think after months he was finally able to sleep in his own bed but he never truly healed from it all, especially the torture. I think after awhile, the ptsd panic attacks slowed, but would still happen once in awhile. Like after finding out Buffy kept Angel hidden from everyone and never told anyone that he was alive and after all of the events of Revelation, he went home and had a ptsd flashback/ panic attack. After seeing Angel in Amends, he struggled but forced himself to deal with it so he could help figure things out for Buffy's sake.

I think Giles spent so many nights struggling whenever he was alone, and I think there might have even been times where he'd drink to forget or distract himself with researching something so he didn't have to deal with his pain, and no one knew this because he couldn't talk to anyone about it. If he was SA'd (like I think he was) he definitely felt like he couldn't talk about that to any of them because of the shame and humiliation of it all.

Anyways, that's my thoughts. Not planning on tagging this and not assuming anyone is gonna see this.

I think the Watcher's Council had no respect for Giles and Buffy which is why they were paired after her first watcher was gone. I think they had no respect for Buffy from the start because she was an LA popular girl and wasn't one of their trained potential slayers. They had no respect for Giles for many reasons and one of those reasons was that he willingly gave himself the Mark of Eyghon.

I think they were expecting him to get her killed accidentally and was hoping for it, but they underestimated her abilities as a slayer and his abilities as a watcher. They were surprised that she came back to life the first time and they were even more surprised that she survived to reach the age of 18 let alone over 18.

I think in the episode Helpless, they were hoping that either she would die from the trials or that Giles would break the rules/ fail his side of the test and they were pleased that Giles did. Also I think in that episode, Giles didn't really have a choice because the council would have brought in someone who didn't care if she lives or dies to drug her and test her and since Giles cares for her, he probably thought it would have been better for him to do it instead of anyone else so he didnt have much of a choice, but afterwards he absolutely regretted it. After finding that Kralik escaped, he realized he had to make a choice and he told her the truth and shut down the test. Then he found out the test was still on and that she was there with Kralik, so he had to go there and help her not realizing that his choices sealed his fate in getting fired. Buffy had every right to hate him and feel betrayed by him but she still forgave him. I think Buffy realized that he didn't have a choice, sacrificed his career for her, and willingly put himself in danger for her and that's why she forgave him.

Another thing is that I think that because the council had no respect for her and Giles, that's why she was never paid for her services and that the only reason Giles was paid and even had a job was due to him being destined to be a watcher and they weren't going to question destiny and he was paid only because he was an official watcher and they had to pay him. I think if they could, they probably would have never paid him for his work. That's another reason why they were so pleased to fire him.

For example, every little mistake Xander does, so many people puts him on blast for it. Yes, he makes a lot of mistakes and makes stupid comments a lot, but he's literally a 90s teenage boy and 90s teenage boys are not known for their maturity and intelligence. I see so many people expecting him to be more like Oz. Oz is not an average teenage boy. He's a guitarist in a band, hes alternative and he's a werewolf. He's on a completely different spectrum than Xander. Xander is a loser type who's been bullied all his life and (insinuated) abused by his father. Its also insinuated that his father was abusive towards his mother as well and that the rest of his family is just as toxic. The dude has trauma and spent his whole life being raised in toxicity so imo he's not nearly as toxic as he could have been. He could have been much worse. All the times he's fucked up (not including times he's possessed) he's running on pure emotion and doing things that he thought was normal based on how he was raised. The whole thing with Cordy and Willow was based entirely off of emotion. Again, teenage boy in the 90s, gonna do stupid shit. Yes I do think he's the worst of the main characters and the most toxic, but I also look at it all from his perspective.

Another example is Giles. I love Giles. He's my favorite character. I've noticed that so many people were practically expecting him to be a perfect robot so whenever he makes mistakes, they put him on blast for it. In the episode Helpless, he betrayed Buffy's trust, but he didn't have much of a choice on the matter. He clearly detested the whole thing from the beginning but he thought that the people he trusted knew best and it would be better for him to do it instead of someone else to do it who didn't actually care about her and wouldn't care if she died., but it wasn't until after he found that Kralik escaped, that he realized that he was entirely wrong in trusting The Council. They were people that he grew up around because of his father and had reason to believe that they always knew best even after he went through so much trauma while at the academy, the after he left the academy and everything that went down with Eyghon, he felt even more like he had to trust in the Council and face his destiny to become a watcher. He absolutely hated himself for his actions of what he did to Buffy, which is why he told her and tried to call off the whole thing and when he found out that it was still on, he went straight into the danger to save Buffy, and Buffy saw that. She then hears that he has a father's love for her and that he was fired for that and his rescue of her, which is why she forgave him. In the beginning of season 4, Buffy was going off to college and he was unemployed, so he thought that she shouldn't need him anymore and that she needed to be more independent but then realized that she's still just a kid and she still needs help. In Season 6, she was literally dead, and he thought it would be best for him to just retire and imo since he never really healed from all of his trauma of his life including the trauma of what Angelus did to him and the loss of someone he felt a father's love for. When she came back of course he had to come back to see her again but then he realized, she was too dependent on him and that it wasn't good for her if he stayed and (again imo) he still had a lot of shit to deal with internally and coming back wasn't good for him either. Coming back the second time and seeing that everything has gone to hell made him blame himself for leaving in the first place even though he needed to. He's made mistakes because he's human. And every mistake he's made he's regretted. Just because someone is older doesn't mean they stop making mistakes. And a lot of his actions were out of pure emotion. In Revelations when he confronts Buffy, he was angry and hurt and he had every right to be angry and hurt. She lied to him and kept Angel a secret while knowing that Angel hurt Giles in so many different ways when he didn't have his soul. I see a lot of people saying "well he should have known that Angel was different with his soul" but that doesn't matter. He has PTSD because of Angel and just knowing that Angel was alive was triggering and the fact that Buffy lied to him about it all was very painful. He felt like she didn't respect him and his job enough to tell him the truth from the beginning which he still would have been triggered by it but he wouldn't be betrayed by her and would try and work with her.

I've seen so many fans hate on other characters for their mistakes, but when it comes to Buffy, suddenly she gets a pass. She's made a lot of mistakes. She betrayed Giles trust, she betrayed and lied to her team on multiple occasions, in Season 7 she refused to listen to anyone telling her that going into "the belly of the beast" with half trained teenagers was a bad idea which lead to people getting hurt or killed (I don't think they should have kicked her out of her own house but they did have every reason to be upset with her) and yet people give her the benefit of the doubt but doesn't give the same treatment for other characters. Don't get me wrong, I love Buffy. I think she's a great character, but I don't understand why she gets special treatment and everyone else doesn't.

Okay so I just noticed something while I was rewatching the episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer "Dark Ages." Giles was SA'd at least twice in the show, and I haven't seen many people actually talk about it. In Dark Ages, while Jenny was possessed by Eygon, she was coming onto him hard and he didn't want to take advantage of her so he didn't want to have sex with her but she still kept going at him and would kiss him and when Eygon revealed himself, he forcefully kissed him before throwing him about. That is a form of SA.

The second time was in Becoming pt 2. Now the whole thing with Angelus that I mentioned in my last post is debatable on whether or not Angelus SA'd him because nothing is actually shown or talked about of everything that Angelus did to Giles. However, the scene with Dru was SA. Dru manipulated him into thinking he was with Jenny by using her mind control abilities and then pretty much forced kisses and touches (possibly even below the belt touches) before its actually revealed to him that it was all Dru and not Jenny and that he was manipulated.

I've seen people say that the scene with Dru isn't SA because of the comedic moment and I've even heard a lot of people say that they don't blame her for being "caught in the moment" because "they would do it too." And in my research of finding out what other fans think of it, it keeps saying that it was not SA and there are very few fans that says it was. By definition, he was in fact SA'd at least twice through forced kisses and touching (only thing shown is touching of his chest but it's still touching non the less).

I don't understand why this is never acknowledged when it comes to male characters. This is something that I've also seen in Firefly to Mal. In the episode Our Mrs. Reynolds, Mal is manipulated into a kiss with Saffron because of her companion training and that lead to him being drugged. Yes he made that "special hell" comment, but he was completely manipulated into it by her. From the very beginning he didn't want to have sex with her but Saffron completely manipulated him with the way she sexualized herself and she basically used his own body, Sexuality and the fact that he hadnt been with anyone in that way for a very long time, against him because it was insinuated that he was getting hard the more she sexualized herself and he didn't like it until he was finally fully manipulated into "wanting it" he even broke off the first kiss because he didn't want to before he was "dragged back in." Again, it's another story of a male character being manipulated into an intimate or sexual act.

(tw for torture and sexual assault)

So first off, the scene with Dru kissing Giles/ manipulating him, I find it interesting how it was made because to me it was both horrific and funny at the same time because it switches between perspectives. From the perspective of Giles he thought he was reunited with the woman he loved after she was murdered so he felt love then it switches to the Vampires' point of view which has the comedy of the two being all like "Drusilla. Honey. We're Done here" and she's like "I got caught up in the moment" and then it goes back to Giles perspective and you realize the horror that he revealed information that he didn't want to reveal because he was (in a sense) Sexually Assaulted. He was manipulated into believing he was with one person only to find out he was actually with someone else and that his mind was used against him. I find the way it was made very interesting from the film making and storytelling perspective.

Another scene I want to talk about is the scene where Angelus is telling Giles that he is impressed by "how well" he was taking the torture. By the end of that scene, it was left to interpretation of what Angelus was about to do. Now I've seen some people interpret it as Angelus babout to break Giles' fingers. To me, it looked like at that point, Angelus already did that. when it was zoomed in on his hands at the beginning of the scene, to me it looked like he already did something to his fingers because they were already bloodied and his hand was opened in a way that could be interpreted as his fingers were already injured. To me it felt like Angelus was about to either hurt him in a more humiliating fashion below the belt or he was going to find other points to break or claw at to cause him extreme pain, tho it did feel more like it being a humiliation based thing because of how Angelus kneeled down next to him, glanced down for a second, and the way he smiled at him but at the same time it could have meant something else.

Lastly, I wanted to talk about his trauma caused by Angelus in general and the aftermath. Now, I didn't realize until after my rewatch, that Giles just about took the brunt of the pain as Angelus was torturing Buffy through hurting the people she cared about. He killed Jenny because of what she knew and instead of leaving her there or taking her to a place where Buffy would find her, he chose to put her in Giles' own bed and leave a romantic scene out for Giles because he knew how much she meant to him and he hurt Giles as much as possible in doing so likely knowing that he would lash out and possibly get himself killed. He knew how to hurt Giles and he did all of that just to hurt Buffy. Then the torture wasn't even to hurt Buffy but he still hurt her anyways. He wanted to hurt Giles for fun and to also get information out of him, but the way he went about taking him, he purposefully lured her away from her friends to fight her and have Giles kidnapped (and as a bonus, hurt her other friends and kill the other slayer) and then proceeded to tell her his plan all alone was to get her away which in turn, lead to her becoming a wanted criminal and her blaming herself for what happened to her friends and what must be happening to Giles. Now as for the aftermath of it all, I don't think Giles ever truly healed from everything that happened. First off, after everything, he immediately went on to search for Buffy. He didn't stop to focus on dealing with what happened to him. Then after Buffy's return, he went onto focusing on training her. Then he ends up finding out that Angel was alive and that Buffy kept that from him. Yes he knew that Angelus and Angel are very different, but at the same time, he had a very emotional response knowing the the man who tortured him for hours for fun and who also murdered the love of his life was alive and the fear that Angelus could come back. He had a very reasonable response. Then after finding out (again, before he could actually heal), Angel shows up at his door asking for help. He had every right to kill Angel right then and there, but he knew how that would effect Buffy so he didn't. That didn't change his fear of Angel though. Even in Season 4 he was still put off by Angel but was willing to work with him in regards for Buffy. I think part of his depression in Season 4 was because of him not truly healing. Yeah a lot of it was because he was unemployed and felt forgotten and left out but I think he was still suffering from his trauma. He never spoke to anyone about what happened to him and if he did go through worse sexual assault during that time(like some of the theories ive seen), that means he likely has a lot more emotions going through his head including a feeling of complete and utter violation and humiliation and maybe even self hatred and at that time there was a whole ideology that men can't get SA'd so it's likely he would have felt like he had to keep it all to himself and he probably would have also felt like he betrayed Buffy even though it was never his choice.

The idea I had for Castle was that when Castle gets arrested for a murder he didn't do in 5x05 and when he was being transferred, instead of Castle actually escaping, he was in fact taken to 3xk and 3xk decided to hurt Castle in a way to get him as close to death as possible without actually killing him, and Beckett, Ryan, and Esposito have to try and find him before its too late.

Then lastly the idea I had for Firefly was that after War Stories, Niska was beyond pissed at Mal for "humiliating" him twice, so he decides to put a bounty out to kidnap Mal and bring Mal to him, so he could "hurt and humiliate" Mal for revenge. After Mal gets kidnapped by someone and taken to Niska, the rest of the crew has no idea about the bounty and no idea where Mal was taken so they have to figure it all out while also having to hide from the Alliance.