i feel like i talk about it soo much but maybe not on this blog (or maybe i do) or maybe its just confined to my own thoughts but i think about buffy + masochism like so much like a Lot and it usually crops up when i start thinking about s6. and there is definitely some bleeding happening there because i identify so strongly with s6 buffy but thats basically half the drive for all analyses of media. but god i love how much she seeks that pain. she cant die no matter how much she'd like to, and dying means peace, and if she cant have peace, she must have done something wrong, and if she's done something wrong, if shes wrong, then she needs to be punished for it. and the way she goes about it, it's half in pursuit of absolution, but its also inherently selfish. she's focused on the peace she used to have and the half-drive to get there. pain = death = peace.
on the OTHER hand, because btvs is nothing without its dichotomies, i feel as the other coinflip of pain is presented in tandem. the flipside of death is life. it is textual, we see this happening the way buffy grows more lively and more in touch with life after she starts her relationship with spike, who has multiple times been connected with the imagery of death. he is the slayer of slayers, he'll make her neck his chalice, he's the one who first brings up the inherent death drive of the slayer and how he took pleasure in killing them. and YETTT. buffy begins her relationship with spike/death that is filled with roughness and bruises and blood and episode-by-episode, we watch her become more connected with her friends and family again. maybe another person has a different reading of this, but i have always viewed that it was this relationship with spike, which was supposed to be that death knell/this unconscious action to get her closer to oblivion, that was instead the feeling (once more, with feeling) given back to her tryst after tryst to bring her back to herself. and she ends their relationship once she's well and truly alive again. i wont discredit the scoobies, her relationship to them is extremely important, but i feel like it really was spike and their affair that led buffy to switch her tracks from death to life.
if pain = death, it is also true that pain = life. if death is calming and forever, life is not. life is furious, fleeting, and feeling. i keep talking about this because this is the crux of buffy in s6 to me. buffy goes from wanting to die to wanting to live, and throughout it we are watching her navigate this labyrinth of pain. first it was inflicted on her, the immediate pain of being brought back with terrible sounds, scents, & sights, clawing her way from the grave bloodied, and its horrible. and then she starts seeking it out with spike. i dont mean to say spike represents pain, but so much of their s6 relationship is actually about buffys relationship to herself, her death, and her newfound life, that spike becomes yet again a mirror held up to buffys darkest. and she goes back to him over and over to look at herself in the mirror. she doesnt have to. but she seeks it out.
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In the whole argument over the magic decorations and all that, at no point did Tara actually volunteer to do any of the mundane stuff she said could be done by Willow herself. She evidently expected Willow to single-handedly put up the entire set of decorations while she benefited from setting them up and also presumably to take them down as well. I'm pretty sure this yet another case of the writers doing her dirty but even someone less sliding full speed down a slippery slope than Season 6 Willow at that point would have had the Peter Griffin "Whoa Whoa Whoa Whoa" moment about that.
It also kind of undermines the whole 'doing it the mundane way is better' as well as yet another of the cases where 'just how *good* a friend is Tara to Anya, actually' comes up. It's Anya's store, it's her party. Tara's supposedly her good friend and yet she's not stirring herself to do something to actually help Anya and getting angry over one of the few favors Willow happily does for an Anya who happily asks.
One of the biggest proofs that most Tara fans don't really register her as a person so much as the purest distillation of shipping culture is that she gets treated as a flawless saint even when these same people opt for 'Willow AND TARA' freeloaded in Season 6. Whenever that discussion does turn up it starts 'Willow AND TARA' but then turns into just Willow.
Tara, the actual human being in-universe who had free room and board in Buffy's house and then skeedaddled after the two roofie flower incidents with only intermittent time with Dawn and helping herself to free food at the birthday party (and LBR here, who wouldn't) clearly has no problems returning to the house where she knows Willow is for that party.
So whatever issues they had between them that is explicitly not a deterrence factor, we see that on screen. We know she picks up Dawn, either from school or at that house and presumably brings her back, so that's further proof of it. She has nothing that really stops or her slows her down from going back but it literally never occurs to the character on screen that someone she knows is treading water or up to her eyeballs in it financially might be able to use some help.
*If* you opt for the 'Willow and Tara wuz freeloaders' line then of the two Tara is actually by far the more selfish and her Season 6 self had some of her own biggest jackassery in a different direction to Willow.
If you actually value your favorite character as a person in her own right her growth arc as a person away from the Scoobies does have one very obvious downside that is a mirror of her growth arc being that in her case, selfishness is good after being a doormat for so much of the time (that this is also ultimately Willow's arc at one very abstract level is a deeper irony but that's a different discussion).
But most of you don't, because you see her as a human stuffie for your favorite shipping partner and don't look even at the things you see on screen in any detail.
So, continuing to think about our three Slayers, now that Faith is here, I wanted to sort of talk about how I see their skills and capabilities comparing.
(I know that calculating comparative power rankings is the lowest form of fanwank, but sometimes it’s fun, darn it.)
So, how do the Slayers stack up against each other?
With Kendra we immediately confront an oddity: in her first appearance, she seems very impressive (tracks down both Angel and Buffy, defeats Angel and fights Buffy to a standstill, matches Giles’s knowledge of the supernatural, defeats Patrice the assassin and seems to hold her own against Spike). But her second appearance is a bit of a let-down: in the battle at the library she manages to dust one vampire minion but seems to be struggling even before Drusilla arrives, and then she seems unable to match her either physically or mentally. Moreover, nobody seems to see her as the natural candidate to take down Angel, including her: if Buffy fails, their last hope would apparently be non-Slayer Willow.
To some extent we can account for this by drawing inferences about her opponents. Drusilla is more powerful than Patrice, sure. And souled Angel might be an easier fight than soulless Angel, if he’s either not trying so hard for the kill, or weaker from his vitamin-deficient all-animal diet.
But I think we can also draw an inference about types of combat: I figure Kendra is best at single combat, where she’s tracked down one specific opponent and can focus exclusively on them. She struggles in the library fight because 1) she immediately has multiple opponents, 2) the situation is chaotic, with all these civilians to protect, and she’s not good at managing that chaos or improvising.
Throw in her stalking Buffy to “test her reflexes”, and I think you can read her as almost a sort of "assassin" archetype: her preferred slaying methodology is to track down a target stealthily, wait for a good moment, and attack when they’re not expecting her and she can focus all her attention on them.
By contrast, Buffy is often complimented, including by enemies watching videos of her, on her flexibility and ingenuity, navigating fluid environments with both lots of allies and lots of enemies. In her conversation with Kendra in “What’s My Line” she talks about both imagination and emotion, by contrast with Kendra’s rigid control.
(Ironically, this suggests that Kendra and Buffy should have swapped roles in “Becoming”: Buffy would do better defending the gang in a chaotic melee, while Kendra might have been in her element stalking Angel, a known target in a specific location, and fighting him one-on-one…)
I like that this suggests they have complementary strengths, rather than either being strictly a superior Slayer. Buffy has two more years of Slayer experience, but conversely Kendra has many extra years of training. And while I do think Buffy’s exceptional, and I would probably bet on her coming out ahead in the end in most head-to-head matchups (for hybrid-Doylist-Watsonian reasons: it’s her show, but the reason she gets a show is because in-universe she’s an exceptional Slayer), I don’t think that means she’s always going to do better at day-to-day slayage.
Out of combat, there’s similar complementarity: Kendra is clearly much more learned about the supernatural, but Buffy’s much more socially and emotionally intelligent. And while Kendra might have a more honed ability to sense the supernatural like a compass (for being dispatched to random cities and tasked with hunting down some unspecified great evil), Buffy’s likely better able to spot subtle clues and figure situations out intuitively. If they worked as a team they’d likely get a pretty even split of moments in the spotlight.
With Faith, we have more data on direct matchups: she fights Buffy three times in season 3, with the first two (in “Revelations” and “Enemies”) both being interrupted before resolution, and the third one won by Buffy. We get multiple indications that she’s sort of the anti-Kendra: all emotion and instinct, no planning or discipline. And I feel like she often seems to do well in multi-combatant brawls (when she doesn't get too distracted by punching one particular guy repeatedly), though I haven’t re-watched all her episodes with an eye to that.
She definitely seems like she has that tenuous advantage that you get when you can and will do bizarre and stupid things in a heartbeat - harder to predict and sometimes the crazy plan turns out really well. But the flipside is you might want someone more around for when they don't.
(I’m inclined to think that Buffy would eventually win a rematch with Kendra, just as she eventually won against Faith, by having the optimal blend of emotion and discipline… though I'm also inclined to think maybe if Kendra suddenly got a lot more emotional or Faith found a source of discipline, that would throw her off enough for them to win. (By “inclined to think” I actually mean “planning to write”.))
We also know that Faith has both less Slayer experience and less training than either of the other two, though it’s implied she’s spent a fair amount of her life surviving under fairly unstructured and dangerous conditions. She might do better surviving long term in an unpredictable and hostile environment than either of them, and I headcanon, for whatever vibes-based reason, that she’s the fastest runner. She just has that Da Share Zone “just walk out/you can leave/cops if you’re quick” swag.
The mechanics of Slayer strength are deeply opaque; we see Buffy training a lot but retaining a distinctly waifish physique, and we can get into the gender politics of that another time, but I sort of figure it's like, she's not necessarily stronger all the time, so much as she has this reserve of supernatural strength she can draw on at will (this can hopefully help to explain the fairly inconsistent depictions of her strength in early seasons) and so when she's training she's drawing on that and getting better at accessing it, but because she's using the supernatural reserve it doesn't change her physical muscles much? Anyway, my reason for bringing this up is that Kendra and Faith might have more tangible muscle because they were either training hard, or running around jumping off rocks, before being Slayers. Though obviously how any of that translates to actual effective strength is going to be complicated, and depend on who's more able to access that Slayer Strength reserve.
Overall, I end up thinking (or just wanting to think) that they're fairly evenly matched, with contrasting strengths and weaknesses that would make them a good team. They might be able to bicker endlessly about who is The Superior Slayer but never definitively resolve it.
“Oh Spike only changed because of the chip, he was forced into it”
You know, The Yoko Factor actually showed us that Spike was fully capable of being a villain even with the chip. You don’t need to rip out throats to be evil, there are plenty of options for committing nefarious acts sans violence. And even the violence can be outsourced to accomplices (like Drusilla serving up a kill in Crush).
Spike just wanted to belong, he succumbed to the desire for love and friendship without any encouragement. Giles floated the idea of him as a white hat ONCE, right after Spike moved into his crypt, but that was it, he was only really invited back in when Buffy asked him to drive the getaway Winnebago car.
He wasn’t encouraged to change or offered much kindness or a real place with the Scoobies. But he wanted it, he wanted to be able to be in Buffy’s life, he cared about Joyce and Dawn, and he changed because of those feelings. Not because of an electrical muzzle in his head. The chip just paved the way for all of his more human desires and qualities to take the reins.
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We’re told more than once that Spike is one of the worst vampires ever recorded, second only to Angel.
But aside from killing two slayers, why exactly is Spike so notorious for being one of the worst?
His vampire family? We see a lot of evidence to Angel’s depravity - his proclivity for torture and destroying his victims slowly, Dru being a harrowing example. He revels in causing maximum pain and fear.
What we mostly see of Spike, including pre-Sunnydale, is that he loves a good brawl. He throws caution to the wind and gets into fights he’s not guaranteed to win.
Giles’ books tells us about him using railroad spikes for torture, but we never actually see any evidence of that, so that's not his MO for long. One of the bullies in Fool For Love says he’d rather have a railroad spike through his head than listen to William’s poetry, so could be that that was exactly what happened - William sought this guy/these people out after he was vamped and did just that? And then he took the name Spike to reclaim it and become someone feared rather than ridiculed, just as he reclaimed "William the Bloody" as a fearsome vampire rather than a bloody awful poet.
I actually don’t think we ever see him torture anyone. Even when he went after Angel for the Gem of Amara he OUTSOURCED the torture to another vampire. Even though it was extremely risky and did indeed backfire. It seems like torture isn’t actually Spike’s thing at all if he would risk the holy grail of vampires to avoid it.
So I’m curious as to what exactly is supposed to make him so much more vicious than other vampires? Perhaps it isn’t really that he has done more or worse evil than others, but simply that he is known as a fearless fighter, someone who seeks out slayers? Maybe he has tried so hard to distance himself from the ridiculed poet and prove himself "monster enough" that he has exaggerated his deeds - and the Council has been known to be wrong before ... I dunno, I have been wondering about this and especially his conflicting history with torture.
Just thinking about how Buffy wants to be a normal girl, but she can't because she is the Slayer. While Spike wants to be a normal vampire, but he can't because of the chip.
Internal circumstances getting in the way of their personal hope for themselves
missed opportunity in s7 is Buffy and Spike not bonding over their souls being pulled out of heaven
cause think about it, if Spike got his own soul back it means it existed somewhere all this time
William was a good man, innocent person who’s never done any harm and of course his soul went to heaven after he got turned
it hurts not only because the soul feels all the guilt over the death and murder the demon inflicted but also because it got violently pulled out of a good and safe place, it was at rest
just like Buffy was… Buffy didn’t exist in another form but as a soul after she died. Her body was still in the ground
imagine her asking him more questions about how it feels? asking “do you think your soul was in heaven?” and him looking all confused at her because he didn’t really think about it
because he didn’t think it through once he made the decision to go get it back; he didn’t think he’ll be disrupting William’s rest
Buffy made peace with the fact she has to live again now and heaven will have to wait for her ( though I’m sure still subconsciously doubting if she will get there again in the end )
but having another person going through essentially the same thing would definitely help her even more, would help both of them actually
