Buffy as a show is in general very pro-sacrifice (season one ended with Buffy accepting that she had to sacrify her life and what remains of her childhood to save everyone else, season two it's Buffy learning to sacrifice her love and her desires for saving everyone INCLUDING herself, season three's ending is Buffy renouncing to go to a better college away from the Hellmouth to keep fighting after Faith proved to be not fit for it...and then there is season five.) but I think that with Kendra, for a moment, we see the futility and the tragedy of all these sacrifices asked from young girls in life... for what? Just in order to make them sacrifical lamb. An eternal carnage of lambs, warriors and martyrs who died too young and will always die young so another could arise, and the fight will never end.

Kendra YOUNG. Forever young.

Kendra who not only died too young, who was not only called as a Slayer when she was young, but who was prepared for the fight and trained endlessy since she was even younger. Younger than any child should be when they start to know about war, about monsters.

Kendra who was raised by her Watcher and not allowed to have friends. She lived all her brief life- all her young life- between books and weapons. There was no time and no permission for her to have fun, to go to high school, to date and try to become a cheerleader if she wanted.

Buffy was the only friend Kendra ever had, for a moment, just a moment- a moment between a joke thrown at each others after a battle, and a promise of a stuffed animal before another one. And maybe it's for this moment of friendship- just for this moment- that Kendra died to protect the ones Buffy cared about the most.

Of course, Kendra fought until the end because she was told since birth that this was her duty and her fate, I also think a part of her died in that library just because she trusted Buffy; because she wanted Buffy's mission to succeed, because she did all she could in order to save Buffy's friends. Because she was so starved for friendship that, after having met a girl like her and having saved each others life, she gifted to Buffy the most precious item she had, her stake who used to bring her good luck and protect her in the fight. Buffy had affectionately mocked Kendra when she discovered about Mr Pointy, but had also told her that one day she would have gifted her a stuffed animal. Kendra will never receive this stuffed animal.

Mr Pointy will ends up protecting Buffy for years, after this.

Kendra died without it.

Something that Kendra just mention in an episode and it is never brought up again (as many stuff about Kendra) is that her parents WANTED this path for her. They were proud that their daughter was probably going to be a Slayer, they chose to surrender her to her future Watcher. I wonder sometimes- did they do this because one or both of them had Slayers in their family's tree; and they know how difficult it is for a girl to leave all her friends and family behind to be called to an higher purpose in her teens, how difficult it is for her family to lose her? So they just decide to let her go, telling her it was an honor, not allowing her to know anything else than duty and war and isolation so she wouldn't have known what she was missing?

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. For whatever reasons Kendra was left with her Watcher, the result was that she was robbed of her childhood to be raised as a weapon.

For all the flaws of all Buffy's parents (her present but very flawed mother who doesn't accept her identity as a Slayer, her absent father ) I think the character of Kendra is supposed to show us, even if briefly, that there is something worse than your parent not accepting that you are different and special: and it's having parents and guardians that accept it so much that they renounce to ever try to give you a normal life.

Parents that "take so seriously" their daughter's mystical call that let this call be her only purpose of life, not letting her even try to live a normal kid's life or teenage girl's experience.

Speaking about parents, and mothers, and the difference on how Buffy's mother reacted to her being "different", a Slayer, and how Kendra's parents acted, in Becoming Part I (the episode of Kendra's death!), we see a flashback of Drusilla- Kendra's murderer and Buffy's dark mirror of the season- and in this flashback she is also talking about her mother. And she is saying that her mother considered her powers something wrong and dangerous, something that made her cursed.

Of course, Drusilla's powers are different from Buffy's and Kendra's, but still they made her different, both special and cursed. It's her powers that made her a prey of an evil creature, a target for a vampire.

And now she is the vampire, this evil creature who are targeting a girl with special power, in Kendra's story. Drusilla wanted to be a nun, and was said to be someone on the road of sainthood. Kendra was brough up as an isolated soldier serving an higher purpose, and she died as a martyr.

That's why there is a tragic poetry to Drusila being the one killing Kendra, and not Angelus. Both Kendra and Drusilla in season two serve as potential tragic distorsion of Buffy's story: two girls with special powers who died young; one of them was corrupted by evil against her will, and ended up spending eternity to commit evil, and the other lived too little, first being made to renounce all the joys of normalcy for her calling in order to become the perfect soldier for the battle against Evil, then dying when the battle of her life was just at the beginning.

Two equally tragic road that Buffy's life could have taken. One of Buffy's distorted mirror killing the other.

Saints and warriors, after all, can both be perfect martyr. And no one does as good as a martyr as a young woman with lots of faith, and a life that she has yet not lived.