#sineya

The First Slayer (Sineya) is introduced in the final episode of S4 'Restless' she is angry and aggressive, attacking the scooby gang after they used magic to interfere with the pre-existing slayer magic in the previous episode. She tells Buffy that death is her gift as a spirit guide in S5. In S7 she appears in Buffy's dream to tell her it's not enough, inspiring her to activate the potentials. That's it. Three episodes.

The only other time we learn about her is in the magical time exchange episode of S7 'Get it done'. Although she's not in the episode we learn how she became the slayer. A girl who was chained down and imbued with the powers of a demon in order to fight them. And if she died, who cares? Easily replaced by the next girl. I'd be angry too.

I don't actually know when they gave her the name Sineya, she is credited on IMDb as 'primitive'. The racism is about as subtle as a brick to the face. Unnamed, unkempt, animalistic, aggressive. The men who 'made' her wear actual clothes, made of cloth, they wouldn't look out of place in the modern day. Where and when she's from is incredibly unclear; Africa is a big place with hundreds of cultures and climates. It seems they were going for prehistory but after the invention of chains and metal weapons.

Now onto the dialogue, the intentional writing that can't be passed off as laziness, or oversight.

When talking about the slayer Sineya describes herself:

“I have no speech. No name. I live in the action of death, the blood cry, the penetrating wound. I am destruction. Absolute... Alone.”

The point they're trying to make is that Sineya doesn't really exist, she is the Slayer. That is her duty. The point of her existence. The Slayer is who she is and who she thinks Buffy should be. This is a central theme to the series as a whole, can Buffy be more than her responsibilities?

Theoretically this is fine, Sineya grew up in a different, more dangerous time, with true demons around every corner. As the first Slayer she sees it as her responsibility to commit fully to the role and save her people from all the bad in the world. But we already have Kendra for that, we don't need all the black slayers (including Nikki but she's a bit less important to the overall story) to be devoted to the cause at the expense of anything and everything else. We could have met Sineya as a child, pre-slayer: a young girl trying to find happiness in a dark world. Did she have hobbies? Friends? Family? Why was she chosen? Was she alone before she became the Slayer? No family to advocate for her, protect her from the shadow men? Maybe she had already killed a vampire, she was already a fighter and that's why they chose her. Maybe she just liked to pick flowers and they chained her to the ground and performed magic on her because they were too scared to volunteer themselves. We don't know.

The next piece of dialogue I want to highlight is something Buffy says to Sineya as a rebuttal of her worldview:

"There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones."

This manages to be racist in two ways, to both the people and ecology of Africa. Deserts are overflowing with life, they have trees and flowers and reptiles, birds, amphibians, insects, and mammals. If they were barren no-one would live there. Secondly no one sleeps on bones, that's not a thing Buffy/Joss. It's uncomfortable and impractical. I have less to say about this one but it annoys me more.

How could this be different?

Personally I like that she doesn't have a name when she's first introduced, it was a long time ago and I think it builds into a story thread of older men deciding what's best for the Slayer, ripping away her humanity and making her into a weapon. This can be reworked into Buffy searching for the humanity in the first Slayer, finding out her name and honouring her in a way history (and the watchers) never have. In the flashback to her becoming the slayer we could learn even more, see her life as a regular human, was she specifically chosen or was she just convenient, what was her favourite colour? I already mentioned some options above so I won't labour the point.