Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Love conquers all and other monstrous myths

At the end of “Lie to me”, Buffy asks Giles to offer her a series of comforting untruths. “The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.” Her response is, “Liar”.

Society perpetuates many myths, usually rationalized as lies of convenience: Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, babies delivered by stork, “the check’s in the mail”, the frail blonde is in danger from the monster, and love conquers all.

Many myths contain an element of truth, and therein lies their power. In Buffy, as in real life, love is a powerful force and a desirable commodity. As Buffy once famously observed, “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.” And the hardest part of living life is discovering the truths behind half-truths. “Love conquers all” promises more than it can live up to - promises a magical solution to those whose love is true and hearts are pure. But in real life as well as reel life, for love of all natures to succeed, those involved must recognize the critical elements of giving effort and thought to their relationships. Love is an endlessly renewable resource, but it needs care and nurturing to fulfill its promise.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon and his writing staff created heroes who spend much of their time confronting creatures most people consider the stuff of fairy tales. Heroes who, paradoxically, are better than the average person at seeing behind societal myths. Of all the big lies we as a society are told during our formative years, “love conquers all” is the biggest, and the one that creates the most disappointment and consequences as we mature. Kudos to Joss for helping us all by not buying into the myth.

The writers balance their lesson that love is not a magical, all-conquering force by reminding their characters and viewers of the power of love, and what it can accomplish.

Why is the myth perpetuated? It offers faith and hope. Joss and company believe that the truth is good for us, but they also recognize that it can be a bitter pill to swallow. Pain comes with truth and knowledge as often as happiness.

Angel and Buffy face the obstacles of his unlife, beyond the poetic paradox of a vampire in love with the Slayer. Angel is the antithesis of what Buffy believes she wants. She still views slaying as a job - something separate from who she is - and continues to yearn for the life of a “normal girl”, which precludes dating a vampire. The limitations of their relationship and the challenges it presents, are brought home time and again in the first two seasons. Having weathered the discovery of his demonic nature and his revelations about his past, Buffy is ready to believe that they have a future. Her innocent belief that love will conquer all is infectious, overpowering the challenges they recognize their relationship must overcome. Even when faced with the consequences of lovemaking, when the soul of Angel, her conscience-plagued lover, departs, leaving only Angelus the demonic beast behind (in one of the show’s most brilliant uses of metaphor), Buffy hopes to reach Angel through the power of love. Ironically he uses their shared bond to attack her vulnerabilities, leading to her irrevocable (she thinks) choice to sacrifice any future chance at happiness with him for the good of the world. It is a painful step to realizing sometimes love is not enough.

When Angel returns, soul intact and memory eventually restored, he and Buffy make an unspoken agreement to lie to themselves and those around them - that they are not in love anymore. Even when Spike, on a tear over Drusilla’s unfaithfulness, points out the deception, they preserve in their self-deception.

“Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.” - Spike, “Lover’s Walk”

Their love is enough to sustain them through Angel’s torment at the hands of The First, but eventually the maturity of his extra couple of centuries (and some nonsubtle promting from Joyce) helps Angel recognize the painful truth that he and Buffy cannot be together. At the very least their hearts are in danger, and the chance they can re-invoke Angelus endangers everyone. Over the course of a few weeks logic prevails over romance, and both of them come to see that love cannot conquer all, this time. After surviving graduation day, they part ways.

When Buffy later visits Los Angeles, they are given more than a second chance. Angel’s absorption of the Mohra demon’s “blood of eternity” makes him human. However, Angel cannot accept this gift at the cost of his role as a hero and a force for the powers of good, and so he gives up a chance at happiness for the greater good. Maybe he recognizes another truth of Buffy: not to value gifts that seem to come too easily or without cost.

Back in Sunnydale, Riley Finn and Buffy hope their similar roles as enhanced human demon fighters will be enough to build a relationship on. Alas, this time Buffy is facing an even greater challenge than falling for “the enemy”. She doesn’t love Riley - as he remarks to Xander in one of the series’ most poignant scenes ever. At best she loves the idea of who she thinks Riley is - in many ways the polar opposite of Angel. She sees Riley’s merits and tries to convince him and herself she can and should love him. When Faith, in Buffy’s body, sleeps with Riley, Buffy’s response has more to do with possessiveness than jealousy. When Riley confronts the truths about Dr. Walsh and the Initiative, Buffy is emotionally supportive, but she doesn’t feel his pain. And when Joyce develops her terminal illness, the emotional disconnection becomes even more apparent. When a final attempt to make himself more a person Buffy will love fails, Riley lets his work take him away from her and Sunnydale. In “Into the Woods”, Xander, ever the perceptive one of the Scoobies, opens Buffy’s eyes to the relationship’s wasted potential, but it’s too late for the Slayer and Captain Pureheart.

No matter his state, Spike’s great strength (and sometimes great weakness) is his passion. Spike and Drusilla thrill to the hunt of the Slayer and their power to wreak havoc. Their demonic natures complement each other and form the basis for their relationship. However, Drusilla’s flightiness and short attention span short-circuit their attempt to be the eternal Sid and Nancy. Spike brings her back around to his point of view by kidnapping her and removing her from Sunnydale and Angel’s influence at the end of season two, but by season three she has gone her own way again. By the time she has second thoughts and comes back to Sunnydale in season five’s “Crush”, Spike’s passion has a found a different focus: Buffy.

Spike comes to believe he loves Buffy, and occasionally shows flashes of his loving behavior. William the Bloody awful poet is in love with the idea of love but not mature enough to put his ideals into practice. The de-souled Spike’s idea of love is in some contradictory ways the most human - a selfish love, based in his wants and needs above his lover’s. Spike is fascinated by and drawn to the Slayer from the first instant he watches her in “School Hard.” His strategy is to study her, and eventually he seems to take Angel’s advice to heart.

“To kill this girl...you have to love her.” - Angel, “Innocence”

Spike, later restrained from attacking humans by the chip implanted by the Initiative, divides his time between moping and plotting non-physical ways to harm Buffy and the Scoobies. This focus grows into an obsession with the Slayer (no doubt enhanced by Faith in Buffy’s body coming on to him) - an obsession that he eventually interprets as love. Spike dreams of sex with the Slayer, and creates a creepy little shrine to her. His feelings are eventually revealed, much to the distress of Buffy, Riley, and the rest of the gang. He tries various substitutes, including Harmony and the Warren-created Robot Buffy, but it doesn’t satisfy his craving for the real thing. After Buffy sacrifices herself in “The Gift”, he tries to fill the void created by her death by continuing to fight on the side of the white hats, taking his role as Dawn’s protector seriously.

Eventually Buffy confides her anger toward her friends for rousting her from heaven to Spike, who uses it to build a false intimacy between them. Even when Sweet’s amulet causes him to reveal his true feelings, they are more about passion and obsession than love.

“First I’ll kill her than I’ll save her...No I’ll save her than I’ll kill her.” - Spike, “Once More, With Feeling”

Buffy, desperate to feel strong emotion, responds to Spike’s passion for a while. But when she heals beyond the self-loathing that motivated their physical relationship, she calls for an ending. Spike, never one to think of his “beloved” before himself, refuses to take no for an answer in the most reprehensible fashion imaginable, attempting to rape Buffy and force her to respond in “Seeing Red”. Anxious to give the Slayer “what she deserves” (which probably varies, depending on which of his dichotomous passions is to the fore), he acquires a soul, in semiconscious imitation of his grandsire. Once he gets his soul back, Spike really does feel love for Buffy. But even with the amount of effort Spike puts into the relationship, the changes he undergoes, etc., Buffy does not fully love him. At the end of “Chosen”, when Buffy tells Spike she loves him, she is sincere. After all, her love kept him in Sunnydale, unstaked, while she fought the ultimate battle with The First. But he contradicts her, recognizing that her love is still not the passion he seeks. Just as true love cannot overcome difficulties without effort, sheer effort and willpower cannot overcome the lack of true love. So much for “If You Want Anything Badly Enough, It Can Become Yours.”...

You may recognize the line, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” If only William Shakespeare’s famous line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream were reversible. But a rough course is not enough to guarantee true love, and Xander and Anya were proof of that. The relationship between the “demon magnet” and the former vengeance demon suffered through any number of rocks in the stream of romance. Xander, having weathered killer relationships with a mummy, a praying mantis, Cordelia Chase, and Faith, to name a few, was understandably leery of trusting his heart to Anya, given her demonic past. And Anya, after a career spanning centuries of exacting revenge for the scorned, and uncertain of her newfound humanity, also lacked confidence.

Xander’s best moment is probably during “The Gift”, when he proposes to Anya in a show of trust to both of them that they will survive this apocalypse. However, once the said apocalypse is survived, the shaky foundation between them is required to sustain a more and more unsupportable emotional structure. Xander’s concern for their future is so great he ignores all the lessons six years of association with Buffy and magick have taught him, and he uses Sweet’s amulet to try to compel them to tell the truth about their fears for the future. Still hoping for love to conquer all, he and Anya ignore the truths they sing during “Once More, with Feeling”, and Xander ends up being responsible not only for the associated deaths of innocents, but for breaking Anya’s heart when he abandons her at the altar. Ultimately, True Love doesn’t stand a chance against the reinforced demons of Fear and Doubt.

Tara and Willow’s relationship is a textbook example of how elements that attract two people can change into the elements that break them apart. Willow and Tara discover in “Hush” that their shared magickal power is greater than the sum of its parts. The common ground on which they build their love affair stems from the recognition of kindred spirits, sisters in Wicca as well as Sappho. Willow’s growing confidence in her magick is crucial over the fifth season, freeing Tara from the restraints of her family history and providing needed power in the battles against Glory. As her power keeps developing, Willow loses the ability to distinguish between the niceties of what she can do and what she should do - and she loses sight of the value of Tara’s love. When Willow twice tampers with Tara’s mind, already destroyed once by Glory, Tara is mature enough to realize True Love cannot overcome Willow’s addiction to magick, and she makes the tough choice to leave her. With Willow’s recovery comes the promise of a new start. But then Tara’s sudden death at Warren’s hands leads to Willow’s nearly losing herself to the dark power of Love Lost, the flip side of the coin. Her sensitivity grows to encompass the pain of the whole world, another great metaphor. In the end it’s Xander who brings her back to herself, to the reminder that life doesn’t always suck, through his love for his best friend.

It may seem paradoxical that Buffy herself, who has known mega-darkness, pain, death, and evil on a personal and continuing basis remains a romantic optimist. It goes back to the issues of faith - her belief in the power of love is necessary for her to face the darkness. And thanks to Joss and the other writers, she and millions of viewers have the tools to sustain that belief.

“I’m cookie dough, okay? I’m not done baking yet. I’m not finished becoming...whoever the hell it is I’m going to turn out to be. I’ve been looking for someone to make me feel whole, and maybe I just need to be whole. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next...maybe one day I turn around and realize I’m ready. I’m cookies. And then if I want someone to eat me - or, to enjoy warm delicious cookie-me, then that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.” - Buffy, “Chosen”