Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Welcome to Buffy’s headspace (as I understand it). My name is Emmie and I’ll be your tour guide. I was inspired to write this meta when I noticed how many episodes in Season 7 end with Buffy standing alone and looking miserable. So this started out as a picspam ode to Buffy’s face (SMG gives good face!) and then grew into a 7000 word meta on Buffy’s character arc in Season 7. (Inorite?) So for anyone who says they don’t understand Buffy during this season, this just may be the meta for you!

Spike/Buffy Fan Disclaimer: My meta here is Buffy-centric, so while I discuss Spike’s relationship with Buffy, it’s in terms of how it relates to Buffy’s character arc and what he symbolizes. I don’t drift into tangents (much) about how much I believe Buffy cares for Spike, how she’s proud of Spike or even shows love for Spike (okay, I do a bit). The specific emotions Spike inspires in Buffy are referenced only when they relate to how they motivate her character’s struggle.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a character torn between two worlds, two identities: her role as the Slayer and her role as simply Buffy (friend, sister, daughter, lover). These two worlds aren’t easily separated and the way they collide and intersect is part of Buffy’s constant struggle. Buffy’s Slayer identity is often telling her to fight alone while her human identity is demanding “give me back my friends.” However, when these two worlds aren’t tearing Buffy in opposite directions, they often provide her with great strength. Buffy’s power as the Slayer enables her to save the lives of her friends time and again (without Buffy arriving in Sunnydale, Willow and Xander would’ve long since become members of the undead as shown in “The Wish”) and likewise the strength Buffy draws from her “ties to the world” enables Buffy to stay strong as the Slayer, to battle against the death wish Slayer’s are in danger of submitting to under the pressures of their violent life.

As Spike attests in “Fool For Love”, Slayers have a death wish because they’re constantly faced with death, with violence and pain, and eventually they begin to wonder “where does [death] lead you” and what might it be like to experience “that final gasp, that look of peace” because being the Slayer is an exhausting trial that never ends until you die (5.07). Death for a Slayer is a reprieve from the constant violent battle; the only way for a Slayer to know rest is to die (a metaphor for life as we are all Slayers battling our inner demons; “the hardest thing in this world is to live in it” 5.22). Buffy battles this death wish, this desire to lay down her arms and finally rest, by embracing life through relationships with her friends and family. Through her connection to her friends, Buffy finds the strength to go on living, to go on fighting (“Strong is fighting! It’s hard, and it’s painful, and it’s every day. It’s what we have to do. And we can do it together.” 3.10).

For Buffy to be truly strong, she must stay connected to her friends and family—they are her strength—but it’s not always possible to be close to her friends. She’ll be disconnected often because of the trauma of her life as the Slayer. She pushes away her friends in “When She Was Bad” because of her issues over dying at the Master’s hand. She drifts away from her friends when she becomes close to Faith and later when she becomes wrapped up in her new relationship with Riley. She’ll begin to emotionally pull away when there’s too many responsibilities for her to handle (e.g. caring for her sister, for her ailing mother) and she more fully emotionally cuts herself off when she feels grief and the inability to help those she loves (e.g. when her mother dies, when Dawn is kidnapped by Glory and Buffy slips into a catatonic state). Emotional trauma and even resenting her friends for ripping her from heaven will also keep Buffy emotionally at a distance from her friends and her sister; it’s only when Buffy reconciles with Dawn and when she confides in Xander about what she’s been going through, that Buffy really reconnects and begins to heal enough to realize she wants to live, that she wants to be with her friends, to experience life and all the world has to offer with them.

Being the Slayer also challenges Buffy’s ability to connect to her friends because she feels it is her duty to protect them, to be strong for them. She is the Slayer—she is the one who dies so that they may live. As much as Buffy loves her friends, a part of her resents her duty because it’s been driven home time and again that Buffy will die long before she’s even had a real chance at life (the fact that death doesn’t last for her both times only makes the bitter pill harder to swallow: Buffy can’t live a happy life free from violence, nor can she find peace in the afterlife because the world and her friends need her). Eventually, her friend’s need and overreliance on Buffy to protect them becomes a burden (“I wish Buffy were here!” 5.11), a burden which Buffy resents as it becomes synonymous with her duty as the Slayer. Being the Slayer means she is automatically set apart from her friends, that she’s different, but Buffy is not purely the Other. She is both the Self and the Other. Letting resentment and jealousy of her friends drive her from them means she embraces the Other; letting go of her resentment and jealousy leads to her embracing the Self and consequently, embracing her friends and family and finding the source of her strength (e.g. Buffy joining with her friends in “Primeval”).

The construction of Buffy’s narrative relies on the conflict of these two worlds, the Other and the Self, the Slayer and her humanity. It’s only when Buffy successfully navigates both worlds and finds ways to bring them into a mutually beneficial alignment that she can achieve victory and even find happiness. To some it might seem repetitive that Buffy must constantly work through the same trials, but this is the essence of her character: her struggles are based on who she is and she cannot stop being the Slayer just as she cannot stop being human. Her issues never get resolved fully nor are they always easily resolved because new forms of conflict arise and sometimes Buffy isn’t prepared to handle them for various reasons (e.g. she doesn’t know how to solve the problem, she’s suffering from trauma, or has too many responsibilities on her plate and isn’t well-equipped to deal).

This is Buffy’s journey for the first six seasons—her struggle to reconcile both her Slayer and human identity (two very non-mixy things)—and it continues in Season 7.

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