Dawn AU: “Buffy’s flunking history. And Mom’s always yelling at her to clean her room. And… and maybe she’s not even a very good Slayer anyhow, if the Master beat her. I just think she should stop.”
God I am getting UNBELIEVABLY sick of the people who when the discussion of “who is the best partner for buffy” comes up and they’re like “obviously it’s faith” or “no actually WILLOW is the best partner” with the air that their take is superior because they’re saying a woman instead of a man and using a citing of “seeing red” as an “OF COURSE taking spike out of the running” type thing when faith and willow are literally the only people who are actual rapist from the entire scoobie gang. Soul having, memory erasing, body stealing, repeat offenses and ZERO real accountability or amends made besides their own “recovery”. They’re horrible people, horrible friends, and they betray buffy over and over and OVER again and make her feel SO BAD about herself. In no universe are they THE BEST partner for Buffy - cuz that’s the debate not who you personally would enjoy or like to have seen but THE BEST
CORDELIA is the actual best female partner for Buffy with kendra being a VERY close second (I just love the idea of Cordy’s family not losing their money and Buffy having a rich wife who takes care of her and spoils her but even if she didn’t have family money she would 100% get her paid by the council as well as understanding her and forcing her to confront hard things bc buffy is so avoidant but cordy is really blunt and honest and she would absolutely eviscerate anyone who dares speak badly about Buffy the way she stands up for xander who DOES NOT deserve it) and also personally I would have LOVED if Dru had become Buffy’s insane vampire watch dog type girlfriend for a more twisted dynamic that I think would still serve Buffy best if she was more morally grey because NO ONE could mistreat her if any of these three women were her partners they would all either literally kill you or emotionally destroy you in the case of cordelia lol and Dru - I just wanted the connection of angel’s two main victims to be explored more and I like the idea of the more corrupted one using that to protect the one that still has light in her
BE BETTER AND MORE CREATIVE WITH YOUR CHOICES OF FEMALE PARTNERS FOR BUFFY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
Faith is absolute shit at practically everything and causes nothing but more problems for Buffy and willow has shown she is completely unable to show up for buffy emotionally or actually understand the burden of being the slayer - SHE GETS JEALOUS OF TARA BC SHE CAN EMPATHIZE WITH BUFFY ABOUT LOSING HER MOM AND GETS MAD
Like I’m still team spuffy til I die bc that’s literally her other half and I ignore the extremely out of character moments in seeing red and in many ways spike is also a victim of angel so I still get some of that one victim helping another dynamic I enjoy but I also like buffy with kendra or cordy for the high school years rather than endgame but just like idk???? Maybe put some actual fucking thought into it instead of “with the nearest gay woman” without actually noting how those women are treating Buffy because ask any woman kisser out there - just because she’s a woman DOES NOT automatically mean she’s gonna treat you better than a man and that is CERTAINLY the case with faith and willow.
I'm doing a Buffy rewatch and it's made me realize that Giles has so many sweet moments with Buffy and Willow, but he never really warms up to Xander. Thoughts on why that is? Love your blog, btw! Your analyses are so insightful and interesting. Hence the question. :)
Thank you!
So ... the most obvious issue, I guess, is that Xander is the comic relief while Giles is responsible for keeping Buffy focused on her mission and aware of the dangers and risks involved. I mean that both in a narrative sense -- these are literally the roles the characters exist to fill -- and also in terms of how they both think of themselves as people. (I don't think you have to be too sympathetic to Xander to realize his humor is a coping mechanism: that he consciously works to be 'the funny one' because he doesn't think he can be as smart as Willow or as stereotypically masculine as he's been brought up to think he should be). And naturally that's going to put them in tension a lot of the time: see, for example, Giles snapping at Xander in What's My Line? when he doesn't take the Order of Taraka sufficiently seriously ("now isn't the time for jokes").
But beyond that, I think there are two or three different factors at play, which we can sum up as "Xander reminds Giles of himself when he was a teenager", or more generally "Xander is a teenage boy, a class of people Giles doesn't have much respect for", or -- taking that word 'class' a little more literally -- "Giles can be a bit of a snob".
Xander reminds Giles of himself when he was a teenager
Of course, on the surface Xander isn't much like Giles at all -- not the adult, educated, respectable Giles we see on the show or the more rebellious 'Ripper' we only hear about until Band Candy. But I think they are more alike than it might appear at first.
People sometimes talk about Giles's Ripper persona as if that's who Giles really is. Ethan Rayne does, in universe, and a lot of the fandom seems to agree with him. It's not really true though, I don't think. 'Ripper' is a mask, a construct that young Giles adopts precisely because it's not the sort of person he's spent most of his childhood being. And what was Giles like for most of his childhood?
Well, we know that he was forced to be more studious than he was naturally inclined to be (he admits in The Dark Age to having "hated [...] the tedious grind of study"). We know from Never Kill A Boy On The First Date that as a boy he wanted to be "a fighter pilot" (compare with Xander's fantasy about being a solider) or "possibly a grocer" (compare with Xander's actual eventual work). We even know, from A New Man, that he could be a bit of a class clown at times (in that episode he starts telling an anecdote about a time he played "a little bit of a prank with the [school's] dart board").
Who does that remind us of? Or what about other similarities: compare, for example, Xander rehearsing asking Buffy out (in Prophecy Girl) with Giles rehearsing asking Jenny out a few episodes later (in Some Assembly Required). Or in Season 6, compare Giles leaving Buffy -- for what Once More With Feeling tells us he believes is her own good -- with Xander refusing to fulfil his earlier promise to marry Anya, also ostensibly for her own good.
There are also big similarities in how both Xander and Giles relate to Buffy. Crucially, both of them describe her as something they're not: a hero. Xander first, in Season 4's The Freshman ("When it's dark and I'm all alone and I'm scared or freaked out or whatever, I always think, 'What would Buffy do?' You're my hero.") and then in a more negative light Giles in Season 5's The Gift (he preemptively justifies his murder of Ben by telling him that Buffy "couldn't take a human life" because "she's a hero, you see ... she's not like us". He's talking to Ben here, but he could be talking to Xander too.)
So that's one factor: Xander reminds Giles of (what he thinks are) his own worse impulses. (I don't think that's a particularly fair assessment on Giles' part, of course. Xander is noticeably more open with his feelings than Giles can be, for one thing. But I think this is how Giles sees Xander.)
Xander is a teenage boy, a class of people Giles doesn't have much respect for
If Xander doesn't remind Giles of his own younger self, he surely reminds him of people he knew growing up. We know (from Season 4's A New Man) that Giles went to public school (i.e. a private, fee-paying school, probably a boarding school). Many public schools in England, even today, are segregated by gender, and (although I don't have the figures to hand) I'd expect the majority were when Giles was of school age, so probably everyone Giles went to school with was a boy.
And what does Giles think about teenage boys? Well, nothing very good. In Season 1's The Pack, he fails to see at first that Xander's been possessed, assuming all his new negative traits are just typical for a teenager:
"Xander's taken to teasing the less fortunate? And there's been a noticeable change in both clothing and demeanor? And, well, otherwise all his spare time is spent lounging about with imbeciles? It's devastating. He's turned into a sixteen-year-old boy."
Later in that same scene he announces that "testosterone ... turns all men into morons". Later still, in Season 3's The Prom, he is surprised by Buffy's classmates recognition of her work protecting them because he "had no idea that children en masse could be so gracious".
We don't really see much of Oz and Giles interacting (beyond Oz appreciating Giles's record collection in Season 4, which is arguably a bit of a retcon since a previous episode suggested Giles is still a fan of the Bay City Rollers), and Buffy doesn't really have any other friends who are teenage boys, so it's hard to be sure how much of Giles's attitude towards Xander is Xander-specific and how much is just Xander being a teenage boy (and thus automatically being suspect in Giles' eyes).
Giles can be a bit of a snob
One way in which Xander and Giles are noticeably not similar at all is their social background. Giles went to public school and Oxford (and it's strongly implied that his parents and grandparents did the same, since going to Oxford seems to be part of his training as a Watcher). Giles had a job (maybe) working for the British Library. Giles speaks several languages, including Latin and Greek. Giles never seems to worry about money at all: he owns a large house and buys new cars, even when he's supposedly unemployed, he's able to give Buffy a gift of a very large check without experiencing any obvious hardship.
Xander ... didn't and can't do those things. I'm not sure the show ever quite makes this explicit, but I get the strong sense that he doesn't go to college not by choice but both because he doesn't have the grades and his parents wouldn't (want to, or be able to) pay the fees. Xander's home life sounds terrible for a number of reasons, but one element is that his parents just don't seem to have the same level of wealth as Willow's or Cordelia's or even Buffy's.
Willow's parents are academics and Buffy's mom owns an art gallery (and her dad does ... something in an office that involves "quarterly projections"), but Xander? In Season 1 we learn he has an uncle (possibly the famous Uncle Rory?) who used to work in a computer research lab, albeit "in a floor sweeping capacity". In Bad Girls Cordelia tells him that she's different from him because "my father has a job". In Out of Mind Out of Sight he admits his mother never cooks and Willow wonders out loud if his parents even own a stove.
Xander is working class coded in a way that really none of the other characters on the show are. None of the other characters until Faith arrives in Season 3, anyway. And crucially Giles also doesn't seem to care for Faith: he treats her much more like Xander than he treats either Buffy or Willow (or even Kendra, who he seems to warm to quickly in her limited time on the show).
I don't know how intentional this is on the writers' part -- I suspect it isn't very intentional, honestly -- but it seems noticeable that Buffy and Willow are both (at least initially) well-behaved, rules-respecting children from stable homes whose parents have money and who encourage their children to take education seriously, and that they are all also fairly obviously Giles's favorites. Especially when you factor in Giles general air of mild (and sometimes not so mild) cultural superiority ("She's quite a good poet, for an American" in Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, say; or his complaint about a demon after money in Enemies being evidence that "no one has any standards anymore"; or his suggestion that Xander taunting the fear demon in Fear Itself is "tacky"; or his arguments with Jenny -- in which she repeatedly calls him snobby -- about the relative merits of rare, curated books as opposed to more accessible forms of knowledge; or his attitude towards Buffy's taste in fashion or music more generally).
And ... well, this is consistent with who the show tells us Giles is, right? Somebody with his background would be encouraged in all sorts of small ways from a very early age to look down on somebody like Xander. Somebody who doesn't go to the right sort of school or talk in the right sort of way or know the right things or have the right sort of parents. So perhaps it's no surprise that he does exactly that.
I was sort of creating a alternative theory about his relationship with Buffy and that becomes most clear in the episode Guise Will Be Guise episode. Where The T'ish Magev is trying to help him (Angel) get over Darla, and he says “Here’s what you need to do, go out, find a small blonde thing, better, break her heart and than leave her and that will help you get over Darla.” And so what I was kind of saying is oh, that whole undying eternal love that he had with Buffy. Buffy was actually the rebound chick, and that she was entirely the reaction to the real love of his life which was Darla. Because she created him for God sake. ~ Tim Minear
#this is genuinely so funny like #buddy #how often did you think about buffy summers getting a research grant #spike is just laying there in bed with dru and shes like idk dripping sexy candle wax on him #and hes like. dru. ducks. what if the slayer got a giant taser. wouldnt that be fucked up. (via @yoursummerfrost)
#also he’s met so many slayers! like not ‘when slayers got funding’ but buffy in particular#he heard about buffy using the rocket launcher and was like this bitch? this one’s going places @faithandbuffy
That part! Like Buffy has to "grow up fast" because she is a traumatised child soldier. If anyone makes that argument that because she's the slayer, she's somehow emotionally mature enough to date a man ten years her senior who's been grooming her... honestly I'm side-eyeing that person so hard I just pulled something. He looks bored when she talks about stuff that's important to her. He asks if we "have to talk about" things she cares about and he doesn't.
Angel canonically can't accept it when Buffy breaks up with him, and canonically then calls her a brat A BRAT when she isn't immediately fine with him breaking up with her. Like she doesn't protest that he can't break up with her, that she won't accept it - she's actually imo more mature about it than he was - she's just sad about it and sad about prom sans Angel, and just generally having a hard time because she's literally fucking 18 and breakups are difficult. And he calls her a brat for it. He. Calls. Her. A. Brat.
Angel sees Buffy as someone who's less than him, whose decisions matter less than his do, whose agency matters less than his does. He sees her as a child, even when she no longer is one.
also i am so sorry but they can never do a buffy reboot with the original cast of characters because you will never ever be able to knowingly recreate the precarious tightrope of sex-symbol, cringefail loser, vulnerable lover boy, clown, trash man, babygirl, that Spike achieved.
This man can only exist by accident, i am so so fucking sorrry
yes, percy rose through the ranks of new rome disturbingly fast. no, jason did not do the same at camp half blood. yes, percy's rise to leadership at both camps took about two weeks and was completely unplanned. no, the same cannot be said for jason. his rise was carefully planned and took over a decade. they're both children of the big three, but where percy thrums with raw power, jason is a sword honed by zeus and hera. where percy is a survivor, jason is a weapon. where percy is a cycle breaker, jason can't get out. jason's fatal flaw was temptation to deliberate because he never managed to make his own choices. he was every classic definition of a hero rolled into one, and he never questioned it because his happiness came after the responsibility. jason was never going to ascend as fast as percy because jason was raised on hard work and discipline while percy, an abuse survivor and child of poverty, knew when to fight dirty. where jason was a transplant, percy was an invasive species. jason was always going to die because he was never more than a tool for the gods to throw away when he outlived his usefulness, or when he started to question his place. if someone as locked down as jason can question the system, anyone can. now that luke has put thoughts of overthrow in everyone's heads, zeus has to be very careful because while jason was expendable as his weapon, percy was unexpected in every way. zeus has no plan for him. when percy dies, he will become a martyr, so he can't die, except now everyone knows that percy doesn't want to be a god either. jason had to die, and now percy has to live.
Whatever you do, don't think about how Luke was always painfully aware of who his godly parent was. Don't think about how when he was younger, he was probably a bit proud to have such a god as a dad because all he would hear from his mother is how great of a man he was. Don't think about how because of that, a young Luke probably wanted nothing more than to be just like his father when he grew up.
Absolutely don't think about how as Luke got older and truly realized what was going on, how much he hated that he ever looked up to Hermes. Don't think about how after his first time meeting Hermes, he hated when people would compliment the physical features that he happened to share with his father.
Absolutely do not think about how Luke had to watch as other campers bowed down to hail him as a son of Hermes after he was claimed. How he probably felt sick from the realization that any hope he had tried to cling to of Hermes not being his father, had been snatched away. Don't think about how Luke seeing that caduceus flash above his head just made it clear that he was his father's son.
And whatever you do, absolutely do not think about how no matter how hard he tried to run from his lineage and change, the last time that he visited his mother just to leave her alone after promising to come back, he realized that his younger self's wish had come true. He had grown up to be like his father in the worst ways.
Just ... Don't think about any of that, ok? 😀🙂🥲
PLAY THE GAME | JASON GRACE X CLARA CASTELLAN @claracastellan - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
dededos
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
izzy806
