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[comradesummers]

i am such a terrible femslash enjoyer because even though i've watched quite a bit of supergirl i've never liked supercorp. and as someone who was raised on faith/buffy and morgana/gwen and had generally been obsessed with katie mcgrath on merlin, that shit should be right up my alley. but i could never get over the fact that lena was a billionaire who chose to run her evil brother's evil company and then complained constantly that people thought she was like her evil brother. like girl no one is making you do this. you could sell the company for scraps and give all the money to charity if you truly believed that what your family had done was bad. instead she chose to continue to profit off her brother's evil success. not to mention some of her own deeply unethical ideas. like remember when she introduced the forcibly outing people as aliens device in like her second episode? or that time she decided that the best solution to the show's clumsy metaphor for xenophobia was to give more people superpowers to level the playing field or something? and don't get me wrong i love fucked up morally grey women, but i could not get past her always acting like she was oppressed whenever anyone called her out on some of the unethical things she did. especially because it seemed like the supercorp fandom always unquestioningly sided with her about it.

[gargfansworld]

Never watched Supergirl, but she could be feeling like selling the company put people out of work

[xaeyrnofnbe]

i think if harmony kendall got a soul she'd sigh dramatically a few times and then be fine. no change in personality either. she was kinda bummed for like a minute about the people she killed but then she got over it. angel and spike just weren't as good at the whole coping thing and this is why she's the best vampire in the buffyverse okay goodnight

[gargfansworld]

I like to think one of the reasons she's such a weird vampire is she had a ton of practice ignoring the little voice in your head that tells you right from wrong as a human

[blush-and-books]

LMAO there's an entire episode dedicated to what sunnydale would be like without buffy but. jenny isn't there. c'mon y'all

[blush-and-books]

@sunnydalelibrarian THANK YOU!!! Like, my train of thought is that even if Buffy isn't in Sunnydale, we see in this episode that Angel still is. Couldn't we assume that Jenny would have still been sent to Sunnydale to keep an eye on his eternal misery?? Without Buffy, Angel doesn't get his soul back and doesn't kill Jenny. Wouldn't she have mourned Willow being turned and had to deal with decreasing attendance by students who are getting killed and maybe even have joined Rupert's task force because of it?? Because she was raised knowing just how soulless vampires can be and she doesn't want these kids to turn into that???

And also I haven't watched 3x10 yet, but I know that Jenny is in THAT one, which is immediately after 3x09. Did they really not have the budget to put her in one more episode. We were robbed

[sunnydalelibrarian]

Exactly, it would just have made so much sense! Also I think bringing Jenny back for that episode would have been an interesting way to complicate the whole Wishverse, because a world where Buffy never came to Sunnydale is overwhelmingly a terrible place but the reality is that some people, like Jenny, would have survived because of it too.

And! If Cordelia were to tell them that, in her universe, Jenny was dead, where would that leave Giles when he had to destroy the Wishverse timeline, if the possibility of the better world he believed in meant one where she was dead?

[gargfansworld]

possibly with Angel's capture she fled the town, since she had no way of knowing where he disappeared to. Or maybe Willow went after her

[missjessefantastico]

i truly don't get when people say kennedy is not willow's type because she's loud, did her years long crush on xander mean nothing to you? you guys only hate her bc she's not tara

kennedy haters dni (or do, but know that i think lowly of you)

[gargfansworld]

Yeah, but her loudness is based on her ego, not her insecurity. That makes her more like Cordelia than Xander

[linecoveredinjellyfish]

to me willow rosenberg is the epitome of a character who's used to thinking of herself as kind and good because she's always been percieved that way by other people, but when other people say "kind and good" what they really mean is "competent yet unassertive." which isn't really a moral value, it's just the kind of personality that makes authority figures like you. so she's in the precarious position of believing herself to be a Good Person while having never really felt the need to develop a moral backbone. and this is of course the main reason why she's a little fucked up sometimes. i love this about her, to be clear.

[gargfansworld]

#girl is just casually sacrificing baby deers

what about that seemed casual?

[comradesummers]

i really really hope dawn isn't dead in the sequel series. i genuinely don't think i would be able to handle that. just tell us she's doing great off screen or something.

[b5ffy]

faith lehane’s avoidance issues are so bad she left her own murder. buffy summers’ abandonment issues are so bad she felt abandoned by faith dropping off a building after she tried to murder faith.

[coraniaid]

It would have been very easy for the writers of The Gift to frame Giles's decision to kill Ben as something other than what it is.

Ben could have tried to attack Giles first, in order to escape, forcing Giles to defend himself (we know that Buffy herself has, by this point in the show, almost certainly taken several human lives in self-defence, whether that's one of the Order of Taraka assassins in What's My Line? or Gwendolyn Post in Revelations or some of the Knights of Byzantium earlier in the season). We, the audience, know that Ben has actually made the choice to side with Glory and betray Dawn -- the writers could have had Giles find this out somehow, rather than having him kill Ben while believing Ben to be entirely blameless for anything Glory did. If nothing else, they could have had Giles kill Ben in a less sordid and realistic way: choking him to death after establishing that he can barely move while Ben struggles feebly to stay alive.

But, notably, the writers didn't do this. At every stage they made the choice to frame Ben's death as unsympathetically as they could. They make it very clear that they don't think Ben's death is something to approve of at all. Just in The Gift itself:

Xander brings up the possibility of killing Ben to stop Glory ("I know he's an innocent, but not like Dawn innocent ... we could kill a regular guy") only to immediately rule it out with a look of disgust. Why say this if not to comment on what Giles will later do?

Willow explicitly notes that the ritual to use the Key is "a one time thing": if Glory doesn't manage to kill Dawn this time, she's got no reason to try again. Why say this if you want Giles's later decision to seem justified?

The scenes with Dawn and Glory suggest that the separation between Glory and Ben is weakening, meaning that Glory herself is becoming more human and more affected by human emotions like guilt and empathy. Why include these scenes if we're meant to see Glory as an active, long-term danger?

Tara prophetically accuses Giles of being "a killer", a word we've heard before on the show (see, for example, the way Faith reacted to being called a killer by Forrest in Who Are You?, or indeed Buffy's own fears that "the Slayer is just a killer" as expressed this episode). Why use this word, or include this moment at all, if we're meant to be cheering Giles on?

Giles himself gives Ben a speech in which he admits that Buffy would never kill Ben because it's not the heroic thing to do. Like ... this isn't exactly subtle.

We are not meant to approve of Giles murdering Ben; and we are meant to see it as murder. The writers go out of their way to tell us that it's morally wrong, that none of the other Scoobies would support it, and it doesn't even work to achieve Giles's stated goal of keeping Buffy safe: she dies anyway, mere minutes after the murder. By every measure, the show tells us, this is the wrong thing to do. Giles will never bring it up again, not even when he's trying to convince Buffy that she needs him to make hard decisions on her behalf.

So it's kind of infuriating that so much of the fandom insists on reading it as an act of heroism anyway.

It isn't. It isn't at all. If anybody other than one of the protagonists was making this decision -- if it was the Knights trying to kill Dawn to save the world, or the Initiative locking up Oz and treating him like an animal because a few nights a month he turned into a dangerous monster, or the parents of Sunnydale trying to burn teenage witches at the stake to keep their town safe -- there would be no ambiguity about this in the fandom at all. And yet, because it is one of the protagonists -- specifically, because it's the character the fandom has decided to read as Buffy's Dad who only does good things because he loves her -- somehow the normal rules don't apply.

It's not an act of heroism though. The show is right about that, and the fandom is wrong. It's one of the worst things Giles does; a complete betrayal of his promise to Buffy in Season 2 to always offer her his support and respect. It has far more in common with his willingness to drug her and lie to her face about doing so in Helpless or to abandon her in her moment of greatest need in Tabula Rasa than it does with any of Giles (many) moments of actual nobility and self-sacrifice. It's a sign that, fundamentally, Giles does not accept that Buffy has right to make decisions on her own.

Giles knows that, given the choice, Buffy would choose to spare Ben's life. He doesn't believe he could ever convince her to change her mind. And so he takes the choice away from her.

Why would anyone applaud that?

[gargfansworld]

Part of the problem is that the universe they created doesn't really fit with the idea that Giles was wrong. Whether it was morally wrong or not.

For one thing, I have to say the idea of sparing Ben after killing members of the Knights of Byzantium to protect people feels a lot like a trope most modern fans don't have a lot of respect for, running through a ton of mooks with actions that either killed them or should have killed them and then sparing the big boss.

I don't know if Glory getting human feelings is supposed to be this sign it's safe to let her live. I think it might have just been to explain Ben getting worse. Buffy was immediately followed by Angel, and season 2's big plot was him going dark even with his soul and all the human emotions it brought and his big enemies were dangerous humans at Wolfram & Hart . Plus grief and anger are human emotions and Glory not getting to go home could easily trigger them. Plus don't forget Anya's newly human behavior in Dopplegangland.

The writers also would have known season 6 would be all about human evil, and although I'm sure it wouldn't have been in people heads yet, Jasmine at the end of Angel season 4 shows the danger of leaving a depowered bitter god around

Now, a further problem with the stance it's wrong. Buffy is likely one of the few Scoobies who would feel that.

Anya and Spike obviously would have no problem doing it. Giles did do it.

Xander brought it up, and it's unlikely the guy bringing it up is going to be totally against it. Also, the next year he was only against Willow killing Warren cause he thought

Willow would likely think she should be against it, but not feel it. And we do know what she'd do the next year

Dawn was captured of course, but she had the same opinion of Willow going after Warren as Xander. Also, I'm not sure that Buffy's morality is the standard for their family. Joyce brought a fire ax down on Spike's head when she thought he was just a person threatening Buffy and when Faith held her hostage she said she thought Buffy would KILL Faith.

Tara is the only one of the group who would be against it

Hell, let's expand it. Just recently left Riley was a soldier. He likely gets the idea of collateral damage

Oz? He's a question. Based on Wild at Heart's end he might accept it. Or he might not. Let's move him to the no category

And over on Angel.

We've seen him go dark. We've also seen him do things for Buffy's own good without her approval. You could probably sub him in for Giles and the only difference would be no bit for the glasses.

Wes? Similar upbringing and training to Giles. He'd do it.

Gunn? He'd be against it, but as we see what he does with Fred's old professor, he'd do it if necessary.

Fred? We know what she had to do to survive in Pylea, she wanted to kill her professor and the idea she needed to be protected from that was a nail in the coffin for her and Gunn's relationship

Cordelia might be a tough one. She grew to become a very caring person. On the other hand, she actually promised Angel she would kill him if necessary. I can see her trying to reason with Ben to kill himself for the good of the world, and then when he refuses doing it.

Faith would probably be traumatized by it, but I think she'd do it in a similar way to Giles and Angel, for Buffy

Lorne probably wouldn't do it, based on the way he felt at the end of Angel

So the anti-klling Ben group would basically be Buffy, Tara, Lorne and Oz.

It's hard to sympathize with Buffy's position in that case. It feels like endangering the world for Buffy to feel good about herself, at a point where all she's doing is feeling bad about herself anyway

[comradesummers]

i love cordelia chase so so much but i'm consistently annoyed by the take that she was never actually a bully because her insults weren't really that serious, and the scoobies were actually super mean to her for no reason. for one, that's just objectively not true. you're cherrypicking only her best moments and conveniently forgetting all of the classist comments she made to everyone but especially to xander, the one working class character, and that time she legit made fun of buffy for having a deadbeat dad or that time she said in front of willow that shylock from merchant of venice complained too much about antisemitism, just to name a few. but also, the cordelia was always perfect narrative is so annoying precisely because her sucking in the beginning is what makes her character arc (pre ats season 4 that is) so good. she went from the thoughtless mean girl to the most loving and empathetic person in the entire buffyverse. that's the whole fucking point!