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Thinking about Buffy and Dawn as chosen ~biological family. Buffy wants to protect Dawn at all costs not because of her memories of them growing up together etc, because even though those memories do feel real to her – she wants to protect Dawn because she cares about her as her sister now.

But it’s actually more than that, because really, what is all that different between caring about your family because you just happened to be connected via biology etc and so shared in experiences and grew close because of that, as opposed to because of having equivalent memories, just they were planted in your head by monks instead? Either way it’s not something you ever chose, it’s just chance, and how you experience their effect is the same either way. Which is why the most affecting Dawn and Buffy moment to me is in No Place Like Home where Buffy learns that her memories of Dawn are fake, and it’s after that that she first decides to be really kind to her. Her little sister has been bugging her all season, but it’s only after she learns that she’s not her sister at all that she’s first able to really connect with her. It’s not that it doesn’t matter that her memories are fake because they ~feel real enough~ that she cares about Dawn regardless – the memories weren’t sufficient on their own. It’s only when she sees Dawn as her own person entirely separate to them that she commits to protecting her, just for the sake of her as an innocent in need of protection. The monks chose for Dawn to feel like Buffy’s sister, but it was Buffy who chose to care about her, knowing she wasn’t <3