hi! in one of your tags you said that giles doesn’t want to be a dad and that ruins his relationships, and im so intrigued. i’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this!! (or if you have a post where you’ve already written about it?)
hi! UM yeah i'd love to elaborate. The tags in question for reference are: #me every time i refer to giles as a dad#he’s not! he doesn’t want to be and he’s bad at it and that ruins his relationships#but it funny
This is probably going to be long so I'm going to put it under a cut:
So okay - I don't mean to say that Giles isn't meant to fulfill a mentor role to Buffy, Willow, and Xander. Not the scoobies as a whole because I don't think he does as much for Cordelia, or Oz, or Anya other than provide general guidance through supernatural expertise (and I guess running a business(?) to Anya...but I'm not going to get into that). In general he's constantly cast as the one they go to for help, for guidance, etc. But I don't think those things make him a dad or parent figure to any of them, particularly Buffy.
And I think he makes a lot of deliberate choices to keep himself in the mentor slot and not the parent slot -- and making those choices becomes detrimental to his relationship with Buffy. I say only Buffy here because I think her relationship with Giles is the only one that challenges who he is to her.
Season 6 in particular is very in tune with this: early in the season Buffy asks him (jokingly but still) "wanna be my shiftless absentee father?" and he is visibly uncomfortable with that and asks "is there some sort of rakish uncle?" He does not want to be in that fatherly role for her, even in jest.
Then when he shows up to defeat evil Willow and she goes "Uh oh, Daddy's home," which, given how his whole season 6 arc of abandoning everyone because he doesn't want to be the patriarch in Buffy's household, he thinks she should take the responsibility of providing, raising Dawn, etc...is very telling to me. It's not just his season 6 arc of him rejecting this role, he does it quite a bit.
Another big one is season 3’s Helpless. There’s a scene where Buffy is lamenting over her father not showing up for her birthday, and mentions he used to take her to the ice show. There’s a not so subtle hint that she’d want to go with Giles, but he turns her down or really doesn’t say anything about it. This is because in this episode he’s “preparing” her for the Cruciamentum by poisoning her basically, and that act while super screwed up of him is him digging his heels into the mentor/watcher role. I feel the episode is implying that you wouldn’t do what he’s doing to a daughter, and he does because she’s not. She’s his Slayer.
Then later when Travers says Giles has a “father’s love” for Buffy it is after he pushes back against what they’re doing to her with the test. He regrets it and tries to help her because again — you wouldn’t do this to your child. Giles’ reluctance to see Buffy as a child, a child he’d look after is self preservation for him based in how he feels about being a father and absolutely wedges into his relationship with Buffy.
There’s other stuff in season 3 too, particularly about Angel coming back and trust issues for Buffy and Giles both ways but Helpless exemplifies these themes best I think.
When we’re speaking on Giles as good parental support people talk about his reaction to Buffy after Angel becomes evil after she sleeps with him back in season 2. And I’m not here to debate that. It’s a lovely moment for them and makes my heart all warm.
BUT when Giles has the opportunity to stick up for her to Joyce in Passion. I’m not saying he should but he could! He doesn’t, he asks Willow if he should step in when Joyce is reprimanding Buffy about sleeping with Angel and Willow asks what he would say. And he…doesn’t know. He doesn’t because he’s definitely not her parent, doesn’t feel like her parent, is choosing not to be her parent even though at this point he is the only adult she has in her support system who actually knows what’s going on.
Again I’m not saying he should do this, but there is something about how he showed he could provide that support in private and does not when it would be a clear gesture. Basically my point is that when Giles has the opportunity to be a “father” figure he chooses not to.
That’s what I mean by he doesn’t want to be a dad! He thinks he’s bad at it and then he is! This doesn’t mean that Buffy doesn’t see him that way, or wants him to be a father to her. It is deliciously complicated and there is nuance to this conversation of course but to defend my unserious and yet deeply serious tags…yeah. Yeah.