#summers sisters

[peachpitfan]

made even more who cheered

the dawn one is lowkey literal too.. she would be nothing if she wasn’t buffy’s sister 🤔🤔

[uhicareforcharacters]

when i'm watching pre-season 5 i'm always imagining where little dawn is. she would've been 11 at the start of btvs. 11! imagine little baby dawnie! i cry!

[no-resolution]

"It's Summers blood. It's just like mine."

[tamsiblings]

firefly x btvs / the gift vs. safe

the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. be brave. live. for me.

[holdtherope]

It doesn't matter where you came from, or, or how you got here. You are my [sibling]. There's no way you could annoy me so much if you weren't.

[invisible-pink-toast]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer | Melissa Broder, "Problem Area"

[hero-adjacent]

[wizardissues]

so have had a couple conversations with people about dawn that have made me think that maybe my take on dawn is worth bringing to the table! it's best framed by my convo with my mom, who was expressing general dawn frustration -- not just with dawn's characterization, but more specifically with the retcon in. and dawn's characterization, as we all know, is very "baby teenage girl" + "was originally written as younger than fourteen," so that's a straightforward explanation, but the retcon to me has always felt emblematic of dawn's status in the narrative as buffy's childhood innocence.

dawn is buffy. she's a part of buffy. the show emphasizes this in season five: that to buffy, dawn feels like more than just a sister and therefore more vital to protect. i've seen this framed as dawn being sort of like buffy's spiritual daughter, but i think that's a little off base: dawn is buffy's innocence, her girlhood, personified. she shows up in season five because if we're charting buffy's emotional journey, season five is the season where buffy feels like she is calcifying and becoming unfeeling because of everything that she's been through -- so of course this is the season where dawn springs into being but simultaneously Has Always Been There! buffy has reached a point of emotional distress so severe that the little girl in her has sprung away and out of reach, becoming a literal other person who is somehow always getting into trouble and causing problems. dawn is this little girl. dawn is a part of buffy.

and this contextualizes EVERYTHING that buffy goes through this season re: dawn. everyone in the entire world is bearing down on her girlhood, and it is her responsibility as the slayer to kill it. like from a pragmatic standpoint, killing dawn would (as giles points out) solve the big-picture problem, because killing dawn means that glory no longer has access to this Exploitable Thing that will allow her to end the world. killing dawn is also what the knights of byzantium are trying to do, and they're presented as just as much of an obstacle as glory, despite having the fate of the world in mind as well. she is posed with this essential choice, and it is so horrifying to her that the penultimate episode shows her literally retreating into her mind, playing over and over all of these moments where she was told it's her responsibility to protect this vital part of her, and the one moment she entertained the notion of just Giving Up. just Letting That Part Die.

which in turn makes her choice at the VERY end of the season so heartbreaking -- she is posed with this question and she chooses, instead, to die. she does not want to let go of her innocence. she does not want to live in a world where she has been forced to kill that part of herself, and so she tries to kill herself instead.