buffy and cordy are literally never not saving each other like the cycle is going on and on forever, in the first episode buffy attacks cordy thinking she's a monster, something she has to save others from. but no, it's just cordelia. cordelia a person and cordelia a shadow self to buffy, the person she was before who she wants to pretend she doesnt have a link to anymore, but she does. cordy asking "what is your childhood trauma" underscores this, bc like, cordy, you are. the person you are, the person buffy didn't get to be because at 15 she was plucked out of that life and into something else she didn't choose. you're buffy's childhood trauma, and she almost just stabbed you through the heart because she was so unaware of her environs.
and after that buffy is constantly saving cordelia. she saves cordy in the harvest, she saves cordy in witch, saves cordy in out of mind out of sight, saves cordy in when she was bad, saves cordy in some assembly required, saves cordy in reptile boy. not including all the times she saves cordy by proxy by virtue of saving all the scoobies / the town / the world.
which is to say!!!! that buffy feels she has irrevocably lost this part of herself!!! and her response is to keep on saving it!!! buffy saves her lost, repressed self as often as she can!!!!!
but then we hit halloween!!! buffy at the peak so far of her childhood slayer trauma (i mean that's the thing is buffy is still in her childhood here. the trauma she is currently accruing is part of her childhood trauma). and halloween is so deeply about the specific cordelia of it all. she picks the pink, feminine dress because it's what she thinks angel will like. and angel has been part of her triangulated desire with cordelia from the beginning, the two of them vying over him in part because of their sublimated desire for each other that needs a straight outlet. but also something angel says in this episode ("i hated the girls back then. simpering morons, the lot of them") calls back to coffy's other most prominent triangulated desire man, owen, of never kill a boy on the first date fame ("i just find most girls pretty frivolous. i mean, there's a lot more important things in life than dating, y'know?"). and that through-line alone is so coffy. like, in never kill a boy on the first date, the first priority for buffy and cordy both is dating. it's part of buffy's perceived humanity that she can't allow herself to fully think about. like, looking at this line in halloween, before their conversation is literally intercepted by cordelia:
"But who am I kidding? Dates are things normal girls have. Girls who have time to think about nail polish and facials. You know what I think about? Ambush tactics. Beheading. Not exactly the stuff dreams are made of."
or this line in becoming, another episode rife with buffy's-lost-life vibes, from the 1996 flashback to the literal coming out scene this line is a part of:
"It doesn't stop! Do you think I chose to be like this? Do you know how lonely it is? How dangerous? I would love to be upstairs watching TV or gossiping about boys or God, even studying. But I have to save the world. Again."
and that loops back again to the halloween costume! buffy's noblewoman's whole job is literally just to date!! ("I was brought up as a proper lady. I'm not meant to understand things. I'm just meant to look pretty and then someone nice will marry me. Possibly a baron.") and she does all of this while literally. Literally. wearing cordelia's hairstyle. the curly iteration of which we've most notably seen at this point in literally the other episode about buffy having lost her pre-slayer humanity and femininity ("What kind of moron would be May Queen anyway?" // "I was."):
but this all loops around back to coffy saving each other!!! namely that this is the first (but not the last) episode where cordelia saves buffy instead!! or is at least in the saving role in their relationship. buffy clings to cordelia fucking constantly in this episode, hides behind her, goes to her for comfort and safety, exhibits so much trust in her. and cordelia in turn checks on buffy, makes sure she's okay:
which is to say!!!! that buffy-as-cordelia, buffy-as-the-self-that-was-lost, buffy-as-an-exaggerated-version-of-that-self, finds safety and solace in the actual embodiment of that self!!! when buffy has regressed to who she imagines herself to be before, cordelia is still the person she wants to save her!!!!! which is all the more telling when we consider that xander says at the end of the episode that they were conscious in their costume selves the whole time. unable to influence their actions, as far as they were aware, but still that implies some degree of their selfhoods being involved. a return to instinct, if on a more sublimated level than in an episode like tabula rasa.
and this is even crazier btw!!!! when you realize that not only is buffy dressed as cordelia, but cordelia is dressed as buffy!!!!!!!!!. I'm not gonna go into a whole thing about why cats are slayercoded but just. look at those images and then read @knightofcup 's post about it
which means!!!! not only is 18thCentury!buffy clinging to cordelia because in fact she feels safe with the piece of herself she has derided and repressed and longed for, but also that that self has inherent slayerness in it!!! that cordelia, and by extension buffy as she was before, was always different, was always part of this. we learn in season 7 that potential slayers aren't just random people suddenly imbued with slayerness. but that they always have some of that mystical power running through them:
"You don't have slayer strength. But that doesn't mean that you're not strong. You have inherent abilities that others do not have" // "Not like you do." // "No, not yet, but it's there. You have the potential. You have strength, speed, instinct. You just have to learn to trust yourself."
we can see this in how buffy pre-slayage and cordelia in season one parallel each other. compare buffy on the steps of hemery high, almost desperately imploring her friends to: "call me, call me, call me!" as they walk away from her. to cordelia in 1x11: "i can be surrounded by people and feel completely alone. it's not like any of them really know me." it's about the isolation it's about the ache to be surrounded by people but none of them fill the void inside you!! because you're different! there is something different about you that neither them nor you can see!!!
so, the part of herself that cordelia represents, that buffy simultaneously repressed and aches for, distrusts and cherishes, idealizes and derides, rejects and protects, in part because she can never get it back, and in part because it was frivolous compared to what she is now. is in fact revealed to be neither of those things!! (while still, on some level, being both of those things). not lost irrevocably: because there was always the slayer in her, even then. not frivolous either: there is a depth to cordelia in season one, and so by extension there is a depth to buffy even before she becomes the person we meet in welcome to the hellmouth. and even then!!! even if all buffy or cordelia cared about was dating or facials, things both of them still deeply care about!!!! there is something about the narrative continually occasioning buffy's rescue of cordelia that brings a fondness to that as well. cordelia represents the humanity and youth of buffy's shadow. and inherent in that humanity and youth is caring about the body, about comfort, about status, about beauty, about romance!!!!
the cool thing about halloween here is it really does mark a turning point in how buffy and cordelia interact in terms of saving each other. because the next time we get an occasion for it, in gingerbread, we find cordelia attempting to return to the same paradigm as before, where buffy saves her ("I came over here to tell Buffy to stop this craziness") but buffy is incapacitated!! and it's cordelia who ends up saving her instead!! putting out the fire with the fire extinguisher and allowing buffy to defeat the monster and save everybody else!!
this in an episode that again codes both buffy and cordelia as ~different~. in that they are both mostly immune from the hive mind witch hunt effect of the hansel and gretel demon. rather both of them are victims of it, as othered parties!! buffy most directly, being literally tied to the stake to be burned to death by her mother, but cordelia is also a suspect of otherness ("and then my mom confiscates all my black clothes and scented candles!"). the cordelia we met in season one, we would likely assume would be on the torch-holding side of the equation.
but no, she has in fact been an Other from day one. the emblem of childhood trauma from day one. the place to hide from and safe, deride and yearn for!! endlessly alone, because so is buffy, before it all. and maybe that's the real reason for the tension with cordelia, when you get down to it. not that buffy was so free and perfect and ~normal~ and connected to the world before she was a slayer, and it was all taken away from her. but that even without that, she always would have had this. this thing that makes her different. that even if she had not had this kind of difference, this kind of childhood trauma, she still would have been an other. the cordelia tension is about the fact there was never any saving buffy from herself. but there is buffy reaffirming that her self is worth saving. not from difference -- association with buffy only makes cordelia more different, as gingerbread attests ("If you're going to hang with [the witches], expect badness, 'cause that's what you get for hanging with freaks and losers. Believe me, I know. That was a pointed comment about me hanging with you guys."). but from destruction, from death. that's always what buffy is saving cordelia from: from being hit by a truck, from being bled out, from being eaten by vampires from being killed and dismembered and sewn back together, from being sacrificed to a giant snake.
buffy keeps saving cordelia, and keeps affirming that this otherness in her, this fundamental place that will always feel like something lost, is in fact always deserving of more life . (this is about queerness btw just to say it out loud, both buffy and cordelia are queer).
this is especially true when we think about the instance we see where buffy doesn't. save cordelia. in the world where buffy doesn't come to sunnydale, where she doesnt encounter this shadow of herself, buffy and cordelia both die at the hands of vampires, no one there to save either one of them:
this in an episode that is again explicitly linking cordelia's otherness to her affinity for buffy -- that cordelia is a pariah because she dated xander, and she "never would have looked twice at xander if buffy hadn't made him marginally cooler by hanging with him" (cough cough gay cough). and an episode that is again about cordelia and buffy trying to save each other. buffy rushes out of the bronze to save cordelia emotionally (as cordelia tried to do to buffy a season prior, in the same alley. and fails for the same reason, that neither is ready in that moment for the emotional vulernability to let this shadow part of them in). cordelia tries to get buffy to sunnydale: (Whatever. Just - listen to me. We have to find Buffy. She'll figure out a way to save us. She was supposed to be here and - as much as it kills to say it - things were better when she was around."). But fails. Buffy gets there too late to save Cordelia, and by coming to town at that behest ends up meeting her own doom.
but then it all comes beautifully full circle in the last episode where they have the occasion to save each other. in helpless!!! the next episode to seriously deal with buffy's anxiety about who she was pre-slayerhood, as she is forcibly reverted to that state!!!:
"Before I was the Slayer, I was… Well, I don't wanna say shallow, but… Let's say a certain person, who will remain nameless, we'll just call her Spordelia, looked like a classical philosopher next to me. Angel, if I'm not the Slayer, what do I do? What do I have to offer?"
and then in this episode, we have another reversal akin to halloween!!!!
where buffy goes to save cordelia, the supposedly helpless (hehe) pre-slayer shadow self, the same self buffy derides verbally in this episode but still in her actions protects!!! but she can't!! and then her shadow self saves her instead!!!!!!!! and then!!!! saves her again!!! before the end of the episode!!!!!
which means!!!!!! that the last instance of either of them saving each other is buffy asking cordelia to save her!! to help her!!!!! that we start out from a place of buffy almost killing her shadow in an alley, to buffy compulsively saving that shadow again and again despite and because she resents, detests, longs for it, to both her and that shadow circling around each other, expecting buffy to be the one who does the saving, but increasingly it is the other way around, to buffy respecting and trusting that shadow enough to request her help and rely on her!!!!!! to ask to be saved by her!!!!!!!!!! ngghgngngghggnn!!!!!!!!!!!!!
