if the apocalypse comes, beep me

August 6th, 2009 at 08:19 pm / +mem / edit

buffy anne summers

Buffy Summers is, in a nutshell, the Slayer. At the beginning of the show, when she first arrives in Sunnydale, she’s what appears to be your typical valley girl; blonde, ditzy, unserious, a shopaholic and not academically inclined. But she hides so much underneath that exterior that she’s basically an enigma. She’s a hardened fighter who takes no nonsense from what opposes her. She makes fast friends on her first day and protects them when they are dragged into danger. This becomes a habit in future episodes, where she is the sole person she can rely on. She’s a rock in times when everything else is slipping away. She doesn’t flinch at danger, or blink an eye at the end of the world. She’s the Slayer, pure and simple. A modern hero. And she’s not somebody to be underestimated. She has her flaws–she has her angsty moments, and her moments of weakness. She has moments when she doesn’t think she’ll pull through. But nobody could ever call her weak.

Buffy’s flaws are quite inter-connected and subtle, and are mostly born from her Slayer duty, which causes her to live a double life. There’s her normal life--high school. later college and the adult world, which is something that she balances precariously throughout the show. Her Slayer duty brings late nights, bloodstained clothes, police investigations and a bad reputation with the principal. She tries to balance pleasing her mother and all the other adults around her with what her duty entails. Buffy has, as is revealed later on in the show, always felt isolated from everyone because of being the Slayer. She feels that she is the only person she can rely on—she has a “superiority complex and an inferiority complex about it.” She doesn’t exactly believe she’s better than everyone else, but she believes that when it comes down to it… she’s the only one with the ability to get the job done. At regular points in the show she shuns her friends to stand alone and sort out the danger by herself. The power is hers, and only hers, and she makes her own laws. By the end of season seven, however, she learns an important lesson—that she can share her power. And so she does, and is no longer the only Slayer. By the end of season seven, she can rid herself of her main flaw and live relatively normally, fighting alongside all the other Slayers instead of having to rough it out on her own.

TBA.