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Willow Rosenberg befriended a girl at 15, and discovered that she would suffer and die young like all those before her. Willow Rosenberg, at 15, had no power or position and could only watch as her best friend slowly but surely marched toward death. And yet, while everyone accepted it as The Way Things Have Always Been Done, Willow Rosenberg, of no born strength, refused destiny. For the girl she met at 15, Willow Rosenberg tore apart reality until her hands were blood covered. She carved apart the universe, called forth the greatest evil and rewrote the force of good. Just so her high school best friend had a chance at a happy ending. And I think that is incredibly real of her.

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Had a funny thought due to this post I saw

Based off original meme by cooltimesonline

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BTVS 4.07 I’ll take her apart. I don’t care how brilliant she is.

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But like it IS crazy that one of the first times cordy ever opens up to anyone it's when she confides in buffy how she feels like none of her friends really Know her, that no one sees her or really hears what she has to say. And then in the end cordy dies bc she's taken over by an evil being (that is. Not even that good at impersonating her lbr) and none of her friends realise. None of them can see. Like ohhhhhhh my god is that not just the saddest fucking thing you've ever heard. Does that not make you want to walk into traffic a little bit

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screw it, faith lehane + textposts (part one)

from @faith-fivebyfive

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People are too harsh about Kennedy from btvs. I have nothing but respect for the fact that her watcher was brutally killed just days or weeks ago, her life is under threat from relentless forces she's borderline defenseless against, new town, knows no one but she's in Buffy's house, Willow pings her gaydar and she immediately devotes herself to tryna hit. Everything else is chaotic and horrible and traumatizing but that DOESN'T stop her, she approaches every interaction with a single minded conviction to make SURE Willow knows she's down to fuck and GOD what a triumph of the human spirit, y'know? What dedication to lesbian pursuits, in the face of utter bleakness. She's an inspiration

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Oh my God everyone kicking Buffy out and putting Faith in charge is the FUNNIEST moment of collective girlfailure in all of Buffy. Genuinely a number one. Faith has been out of prison for less time than a Hulu Trial and they’re just like “put her in charge we are SICK OF THIS BLONDE BITCH” and it goes exactly as you expect. Nothing but respect for my idiot in chief

It's so fucking funny bc Faith doesn't even really want it, it's just pretty much her being a victim of her own Hotness Bubble like

The Potentials are all freaked out and bummed over how Their Lives Are All In Danger and Buffy's been stressed so she hasn't been the fun parent lately. Then Faith rocks up - they don't KNOW her. But she's SO hot. She's funny. She's got this rep. She's got slaying experience. And, crucially, she's really exuding this kind of dirtbag ex con zen that these idiot teenagers IMMEDIATELY misread as competence.

List of things Faith is competent at by season 7

-slaying (I'll give her that!)

-looking good in tank tops

-being pretty chill when people take shots at her over the whole Going Evil Phase

-being stabbed

-sustaining head trauma

-i mean getting her ass absolutely handed to her repeatedly without dying

-being gay for buffy

You'll note this list does NOT INCLUDE any sort of leadership skills. She's literally JUST hot and kind of charming.

She is the deadbeat dad who has the kids on the weekend and doesn't make them stick to bedtimes or do their homework and she let's them play M rated video games and say "bitch."

AND THEY PUT HER IN CHARGE. THE SLAYER WHOSE MOST NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS ARE FAILING TO END THE WORLD AND SUCCEEDING AT GIVING HERSELF BRAIN DAMAGE.

And what does she do when she's in charge? Almost immediately receive another traumatic brain injury.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer Alphabet ↳ C ✫ The Council We’re not in the business of fair, Miss Summers. We’re fighting a war. You’re waging a war, [Buffy]’s fighting it. There is a difference.

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This but also:

Dawn explicitly has a crush on Spike, in the same way Buffy did with Angel in the first season. And Spike doesn't pay any mind with it, knows that it's something she'll grown out of. Meanwhile, Angel spends a good chunk of btvs agonizing over the age gap and STILL proceeding to date her

sometimes the show is not self-aware. it does not understand what it is showing us. how else could you explain the near perfect parallel it gives us regarding angel and spike and their attitude toward buffy and dawn

like buffy asks soulless spike to protect a magically important nearly-fifteen-year-old dawn after she dies and his response is until the end of the world (not even until he dies but possibly longer) and he becomes her babysitter teaches her card games and they paint each other's nail

where as the ptb send word to a fully souled angel that he must protect a magically important freshly sixteen-year-old buffy and his first thought is wow she's clearly part of MY destiny this is a romance thing and it's gonna be so hard NOT TO FUCK HER

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LISTEN LISTEN- Because I just rewatched it today and I'm FERAL. It's just,,, perfection.

It's like, Faith who has always disdained Buffy's good girl act, trying to rehearse it in the mirror? Saying throughout the episode, at first mockingly, and then, at the end, having come to believe it? Learning through this brief experience of being Buffy that she wants to be a better person? Amazing.

Faith's change of heart coming precisely because of people's behaviour towards her when she fails to properly Buffy? Joyce showing empathy when Faith writes herself off as just crazy; seeing the scoobies' faith (hah) in Buffy; her trying to act all sultry with Riley, only for him (in one rare winning Riley moment) to answer with only love. Faith got the Buffy treatment, got to be part of the group for one second, and it was enough for her to realize that she wants more of that.

And on the other hand we have Buffy in Faith's body, who spends most of that episode with no freedom, a prisoner, unable to even control her own body for a chunk of it. Being at the receiving end of the disdain that Faith has had to go through for so long.

That confrontation at the end where Faith lets out all the self-hatred she feels and lashes out, only to immediately switch bodies back. She's back in a life she hates, in a body in which she's spent a year prisoner, when she was so fucking close to getting away. And Buffy, god, at the end there it's like she literally felt the remnants of Faith's emotions running through her body and it was visceral.

What really gets to me though is their support systems. Buffy's literally walking a mile in Faith's shoes and it fucking sucks, but, unlike Faith, she is able to escape it because at the end of the day she's Buffy and she's not alone, she's never been alone. Giles buys her explanation, and Willow and Tara - who hadn't even met Buffy beforehand - immediately realize what's wrong and work on a way to help fix it, to support Buffy. Meanwhile all that Faith has is a token from a ghost long gone

Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 4 episode 16 Who Are You? remains the best episode of TV ever made

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Crucial thing about Buffy Summers is that she would rather die than have a conversation. She doesn't want to get other people involved in her business if she can help it, and throughout the series we see her become increasingly self-reliant as she learns to trust in her own abilities as the Slayer. The downside to this is that it weakens her connection to her friends as she becomes convinced that they can't understand what she's going through. By the late seasons, Willow and Xander fit the same role relative to Buffy that Joyce did back in high school. To Buffy, it's not worth opening up to them if they'll never really get it. All she'd be doing is pushing her problems onto people who wouldn't be able to help. In addition, thanks to that self-reliance, she always thinks that she can solve everything on her own. She doesn't like to open up about her issues, meaning that her loved ones often don't find out that anything is wrong until it's too late for Buffy to handle it delicately. For instance, when Joyce finds out that Buffy is the Slayer in season two she has a lot of questions that Buffy doesn't have time to answer because the world is literally about to end. In a desperate attempt to keep Buffy from leaving Joyce threatens to kick her out of the house, which obviously wasn't something she should have said even though it wasn't sincere. By refusing to let her mother in on the details of her life until the last possible minute, Buffy put them both in a situation where she was forced to drop the information and run, leading her mother to hate the Slayer calling in season three. Joyce only gets a peak at Buffy's life when the supernatural gets so bad that it's completely out of Buffy's control, which leads to Joyce seeing Buffy's life as nothing but terrible. We see this especially with Angel. Buffy never tells Joyce anything about her relationship with Angel except for when he's evil and planning on killing her, which means that Joyce never trusts Angel even when he's a good guy genuinely trying to protect her.

Switching back to the late seasons; after Buffy comes back from the dead she feels unable to connect with anyone except Spike. She was obviously going through a whole depression in season six and I'm not going to say that she handled it wrong because frankly as long as she made it through alive she did everything right, but this lack of communication with her friends does cause some problems for her. We see in the musical episode Buffy is forced to finally tell the truth about what death was like and how depressed she's been feeling, and it absolutely crushes all of her friends. Not only does their friend find them responsible for her depression, but she also felt the need to lie to them about it because she thinks they'd rather see her as happy than honest. Buffy tries to protect her friends from her life rather than sharing it with them, so everyone ends up upset and isolated. For the next leg of the season she has the whole relationship with Spike going on that she doesn't tell anyone about, which once again means that no one finds out until it's so bad she can't control it. (This is paralleled with Willow's magic addiction in a way that's interesting but I'm not gonna talk about it right now). Xander gets angry at her for sleeping with Spike when we know he had a much more chill reaction back in season five when the Buffybot made everyone think Buffy was with Spike, showing that the circumstances of him finding out had a big impact on his reaction. If Buffy had been up front about the relationship rather than waiting for Spike to spill the beans mid-argument, her friends probably would have been more understanding. Instead, Xander only sees Spike as the guy who starts fights and tries to rape his friend. By season seven Xander and Dawn don't understand why Buffy wants to protect Spike, because she didn't want them to know about any of the relationship so they only got to see the worst of it. If she was willing to share the parts of Spike she found genuinely appealing, she wouldn't have been hiding the relationship in the first place. Instead, everyone else sees him as an irredeemable asshole and Buffy doesn't take their concerns seriously because she can take care of herself.

I think I'm running out of steam so this post is probably approaching its end, but yeah. I think it's super interesting how Buffy works on a "dude, just trust me" level, and you can see throughout the series that her bubble of trust shrinks dramatically. Her fundamental trait of not wanting to share her struggles stays consistent, but as she grows up and gains confidence and competence she ends up willing to let down her mask with fewer and fewer people. She's a uniquely powerful Slayer because of how she draws on the strength of her friends, but she hates that she has to do it and tries to lock them out of her life as soon as she reaches a point where she thinks she can handle it alone. Once things boil over she's always left with a situation that's far worse than if she'd just been upfront with everything, but despite that the people in her life still always support her unconditionally. Joyce welcomes her back into the house with open arms, Giles respects her renewed relationship with Angel, Xander agrees to let Spike live with him despite his concerns. Buffy has so much trouble accepting the love that constantly surrounds her, but it remains anyways.

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harmony is in love with cordelia and cordelia is in love with buffy so by proxy harmony is also a little in love with buffy bc that's how you get in with cordelia by liking what she likes. and harmony tries to like spike and spike is in not-love with buffy but clearly thinks of her every fucking waking moment so harmony also is still a little bit in love with buffy because buffy is still haunting her relationships. and harmony starts working for angel who was in soul-losing love with buffy and harmony wonders what the hell the big deal is really because she's yet to escape the girl's shadow no matter where she goes. and then harmony is determined to answer that question so she goes and actually tries to befriend buffy summers who looks like her and used to be her and has been like a third very unwelcome party but one that is clearly going nowhere so she might as well learn to like her. and then she falls in love with buffy, no more proxies needed. and she gets it. but it was still pretty rude of everyone

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"I've taught you all I can about being the Slayer"

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BtVS text posts: S6 pt 3