#kinda got freaked about being perceived and am anxious to post this. but here goes

[thechosenthree]

I am back with more Kendra haunting the narrative thoughts after watching Helpless.

This episode is all about slayers and tradition, it’s about the Watcher’s Council treating the slayers as expendable and disposable. Giles says “It's a test, Buffy. It's given to The Slayer once she— if she reaches her eighteenth birthday.”

This episode is about Kendra.

Even though the episode refuses to say her name, Kendra Young is everywhere! Not even a full season before this episode aired, we were shown— for the first time but far from the last— the tragedy of a slayer dying too young in the line of duty, another slayer rising from her grave and then her being seemingly forgotten about.

The show tries to forget Kendra the same way the council does. I’ve already talked in the post I linked above, about how Faith’s existence ensures that we don’t. But it’s more than that!! The tragedy of the slayers and what Buffy and Faith go through, the entire premise of the show, continues to remind the audience of the slayer who didn’t make it as far as them.

Buffy is going through an identity crisis this episode, she has lost her slayer powers and she doesn’t know why. Giles is in no big rush to figure it out, he doesn’t actually seem all that concerned, and Buffy grows increasingly adrift. She realizes she doesn’t know who she is if she’s not The Slayer.

She’s very aware of who she was before. She brings up Cordelia to make this comparison— her ex shadow self who is a representation of her childhood, of the Buffy she was before she was “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”— and she seems ashamed of who she was then.

She doesn’t want to go back to being that person. She literally CAN’T go back, and she knows that. She has been changed by her experiences, even without her slayer powers, she is a different person than she was. Buffy says “I’ve seen too much. I know what goes bump in the night. Not being able to fight it— what if I just hide under my bed, all scared and helpless?”

She can’t return to the naïveté of the life she lived before she knew what was out there. I mean, she already tried that!! Buffy spent much of s1 trying to hold on to who she used to be, not wanting to let it go, not wanting to acknowledge that that girl and that life were already gone. Her death in Prophecy Girl goes hand in hand with her accepting that she can’t outrun her destiny, she can’t NOT be The Slayer.

Much of s2 was about accepting that being the slayer was a part of her life now. But Buffy continued to treat it like it was a job, one that had been chosen for her and that she’d accepted she needed to do, but a job nonetheless. She was at war with these two sides of herself, unable to see how they could possibly fit. Kendra played a big part in helping her along that journey. “You talk about slaying like it's a job. It's not. It's who you are,” Kendra tells her in What’s My Line.

Kendra who identified as “The Vampire Slayer” before identifying as Kendra. Kendra who never had a childhood or the chance to try and figure out who she was as a person. She was a weapon and a tool forged, used and discarded by the council (and the show). Being the slayer was not only who Kendra was, it was all she was allowed to be.

I can’t imagine the writers were unaware that writing an episode like this would remind people of Kendra. After all that same Buffy speech I quoted earlier includes the first mention of Kendra’s stake since it’s introduction in Becoming. “… Or what if I just become pathetic? Hanging out at the old slayer’s home, talking people’s ears off about my glory days. Showing them Mr. Pointy, the stake I had bronzed.”

Buffy is able to imagine living long enough to grow old IF she doesn’t have her powers. That isn’t the life of a slayer and she knows that, has seen the consequences of this life first hand. She herself has already died young, and a year later she watched her friend die. She goes from being unable to imagine any kind of future at all for herself to spiraling about the possible reality of a powerless one.

Buffy talks about all this while name dropping the stake a 17 year old slayer gave her just before her death… A slayer who didn’t even live long enough to be forced to endure this cruel test.

Reminding the audience of Kendra seems intentional. Which makes them refusing to say her name even more infuriating.

But she IS there, whether truly intentional or not, the show continues to remind me of her. She’s nowhere and everywhere all at once.