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Buffy and Angel × 'Hunter' by Paris Paloma

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I just finished Passion (S2, E17 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for the first time nobody talk to me

It’s 2am and I am sobbing

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I love these freaky vampires me and who

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Rewatching Dead Man's Party and Giles threatening Snyder has got me giggling and kicking my feet. The way he says "Would you like me to convince you?" fucking floors me every time. It's the way he never drops the polite, pleasant, proper gentleman facade, but it cracks for just a split-second and there's a hint of real danger underneath, and you can see the precise moment Snyder realises he's overplayed his hand

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BEST OF BTVS: Buffy & Kendra

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We never see what happens to Kendra’s body which I guess makes sense because it’s during the time when Buffy is in LA but I do wish we’d gotten a scene of Buffy visiting her grave (wherever it is) and leaving the stuffed animal she never got to give her. Like just some kind of further acknowledgement of how horrible what happened to Kendra was and some evidence that someone gave her the respect and dignity in death that was stripped away from her in life.

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Tara Maclay + text posts

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Rip William "Spike" Pratt. You would've loved Character Ai and Chai.

(The invention of the Buffy Bot could just be seen as Spike making an Ai bot be like Buffy for him to talk to online for hours and now I can never look at Buffybot the same.)

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BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER | 3.14 "Bad Girls"

Giles: "Uh, Buffy, would you…" Buffy: "I'll see if I can get her back."

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BEST OF BTVS: Kendra Young

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"To be with you in paradise, What I wouldn't sacrifice."

Alex Warren, Eternity

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Am I missing something or is there a big glaring flaw in the First's incorporeality in retrospect? Because in Season 7, there's a whole big plot point centred around the fact that the First is unable to touch objects or people in the physical world.

However, when the First orignally appears in Amends back in Season 3 to torment Angel as Jenny Calendar, he's like covering his face and clutching at his head and it takes his hands and pulls them down away from his face.

Like I get not cross-checking every detail to make sure it lines up because that's a lot of effort, but if you were going to make something like that a big plot point, surely you'd want to make sure you hadn't already contradicted yourself?

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@yvepaints Okay, fuck it, let's do this!

(Warning, this is probably gonna be a whole entire essay so buckle up everyone.)

Okay, so to begin with, both Annabel Lee and The Raven are examples of Edgar Allan Poe’s favourite genre to write in, which is “narrator is miserable about their dead girlfriend for several stanzas”. His most frequently used archetype is the beautiful woman who died too young and whose memory now haunts her lover for the rest of time. The crux of my parallel is that the narrator of Annabel Lee’s response to his eponymous lover’s death is very similar to Willow’s response to Tara’s death, while Giles responds to Jenny’s death in the same way as the narrator of The Raven responds to Lenore’s.

Let's start with Willow, Tara, and Annabel Lee.

The narrator describes their relationship with Annabel Lee as “I was a child and she was a child […] But we loved with a love that was more than love”, emphasising that even though they were young, their love was nevertheless real and powerful, and indicates a belief that they were meant to be together, that they should have been together forever, and the poem is laden with a sense of bitterness towards the universe for taking her away and preventing that. All of this I think fits with Willow’s perception of her relationship with Tara and her feelings about Tara’s death, especially as expressed in The Killer In Me, when she says explicitly that “we should have been forever”.

Another parallel is the tension between natural and supernatural in the manner of Annabel Lee’s and Tara’s deaths.

[Continued under the cut because, as I warned you, this is an entire essay!]

Annabel Lee dies from mundane, natural causes - it is implied she caught a chill - but the narrator, unable to accept this, constructs a supernatural fantasy in which she was murdered by a jealous seraphim. Meanwhile Tara, who does live in a world where people are regularly killed by supernatural forces, dies from a gunshot wound, which seems mundane by comparison. Also, when Willow tries to bring Tara back at the beginning of Villains, she is denied because Tara’s death was due to human causes and she is not permitted to “violate the laws of natural passing”. But Willow responds “how is this natural?” indicating her refusal to understand it in this way. Neither Willow nor the narrator of Annabel Lee can accept that their lover just died, in the same tragic but ultimately common ways that hundreds of people do every day.

Furthermore, the narrator states that “neither the angels in heaven above | Nor the demons down under the sea | Can ever dissever my soul from the soul | Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”. It implies that their love is stronger than the will of Heaven or Hell, but there is also the hint of the narrator themself wishing to be stronger than either as well. There is a defiance in it, a refusal to submit to whatever higher power thinks that death can separate them from Annabel Lee, which aligns with Willow trying to bring Tara back because she believes she is both capable of it and that it is her right to do so.

Throughout the last two stanzas of Annabel Lee, there’s this underlying idea that the narrator won’t let Annabel Lee be dead: going back to the idea that neither angels nor demons can keep her from them, but also the final lines describe how “all the night-tide, I lie down by the side | Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride | In the sepulchre there by the sea”. While Willow obviously never goes this far, her refusal to let Tara be dead is not dissimilar; aside from her initial failed attempts to resurrect her, this returns in the form of Willow’s guilt for moving on with Kennedy in The Killer In Me, when she says that ���[Tara] was never gone. She was with me. We should have been forever and I- I let her be dead”. Willow cannot bear the thought of accepting that Tara is really gone any more than the narrator can accept that Annabel Lee is gone; in a sense, they both perceive it as their responsibility to prevent the woman they love from being truly dead forever.

{Okay, let's have some multicoloured text to break this up halfway through!}

Everyone had a breath? Great.

Now onto Giles, Jenny and The Raven!

So, The Raven opens with the lines “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary | Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” which, let’s be honest, sounds like every night in the life of Giles. But getting into the actual parallels, for one, the narrator of The Raven never addresses his grief outright. He simply says that “I had sought to borrow | From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore”. The implication here is that he's not facing it, he's avoiding it. This resembles how Giles immediately throws himself back into his books and his research in the episodes after Passion rather than actually processing Jenny’s death.

There’s also a scene in the poem (stanzas 4 and 5) where the narrator hears a sound, puts down his book, and opens his chamber door to find no one there, at which point he starts to consider the possibility of there being something supernatural at play and whispers Lenore’s name into the darkness - and hears only an echo in reply because, of course, it isn’t her. This scene is almost replicated beat for beat in I Only Have Eyes For You, where Giles is sitting in his office reading, hears the ghost, opens the door, calls Jenny’s name, and receives only silence in response because she's not there, it was never her.

Furthermore, the poem’s recurring image of the raven sitting “perched upon a bust of Pallas” is an applicable metaphor in itself: Pallas is an epithet of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and the raven is the embodiment of grief, so it functions as a visual representation of how the narrator’s grief is taking precedence over his wisdom and reason. This theme manifests in the rest of the poem through the way that, even though the narrator seems to be a learned man and he recognises that the bird is simply saying the only word it knows, he continues to ask it spiritual questions and read meaning into its repeated answer of “Nevermore!” even if that meaning is upsetting to him - like, for example, the suggestion that he will never see Lenore again even in Heaven - because that’s still better than admitting that Lenore is just gone.

And that is precisely what Giles is doing in I Only Have Eyes For You: he would rather ignore all the evidence and forgo all logical conclusions to believe instead that Jenny’s spirit is trapped and stuck reenacting a violent murder over admitting that she’s gone and that’s it. For both Giles and the narrator of The Raven, constructing a fantasy - even a miserable, heartbreaking one - is preferable to accepting a reality where the woman they love is just dead and they will never know where, if anywhere, she is now, only that it is somewhere they can never reach her.

Finally, the narrator states that “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December”, suggesting that this incident happened a while ago, which fits with the poem being in the past-tense. Until the final stanza, which returns to present-tense, and begins with the phrase “and the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting | On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door”. This suggests that, even though an indeterminate length of time seems to have passed since Lenore’s death, the narrator’s grief has not left him yet. So our analogy flash-fowards to Becoming, Part 2, where Giles knows logically that it cannot possibly be Jenny in front of him, but he’s desperate to believe it anyway. And flash-forward again to Beauty and the Beasts, when he tells Buffy that for a while after Jenny died, he had dreams where she was still alive. Jenny's death and its impact on Giles even gets mentioned a couple of times in the comics as well, which take place years after the show ends.

Because that raven is still fucking sitting.

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading and bearing with me while I try to put my English Lit degree to good use! I hope you enjoyed reading this even a fraction of as much as I did writing it.

Willow and Tara are Annabel Lee coded, Giles and Jenny are The Raven coded (yes, I could elaborate and that is a threat)

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buffy the vampire slayer — she alone will stand against the vampires

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i feel like riley and angel see buffy and spike as the sk8r boi and avril lavigne pairing in the song sk8r boi and themselves as the girl who did ballet and now feeds babies all alone

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Willow and Tara are Annabel Lee coded, Giles and Jenny are The Raven coded (yes, I could elaborate and that is a threat)