#'tis the season to mildly obsess over decades old Buffy fanon and internal timelines

[coraniaid]

Thanks to everyone who's replied so far.

Looking at the sources @mariedemedicis mentioned, and doing a little more digging of my own, I'm now fairly close to being persuaded that @moistvonlipwig's take is correct. My guess is that this is something that large parts of the fandom decided on while the show was still airing -- initially based on the repeated airdate of Surprise and Helpless -- and which the writers then chose to run with without ever quite making an exact date official. (We do know, after all, that there was quite a lot of contact between the early fandom and the creators of the show.)

As @mariedemedicis pointed out, by 2011 Dark Horse were running promotional events on January 19th to tie in with Buffy's 'official' birthday.

This might not be the first time an official channel agreed that this was Buffy's birthday though: I found an old ProBoards thread from 2010 in which somebody strongly implies that Buffy's birthday is something not up for debate, saying: "We all acknowledge that Buffy's birthday is January 19th and that Tara's is October 16th. However, we never receive definite birthdays for any other character". This thread doesn't seem to state when "we" had received "definite" confirmation about Buffy's birthday, but I think it's possible that this had happened.

A few years earlier still, Buffy's birthdate seems to have been a bit less agreed-on. A buffy-boards thread from 2005 includes a post which says merely that "It's generally accepted that Buffy's birthday is January 19, 1981". The author of that post goes on to mention the air dates of Surprise and Helpless and the "Capricorn on the cusp of Aquarius" line from Doomed we've already discussed.

The oldest source I've been able to find is this episode guide (first archived in May 2000) for Doomed itself. In the trivia notes, the authors of the guide also point out the Capricorn/Aquarius line and say that this "confirms that [Buffy's] birthdate is somewhere between the 17th and the 20th of January of 1981 (most likely the 18th or 19th)". They also mention the airdates of Surprise and Helpless. They also claim -- and I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere -- that Season 4's A New Man (Buffy's birthday episode that season) had originally been scheduled to air on January 18th 2000 but was pushed back a week for unknown reasons. (Though what I think they actually mean is that Doomed itself was delayed by a week and that this pushed subsequent episodes back; in reality Doomed aired on January 18th, a few weeks after the previous episode of the season and A New Man aired the following week. Given the internal continuity I don't believe Doomed could ever have been meant to air after A New Man and I don't think this is being suggested.)

So ... yes, it looks like this was something the fandom decided on very early on in the show's history and later became retroactively adopted as canon, rather than something -- like Faith and Kendra's last names, for example -- that was first established by some sort of official off-screen announcement. Unless I've missed something that happened between 2005 and 2010, anyway.

One potential complication I should perhaps note is that I sometimes see it claimed that Buffy's birthday is meant to be some sort of stealth reference to Dolly Parton (who was also born on January 19th and whose company Sandollar Entertainment helped to produce the show). Based on the above, I don't think that can be right: I think the shared birthday link must just be an odd coincidence. If it was meant to be a deliberate reference, and it had been decided on before the end of Season 5, surely it would have been given in The Gift (in the way Tara's was two seasons later)?

By the way, if (like me) you're prone to being weird about calendars and thought it strange that two episodes of a show that ran once a week could air on the same date in back-to-back years, the answer is that Buffy only regularly started airing on a Tuesday after Surprise aired. In fact, as far as I can tell, the show started life in the Monday slot and stayed there for the first twenty-five episodes. Surprise was the last episode to air on a Monday, with Innocence -- the concluding part of the story of Buffy's birthday -- airing the following day. That meant that the date Surprise had aired on (which was a Monday in 1998) would be a Tuesday in 1999. But of course, this change in air dates was something that happened because of WB's own scheduling decisions: it was a happy coincidence that in Season 3 the writers could now air a second birthday episode on the same date as they had a year earlier, not something anyone involving in making the show had arranged in advance.

Finally, while I didn't mention it in the original post, we do know by watching Season 2 that Buffy's birthday has to be before February 14th: Surprise has to happen before Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered, after all, and that episode has to take place during Valentine's Day. And we know from Season 3 that Buffy's birthday has to be not only after Christmas (Helpless airs after Amends which covers Christmas Eve) but also while Buffy has been back in school for at least a little while (after Amends, Buffy is back in school for Gingerbread, which ends with Amy turning herself into a rat, and when Helpless begins Willow has had time to buy an exercise wheel for the newly rattified Amy). So even before the Capricorn line in Doomed I think it was established that Buffy's birthday had to take place in mid-late January or the first week or so of Feburary, even if you chose to ignore the original airdates altogether.

Would still love to know if there's anything more official than that out there though, particularly anything in that 2005 to 2010 window.

Does anyone know the original source of the idea that Buffy's birthday is definitely January 19th? Because -- unlike, say, Tara's birthday, which we know is October 16th because it's given on her headstone in Help -- I don't think it's actually confirmed beyond doubt in the show proper. In particular, neither of Buffy's grave markers -- neither the one in Nightmares nor the one we see in The Gift -- gives a date of birth, only a year.

(Obviously I'm ignoring the two different dates of birth shown in Buffy's Sunnydale school records in I Robot ... You Jane. Neither of these can be correct because they' make Buffy's age at least seventeen, but we know from dialogue that she's sixteen in The Harvest at the beginning of the season and still sixteen at the end of the season in Prophecy Girl. I think those two wrong dates can be explained away as Moloch already using his presence on the net to change digital records.)

Yes, we first see Buffy celebrate a birthday in Season 2's Surprise, which first aired on January 19th (the same date that Season 3's Helpless would air next year, when Buffy again celebrates a birthday), but I don't think this on its own can mean much. The events of the show aren't normally supposed to have taken place on the days the different episodes aired. (Sticking to Season 2, Halloween aired a few days before Halloween, Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered aired days before Valentine's Day despite being mostly set after it; Season 3's Amends covers several days including Christmas Eve but aired on December 15th.) And none of Buffy's other on-screen birthdays (of which we see three, in Season 4, 5 and 6) first aired on January 19th: a couple didn't even air in January.

The closest I think we come to fixing January 19th as Buffy's canonical birthday on screen is a line in Season 4's Doomed, when Buffy describes herself as being a "Capricorn on the cusp of Aquarius". But although that does put her birthday within a few days of January 19th, I don't think it does more than that. Somebody born on January 17th or 18th could also very easily describe themselves this way, no?

As usual, google is no help here. I can find lots of breathless "did you know Buffy's birthday is on January 19th?" clickbait, but what I've not been able to find is something along the lines of "This was confirmed by Joss Whedon on [date] at [event]" or "This was revealed in the official Sunnydale High Yearbook" or anything like that. Generally I wouldn't treat a source like that as being completely canonical -- though I might for something small like this -- but it would be a lot more compelling than "everyone on the internet keeps repeating it, so it must be true".