#'why isn't Buffy paid to be a Slayer the way Giles is paid to be a Watcher?' is such an annoying question

[coraniaid]

Other than a few seconds of dialogue in Season 5's Checkpoint -- in which Buffy demands the Council reappoint Giles as her Watcher and he be "reinstated at fall salary ... to be paid retroactively" -- is there any indication that Giles was being paid to be a Watcher?

I have asked this before, and nobody has provided any, but surely there must be, because the fandom seems convinced that all Watchers are paid despite the fact that almost nothing else in the show supports it.

If Giles is being paid to be a Watcher, why does he repeatedly talk about it as a "duty" and a "calling" comparable to Buffy's calling as a Slayer in the first two seasons of the show? Why did his father feel the need to make "a tiresome speech about responsibility and sacrifice" when he told him he was "destined to be a Watcher" (as Giles describes it in Season 1's Never Kill A Boy On The First Date), if said "sacrifice" came with direct fiscal remuneration? Why does nobody suggest at any point that being fired by the Council might cause him any financial hardship; why doesn't Quentin Travers make any mention of no longer paying him?

Why does he all but explicitly tell Buffy (in Season 2's What's My Line?) that he isn't being paid to be a Watcher? In that episode, Giles reminds Buffy that she [like him] has a calling which is "more than a 'gig', it's a sacred duty ... one that shouldn't prevent you from eventually procuring some more gainful form of employment, such as I did". The reading is very obviously meant to be that Buffy has a calling (as the Slayer) but could still get a paid job later in life, in much the same way that Giles has a calling (as a Watcher) but could still get a paid job as a librarian. If Giles is actually being paid to be a Watcher -- anything more than a pittance, anything that makes school librarian seem like a "more gainful form of employment" --- then this simply doesn't make sense for him to say!

So why has the collective fandom decided it must be canon that not only Giles, but all Watchers ever, are paid to be Watchers? Surely there is far more evidence that they are not, and that that one line of dialogue in Checkpoint is just a continuity error? Do we ever get any further reference to the Council paying Giles, after that episode? What is everybody else seeing that I'm not?

[sainthelgas]

Am now back to watching buffy the vampire slayer after taking a break. Am now on s2e9.

S2e9+ S2e10 Spoilers below

Xander got a role as a prison guard. Which he treats as a bad thing but like prison guards get paid bank. I know my uncle (who is bald) is one and is rich beyond reason

I like how all the characters are flawed but in unique ways. Willow is naive, Xander is a myspgynist, angel is a predator, giles is british.

I love this lame ass vampire spike keeps around to do the translations. He doesn't seem to be into the weird shit the rest are into. It feels like he's just tagging along because if he doesn't they'll kill him.

The slayer system sucks. Cause I feel like a weaker woman than buffy would've just moved to new york and told the rest of the world to fuck off. And if a new slayer can only be appointed when the old one dies I can't imagine the vampire community would wanna kill her if she isn't going out to kill vampires. But also they might cause the end of the world if not pushes back against so like she doesn't really have a choice.

She had to give up her dreams when she became a vampire slayer... fuck me!

"Xander, can you shut the fuck up?" -giles

I like this chud assasin who pretends to be a door to door salesman. Maggots ftw

Oh shit the guy who owns the bar they frequent knows there are vampires who use his bar as a hunting ground. It's like a fnaf situation. As long as he can keep his business running smoothly he'll allow them to pick off a few of his patrons just to keep the peace.

And he's like selling them blood on the side? Damn. Vampires get slayed buffy gets angel. What does willy get? Paid.

I wanna see a spin off about this guy on his own. Even though there seems to be a high chance of spike killing him for ratting him out. Maybe he can move to boston and open a new vampire friendly bar. It'll be like cheers but with vampires. It'll sell a million dollars

Willow has a fear of frog? Holy shit same! Maybe not a full on phonia but some feogs freak me out.

The chud vampire is named Norman Pfister? Pronounced like fister? That's insane. I thought maybe pfister was another name for a worm or a maggot or something but no! Apparently it's just some swedish last name. Pfister? I barely even know her!

Ohh shit just finished episode 9. She is a vampire slayer too??? There are multiple of them? I thought it was like a one and done sort oft hing. Like the pope or the dali lhama.

And thats why she tried to kill angel! Cause he's a vampire! Ooohhh

I love seeing angel actually squirm and worry for his life. He's always been the hot guy who usually has control over the situation. It's nice seeing the other side of him. Makes him feel a lot more human even if he technically is not.

Okay so there aren't multiple. Kendra was summoned to the position due to a technicality when Buffy was dead for a bit at the end of season 1.

Woohoo Willy is alive! And he made bank from selling out Angel!

Did Spike really drag angel down here just to make him sit in the cuck chair?

And shit. Xander and Cordelia? I would pretend to be surprised but I got spoiled about thay already. But we can still play pretend.

John green got shot! That cop wasn't even supernatural or anything that's just what she does.

Buffy and Kendra are such good foils. Kendra seems like she is kinda like what buffy is expected to be. Someone who exists to be a vessel for "the slayer" while forfeiting her own life in the process. It's weird how she had a weird amount of respect for Xander. I thought it might be because he's a man or something but she didn't act that way around giles. Maybe she has a crush on Xander or something? Idk

This episode is basically just Angel squirm compilation. They're putting him in such peculiar situations. As someone who never really found angel atteactive prior to this episode I get it more now. What does that say about me?

"I am the bug man, coo coo cachoo" killed me. Xander had a banger every blue moon.

Were Druscilla Spike and angel like in a polycule? If vampires were real they'd definitely be super into polyamary I think.

"He's a vampire, he should die" (vine boom) (thunder) (werwolf howl)

Willy is such a little weasel. I love his traitorous ass. I know he'll probably be dead by the end of the episode but still.

I love Kendra so much. Something about girl raised from birth for a single purpose just gets me. She had a better character arc in a 40 minute episode then a lot of characters do in whole movies. I hope we see her again.

And willy gets away! It's all turning up will.

Oh and Xander/Cordelia is happening I guess. I thought they might wait on it but I gues not. Fair, I guess that's a fine relationship. It probably won't be end game but as long as this stops him from longing for buffy/ leading willow on i'm happy.

[coraniaid]

To the extent that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deliberately and consciously About any one thing, it is about growing up. Specifically, it is about Buffy herself growing up. Moving beyond her childhood and her teenage years and becoming an adult.

And -- not always, but very often -- the metaphor that the show keeps coming back to for growing up is death and dying. Buffy's childhood friend Ford dies, and Buffy and Giles talk about growing up while waiting by his grave ("I'd like to stop," Buffy admits, just before Ford, now a vampire, bursts out of his grave). Buffy's mother dies young -- barely over forty -- and Buffy is forced to grow up again ("Who's going to be [Mom] if I'm not?" she asks her sister Dawn, her idealized childhood self made flesh, "Who's gonna take care of us?")

Buffy herself dies twice, and climbs out of a grave in a symbolically important way three times (in Nightmares, in Bargaining and in the very literally titled Grave). Buffy's main enemies on the show, especially during the high school seasons, are vampires -- forever young immortal creatures that refuse to die, but which "she alone" has the power to kill -- and Buffy can only defeat the Master by accepting the inevitability of her own death. The act of dying at the Master's hands both makes her more powerful ("I feel strong," she says after being revived, "I feel different") and also enables her to meet other people like herself (first Kendra, then Faith). Death is her gift, you might argue.

Another thing the show regularly associates with adulthood is money, particularly for Buffy. As a child, money isn't something that Buffy herself worries about, except abstractly: in School Hard she complains about spending a large fraction of her allowance on a new cream rinse that turns out to be "neither creamy nor rinsey", and in Homecoming she'll rue that she spent "a year's allowance" on a now ruined dress, but these allowances never actually run out. There is always money for new dresses.

Money is something for Buffy's parental figures to worry about. Joyce admits to "dreaming about bills" in The Puppet Show. Her father chooses his job over her in Helpless because "his quarterly projections are unravelling ... he can't afford to take off right now". It's Joyce, rather than Buffy, who worries about how she'll pay her way through college in Choices ("I know we can make it work if your father pictures in", she says, in what in hindsight seems like hopeless optimism) and it's Joyce who will be paying the bill for all the expensive textbooks Buffy buys in The Freshman ("I hope it's a funny aneurysm," Buffy says, which probably means nothing). And [whatever you think about Giles being paid], this is why Buffy insists on Giles being restored as her Watcher in Checkpoint, "reinstated at full salary", but doesn't think to argue for any salary for herself. Buffy doesn't get paid. Even at this stage of the show, money isn't something she has to worry about.

So, after Buffy dies for the second time and is brought back into the world again -- after she is forced to live in the world as an adult, and permanently take over the role of her mother -- it's no wonder that suddenly money becomes important to her. Not just important, but real, in a way it never was before. Those bills Joyce was dreaming about in Season 1 are Buffy's bills now.

And this is also why Buffy's friends can't just bail her out. Why Willow and Tara plan to go on living in her house without paying rent. Why all the gang come to offer her (moral) support when she starts her "subsistence level employment" in Doublemeat Palace, but don't think to actually pay her for the food they order. More than that, it's why Buffy doesn't ever think to ask for rent, and why she tells Xander his burger order is "on me" before he ever admits to looking to get a free meal, why the only person to give her financial assistance is her former Watcher (and now fellow adult) Giles.

Because her friends haven't gone through everything Buffy has. "It's kind of a Slayer thing", you might say. Unlike her, they haven't died. They haven't had to claw their way back to life from out of their own grave, into a world where everything is suddenly "hard and bright and violent". They haven't been forced to grow up yet. They don't know what it's like, and (as Buffy herself says in a different context), it's important to her that "they can never know". They're still kids. They're not in hell. Money isn't real to them yet.

[coraniaid]

Looking at this post again, I think I forgot to stress something important, which is that my reading isn't exactly "Giles often talks about being a Watcher as a calling or a duty, so therefore he can't be paid for it." I do think it is suggestive, given Giles's background and what we can plausibly infer about the Council's history, but it's not so conclusive on its own.

My real point is that whenever Giles talks about Watching as a calling he is doing so as a way of connecting with Buffy. It's his way of reassuring her that the destiny which makes some of the aspects of life which other people take for granted -- be that dating, in Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, or looking for a job, in What's My Line? -- either difficult or impossible for her is something they have in common and something she doesn't have to face alone. And that reading doesn't really work if actually being a Watcher comes with a monthly income. I think it makes the two roles -- Watcher and Slayer -- too different.

Honestly, watching the first two seasons in isolation it's kind of surprising to be told that being a Watcher is something you can even be fired from. Young Giles didn't seem to ever want the job, he quit his official studies before graduating and got mixed up in in the misuse of evil magic (which is, uh, the exact thing Gwendolyn Post was fired for, right?), he is (morally if not legally) responsible for an innocent man's death. That can't get you fired, but showing a modicum of respect for your Slayer and not wanting her to die pointlessly can? Come on.

But I accept that, whatever the show implied at first, Watchers can be fired. Because Giles being fired by the Council is something the show itself takes seriously. It's a possibility established in advance by the reveal a few episodes earlier that Mrs Post was fired. It has an impact on the plot for the rest of the season it happens and beyond. Which is, well, not something that I think is true for the idea Giles was getting paid.

(My in-universe headcanon to reconcile all this is that Giles's father was very influential in the Council back in the day and that he was very keen personally that his son also became a Watcher. That's why Giles didn't get to opt out of being a Watcher when he was younger and why the Council pull strings to cover up Randall's death and get Giles back into Oxford with no questions asked afterwards.

But in the present, Giles Senior is gone -- either retired or passed on or ousted in a power struggle with somebody like Travers -- which is why Giles can now be fired so easily. I think this also explains why the Council don't seem to like him very much even before the events of Helpless: it's not just being far away from England and on active duty training a Slayer that's the problem, lots of the higher-ups aren't happy about the fact that he got what they would have seen as preferential treatment and think he shouldn't have been allowed to be a Watcher at all.

But, well, obviously the non-diegetic reason is that the writers of the first two seasons hadn't come up with the idea of the Watchers Council and had no idea at all that Giles was going to be fired from it.)

[coraniaid]

I'll admit that I sometimes get very annoyed when other people suggest in-universe workarounds for Buffy's Season 6 money problems -- as if these were just something bad that the writers let happen to Buffy by mistake and not the entire thematic point of the season -- or when they argue that the Watchers Council should have given Buffy a regular salary the way they did Giles -- as if Giles being paid by the Council at all wasn't just a throwaway joke from Checkpoint that the show obviously never intended to be taken seriously and isn't even remotely consistent with the way he's written up to this point or after -- or more generally whenever they suggest that bad things happening to Buffy are some sort of writing mistake that can only be explained by the "fact" that all the Buffy writers are men (a weirdly common claim on here that denies the substantial contributions made to the show by Marti Noxon and Jane Espsenson and Tracey Forbes and Rebecca Kirshner) rather than being ... you know, the actual story being told.

Yes, often the plotting of Buffy isn't very tight and the worldbuilding could easily be improved. It is a bit silly that Willow and Tara live rent free in Buffy's house in the same season she is meant to be becoming an adult who needs to get a job to pay her bills; it doesn't really make any sense that there is an entire Council of Watchers who seem to find the actual Slayer herself a slightly tedious nuissance when she's the entire reason their organization exists; it very obviously is unfair that Buffy suffers from having to be a hero who regularly saves the world. But the story is not improved by making things easier for Buffy. A better version of Season 6 might fix things so that Willow and Tara being unable to give Buffy money made sense, but it wouldn't take those money problems away altogether. If Slaying was a career you could make a living from the central metaphor of the show would collapse. A version of the show where Buffy had a large support network and no financial or romantic problems and never argued with her family or friends would be incredibly boring.

However, when I say things that might superficially seem to resemble these sorts of complaints ("why doesn't Giles find Faith somewhere to live?", for example, or "why doesn't Jenny buy herself a laptop and work on spells at home?"), I think you'll find it's actually very clever and incisive media analysis. Honestly I should get some sort of medal for it.

[coraniaid]

Reblogging myself rather than responding directly to tags or replies (because I think it's hard to have any sort of multi-paragraph conversation that way).

First, yes, it is true that what little we see of GIles's private life in the high school seasons does not suggest he is surviving only on a librarian's salary. That could, I admit, be taken as evidence he is being paid to be a Watcher. But what we see of Giles's life in Season 4 and early Season 5-- after he has lost his job as a librarian, and after he has been fired by the Council, and before he becomes owner of the magic store -- also does not suggest Giles is struggling for money, and at this point he cannot be being paid by the Council. And, after all, housing is explicitly cheap in Sunnydale (Joyce can afford a pretty sizeable house just on the profits of a small and often struggling art gallery, for example).

I think the more likely in-universe explanation (the out-of-universe explanation is, yes, that the show is often not very realistic about or concerned with the reality of money until, in Season 6, it suddenly decides it is) is that Giles himself is personally independently wealthy. We know that he went to private school (or rather, what he'd call a "public school", as he describes it in A New Man) and then to Oxford. Most parents whose children did all this in the 1960s were not exactly poor, and Giles is (at least implicitly) his father's oldest son (or else surely somebody else would have inherited the family business of Watching?).

The Council are explicitly a very old-fashioned and British-based organization. I do think they would be very, very resistant to the idea of paying Watchers, if this was something that people should have been doing out of a sense of "duty" and "responsibility". For context, British civil servants weren't regularly paid until 1855, and British members of parliament weren't paid at all until 1911 (while members of the upper chamber are still not paid). And these historical changes only happened because there were large mass movements devoted to campaigning for them to be enacted for decades. As a (necessarily) secretive and private organization, one whose members were (if Giles's case is typical) the children and grandchildren of previous members, who was going to exert that sort of pressure on the Council leadership?

It is also, I think, much easier to believe that no individual Watcher would ever agitate for their Slayer to be paid if we assume that they aren't paid either. If we assume Giles is being paid, and realizes that being paid is important, it makes his treatment of Buffy much shabbier than I think it was originally meant to be . (And yes, it's often pretty poor anyway, but in a somewhat different way than this would imply.)

Of course, there is a lot of rather mutable history and backstory in Buffy's setting, granted. From the actual age of Angel and other vampires to which vampire sired whom and when or how Anya's powers work or whatever else. The very existence of the Council is, quite obviously, not something that the writers had thought of before Season 3. I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of retcons. If the show wants to fudge some detail for the sake of a better story or more plausible characterisation, that's absolutely fine with me. I just don't see what this particular retcon adds to the show.

Why should I change my original reading of the first three seasons, which to me strongly suggest that Giles isn't being paid for the reasons I gave above, simply because the two writers of a Season 5 episode -- neither of whom were even on the writing staff until Season 3 -- happened to throw in a line or two that contradicts it years later? Especially when this retcon is so incidental to the plot of Checkpoint or to the wider show going forward. If you weren't paying attention for ten seconds you'd never know you missed anything.

It would be different, perhaps, if Giles being paid was something the show took seriously from this point onwards. If he admitted to Anya in Bargaining that the Council had fired him again after Buffy's death, and he now couldn't afford to live in Sunnydale. Or if, when he gave Buffy a check in Life Serial, he acknowledged that he'd been paid to be her Watcher for more than half a decade and he felt it was something he owed her. But he doesn't say that, and neither does she. There's no suggestion from the writing in Season 6 that the audience is even supposed to remember that Giles is being paid to be a Watcher. (It would not surprise me in the slightest if the writers themselves had forgotten.) So, again, why should I take this one moment in Checkpoint seriously if none of the later writing does?

Lastly, I'd note that Checkpoint doesn't just introduce the retcon that Giles is being paid. Buffy, not Giles or Travers, is the first one to bring up the idea of Giles having previously had a salary. So Checkpoint wants us to believe that Giles was being paid to be a Watcher and that Buffy knew about it. So I don't think you can wave away Giles lines in Season 2 about "more gainful employment" as just a case of Giles lying to [or at the very least, very deliberately misleading] Buffy and her accepting it, because if he was lying to her then he must -- at some point -- have admitted the truth to her later, before this scene. And not only do we never see this happen; there's no obvious point at which it would or could have happened (does he bring it up after Helpless while trying to apologize for his part in the Cruciamentum, maybe? "Sorry for drugging you and risking your life and saying nothing while you were terrified, but well, you see, Travers writes my paychecks"? Or when she got back from town in Dead Man's Party? "I'm so glad you're back, Buffy, this means the Council will keep paying me to be your Watcher."? No, surely not.)

I have often been -- and will continue to be -- very critical of Giles. I suspect I have rather less sympathy for him than the average Buffy fan. I just really don't like this particular retcon, I'm not sure why everyone takes it so seriously, and it suggests that Giles is deeply selfish in a way that I don't think the first few seasons of the show support. So much of Buffy's backstory is vague and contradictory, why did we all decide to make this throwaway line the basis upon which we'd understand the character of Rupert Giles?

Other than a few seconds of dialogue in Season 5's Checkpoint -- in which Buffy demands the Council reappoint Giles as her Watcher and he be "reinstated at fall salary ... to be paid retroactively" -- is there any indication that Giles was being paid to be a Watcher?

I have asked this before, and nobody has provided any, but surely there must be, because the fandom seems convinced that all Watchers are paid despite the fact that almost nothing else in the show supports it.

If Giles is being paid to be a Watcher, why does he repeatedly talk about it as a "duty" and a "calling" comparable to Buffy's calling as a Slayer in the first two seasons of the show? Why did his father feel the need to make "a tiresome speech about responsibility and sacrifice" when he told him he was "destined to be a Watcher" (as Giles describes it in Season 1's Never Kill A Boy On The First Date), if said "sacrifice" came with direct fiscal remuneration? Why does nobody suggest at any point that being fired by the Council might cause him any financial hardship; why doesn't Quentin Travers make any mention of no longer paying him?

Why does he all but explicitly tell Buffy (in Season 2's What's My Line?) that he isn't being paid to be a Watcher? In that episode, Giles reminds Buffy that she [like him] has a calling which is "more than a 'gig', it's a sacred duty ... one that shouldn't prevent you from eventually procuring some more gainful form of employment, such as I did". The reading is very obviously meant to be that Buffy has a calling (as the Slayer) but could still get a paid job later in life, in much the same way that Giles has a calling (as a Watcher) but could still get a paid job as a librarian. If Giles is actually being paid to be a Watcher -- anything more than a pittance, anything that makes school librarian seem like a "more gainful form of employment" --- then this simply doesn't make sense for him to say!

So why has the collective fandom decided it must be canon that not only Giles, but all Watchers ever, are paid to be Watchers? Surely there is far more evidence that they are not, and that that one line of dialogue in Checkpoint is just a continuity error? Do we ever get any further reference to the Council paying Giles, after that episode? What is everybody else seeing that I'm not?