#btvs universe

[itwasanangryinch]

Diversity win! The demon that orchestrated the kidnapping of your son, the betrayal of one of your closest friends, and the suspended animation of an enemy who should have died hundred of years ago uses they/he pronouns.

[oncemorevithfeeling]

AND WHEN THE WHOLE WORLD WAS AROUND JONATHAN AND EVERYONE THOUGHT HE WAS THE SUPERHERO SUPERSTAR BUT THESE TWO WERE STILL ALL OVER EACH OTHER????? HE LIT CASTED A SPELL SO EVERYONE ADORED HIM BUT ALL SPIKE COULD THINK AB WAS BUFFY??? TO TOUCH HER??? TO FIGHT HER?? CALL HER NICKNAMES???

[smthwckd]

another day another murderous blonde man to rot my brain

[clarkgriffon]

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER 6x22 | “Grave” 

[anjelia3]

"By the way, I'm over the whole needing-to-be-mature thing."

[elverrie]

as a garlic lover and enjoyer being a vampire in buffyverse would`ve been okay, cause i wouldn`t have my soul and, i hope, my love for garlic would`ve been replaced by some new demon enjoyments. otherwise it would`ve been such a tragedy to mourn garlic bread... garlic pasta... garlic everything. it`s always the things you love that kill you

[ptieuca]

buffy & angel + post season three/ats

[ethereal-w0lf]

It’s international asexual day!

List of canonical ace characters from media I like:

- Todd Chavez

- SpongeBob

- Lilith Clawthorne

-Peridot

-Sherlock Holmes (depends on the adaptation but book him definitely is)

-Gwenpool

-Jonathan sims

-Jet Sikuliaq

-Kusuo Saiki

And I head canon Spencer Reid, Gwendolyn Bouschard, Rupert Giles, Bo, Constantine and Vigilante as acespec

Happy international asexuality day for my Demi mom and my ace self

[xaeyrnofnbe]

ok i don't necessarily headcanon spike as a transgender man. because he isn't. he is cisgender and that is fine because there's nothing wrong with that 😌. HOWEVER. there is a version of the show in my brain where everything is exactly the same except he is trans (and gnc but primarily trans). and literally even the dialogue is the same but it means something slightly different now. "i know i'm a monster, but you treat me like a man" "to be a kind of man" etc

[5bi5]

Kendra with a sword

[bluehairedboyfriend]

[through sobs]: LEAVE! BUFFY! ALONE!

[tenderjock]

BUFFY BROKE UP THE COVEN (but make it gay) ->

in which DARLA is the vampire cursed with a soul who falls in love with the slayer; and DRUSILLA is the monster who remakes herself in order to earn a chance at buffy summers' love.

insp | insp

[aardvaark]

watching US shows is funny because their concept of "small town" seems very very different to mine. sunnydale from buffy the vampire slayer had 38,500 people… babe that’s a city.

[okiankeno]

her canine teeth in the side of my neck

[vargamornight]

buffy leads because she is the only one she believes capable of it. willow follows because she wants the privileges of being beside the leader (aka doing whatever she wants, whenever she wants, and never facing any consequences because buffy loves her and buffy's the one in charge of consequences) without any of the responsibility of leadership (aka consequences)

willow has proven that when she is powerful enough that she doesn't need to fear consequences, she does not hold back. not one bit. she will do whatever she wants, kill whoever she wants as horrifically as she wants, and the only thing that EVER stops her is the worry that buffy won’t like her anymore, because if buffy doesn't like her anymore, then she won’t be able to get away with all of her usual bullshit.

[coraniaid]

People who feel sorry for Faith in Season 3 -- a group which certainly includes me, by the way -- sometimes suggest that Buffy should have done more for her. Faith was a traumatized teenage girl, the argument goes, she'd arrived in Sunnydale afraid for her life after seeing her Watcher die in front of her eyes, she didn't have anybody else to turn to or anywhere to stay or anyone to teach her about how to be a better Slayer.

And the rebuttal to that, by people who don't agree that Buffy had any such obligation -- a group which also includes me, for the record -- is that ... well, it's really silly? Buffy is herself also a traumatized young woman. She's just come back from some of the worst months of her life, a life she's only now slowly starting to rebuild from almost rock bottom. Yes, of course, Faith needed help; yes, objectively Faith's life is in many ways harder than Buffy's. But it's asking far too much of Buffy -- and letting everyone else in Faith's life off the hook far too easily -- to expect her to take on the role of Faith's primary caregiver. Giles should have done more, or the Council should have bothered to send Faith a new Watcher of her own far sooner. They shouldn't have just delegated that to Buffy herself. No matter how hard Buffy had tried, she was never the one who should have had that responsibility thrust upon her.

And then we get to Season 7, and the Potentials, and ... well. The first time as tragedy, I guess.

Once again, Buffy is just coming back from some of the worst months or her life and trying to rebuild after rock bottom. But this time around it's almost like the show decides to adopt the fan position I criticised earlier. As if it's saying to us: "Okay, Buffy is no longer a mere high school senior worrying about getting into college! She's now a certified college dropout, with a recently dead mother and exciting new bills to pay and a kid sister she didn't have to worry about before. And don't forget that she's a whopping four years older than she was in Season 3. Now it is surely perfectly reasonable for her to have to look after a dozen or more little Faith Lehanes, all of them hurt and scared and angry. Some of them have dead Watchers and some of them never seen a vampire before and all of them are going to die soon, painfully, unless Buffy can do something about it."

I said earlier that Buffy does a pretty terrible job leading the Potentials -- at least before Chosen -- and I think that's fair. She does do a pretty bad job. But I also think that ... well, duh, of course she did a bad job. What kind of idiot would expect her to do more?

She was always going to do terribly, because she was being asked to do something almost impossible with no warning or training or preparation. Buffy isn't a general. This isn't one of her strengths. She works best alone, or in small groups of people she already knows well and can rely on without having to win over. Yes, Buffy has helped organize large groups of people before -- the hell dimension prison break in Anne, the fight against the Mayor in Graduation Day -- but these are exceptions rather than the norm. She also doesn't have any experience in the proper way to train a Potential Slayer, because she's never done it before and she never received any such training herself before getting her Slayer powers.

And the show has always told us that Buffy usually struggles to connect to new people quickly. Her social circle, years after graduation, is entirely made up of either people she met in her sophomore year of high school or people who are either currently dating or used to date people she met in her sophomore year of high school. it's a running joke in Season 6 that she doesn't know the last names of any of her coworkers.

She does better when she can delegate to other people, which is what she actually does in the two examples I gave before (it's Lily/Anne who Buffy puts in charge of getting the other kids out of hell in Anne; it's Xander who she puts in charge of organizing the other kids in the battle against the Mayor). Buffy was -- very slowly, very carefully -- teaching Dawn how to (avoid having to) fight vampires at the beginning of the season. Dawn is the very first person she's ever tried to teach this sort of thing to! Now she has to teach a houseful of girls she doesn't even know, all while keeping them safe from an ancient evil entity and its horde of demonic cultists and taking care of her sister and having a job and carrying out her usual duties as a Slayer. Of course she's going to find that really, really hard.

There are things I think Buffy can and should have done differently. Off the top of my head: nobody in the house should ever have been sleeping alone; they should have adopted some sort of handshake/hug greeting protocol so you'd always know that you were talking to a real person and not the First; Buffy should have recognized that Kennedy (and some of the other older Potentials, maybe?) actually knew more about teaching scared fifteen year olds with no powers than she did and [more formally] delegated training responsibilities to them and had regular catch-ups with them (both because this makes practical sense and because winning over the loyalty of a handful of older girls, the ones most likely to be the focus of any mutiny or protest, is much easier than trying to approach all the Potentials as a single uniform mass); she should have socialized a little with, if not all the Potentials, at least that older and more responsible subset who she needed to stay motivated and onside; she probably should have forced herself to very obviously know all the girls' names and one or two facts about them; she probably shouldn't have told them all that their friend killed herself because she was weak and scared and stupid and so were they. And so on.

But the biggest issue here is that ... Buffy shouldn't ever have been asked to do this! Not by anyone who knew her, or who cared about her well-being.

Again, if this is the point of Season 7 I think it makes some sort of sense, at least from a Doyleist perspective. I think the show actually has (maybe unintentionally), laid the groundwork for this being kind of a weakness of Buffy's. Again, the execution is a little sloppy, but whatever. There's something like a narrative arc there, at least in potential.

But from a Watsonian perspective, and without wanting to be (too obviously) a hater ... isn't this just another abrogation of duty on Giles's part? He is (as far as we know) still a paid Watcher right up to the point the Council building explodes! Looking after the Potentials is literally his job! He explicitly tells us in Bring On The Night that the prospect of somebody going after the Potentials like this is something that the Council "always feared" might happen. And so naturally when it does he decides to ... make it Buffy's problem. Why is she the one who suddenly has to worry about training the Potentials and teaching them how to fight vampires and keeping them safe when, of the two of them, he is the one actually qualified to do it?

(Yeah, I know, it's because the writing of Season 7 isn't even close to good and requires the characters to contort themselves through strange hoops to match the very specific story beats the writers have decided on. But also ... well, giving up and placing all the pressure on Buffy to look after a dozen-odd little Faith Lehanes is actually pretty much in keeping with how Giles ended up dealing with the original Faith Lehane, if you think about it. And he asked the Council to be given the chance to take care of her, too. So maybe this is more in character than I'd like to admit.)