#buffy can't make friends to save her life out here and it's probably cause they know the scooby gang is fucking impenetrable

[camellcat]

reading a post s7 fic and it's got me thinking... like, y'know, maybe the reason wil and xand struggle with their partners is because no one really comes above buffy. they're part of the slayer's arsenal, her best weapons, her biggest supports. and why buffy has such people troubles in general is because she will always always save wil and xand before anybody else. cause it's them three against the world

[firemanwhenthefloodsrollback]

side character deaths in buffy

I've been thinking a lot recently about death in buffy, mainly inspired by Help and everything that has to say to us about avoiding, accepting and understanding death

obviously the main characters' deaths are heartbreaking, because they're written to be heartbreaking and break our relationships with characters we love and know well. buffy (twice), angel, spike, joyce, tara, anya, and all the many alternate universe and dream vision deaths that kill the main characters rip my heart out of my chest for obvious reasons. but today I've been thinking more about the deaths of people we didn't know that well and whose deaths we watch without knowing them well. so I'm gonna talk about some of those cause it's my blog and you can't stop me.

(for the purposes of this post I'm counting main characters as anyone who was in the credits, with the addition of joyce because come on)

Deputy Mayor Allan Finch/Warren in Bad Girls and Villains

These two deaths both make you gasp for the same reason - they're sudden, physically icky (warren has the edge here with the flaying but the dark blood and death rattle for allan is also horrible to watch) and while we don't have a lot of positive feelings for the victim, we gasp because of what it means for the murderers and how we suddenly realised this season is going to get darker than we thought. faith and willow both spend the rest of their time on the show dealing with the consequences of these deaths and the audience knows in the moment they happen what it has to mean for the main characters. we want to save faith and willow from the consequences of having done this. just like faith, we're confused in the dark when a figure comes towards the slayers and we don't realise what's happening immediately, and with willow we've been watching her friends approach through the forest the whole time she's giving her evil speech thinking they have to be in time to stop her because no way would the writers let willow torture a man to death on screen. If warren or the deputy mayor had died because of a demon or accident we probably wouldn't have noticed (in the deputy mayor's case) or we'd have actively applauded (I rly wanted to watch warren die).

Jesse in The Harvest

I'm guilty of forgetting about Jesse (and so is the buffy writers room when they fail to mention him for seven years) but killing off a character who looked all set to become a scooby in the pilot and then making his best friend dust him as a vampire was both shocking and showed us a lot of the issues the show would go on to consider in miniature, right at the start. we've had campy vampires running around and wisecracking, we've had vampires being cool and edgy, the master being a total ham, but then we suddenly have to watch xander grapple with the idea that vampires are more than strangers in graveyards, they're the people you knew with yellow eyes and no soul, they can talk to you with all their childhood memories of you intact. season one might do a lot of floppy cardboard monsters but Jesse's death tells us they fully intend to Go There with the horrifying psychological implications of what vampires can do to you.

Jenny Calendar and Kendra Young in Passion and Becoming

I think of these deaths together because they were both characters that we half-knew and thought we'd get to know more. they were both characters who we felt could have gone on to be in the credits, have their own plots, and had a lot left to explore on the show. having two slayers in town could have been interesting (and would go on to be interesting in season three) and as well as her love story with Giles, we'd just had the veil pulled back about Jenny's heritage and reason for coming to Sunnydale - so both of these deaths were in the horrible sweet spot of having got to know the characters more than someone like Jesse, but not feeling 'done' with them yet. they were both killed by vampires who didn't even feed on them, by neck injuries that weren't bites by 'big bad' vampires who were really after someone else. after their deaths they both set more in motion and had long thematic afterlives - we think about Kendra when faith is called, and when we meet the potentials, and Jenny gives us the soul curse and gets willow started casting spells. Kendra definitely deserved more remembering than she got, and in a world where Joss Whedon had more time for Black characters I like to think we'd have got more of her and Mr Pointy.

the normal teens buffy couldn't save

before I started writing this post, I knew this was where we were going to end up.

(Jonathan maybe doesn't totally count here but I did because his final lines made me so sad)

characters who chose to join a battle between good and evil and died as part of that fight break my heart, but at least with Jenny and Kendra they knew at least partly what they were signing up for. Larry and Harmony we knew enough to have compassion for, and even when they were mean they were mean in regular school kid ways rather than big bad evil ways. I went to school with all of these people and probably so did everyone else.

Larry and Harmony died on graduation day when they were meant to be becoming adults under posters that said 'the future is ours' - Larry was newly out as gay and Harmony was about to get out from under the popular girls and maybe become a person who could stand on her own two feet, and Buffy could have helped them if there'd been less murder and death going on everywhere around them. harmony as a screaming blonde teen was exactly the type of victim buffy saves ten times an episode in alleys outside the bronze. Jonathan had more of an arc but at the end, back in high school after making an optimistic, bittersweet speech about coming to terms with high school and being optimistic about the rest of his life, leaving behind Andrew and Warren's bitter obsessive revenge of the nerds fantasies.

and Cassie, my heartbreaking queen, the one that gets me more than anyone that I wrote about a lot yesterday, knew what was coming and that no one could save her, and all the things she listed that she knew she'd miss were teenage coming of age things. she wanted to go backpacking, attend college, go to a dance with a boy, and fall in love one day. the whole of Help, she's considering the rites of passage she won't get to do, and in her therapy sessions Buffy tries to inspire her to want to go to college or join the french foreign legion. for buffy, saving Cassie means giving her a future. we haven't met the potentials or heard the word potential yet in Help but this episode is all about potential, and Buffy's attempts to save a life meaning safeguarding someone's potential and right to grow up.