#buffy summers

i’m not kidding when i say i lose my mind thinking about the gift dawn summers. there’s a lot to juggle in that episode, a lot to consider, but every time i rewatch i always find myself focusing on dawn’s face.

michelle trachtenberg gets a lot of flack as an actress, but by god in the gift she’s fantastic. she resonates perfectly as a terrified, miserable little girl, scared and aching for her sister. she tries to be brave, tries to stand up to glory in some meaningful way, tries to be strong, but it’s hard, so hard, and it all leads back to her chained up at the top of a tower, bleeding, ready to die. and in spite all of that this crying fourteen year old still musters up the resolve to jump to her death. and it’s not like making the same choice was easy on buffy, for sure, but buffy was both struggling with some suicidal ideation from the beginning and at age sixteen had resolved herself to the fact that she was going to die young and violently. to see dawn, who has this entire season been playing the role of the bratty younger sibling without a singular drop of courage or bravery in her blood, (and rightfully, because a fourteen year old shouldn’t haveto work herself into sacrificing herself to save the world, but this is buffy and nothing’s fair) be so ready, even through the tears, even through the pain, to fling herself off the tower and let the energy take and break her body is just astonishing.

it, among other things, certainly gives credence to the fact that the monks built dawn out of buffy. summers blood. you can’t beat it.

but it’s not just that, either.

it’s when buffy resolves herself to herdeath that we stop committing ourselves as viewers to the notion of dawn’s death and start resolving ourselves to buffy’s passing. and when dawn realizes, understands what lightswitch has flicked on in buffy’s head, comprehends that buffy isn’t going to let dawn sacrifice herself but buffy is beyond letting the world burn either, and thus there’s only one other option - that’s when she begins to break down. because that bravery is no longer sustainable when dawn is only committing herself to her own death. to watch her big sister, dawn’s paragon of virtue and courage and kindness, fall so completely and totally is beyond dawn’s capability to handle. her mom is dead, and her adoring sister, the only maternal figure dawn has left, is about to jump off a tower and into a murderous ball of light and die. right in front of dawn’s eyes.

and dawn is fourteen years old.

and dawn can’t do anything to stop buffy. she never could. so instead she lets her sister whisper into her ear words dawn likely is too shellshocked to ever properly relay to anyone else, allows buffy to kiss her on the cheek, and then watches her run, singleminded, determined, full of love and conviction in that predictable buffy summers way. dawn is the only person on the planet who hears buffy summers’ last words. and there are those who would claim spike, or angel, or faith mean more to buffy and deserve more than dawn to be with her at her death. but buffy and dawn’s relationship is so much more than love. it’s dawn trying to raise her mother from the dead as buffy commits herself to being dawn’s parent now and dawn having to watch as her sister refuses to cry for her mom in fear of falling apart. it’s buffy rescuing dawn from every danger, doing her goddamn best to prevent dawn from ever needing to be roped into the endless cycle of bloodshed and violence buffy was forced into at age fifteen, and in her final action preventing dawn from committing to dying young and violently one last time. it’s summers girls, and their brave and miserable blood.

as dawn stumbles down from the tower, completely alone, bleeding from dozens of shallow cuts, we are privy to her face. at the most vulnerable she’s ever been. and she is crying, because of course she is, but we also see the exact moment when all of her features stiffen and she remembers to be brave.

she remembers to live.

for buffy.

dawn summers, man. i love her far too much.

it’s kind of amazing that every single episode that directly tackles fundamental identity issues and other vs self perception in buffy is so inundated with gay subtext. the writers really saw xander, willow, faith’s difficult relationships to masculinity, control, and violence respectively and went “we’re gonna make this gay as hell” huh. 

not to revive this blog but i’m still so wild for the way season six rides off the coattails of season five in a way no other season of buffy ever does, an active and deeply satisfying deflation of tension.

you can’t go bigger than the ending of season five. you can’t go bigger than glory and all her magnificent godliness, her posturing and presence. you can’t go bigger than the thematic lines drawn in the sand from blood of blood concerning blood, the family and hope and great passionate scenes of death and despair. of shots like xander with the sword, of dawn in an ancient dress tied to a telephone tower barefoot and dripping with tears and her own life leaking out of her in an image evocative of a priestess of cassieopea tied to the rocks waiting for her death. you can’t top this intimate dance of mythology and pride and worlds.

but rather than even bothering to try as is expected season six fucking turns around. it backpedals. it flings glory down from her pedestal and on it it places.. three repressed, lonely, misogynistic nerds drowning in the trappings of geek culture and their own ingrained issues towards woman, autonomy, and surveillance. it doesn’t hand buffy a giant monster to fight, nor does it have her grow and motivate herself through undying love for the family she’s made. rather it rips her out of her earned spot in heaven and she suffers in a world that seems so suddenly cruel and bright and lacking in magic.

the tragedy of the mundane. it’s so good, guys

idk why i just realized this but…. giles’ fury at buffy for hiding angel’s resurrection from him, specifically concerning the line “he tortured me for hours, for pleasure” is a dynamic angel himself replicates when he harbors faith after she tortures wesley… both people seeking redemption and not to forget their sins but to work always in remembrance of them and the watchers they leave in their wake still suffering from the pain they inflicted . interesting parallel that i don’t know why it took me so long to notice.

one subtle and under-appreciated aspect of buffy as a show is the ridiculously funny and compelling justification the writers pulled out to explain why school wasn’t canceled when a guy died and how incredibly quickly the grieving process goes for every person in town, which was that given that sunnydale was on a hellmouth, death is as natural as breathing to the residents and thus not something to uproot your life for. 

which, first of all, raises so many more questions, like: why does nobody move away? why are people unwilling to accept the existence of vampires when they’ve been surrounded by supernatural activity for years? it’s such a ridiculous way to retroactively explain abnormal behavior and yet despite the logical issues it presents it’s also a very satisfying explanation, somehow.

because, second of all, the utilization of this justification is goddamn hilarious 99% of the time. cordelia asking if xander is going to fifth period immediately after he tells her the world is going to end? oz casually mentioning that the school newspaper has an obituaries page? snyder’s easy acceptance of the fact that the previous principal was eaten alive by wild dogs? the uncanny nature of it produces comedic gold.

but it’s more than funny, it’s.. actively engaging, somehow? maybe because the continued existence of these background children in a world where everything is out to get them obviously caring more about school and their love life than impending doom works really well in conjunction of a story that basically tells you straight up that high school is the real monster? maybe because there’s something uniquely intriguing about the idea that every single day people get murdered or disappear or transform into giant phallic snakes, but your life just keeps happening and you’ve gotta deal? maybe because this unnatural universe just spices up buffy as a show, i don’t know. regardless, it’s something i really appreciate about the show that flies under the radar most of the time. 

the thought that sparked this post: ben gets way too much shit.

the dude just wants to be a human being. he wants to live and date and do his job, go out and take trips and help people and just live his fucking life. and isn’t that completely understandable? we all want for bigger, better things, but just the simplicity of living your own, independent life unaffected by any parasitic chaos gods is something the most of us value. 

buffy gets that. buffy wants to be a human being too. she wants to go to the prom, to hug her mom and not lie to her day after day, to do well in school and pick up boys while bad music is playing, but she knows and acknowledges that that life will never be hers. her life is pain and fighting and isolation and though she may be closer to other people than basically any slayer in history, her existence will always, essentially, be different and lonely and hard. 

more under the cut

buffy accepts this, because what choice does she have? she’ll rebel at every step and keep her friends close by, love other people and do her goddamn best to ignore the clinical nature of slaying the world’s doing its best to impose on her, but she’s been lock-step with this life for years. her rebellion, while ever-present, never results in the bad guys winning, the evil going unslayed. she does her job screaming, but her job is done.

ben doesn’t live like this. ben finds himself incapable of living like this. ben is not brave. he is just a guy and he wants to be separate from this thingin his body so bad. 

i think by approaching ben with the mindset that everything he does is done with the express intent to ignore the supernatural burden imposed on him since childhood, a lot of his actions become a lot clearer. he tries to date buffy aware and stubbornly ignoring of the extreme danger posed to her by any kind of relationship with him. he goes to buffy in the desert when she needs a doctor knowing that glory could show up at any minute and kill all of them. and why does he do this? because he wants so badly to be a person in full control of his body, and his solution to the fact that he isn’t is to ignore it. ben always operates as if he is in complete control of himself at every given moment. and this is expressively selfish. but i don’t know if any average person would do anything different in that situation.

it ties in to the core of why fans hate dawn. she’s selfish, she’s cowardly, she doesn’t sacrifice anything for the greater good. even though she is a 14 year old girl, and the expectation that she would do this is absurd. even though ben is just a regular dude with no special abilities beyond the parasite that has been puppeting him since he was born. we hate them because there is nothing about them that serves as a paragon. they are entirely, unabashedly human in their portrayal and that makes us deeply uncomfortable.

selfishness and fear are hard to ignore. there is no entertainment or wish-fulfillment in that. just a sort of unpleasant truth that we go to extravagant television like buffy to ignore. 

there’s definitely something to be said here about how this communal hatred of human terror and selfishness extends to a dislike of season 6 buffy and how her disoriented depression is disliked because it is not palatable in that sort of snarky-feminist-icon way, but this is getting a bit too long for a tumblr post as it is. basically the point of this is just that i hate fandom tendency to crusade against writing choices that make us think about things we would rather not acknowledge.

i have a deep attachment to angry, guilty women embodying angry, impulsive men, expressing awful repressed emotions that they don’t feel like they have the right to feel through a veil of Boy Rage while waving around guns, which is why the killer in me and i only have eyes for you are the two most underrated buffy episodes 

but no like seriously

both the killer and me and i only have eyes for you come off of heavy bombs of episodic pain, i only have eyes for you in the form of operating after the trauma of innocence, surprise, and passion, and the killer in me operating after the trauma of seeing red, two to go, villains, and grave. these episodes were a powder keg finally going off, the burn and the explosion and i only have eyes for you and the killer and me are the initiators of that burning sitting in the wreckage looking at what they’ve done and somehow - trying to deal. 

buffy and willow lost someone they love, dramatically, painfully, and the idea of forward movement, buffy refusing to blame herself for angelus, willow finding someone else to be with, they treat as morally reprehensible because the two girls are inundated with bearing it - the notion that they must bear it, that sins and pain and grief are for their backs, all the time. and both times, a masculine presence forces its way in to articulate what the two cannot say in their own sacrificial unhappiness. warren tells willow, and us, that willow cannot deal with kissing kennedy, with being with anyone, because tara’s memory is too fresh and too beautiful and willow is at too much fault to try and move on. james tells us that buffy unknowingly unleashed a monster and in her efforts to put it down she refuses to acknowledge forgiveness beyond the horizon. james and grace dance. willow screams at kennedy in the garden with a gun. 

the two of them become someone they fundamentally are not, warren creeping his way into willows mind and james borrowing buffys body for a ride, to elucidate what the two have been feeling and suppressing and suppressing for so long and to illustrate quite plainly how the future needs to be. 

warren tries to gun kennedy down and willow knows that she has to be with kennedy to make the vengeance go away. james and grace tell eachother that it’s okay, that it can be better, and buffy understands quite plainly that she needs that betterment for herself

idk man feelings i have them