#let me know if i said anything terribly inaccurate

I think something that’s so compelling about Faith’s character is that she doesn’t want to prove to Buffy that she’s better than Buffy, which is different than your average villain. She want’s to prove that she and Buffy are the same, not that she is better than Buffy but that Buffy is just as bad as her. (If you want more about this I recommend you read this amazing post by @herinsectreflection.) I think this is so interesting because in some ways this can be read as, “Oh, she wants to bring Buffy down to her level,” and that on its own would be very interesting. Conversely this could also be taken as, “I don’t want to be worse than you,” because that is the last shred of “I’m not evil” Faith might have. She’s holding on to the idea that all the things she’s doing aren’t bad, or at least not her fault, because in her shoes, Buffy would do the same, right? It’s not Faith’s fault that any of these things happened, her circumstances are just not bad. Although in reality, this doesn’t excuse her actions, in the twisted mind of a severely traumatized teenage girl, it might. This can also explain some actions in SanctuaryandFive by Five, such as the sobbing and the “I’m evil, I’m evil.” At this point, there are a lot of things that are not going so well for Faith (most of them are at least partially her fault but regardless,) and one of them is (as referenced by the linked post above,) the realization that her and Buffy are not the same, that Buffy is better than her. She had to let go of the last thing convincing her that she was a good person, and everything came crashing down.