#this isnt my best work but take it ok
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.
