Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series)

by Gilene Yeffeth

  I know it’s fashionable just now to be annoyed at Joss Whedon for killing her off. The level of hurt and indignation among fans has been nothing short of staggering. Of course, much of this rage (often inarticulate in its unfocused emotion) is aimed at Whedon’s unthinkable act of betrayal to those viewers who saw Willow and Tara as lesbian role models. I’m one of those lily-livered romantics for whom politics goes right out the window as soon as my heart is ignited. That we were privy to the sweet musings, hot sex, heart-stopping epiphanies and tissue-shredding rifts of these lovers, to me, meant never considering the sociological implications of this couple’s representation as the only loving lesbian relationship on serialized television. These two simply were, from moment one in “Hush” (4-10) by the soda machine. No sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, as tall, trousered Rosalind/Ganymede would say. Their own paths of self-actualization converged like overflowing tinderboxes suddenly upended and neatly arranged into cordwood. Willow’s need for approval and Tara’s need for unconditional love allowed their supernova trajectory its singular, incendiary thrust toward its triumphant but tragic end; like all witches who burn, martyred by flames, they move on to a place where their gods are the right ones.

  Of course, this is not over. I don’t necessarily mean Whedon will decide to reunite them, or resurrect Tara or have her serve as some sort of shamanic, psychopompic, or otherworldly mentor, or have Willow find some magical means of contacting her or entering the realm of the dead (although none of these narrative trails would be unreasonable or untenable).

  In season seven, the closest thing we have to a reappearance of Tara occurs when Willow becomes romantically involved with one of the new ”slayers-in-training” named Kennedy. (For the record, I find Kennedy to be bossy, bitchy, and nowhere near as beautiful and dreamily sublime as Tara. It’s like comparing apples and ugli fruit.) When Willow feels her attraction to Kennedy growing, she experiences an unusual transformation; she becomes, to all outward appearances, Warren. In other words, she takes on the mantle of Tara’s killer, because her unexpressed rage, guilt, and most of all, her sense of betrayal, take over her Willow persona. Other characters, in discussing the source of the “big bad” that is destroying Sunnydale and, by implication, the world, agree that it was Buffy’s coming back from the dead “not right” that engendered this new evil. Anya matter-of-factly states it was Willow’s insistence on resurrecting Buffy that has brought them all to where they are now; and this, to Willow, means a burden of unbearable guilt. Heavy stuff for a witch who nearly destroyed the world and everyone in it; far more terrifying for her is the prospect that she was even indirectly responsible for Tara’s murder.

  In “Conversations with Dead People” (7-7), Willow is contacted by Tara through Cassie, a dead girl who claims to know Tara, who says Willow is not allowed to speak to her because of what she did. But there is deception and cruel manipulation here, as several characters are made to confront their worst insecurities and fears: From Beneath You, It Devours. This suggests karmic turmoil to the extreme, and the California Crew of Light is adept at nothing if they aren’t good at speeding up their own karma. But for two lovers to have had the recognition these two did at the beginning, such instantaneous comfort and tension and heat, bespeaks a timeless and enduring connection, a love that spans ages and incarnations, steeped in karmic debt, a ritual bound to circle round and repeat itself until they get it right.

  And so we wait for the fawn to be reborn in spring, dappled in green light beneath the weeping willow. Then winter comes and the scattered does provide cover for the king stag. Starvation threatens and acorns vanish. The riverbed creaks and melts. The elf queen metes out death and punishment and is lonely. The forest floor is fragrant and damp with decay. The bluebells push through again. It always happens, it will never not happen.

  Peg Aloi teaches creative writing and film studies, and writes film criticism for The Boston Phoenix, as well as a regular media column for witchvox.com. Her poetry has been published in Obsidian magazine and on gothic.net, and her first published short story somehow became a chapter in some stranger’s doctoral dissertation somewhere in New Jersey. Last summer she won the Gorseth Kernow’s Morris Cup for a poem about an ancient Cornish landmark she’s never actually visited. In October 2002 she attended the first-ever academic conference devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Norwich, England.

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  LIONS, GAZELLES,

  AND BUFFY

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who knows as much about vampires as anybody, has come up with a surprising and remarkable theory about the ecology of vampires in the Buffyverse. I resisted Quinn’s theory at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, as Oz would say, “actually it explains a lot!”

  NO MATTER WHAT THE GAZELLES may think, lions are good for gazelles, as naturalists have long observed: lions cull the herd by eliminating the weak, the slow, the stupid. Without lions, the genetic quality of gazelles would diminish and the increasing numbers would over-graze the veldt; resulting in starvation and a far more radical culling of the herd than lions achieve. Of course, the lions have a big advantage: gazelles aren’t carnivorous. If they were, their battles would be a lot more hazardous for the lions. In other words, the lions would be in the same situation Buffy is, a predator after a prey that can fight back on more than equal terms. Nevertheless, Buffy is good for vampires for precisely the same reason that lions are good for gazelles. The stupid, the crazy, the ravenous all fall to her stakes, and their numbers are kept in check, preserving the intelligent, the capable, the formidable. Just as among lions the lioness is the principal hunter, the female human is the most effective vampire slayer.

  And just as the relationship of predator and prey is a very close one, so is Buffy’s with those vampires who are clever enough, sensitive enough, human enough to know that she is an opponent worthy of their steel, and appreciate her as such, because of their esoteric ecological ties. She also knows that they are opponents worthy of her steel, and that, like it or not, they are deeply dependent on one another. The few who comprehend her necessary role in vampire existence fall under her spell, and only they have the capacity to command her attention and respect. Whether it is the Byronic Angel, the sardonic Spike, or the arrogant Dracula, those vampires who manage, through understanding and skill, to avoid her attack end up in a complex relationship with her, a recognition of the bond they share, and which both vampires and Slayers accept, sometimes with relief, sometimes with attraction, sometimes with repugnance, but always with mesmeric intensity. Theirs is a mutual understanding that goes to the heart of Slayer and vampire alike. It is more than sexual attraction—although that always plays a part in vampiric folklore—that binds them together, it is their shared role in the metaphysical ecosystem of Joss Whedon’s Buffy universe.

  From the beginning, Whedon has maintained the premise that the Slayer’s role is to keep vampires in check, and it is stated directly in the voice-over of the opening credits of the first season: She alone will stand against the vampires. Simple math shows that she would be unable to rid the world of vampires, but, if she keeps on the job of necessary destruction, the vampires will not overwhelm humanity, and the worst of the vampires will be stopped before they can do anything too damaging to Sunnydale—and, by extension, the world. This view has remained consistent from the start and continues to shape the direction of the series, twisting and turning around this central point. Through that consistency of vision Whedon keeps the escalating high-jinx from flying off into incoherence, which has happened to many other series with a paranormal element in its structure. When Whedon wants to show the delicacy of this metaphysical ecological balance, he steps outside his vision via an alternate universe, such as the universe where Willow is a black-corseted vampire with an inclination to boredom. In the Buffy-less Sunnydale, the vampires have run amok, and they are using up humans at such a profligate rate that starvation will be upon vampires in le
ss than a generation, for their human nourishment will be exhausted. By the same token, in a vampire-less universe, Buffy would be a young woman facing those problems that confront almost all young women, a capable person with a lot of determination, but not unique as she is as the Slayer. Or perhaps she would be in a mental hospital, as Whedon has posited. For Buffy to be Buffy, she needs vampires. For vampires as a species to survive, they need Buffy.

  Buffy lives at the Hellmouth for just the same reason as lions wait at the waterhole—that’s where the prey is. If vampires are going to congregate anywhere, it will be at the Hellmouth, and she’ll be there to waylay them. She must be close to the trouble in order to keep the situation in hand. By the same token, vampires—and all other manner of unpleasant supernatural creatures—are drawn to the Hellmouth because it seems to nourish them and give them increased energy. The nightly patrol that Buffy undertakes is like a lion on the prowl, and is done in the preferred leonine-predator way—one or two deputies to drive the prey to the Slayer. The Scoobies are essential to the predator routine that Buffy has developed to deal with her slayage, and their presence reinforces her hunting and the obligations of predation.

  Which is why Riley could never sustain a relationship with Buffy—he was one of a band of competitive predators, working on her territory and after the same prey. Unlike Buffy, he was part of a pack-like, secret, large group of young males trying to horn in on Buffy’s job, and turning themselves into targets in the process. To make matters worse, the commander of the all-male group was Professor Maggie Walsh, who was on a campaign to eliminate all Buffy’s myriad prey, which would disrupt the universal balance of Slayer and vampire. For Buffy to join the Walsh Crusade, she would have had to accept Walsh’s authority and agenda, which she could not do, for it would upset the balance of prey and predator. She made her own perverse superman in the hope of perfecting the non- or hyper- human—Adam, her manufactured son and murderer. All this reflected Maggie Walsh’s hubris and her zeal, by which she was able to excuse all her excesses and justify the enormity of what she had undertaken. The result was Walsh’s attempt on Buffy’s life; she could not continue her extermination project without upsetting the balance of the Buffy universe.

  That intrinsic conflict was the underlying reason Riley felt that Buffy didn’t love him—he didn’t have the intense bond that Buffy had with her prey, and in time came to resent the lack of it, to be jealous of the profoundly intimate predator/prey relationship he would never be able to share. Even though he rejected his primary pack, he could not break away from such institutions entirely, and when his loyalty was put to the test, he remained with his pack rather than with Buffy, to help her on her hunt. Strong as his devotion was, he could not cope with the equivocality of the Buffy/vampire nexus. His own experimentation with vampires revealed his desire to know that predator/prey bond, although he couldn’t sustain the relationship in the manner that Buffy and vampires enjoy. Making himself a victim could not come close to Buffy’s reciprocity with vampires, no matter how many demons, vampires, and other supernatural critters he and his fellow “soldiers” have neutralized. That Riley chose to remain with his own pack isn’t surprising, given his own predatory inclination coupled with his absolutist philosophy, though it was a great disappointment to Buffy.

  In most folklore throughout the world, vampires are few in number, hunting sometimes in small clans, but more usually alone or in pairs. Folklorically, the most packlike creatures are the werecreatures, which are often said to pursue isolated humans or communities in formidable groups, while vampires tend to cut out one or two humans from the community, wooing them rather than terrorizing them in order to establish a mutual dependence, hence the heavy erotic punch that vampire myths tend to possess, helping to create the fascination with which the vampire is imbued. And the vampire hunters in folklore often have some tie to the vampire, such as blood relation, abandoned lover, or penitent and/or confessor. Buffy may not have blood relationship to her vampire prey, but she is born to this task, assigned by fate to preserve humanity from vampires—she is destined to spend her life in pursuit of her prey in the best predator tradition. It is appropriate that her recognition of the First Slayer validated the predator image—that Neolithic hunter with the spears and shamanistic bodypainting—and the task of devoting her life to this calling. From the inception of Slayerdom, the Slayer has been a hunter: in other words, a predator. Buffy may be uncomfortable with the primitive First Slayer, but she is aware that they are linked in purpose, and that predation is crucial to the mission.

  Giles’s neutrality as Watcher makes it clear that he is not a competing predator—he is there to provide instruction and support, to train and assist the Slayer in her fated work—in other words, he was cast in the role of a metaphysical scout, providing the information Buffy needs to do her work, but unwilling/unable to participate in the actual slaying. As Giles became increasingly active in Buffy’s work over the seasons, he became less and less a Watcher, his neutrality diminishing steadily, until he was effectively excommunicated for his participation in Buffy’s activities. The more Giles was moved to engage in active evil-hunting, the farther he got from Watching. It also provided the opportunity for him to leave Sunnydale and all that it contained, since he had never aspired to being a predator himself yet he had reached the point of having to become one in spite of himself. It also allowed him to return to save the day with his knowledge, making it possible for Buffy to fulfill her work as Slayer while restoring Giles’s task of information provider.

  Multiple predators is a tricky proposition in this universe, and Joss Whedon has been at pains to show that secondary Slayers are intrinsically flawed. Kendra was overly rigid in her predation, and her failure to adapt was her undoing. But the more perplexing case of flawed Slayer was the vampire-like Faith. It is necessary for any reputable predator to respect its prey, to understand the importance of their relationship and to honor it. Faith was not a successful predator in any sense of the word, for she lacked respect for her prey, and indeed, for humanity as well; she didn’t acknowledge the irrevocable tie between predator and prey, nor did she comprehend her role as protector. Faith was an exploiter of both people—particularly Buffy, who put the pressure of conscience on Faith and provided a living counterpoint to Faith’s fecklessness—and vampires, using her slaying as an expression of pride. Unable to function as a predator, Faith could only strive to disrupt Buffy’s well-balanced predation. She condemned Buffy for her concerns and her integrity, while seeking to use Buffy as a foil to enhance her own circumstances. From her seduction of Xander to her alliance with the mayor, her ambitions over-rode all other considerations; ultimately she suffered for it, which, in terms of folklore, was necessary because of her betrayal of Slayer ethics as well as her contempt for her predestined work.

  Crucial to the acceptance of the tradition of predation is the constant contrast of the mordant wit that makes it possible for Buffy to discuss matters that would be either too grim or too far-fetched to hold the continuing attention of the audience. Much like the Mulder period of The X-Files, Buffy uses ironic humor to underscore the ongoing themes of the series without having to lecture or preach on the subjects. The wry humor takes the sting out of the predation, and also gives the series its deft touch; without the humor, the series would be heavy-handed and ponderous. Predation can be a gritty subject, unsympathetic to most audiences, and conceiving the predator as the good guy is a dramatically chancy device. The Slayer’s being a young, attractive, petite woman makes for an opportunity to create a heroine who is allowed a degree of ruthlessness that would be much less acceptable in a large, muscular young man. Being female, Buffy has a fine chance for making pointed observations about her circumstances that in a male performing the same function might seem a sign of weakness, or at least a lack of heroism, or an inadequate comprehension of the scope of the task being undertaken.

  As the series has evolved, the skills of the Scoobies have continued to adapt to the
new circumstances that continue to crop up in Sunnydale. Willow’s pursuit of witchcraft was a natural extension of her general intellectual curiosity, and made it possible for her to continue to contribute to the ongoing predation. The newly-human Anya, with her charming mix of venality and naiveté, brings an insight that simplifies some of the more exotic predations the Scoobies have undertaken. Dawn’s elaborate transmogrification to human form removes her from simple kid-sister duties, and retains a very particular potential for handling the more apocalyptic prey. Xander provides the human anchor for all these outré conflicts; it is entirely appropriate that Xander stopped the cataclysmically inclined Willow from ending the world as an expression of grief—only he is sufficiently committed to the here-and-now to interrupt the most dreadful manifestation of predation. Remarkably, Spike, the most ambiguous of Buffy’s supporters, has changed the most dramatically as his bond with Buffy evolves in his continuing attempt to participate as fully as possible in this essential relationship; hence, he achieves more than redemption in the end through his altruistic apotheosis, going out in a literal blaze of glory.