History Headscratchers / BuffyTheVampireSlayer

* JustBugsMe/{{Buffyverse}}
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* JustBugsMe/BuffySeason3
* JustBugsMe/BuffySeason4
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* JustBugsMe/Buffyverse

JustBugsMe for ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer''.

JustBugsMe for ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer''. Spoilers abound.

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder:Warren]]
* Why is Warren seen as a mysogionist by most of the fandom. The two people he murdered were women but both of them were accidents and I doubt he would have hesitated any more if Buffy had been a man. When he mind controlled his former girlfriend it seemed like he didn't fully understand how playing out his fantasies would hurt people.
** First, he built a sexbot. A sexbot whose personality gives a disturbing insight into Warren's views on women. "Crying is emotional blackmail," for example. Then he broke up with his sexbot by abandoning her to chase after his new girlfriend. Then he built another sexbot, but to be fair, Spike can be very persuasive. Then he kidnapped his now ex-girlfriend and mind-controlled her to be his love slave; her death was an accident but the attempted rape was not. I believe he may also have thrown around derogatory comments towards Buffy's gender as well, but it's been so long that I can't remember the exact words.
*** "Just one night when superbitch woudn't show up!" Pretty much everything Warren says during the fight in "Seeing Red" is sexist comments.
** As for not understanding how playing out his fantasies would hurt people, that's more Andrew and Jonathan, who were just in it for the fun. I don't think Warren had any illusions about what he was doing; he was pushing for killing Buffy right from the start, after all. The other two had to be eased into the idea of murdering someone, and only one of them (Andrew) ever accepted the prospect, and then, only because it happened and they got away with it; Warren was perfectly fine with it right from day one.
[[/folder]]
[[folder:Dark Willow, Gay Willow?]]
* The PsychoLesbian trope being used repeatedly in regards to Dark Willow. Dark Willow has been foreshadowed all the way from the first episode she did a spell, Becoming Part 2. Giles insists it will not end well to open that door, and in Lovers Walk, we already see Xander pointing out how immoral Willow is being by trying to fix everything with magic. I never bought the magic = drugs storyline, and I feel it was a cop out to make none of it Willow's fault. If they had continued with Dark Willow appearing because of Willow's own flaws and being power hungry, I would have loved it. But I digress, it seems like they were trying to lead up to Dark Willow from day one. It just so happened that she needed something to push her off the edge, and it had to be Tara's death. The Dark Willow storyline is not about a lesbian going psycho after having sex, its about a girl whose own flaws brought her down, and that girl just happened to be a lesbian. And the having sex bit is just Joss's way of screwing with us, making the characters happy before bringing them down. Remember Angelus?
** Think of it more like magic is a metaphor for ALL drugs (recreational AND pharmaceutical). Willow had a recreational drug problem, and Tara didn't want her to give up magic entirely, just use less of it and for better reasons (i.e. stop doing crack, but you can use anti-histamines during allergy season). When Tara dies, Willow goes over the edge and tries to kill people (think of it like she's trying to poison them, with drugs). The lesbian angle doesn't factor into the Dark Willow storyline. AT ALL. Word of God even says that if Seth Green had still been on the show, he would've died in Tara's place (as Willow's significant other) and the rest of the story would have been the same. Not everyone is Jesus in purgatory.
*** Agreed, being gay is nothing to do with the Dark Willow storyline. Replace Tara with a boy and the storyline runs exactly the same. Also, no-one said that magic=drugs, just that the overuse of magic has similar effects and is addictive. Lots of things can be addictive, not all of them are drugs.
**** The drug parallel was so blatantly obvious, you'd have to be blind not to see it.
** I'm with the original troper. Willow and Tara's relationship was bound up in their magic right from the beginning of the relationship - and there's actually another example of Evil Willow = Lesbian (or [[NoBisexuals Bisexual]]) Willow: Wishverse Willow. "I'm so evil, and skanky. And I think I''m kinda gay!" Magic as Willow uses it is deeply bound up in femininity and sexuality and mother goddessy stuff. "Wicca" was practically used as a euphemism for "lesbian" in season 4. When Willow goes off the rails it's definitely a case of psycho lesbian.
*** Not really. Vampire Willow is shown to be evil not because of her sexuality, but because she's a soulless vampire. And as a soulless vampire, she feels little guilt and fear, which makes her more uninhibited and thus more likely to experiment and become aware of her sexuality than Season 3's Normal Willow. Season 3 Normal Willow's line never says that being "kinda gay" is evil. It merely shows how Willow thinks that Vampire Willow might represent sides of her she hasn't explored yet; at this point, she hasn't explored her vengeful side or her preference for women, but the two are connected because she hasn't gotten to know either of those sides yet, and not because being gay and evil are related. After [=VampWillow=] is long out of the picture, Normal Willow's relationship with Tara is far more romantic and less dangerous than, say, [=VampWillow=]'s relationship with [=VampXander=]. Or Buffy's initial relationship with Spike. Magic does not equal "lesbian" since other characters like Giles and the Watcher's Council use magic without the sexuality symbolism. Willow's magic addiction represents drug abuse. If her addiction represented lesbianism, the show would've had Tara get (destructively) closer to Willow without breaking up with her in Season 6. Finally, Willow isn't the only character to snap when her lover gets caught in crossfire. Giles sets Spike's house on fire after Jenny died, remember?
*** Not even necessarily when a lover is caught in the crossfire. Just an episode or two before Willow snapped, Xander went after Spike with intent to murder when Spike and Anya had a mutual sympathy bang.
* On the note of Oz dying in Tara's place...FridgeLogic. Wouldn't Warren need silver bullets to kill Oz? Would load his gun with silver bullets if his target is the slayer?
** Silver with gold-flake bullets anointed with holy water on one side, desecrated communion wine on the other, and a hollow-point core full of holly, hemlock, and mistletoe bound with a paste of crushed garlic. You can't be ''[[CrazyPrepared too]]'' prepared when going after a Slayer with a mortal weapon, especially if she has a werewolf bodyguard in addition to her witch girl-friend ([[AndZoidberg and Xander]]). Tara-verse Warren was going by the assumption that the Slayer gets no powers other than super-strength from whatever causes the slayer line (from what we know, a demonic spirit similar to a bodiless vampire). Buffy had a HealingFactor, and while Warren was right about the Slayer not being able to survive a well-placed bullet, he was wrong about her being only human. ''I'''d have prepared a whole rack of bullets like that as soon as I got the money for the silver (the members of the Trio were rich early in the season, in addition to their OffscreenVillainDarkMatter), and gone after the Slayer using one (or [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill eight]]) of those if I'd wanted to kill her. ...And a cold-iron athame dipped in sea salt in a shoulder holster, [[ProperlyParanoid just in case the bullets didn't end the situation]].
** Actually, it's more likely that Warren ''never would have existed at all'' in that scenario. Whedon has mentioned that he originally intended to kill Oz in order to push Willow toward the dark side, and that it only wound up being Tara because Seth Green left the show prematurely. He never said the circumstances would have been exactly the same, or even similar. Oz's death probably would have happened much sooner, as he was already established as Willow's love interest by season four and no additional time was needed to set things up. And as a sidebar, was it ever even established that Oz can only be killed by silver bullets, even in human form? You'd think that would have come up.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Buffy Saved Dawn From Heaven?]]
* Buffy wants to die at the end of Bargaining to go back to Heaven, thinking Earth is Hell. However, she sees Dawn in danger and rescues her. Which makes sense from Earth's standards, where death is painful, however, Buffy herself has experienced. If I came back from Heaven, I'd personally kill my whole family so that they can experience it with me. And why doesn't she just kill herself after saving Dawn? Season 6 and 7 becomes one giant plothole after considering this.
** Well, in RealLife it's usually said that suicide sends you to Hell. You can think of it as the real life writers who tell us about heaven in the first place covering up a plot hole. And while this is a total FanWank, she probably doesn't know if Dawn will exist after being killed. Dawn's the Key. It's stretching things even to assume that the Key has a soul and can go ''anywhere'' after death. (Of course, this ''is'' a FanWank, since the writers have tried to ignore the implications of being the Key as much as possible, and couldn't possibly have intended this.)
** It's one thing to commit suicide. It's an entirely different thing to watch those you love get hurt and possibly die. Also, Buffy died and was at peace. Dawn didn't want to die. Most suicides don't want to see people they care about get hurt. That's why they're suicides, and not mass murderers.
** There's also the fact that Buffy died in pretty unusual circumstances. As she says herself, she doesn't really knows about theology nor how dimensions work. So she probably figured that it's entirely possible that her stint in "Heaven" was caused by her being tossed into a freak dimension by the big end-of-the-world space rift. Who's to say that dying some other way would send her back there ?
*** "I was in heaven... I [[NoticeThis think]] I was in heaven..."
** This troper always assumed that going to hell or heavenly dimensions in Buffy wasn't based on a reward thing - it was more just random where you got thrown into when you passed from the mortal dimension. I also assumed that to get into one of these dimensions you had to die a mystical death (via an opening between dimensions, like Buffy or Angel at the end of series two) so just killing her friends and/or herself wouldn't mean they all ended up in heaven.
** She sacrificed herself for the entire planet without being asked, when you do that you go to heaven.
** Because she was a traumatized, psychological wreck. Logic, reason, and rational behaviour should not be expected of someone who's just been through what she has. Wanting to die to make the hurting stop and get back to the happy place does not prevent her from having "Protect loved ones" hardwired into her basic behavioural patterns.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampire Imaging]]
* A minor point, but one that constantly irritated me: vampires don't have reflections in mirrors, but they do show up in photographs and in film? Buuuh?
** One explanation: It's mentioned at one point in ''Angel'' (possibly the Pylea arc?) that the demon within can't stand the sight of itself. So it clouds reflections in mirrors but not in photos or film which it doesn't understand. That would also explain the occasional small reflection throughout both shows; if the demon's not aware that it's casting a reflection, it doesn't cloud it.
** I heard somewhere, possibly in a commentary that there's a deleted scene where someone asks Angel about it, and he responds with "It's meta-physics, not physics."
** Most cameras don't have any mirrors in the optical path between the lens and the film. SLR cameras have them in the path between the lens, and the ''viewfinder'', but when you actually take the picture, the mirror pops up, giving the light from the lens a straight path to the film, so if you took a picture with an SLR camera, you wouldn't see a vampire in the viewfinder, but it would show up on the film.
*** One of the few consumer cameras that did use mirrors were the Polaroid instant cameras, that folded flat, and spat the picture out the front after you took it.
** Not me explaining anything, but how cool would that spy-film of Buffy fighting a Vampire that Spike made in the second season been if it would have shown Buffy fighting... nothing. Having Spike filling in the missing pieces.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Cheese Man]]
* In that freak shared dream they had after killing Adam, what was up with that guy with the cheese?
** WordOfGod says he was just supposed to be something random.
** Basically, Joss Whedon and the staff had so much symbolism in the dream scenes that they decided to come up with something completely nonsensical for fun. :)
** Another way to look at it is that the Cheese is the central metaphor of the entire series for the Slayer. To understand the Cheese, is to understand the series. The Cheese Man makes four appearances in this episode:
*** 1) Willow's Dream: "I made a little space for the cheese." -- Buffy has to make space for the Slayer in her life.
*** 2) Xander's Dream: "These will not protect you." -- While the Slayer protects what she can, she can't be everywhere. You have to look out for yourself.
*** 3) Giles' Dream: "I wear the cheese. It does not wear me." -- The Slayer is a mantle that Buffy wears. It is not all that she is.
*** 4) Buffy's Dream: The Cheese Man appears between her, and the First Slayer. Buffy's role as the Slayer acts as a barrier between her, and the monsters that she faces
** Alternatively, each "Cheese" is a metaphor for the inner psyche of each character, and how they relate to The Slayer.
*** Willow makes room for "The Cheese" in her life, always trying to be the comforter for Buffy, giving her what she needs to go on.
*** Xander wishes to be "The Cheese" himself, but just wanting to be like her will not protect him, and he knows it.
*** Giles' relation with Buffy is complex; He once thought that Buffy was a force that controlled his life, but now realizes that he has shaped her as a father figure, and in a way she has become more like him.
** Also remember Willow's wooing Buffy advice to Riley in Season 4's ''The Initiative'': "She likes cheese."
** The way I always looked at it (remembering that Whedon said it was meant to be totally random) was that it was sort of a nice tie-in to the rest of the dream elements to make them something the viewers can easier relate to. For example: In most dreams, no matter how linear or how much sense they make, there's usually one or two elements that don't really make sense no matter how you slice it. Thus, we have the dreams experienced by Buffy and the Scoobies, which given the plot line and progression of the episode, make sense in at least some basic way - there's something violent and angry that wants them all to die - and then you get this batshit crazy "cheese guy" vision out of nowhere. My two cents, anyway.
** If you interpret "cheese" in the American idiomatic way, to mean "kitchy and silly," the cheese man's words could be interpreted as Whedon's philosophy on screenwriting:
*** "I made a little space for the cheese." -- letting some campiness into the script keeps things from getting too heavy.
*** "These will not protect you." -- Assuming by "these," he is referring to cheeses: if your story sucks, you cannot fall back on "it was supposed to be silly!" to defend it.
*** "I wear the cheese. It does not wear me." -- Control the silliness; it must serve the story, not the other way around.
**** Dude. You're either a genius or a complete loon, and right now I'm leaning towards the former.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Jesse - Lest We Forget]]
* Why is Jesse never mentioned or even alluded to ever after he dies? I mean, the implication is that he, Xander, and Willow had been best friends for a long time and yet no ever talked about him even a few episodes after his death.
** [[WeirdnessCensor Sunnydale Syndrome]]: when you live in that town you get used to putting the random, inexplicable, and/or violent deaths of people close to you ''firmly'' in the past.
** They're not gonna grieve forever, eventually they move on. After all, Joyce and Tara weren't talked about for long after their respective deaths. Of course, the real reason he isn't mentioned is because of writing. The audience barely knew him, and thus didn't really care when he died. The characters will care, but having them cry over somebody the audience doesn't care about usually results in {{Narm}}. As a FanWank, presumably they do all crying off-screen.
*** That's a good point, but not really what I was asking. Joyce and Tara were both talked about after their deaths, but Jesse isn't mentioned ever, even as a casual reference. For example, when Angel lost his soul (only a season after Jesse's death) Xander never said anything like "I had to kill my best friend but Angel gets a free pass?" which seems like a pretty in character thing considering he brings up Angelus when Buffy goes to kill Anya.
** Yeah, I was just thinking about this. It's like Jesse has experienced an odd form of BrotherChuck.
** [[AngstWhatAngst Angst? What angst?]]
** Every time Xander and/or Willow mentioned something about their pre-Buffy past, it seemed quite odd that they didn't bring up Jesse, given that he should have been a huge part of their past.
** Not really an explanation, but it's worth noting that it's probably because of this that [[{{Angel}} our friends over in L.A.]] continue to mourn [[SacrificialLion Doyle]] long after he's dead and gone.
* There's actually a trope for this: ForgottenFallenFriend.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Problem With Pangs]]
* While I understand it was supposed to be RuleOfFunny, is anyone else bugged by Willow's behavior in the Season 4 episode "Pangs?" A mystically-powered specter is killing her ''best friend'' Xander with a lethal and painful disease because he had the miserable luck to be the first person the Shumash ghost encountered, and she's not only unconcerned but banging on endlessly about how Hus deserves his revenge? Even if she's become that ardent a StrawmanPolitical, shouldn't the fact that ''Xander is dying in front of her'' upset her a little bit more than her opinion of American history?
** I dispute that it was "rule of funny". Willow felt played entirely straight in that episode. Yes, the writing was really that unreasonable.
** Most of the early eps in Season 4 weren't exactly the best. Whedon was trying to redefine the show with college themes rather than high school ones, and it was a shaky renovation. The show stepped back up in the second half of season 4, and then shot upwards from there.
** Objection to both of the above claims. One, Xander wasn't even close to dying, he was sick but still active enough to ride a bike at high speed across Sunnydale. Second, Willow's reaction was clearly shown as over-the-top for the sake of comedy. The whole episode had that tone, and the uselessness of his angsting at this point was pointed out several times. Why do you think the episode had Spike of all people, still sociopathic and just recently halted in his killing, deliver a rant that's accepted as a compelling counterpoint?
*** Because his being a sociopathic killer does not invalidate his point. That's an ad hominem. Spike has always been the character that sees things surprisingly clear and treats the others with pointedly brutal honesty, and this case was no exception. He's sort of like Anya in that regard; he'll say what no one else is willing to. He just doesn't do it left and right, like she does. Also, Xander had a magic disease that acted like syphilis. They even called it syphilis that was acting funny. Syphilis can very easily be fatal if untreated.
**** But not instantly. Syphilis takes months at least to really hit home and is actually fairly treatable these days.
***** Magical vengeance curses inflicted by vengeance demons that take on the form of fatal illnesses, on the other hand, tend to strike instantly. How treatable they are is, as of yet, unknown.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Buffy's Soundproof Bathroom]]
* So, in "Seeing Red", Spike tries to rape Buffy. This rape attempt goes on for a few minutes, during which time Buffy is shouting either "No" or "Help." The entire episode Willow is adamant about not getting up, and therefore she and Tara, two ridiculously powerful witches, are just a few rooms down. Given that they live in a town where someone shouting for help is very likely to be something ''very'' bad, why did they not come running to the rescue?
** They might have put a soundproofing spell on their bedroom to keep from freaking out their housemates. Still probably a bad idea in a town like Sunnydale, but hey they might have been high on magic or something equally silly.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Why Don't Ya Just Stake Drusilla]]
* Why did they never get around to dispatching uber-evil Drusilla? And then she showed up in ''Angel'', also unstaked! Is Joss saving that for a comic or something? Kendra must be avenged!
** Rumor has it that Juliet Landau refused to appear in anything other than flashbacks or illusions after Buffy Season 5 to prevent her character from being killed off.
** I think Buffy never actually had the chance to stake her. As for Angel... maybe he just couldn't bring himself to do it?
** Angel set Dru and Darla on fire fully intending to kill both of them. And then Drusilla never showed her face in ''Angel'' again. In the ''Buffy'' episode following, Drusilla literally just walked away while Buffy was acting all disgusted.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Makeup Artists Work In Vein]]
* While the Buffy special effects usually range from the decent to the deliberately campy, and I expect some things to look fake, there's one time it really distracts me. In the Evil Willow episodes, the veins on her face look like they were just drawn on her skin with marker rather than seeming at all textured or real. The reasons this bugs me are twofold. 1.) Making this look right would be an easier effect than most of the stuff they've pulled off. 2.) Unlike the monster masks, prostheses, and more extensive makeup jobs, Evil Willow's creepiness depends primarily on the actress's facial expressions and dialogue-- so you ''have'' to focus on her face and can't just let your eye slide over it. It may look better on a bigger screen from far away, but watching the [=DVDs=] on my computer it's a really annoying effect.
** This Troper thinks they look... pretty much like normal veins, if blood looked black. Veins aren't exactly very textured.
** They look like they're just drawn-on lines because that's how they were done, according to the DVD commentary.
** Subject to your interpretation of the magic involved, texturing would not be appropriate on the facial veins. Humans have a layer of subcutaneous fat between their skin and their veins which tends to prevent smaller veins (such as those in the face) from bulging. The subcutaneous fat layer is more prominent in women, giving them a "softer" appearance. Large veins in her temples and arms could have benefited from texturing. I agree though, the "drawn on" effect could have been blended in better.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Continuity in "Angel"]]
* Several continuity puzzles in "Angel" (i.e. ''Buffy'' episode 1:7):
** The first time Buffy sees Giles after fighting The Three, he has just spent hours reading up on them; why?
*** She probably called him from home while Joyce wasn't listening.
**** They're three of the Master's known followers, and apparently dangerous ones. He's just got to their entry in The Big Book of Vampires.
** That same day, why does everyone expect Angel to spend all day in Buffy's house, rather than slipping out when there's no chance of meeting vampires?
*** He can't go out between sunrise and sunset. The rest of the day, Joyce is around.
*** Yeah, but no one but him knew that. They didn't find out he was a vampire until he left that night.
** Why does Darla change from a blue CHSGU to a red CHSGU on her way from Angel's apartment to The Bronze?
** Why does Buffy change from a black coat to a blue coat on her way from the hospital to The Bronze?
*** [[AWizardDidIt You know the answer.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Why Don't Ya Just Stake Spike]]
* Why didn't the Scoobies kill Spike in Season 4? He's still unrepentantly evil, he's done nothing to imply that he might ''stop'' being evil anytime soon, and he frequently said that he wants them all dead. Hell, as of Faith's return, he a) had never actually helped them fight demons that we see, despite his "let's kill something!" speech, and b) ''had'' declared his intention to sic Faith on the lot of them and then laugh.
** Spike was literally helpless. The only thing he could ''actually'' kill were animals and demons (once he figured that out), so even though he threatened them, they weren't going to kill him until he actual became a threat (which he never did until Season 7, when the First overrode the chip somehow).
*** Just because he couldn't rip anybody apart didn't make him harmless. He was a threat when he could help Faith find the good guys and kill them in their sleep, he was a threat when he helped Adam isolate Buffy inside the Initiative, he was a threat in Season 5 when he and Harmony held hostage the only person in the state who could save Riley's life, and that's just in the episodes I've seen so far. Also, it's not like they've never killed vampires just for being vampires.
** Riley states that Buffy felt sorry for him in "Buffy vs. Dracula". While it may not make complete sense, that's her stance. And actually, they've never killed harmless vampires before. Really, the only vampires that are harmless were Spike and Angel. All the others actually kill and eat humans.
** Even a chipped Spike is not easy to kill, especially in season 4 when he hadn't been fully Spikeified yet, and the good guys had bigger things to deal with. Also, by the end of the season, Spike was working with them more than he was working against them, even if it was in {{enemy mine}} type situations.
** What WAS implied was that Spike loved Buffy from day one. Buffy learned to tolerate him because she wouldn't kill him when he was helpless and he kept hanging around. She just had a sexual relationship with him in season six and fell in love with him in season seven. (You can tell she was in love with him because she chose to spend her final hours with Spike when she could have spent them with Angel.) When she finally admitted it, Spike just couldn't believe she did and that's what lead to the statement "No, you don't".
*** Yeah, right. Barely episodes before that Buffy referred to Angel by saying "I loved him more than I will ever love anything in this life!" She wouldn't have said that if she cared very deeply about Spike. I don't think Buffy was ever in love with Spike, or if she was it wasn't the kind of obsessive all-encompassing need that Spike defined love as.
**** Love doesn't work the way you think it does. Just because she loved Angel ''more than anything'' doesn't preclude her from loving someone else. How do you think people end up remarrying after a spouse dies?
***** No, I'm sorry, but love doesn't work the way ''you'' think it does. You can love someone, and have them die, and then fall in love again, and I understand that it's possible to love both of them. But if she loved Angel ''more than'' Spike, with both of them alive, it's pretty clear he's getting the short end of the stick - just like Riley. You can't love someone completely if you're still more involved with someone else.
****** You don't have to love someone ''completely'' to love someone. Quoth Wesley in the other series, a lot of peope have to make do with ''acceptable'' happiness. Just because she was still in love with Angel doesn't mean she felt absolutely nothing towards Spike. Love isn't a FalseDichotomy where you either '''completely love someone with all your heart or soul''' or could care less if they went off and died tomorrow; there are degrees of love. What Buffy had with Angel was fluffy puppy teenage love, the kind of love that seems perfect and absolute and eternal, and it's important to note that Angel was the one that ended it; Buffy still loved him, he's the one that walked away. What Buffy had with Riley was a nice, normal boyfriend and a nice, normal life that she can't handle because of who she is. What Buffy had with Chip!Spike was a mutually destructive exercise in futility, which both Buffy and Spike called it out on at different times. What Buffy had with Souled!Spike was hard, painful, and complicated, the kind of relationship that can either be grown into, or broken apart, because it needs time to develop into something real. Of course Buffy loved Angel more than any of the other relationships here. He was her first love, her first sexual experience, and her perfect teenage puppy love. That doesn't preclude her from ever loving again, and it certainly doesn't mean that Angel was the ''right'' relationship for her. Even Buffy herself notes this in her Cookie Dough speech.
**** She didn't love him, she found him comforting. Guy tried to rape her, soul or no soul you don't come back from that. Whether she loved Angel or not, more complex. But she didn't NEED either by that point. Cookie dough and all that jazz. But yeah, Spike fell for her from that creepy stalker bit in the Bronze in "School Hard." It's Spike's tragedy to love women who can't love him back, Cecily, Drusilla, Buffy, Fred...
**** It's odd how everyone rags on Spike for that and conveniently forgets Xander did exactly the same thing. Except without spending a year in a horribly abusive (both ways) relationship with her first.
***** Of course Xander was under the control of an evil hyena spirit at the time. Spike has no such excuse.
****** Yes he does. He's a vampire. Vampires have evil demons in them that make them ''evil''.
****** In addition to being a vampire, it's the fact that Buffy and Spike were in an extremely unhealthy yes/no sexual relationship for a year beforehand, in which it was firmly established that the word "no" is foreplay and actually means "yes". How was he supposed to know she actually meant it this time? What Spike did was still wrong, but it isn't like he just got up one morning in a raping mood; it was simply the endcap to a whole sequence of wrong events for which neither Buffy nor Spike can be considered to be 100% responsible for.
**** One thing I've found weird is how people are willing to forgive Angel's actions as Angelus but are unwilling to see that ensouled Spike is no more responsible for the attempted rape than Angel is responsible for Angelus killing Ms Calendar. I think Buffy is more than capable of making that distinction.
***** The Scooby's are actually still hesitant about Angel even after he gets his soul back, particularly Xander and Giles early on. It's also of note that Angel had decades of time as an ensouled vampire, feeling remorse and resentment for his deeds to the point of changing as a person, essentially cultivating an entirely separate persona from Angelus, making the distinction between who is and isn't guilty of the murders seem to fit. Spike was just Spike with a soul. His personality, mannerisms, attitude, etc. didn't really change, he just became racked with guilt for his deeds. So unlike Angel and Angelus who you could legitimately excuse as a case of mystical DID at that point, Ensouled!Spike was still the Spike that tried to rape her months earlier, just with the new-found ability to feel bad about it.
****** The Angel/Angelus "separate entity" stuff is more a result of bad writing in Angel's Season 4 than anything. Since the beginning of Buffy and in most Angel's seasons it is clear that Angelus is just Angel without a soul (which is not an entity itself). In many instances of Angel's series (especially in Season 2, 3 and 5) you can see glimpses of his darkness (Angelus) coming through, making it clear they are the same person/entity/character/whatever. Angel and Angelus personalities are not stark different as many people say. Angel in Season 5 shows this very well. If you compare Angelus in Buffy Season 2 to Angel in Angel's season 5 there isn't much difference, except that he is one of the "good guys" now. He also talks about his pasts deeds as Angelus as himself, sometimes in a very nonchalant way.
***** The ability to feel bad about it is ''all'' that separates a vampire without a soul from their human counterpart. If Spike had had a soul ''it wouldn't have happened.'' He is not responsible for the event at all. The reason he didn't change much is because, unlike Angel, he realized ''it wasn't his fault.'' Spike doesn't feel guilty for the crimes he committed when he didn't have his soul, so he doesn't have the same internal conflict that made Angel and Angelus separate entities. Ensouled!Spike is not the same person, simply because he ''can'' feel bad about it.
****** I'd never argue for a RealLife attempted-rapist the way I argue for Spike, but I think there's a FantasticAesop at work. This being who supposedly lacks a moral compass (but despite that has been ''trying'' to learn to act morally, if only to avoid offending Buffy) gets blamed for failing to act in a consistently moral manner. The act chosen to convey his internal flaws isn't something a souled being wouldn't have done[[hottip:* :in the last 24 hours, how many RealLife humans have raped their friends and co-workers, anyway?]]. If you consider "moral compass isn't working" to be a serious handicap, then Buffy's toying with him all season was even more out-of-line than it seems on the surface. And if Spike mostly learns things like a Pavlov's dog (which you could reduce him to, by some accounts), then Buffy ''trained him'' to disregard her repeated denials, and he had no natural resources to make him think "Oh wait, this isn't how it's supposed to be done" (and no natural relationships to weigh it against). Every time I watched that scene, I was struck by how there wasn't a moment there where he ''meant'' to do wrong by her; it's only once she kicks him away that he even realizes she really didn't want him right then. I call communication failure, not wrongdoing on Spike's part.
******* It doesn't help that the series repeatedly contradicts its own [[OurSoulsAreDifferent vague definition of "soul"]]. The human characters (with, at times, the show's blessing) claim Spike can't be a good man, but he manages heroic sacrifices and many other good qualities well in advance of the soul. They claim he can't love, but devoted love was his defining trait literally from Day One.
******** Actually, it's not contradicts itself, they're just wrong. The way a vampire works is a demon possesses a body and the soul leaves it. Each demon is an individual who bases their personality on the person they are now in control of, normally taking it UpToEleven. For example, Willow, while not knowing it, is bi/gay (whichever it is) and has a mean/sadistic side. Vampire Willow takes the sadism and bisexuality to 11, as well as her innocence at the same time. Spike was a hopeless romantic in life. Take that up to 11 and combine it with over 100 years of evil and modern Spike is easily explained. Liam was an asshole in life. Angelus was an asshole taken up to 11. So on and so forth.
********* In short, the demon Flanderizes you.
******** It's important to keep in mind that none of the human characters have ever been a soulless vampire, nor have most if not all of the human Watchers who passed on this information, nor the human authors who wrote books on demons, or any of the other humans of note. All they have is dogma from old books written hundreds or even thousands of years ago by authors who deliberately intend to paint the blackest picture possible. That isn't to say vampires aren't evil, they clearly demonstrate that they are on several occasions. Just that it's more complicated than, "You don't have a soul, so you can't ever feel love or do good things." I think the reason people cling to tend to this argument is because Angel himself supported it; he believes that vampires are emotionless killing machines just as strongly as the humans do, and helped foster this image. However, it's important to note that Angelus deliberately REJECTED his humanity and EMBRACED the idea of being an inhuman monster with open arms, as Angel himself notes, and this concept has painted his image of vampirism. Even his sire, Darla, contradicts this view; she had a very aggressive relationship with Angelus, but she makes it very clear during Angel's series that she DID love him, and was devastated and horrified to learn he did not return the sentiment.
******* I always thought Spike was different from other vampires...while Angelus is ridiculously, unrepentantly, coolly evil, Spike was often more pathetically emotional. His obsession with Drusilla is an example of this. I think fans find it harder to forgive Spike for the almost-rape scene because he was very ''human'' even without his soul, whereas Angel was completely empty without his. The creature Drusilla and Spike summon in Season 2 even says as much, condemning Spike as emotional but calling Angelus "clean".
** Spike was pretty clever. Once he realized he was "de-fanged", he took steps to make himself useful to the Scoobies by selling information. Early on he did try to turn the Monster of the Week against them, but when Thanksgiving rolled around, he realized that they were the closest thing he had to family. Messed-up Vampire logic, but it worked.
*** Since Spike would have been utterly incapable of fighting back, any attempt to kill him would probably have felt unpleasantly close to outright murder (vampire or not). This would have resonated particularly with the Scoobies after the debacle with Faith.
** Spike offered useful information when he first arrived. Once they didn't want his information anymore, the Gang was too used to thinking about pathetic, bathtub Spike to consider him a threat - something he mocks them for twice that season (once with Faith, once in The Yoko Factor). So, in short, they are all tactically incompetent.
*** Its instructive to note that after 'Yoko Factor', when he'd really worn out his welcome, Spike stays away from them for the rest of season 4 unless they're ''desperate'' for his help and even then makes sure to duck out before they can find a free moment to punch him. He doesn't come back after that until they've had a chance to cool off.
**** Continuing from that, he only really became a member of the crew when Buffy went to him for his help after Glory identified Dawn as the Key, and they were able to trust him at THAT point because one episode prior, he had proven willing to die to protect Dawn. Before Intervention, he was just useful enough to be worth keeping around and just helpless enough that the thought of killing him in cold blood left a bad aftertaste, and after Intervention, he was one of the gang.
** Spike was supposed to be a disposable villain, but, storyline aside, he lived basically because the fans liked him too much. Legions of Spike fangirls would've had Joss' head. Spike was a replacement Angel, filling in the spot of a guy who'd been around a long, long time who was trying to live with what he did, but with more snark and bleached hair.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The First Evil - Using Buffy's Image]]
* Why didn't the First, which could appear as Buffy, try to get Buffy in trouble by using that? Get a minion to pretend to be a hostage threatened by "Buffy". Once the police catch up and can clearly see who's the hostage-taker, then leave and have the hostage say "she miraculously didn't get hit by your bullets, but I know where she lives".
** Since it is the First Evil, the most evil and powerful thing in the known Buffyverse, this troper is sure it had larger goals than that, such as world destruction.
*** The First wanted, as part of its plan, to get rid of Buffy. Getting her put in jail would easily do so.
*** A prison couldn't stop a slayer from busting out, which she would do if the world/her friends were in serious danger. See: Faith, that very season.
** By the end of season 7, the First had corrupted all the cops in Sunnydale anyway, so it didn't have to bother with such an elaborate plan. Besides, police going after the slayer wouldn't take her out of the picture, they would just slow her down a bit.
** In "Dirty Girls," Caleb mentions several times that he believes Buffy will lead the Potentials to their deaths. The First as Mayor Wilkins claims that The First, on some level, actually ''is'' the person it's impersonating. Because Buffy has died, The First can know her better than any other living opponent--At the very least, it likely has access to all of her thoughts and memories at the time of her death. The First now has intimate knowledge of Buffy, and the last thing it wants to kill or incapacitate a leader that it can easily manipulate (hence why both Caleb and the Turok-han spare Buffy's life when she's unconscious).
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Warren & The First]]
* According to the season 8 comic Warren survived his flaying. So how could the First take his shape?
** Quoting Joss Whedon when asked that exact question: "[[CanonDiscontinuity I forgot, OK?]]"
** This one is actually fairly easy to explain away. Buffy's "technical" death at the end of Season 1 (her heart stopped, but she was revived about a minute later by CPR) was enough for a new slayer to be called. Maybe Warren's heart stopped before [[spoiler: Amy]] revived him and that was all the First needed.
*** This seems fairly logical, and it's backed up by the fact that in Angel, the titular hero was able to enter someone's house when their heart had stopped, and resuscitate them. In the Buffyverse, it seems that stopping the heart counts as death.
*** Not to mention that The First is using our heroine's form due to her death-by-technicality, so Warren is the same. It's plausible that The First could use the form of anyone who's suffered a heart attack. You know, after it gives them one.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Sexy Vampire Sex]]
* As we all know, Buffy has slept with Angel and Spike. However, vampires are explicitly stated to have no pulse, and, we can surmise, no blood flow. If the penis engorges by increased flow of blood to it, how the hell could a pair of beings with no blood flow "get it up"? No amount of Viagra would solve that problem.
** On a related note, they are also mentioned to have no body heat, so wouldn't having sex with them be uncomfortably cold?
*** No more so than sitting on a couch naked. They should pick up whatever temperature is around, and this is California. Also, some people LIKE the cold... you know, that way.
*** Back up a bit. How is it that Buffy and Dawn each ''kissed'' a vampire without noticing his lips were cold?
**** In Dawn's case, they were outside on Halloween night. A normal human's lips might have been pretty cold as well. Buffy and Angel were inside, but it was night then as well.
*** In the ''Angel'' episode with the blind assassin, it's shown that vampires' muscles do generate some heat when they move, so maybe sex gets them warm.
** At one point Spike taunts Buffy that she must like that about vampires (the cold body thing, not the lack-of-erection thing).
** Vampires are dead bodies magically animated by a demon inside. ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' was a show that had werewolves, a giant preying mantis that ate virgins, robots, and a Hellgod. Conceivably, vampires getting erections is one of the ''least'' improbable aspects about the show.
*** Also, vampires definitely have at least some blood flow: witness Spike and Drusilla's bloodplay in "School Hard". How that squares with not having a pulse is another question...
** They have enough blood flow to move. Really if they had absolutely no blood flow, rigor mortis would set in. They also have enough blood flow to become drunk and for Spike to incapacitate Dru by stopping the blood flow to her brain. It's demonic magic, they have blood flow of some kind, they just don't use their heart to do it.
*** Bearing in mind that the Dru thing is a FanWank to explain how Spike manages to strangle her into subconsciousness when she doesn't breathe. On the subject of massive misfires regarding vampires not breathing, lets look at how Angel can't do CPR, yet he can ''smoke''!
*** When you strangle someone unconscious, you're not cutting off their air supply - that would take ''minutes'' to render anyone unconscious. You're cutting off the blood flow to their brain by squeezing the carotid arteries. That's not the problem here. The problem is that if she doesn't breathe, her blood isn't oxygenated anyway.
**** Smoking merely requires you to be able to able to inhale and exhale ''anything''. Artificial respiration requires you to be exhaling a specific gas (notably, carbon dioxide - it helps trigger the breathing reflex) in addition to the oxygen you're trying to get into the recipient. Vampires are capable of the former, but lacking actual functioning metabolism, not the latter.
***** Even if a vampire's exhaled air has the same composition as normal atmospheric air, it ought to be better than the increasingly-deoxygenated air that's sitting in an unconscious person's lungs. Heck, that's what "bagging" a patient with one of those plastic squeeze-bulbs is for: it may not help stimulate their taking a breath, but at least it'll keep the person from ''dying'' on the spot.
**** And he can have breath warm enough to cause condensation in cool air, as shown when he dug himself out of his grave!
**** And vampires' ability to talk? You know, pushing air over your vocal chords? How's that happen with no breath?
*** And that (contrary to most TV and Movies) Rigor doesn't last all that long, and vampires do 'die' as humans before re-awakening, so it could have set in, and left by the time they rise.
**** Rigor mortis lasts a few days, and afterwards, your corpse doesn't really look human anymore. Nor will it move like a human; there's far too much decomp already.
*** Or how the First tortures Spike by holding his head under water, and that Spike gasps for air when he surfaces.
**** Well, it ''was'' holy water. As for Spike knocking Drusilla out like that, I assumed he just damaged her spine a little.
***** Or maybe it was shock.
** They also enough blood to do a siring.
** They borrow the Swedish penis pump from Austin Powers.
*** We have a winnah!
*** "One copy of 'Swedish Penish Enlargers and Me: That's My Bag, Baby!', by William the Bloody"
** The same magic that lets them have brain and muscle functions and avoid tissue necrosis without circulating blood also lets their "Vlad the Impaler" rise from the grave.
** About the breathing, just because they don't ''need'' oxygen doesn't mean they don't have the same drowning reflexes as a human. They can also talk, so moving air in and out of their lungs still works, even if respiration doesn't take place.
*** The Vampire RPG has explicit rules for this, basically saying that vampires can mimic any necessary human function by expending the store of blood in their bodies ("Blood Points"), allowing you to look and feel human, have body heat, have sex, etc.
*** Perhaps they have minimal breath - enough to talk or smoke, but not enough to give effective CPR.
**** This could be explained by their diaphragms eventually atrophying somewhat. I mean, what happens to ''any'' muscle you stop using?
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampire Entrance Rules]]
* How did the vampires get into Buffy's room in The Freshman, when they weren't invited?
** Kathy was living there. Kathy was a demon. Demons homes is exempted from the invite-rule.
** They only said that in regards to demons living alone.
** It was her dorm room, so perhaps she hadn't spent enough time in it yet that she considered it a home, but merely a public place (vampires are allowed into public places, like schools, with no invitation).
*** We already know vampires can enter hotel rooms. And also note that Spike was able to enter Willow's dorm room without an invitation.
*** Spike did have an invitation. He knocked on the door and Willow said, "Come in." Kinda stupid for Willow but, hey, it happens.
** OK, then how did Spike and Dru get back into Spike's house right after Dru sired him, in the flashback in "Lies My Parents Told Me"? Even Spike should have needed an invitation, since it was shown that Angel needed one from his sister to get back into his old house once he had been sired.
*** Maybe Spike was the owner of the house. We saw in the first episode of ''{{Angel}}'' that a vampire landlord doesn't need an invitation to enter his tenants' rooms, so it's possible that, if Spike was the legal owner of the house he wouldn't need an invite either.
**** In Victorian times he probably would have been the owner of the property after his father (apparently) passed on. The scriptwriters appear to have taken Victorian law into account in terms of estate rights. While Victorian women could inherit, the property in question appears to have been left to the male heir. At that point in history, only women who never married could own freehold land and control inheritances.
** Okay, but why were they always hanging out in the library and the school after hours in seasons 1-3 instead of Giles' apartment or anywhere vampires couldn't get? They were attacked in the library all the time. And especially when they were doing something important (Jenny with the translation, Willow with the restoration of Angel's soul, etc.). They should have known better!
*** One, the library is where Giles' research materials are. He can't fit all those books in an apartment, and until he owned the Magic Box he had nowhere else to put them. Two, using someone's home requires their parents being in on the deal, which didn't happen with Buffy until season 3. And last but definitely not least, until the kids graduate high school Giles is risking going up on the sex offender registry if he's known for regularly inviting students over to his apartment. On the other hand, nobody gets suspicious of the school's librarian being in the library, or of students staying late to study.
*** A librarian presumably very late into the night with the same group of students. Two (or three) of which are highly attractive female (Willow the subjectively least attractive of the three girls doesn't even qualify for Hollywood homely) and one boy who seems to spend the night two to three nights a month wouldn't raise brows? He'd probably raise less attention at his apartment out of sight out of mind.
*** Real answer: The issue of whether vampires can't enter dorms or hotel rooms is one of the biggest inconsistencies regarding vampires. Witness Angel, who can't get into Kate's dad's apartment. Or when he couldn't get into this one guy's apartment, and fall through the barrier when the guy died. Or how he couldn't get into Kate's apartment without help from the boys upstairs.
*** Actually dorms and such have been handled pretty consistently. Dorms and hotel rooms can be entered freely because they are spaced borrowed for a short time that the person doesn't consider home. Apartments, however, are considered home by the person living there and thus cannot be entered. as for the library question...
*** RealLifeWritesThePlot. They had limited money for sets and saving all that money by having things happen at the library or Buffy's house all the time saved them having to build another one time set, or take up standing set space (which is at a premium on any show) with a useless apartment. Giles' place substitutes in season 4 and the Magic Box later.
** Angel explained to Ms Calender [[spoiler: right before he killed her]] that he could get in to the school without being invited because the school's motto was "Those who seek knowledge, come forth" or something like that (which was a completely unnecessary explanation anyway, since [[spoiler: when he still had a soul]] he had been invited into the school and been in the library before). One wonders why the school didn't change it's motto at some point to say "Those who seek knowledge and are not dead."
*** Easy. The Mayor built the town for vamps and demons, so the motto is useful for them.
*** It also appears to be Angel's joke rather than the real reason, which is that the school is a public building so vampires can and do come in any time they want. Angel develops a sense of humor when he's evil.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Girl Power]]
* Something I find ironic in Buffy is that the whole "Girl Power" type stuff are all based on characters with super powers that don't exist in real life. So Buffy is inherently gifted to be stronger than any normal human, and Willow has abilities that can warp reality, but a more 'real' character like Joyce dies off arbitrarily.
** Yes, it's called metaphor, and the show's full of them.
*** I know, but it still bugs me.
** Buffy is repeatedly stated in the early seasons to have had to "grow up fast". Her powers put her into incredibly traumatic situations which no normal person (and indeed, few Slayers) would have to deal with, including her own death and being ''dragged out of Heaven'', but she is ultimately able to power through and continue to care for others and do the right thing. She never gives up, and never stops fighting. Willow has much the same deal, except that she had to ''earn'' her powers. However, even before she had them, she possessed a great inner strength which allowed her to provide help and support to Buffy, maintain her loving relationship with Oz in spite of the dangers and difficulties, and was willing to stand up against evil in order to do what is right and help people (take note of her awesome HannibalLecture to Faith in "Choices", in a situation where she was otherwise helpless). Even Joyce shows (more subtle) strength when she learns Buffy's secret, disregarding her own feelings about the situation to continue being a loving, supporting, stable figure of normality in Buffy's life (the same goes when she learns about Dawn, who she never for a moment stops treating like her daughter). There is more than one kind of power, you know, and the women in this show display it in spades.
** More important than any physical presence is the way in which the female characters develop their identities separate from any male characters. When they do start to behave dependently, it ends badly for them, usually in the same episode (e.g., Buffy's college dating experiences). The female characters are very self-possessed, without being commitment-phobic (until Buffy gets fed up).
** The main character has superpowers because that's just the story. Said character is a girl because there's no reason why not, and deliberately subverting the Valley Girl stereotype seemed like a fun thing to do. Hence, due to the nature of our society, we have something resembling feminism.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Totally Radical]]
* What's with all the ''StarWars'' references?
** Up to date geek references don't age well. Referencing ''MontyPython'' and ''StarWars'', you're good and don't seem TotallyRadical... however the then-current Anime references Andrew makes in Season 7 stick out like a sore thumb.
*** It's tricky because those things have lasted, so a modern geek would make ''some'' references to them... but having lots of them and few modern references I'd say ''is'' TotallyRadical. It screams out "this is what someone the age of the writers, not the characters, liked as a kid". This goes double if more modern references are used to show that a character (Andrew) is uncool even by geeky standards. (And I missed the current references anyway. What were they?)
**** How precisely is the show going to make references to itself? It ''was'' the up-to-date geek reference at the time.
** Oh, come on. There were plenty of things other than itself. ''HarryPotter''. Any manga. ''{{Dragonball}}''. ''[[BabylonFive Babylon 5]]''. ''Hercules'' and ''Xena''. ''Magic the Gathering''. ''{{Everquest}}'', ''FinalFantasy'', and ''modern video games''. Some of these were actually mentioned... but very occasionally, out of proportion to ''StarWars'' and anything else the age of the writers.
*** Harry Potter was mentioned... ''[[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids by Dawn]]''. Manga was still very much a niche market, Hercules and Xena were old-school (and Xena is, in many minds, the only one of the two that made it to classic status) and more than the few Xena references they made would have seemed like an unsubtle lampshading of the idea that ''Buffy'' could be seen as an unsubtle ''Xena'' ripoff. Xander made a few ''Babylon 5'' references (at least I think they were Babylon 5, they could have been ''Battlestar Galactica'' or ''Battlefield Earth'' references), but nobody in-universe got them, whereas they did get the ''Star Wars'' references, so he kept making them. As for MagicTheGathering, I have no idea (maybe Xander just wasn't into collectible card games, [[CrackIsCheaper as many people weren't and aren't]]), but Xander really seemed like an old-school:general preference and modern:FPS fan without much time or money(<-important) for games and up-to-date system. Buffy didn't have much time for entertainment (so she tended to stick to the must-sees, b-movies, and new stuff that came through the Sunnydale theater), Xander was mostly into the sort of things the others didn't bother with, Willow is a reader/studyist, and everyone else is between forty and three hundred years old (the latter of whom can't exactly go to the matinee). Oz is really the only main character who would intentionally make the sort of references that only he and/or Xander would get, and they ''did'' have a few back-and-forths, and he also made references that would be popular at the time and music references that nobody else would get, but he wasn't on for two thirds of the series and the writers didn't feel comfortable using him for anything but things with gravitas.
*** The issue isn't that there weren't no new references ''at all'', but that they were vastly outnumbered by old ones. And a lot of those explanations are reaching, most of them being explanations of why characters wouldn't know ''any references at all'', not explanations of why they would know old ones but not new ones. (Okay, Buffy didn't have time. But watching an old show takes as much time as watching a new show.) And saying "nobody in-universe got the references" just restates the problem: why are the writers writing characters who get references from the writers' childhood instead of contemporary ones? Also, manga was indeed big at the time. The series went up to 2003 and manga was big starting in 2000 or so.
*** I covered that. When you're not seeing much, the "everyone's seen them" classics take precedence. Name one thing other than ''HarryPotter'', ''Twilight'', and ''Buffy'' that's more pervasive in current culture than ''StarWars'', even limiting it to people who were under twenty or 25 during the run of ''Buffy''. Especially since StarWars is more widely known (across the world) than at ''least'' Buffy and Twilight, and probably Harry Potter as well. And by 2000, they were nineteen and twenty (again, with age groups ramging as high as two hundred), [[WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids in college]] or working, and had the whole world-saving thing going on. I bet that Anya and Spike (and Cordelia, if you count characters who moved to ''{{Angel}}'') were the only people with the time and money to even get started with anime and manga aside from watching the occasional show on television, and none of them are really the type to bother with it (I would love to see Spike's reaction to ''{{Hellsing}}'', though). The last point is emphasized by Andrew's contrast, because he's supposed to be a geek even compared to Xander (even compared to what Xander used to be like), and didn't really have much going on for him aside from a part-time super-villain job and all the cash he could keep Warren and Jonathan from calling dibs on.
**** You're still saying that since they don't have the time they wouldn't watch new series, but would somehow watch the classics. It's not literally true that "everyone's seen them"; everyone with the time to see them has seen them. "They don't have the time" may be a reason why they watch few things at all, but it ''can't'' be an explanation for why they watch few new things compared to old ones. Old series ''still take just as much time to watch''. The same goes for not having the money. And the answer to your question depends on what time period you are talking about. For now, I'd say that ''{{Naruto}}'' or ''{{Halo}}'' or ''FinalFantasy'' are more pervasive than Buffy. For back then there are plenty of things as pervasive including the ones I already listed. Heck, Pokemon and Power Rangers would be in both periods; they're kids' series, so the characters might not currently be watching them, but they should be aware of them to the extent that as geeks they'd make references.
**** I think the idea is that they watched all the old stuff before the show began, so that's why they had time for it. Xander and Willow have talked about their movie festivals and how they're old sci-fi buffs, and I'm guessing that's how they know their obscure Star Wars, Star Trek and Monty Python references - they're citing the stuff they grew up watching as children, on television marathons that don't cost anything. Ever since Buffy arrived, they haven't been keeping up with the pop cultural lexicon because they're too busy and they don't really have the money. Andrew, on the other hand, had been living a rather dull, adventure-free life until the Trio began, and he's kept up with otaku culture a lot more. Hence he was throwing out references to Dragonball and Homestar Runner that left everyone else just blinking in confusion. In reality, it's all because of AuthorAppeal and Joss Whedon and other similarly aged writers on the show sticking with what they know culturally (which was, in their defense, probably a safer bet than trying to be up-to-the-minute and falling into real TotallyRadical territory), but in-universe, I don't think it's too implausible: Xander and Willow are the main source for pop-culture references, and they're just not into the current stuff, that's all.
****** It also occurs to me that Joss did mention this, kinda indirectly, during the first season commentary. He pointed out that in the first few episodes, Buffy actually does use Valley Girl slang and she makes references to current shows like ''The X Files''. He said it just didn't feel right, and he gradually phased out the attempts to sound current. It's debatable whether that was a good idea, but it shows that he was aware of the problem and tried to fix it, but decided it only made things worse.
****** I don't think that "they watched the old stuff before the show started" solves it. The things that were on when they were kids still aren't the same things that were on when the writers were kids, and should have included a lot of new stuff as well as classics. Buffy started in 1997. X-Files started in 1993. Babylon 5 started in 1994 (with the pilot in 1993). Star Trek: Deep Space 9 was 1993. Sailor Moon was 1995. Power Rangers was 1993. Hercules was 1994 and Xena 1995. ValiantComics' biggest year was 1992 (and if you were into comics at all, Valiant Comics really was ''huge''). And that's not even getting into video game references. Of course, AuthorAppeal is the correct answer, but it and TotallyRadical aren't mutually exclusive, and having things that are out of date because they are from the writers' own childhood is a big part of TotallyRadical.
****** You know, there comes a point where you're just going to have to repeat the MST3KMantra or at least just settle for grumbling how it sucks. Your mind apparently isn't going to change no matter what anyone says, and it seems to me like you've moved from a valid JustBugsMe to just being willfully stubborn. Lots of people don't keep up with ''any'' of that stuff and I think you're overestimating how important any of it is to two small-town kids who aren't specifically into those things (I was into comics in the TheNineties, I had friends who were even more into them, and I've never even ''heard'' of ValiantComics ...oh, so TheOtherWiki says they're the Turok/Shadowman publishers. That's still incredibly obscure compared to Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, Wildstorm and so on). Not ''every'' teenager is into the latest pop-cultural trends. Some are oblivious to them. Willow and Xander are most likely making ''Star Wars'' references because they liked the movies as ''children'', not because they're particularly immersed in the sci-fi genre as teenagers. If that explanation doesn't work for you, then I don't know what else you're looking for, apart from other people saying "yeah it sucks". Other people are conceding that there's a Doylist reason behind it, but you're not willing to give a single Watsonian inch, so there doesn't seem to be much point to the discussion.
** The Matrix was heavily referenced in Superstar. I can also remember refences to Spider-Man and The Simpsons.
** As tempting as it is to assume as much, not character who makes references to StarWars is supposed to be stereotypical geek who's into every stereotypically geeky thing. Xander probably comes off as most geeky of the bunch, but his interests can just as easilly be explained by saying that he's a slacker who watches too much television, including movies that are rerun endlessly on basic cable (like Star Wars, and for that matter, ApocalypseNow). Keep in mind these characters grew up in the 80s and 90s, before the rise of the internet and instant netflix and tv-on-demand. Back in ye olde days of terrestrial broadcast, reruns and movie channels meant most people's reference pools extended backward for more than five minutes.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Slayers Killing Humans]]
* When is it considered okay for a Slayer to kill a human? The show can't seem to decide.
** I THINK it's only okay if the human is unrepentantly evil in a way that the regular justice system can't/won't punish AND they were involved in supernatural hoodoo.
** Only when necessary, or if the human is advanced in magics enough to the point where the police can't do anything. Gwendolyn Post had to be killed, or she would've destroyed the world, the German soldiers and the knights were going to kill Buffy/Dawn if she didn't kill them first, and there wasn't any time to incapacitate or reason with them. Faith was an acceptable target, b/c there was no way any cop could stop Faith (yes, I know Buffy didn't kill her, but she very much wanted to). Warren on the other, wasn't OK. His magics weren't very strong, so the police could take him, and while he did kill Tara while trying to kill Buffy, the deed was done, and Willow was wrong to continue chasing after him like that. The Deputy Mayor was wrong b/c he just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, though it is unknown how Buffy would've felt had she learned earlier that the Deputy Mayor and actual Mayor were about to kill her graduating class and overtake Earth.
*** Er, the Deputy Mayor was trying to warn the Slayers that the Mayor was up to no good.
*** We THINK that's what he was doing. He may have just been checking up on Balthazar. We will never know.
*** I ''think'' that we earlier hear the Mayor tell the Deputy Mayor to give the Slayers some information about Balthazar, because it's to his advantage that they fight. (Balthazar's lot are a nuisance and not really on "his" side, and he might as well use the Slayers to get rid of them because if the Slayers die then that's even better for him.) I assumed that he just decided to give them this information in a dark alley while they were patrolling.
** Gwendolyn Post had a gauntlet that shot lightening bolts. That's hardly world destroying. And, frankly, with the slow rate of fire and the atrocious aim, a pistol would have been much more dangerous.
*** Buffy wasn't aiming to kill G Post, she was aiming to cut the magic glove off her; could she know that that would have the side effect of killing her?
*** Ah, yes, of course. A severed arm is JustAFleshWound.
**** More survivable then a severed head.
** Actually, there is a very simple answer to this: Warren, Ben, the Mayor's deputy and those who weren't killed but could have been, were all helpless or relatively so. The Knights of Byzantium, Gwendolyn Post, and others, were either mystically armed, competent, or similarly dangerous: it is the difference between life-or-death combat and killing a helpless person in cold blood.
** Self defense?
** Yeah, I rememeber it being said several times that Slayers don't kill humans. I never heard the words "except in extreme circumstances" said afterward. Ignoring the fact that Buffy is much stronger than normal humans, IE, the knights of the Byzantium, and could easily incapacitate them without killing them.
*** Buffy was threatening to kill her -own- friends at that point. Not quite sure she was sane.
** "Don't kill humans" seems to be more of a guideline. After all, if a human is mystically capable of fighting the slayer and attacks her it would be stupid of her not to fight back. Self defense killings may be fine as long as they are in mortal danger. I think the actual rule may be more along the lines of "Don't kill defenseless humans."
*** This might also be the reason Buffy didn't want to kill Spike, as he was essentially defenseless.
** It's actually a compelling question. When IS it okay to kill someone? What justifies taking the life of another human? There is no solid, concrete answer. [[strike:The show]] [[TruthInTelevision Real life]] is inconsistent on this because there simply isn't an absolute Yes/No guideline that can be established. It has to be taken on a case by case basis, and there is no one to say, with absolute certainty, "That was the right thing to do".
** Also remember that most of the rules of what a Slayer does and doesn't do were made by the Watcher's Council - who have no interest in keeping any individual slayer alive for more than a few years, if that. From that perspective, a "no killing humans ever" rule makes sense - if the slayer is killed because she won't defend herself, a new one will just be called elsewhere, and if you allow the slayer to go around killing humans, even in self defense, it's possible that eventually she'll turn on her watcher. The inconsistency in regards to the subject is a result of the Scoobies trying to adapt the outdated, harmful rules into something that worked for their situation.
** There's a practical reason for the "don't kill humans" rule; vampires leave no evidence that they were ever there after being killed except for a heap of dust, but normal people tend to leave behind not just their bodies but all sorts of potentially incriminating evidence that can get the person who killed them into serious trouble. People don't tend to like having or letting people who murder other people walking around freely, and don't tend to be willing to accept "yeah, but he was an evil sorcerer who was planning to open a portal to Hell" as a valid or plausible excuse for offing them. Ergo, don't kill ordinary humans (unless, presumably, you're left with no alternative) because it calls down heat you don't want.
** Where does the show actually state that the Slayer may never kill humans under any circumstances? This troper has always understood that, quite simply, the Slayer doesn't have "jurisdiction" over purely human affairs; human institutions have jurisdiction, and the Slayer must yield. Therefore, absent supernatural circumstances, the Slayer must respect human rules of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justifiable_homicide justifiable homicide]], and may only kill a human being if and only if an ordinary person would be justified in doing so in the same circumstances.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Caleb And The Scythe]]
* Why the heck did Caleb dig that Slayer weapon scythe out in the first place? Why the hell didn't he just leave it embedded deep in the rock where Buffy had no idea of its existence? For that matter, why didn't he just blow up the Summers house just like the Watcher's Council?
** Because a) She's Buffy. She'd find out about it somehow, and b) He' a twisted psychopath. He wanted to play with his food before he ate it.
** And why does Caleb lure Buffy into the very place where the Scythe was buried and not any random house anyway?
** This troper thought it was all part of some XanatosGambit? 1: Dig up the weapon. 2: Mock the slayers loneliness. 3: Watch as slayer makes an army of X Slayers. 4: Cackle as the new army of slayers trashes the rule of one good and proper, leaving the world without slayers for X generations and ensuring the rule of the First in a couple generations time.
*** Buffy went a good seven years without ever knowing it was there, or even that it existed in the first place. It's a fair assumption that if Caleb hadn't dug it up, she would have continued on not knowing it was there or even existed.
*** She also didn't need it for those seven years. Those Who Watch the Watchers would have brought the Slayer to the Scyth when the time was right.
** Also, how in the world could Buffy come up with the turn-potentials-into-slayers plan in the series finale? How could she know that the scythe had that kind of power?
*** She felt it, remember?
*** Excellent question. I would add one more - how did Willow manage to power the Potentials anyway? She just channeled some random magical energy into the Scythe and its magical AI did the work? Lucky for her that the Scythe did exactly what they wanted except for something completely random...
**** AWizardDidIt.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Faith's Age]]
* Why did they make Faith older than Buffy? Okay, it hasn't been confirmed in the core canon, but pretty much everyone seems to accept the spin-off novels. Quite aside from the fact that Faith [[DawsonCasting looked]] and acted a lot younger than Buffy, having Cruciamentum fixed as the Slayer's 18th birthday when she could get Called at age seventeen and two-thirds would increase the habitual stupidity of the Watcher's Council to jaw-dropping proportions. Not to mention you'd think the show would have at least nodded to the fact that Faith should have had it first, if she was supposed to be older.
** Canon says that the girl is "usually" between 15 and 18 at the time of her choosing but the selection is random. That they normally don't live PAST the age of 18 is the sticking point. Buffy and Faith are huge exceptions. I think Whedon and Co. made the character of Faith older so they didn't have to worry about the character being limited by being in school although they never explained her frequent presence in the school library. (What's REALLY funny is that Sarah Michelle Gellar is 3 years older than Eliza Dushku.)
*** Seems to me that as long as nobody's heads are flying off their bodies, weirdness is ignore. A strange girl in the library is nothing compared to what has happened before. And questioning weirdness tends to get people eaten.
** Yeah, but it wasn't Whedon who made Faith older, it was some guy called Robert Joseph Levy. Up until that random spin-off pretty much everything about Faith, from her desperate search for a parental figure (Joyce, Gwendolyn Post, the Mayor, even Angel) to her desperate attempts to get in with Buffy and her friends, right down to her over-use of make-up and her choice of reading material (and yes, I read comics as an adult. But still) seemed to be calculated to make her seem child-like. And then it's suddenly 'oh, by the way, she's actually the ''older'' sister in this relationship'. Even before you add in the Cruciamentum thing, it bugs the hell out of me.
** Argh. Yes! This annoys me so much, so I'm thankful it's not actually canon. Fortunately, most fans seem to follow the more logical Faith as little sister Slayer theory. There are so many signs in the show that suggest Faith is younger than Buffy as mentioned above, particularly the fact that Buffy calls her something along the lines of "my new bestest little sister" in Faith's first episode. And to comment on the school issue, Faith wasn't limited to school because she was old enough to be out of it, she wasn't limited to it because she dropped out.
*** Faith came to Sunnydale AFTER Buffy did, so of course she's the "little" sister.
** I don't know if it's canon, but it seemed to me that the Cruciamentum fits in with the idea of keeping the Slayer from becoming too powerful, and treating each individual Slayer as expendable. While the Watchers are supposed to believe this is a difficult but purposeful test, it might only be a method to stop any Slayer from reaching adulthood. In the rare case a Slayer lives to the age of accountability, the Cruciamentum ensures she'll be killed and another Slayer will be activated.
** Sure, but one of the slayers Spike was shown to have killed was a mom in her thirties. It's pretty clear that the Slayer doesn't have to be a teenager, that just tends to be the case. Their shortened life expectancy is generally chalked up to the whole "Being the Slayer" business, as opposed to some arbitrary death date, so it can be assumed that a Slayer called at 17 isn't always expected to die by the time they are 18, and a Slayer called at a very young age might be expected to die well before then.
*** No, she was a mother played by a woman in her 20s. In the show, most teenagers were played by people in their 20s. Nikki's age was never specified, so she could have been anything from late teens to mid 20s when she died -- 25 was given, quite specifically, as the cut-off age on at least one occasion.
**** Wasn't that just the Watchers' cut-off age? She could have been well over 25 thanks to a lot of luck and a little not letting anyone know where she was at the end of term if she wasn't killed or executed or anything.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Souls And Stuff]]
* So the gypsies have the power to restore a vampire's soul. They're really pissed at Angel for turning Drusilla, who they love, into a soulless vampire...wouldn't it have made more sense to restore Drusilla's soul? Or both of them, if they have two of the orb thingies? For that matter, why don't the Scoobies do it to Spike and Drusilla after they learn how? It wouldn't have screwed with the plot too hard most of their important enemies after second season aren't vampires anyway.
** Screwing with magic tends to bring out much more horrible things. Just look at Xander. The poor idiot really never learned not to mess with magic spells. It almost got him married to a demon.
** Drusilla had nothing to do with the gypsies. They punished Angelus with a soul because he killed a gypsy girl who was particularly popular/important with the clan, and that girl was not Drusilla or remotely related to her. As for why the Scoobies don't do it, the show pretty explicitly states that it's one heck of a nasty thing to do. And doing it to Drusilla would be about the worst thing I could think of. Angelus did a nasty job to her; she was already irreperably insane before he sired her. Getting her soul back might not give her any remorse, and if it did, the grief would probably drive her to suicide in days.
*** Of course, being "a heck of a nasty thing to do" doesn't stop them from doing it again to ''Angel'', even though he'll have a whole lot of new atrocities to feel horrible about, and apparently expecting everybody to think they've done him (and Buffy) a favor. Originally the reason for the re-ensouling in Season 2 was as a backup in case Buffy didn't manage to kill Angel - it wasn't meant to be doing him a favour, just another option to contain him - but that seemed to be forgotten.
**** That was the stated reason, but there was still the underlying motive of, as Xander so eloquently put it, "You want to forget all about Ms. Calendar's murder so you can get your boyfriend back." This IS why Xander didn't tell Buffy about Willow reattempting the re-insouling after promising he would; he wanted her to fight and kill Angelus, rather than holding on and waiting for Willow to give Angel back to her.
** The soul curse did a number on Willow, it nearly killed her, hence why they don't just spam the spell all over the place every time they meet a vampire. Also, giving somebody a soul doesn't always give them instant remorse and cause them to immediately start doing the right thing. Angelus kept on killing even after he got his soul, and Darla was slow to react as well. Drusilla would indeed kill herself, after all look at the sane vampires who got souls. Angelus and Spike both temporarily went insane after getting their souls for the first time, imagine what it would do someone who was already insane. It's not a gift, it's a curse.
*** I'm a trifle fuzzy on why Drusilla killing herself would be a bad thing.
**** Because, she'd only be pushed off the edge to kill herself if she had a soul, and if she had a soul she'd be essentially a good person, or at least human enough that her dying would be bad. It'd be like killing Angel or ensouled Spike out of cold blood.
*** "Angelus kept on killing even after he got his soul", inaccurate. He was only killing bad people, and Darla called him out on it. When she tried to get him to [[IfYoureSoEvilEatThisKitten eat a baby]], he couldn't do it.
** On the note of soul restoring, When they restore Angel's soul on one of the many occasions, why don't they leave out the part about him losing it when he achieves perfect happiness? I guess I can understand the first time it was Willow's first spell and that might have been beyond her but later on when she repeats the spell on Angel she's basically achieved her peak magic ability and brought Buffy back to life so performing it then doesn't seem beyond reason.
*** Possibly no such spell exists.
*** I'm inclined to blame RealLifeWritesThePlot here. If ''Angel'' hadn't been spun off, and his character had thus been around Sunnydale, Willow would probably have developed a better version of that curse in a few seasons. As it was, in-universe we have "out of sight, out of mind", combined with the assumption that Angel's destiny will take care of everything. Realistically, once the actor is working with another network, we need to make it ''very'' clear that Angel and Buffy have no chance of being a happy couple.
** What I want to know is why the Gypsies never told Angel about the CurseEscapeClause. When you think about their agenda of making Angel Suffer, it actually works in their favor: First, now Angel would know that if he ever experiences happiness, he become souless again, which would make definitely make him suffer more, and secondly, it would have saved many more lives, because he would have been even less likely to become Angelus ever again. I mean, I know they were only interested in Revenge, but it would has really worked in everyone's best interest, not just Angel.
*** Fanwank: They couldn't assume he'd stop killing immediately upon getting the soul, or that the soul would be enough to stop him from taking vengeance on those responsible, so they would have steered clear. Angel was capable of serious violence towards humans when pushed far enough; having a couple of gypsies come up to him and say "ha ha, it's even worse than you realize" might well have been enough of a push.
*** Plus, if Angel knew there was an escape clause that'd remove his soul again, he might have actually taken it and turned back into Angelus. He did continue the Angelus role at first, and tried to cover up the change so that Darla, Spike and Dru wouldn't know it (he couldn't get any closer than being a SerialKillerKiller and flunking Darla's IfYoureSoEvilEatThisKitten test, though). And in the series ''Angel'', he actually did try to deliberately lose his soul after hitting his DespairEventHorizon. It flopped, because he was too busy being in despair to lose himself to "perfect happiness", but he did try, and the gypsies couldn't take the risk of Angel trying the same thing a hundred years earlier and possibly succeeding.
* Why did the gypsies give the curse that escape clause, anyway? If Angel feels he has done enough good to be forgiven (and thus probably won't want to do any more harm for which he will need to atone), he gets turned into a monster who won't care about atonement. If his soul doesn't work well enough to make him feel remorse every waking second, and every dreaming second, he gets turned into a monster. If he [[{{Canon}} gets distracted by something pure]], he gets turned into a monster. It kind of defeats the purpose that whether he is a philanthropist or a murderous rapist sadist while he has a soul, if he is ever happy (being nice to people or being Angelus at people), he turns into a murderous rapist sadist with no soul. Wouldn't they prefer that he have no out built into the spell, and have to use another spell to get it out of him? If [[MagicAIsMagicA it needed a loophole to work]], why not make the loophole something more specific, difficult, and/or unpleasant to achieve, such as "if he ever achieves pure pleasure from causing an innocent (by the usual mystical definition) pain, he loses his soul, and his brain turns to head cheese"? Did they think that anyone would have too much more trouble to [[strike: kill]] [[strike: execute]] [[{{Watchmen}} put down]] a murderous, rapist, sadist vampire with a soul than they would a murderous, rapist, sadist vampire with no soul? Kendra canonically wouldn't have.
** Rare or expensive material spell components?
** The point of the curse is for him to spend the rest of his days in a state of constant misery. If he experiences a moment of perfect happiness, then the curse has no point, the magic stops binding his soul to him, and it goes bye-bye again.
*** Yes, I understand that that was the point of the spell. But as outlined above, there are many reasons that Angelus would be better with a soul and potentially happy than without a soul and potentially happy. If he loses his soul, for any reason, he won't care about not having been nice to people unless he gets a new soul. Liam [[{{Understatement}} wasn't very nice]], and they couldn't have expected him to turn into Angel after knowing what he was like before being vamped, but a vampire with a soul is certainly better for the people around them than a vampire without a soul, no? Was the spell charm just an IdiotBall?
*** The thing is, the gypsies were royal {{jerkass}}es. Jenny even called her uncle and the rest of the clan out on it when they refused to restore Angel's soul even with Angelus running wild. The rest of the clan just doesn't care what happens to other people. They don't care if ensouled Angel redeems himself or becomes an even worse monster than Angelus, and they don't even care about the damage Angelus will cause if the curse is ever broken. All they care about is that Angelus suffers, and the best way they could think to do that was to trap Angelus inside a human soul and force him to endure everything Angel feels. Even that shows how completely amoral they are: they dragged Liam's soul out of the afterlife just to be the instrument of Angelus's AndIMustScream torment. The reason the curse's escape clause makes no sense as a strategy for reforming Angel or for containing Angelus is that the gypsies didn't intend for it to do either. Their only reason for cursing Angelus is to make him suffer, and once he stops suffering, the curse has run its course. If that sounds twisted, myopic and incredibly petty, well, it is, which is Jenny chewed out her uncle for it and refused to keep playing by those rules.
*** The problem is that Angel wasn't ''done'' suffering. He'd just stopped for a second. By phrasing their spell in such a way that his soul would be dismissed if he ever got happy for a second, it meant that he ''would'' be done suffering, since there would be nothing left ''to'' suffer. Even if it was "vengeance" rather than "justice," it was damn stupid.
** It's possible that they didn't write it as an escape clause; instead, it may just be a result of the nature of the curse, that if the curse ceases to function, then the curse ceases to exist. It is, after all, a curse; by its nature, it is malicious and intended to cause harm. If it is no longer causing harm, then the curse is no longer functioning, and simply ceases to be. Not something written into the curse itself, but an unfortunate effect of its fundamental nature.
*** I just have to say, I really like this idea in terms of Occam's Razor. Rather than a complicated escape clause deliberately written into the spell, maybe the curse simply works that way because it was designed as a ''curse''. The moment his soul's presence is no longer a curse on Angel, it vanishes simply because the curse is broken. That'd also help explain why Willow didn't try to change the spell: it's not just a matter of removing a few "but he loses his soul if he's happy" lines at the end, but of inventing a completely new ensouling spell from scratch that has the same effect as the gypsy curse, except without being a curse.
** Besides the fact that "cursed until you find true happiness/love" is {{Older than Dirt}}, you can also think of it as a two-part curse. First, Angelus is cursed with a soul to spend eternity struggling with guilt and remorse for his crimes. Second, should he ever actually be able to move beyond his guilt and achieve true happiness, his soul is revoked, he reverts to Angelus, and any chance he has at maintaining that happiness is forever destroyed. As stated above the gypsies that cursed Angelus were not nice people; the curse was never necessarily about reforming or containing Angelus. It was about vengeance.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Xander's Behaviour]]
* Why was Xander still considered one of the good guys after his behavior in the season 2 finale? And two episodes into season three?
** Because he wasn't trying to kill/maim/destroy anyone?
** Because he's not a MarySue. Even good guys screw up, and let's face it, Angelus was a menace and nearly killed them all, hell he almost destroyed the entire world. Telling Buffy just to kick his ass and not hold was, in his eyes, the best plan, since even if Angel got his soul back, there'd be no guarantee he'd get it again.
*** I agree that non-MarySue good guys screw up. However, they should expect to face some consequences when they do. Xander effectively decided that he knew better than not just Buffy, but Willow, Giles and even Jenny. So he proceeded to break a promise to Willow, and in the process make Buffy think that Willow wasn't in any more mood to help her than he was. Yeah, good guys do make rash decisions like that, but shouldn't he have at least gotten ''reprimanded'' for it? He suffered no consequences whatsoever.
*** People don't automatically suffer consequences in reality - why should they in fiction, whether he was wrong or not? Personally this troper feels Xander was the only one with any sense of perspective about Angel. I spent half of Season 2 and 3 going "Just bloody stake him already!" OK, there wouldn't have been the spin-off but in other terms, it's amazing that the characters so soon ''forget'' that Angel is dangerous.
** Because nobody knew but him. In Season 7 during one of the ''many'' arguments between Buffy and the rest, she calls Xander on his phrase "kick his ass", to which Willow responds "I never said that". Willow had no reason to believe Xander didn't pass the message on, and Buffy had no reason to believe Willow said anything but that unless Xander raised the topic himself, which is...unlikely.
*** Okay, then, why didn't they reprimand him when that argument was finished? I hoped that they would, and I know that I'm not the only one.
*** It's been 5 years and everything turned out OK. What would be the point?
**** I didn't mean the ''in-universe'' explanation for why he didn't have to face up to what he'd done, I was asking why the ''writers'' never had him face up to what he'd done, and we the viewers aren't supposed to mind?
**** I was of the impression that the Season 7 reference was: a. a shout out to season 2 and b. a kind of "hey, look how bad things are that the gang didn't pick up on this" thing.
** Also, who's to say it was the wrong thing to do? At that point, Xander had no confidence that the spell would work, and also knew that even if it did, that the gateway to Hell could still be open, and that telling Buffy to "hold it back" could (and probably would) get her killed. Saying "kick his ass" instead of "hold it back" probably saved her life. And even if it didn't, it was his prerogative to decide what Buffy needed to hear at that moment. If you knew that someone had to do something hard that they had no confidence in doing, would you tell them to only do it until they could give up, or would you have them push through it all despite the hardship? Granted, Angel DID get his soul back, but that was AFTER the gate was open, and killing him and using his body to close the gate was still necessary. Selfish on Xander's part? Yes. But not irredeemably evil. And certainly not the ONLY time he's ever done something stupid. Remember that love potion? If they can keep him around after that, then slipping in a few words of encouragement can be forgiven, especially if it was really needed by Buffy (she still wasn't sure she could do the deed herself, remember. She needed it more than blind hope.)
*** None of that explains why Xander thought he had any right to talk to Buffy the way he did in the second episode of season three...
**** He's upset with her. From his point of view, she bailed on them and left them to manage the fort without (from what I recall) even letting them know she's alive. Granted, he bares some responsibility for why she did so, but people's feelings can be complex.
**** While we saw the note Buffy left for her mother, it stands to reason that Joyce may've just lied to them by saying Buffy went to see her father if asked. Also remember that at the time of Buffy's departure, Willow is in a wheelchair and the whole gang has just dealt with the world almost ending. Buffy's suddenly gone and it's pretty much left to an injured inexperienced witch Willow, a Watcher in Giles, an inexperienced Xander, an inexperienced Cordelia, and a three days of the month werewolf Oz to protect Sunnydale. While they probably just fought off vampires, something bigger could have occurred too and Buffy was nowhere to be found and none of them had any idea where she was or if she was even alive. Willow makes mention of the fact that they dusted just six out of ten vampires (she says 9 of 10 but Oz corrects her) and who knows how many they did not even encounter. Willow points out how they had to pick up the slack to Buffy.
--->Buffy: You guys were doing just fine without me.
--->Willow: We were doing the best we could! It's not like we had a lot of choice in the matter.
*** Buffy took her friends for granted. She ran off, came back three months later and expected to be treated just as before as if nothing had happened. I don't blame her, she was in a world of pain that summer but I don't blame Willow and Xander for feeling hurt by such a behavior either. Also notice that the scandal in Dead Man's Party only starts after Buffy tries to skip town once more which led Willow amd Xander to believe that Buffy didn't care about them or their friendship. Selfish? Yes. Human? Totally.
** Xander is considered one of the good guys because he is in fact a good guy. Yes, there's a lot of shades of gray involved but not more so than Buffy herself.
** If Xander changed the outcome of Season 2 at all, though, he basically did it for the better. Telling Buffy that Willow was trying to restore Angel's soul would have most likely made her more hesitant in fighting him in the first place. Once it happened, I doubt there was any confusion as to what had happened (Buffy already knew Willow had tried once and been attacked). Buffy being forced to stab him would have happened regardless, since Angel succeeding in removing the sword happened regardless. Not to mention, Xander saved Giles. As for his behavior in Season 3, he's pissed at Buffy for abandoning them all, and arguably he's justified in it. Willow, Joyce, and Giles are ''all'' pissed at her, Xander just is the most outward about it.
** So, remind me why so many people think Xander's the reason that Buffy had to send Angel to the hell dimension. Season 3 startup scrappiness aside, had he told her "Oh, Willow's trying to give him back his soul, keep him away from the statue but try not to kill him," the only way it could ''possibly'' have changed (due to Buffy going all-out in the timeline that did happen) is that Angelus might have killed Buffy and/or gotten to Acathla slightly earlier. Since he did tell her "kick his ass" (more specifically, that that's what Willow had wanted to say), it would have risked Buffy dusting Angel before he got his soul back, or before she noticed that he had been re-ensouled (which didn't happen), but it also stopped her from holding back and increasing the risk of Angelus killing her or completing the ritual (the latter of which, unfortunately, happened anyway). Is the problem that if Buffy had held back and Angelus had completed the ritual and (assuming Buffy could even overpower him in the same, useful way she had Angel) gotten sent to the hell dimension, that he wouldn't have had a soul at the time and wouldn't have been miserable? That he wouldn't have had a soul at the time and Buffy wouldn't have felt so guilty? A combination of the two (what I think is the case)? Or something else?
*** Giving Angel his soul back was only a back-up plan in case Buffy failed to kill him anyway... And given it's a ''curse'', it's not as though Willow would have been doing him, and therefore Buffy, much of a favor, which she'd have realized if she'd thought it through. Any guilt surely belongs to Willow not Xander. As the troper above said, Buffy would have needed to kill Angel anyway.
** So Xander is blamed for putting a higher priority on saving the world than saving Angel or being honest with Buffy? Can I just revel in certain fans' fabulous lack of priorities? Not to mention that Angel pulled the sword from Acathla before Buffy had a chance to engage him in a fight an stall for time waiting for the spell to work so the whole thing is monumentally moot.
* Leaving Anya at the altar for an absolutely BS reason, no one, AT ALL, calling him out on this, and then Xander having the unmitigated gall to judge Anya for having sex with Spike in the immediate aftermath? W.T.F? This was the exact moment when I got turned well and truly off BVTS.
** Xander'd been uncomfortable with the impending marriage all season. The unfortunate fact is, he's just too young; the big Apocalypse proposal was a grand and powerful gesture, but after they all lived through it, he started to have cold feet. He NEEDED to talk to Anya about maybe putting it off all season; Once More With Feeling even gave him them a song about this problem, I'll Never Tell, the title of which is precisely why it all went to hell. That he broke off the wedding was inevitable; the demon itself only gave his season-long fears and doubts solid form and forced him to face up to them. It's the timing that was just ''terrible''.
*** What pisses me off is that that makes Xander's assurance about his apocalypse marriage proposal complete BS, and that Anya was completely on the money when she accused him of that.
**** He probably genuinely believed he meant it at the time. Anya saw through it initially because she's actually pretty decent at the same "See it for what it is, with all the social and ethical bs stripped from it" shtick that Spike is, but I have no doubt Xander honestly believed he was ready for it in the heat of the moment, and only started to freak out afterwards. But yeah, Anya was totally right.
**** I prefer to believe that he really did mean it, and that was just backpedaling by the writers.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Cops Are Useless]]
* Why hasn't the government done something to investigate the astronomical death rate in Sunnydale? A routine check to identify trouble spots should have flagged Sunnydale a long time ago. "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" implies that the feds may be aware, but what about the state government?
** Isn't that what the Initiative was for?
** Principal Snyder and some cops had at least some idea that vampires and such were real given his statement "What would you prefer, the truth?" when pressed about brushing vampires as being gangs on PCP. Presumably, there are those in power who know that demons walk the earth, but they know there's nothing they can really do about it. The existence of the Initiative also implies they know. The failure of the Initiative also implies they know not to mess around with that stuff anymore.
** Sunnydale was deliberately founded by a man with a demonic pact to be a place demons could freely feed. For the 100 years Sunnydale existed and that man was alive, he was mayor of the city, and is strongly implied to have been in complete control of the local civil service. All major civil servant jobs would have gone to people who were both loyal to Wilkins and knew full well about the demonic nature of the town. Wilkins would have ensured that any information that would have allowed Sunnydale's demon population to be interfered with would be repressed, and would presumably have ensured a constant influx of new citizens to keep the demons sated. Within ''months'' of his death, a government project to investigate and possibly control demonic activity is sent to Sunnydale. After the project turns out to be a disaster, the government immediately pulls out (with the implication that they realise that Buffy is doing a better job than they ever could).
* On the subject of the Initiative, the government learns of demons and so forth preying on the US population, sets out to study and control it, but it goes wrong and proves the demons and so forth are more dangerous than they thought. And then they do nothing. No more investigation, just cover it up and try and forget and hope like hell it doesn't come out, that nothing like Graduation Day happens live on national or international television? I call bullshit, having their asses handed to them in the way that the Initiative imploded would not make any even half sane government back off and leave it up to the mystical slayer, let alone a government as paranoid and controlling as the US. They'd come back with more firepower, bigger facilities, better facilities and a lot more security.
** Who's to say they didn't? If security does their job right, you would never know they're there. Despite withdrawing from Sunnydale, they were still able to appear out of nowhere when Riley needed help as simply as Buffy talking into a phone with a dial tone, when Riley was pursuing that demon, and again when Spike needed his chip removed.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Joyce's Life Insurance]]
* Part of the plot in the episodes where Buffy is resurrected is to use the Buffybot to pass off as Buffy so people wouldn't know she's dead. Otherwise Buffy's dad would take Dawn away. Yet later, they mention collecting her life insurance. How the hell did they collect the life insurance without letting people know she was dead?
** I'm pretty sure it's Joyce's life insurance that they collect.
*** Not a JBM, just an amusing note: I would love to have been there to see the Buffybot collect Joyce's life insurance, as I'm sure she didn't leave it to Willow and Xander. That must have been hilarious.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Buffy's Job]]
* Why is it that the slayer has to scrape by in a dead-end job, like at the Doublemeat Palace? According to Spike, it's true for most of the slayers, and when they despair of this, they get themselves killed. Yet the Watcher's Council is an extremely rich secret organization. They pay the Watcher; can't they afford a salary for the Slayer?
** The slayers aren't expected to live past twenty, and they certainly don't expect them to get friends and family. Their ideal model of a slayer is more like Kendra than Buffy. Thus, they saw no reason to pay slayers, since so few live into adulthood.
** It's still a fair question. In seasons 1-3 it is implied several times (and can pretty easily be figured out by someone with a brain) that Buffy has a natural aptitude for law enforcement. Why the heck doesn't she go for a job as a police officer? She has the strength and the speed to be good at it, and the primary purpose of the job is to "''Protect'' and serve". The only possible explanation is that it would take too much time for her to get the job, but that frankly doesn't hold much water. Why didn't she apply there ''first''?
*** Like you said, it'd be too time consuming. With a burger joint, you punch in, work a couple hours, punch out. Police work is much more complex and way more stressful. Not to mention, Buffy is good at fighting demons. What if Joe the crackhead shot her? No more slayer. She'd probably get charged with police brutality anyway, given her superstrength, and general attitude about procedure.
*** Also, police jobs require highly specialized training, which would have taken her away from Sunnydale, and can you IMAGINE what the inevitable slew of background checks would have turned up?
**** Background checks indeed. What with the "death" of Ted in Season 1. Kendra's in Season two, and the Deputy Mayor's in Season 3; she was implicated in/questioned on three murders before she even finished school. I'm pretty sure that's not the type of person the police look for.
***** It IS Sunnydale, though. Quoth Snyder, the police in this town are DEEPLY stupid.
**** And, of course, note how disappointed Buffy was when she learnt that her career aptitude test pointed her in the direction of law enforcement. That's not what she wants to do with her life.
*** It's very rare for police to work alone; Buff would be spending all her time with a partner, and that can make the "this one's undead, hold still while I grab my stakes" speech a little awkward.
*** The Watcher's Council HATED Buffy. And Spike -did- promise to steal money for her. In short, normal Slayers depend on their Watcher for support. Buffy is nowhere near normal.
**** They hated Buffy when she tried to get pay for Giles, too. She got the pay for Giles anyway. So I don't see how hating Buffy is a problem in getting pay for herself.
***** They did, but she had leverage and the only money she actually got him that they wouldn't have had to pay eventually (based on rehiring him) was retroactive pay (and that was only at Giles' suggestion). If she didn't just not think of it, it's possible that she didn't want t push it ("it" being as much or more her personal [[[YourMileageMayVary mis?]]]use of power as their patience, since, leverage).
** There are just too many possible ways she could get money:
### Getting paid by the Watcher's Council is entirely legitimate. Yes, the Watcher's council doesn't pay Slayers. They weren't going to pay Giles either. She forced them to pay Giles. If she's able to force them to pay Giles (whom they didn't want to pay), she's able to force them to pay someone else they didn't want to pay (herself).
### She could have worked at the magic shop when it was around. They had a comedy episode showing her failing, but most of the fail happened because of one time events, and they had to stick in a line saying that she didn't think the job was for her even ignoring the one time events. It may not be for her, but lots of people work in undesirable jobs to support themselves, and it still beats Doublemeat Palace, especially since she could say "I was late for work because I had to slay something" and be believed, a benefit few other jobs have.
*** I actually see this one as being perfect. She was there all the time anyway, and, as you said, she could tell the truth when she's late and wouldn't have been reprimanded (apart from when Anya ran the shop). If I were her, I'd jump at the chance.
**** The biggest problem is Ms. "Capitalism, YAY!" Anya first having seniority and then outright being her boss; Giles would be forgiving of Buffy being late because she had to slay something. Anya would fixate on the whole "time is money" thing and equate it to stealing from her.
### When Riley visited and she helped his organization, she completely failed to ask how much it pays... and it's beyond reason that a group like that wouldn't pay its help anything (especially fairly unique help like a Slayer).
### Ask Angel. He was working on a completely different financial scale than her (at one point he defeated demons who had $50000).
*** Oh yeah, that'd work great. Hey, torturous love interest! No, I'm not here to warn of great evil or start another doomed romance, I was just wondering if you could spot me a few. Oh, and how come you have a baby?
*** Why not? I'm sure if she acted pouty she'd get it from him. (Side note, Buffy knows Angel has a son. At least Willow did in Orpheus so we must assume buffy does as well.)
*** She wouldn't want to manipulate Angel like that. Good guy, you know?
**** We are talking about the same Buffy here, right? The one that robbed a bank to fund the Slayer organization in Season 8?
***** "Paying my bills" isn't quite the same as "financially supporting a private army."
** Was there any reason she couldn't have had Willow, Tara, or one of Giles' associates test for magic on the ''many'' artifacts they found lying around near the {{MacGuffin}}s and keep anything that so much as glowed, have Giles and/or herself cross-reference it against shielded artifacts, sell anything that passed both tests, and then keep some sort of log of who bought it in case it was an unknown, shielded artifact? It would give them a source of money, it would be easier to track down any unexpected mystical items if they had a buyers' log than if someone just walked into the tomb or whatever and walked off with something. In many cases it wouldn't even have been grave robbery, since some of the places were just storage (and didn't some of the demons just hoard artifacts because they were shiny and expensive, not because of any inherent magicality?) and a couple of them weren't technically graves [[OurVampiresAreDifferent once their occupants got up and left]]. It is, in fact, explicitly shown in the comics that that room full of gold that Spike and Harmony found was still pretty full after Spike took the gem and Harmony took what she could carry.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampires With Guns]]
* Why in the hell didn't the vampires just shoot Buffy? We know they can use guns. They have shown that they can pop out and surprise Buffy when she was on patrol, if only they just invested in some shotguns and plugged her instead of playing into her strength (hand to hand combat).
** Buffy got taken down by one shot from a not-very-big handgun. It's just silly MookChivalry that prevents people from shooting her.
** It's been shown vampires love the hunt. Taking down a Slayer with machine gun fire is tacky. Plus, Slayer blood is yum-tastic.
*** That's a pretty poor justification, she'd be a lot easier to kill and drain dry after you shoot her in the gut, the real reason is Josh seems to hate guns for some reason.
**** Not so, look at ''{{Firefly}}''.
** Maybe they just thought it wouldn't work. "Surely a being made to fight me wouldn't be hurt by something I'm almost immune to. Right?"
** Real reason? The show started in a high school. Guns in a high school? You can see why they didn't. By the later series guns just weren't very Buffy.
*** They actually did use guns where it would make sense for the villain to have them, but in one commentary it was mentioned that when an episode was pulled from reruns after Columbine, they decided to completely scrap the idea of vamps or mooks with guns.
** Maybe they just didn't have a gun on hand. You're a badass demon that can break a weak, defenseless human with your bare hands, who really gets off on the thrill of seeking, hunting, and tearing open the veins of your defenseless, human prey with your bare teeth. What part of this would be serviced by carrying a gun? Most of the vampires Buffy fights, she found them, often shortly after they rose from their grave. Very few vampires go looking to fight the Slayer; those that do usually want to prove something about how badass they are by fighting and killing the Slayer, and it would hardly prove anything if their big epic battle was, "Did you know guns kill people? It's so cool." Guns don't just grow on trees; in order for a vampire to use one, he has to have one on hand.
** Not directly Buffy related, but in the WorldOfDarkness, vampires tend to get "stuck" in the times they were turned, mentally. Which makes some sense: they're immortal, the human world is of absolutely no interest to them except for its Happy Meals on legs component, and their daily routine is stalk/corner/suck dry. That dynamic hasn't really changed since human society began, except maybe these days there are a lot more meals to be had (and, puzzlingly, a lot more people who would give everything they own to get sucked on by a vampire). The world happens around them, and so does history - the world changes, but not the vampire. The prop guy in the DVD extras says something along those lines as well, about vampires and demons being tied to archaic, medieval weapons because that's what they know. Of course, that doesn't explain why vampires turned yesterday don't use guns either... I guess the demon that takes over doesn't listen to the human part.
** The scene where Warren tries to brag about killing Buffy in a demon bar's also worth noting. The moment he revealed that he simply shot her with a gun, the others started laughing at how naive he is for thinking that'd be enough, and then their skepticism seems to be confirmed by news stories that Buffy's alive. The audience knows how close it really was for her, but it looks like demons and vampires just assume the Slayer can't be taken down that easily (which made Darla breaking vamp tradition for a GunsAkimbo fight with Buffy all the more awesome).
** I suspect that, if they didn't kill her dead dead dead, that super fast slayer healing would take care of something as small as an entry wound and a few broken ribs pretty quickly. (A machine gun or the infamous rocket launcher would be a better bet). Also, stealth would have to be involved - Buffy's usually a pretty fast-moving target once the surprise round is over.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Flaming Vamps]]
* Why didn't Buffy make greater use of fire to kill vampires? I can understand why white phosphorus rounds or napalm might have been hard to come by, but when attacking a vampire lair, why not use a few Molotov cocktails?
** Setting urban areas on fire often attracts the police.
** I agree. It's occurred to me before that perhaps a flare gun would be an extremely useful weapon against vampires.
** Let's look at her most significant use of fire against vampires: It got her expelled, put a permanent mark on various records (both physical and hearsay), she had to move to a town where nobody knew her any more and the school was on top of the door to hell, nearly got her killed, and could easily have caused far more damage if there were a couple of unexpected factors. That might make her hesitant to use fire, except when it's being held on a conveniently pointy stick and the sharper end is already in use.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Sergeant Xander]]
* Why did Xander never consider a career in the military? "Innocence" makes it clear that there is a military base in the area, and while his military skills did fade, he still would have been better qualified than 90% of the US population. He could have done his training over the summer and gotten a posting to the base?
** While the regular military is out, as the odds of his being assigned to his hometown would beggar probability, you'd think he could still go for the National Guard. If nothing else, it would have made sneaking out the ''next'' rocket launcher from the local NG armory a ''lot'' easier. Not to mention periodic weapons refresher training, et al.
** Judging from his reaction to Spike's mocking claim in late season 4 that a military career was "all he was good for," it seems more than plausible that Xander ''really'' didn't want to join the army. Can't say I blame him.
** Joining the military makes it very difficult to control your own time, and there's a good chance he'd end up on active duty at some point. Xander's not cowardly but I don't think that being separated from Buffy and Willow for months on end would work for him.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampire Armor]]
* Why does no vampire ever wear armor? Having a piece of wood pushed through their (apparently unnaturally fragile) sternum seems to be one of the few things that can kill them - you would think a stab vest would be a wise acquisition. Some of them (eg. Kakistos and the Master have even been around long enough that old school armour would be something they'd remember, and possibly even been trained to wear.
** The Master and Kakistos were (probably) cocky. Also, Kakistos was immune to stakes that aren't huge (like support beams).
* I take it we've all noticed how clothes worn by Vampires mysteriously turn to dust with them - unless they're plot related, thus making it easy for the less than cunning members of the Scooby Gang (which might well be all of them) to spot the key item?
** Stakes sometimes dust too. The rule seems to be that an item doesn't dust only when a living being is directly touching it when the vampire dusts. There are a few exceptions, but that seems to be the standard.
*** Metal seems to survive too. The Order of Unpronounceable Ring in series 2 for instance.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Slayer Lineage]]
* Buffy dies at the end of season 5 but somehow a new slayer doesn't show up. And I know it would be reasonable to assume that maybe she just never came to Sunnydale, but with the call to arms of all potential slayers and the destruction of the council in season 7, shouldn't we have heard about a third slayer?
** No. After Buffy died the first time, the Slayer line passed to Kendra, then on to Faith after Kendra's death, so a new Slayer would only be called if Faith died. I believe this is actually the WordOfGod, although I don't remember where I read it.
*** The problem with this theory is that even if Buffy's death didn't call anyone, the characters think otherwise. They act as though Buffy's third death would call someone, even if that's false. If they think that Buffy's third death would call someone, they must also think that Buffy's second death already did call someone, and they would expect another Slayer. Even if this expectation is false and no other Slayer is called, the characters should behave as though it's true.
**** WMG: The Third Slayer was Dana (the insane slayer who appeared in ''Angel'' Season 5). The Council found out, got her medical records, maybe even infiltrated the asylum the way they did with Buffy in "The Origin" so they could see for themselves, and concluded that Dana was too dangerous to be released. They might have considered offing her, but to do so could have sparked a war with the Scooby Gang, a war which the Council would almost certainly have lost.
*** WordOfGod has indeed confirmed, via interviews, that the slayer line passed to Kendra and then Faith, making Buffy the extra slayer. Faith would have to die for another slayer to be called (though it's a moot point, now that they're all active anyway).
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Seasonal Rot]]
* So, seasons 6 and 7 sucked and were rightly panned by fans and critics. Season 8 sucks, containing out of character moments, retroactive erasing of character development, gratuitous cameos even if they don't make sense, and terrible pacing, and fans and critics love it. What's the deal?
** This troper hates it...
** Let's be more specific: While I don't actually ''mind'' Season 8 (I mean, it's alright, I guess), the "Lesbian Buffy" subplot of issues #12-#15 was just plain ridiculous. Now admitted, my knowledge of the intricacies of bi/homosexuality are next to nil, but despite having shown no interest in the female gender for the whole series, Buffy is suddenly shown engaging in an extended tryst with another girl cause...why? Oh, and according to Whedon both Spike and Angel have also shagged in the past because: they knew each other for a while and [[WordOfGod "they're open-minded guys. They may be evil but, you know, they're not bigoted or closed-minded"]]. Mmm ''hmm''.
*** Unlike as it is portrayed in most media, there are very few 100% straight OR gay people in the real world. Most people fall in the spectrum somewhere in between. It doesn't mean that everyone would do someone of the same sex, but most perople have SOME attraction to their own sex. In Buffy's case, her best friend's is gay (actually what we've seen on screen is she's bi but that's an other discussion all together), so there would arise a natural curiousity as to what being with a woman would be like. Most people would not act on it, but she had been going through a lot and was depressed. This coupled with the fact that she states she is NOT gay lead me to assume that she just gave in to curiousity in the heat of the moment. It's not what most people would do, but it does happen. As for Angel and Spike, it has been shown that vampires have very different opinions on what is taboo than what normal humans do. So while I don't need to see that scene I can imagine it happened without to much suspension of disbelief.
*** Look, it can't go both ways. Either sexual preference is a Kinsey sliding scale subject to curiosity and restraint, and the fundy claim of "curing" gays is actually possible, or it's something that we're born and hardwired with, which means that both sides are equally hardwired. It's a contradiction to say that gay people can't choose to be straight, but that straight people could be bi if they'd just be more "open minded" about it. Personally, this troper tends to think it's hardwired, and that Buffy suddenly having a lesbian affair is just pandering to the Hollywood popularity of female bi "experimentation" (it's interesting how ''male'' bi behavior isn't equally vogue: imagine how the public would react if it was Shia [=LeBeouf=] crossing gender lines, instead of the usual hot, rebellious girl like Kate Perry or Lindsey Lohan?)
***** Why couldn't different people be born at different points along the Kinsey scale? Buffy could have been born a 1 or 2, so she has to by chance run into the right people to go for a lesbian experience.
***** Screw Hollywood. Also, I support the theory that all humans are born bi, and are then forced into roles by society. So, that explains everything.
**** Um, what? "You can discover new things about your sexuality / your sexuality can change over time" does NOT equal "you can choose what you want your sexuality to be".
**** Sexual preference is indeed hardwired. However most people in the real world are bisexual, not gay or straight. And there are also different levels of bisexuality. Human sexuality is a lot more complicated than people usually think it is. Also this troper knows a girl who had this exact thing happen to her, so it cant be all that unrealistic.
*** I think the writers of Buffy are just gay for gay couples. Like Jane Esperon thinks that Giles and Ethan had a sexual relationship in the past. Which is not a vibe I get from Giles. At all. Not even a little bit.
*** But is it a vibe you get from Ripper?
*** Games, pranks, dares, and bets with sexual results and penalties that would sometimes be between between Ripper and one (or more) of his mates, yes. Sexual relationship, no.
*** I know people harp a lot on that whole Satsu thing, but I see many more things wrong with season 8 than that. Buffy not only stealing money to finance their operation, but doing it gleefully as well, the same Buffy who was so worried about abusing her powers in season 3. We have Willow's claim that when Buffy was brought back, the violence came back, but it never stopped. The [=BuffyBot=] was the only reason demons hadn't torn Sunnydale apart, and Willow claims they were happy, yet the opening of season six showed her to be very determined to bring Buffy back, and I got the impression she had been like that the whole time, but the comic seems to think that she was happier with her best friend dead and lover alive than she was with both alive. They throw out all of Faith's character development, and instead of wanting to make up for what she's done, she wants to just cut and run because it's too hard. She's made crazier than she was before, stabbing Giles in the arm just for touching her shoulder. And remember how they said early on that Dawn wasn't as strong proportionally as she was large? I like how they forget that just so Dawn can fight a giant mech. Because that's not totally out of place. This is only a partial list of things I find wrong with Season 8. I apologize, I know that ItJustBugsMe is for actual questions, not just complaining, but I'm honestly baffled as to why I see so little criticism of Season 8, since to me, the flaws are blatant.
**** It's not Buffy who keeps Sunnydale safe, it's the demons' and the vampires' much larger than life image of her (especially with the beating a Hellgod thing).
**** Most of those 'flaws' are just you misunderstanding (or not paying attention). Willow: It stated, not that she was happier, but that she feels that she ''CHOSE'' Buffy over Tara. That if she hadn't brought Buffy back, Warren would never have gone after them, and Tara wouldn't have been killed. She's determined not to let that happen again. Not to be put in a situation where she has to chose between her lover and her best friend. She wants Buffy in her life, but she is never going to be forced to choose again, if she can help it. As to Buffy's robbing the bank, it's obvious that it is something that's going to come back to bite them in the ass in the future. And Faith DIDN'T "cut and run because it was too hard". She left because Buffy wouldn't give her a chance to make up for what had happened. It does seem they may have made a mistake with the whole Dawn thing, though.
***** Incorrect. You glossed over several points. Willow DID say she was happy, and that the violence stopped, neither of which are shown to be true. The bank robbery, the point isn't that it happened, it's that it was out of character in the first place. It doesn't matter whether they'll pay for it or not, it still contradicts Buffy's character development. You also didn't pay attention during the Faith arc. The arc STARTS with her trying to pack her bags and go away before Giles catches her, and Buffy isn't said to have anything to do with it. Ironically, if all fans are willing to resort to weak justifications like that, it answers my question as to why it's popular despite its flaws.
**** This troper also just wants to point out that Buffy's been lonely for a good, long while. The only male influences in her life right now are enemies, Xander (too much history there), Giles (squick), and Andrew (a whopping hell no). She mentioned in the first issue how much she missed sex. She's lonely, horny, and surrounded by an almost entirely female population. She can be forgiven a bit of sexual experimentation in the complete absence of males.
** I rather resent the flat stating of "Season 6, 7 and 8 sucked." That's an opinion, not a fact. I loved season 6 and 7. I haven't read 8, but if I didn't like it I still wouldn't state that as fact. Remember: YourMileageMayVary
*** Agreed here. While they weren't the best of seasons, they certainly could've done worse. As for season 8... I dunno. Maybe AdaptationDecay but at the same time FanWank because so many fans wanted a season 8 that they're willing to make excuses for it anyway? Haven't read Season 8, so I wouldn't know, but that's my guess.
**** Some people found Buffy and Faith's interaction in season three to be at least slightly romantic, so that would do away with the problem of never interested in any women. Also Dawn was shown having enhanced strength. She was able to mess up the portion of the castle she hit. She just messed herself up to. Extra strength not extra durability. Considering the Buffyverse isn't exactly a place where Mecha are everywhere perhaps the [=MechaDawn=] (damn that was ridiculous) wasn't the most durable thing out there either.
** Um, hello. Just because Dawn's strength wasn't proportional to her size doesn't mean she wasn't ''stronger''. If her strength had remained the same as it was when she was a hundred times smaller, her body wouldn't have worked at all. She would have been crippled and completely unable to move. It's just like how an ant is able to carry ten times it's bodyweight, and while a human is able to carry much more we ''can't'' carry ten times our bodyweight. That just means Giant Dawn is unable to carry things as large as she used to when measured comparatively to her body.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Scythe Or Axe]]
* Why is the weapon obtained in season seven refered to as a scythe? It's not remotely scythe like. I don't know what would be a more accurate name but it's definitely not a scythe.
** It's a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_scythe war scythe]]. The handle is a bit shorter than normal though. I suppose you could call it an axe.
*** It's not a war scythe either. A war scythe is like a pike with a long blade instead of a spike. The scythe in BtVS is more like a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardiche Bardiche]].
**** Isn't the weapon in question older then recorded history? Maybe it preceeded the wordage, like the theory that the assistants for [[ArtemisFowl the Fowl family]] generated the meaning for 'butler'.
***** Not quite - it was forged in ancient Egypt. As it is effectively unique, they really ought to just come up with a name of their own for it. Maybe "sineya" after the First Slayer?
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Slayer Density]]
* Buffy can punch through a brick wall and leap out of a three story building no problem. But she tends to be slapped around just like a regular girl who knows Kung Fu. Bugs the heck out of me.
** The reason she gets slapped around is that she doesn't weigh a whole lot. Hence, knocking her around is just a matter of hitting her.
** She lacks some RequiredSecondaryPowers, thus she isn't anchored to the ground like some super strong people. Vampires get the same treatment.
* I know, budget restraints, but plywood over the windows is not effective for the minions in Season 7. The -existence- of a window is good for vampires, but by then the BigBad had lots more options.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Touching Giles (not like that)]]
* Also in Season 7, the beloved Giles returns and nobody gives him a hug? I was at least hoping for a handwave of the BigBad saying 'I crafted a low level spell just to screw with your minds; I was bored'. But nothing.
** That was intentional. By not having him touch anyone for 'weeks' without making it too obtrusive, the audience could be kept guessing whether or not he had, in fact, survived the seemingly unsurvivable attack at the end of "Sleeper".
*** That's exactly the problem with that MindScrew--it didn't make any sense. Giles should have been touching people all the time. The ''only'' reason for him not to do other than actually being the First (which has its own problems) is that he read the script.
**** The people who thought he was the First were Andrew, Anya, Xander and Dawn. He might have come into contact with Buffy, the Potentials and Willow, but they were all otherwise involved when the call came. Hell, he might have touched one of the others, but they just didn't remember, being too worked up by the idea that he might be the First.
***** Buffy attempts to hug him when he arrives in "Bring on the Night", but the Potentials get in the way.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Book Cage]]
* In season 1 "The pack" why to they have a jail cell in the school?
** The shooting script refers to it as a "steel-mesh book return cage".
** Yeah, it's a cage typically used for storage. Naturally meant for storing books and inanimate objects, but in Sunnydale it has other uses. It comes in quite handy further in the series.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Judge]]
* In "Innocence", Spike and Dru realise that Angel's curse has been broken when the Judge fails to burn him, declaring that there is no humanity in him. But why was he able to burn the (presumably equally soulless) vampire Dalton in the previous episode?
** Dalton loved to read for the joy of reading and to acquire knowledge, which were "good" traits.
** It's not just a soul, it's how "human" they are. Dalton had a very human love for love and study, hence he got burned. The Judge also mentions that Drusilla and Spike could be burned because of their love for each other. Angelus couldn't be burned because he's just that sadistic.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Ms Kitty Fantastico]]
* Willow and Tara had a kitten. What the hell happened to it? It just disappeared.
** Dawn has a line sometime late in Season 7 about how she doesn't leave crossbows lying around "since that time with Miss Kitty Fantastico."
** Miss Kitty Fantastico lived with Tara in her dorm room, and the last time we saw it, Glory had just ripped the wall open. Maybe Miss Kitty was killed then, or just wandered off when no one came by to feed her for a few days.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:I'd like to Order one slayer, extra-dead.]]
* Since the Order of Taraka turned out to be so scarily effective against a slayer, you have to wonder why they haven't been called on by other big bads throughout history. Spike's lackey questions whether hiring them is "overkill", but when Spike says it's "just enough kill", he has a point - who, from evil's point of view, is a bigger target than the slayer? It's possible that whatever price they demand for their services is far more than most would be willing to pay (and maybe that's what the minion meant by "overkill"), but it's interesting that a team of assassins capable of taking out a slayer has existed for centuries, but apparently hadn't been used in that way (if Giles' shocked reaction is any indication) until Spike hired them.
** One possible explanation is that, since a new slayer's immediately called by the death of the last one, most villains would consider killing the slayer to be nothing but buying a little bit of extra time. And if the Order of Taraka charges per individual Slayer, they could run up a huge bill very quickly...
** Killing a slayer is a big thing for a demon or vampire. Its a pride thing. Can you imagine some demon walking up to his demon buddies and bragging about hiring the Order of Taraka to kill the Slayer?
--->Demon 1: Hey I just killed the Slayer!
--->Demon 2: How'd you manage that?
--->Demon 1: I hired the "Order of Taraka to kill her!
--->Demon 2: ...wuss!
** Also, where did you get that the Order of Taraka was effective at killing the Slayer? XANDER and CORDELIA were able to kill one of their assassins. They sent three assassins to Sunnydale and all three turned up dead, with the Slayer alive and kicking. This, coupled with the above note about the Slayer line, means that fighting the Slayer ONCE might be good for a paycheck, but sustained conflict would be terrible for business. Slayers will continue to be called indefinitely. No matter how many assassins they have to throw at her when she's found, it's a losing battle. The Order of Taraka will run out of men long before the Slayer line spontaneously decides not to exist anymore.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Scooby Murder Gang]]
* What really bugs this troper is how the half the Scoobies are murderers, and yet nobody ever gets punished, not even karmic punishment, for it. Buffy makes a big deal about turning herself in when she thinks she's killed someone in "Dead Things", but then Willow kills Warren of her own totally free, premeditated will, and everyone handwaves that as "he had it coming" (it's funny how Buffy talks about how she has to keep Willow from crossing the line by killing a human being in "Villains", and then after Willow does so, Buffy redraws that imaginary line and says that now Willow would cross it by killing ''innocent'' people). She suffers no consequences whatsoever for it, just the karma-free satisfaction of having gotten revenge for Tara's death, not to mention free magic lessons from Giles and a coven of witches. Then Anya goes on her own killing spree as a vengeance demon, and Xander actually hangs a lampshade on this problem with the line "when our friends go all crazy and start killing people, we help them!" And then there's Faith, whose penance for killing multiple people in cold blood was to spend maybe two years in jail, and then run around the Buffyverse being a "hot chick with superpowers" (her words!) once the rather flimsy pretext of Angelus being loose arose. The heroes in the Buffyverse not only don't pay for their murderous moral lapses, they don't even feel guilty about it. They kill to boost the drama, but then they go right back to witty one-liners and "one for all" comradery once the blood's been mopped up.
** About Faith, she just saved the world and then went off to do it again. It seems to me that if you save the world, you should be given a full pardon and a mansion and the ability to restart any TV show you please. Plus, Angelus being loose is not a "flimsy pretext". It's an apocalyptic level threat. Plus, the only karma you should get for killing a raping, murdering, homicidal madman is good karma (for making the world a safer and cleaner place). The "free magic lessons" were to help her control herself, as she's in a line of work where pure rage is likely to happen again. They don't want a repeat of Dark Willow Tries To End The World. Plus, murdering evil isn't murder, it's just cleaning up messes. Hell, even Faith killing the Mayor's Assistant was a good thing, because he was the Mayor's Assistant. It's like complaining when [[StarWars Darth Vader]] or [[{{Halo}} Tartarus]] dies! Even if he never killed anyone before, his inaction alone has caused deaths, which still makes him deserving of death.
** Try turning your friends into the police. Buffy wouldn't want to throw her best friend in jail, evil non-withstanding.
** OK, one at a time: Willow was literally insane with grief at Tara's death, so, standard insanity defense applies here. In addition, at the beginning of season 7, she still clearly deeply regrets what she's done. For demon Anya, this was SOP; she was known for the creative ways in which she would wreak havoc in her earlier demon days. She was also willing to give up her life to take back the wish that killed so many, and since it ''was'' taken back, she effectively only killed Halfrek. She's still guilty about this, as she distances herself from the Scoobies at the end of the episode, but Buffy brings her back by telling her that they need to stick together. Justified in that Halfrek was a demon. As for Faith, watch the ''{{Angel}}'' episodes "Five By Five" and "Sanctuary."
*** I saw those episodes. I agreed with Wesley that someone who spends the night torturing people shouldn't be eating pastries the next morning. The gist of these rebuttals is "well they felt really bad about it". That's not the point. You don't get to walk away from your crimes just by saying you regret them. Not to mention that Willow never even regretted killing Warren. Her guilt in "The Killer in Me" was all about Tara, and she even went on to use her murder of Warren as a RuleOfFunny threat against Andrew. In a storyline where Angel's spent decades on Earth, and centuries in a hell dimension, trying to atone for the actions of a demon inhabiting his soulless body, I'd expect ''some'' kind of karmic come-uppance for the free will decision of a human character to commit murder. Andrew actually suffered more for his killing Jonathan than Willow did for her behavior: at least we saw him directly confronted with it and moved to tears by what he'd done. Willow was taken to England on a magical holiday and the most she ever had to deal with was a vague, almost played-for-laughs worry in one episode that she's "still evil".
**** "You don't get to walk away from your crimes just by saying you regret them." You think going to prison, voluntarily, with full knowledge that you could, at any time you wanted, break out of said prison with insolent ease, counts as walking away from your crimes?
***** First of all, that only applies to Faith and not to the others. Second, if you're really not walking away from your crimes, you don't get to pick the length of your prison sentence--you go to prison for as long as the court sends you. If Faith didn't immediately go back to prison after the crisis was over, then yes, she walked away from (part of) her crimes.
***** Since Faith is my favorite character in the Whedonverse, I feel compelled to speak up. Look at the timeline: Wes goes to collect Faith, she busts out, they go to LA and put Angelus back in Angel, with Willow's help; Willow and Faith immediately head for Sunnydale; we then have the Buffy finale and Sunnydale goes bye-bye; at this point, Faith's been out for awhile and since her trail led to Sunnydale, could be of the opinion that nobody in law enforcement was going to find her, and she could do more good outside of prison than inside it. If you were given that set of circumstances, and had a problem with authority already, wouldn't you opt out of returning to prison?
***** The timeline just proves that Faith is able to stay out of prison, not that it's the right thing to do. If she really wasn't walking away from her crimes, she'd turn herself in and serve the rest of her sentence, whether the police could catch her or not and whether she likes the authorities or not.
**** You seem to have missed the parts where Buffy attempted to kill Anya and only stopped when Anya hit her ResetButton, Faith attempted to commit SuicideByCop using Angel, and Season 8 is definitely building to something with Willow, given recent events.
*** On another note, Anya gets somewhat of a pass since she did ResetButton her own actions at the expense of what she expected to be her life. Faith also gets a pass for willingly being in prison for several years, since that's at least some karmic balance, some permanent change in her life. Willow, more than anyone, is what bothers me. Even if she doesn't go to prison, there should be ''some'' repercussion, some lost trust among friends, some lasting sense of guilt, something substantial. If one good thing came out of the Season 8 comic book, it's that, by bringing Warren back to life, it's at least taken away the reward of her getting revenge, so that her rampage really didn't accomplish anything after all.
** As was said, Willow was insane at the time. If she had been turned in she probably would have gone to an asylum for treatment. Which is exactly what happened to her after season 6. Also what would you tell the police? "She used magic to turn him inside out?" Welcome to the loony bin. And Faith was reformed. She willingly chose to go back to prison because she was reformed. When the world needed her she broke out. (Buffy might have even had Riley use his pull to get a pardon for Faith after she helped Buffy defeat the First. Or Angel as head of Wolfram and Hart might have used his newfound influence to get Faith pardoned.)
** Willow killed two people, both of which were very bad people. The rest she was stopped from doing. This doesn't get her off, but they are mitigating factors. She's also black magicked up. Faith, Anya, Giles even Buffy have a higher kill-count. Also, try sticking Willow in prison or a mental hospital. She gets treated like a normal criminal/patient. She doesn't get any training to counteract her magic addiction. I'd give her a month, maybe two, before she goes loopy again and massacres the whole place. Giles, being the all round clever bugger that he is, knew the proper treatment and saw to it that she got it. Then she helped save the world. Looks like redemption enough to me.
** The closest mundane parallel to Willow's actions that I can think of would be if she was a recovering drug addict who, upon seeing her girlfriend shot, jacked herself up on PCP and adrenaline, killed Warren, tried to kill her associates, then tried to set fire to the town all in a drug-induced rampage. She needed rehab and counseling. Willow probably would have stayed in England for years if she hadn't had to leave early in order to save the world. They didn't bring her back because she was ready. They brought her back because she was the most powerful witch in the world and they couldn't afford to keep her on the sidelines. Same deal with Faith.
** One element that seems to be missing from the discussion of this point is that the shows imply that some of these folks are just too powerful to be dealt with ordinary punishments. Faith can presumably break out of prison without too much effort, and there must be very few witches or warlocks willing to risk fighting Willow unnecessarily. There is very little meaningful chance of imprisoning these folks; short of killing them, the only punishments that can be dealt to them are those that they can be convinced they deserve.
*** Didn't Buffy outright say that they couldn't trust a CardboardPrison with holding Faith after she woke up, and they were trying to figure out ways to take care of her that didn't involve [[AdultsAreUseless the]] [[WhatTheHellHero Watchers]] or killing her?
***** So, TheComplainerIsAlwaysWrong? You basically just said that if you don't agree with the rest of society then you are evil. Plus, think for a moment. She just helped save the world. I think that should get you a full pardon and perhaps a religion to boot.
***** What purpose would she serve by going back to prison? There are three basic views as to the purpose ''of'' prison: to punish, with no purpose other than cruelty (a position that has rather fallen out of favour in the last century or so); to reform, through both punishment and education (a goal which was clearly achieved in Faith's case); and to protect society from those who are dangerous (clearly no longer necessary in Faith's case). So unless you believe in cruelty for cruelty's sake, Faith's further incarceration would have been a pointless waste of a useful, and possibly vital, resource.
****** "To punish, with no purpose other than cruelty (a position that has rather fallen out of favour in the last century or so)"? There is a ''huge'' portion of the general public, if not the majority (certainly the majority in the U.S., and I'm willing to bet the majority around the world when popular public opinion is considered alongside academic theory), that is very firmly in favor of legal punishment as its own virtue. And to those people, that's not "cruelty", it's "justice". Which is really what this whole thing comes down to. Half the fans are saying Willow and Faith were rehabilited and further punishment would be pointless, while the other half are saying that justice itself demands further punishment. Everyone's talking around each other's points because two different moral theories are clashing. There's really no way to compromise between them, and debating which view is "better" would be a topic for an ethics dissertation.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:A Singular Slayer]]
* Why is there (originally) just one slayer? I mean how could a single person in a one-Starbucks town like Sunnydale fight off all the evil in the world? What happens to all the other vampires in the world and why aren't there more towns like the taken-over version of Sunnydale where vampires and demons rule? If flashbacks are any guide, there have been slayers in different parts of the world. Are the slayers just put wherever the most evil happens to be?
** When the slayer was originally created the entire human race lived in fairly close proximity to each other. The slayer could easily move between the few villages. (Yes, the slayer is nearly as old as humanity itself). The group of elders who created her (the group who would go on to become the watchers) didn't have the foresight to think that humanity would spread to a large enough area that one slayer couldn't protect it all. By the time this was apparent they had lost the means to create more than one slayer per generation.
*** Well then that just made the Slayer rather minor then in the modern day, being able to cover only a limited area. One girl to cover the whole world? if 'She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness' was actually true then humanity might as well have lay down and died...
**** She might seem rather minor from one perspective but have you ever noticed that slayers always seem to be where the big bad is hatching his plans? The oft-forgot gift of prophecy really plays tricks on your subconscious.
**** Are you telling me there isn't anywhere else with evil people trying to take over/destroy the world with dark whats-itz and who-zits? One person would never be enough to fight all the magical evil in the world.
***** No, but as we've seen she really isn't the only one to stand against the vampires, etc. That seems to just be theatrics on the side of the Watchers council. (Drogyn being an example of someone else who can. Also most watchers are capable of fighting themselves if they have to.) The gift of prophecy guides them to the apocalypses that cannot be averted without their intervention.
**** Yeah but why aren't Faith and Kendra originally born near the Hellmouth? They eventually show up but what were they doing in their hometowns the whole time? Kendra and Faith were meant to be replacements and if Buffy had actually died and was therefore unable to kill ALL of those vampires and demons, Sunnydale would have become overrun with evil. I doubt there the evil was getting taken care of (which is unlikely, seeing as Kendra believed she was the only slayer). Shouldn't they have been sent to Sunnydale the second they were chosen to be slayers?
***** Buffy was already there.
***** Faith knew that, Kendra didn't. Kendra almost killed Buffy when they first met. Did Kendra and her watcher just know it was being taken care of by some vigilante? Or did Kendra's watcher know a slayer was there and just choose not to tell her for some bizarre reason?
***** Kendra was called there when something was happening that could require both slayers to stop. And yes, I would assume her watcher knew and was just a dick. After all, he made Kendra fly in a cargo hold, didn't he?
***** Besides, Sunnydale already WAS overrun with evil. The entire purpose of its existence was to be overrun with evil. It was founded by a man who made a demon pact to make the town a feeding ground for evil.
** Buffy was NOT born in Sunnydale, nor was she called to be The Slayer there. She was in LA still, and didn't go to Sunnydale until her mother decided to move. Destiny probably drew her there if anything, but Slayer Calling seems to have nothing to do with where most of the evil is at the time. It's simply a contrivance. As for how evil is stopped? Well, who says humans are completely helpless? Sure there's plenty of evil in Sunnydale, but it's literally right next door to Hell. There can't be THAT much evil in the world.
** It is implied that the Watchers council have their own agents around the world who deal with everyday threats, and the Slayer would be called in when something major crops up. However, remember that Buffy is not a "normal" slayer. Kendra is an example of what a "normal" slayer is like, and with her we see that she is sent to Sunnydale by her Watcher when he senses that something big is about to go down. Once the apparent threat is taken care of, she leaves, only to be sent back once the true threat emerges.
*** Also, in "The Wish", we see an example of what Buffy would be like as a "normal" slayer. In this episode's alternate timeline, Giles has to contact the council to arrange for Buffy (who is on other assignments) to be sent to Sunnydale in order to deal with the threat there, with the implication that she would leave once done. The is how the council/slayer organization seems to be intended to work, only Buffy doesn't operate according to the council's orders and wishes to remain in Sunnydale. Luckily Sunnydale is on a hellmouth and is where most of the real bad stuff that a Slayer would be needed for goes down anyway.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Slayer Genes?]]
* So is there a genetic component to being a slayer or is it just a mystical curse that strikes a random girl?
** Sounds more like a curse because as far as we know the Slayer's parents have all been quite normal. And since most Slayers die young, it's unlikely that its passed down genetically, especially since there is only one Slayer per generation. How the girls are chosen is the real question. What happens if a Slayer refuses to accept her duty? What if she physically can't? Is there a clause in the spell that makes the Slayer physically able or are Slayers chosen from those who are?
*** Until Joss states otherwise, I'm going to assume that Slayers are mystically chosen from amongst a pool of those who are physically able to do the job. What happens if the Slayer refuses the job? Well, Buffy tried that. Both the film and the show have her declining the job. Imminent danger and sense of duty changed her mind. For a better example, see Faith in the latter half of season three. She might be an extreme example, but of all the Slayers who've existed over the centuries it's not hard to imagine that one or two either ignored the call, or used it for personal gain. I'm guessing they didn't last too long.
*** Especially considering The Watchers Council's stance on Rogue Slayers, after a certain amount of leeway a Slayer who ignored the call would be killed to call the next one.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampire Pain]]
* In the season 7 episode "Potential", Dawn says that vampires 'feel pain, but don't let it deter them'. If this is true then how come Spike's chip can stop him from killing people.
** The pain from being hit by a regular, non-superpowered teenage girl is probably a lot less severe than an electric shock to the brain.
** Also, there are different components of how pain is processed in the brain. It's not just processed as a physical sensation but also as an emotional experience. It could be that vampires normally feel the physical sensation without the emotional reaction (kind of like someone on valium - they can feel pain but it doesn't bother them) but the emotional reaction part of the pain processing system is still functional and Spike's brain chip activated that system? (It could also be activated in situations where vampires feel pain from something that actually endangers them - after all, vampires seem to have a pretty normal pain reaction to being burnt by sunlight.)
** It could also be Dawn was just saying "Vampires are tough, and [[{{Determinator}} don't let pain stop them]] from trying to kill you." They feel pain, but have Demonic SuperStrength. It's not exactly complicated.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:What was Caleb?]]
* What exactly ''was'' Caleb? Were we ever told? Demon? Some insanely superpowered person? Something else entirely?
** Apparently just some serial killer that the First imbued with portions of its power.
** He was NathanFillion. No other explanation is needed to explain his godly super strength, it's a byproduct of being Nathan Fillion.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Burying Demons]]
* Why did Buffy want to bury the demon at the beginning of 'The Wish'? It doesn't really make sense that she would deliberately ''go out of her way'' to maintain TheMasquerade.
** It looked like it was in the middle of a family picnic spot. Leaving a dead demon stuffed in a back alley is one thing; leaving it where a bunch of little kiddies are going to stumble over it, poke it with sticks, and catch any weird demonic diseases its rotting corpse contains is quite another.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampire Heart Removal, Stake Immunity]]
* This isn't really [=BtVS=]-specific, but applies to all vampires. Vampires die/dust if they get a wooden stake to the heart, right? But since vampires have no pulse, their heart doesn't actually have any biological function. So why doesn't some vampire get a vampire surgeon to cut him open and remove his heart. Then he'd be immune to stakes, right? Even huge great support beams. Throw a blanket over your head and it's as good as the Ring of Amarra.
** ...watch ''Angel''. That actually happened in one episode. He was invincible for a few hours, then inevitable death. Apparently vampires do need their hearts to live. Biology be damned, this is ''mystical''.
** The canonical comic ''Tales of the Vampires'' had a vampire who replaced had his heart replaced with a silver one... which somehow let him go out in the sun and removed the inevitable death part of simply removing the heart, but still allowed him to be killed by decapitation and (presumably) immolation... it never really elaborated why it works like that or why more vampires don't do it.
** It's not the biological function of the heart that's important. It's a mystical thing. Destroy the heart, destroy the vamp. In fact in the Old World of Darkness there was a power that would let a vamp remove his/her heart and bury it in a jar and it would make them more or less invincible. But if the heart were destroyed the vamp would die. And you can't watch it 24/7.
*** Serpentis 5, 'The Heart of Darkness' if anyone's interested.
** It's possible that while putting a vampire's heart in a block of lead in a cement-filled sinkhole would prevent staking, it would also remove the heart from its owner's field of personal space and allow it to be magically immolated with as much ease as a cow heart in the next room.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Buffy and Angel's "Love"]]
* Why exactly do Buffy and Angel think they're in love when all they do is bring out the worst in each other? I used to hate Angel until I saw his spinoff and found out that he's a pretty relaxed and even funny character when Buffy's not around (in fact, he tenses right back up again in the episode I saw where Buffy guested). And when Angel's around all Buffy does is moon over him and ignore her friends. I know love is a complicated thing and all that, but come on! Ultimately being in love, in spite of the difficulties and complications, tends to make people happy. Buffy and Angel are never happy when they're Buffy-and-Angel.
** One of the more realistic aspects of this show is that it's never shied away from the fact that teenagers do dumb things. They're controlled by their hormones, and that often makes them stupid. Buffy is a case in point -- she finds this (much) older guy stalking her, but he's pretty so [[StalkingIsLove it's romantic]]. And ''because'' she's sixteen she decides that her attraction ''must'' be True Love (not to mention Epic Love). Eventually she grew out of this (and a lot of fans were upset about this, because OMG Stalking Is So Romantic).\\
Angel? Well, he's got a history of stalking young women and becoming dangerously fixated on them. If Drusilla's backstory had a point, it was that Angel's relationship with Buffy was '''not''' coming from a healthy place on his end. Remember, he had been stalking her since she was 15.
*** He even showed hints of this in one of the flashbacks before he turned vampire, when he was spying on his family's only servant for a few minutes before he tried to convince her to goof off with him.
*** I agree with much of what's said here, but as far as the stalking is concerned, remember that Angel wasn't stalking Buffy until he was told he should/had to by Whistler. It became his job, and one of the first steps of his attempts at redemption. So...it's definitely still a bit creepy, but at least it's for a somewhat "noble" reason. I think it could be argued that unlike with Drusilla, the love (or attraction, or lust, or whatever you want to call it) develops as he's keeping an eye on her for protection/help, rather than being the reason he begins following her.
** Slightly more Bangel-friendly reasoning: the early part of season 2. The bit where they're actually happy and sweet.
** Just throwing this in here, it seems to me that loving someone who brings out the worst in her is Buffy's human flaw. Probably a trait inherited from her mother. (After all, she's divorced the man of HER dreams. It must be a trait of the Summers' women...what exactly IS Joyce's maiden name? Is it ever mentioned in the show?)
** Little point, but important: If you have really never fallen for someone who made you miserable in some way at some point, I envy you.
** You seem to suffer from what I like to call "The Twilight Delusion" where you think love is a beautiful thing that always brings out the best in people and makes them happy. This is a completely untrue view of love. Love, like any other emotion, can be a bad thing. Some women who are beaten love their abusers, a stalker loves the object of his/her affection, etc. Just because two people are in love doesn't mean they are right for each other. And also, Buffy and Angel have a pretty unique situation. Under different circumstances, they might be able to make each other happy.
*** Let's let Spike sum it up: You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Love isn't brains, children, it's blood, blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it.
** They don't always bring out the worst in each other - or no more than many of the other characters do when they fall in love. Eg: Xander and Cordelia, Xander and Anya, Spike and ANYONE he loves, and so on. I think Buffy and Angel's love was always complicated by the fact that they had sexual tension up to their eyeballs and no way to relieve it, and the way Angel was aware he was never going to be able to have her on a long-term basis. In Season 1 Angel had a GuiltComplex and Buffy was kind of immature, they were happy for a while in Season 2, but then when Angel went evil for a while both must have known that their relationship was a ticking bomb. It was complicated and difficult and was hurting them both intensely, so it's really no surprise that their love at that time was never going to work out. However, as Buffy says in S7, in the future... :)
*** Which isn't the point Buffy was making at all. Angel took the Cookie Dough speech to mean "Give me time and then we'll be together" when the point of it was that things change, people change, and there's no way of knowing who she'll be in the future or who she'll be with when she's become the person she's going to be as an adult. It was Angel that pushed the, "Who's going to enjoy cookie Buffy?" question, which Buffy answered with "I haven't really thought that far ahead."
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Christian God in Buffyverse?]]
* So, is there a Christian God in the Buffyverse? I would think not, given Joss Whedon's views on the "Sky Bully," and also the crap-sack nature of most of the multiverse. But if there's no Christian god... why does the crucifix repel or harm vampires?
** From what I hear, they always did. Christianity was a very anti-vampire religion, so whatever damaged vampires was deigned holy, rather than the other way around.
*** And it's specifically Christian crosses. There was some episode where Willow made a reference to having to hide the crosses from her Jewish family, so obviously non-Christian symbols don't have the same effect. And it seems (unless Plot deems otherwise) that only crosses specifically invoked as a defensive measure worked (otherwise vampires would definitely not be hanging around graveyards, Christian crosses are all over the place).
**** Unlikely. Spike seems to be harmed by a cross in a church in season 7, after he's resouled. I doubt that cross was put there for defensive purposes (although with Sunnydale, you never know).
**** I'm guessing that the "Christianity appropriated pre-existing anti-vampire rites and artifacts" view is most likely correct. Crosses in general and Crucifixions in specific predated Christ by a good deal, so maybe someone noticed that vampires never tried to turn anyone on a cross and decided to run with it.
*** This Just Bugs Me. If Christianity is/was so dedicated to fighting vampires, why are so many denominations, Catholicism in particular, obssessed with burying bodies intact, when burning/staking/decapitating corpses would be an excellent method of preventing a loved one from rising as a vampire?
** Well, the devil exists. (He built a robot, remember?) I would assume god must also, as it seems weird for a show to say the devil does and god doesn't.
*** But how do we know he's '''the''' Devil? Any sufficiently advanced demon could ''claim'' to be the devil, and in the cosmology of the show (which, let's not forget, includes Egyptian and Roman deities as forces that can be summoned and entreatied) we'd have no way of knowing he was lying.
*** Wesley confirmed that the devil had, indeed, created a robot. Wesley isn't the kind who would state that if it wasn't known for sure the devil had built it.
**** The same problem exists. How does Wesley know it's '''the''' Devil and not just a sufficiently advanced demon? Let's not forget the Watcher's Council is based in Britain, where they have more than 1,000 years of accepting Christian cosmology as ''fact'' -- the older accounts of the Watcher's Council probably attribute ''everything'' supernatural to "the Devil" without examining the details too closely.
**** The Watcher's council isn't a religious group. They are the direct descendants of the group that created the Slayer. They are (and always have been) truth seekers. The first thing you learn as a Watcher is to separate fantasy and reality, remember? So when a Watcher says something was created by the devil, I'll take them at face value on it. If it was made by an advanced demon, Wesley's response wouldn't be, "Yes, El Diablo Robotico," it would be "Yes, an advanced demon claiming to be the devil did indeed make a robot."
***** Just to be clear... this is the same Watcher's Council that had Spike's age listed as "barely 200", right? Clearly they know everything there is to know about demons in general, including the exact truth about those notable for lying a lot.
***** That was due to Spike's backstory not being at all developed in his first appearance. Angel has a lot of inconsistency in his age as well. That's a writing problem, not a Watcher's council problem. But again, if Wesley didn't know for sure that it was the devil his respone would be "A demon claiming to be the devil built a robot." not "yes, the devil built a robot." (not exact quotes but I think you get the point)
** You're arguing from a false premise. The existence of the Devil doesn't prove the existence of any God, much less the Christian version.
*** It's a perfectly valid premise. The Christian god created ''the'' devil, so if the devil exists his creator must as well. That's like saying that arguing my mom must have lived because I'm alive is a arguing a false premise because my existence doesn't prove my mom's. And that would just be nutty.
**** Not the same thing. To use your example -- your existence proves that you had a mother. It doesn't prove that the woman you assume to be your mother ''is'' your mother -- that would take a DNA test, or an eyewitness who was present at your birth and can be fairly certain you weren't switched with someone else at a later date.\\
The problem with this "proof" is that the only evidence that the Judaeo-Christian God created the Devil is Judaeo-Christian religious writings. Which can only be assumed to be true if the existence of God -- and therefore their divine provenance -- is already accepted as ''fact''. Which it can't be without evidence. In other words, the existence of the Devil (assuming Wesley was right -- and he's often been wrong) only proves the existence of God if you accept the existence of God as already proven. As it is, for all we know the Devil could have invented God himself, and fooled everybody with the fiction that there's some benevolent higher power who created him when he was actually created by, for example, the First Evil.
**** I'm just going to start by saying I'm an atheist and have been arguing just from an IU perspective. But this is TheDevil. A character that originally comes from Christian mythology. In other words the only proof the devil exists is from judaeo-christian writings. Even if you don't think his existence proves beyond a doubt the existence of the christian god in the buffy verse, it goes a long way to show that he does exist. If there is no god but there is the devil that means there is ultimate evil without an ultimate good to balance it, and the balance between good and evil was a major theme of Angel.
***** The only evidence in our world is Judaeo-Christian writings. In the Buffyverse -- well, there's a bunch of luchadores who claim to have fought a robot built by the Devil (or possibly '''a''' devil -- their use of the definite article could have been due to familiarity with this individual). At the risk of repeating myself -- a being either claiming to be the Devil or assumed by the luchadores to be the Devil has made its presence known. You can only extrapolate the existence of God from ''that'' event if you accept Judaeo-Christian theology as fact.
***** But the watchers were aware of this robot as well and also used the definite article. it's the only time the question has ever been directly dealt with in the show itself. (Once someone [I think Tara] asked and Buffy just said that there was no evidence either way). But you do have a point. Perhaps YHWH was one of the powers.
***** In support of the hypothesis that the Devil that built the robot need not be the Christian Devil, it's worth noting that one of the members of the Council of the Black Thorn is Izzerial the Devil, who seems to be just a demon of sorts and not a force of ultimate evil or anything like that.
*** If I'm remembering correctly, the only real discussion of this occurs when Angel asks if Wesley ever "heard of" a robot built by the devil. Wesley's respose is "El Robotico Diablo? Why?". That doesn't confirm the existence of a robot built by the devil -- just that Wes has heard a ''story'' of the devil building a robot before.
** To get back to second part the original question, I believe that WordOfGod states that only Christian objects harm vampires because Christianity has a long history of fighting vampires, though I can't find where I read that. However, I once read a fan fic that explained the weakness to crosses was because crosses have an association with the sun and that holy water works because the act of blessing it is actually a spell that imbues it with anti-vampire properties, an explanation which makes a lot more sense.
** Didn't the psychologist-vampire that analyzed Buffy in "Conversations with Dead People" ask about just that, and Buffy said that there was no proof against it and none for it? So basically the same as it is in our world.
*** Yep, her exact words were "nothing solid". Which makes sense, given that, as said, although Christian rites and beliefs have power in the Buffyverse, so do lots of other rites and beliefs. And her experience in Heaven was so vague and fuzzy that it's hard to say what it proves. Still, there's nothing to say that God doesn't exist in the Buffyverse. The characters themselves just can't be sure, because there's so much crazy supernatural stuff going on that it's hard to sort it all out. The [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane snow scene at the end of "Amends"]], or Angel being allowed to break the no-entry rule to save Detective Lockley, were both taken by the characters as a sign from above - though again, figuring out whether any apparent miracle is God, the Powers that Be or some {{Chessmaster}} demon at work is part of the problem. The First claimed to be the one who saved Angel from the hell dimension, but that was never confirmed, and everything else the First said to Angel was a lie. Maybe it was God? Or the Powers that Be? Or Jasmine? Or Wolfram & Hart? Or a freak metaphysical accident? Or maybe it just plain was the First after all. Those are the sort of problems the Scoobies face in trying to answer the religion question, and it's not much different from the debates people have in the real world.
** The Christian god is, by definition, unique. So, if there's another god in the buffyverse, the Christian god can't exist. Isn't Glory defined as a god? (E.g. at the very end of "Checkpoint")
*** There are henotheistic elements in Judeo-Christianity, which is why God's given the Old Testament title "God of Gods". That's also how a lot of fantasy series (''[[XenaWarriorPrincess Xena]]'' and ''[[HerculesTheLegendaryJourneys Hercules]]'' come to mind) manage to squeeze Christianity into a pantheistic setting. There are [[PhysicalGod gods]], and then there's {{God}}.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Is Oz Dangerous?]]
* Why is Oz considered dangerous in werewolf form? He never actually hurt an innocent/ally (apart from superficial scratches), despite lots of opportunities. The only one he seriously hurt was Veruca, and she was trying to kill Willow at the time.
** He tried repeatedly. On at least two occasions he had to be shot with tranquiliser darts to prevent him from attacking people. On his first night out, he attacked the Bronze.
*** He also turned on Willow after ripping out Veruca's throat, and Buffy tackling him and pumping him full of tranqs was the only thing shown stopping him from continuing his attack. Buffy ''explicitly states'' that Willow would have died if Buffy had been held up by the run-in with the Initiative even a few seconds longer, and Oz (what with having no memory from wolfing out) is in no position to argue, and in fact [[WorldOfCardboardSpeech does not]].
*** Of course, there was also that time - during the day, no less - when he tried to kill Tara.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Buffy and Dawn Don't Have Wallets]]
* This is probably the tiniest IJBM ever, but here we go: Season Six, "Tabula Rasa". The gang loses their memory, Willow gets the idea of looking in their wallets for ID. But Buffy and Dawn ''don't have wallets''. Seriously? I know it's to set up the Joan/Umad joke, but come on. Dawn maybe, but Buffy's an adult with photo ID and bank-cards.
** Which she didn't necessarily bring with her. She doesn't drive, so she doesn't need to make sure to have her license on her when out and about, and I doubt she was planning to buy anything at the magic shop.
** The real question we should ask ourselves is: If the gang bothered to look through their person for possible locations for a wallet, why did none of them find the black crystal thingie that gave them amnesia in the first place? Sure some of them might've stopped looking after finding their wallets, but I believe Giles' was '''right in his coat pocket'''. How could he miss that?
*** Willow probably did find the black crystal, but having no memory probably thought "Oh, a black cyrstal" and got on with things.
*** What? Willow was the only one carrying a crystal, the spell just got overpowered as too much Lithe's bramble got burned. What made you think they all had a crystal? The only crystal falls out of Willow's pocket and is stepped on by Xander ending the spell.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampire Evolution]]
* The ancient uber-vamps are meant to be, in general, much tougher than modern vampires - then why the hell did modern vampires evolve that way? The point of evolution is survival; true they needed to become more human-looking, so they didn't die, but they probably should have kept the thicker ribcages.
** According to Giles, "As Neanderthals are to human beings, the Turok-Han are to vampires. They're a primordial, ferociously powerful killing machine, as single-minded as animals. They are the vampires that vampires fear. An ancient and '''entirely different''' race, and until this morning, I thought they were a myth." Modern vampires aren't descended from Turok-Han, just related to them, like us to Neanderthals.
** Moreover, vampires are plenty tough without being Turok-Han. And the more human in appearance, the more likely they are to blend, and the more humans they'll be able to turn, increasing their number.
** I also think that the first Turok-Han we saw was getting a power-up from the First, the same was that Caleb was. The later "uber-vamps" weren't nearly as tough.
** I always thought of the Turok-Han as just really old vampires, whose features changed over time along with their strength (like the Master).
** OK, try this one on for size: The Turok-Han were an earlier form of vampire, created before the Old Ones left. When the normal vampires showed up they were competing for the same resources, so ended up battling the Turok-Han. Obviously the Turok-Han were tougher, but the vampires were smarter, able to pass as human and probably able to turn humans more successfully, so they wiped out the Turok-Han. Except for a handful the First saved and hid under the future site of Sunnydale and slowly fed prisoners to turn into more of them.
** I always thought of the Turok-Han as a "pure" vampire. Since vamps are supposed to be human/demon hybrids, the Turok-Han would be a pure vampire demon without that pesky, fragile, human shell.
** Vampires cannot evolve. They do not breed, and evolution requires breeding.
*** They wouldn't have to evole, just be created by a similar source. Evidence for this: In Episode 2 Giles says that vampires were created by the last Old One to leave this dimension, but Illyria on ''Angel'' , who predates that time, remembers vampires from her time. So maybe she remembers the originally created Turok Han and the vampires we know were created later, resulting in the above suggested conflict.
**** That makes sense, as the last Old One created vamps as a last-ditch measure to maintain a presence on Earth. Giles isn't saying that the vampires evolved from the Turok-Han, just that the Turok-Han and vampires came from the same source: the last Old One. The Turok-Han were probably the foot soldiers in that particular Old One's army, created from a portion of its power. Later on, the same Old One used the last of its power in a different way, to infect human beings and change them into vampires. So the vampires and Turok-Han come from the same source and could be considered relatives, but, just like humans and Neandethals, neither one evolved from the other.
*** Vampires are TheVirus. This leaves plenty of room for evolution.
**** Evolution necessitates mutation. As far as we can tell, being sired by a vampire means acquiring all the standard strengths and weaknesses of vampirism, even with exceptional circumstances. Drusilla, for example, sired Spike, but he doesn't acquire any of her extra superpowers. Nor does Darla, who was sired by the Master. The only exception is Sam Lawson, sired when Angel had a soul and thus unable to take sadistic pleasure in the various vampiric atrocities, but that was an exceptionally unique case, and we don't know if Sam would have passed his "condition" down if he had sired anyone else. In short, vampires can't evolve because vampirism never changes: being sired is being sired, and you always get the same situation afterwards.
***** Though the fact that having a soul effects the vampires one sires suggests that the human side does have at least a tiny bit of influence on vampirism, and humans are theoretically a constantly evolving species. It would at least lead to vampires having different mental capabilities and initial physical structures as time goes on.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Mummy Storage]]
* In "Life Serial," why is the mummy hand just lying/crawling around in the storeroom? Shouldn't it be in a cage or something? If ''Buffy'' had such a hard time with it, how would any of the others be expected to get it for a customer? Maybe there's some way to deal with it she doesn't know about, but then, no one tells her. It's a relatively minor complaint that ''does'' make for a ''hilarious'' montage, but really ...
** It was suggested to this troper that the hand had escaped.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Why the Season 6 and 7 Hatred?]]
* I am wondering, why is it that people seem to dislike season six and seven? I found them quite interesting, and do not understand why there is so much negativity towards those seasons?
** For this troper, seasons six and seven sucked because IMO, the Scoobies had turned into nasty jerks at that point. They had become overly judgmental assholes who thought they were better than everyone else. And they started out as the dorks! I felt way more sympathy for Anya, Spike, Faith, and pretty much every other demon/vamp/what have you by the time season six was over. The only character who always stayed true to form for me was Giles. Loved him just as much as I did when the show started.
** Season six was a good idea executed poorly. Willow becoming addicted to power: good idea. Willow taking magical hits from a magic drug dealer: lame in an after-school special way. But season six still had a number of wonderful episodes. Season seven is widely disliked for several reasons. At the beginning of the season, the writers were trying to make the Scoobies quippy and fun, just like they were in earlier seasons. However, they weren't the same people anymore, and the dialogue just made them sound blithe and callous. As many tropers above noticed, people who do bad things got off lightly - Willow in "The Killer and Me" never expresses regret for killing Warren, Andrew becomes one of the gang (he goes from Spike S4 to Spike S6 in the course of five episodes), and Buffy says she'll let Spike KILL Wood just because Wood wanted revenge for his mom. And then the biggest problem is Spike - he's kind of insane early in the season, but even after he mostly gets his mind back, he still just acts like a whiny baby. He never talks about his guilt, and in the one scene that the writers were planning on making him do just that, Joss came in and rewrote it to be about how Buffy used him in the previous season(!) Really, the show becomes all about Buffy and Spike - she repeatedly says he's the strongest one the Scoobies have got, which seems slightly ridiculous since every time they've clashed with him, he's never won, and their soapy scenes just have not been earned. Not to mention all the major plot hole in the ending - Buffy's plan, by itself, would've gotten everyone killed, if not for the MacGuffin that Angel delivers to them. (On the DVDCommentary, Joss all but says outright he didn't really have a great idea to end the show, since he used his series finale at the end of season five.)
*** The problem with complaining about the writers having to include a to power Maguffin in the plot for the plan to work is that the only reason there was an enemy that powerful was because the writers created them. Writer fiat works on both sides.
*** They are fighting a war. You can't have infighting in a war. The only threat that they could use was death, so she used it. Also, I thought they sounded fine, and like I said elsewhere in this page, if you regret killing a murderer, you should be tortured to the brink of death, revived, and have this done to you until you die of old age. Oh, and if Spike turned on them, think of someone who is already Caleb level strong, and then give him a power boost. Game over. Also, Andrew only really became part of the gang at the end, they still treated him like shit most of the time. Oh, and the Scoobies ARE better than everyone else. They are the ONLY people who can prevent the end of the world. That INSTANTLY makes them better than everyone else. I still agree with Faith's Want, Take, Have idea, as the law shouldn't matter when you are trying to prevent the end of the world (again).
*** I found Season 6 and 7 got better as I got older. I came to Buffy late, and watched all the episodes when I was about 16-18, and much more enjoyed the high school seasons, when the characters were 16-18. Now that I'm approaching 20, I suddenly understand the later season much more. Having had a minor substance problem, I don't even see Willow's storyline as being Narmic anymore, because the experience is Narmic in reality, and I hated Willow's storyline originally. The schizophrenic nature of Season 4, the sense of lack of place of Season 5 and 6, now all make a lot more sense now I'm older, and I like them almost as much as the earlier season.
*** I also came to Buffy late (I was 20 by the time I started watching), and I found that season 6 was really very good. Maybe it also benefits from marathon viewing instead of waiting a week between episodes, I'm not sure. But I felt that the themes and ideas of season 6 really worked for me. No, it isn't the best season (an honor I would assign to season 5), but it was definitely not terrible, either. Season 7 was deeply flawed and there were a lot of times I felt the writers had just entirely forgotten what the characters were like (the mutiny being a massive wallbanger for me), but I still don't think it was the worst season. I'd say the first season was the worst, not because it was bad, but because it hadn't yet found its footing or uncovered the depth the series would later develop.
** My take. I quite like Season 6. As noted above, it should have been "power corrupts", not "drugs are bad", and it certainly isn't the *best* season, but a lot of it is quite good. Season 7 is just bad. There's almost nothing worth watching in it- the only episodes with any merit at all are "Same Time, Same Place" and "Conversations with Dead People" (and the latter solely for the Buffy/Holden bits). Why? Mostly I think because the writers forgot the series was supposed to be light-hearted and not take itself too seriously and tried to make everything much too dark. The focus on the potentials (most of whom are not well-acted) and Buffy herself (who has always been one of the weakest characters) at the expense of the rest of the main cast didn't help. Buffy's endless pointless speeches are a particular sore point. The plot is also stupid- actually not the main problem, I don't think, but it doesn't help. The First was a stupid idea for an adversary from the beginning. The ubervamps were not scary and completely dull. And if we're nitpicking, how about the idea that you could spend days in a crowded house with someone and not notice they were **** incorporeal***** !!!! (used *twice*, please).
** For this troper, aside from considering "The Gift" to be the perfect season finale, I didn't like Season 6 because it didn't make any sense compared to the previous seasons. Just using the most obvious examples: everyone was disproportionately concerned with the most mundane of things (Xander and Anya's issues, Buffy and Spike's hate-fucking, Buffy's employment, Dawn ''shoplifting'', etcetera) despite enduring multiple Apocalyses and endless instances of murder and mayhem (Giles bursting into laughter near the end of the season summarises my thoughts on the matter), and despite previously pounding the crap out of a literal PhysicalGod Buffy has trouble with three idiots who had no idea what they were doing (The SortingAlgorithmOfEvil may be annoying sometimes, but it exists for a reason). The season isn't necessary bad, it is simply a bad ''Buffy'' season. Season 7, however, was just a mess in every way.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Crosses and Holy Water]]
* In ''Buffy'', vampires have existed since before the crucifixion. At what point did crosses become harmful to them? And holy water, for that matter...?
** Perhaps it's incidental. A bunch of Romans mages got together and decided on a symbol to ward off vampires and settled on crosses because they're relatively common and easy to make. Then Jesus got nailed to one and everyone started wearing 'em, because nothing pleases someone more than seeing a representation of their method of execution. Couldn't say holy water.
** Maybe they don't harm vampires because they're holy; they're holy because they harm vampires. Whatever property these objects have that causes them to harm vampires was considered confirmation that they were, in fact, holy.
** Maybe it's backed up by belief, and anything considered holy by a sufficiently large quantity of people has that effect on vampires. They use crosses in the show, because the Watchers, as well as the residents of Sunnydale, are from a predominantly Christian culture and thus naturally assume that crosses are holy, and use them. To my knowledge, it's never verified that other popular holy symbols don't work. It only even comes up when Willow brings up that the Rosenbergs might not appreciate having crosses nailed to their walls, and at that point in the show, she probably wouldn't think to question Giles. It is entirely possible that if she had tried nailing a Star of David to her wall or brandishing a menorah, it would have worked just as well.
** Before it became a Christian symbol, the cross was a symbol for the sun, and in magic a symbol for a thing can stand in for the real thing. Another ancient symbol for Christianity is the fish. Imagine a meeting of early Christians debating what their primary symbol should be. In the middle of the debate between the cross, and the fish proponents a bunch of vampires attack. The fish proponents wave their fishes at the vampires and get eaten. The cross proponents survive.
** Even the vampires don't know for certain. The Master, a vampire who is probably older than Christianity, wonders why he is so afraid of crosses while staring at one. To him, it's nothing but a couple planks of wood glued together. But it still fills his heart with dread.
*** According to WordOfGod, The Master is only about 600-800.
** Theory put forward in one of the unauthorised ''Buffy'' guides is that the early Christian church effectively "tweaked" the rules of reality (just as Willow later does with the scythe) and charges the objects sacred to their faith with anti-vampire mojo. That would also account for the absurdly useful invitation rule.
*** Why would the Christian church need to have had anything to do with the "absurdly useful" invitation rule? Threshold law is, in a number of religions (particularly wicca and most variations of witchcraft, including [[InterfaithSmoothie Joss's written and Willow's practiced version]]), an inherent property of a place being a home. That's why the dorm rooms (at least shortly after Buffy and Kathy moved in) didn't count, and nor do hotel rooms, because they are merely the place of residence for the people within and don't have the connection of being their home from which to draw power of threshold law. Vampires just happen to be one of the many demonic or magical species that aren't [[DependingOnTheWriter blind/powerless/lucky]] enough to ignore it the way humans can.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Spike's Chip Kicking In]]
* So in season 4, Spike gets this chip installed into his brain that causes excruciating pain when he tries to harm a human. Okay. Then why does it ONLY kick in when he tries to bite Willow? What, did his escape and him throwing her around not count?
** It probably just took a while to kick in and Willow was just lucky it began to work when it did.
** Actually, it kicks in as soon as he gets out of his cage. During the struggle with the two doctors, you can see he pushes them out of the way a lot, but he actually ''attacks'' just once. That one time, he screams in pain. People just don't remember that particular moment, the first time around, because ''they don't know the chip is there'', yet, so they assume someone or something hit Spike, and that's why he's screaming... but he's the one hitting. Next time we see him, he's at Willow's place.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Why Contain Daryl?]]
* In the Season 2 episode "Some Assembly Required", I don't understand why they'd have to keep Daryl locked up like that. Is it because of the government? I think they'd be ''very'' happy and rewarding to people who know how to bring people back from the dead. Give mom a heart attack? Solve this problem by not letting her see him until they think it's the right time. Or, avoid all of the above issues by getting him a fake identity. All the scars on his face? Yeah, they're freaky as hell. But I've seen people who faces scarred even worse than that still living their lives, and the worst I've seen is people staring at them, never anything like getting screamed at for daring to show their faces in public. Makeup could also at least make the scars a bit less creepy. And his insanity seemed to have come from desperation and loneliness, so... yeah.
** Daryl was the one who wouldn't come out in public. At one point his brother tried to convince him to come out, he said no. At a guess I'd say it was because he'd been the guy every girl wanted and was now all scarred and green.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Angel and Angelus--Which When?]]
* Why oh why do fans refer to the evil Angel as Angelus? It's one thing in conversation when the two must be differentiated between, or when discussing his past, when he did go by that name, but it shows up online in episode descriptions, even cast lists. He IS Angel. The Scoobies and Spike and Dru only call him Angel. He flat out says that he is Angel in "Innocence". Why all the "Angelus"?
** Because his name is Angelus. The demon with an angel's face. Angel is just a shortening of the name Angelus. If you look into the flashback sequences of his history, he was always Angelus after he ceased to be Liam; it's only this modern Angelus with a soul that is considered "Angel".
*** But that directly contradicts the show. When Buffy tells him he's not Angel, he insists that he is. He is only referred to as Angel after that. The only people that call him Angelus are people that knew him way back when, and then they usually stop. The de-souled Angel is only ever referred to as "Angel". Therefore, the only time Angelus should be used is when referring to his past actions.
*** It's a question of semantics. There isn't a correct or incorrect name for him, whether it's Liam, Angelus, Angel, The Magnificent Poof, etc. When Buffy tells him that he isn't Angel and he insists that he is, they're not arguing a case of what name she should call him, they're talking about the person that name represents. A name is, ultimately, just that: a name. Spike refers to him as Angelus a few times while he still has his soul; it doesn't mean he IS Angelus while he has a soul, it's just a name, and with the exception of Jasmine, names don't hold any power over the individual wearing them. Ultimately, fans refer to the evil Angel as Angelus because it just makes it easier to differentiate between the two. The show also started doing this after Angel's series picked up; you never heard Angelus referred to as Angel on his spinoff. There isn't any right or wrong reason for it; it's just simpler than "The Good Angel" and "The Evil Angel who wasn't Angelus because he lost his soul after he had regained it but was basically Angelus going by the name Angel".
** 'Cause it's just easier that way!
** Interesting side note: Drusilla refers to Angel as "Angelus" when he ''has'' a soul, and "Angel" after he becomes evil.
*** Dru's insane. Also, the reason for it is because it's how it's done in ''{{Angel}}''.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Angel's Responsibility for Angelus' Actions]]
* The way I understand it, a Buffyverse vampire is essentially a demon possessing a human corpse. This would imply that Angel and Angelus are two completely different beings. So why does everyone act as though the reensouled Angel is responsible for Angelus' crimes? I'm thinking in particular of Giles's attitude after Angel returned in season three and Angel's own periodic bouts of intense guilt.
** Living body plus soul: Liam. Corpse plus demon: Angelus. Corpse plus demon plus soul: Angel. The motive force for Angel and Angelus is the same demon, so they're sort of the same person. Or at least that's how it's usually described. At any rate, Angel can feel responsible for anything Angelus did post-curse because Angel could've prevented it by killing himself rather than risk happiness.
*** But he didn't know about the happiness clause in the curse, did he?
**** Since when has logic ever stood in the way of Angel (or any character on the show, for that matter) feeling guilty?
*** Everything that Angelus became is a direct consequence of a conscious choice that Liam made. Darla offered to make him a vampire. He wasn't mislead, he wasn't taken by force, the choice was laid squarely in his lap and he said, of his own free will and his own volition, "Show me your world." Liam may not be Angelus, but everything that Angelus has ever done is because Liam chose to become Angelus.
**** Darla never said anything about vampirism. How could Liam have possibly known? Boy just thought he was going to get laid.
** There's a bit of dialog between Holtz and Wesley in Angel [=S3=] "Loyalty" that gets at some of the question nicely.
** Angelus killed Giles' girlfriend and tried to kill most of the Scoobies. Interlectually they might know that Angelus and Angel are different people, but emotionally they still see the monster. Same for Angel's guilt. He might know that it wasn't really him doing all those terrible things, but it still feels like it was him.
--->'''Wesley''': If it's a sacrifice you require, take me. Angel's no more responsible for the crimes of Angelus than I am.
--->'''Holtz''': Really?
--->'''Wesley''': Yes.
--->'''Holtz''': And was it your hands that held down my beloved Caroline as she was violated and murdered? That wrapped themselves around my son's neck and snapped it like kindling? Where yours hands that clutched at my daughter as she was turned into a creature damned for all eternity?
** In a major aspect Wesley is right, the modern Angel is disconnected from the entity that performed atrocities. Yet there's also a lot of common links, material and psychological. Plus, people that have been profoundly hurt by Angelus aren't always rational. It's like the same problem of seeing a friend/lover turned evil except in reverse.
*** In a way, it'd be even ''more'' frustrating, finding out that the vampire who tortured, raped and killed the people you love is now an innocent, good man. You're denied justice forever, you're not even allowed to hate him anymore because now he's a different person. I can see how some sufficiently enraged victims would just shift their rage onto Angel instead and keep going. And since we know from "Orpheus" that Angelus is [[AndIMustScream conscious and trapped inside Angel]] all the time, torturing Angel and making him suffer does make Angelus suffer too. It's just that such vengeance requires torturing the innocent human soul in the way (something Holtz, at least, had no problem with).
** In a major way, it's similar to feeling guilty over things one does if one is drunk and/or on drugs. There's a difference here, in that drunks and drug addicts chose to start whatever they do, but the principle is still the same. Your mind and heart may not have been behind it, but you still did it.
*** I'd imagine Angel does feel exactly that kind of guilt, since his vampirism began with being tempted by Darla into the alley. He probably asks himself every day why he had to be in the pub that fateful night, why he followed Darla instead of realizing something's wrong and backing off, why he was living a life that crossed their paths at all.
** Buffy doesn't hold him responsible at all. This is partially influenced by her love for Angel, but she was also the first to understand the difference between Angel and Angelus. She knew Angel better than anyone, and while what Angelus did in the bedroom scene was evil, most of the emotional agony Buffy went through was the result of learning that her lover had been replaced by a psychotic killer, and that ''she'' was responsible for that.
*** Buffy isn't always right. She was willing to let the whole world die if it meant protecting Dawn, she refused to stake Spike in seasons four and five on the grounds that he's harmless despite him repeatedly and consistently proving otherwise on several occasions, she unchained ensouled Spike as a demonstration of her trust in him season seven despite the First's trigger for him to go berserk and kill everyone having not yet been disabled, she pursued Faith to L.A. on a pure vengeance kick and gave Angel hell for daring to try and save her, she has a consistent personal tendency to, when under the influence of a spell affecting multiple persons, believe that she's been unaffected due to some mystical Slayer immunity to magic that doesn't actually exist (see: "Something Blue", "Him"), Buffy has been wrong or done the wrong thing on countless occasions. She's not a perfect, flawless hero, and her opinion on a matter is not an absolute truth. It's true that Buffy, personally, doesn't hold Angel at all responsible for anything Angelus ever did, but there's no reason to assume that just because Buffy believes it, it's right. Angel DOES hold Angel responsible for everything Angelus did, and I think he knows Angel better than Buffy does.
**** No one is always right. "X isn't always right" followed by a list of things x did wrong isn't an argument against x being right in this instance. Also, Angel holding himself responsible for Angelus's actions doesn't mean he actually is responsible. After all, is someone who has survivors guilt after their family is killed in a random electrical fire responsible for their family's deaths? One of the the recurring themes with the character is blaming himself. To believe he actually is responsible is to miss one of the character's central arcs throughout both shows.
***** In Angel's case, he explicitly states that, even though he has his human soul back, the demon half of him is still inside of him and his current persona is an amalgam of the two. Liam may be the dominant half, but Angelus is still in there and still active. He DID do all the things he was blamed for and enjoyed every moment of it, but getting Liam back gave him back his guilt and inhibitions. As shown in the episode with the starlet that tried to [[ItMakesSenseInContext reverse vampire date rape him]], he's capable of cheerfully performing Angelus style acts if his inhibitions are removed, soul or no soul.
**** It's perhaps most clearly shown in S4 {{Angel}} when Faith is in Angel/Angelus' mind - after he got a soul, he still drank innocent blood at least once. Maybe, since people with souls can be evil too, Angel has an darker side, and simply assumes that that's Angelus - so when he feels like doing something wrong, he thinks it's because he's still part-Angelus and what Angelus did was because of the darker part of himself. Because vampires are basically the worst of us, Angel probably thinks that must mean he was (and is) a worse person than everybody else in order to do those things.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Willow--Bisexual, Lesbian, Queer?]]
* Why is it that Willow seems to completely forget her sexual attraction to men? Now, I liked Willow/Tara very much, but this bisexual troper is annoyed by this oversight. (Also, Oz was cool. Way better than Kennedy, way more alive than Tara in Season 7 and later. But this is aside the point.)
** This is a textbook example of NoBisexuals. My theory is that the writers are afraid of [[ViewersAreMorons accidentally implying that Willow's lesbianism was just a phase]] if they have her start dating men again.
** This troper thinks that she ''was'' still attracted to men, only she was in denial about it. Witness her reaction to Giles singing in "Where The Wild Things Are", and to Dracula.
** Willow also seemed insecure about identifying as a lesbian. Remember when she flipped at Tara, sarcastically apologizing for not having as much "lesbian cred" or something like that? (I think this was in season 5, but I'm not sure.) Willow seemed to identify as lesbian because the women she was involved with needed the assurance that she wouldn't leave them for a guy - bisexuals get that a LOT, as stupid as it sounds. So it was an image thing for her.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Joyce, Buffy, and Natural vs. Supernatural Death]]
* Joyce's and Buffy's deaths. Does it bother anyone else that after Joyce died there was an entire episode about how bringing people back to life is unnatural and wrong but then this is completely ignored in favor of reviving Buffy? True she's the slayer but after well established rules and showing that it's wrong to defy death it's really annoying that she is revived so arbitrarily. It's even more annoying when put in the perspective that she can get revived because she's the Slayer but apparently her mother, Kendra, Jenny Calendar, Anya, Jonathan and more, can't be revived because they're not important enough.
** She can be revived not because she was the Slayer, but because she was killed directly and explicitly by magic (as opposed to, say, a brain haemorrhage, a cut throat, a broken neck or a knife wound). Yeah, it's still fairly arbitrary, but it's got nothing to do with "importance".
** I think what the troper meant was plot importance as opposed to in universe importance. It can't be Buffy the Vampire Slayer without a Buffy. The writers didn't need to bring back the other characters because they weren't Buffy.
** The explanation really doesn't help. I know that's why it was possible but it annoys me to no end.
*** Especially since it turns Joyce's death and Buffy's subsequent explanation about natural order a BrokenAesop.
*** On the other hand, it has been repeatedly implied that the Scoobies made the ''wrong decision'' in bringing her back. That's certainly Buffy's opinion throughout Season Six, and if they hadn't revived her, there would have been no problems with the First.
*** It's also pretty clear that they all had reservations before doing it. They knew it was wrong, they just chose to ignore that.
** That whole mystic death thing is never clearly defined anyway. Death by vampire, demon, or human isn't mystic but death by summoned spider demon apparently is. Basically all the writers just decided that everyone who wasn't Buffy died by non mystical means but Buffy is the one exception even though jumping into the portal shouldn't have killed her and it should've been the fall that did it.
*** The spider demon only existed because of Anya, so yeah, mystical.
*** Spike managed to endure the fall without much injury, and Buffy is explicitly stronger than vampires, so the portal was most probably the cause of her death.
** I thought death by Vampire/Demon/Spell did count. But mortals bringing mortals back from the dead is incredibly difficult (since the universe is stacked against humanity), so Buffy was the only one the Scoobies bothered bringing back.
*** It should also be pointed out that the MacGuffin used to resurrect Buffy was destroyed during the resurrection spell because of the intervention of the biker demons, and was clearly stated repeatedly to be the last of its kind.
*** Of course, the main powering influence behind Buffy's resurrection was Willow, the new leader of the Scoobies. And this was while she was going through her "magic solves everything let me use more" approach to problem solving. When others in the show died, she wasn't an addict - and, in fact, when Joyce died close to the start of her serious magic addiction she did encourage Dawn by causing the book with the resurrection spell to slide out enough to become visible. What they did was shown as wrong, and the reason they didn't do it for others is a) they knew it was wrong and b) they didn't have the power needed until Willow went a bit crazy.
** Besides, Joyce got an episode about how bringing people back to life is wrong, but Buffy got a whole season for the same thing.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:No Wounds from Stakes]]
* Why does staking never leave a big injury in the vampire's chest? Whenever somebody jams a stake in their hearts, there's never a hole, they seem fine until they dust. Even that time Riley shoved a fake wooden stake in Spike. It wasn't real wood, but it was still sharp and big, Spike should've had a wound from that. Now, there are the usual answers for a question like, and I tried to think them all out. None fit for this show though. It can't be because that'd be too gory, as they've shown some pretty nasty vampire injuries before on Buffy. It couldn't be for special effects, as they have both enough SE power to make the lumpy vampire face, and around mid season 2, they can show the vampire skeleton as they die. They can render bones falling, but they can't make a messy hole on somebody?
** It wouldn't be that big and messy. Vampires don't have a pulse, so their blood is just kind of there; it wouldn't pour out like it would with a human. The hole in the vampire's shirt would be relatively small, or at least small enough that moving his arms would probably cover the mark in his flesh. Besides, an inch-wide hole just isn't that visible, especially if it closed when the stake was removed, as puncture wounds often do.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Angel's Invitation to Giles' Home]]
* Maybe I missed an earlier episode where Giles invited him in, but how did Angel get into his house to leave Jenny's corpse?
** Maybe Angelus threw the corpse and all the romantic stuff through the windows.
** I thought it was Jenny's house, so that he could come in once she was dead.
** It was established in a throw-away line earlier that Angel has an invitation to Giles', but we never learn why. I'm not normally one to call HoYay, but there's also the fact that, after it's established that Angelus is most driven to hurt those who Angel was close to, he did way more nasty stuff to Giles than to Buffy.
*** Until Jenny joined, Angel was the only other adult in the Scooby Gang. Its hardly suspicious that Giles would want a private place to confer with him. As for the 'way more nasty stuff', Angel killed Jenny Calendar because she was a threat to him, not just to get at Giles: leaving her corpse for Giles to find was merely a bonus.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Occult Books in a Public, Vamp-Accessible Building]]
* Speaking of which: Giles cover is his librarian job at the Sunnydale school. That's fine. However, since the school is a public building, vampires can enter it (and the library) whenever they damn well please, and do so repeatedly, whether it's to steal Giles' books, attack the Scoobies and what have you. Why does Giles keep his occult books there instead of his own vamp proof house, and why don't the Scoobies hold their briefing and research sessions there either? It's like they ''want'' to be raided.
** Let's see... Kids spend a lot of time in the school library: Yay, education is working! Kids spend a lot of time at the house of an unmarried teacher: Kind of suspicious.
*** Except the raids happen at night, by definition. When the secret sessions also happen. Kids spend a lot of nighttime in the library with the weird English guy with his weird books (that he orders through the school system, apparently)? Nooot suspicious at all ;)
** Giles doesn't have a house, he has an apartment. That didn't look large enough to hold all the books. As for anybody noticing the timing of the sessions in the school library, the laxity and SelectiveObliviousness of the Sunnydale authorities and school system is legendary. This only gets even more pronounced during season 3, after Giles has intimidated Principal Snyder into their arrangement of 'You give me what I want and pay no attention to what I'm doing, and I don't beat the living shit out of you.'
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tara's Corpse's Footwear]]
* I know there are many deep and intense discussions happening on this page, but I just have a quick complaint. In Season 6, when Tara dies, there are at least two separate shots of Tara's body. Both these scenes are (as is necessary) very dramatic and emotional. But I feel like the gravity of the situation was undercut by Tara's corpse wearing ''brightly colored flip-flops''. I mean, sure, she's home, she's getting comfortable, it all makes perfect ''sense'', but it's almost humorous in its visual juxtaposition. Note to future writers/directors: If someone dies and you want viewers to take it seriously, make sure they aren't wearing flip-flops. Bare feet, shoes, whatever else, is all fine, but no flip-flops.
** It's all done on purpose. Her accidental Bridge Drop death; Xander, Buffy and Warren not knowing about it; her un-meaningful last words. It's all meant to impact on the suddenness of it and how unfair it is.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Angel's Curse]]
* Why didn't the gypsies who cursed Angel do more to keep him from being happy? It seems to me that for all their supposed hatred of Angelus that they do very little to keep him unhappy- the only gypsy who makes ''any'' attempt at all to keep Buffy and Angel apart is Jenny, and her 'efforts' amount to convincing everyone that Angel should be the one to take the Judge's hand to wherever he was taking it, keeping Buffy and Angel apart for a few months at the most.. Also, why didn't anyone tell Jenny about the clause in the curse until after it was too late? Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have bolted! And if keeping Angelus unhappy and cursed was that important, why do we never hear from the gypsies again after Angel lost his soul? No attempts to kill/recurse Angel (unless you count Jenny's actions, which seemed to be more as something she did of her own volition than something the gypsies told her to do. And after Jenny died that was it from the gypsies; never heard from or saw them again for the rest of the series. What's up with that?
** I think the gypsies that originally cursed Angelus were massacred by his vamp family, and when Angel went under the radar they lost track of him for a long time.
** Yeah, Darla led a wholesale massacre against them once she found out what happened to Angelus. Also, a present-day elder woman sensed that Angel's pain was lessening (which sent Jenny's uncle rushing to Sunnydale to find out what's going on), so they had mystical ways of keeping track of him from afar.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:When is the Buffyverse Unmasqued?]]
* Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that the Buffyverse is now TheUnmasquedWorld, it did take [[WeirdnessCensor Sunnydale Syndrome]] to ridiculous levels and it makes for an interesting direction for the franchise. What bugs me is that we don't know what caused it. Has it been since the destruction of Sunnydale? It seems unlikely given that Angel season five is set after that. Was it LA going to hell? Probably the most likely option but it really bugs me that we're never given an answer or actually shown it.
** I think Wolfram & Hart's reality-rewrite of Conner's life also removed most of season 5's public fallout, since their success depends on TheMasquerade and Jasmine blew the lid on everything. I don't think Sunnydale by itself got much attention (it did from the government, but they already knew about the hellmouth and presumably invented a cover story, such as a freak earthquake and sinkhole, to explain it). The Fall of Los Angeles at least killed the masquerade for the city itself, and the stories coming out of L.A. were probably pushing the rest of the world into collective uncertainty... and then Harmony came along and nudged public opinion right over the edge into "holy crap, there really ''are'' vampires [[spoiler:and they're awesome]]!" territory.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Season Eight, After the Fall, and Timeline]]
* After the Fall is presumably set just after Angel Season Five, which means that it's a year after Buffy Season Seven ended. Buffy Season Eight however is just given as "some years later." Is there actually a canonical figure for how far ahead in time, Season Eight is to After the Fall?
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Spike's Beauty Regimen]]
* How is Spike's hair so peroxide blonde? I mean, can you imagine him going into a hairdresser's to get it bleached? Or taking the time to do it himself?
** I have more trouble picturing him painting his nails.
*** We see him painting his own nails once.
*** Non-relevant, but *person who painted their Spike Action Figure's nails*
** Maybe he [[RequiredSecondaryPowers only bleached it once]], on a lark, when he was really, ''really'' bored, like how he let Harmony draw on him, but didn't think ahead to realize that it wouldn't grow out and/or liked it enough that he never bothered to re-dye it.
*** It does grow out - when he was all crazy in the basement, he had some serious roots, in a "you've really let yourself go" kind of way. I think he just likes it. He probably does an occasional run to the all-night drug store for peroxide and nail polish.
** Spike is repeatedly shown to be pretty vain. And, y'know, no one ever said there weren't vampire hairdressers.
** This troper is more concerned about Angel's beauty regimen, considering he apparently spends all of his spare time brooding yet finds time for hair gel.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Rebellion and Old vs. New]]
* One of the major themes of the show is rebelling against the "old ways". Buffy does not adhere to the mythos; she attends school, has friends who help her, she quits the Council, and when a demon that supposedly can't be killed by any weapon appears, she uses a rocket launcher. The biggest expression of this is in the Season 3 finale when an Old One incarnate is taken down by the youth of Sunnydale, and some TNT. Fast forward to the next season finale, and a high-tech government outfit has started to fight back against the supernatural, only to be told by a Chosen One who pokes demons with a sharp stick to back off because it's not their business, and they're playing on her turf. Did anybody else find this a complete contradiction to the message the previous three years had worked so hard getting across?
** Joss wanted an anvilicious '''Guns Are Bad''' moral in the series and realized that even though modern weaponry would logically be effective in the fight against Hell, since '''Guns Are Bad''' he had to totally turn around the Scooby's stance on this so much that the universe rewrote itself so that only pointy sticks are effective against the legions of hell. Also, the military is evil as a representation of ''The MAN'', so we couldn't show a military force as more effective against demons than our heroine with the pointy stick. AuthorOnBoard, basically.
** Alternatively, the problem with the Initiative is that they attacked the problem of demons with science. A smarter Initiative would have accumulated a library to put Giles' to shame, and had a few witches or warlocks on staff. Evidence indicates that the reconstituted Initiative was moving in this direction. Besides, Wesley used guns (with mixed results) on Angel.
** Besides, the Initiative was actually doing pretty well so long as it focused on fighting monsters [[spoiler:and not creating demon-cyborg supermen]]. Buffy's complaints aside, the lesson didn't seem to be "modern military sucks, old-fashioned slayers rule" so much as "EvilIsNotAToy, so stop trying to run tests on it and just kill it already". Or at least, the lesson was eventually toned down to that: when Riley returns later, he's still a government agent using high-tech weaponry to take down demons, and he seems to be doing a bang-up job at it.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Dawn Gets No Cool Power Despite Being Mystical Energy]]
* Dawn really got screwed over. Every other avatar of a primordial force in the Buffy universe can at least ''do something'' a normal human couldn't (see: Illyria, Glory, arguably Cordelia etc.). Dawn's blood opens a ''single particular portal'', and for some reason that also makes Buffy's blood close it. You think as a manifestation of the Key she'd at least have the ability to magically open and close any lock, door, portal, or gate anywhere at will or something along those lines.
** If that were true, let's hope the [[{{Exalted}} First and Forsaken Lion]] [[http://keychain.patternspider.net/archive/koc0005.html doesn't find her.]]
** At the beginning of season 6, Dawn doesn't believe she's the Key anymore. Presumably it was a one-time thing and she had exhausted all of the mystical energy. By the end of the show, Dawn was pretty competent in combat and could perform magic by herself.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Slayer's Femininity]]
* It's probably been explained in the series already, but bear with me - why is it the Slayer is always female?
** One of the episodes in Season 7 talks in detail about how the First Slayer got her powers: in a ritual that is essentially mystical demon rape. The Shadow Men took this young woman from her village against her will, chained her to the ground and unleashed the demon on her. My thought is that a young man of that age probably would have fought back and wouldn't have let himself be infused with the demon's power. As you can tell, the Shadow Men didn't care much for the girl and it was probably a domination/power thing. Perhaps a male Slayer wouldn't have been as easy to control as a female Slayer. Other than that, perhaps the flimsy excuse is the whole Girl Empowerment thing.
*** One wonders how come a bunch of guys trying to amp Buffy's Slayer powers is portrayed as near rape (starting to go down to waist level after it failed to get in through her nose/mouth), but Willow activating potential Slayers all over the world without their permission is portrayed in a much more empowering fashion.
**** Well, Buffy did at least ask some of the local girls. But also if they actually used the simple act of creating a Slayer as a rape metaphor then Buffy, Kendra and Faith were all raped in the show and Kendra and Faith loved it. More likely it's just meant as an examination of the Shadowmen's mindset. Force the power on one girl. Hell they could have given Buffy the thing that contained the demon and sent her back. But they were stuck with the old way while Buffy came up with something new.
**** The difference was that [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment the potential slayers were already potential slayers]]. Making a random girl into a slayer is not the same as activating a potential slayer, which is an entity with some distinct mystical standing in the Buffyverse. Willow merely gave these girls access to something that was already theirs, and already a part of them. Further: since the state of girls and women has improved [[{{understatement}} just a bit]] since the stone age, these girls can truly ''wield'' the power of the slayer, unlike Sineya, who was ruled by it. Sineya didn't even have language, while the modern potentials had culture, community, and sense of their own personhood that made them stronger than their common spiritual ancestor. The first Slayer's suffering, while tragic, is now a part of their heritage, and more than just something to honor and respect; heritage is something that can be made use of. Hence Buffy's remark about the Scythe, which was the physical embodiment of the slayerdom: "It’s old, it’s strong, and it feels like it’s ''mine''."
***** There are girls who would not have become Slayers if Willow hadn't made them Slayers. It's splitting hairs to say that this doesn't count as forcing the power on them because they "had it already". They didn't have it, not in the form that messes up lives. Forcibly activating a potential power that most would otherwise never see is ethically the same thing as just forcing the power on them--if one is rape, so is the other. It's true that Buffy made that statement, but she can't channel the feelings of the other Slayers. Not to mention all the third parties who are affected by the fact that she and Willow just gave a bunch of random people the equivalent of invisible guns with unlimited ammunition.
****** But the first slayer was given "power" ''beyond her control''; it caused her to lose her humanity. That's substantially different from the situation of the new slayers, who are not only capable of controlling that power, but presumably under no obligation to change they way they live upon recieving it -- with thousands of slayers in the world and the whole "chosen one" thing more or less debunked, becoming a slayer is pretty much being given free superpowers to use or not use. Willow and Buffy gave the potential slayers new options, whereas The Shadowmen reduced Sineya's options to one. It seems fair that only the one that ''takes away choice'' is treated as rape.
******* And what about Dana? Having the Slayer heritage and powers suddenly forced on her in her fragile state turned her from damaged goods to a completely broken psychopath fighting vampires and demons from hundreds of years ago. Becoming a Slayer isn't just getting really strong. The vision dreams are part of the package. So is the connection to the other Slayers. And it DOES take away choice: none of the hundreds of activated Slayers can ever choose to just be normal and not have crazy messed up dreams of monsters killing people if they don't use their new superpowers to kill things (or even if they do, honestly). They're all Slayers now. Whether they accept or reject the call, they're still Slayers, and can never not be Slayers again. I don't see how it's different.
******** Potential slayers [[{{Canon}} already have the visions and dreams]]. The upgrade from Potential to Slayer only installs the [[CursedWithAwesome useful superpowers]] on top of the [[BlessedWithSuck preexisting nightmares and connection to the collective slayer unconscious]]. Dana became violent after activation, but Dana was ''catatonic'' until then, and would have presumably had the same nightmares as a potential if something had shaken her out of her catatonia sooner. Also, not being catatonic seems like it belongs in the plus column.
********* I'll take "catatonic Slayer" over "Murderous, insane Slayer" any day.
********** Sure, but if you want to take that approach, a ''dead'' slayer is better than a murderous, insane slayer, too. Not being catatonic constitutes an improvement in Dana's condition if we're at all worried about ''Dana''. Buffy and Willow didn't make Dana crazy, nor give anyone any nightmares, nor take away choice from any of the potential slayers in the same way that the Shadowmen did to Sineya.
** This was kind of lampshaded. Connor met Faith for the first time and said something along the lines of "So, Slayers, I've heard of you. How come you are always girls?" and Faith responds "I don't know. Maybe we're just better at it." Doesn't answer the question of course.
** Plausible Answer: Vampire Bait. Girls are stereotypically seen as the weaker sex and most vamps seem to be male. Could be that vampires underestimate her and see her as abnother easy meal, when BAM! she fights back and stakes them with her incredible strength.
** It is Joss Whedon's unashamed AuthorAppeal.
** The Slayer wasn't intended to be a person. She was intended to be a weapon, something to be controlled and wielded by her Watcher against the forces of evil. Remember that the Slayer was empowered in a time when women were more or less objects and, even though the general treatment of women have improved, the Watcher's Council still views the Slayer in much the same terms. She's always a woman because women are supposedly weak-minded and easy for their masters, the men holding their reigns, to control. Kendra is a solid example of what the Slayer is supposed to be as conceived by the men who created it. Buffy, conversely, rejects the entire notion, and that's part of what makes her special.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tara's Family Line and Inbreeding]]
* Wait, if the women in Tara's family are supposedly demons, and the father was making that claim, does that mean Tara's family is inbred?
** In Tara's mother's family. It's probably assumed that Tara's mother had told her husband the tales of the women in her family.
*** Tara actually isn't part demon. Spike punches her in the nose and it causes the chip to hurt him, proving that there is no demon in her. It was just a lie to keep the women in line.
*** Better question. WHY DID TARA'S LITTLE SISTER CHEERFULLY GO ALONG WITH ALL OF THAT CRAP?! You'd think she'd either think it sucked or angst about it, but she seems very chipper about the whole "I'm part demon and need to be kept in isolation" arrangement.
**** Beth is Tara'a cousin, not her sister. If she went along with it then she's probably Tara's paternal cousin.
** He's an anti-magic bigot, so it makes sense that they'd be persecuted for being [[DealWithTheDevil evil]] [[OurDemonsAreDifferent witches]]. Which is ridiculous, 'cause wicca's good and love the earth and woman power [[EarWorm I'll be over]] [[MusicalEpisode here]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Initiative. Seriously?]]
* The Initiative. Joss Whedon's handling of this [[MildlyMilitary "military" organization]] killed my interest in the show. There was [[CriticalResearchFailure NOTHING]] truly military about The Initiative at all, except that it was [[GoodLookingPrivates majority male]] and they used guns. And it wasn't a case of "Our Secret Military Groups are Different"; it was that the writers [[TheyJustDidntCare just didn't care.]] To name a few things, military people do ''not'' [[CriticalResearchFailure refer to each other as "agents", they refer to each other by their rank.]] Speaking of which, Riley acted like it was big secret thing that he had a rank (and Buffy seemed surprise). Ranks aren't secrets, or something only some people have--a military rank is literally the first thing other servicepeople will want to know about you because it quickly tells your amount of experience, level of responsibility, and sometimes even skill set. The costume department didn't bother to give Riley and co. clothes that looked like uniforms, but instead settled with [[WallBanger plain trousers and sweaters]]. Riley's hair? Too long. Mentions of specific branches? Riley made an offhand mark about Marines, once, but that's it. (The irony of it being Marines is just hilarious--Marines are notorious for being insanely proud of being in the Corps, and the sterotypical Marine brags about it. A lot.) And all this is just scratching the surface.
** Yeah, because nothing says "undercover" like openly flailing your rank and military clothing around in a college campus.
*** The cat was out of the bag already; Buffy knew he was military, but Riley was acting like his rank was a secret. Also, the costume designer was clearly going for non-civilian, but for some reason couldn't buy some cheap fake uniforms.
** The Initiative wasn't really a "military" organization per se like another branch of the armed forces, more like a secret paramilitary group recruited from the military. Similar to the CIA's Special Activities Division, who are almost all former military, but once in SAD no longer are part of the actual military. The Initiative is basically the same way.
** This is little mis-read. The Initiative wasn't military, it was government, closer to the FBI than the Army. Riley and co. might have been recruited from the military, but that's just good sense. You want guys that can fight. But the operation itself wasn't. This is fairly clear in series 5 when the new Initiative comes to Riley and assures him that they ARE military, not government, so he knows they're different.
** [[ITakeOffenseToThatLastOne They did mention in the commentary that Riley's hair was way too long.]]
*** Marc Blucas likes his hair! >:(
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Willow's Name is Mud in Season Six]]
* Am I the only one terribly TERRIBLY disturbed by the way everyone treats Willow in season 6? She took great risk to use the return spell on Buffy and was egged on by the other scoobies to do so, and yet Giles lays down the hammer on her... HARD. They would all be dead a few episodes in to season 6 if not for Willow's spell. Further, Willow's "problem" with magic only became an actual problem when everyone treated her like shit for harmless spells she cast for the benefit of everyone else. She pulled Buffy back at great expense to herself. She cast the decorations spell for Anya and Xander just to make them happy. We never see her just casting spells wily-nily for her own selfish purposes. Yes, she made the wrong choice using the forget spell (both times) but the way everyone treated her was wrong. Her forays into the magic drug at Rack's only happened because Tara treated her like shit because she cast the decoration spell. Am I missing something here?
** It's season six. After "Tabula Rasa", Season six sucks, and everything the characters do is just to make excuses to pour more and more angst into the craptacular season. I think they were trying to lean on the success of ''{{Angel}}'' by making the show DarkerAndEdgier, without bothering to have decent CharacterDevelopment, the thing that made DarkerAndEdgier ''work'' in ''Angel''.
** Umm, the decoration spell wasn't so much the problem as Willow ''erasing some of Tara's memories''. Given the fact that Tara has past issues with being mentally tampered with, and, as she mentions during "Once More With Feeling," she can't be sure this was the first time Willow did this, it is kind of a WhatTheHellHero moment.
*** The best way I can describe the problem was Willow using spells when it would have been easier - and probably ''safer'' - to do things the mundane way. The episode where she first wipes Tara's memory, "All the Way", also has her almost using a spell in the Bronze that would shift anyone not Dawn's age into an alternate dimension. With the resurrection spell, it was still pretty dangerous, regardless of whether it worked or not. The only Scoobies that knew what would happen were Willow and Tara, and even then Tara was freaked, while Giles was upset because she'd taken such a big risk. What if something had gone wrong? As for her not casting spells for selfish reasons, she doesn't most of the time, except for the "my will be done" spell from "Something Blue" and all the fooling around she and Amy did in "Smashed".
** I hated the way Willow was treated in season 6 and felt like a great deal of her problems were helped along by Giles and Tara's attitudes. For one thing they never offered any explanation of why what she was doing was bad. Tara was shown as to be upset by Willow's magic use before the arguement that led to the memory erasure. But she never tried to convince Willow it was bad. She just told her it was and expected Willow to give up something she plainly loved without further explanation. And Giles was an ass. He spends most of his time in season 6 ready to leave and when he isn't he's berating Willow. Who was the Scooby Gang's big weapon without Buffy and he certainly never expected her to be brought back.
*** In Tara's defense, she did try to tell Willow why her use of magic was wrong. Part of the proplem was, Willow kept erasing Tara's memories of the arguments. As for Giles, he had a point that necromancy was dark magic. If Willow couldn't see that, it really doesn't bode well for her.
*** Very dark. Committing a blood sacrifice in order to call upon the spirit of a god of the underworld (Osiris, to be precise) in order to tear a soul free from the Afterlife and bind it back into a mortal vessel is some SERIOUSLY black mojo. But it's not just the necromancy and the memory erasure. Willow's problem is something that's been hinted at way back in season 3, and remained consistent: it isn't that she uses magic, it's that she abuses it. It's her answer for every problem. It's her solution for any emotional turmoil. Need party decorations? Magic! Trying to find a friend lost in the spooky house? Magic! Boyfriend left you? Magic! Sexually attracted to a good friend who you don't want to be? Magic! The ensouling Angel spell opened a gateway to power she did not have the discipline to properly manage, and people have been calling her out on her abuse of it since way back at Xander telling her they don't need a love spell to not be attracted to each other. She just has never listened.
**** Willow knows herself. Maybe she just thinks "If I could stop making out with you just because I wanted to stop making out with you I'd have never started in the place." It did take Cordy being impaled to get them to stop. The image of a friend with a pipe through the gut every time your lips touch would have a pretty powerful de-lusting affect IMO. So basically I think she was RIGHT, they did need more than simple willpower.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Cross and Christianity]]
* Okay, so I've heard some people present the idea that the cross is a symbol for the sun and that's why it works on vampires (as an alternative to "the power of belief" which would imply ANY religious symbol and possibly any idealogical symbol held sacred by enough people could be used to deter/harm vampires; or that Christianity is the "right" religion which has it's own meta issues and in-verse problems such as Christianity being less than two thousand years old). Wouldn't it imply then that; a) any sort of cross would work - could you ward of vampires with [[http://www.mukwonago.k12.wi.us/~weberja/swissflag.gif the Swiss Flag]], this [[http://www.mp3playerguide.com/cross_shaped_mp3_player.jpg Cross-Shaped mp3 player]] or a [[http://www.lasyfashions.com/images/_products/spclothing/15589d.jpg cross strapped top]]?: and b) that other sun symbols would work just the same - could vampires be detered by [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Circumpunct.png a circled dot, the astrological symbol for the sun and the sign for the Egyptian sun god Ra]] or anything made of gold, which has been frequently associated with the sun in so many cultures/religions?
** I always thought that the cross and holy water and whatnot were made symbols of divinity *because* of their ability to repel vampires. How this explains why older religions don't have anti-vampire divine objects is beyond me.
* What I can't stop wondering is whether a lowercase "t" would have any effect. I just can't shake the thought of a vampire reading a book and wincing at every "t" he came across.
** It seems to only work with objects ''specifically'' made to be religious symbols. Not once does anyone take two vertical pieces of something, hold them at right angles to each other and use it against a vampire. It is only ever actual Christian crosses that are used.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Angel's Lack of Accent]]
* Angelus' Irish accent and Angel's lack of said accent has always bugged me. Why doesn't he still have an accent, when Spike and Dru still have theirs'?
** All of his Angelus scenes have an Irish accent, so maybe he deliberately lost it to try to disconnect himself from that life.
*** Modern Angelus doesn't. Really it's just because DB sucks at it.
** It's implied that it's something physical rather than psychological. In the Angel season 4 episode "Spin the Bottle" we see Liam wondering where his accent has gone. He came to the US between 1900 and 1929 and has never been seen to leave it.
** Spike doesn't have his accent anymore. The accent he has in the series proper is an affectation. When he was alive he had a different accent. He just thinks the one he uses now makes him more badass. I wouldn't be surprised if his normal mode of speech was an American accent just like Angel.
*** It's not. In "Tabula Rasa," when everyone loses their memories, Spike speaks in a British accent—in fact, it's a major plot point, since he discovers he's British, which leads him to believe he is Giles's son (and HilarityEnsues). If he were consciously affecting his accent, he wouldn't have spoken with a British accent (since they all forgot ''everything'', including Spike/"Randy" not realizing he was a vampire). As for Angel's lack of accent, it makes sense. Angel is older then Spike, probably has been in America for longer, and possibly wanted to pick up a more American sounding accent to avoid attracting attention (whereas Spike loves attention, as shown in Season 2).
*** Spike speaks with ''a'' British accent. Specifically the one living William spoke with in "Fool for Love." It's a subtle but noticable difference.
** Maybe he's changed his pattern of speech so as not to attract attention to himself. Having an accent can be very inconvenient at times, so changing his manner of speech may have rid him of unwanted curiosity.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Unsexy House-Smashing]]
* Is it just me or is the Buffy/Spike house-destroying sex scene in "Smashed" the most spectacularly unsexy thing ever to hit television? It bugs me that people hold it up as the epitome of hotness - it just made me want to gag.
** I don't think it was meant to be attractive. It was the start of some pretty dark stuff for Buffy. But yeah, YourMileageMayVary, of course, but I would think finding it sexy is a little worrying.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Why is There Another Song After Sweet Leaves?]]
* So, in "Once More With Feeling", everyone is singing because of the demon's magic. After defeating the demon, they sing another song. Shouldn't the magic have gone away?
** I guess there was little magic residue left over that kept them singing for a short while. Or maybe they just found that they really liked singing.
*** The answer is in Sweet's parting words: "All those feelings you've been concealing, say you're happy now [[TitleDrop once more with feeling]]" As to why Spike and Buffy were doing reprises of earlier songs, while everyone else was finishing "Where Do We Go From Here?", my guess is it's because once the aforementioned song finishes, that's when the magic fades and Buffy and Spike left the song early.
** In "Where Do We Go From Here" its alluded that they can't stop singing until there is a curtain closing moment. Hence the line "When the curtains close on a kiss, God knows we can tell the end is near. Cut to Buffy and Spike and their moment which ends in a kiss and curtains closing.
*** That was just some fourth-wall breaking {{Foreshadowing}} (we know they can break the fourth wall because Anya and Xander do so ealier, with Anya doing some LampshadeHanging about it). Sweet has them do a big finale after he's banished; see above.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Riley Hatedom]]
* Why does everybody hate Riley? He was the healthiest relationship Buffy ever had.
** "Healthiest Buffy ever had" is... kind of damning with faint praise. Yeah, he wasn't fighting off constant urges to kill her, and he didn't make her miserable for prolonged periods until the last stages of their relationship, but he still hurt her.
** There's also the ancient and time-honoured principle of AllGirlsWantBadBoys. Riley suffered hugely from coming after Angel, and then in retrospect from not being Spike. His complete failure to repeatedly try to murder Buffy clearly disqualifies him as suitable relationship material.
** He had a pulse and an average body temperature over 70 degrees fahrenheit. That alone disqualifies him from being suitable relationship material for her.
** A) Riley was a complete dullard when he was first introduced. It's hard to support a relationship when one character is so boring. B) He was an old-fashioned sexist who never really got over the fact that *gasp* a girl is stronger than him. C) He became a [[ReplacementScrappy Replacement Relationship Scrappy]] after the popular Buffy/Angel romance. D) As he was criticised for being to boring in season four, season five saw him going "dark" in a rather lame way. E) This "darkness" consisted of getting suckjobs from vampire whores. F) He whined repeatedly in season five that Buffy wasn't paying him enough attention while her mother was dying from a brain tumour and a hellgod was trying to kill her little sister. G) When Buffy found out, he acted like he did nothing wrong and gave her an ultimatum. H) The show started ShillingTheWesley, including Xander in a particularly OOC moment. So yeah, that's why nobody liked the relationship, or Riley himself.
*** In Riley's defense, Buffy bears at least half the blame.
*** How does Buffy "bear half the blame" for her relationship with Riley failing? ''He'' is the one who couldn't cope with his girlfriend being stronger and more durable than he was; ''he'' is the one who decided to try and find what she saw so attractive in the night... by going out and getting suckjobs from vampire whores. And he bitches that he's not getting any attention from her when she clearly has a hell of a lot on her plate already, what with her mother being seriously ill ''and'' a hellgod being after her sister. Buffy, on the other hand... tried to hold back on her strength and act more feminine, to try and ease the concern she could sense from him. She was openly devoted to him and never cheated on him (despite her mixed feelings about Spike; in fact, her main argument when Riley admits that he's jealous after Angel breezes through Sunnydale is "have I ever given you any reason not to trust me?"). She tried to cut back on the slaying, to try and treat it as just a job (the way it was to him) but failed because it's ''not'' a job for her - it's a calling; she can't just roll over and sleep after hitting a quota for area patrolled and vamps staked for the night, she has to know that she staked all the vamps she could find and covered all the ground she could that night. And when her mom got sick ''and'' Glory started gunning for her sister? She acted the way she normally does under stress: she closed down and withdrew from just about everyone. Everyone else knows she reacts this way and refuses to let her withdraw from them; Riley... just sat around and moped and whined.
**** That was pretty much Buffy's problem. She was so busy withdrawing from the world that it never occored to her that all Riley wanted to do was be a good boyfriend and comfort her. Because he was pushed away, he felt useless and unloved. Also take into account the fact that Riley has to get used to not being on that super-soldier serum. It's seen as unreasonable that he asks for comfort from his girlfriend because Buffy has problems of her own and as such cannot take the time to bother with him.
*** Buffy doesn't bear half the blame, or even a quarter of the blame, but she did handle the situation poorly. That's in character for her, though: when Buffy is in love, she throws herself into it completely, practically without reservation. She shouldn't have tried to "feminize" herself for him, and shouldn't have tried to slay less to assuage his insecurities. But it's understandable that she would, because that's what she does.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Ripper's Age]]
* Okay, "Band Candy"... adults regress to age 16 on eating magic chocolate. Granted. So why does Giles become Ripper? He didn't become Ripper until he went off the rails as an undergraduate - given that he was take up to Oxford in the <quick calculation> Sixties (or earlier, depending how old he was meant to be) he would have needed to be a fairly well adjusted and studious public schoolboy.
** RuleOfFunny aside... this can be fanwanked as Giles simply being smart enough to go to university early. Or adults regress to "late teens" rather than 16. But yeah, the magic chocolate seemed to operate fairly arbitrarily.
** They didn't become carbon copies of their teenage selves (they retained all their memories of being adults, at any rate), the candy just stripped away their maturity. Giles minus maturity equals Ripper.
** Sixties 'or earlier'? Giles seems to be in his mid-forties at the start of the series (the same as the actor Anthony Head), so was most likely at university in the late 1960s or early 1970s...
** Giles says that his "Ripper" phase was when he was 21, when he dropped out of Oxford. He also states in the same episode that he hasn't seen Ethan and the others for over "twenty years". This implies he is about 45 at the time, and would have been at school in the late 60s and at university in the early 70s. About the question, it seems like the candy simply makes you immature rather than a teenager, as not all teenagers are the yobbish morons the adults become on the candy.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Empty Places]]
* "Empty Places" in series 7 anyone? Buffy gets the Judas treatment from the entire group (bar Spike). What exactly had she done to deserve that? She has forgiven Willow and Faith for murder and trying to end the world. Forgiven Xander for all the snide comments about Spike and Angel not to mention his blatant lies to her about what Willow said about Angel back in Season 2. She put up with Giles going behind her back in an attempt to kill Spike and on top of that dumping the potentials on her most of whom turned out to be ungrateful whiners. Plus the final insult when Dawn throws her out of her own house, this being her own SISTER who had committed suicide to save her in the finale of season 5. What makes it worse is she was being blamed for things that were totally out of her control. She assaulted the vinyard with the potentials under advice from Robin Wood. She took exception to Faith taking the potentials out to the Bronze, an action which horribly exposed them to attack from the bringers and which Giles seems to have no problem with despite reprimanding Buffy about something virtually identical earlier in the season. Then when Buffy outlines a perfectly reasonable, if admittedly dangerous, plan to the team she is thrown out. If I had been Buffy I would have walked away from this bunch after the finale and never wanted to speak to any of them again. The entire supporting cast turned into total [[JerkAss Jerkasses]] and if Joss meant us to feel any sympathy for them then I'm afraid he really got it wrong.
** YourMileageMayVary. Personally I thought that Buffy was being a domineering bitch that was jumping into stupid plans out of fear of Caleb. Her last "plan" had gotten Molly killed, and many other girls injured. The next plan she suggested was exactly the same, yet she wasn't willing to listen to anyone else's suggestions. She needed a great big slice of humble pie.
** Not just Molly. Buffy's rushed plan got two girls killed and many injured. And Xander lost an eye... not that this stopped him from following her for the rest of his life (despite not wanting her to take the lead in that particular not-too-clear-minded moment).
** I didn't think the plan was too rushed. I thought it was quite clever. She left some of the weaker potentials at home under the protection of Willow. She split the team into two fairly even groups, both with their own Slayer's, and gave the advice to come in if it looks like an ambush. This was the most sensible thing she could have done given the resources.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Giles' Absence at Xander and Anya's Wedding]]
* How come Giles wasn't at Xander and Anya's wedding?
** He was in England - he left in "Tabula Rasa" because he thought Buffy needed to learn to stand on her own. Not really smart, but eh. * shrugs*
*** He's only one plane ride away. Surely he'd want to see the wedding of two close friends that he'd been fighting evil with for the past 6 years?
*** He might have been busy. You know, huge demon battle, meditating in a forest somewhere, being interrogated by the watchers, dying family member...it's kind of stupid to assume he has absolutely no life in England.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Why Can't Halfrek Help Anya?]]
* In "Entropy", Anya is trying to find someone to wish vengeance on Xander, preferably a female someone. She complains that she cannot find anyone to Halfrek. Halfrek. The demon that has no problem with Xander getting hurt. The ''female'' demon that has no problem with Xander getting hurt and is Anya's friend and is looking to help her out with her vengeance. You see where I'm going with this?
** Why would Halfrek want vengeance against Xander? There needs to be a reason you know.
*** He left her friend at the alter? Halfrek has no less need for vengance against Xander than Buffy, Dawn, Tara, Willow or Spike, all of whom Anya attempted to make a wish.
*** Maybe Vengeance Demons can't make wishes for each other?
** Anya is a woman scorned, not a neglected child. That's Anyankha's territory, the (first potential, then actual) irony of which was never lost on anyone involved in all three years that she was with Xander. Just as Anyankha's a stickler for only casting vengeance spells for scorned women, Halfrek's probably the same with neglected children.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Why Do The Gentlemen Need Hearts?]]
* Even though "Hush" was a great episode, there's one little problem. No one actually explained WHY the Gentlemen needed to take seven hearts. It's established that they have to take them, but that's as far as they go to explain.
** Fairy Tale demons, as per Giles. Apparently, that's how the fairy tale was written.
*** ...I thought that they were fairy tale demons as in demons on whom a fairy tale was based, not that they were fairy tales as in summoned from a fairy tale or created from/took their power and form from a fairy tale.
** They probably needed the hearts for some kind of demon ritual, which is probably also why they apparently needed to wait until the second night they were there to finish "collecting." The Gentlemen were carefully arranging the seven heart-jars in a semicircle, they clearly meant to do ''something'' with them.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Master's Skeleton]]
* A ''Buffy''/''Angel'' combination: when the Master, aged about 600-800 according to WordOfGod, died in season 1 of ''Buffy'', it took him at least 15 seconds to go poof in a long process of shrieking and vaporizing (as opposed to the usual 2-second drill). And even then, a skeleton remained which had to be crushed later. In season 5 of ''Angel'', however, a ''freakishly'' ancient vampire called The Prince of Lies, who was a play on Nosferatu and was reportedly as old as darkness itself, got dusted by Angel and turned to ashes just as easily as any other vamp. Not even a skeleton or anything. CanonDiscontinuity, anyone?
** It's never been directly stated that a vampire's durability is affected by his age. While it's almost certainly a factor, there are probably many other elements. The Master, for example, was steeped in magic, and had spent the best part of a century testing the magic of the Hellmouth. Besides that, who knows the truth of the Prince of Lies' reputation? I rather like the interpretation of (the similarly Nosferatu-inspired) ''Shadow of the Vampire'', in which the vampire himself can no longer remember his origins or age.
** Even if a vampire's durability is affected by his age (it probably is), '''how''' he ages and ''"evolves"'' seems to be different for each vampire. The oldest ones that we know are the Master, the Prince of Lies, Kakhistos and Dracula (and then Darla and Drusilla, I guess... leaving the soul boys aside): they're all pretty different from each other. So, if there's not a recurring ''standard'' for their elderly non-life, there's no reason to assume there is a common ''standard'' for the way they get dusted. Heh... look at how Darla got dusted: I doubt the Master would be able to do ''that''.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Anya's Power Center]]
* Possibly another case of "I forgot, OK?" on JossWhedon's part, but bear with me: in "The Wish", Anya's first appearance, Giles says that destroying her power center will cause all the wishes she's ever granted to be canceled and it works, so supposedly they were, but in season 6 (and some other cases I can't really remember), it's explicitly shown that the wishes weren't undone - this guy Anya turned into a demon decades ago was still a demon. It's even shown at a certain point that she caused the Russian communist revolution, so wouldn't that have been undone as well? I realize this is probably just BroadStrokes, but I had to.
** We don't know that all of Anyanka's wishes were made using that specific amulet. Perhaps their power fades over time, or they're only good for a certain amount of wishes, and Anyanka needs too keep using new ones. Indeed, since Giles got this info from a book, it's implied that this might have been done before.
** Then again, Anya herself seems to have forgotten about that by the time we get around to "Selfless" in Season 7. Even according to D'Hoffryn, the ONLY way to reverse it is with the life and soul of a vengeance demon (maybe because he just wanted to get his own bit of vengeance on Anya, but that doesn't explain why she wouldn't already know).
** It always made sense to me that the amulet caused a snap-back in "The Wish" because shifting between potential time-lines wasn't just a one-shot spell. It required a constant will of effort to prevent the timeline from snapping back into place (And indeed, into time; once the spell ends, no time is seen to have passed). It wasn't a standard wish, and therefore the amulet was essential to its continued effectiveness.\\
Of course that theory hinges on Anyanka never having granted a wish like it before, which is highly unlikely ("I wish I'd never met him" seems like a likely request) and it's also sort of implied that she'd done it before ("I had no idea how much of a difference ''this'' spell would make" or something). On the other hand, that might also explain why this spell was different to the previous ones and required so much more effort to maintain; this one changed massive swathes of lives, not just two.\\
Hell, considering how much changing the past is A) frowned on and B) stated to be really freaking hard if not actually impossible (albeit not in those exact words, but they make reference to "changing the past" when they talk about resurrection) at other times in the series, it seems strange that Anya gets a free pass to remake history as she sees fit. It's possible that any reality altering spell would only be temporary/would only last until the spell was terminated (i.e. by destroying the power center).\\
As a final possibility, the spell might not have been complete when Giles destroyed the power center. Possibly it takes a certain amount of time for the new reality to take prescience over the old one; once that time is up, destroying the power center does nothing. As an added bonus, this would explain why Cordy still remembered the old timeline (seeing as the usual point of wishing you'd never met someone is that you wouldn't remember, surely). Once reality finished asserting itself, she would have forgotten along with everyone else, leaving aside the point that she would also have been dead.\\
Of course, this is all just so much FanWank. The obvious explanation is that AWizardDidIt.
*** It does fit with Halfrak's praise of Anya later, though. She brags about how Anyaka was an amazing artist with wishes, and she could twist and turn them into masterpieces of vengeance. She also never mentions any of those wishes being retroactive. Putting the two together, maybe granting a history-altering wish was a completely new idea that Anyaka had been wanting to try, which is why she was talking to Giles about how "I never knew Cordelia's wish would be so exciting". It's probably really just a RetCon, since Giles knew from his research that the amulet would break her wishes, but it fits in with her later character and reputation.
** Remember when Xander got split in two? Willow mentioned something regarding her dissolution of the spell, that their natural state is to be together and the magic is doing all the work, she just has to break it and they'll snap back. Maybe there's a statute of limitations on this sort of thing. How long can a person, object, or even reality itself be under the effect of a transmuting spell before the magic becomes ingrained into its central being? Let's say Anya's spell to turn Olaf into a troll. At what point does it stop being a spell, and he starts just being a troll? For older magicks such as that one, that could be why nothing changed; the Amulet isn't doing anything anymore, they've passed their statute of limitations on ending the magic, and that's just the way things are now. Cordelia's wish, on the other hand, was recent. The magic was still working.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Where Did the Magic Box Go?]]
* Why did they stop using the Magic Box in S7? I know the in-story reason, because Dark Willow destroyed it at the end of S6, but what was the writers' reason for keeping it destroyed and not using it in S7? Because losing that set meant that the new "meeting place" became the Summers House, and as the main character and pretty much every other character was living there at that point, it meant that almost every single scene was set in that house, which made the whole season feel static and claustrophobic. Half-way through the season, many fans were screaming for them to get out of the damn house. Why wasn't the Magic Box kept as the meeting place, therefore diversifying the sets a little bit?
** Maybe it was a RuleOfThree sort of thing, and the spot where they met had to be destroyed once in every three years. Maybe something else would've been destroyed in season 9 or something.
*** But they'd only had the Magic Box set for two seasons.
** They couldn't justify still having it. In season six Anya became the sole owner, and after becoming a vengeance demon again she didn't need it anymore. Because of this, after Willow destroyed it it wouldn't have made sense for her to keep it.
** Besides, it SHOULD feel static and claustrophobic in S7. That's part of the idea, with all the Potentials and the Scoobies crammed inside the one little house, it SHOULD feel cramped and unwieldy.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Dawn's Not Grateful]]
* Something that annoyed me throughout season 6 and 7, especially season 7 episode "Him" and the whole abandonment thing Dawn had in season 6: Has everyone magically forgotten that Buffy ''died for Dawn?'' She sacrificed her life to save her little sister, and while I realize that the writers have to keep them fighting to appeal to the viewers in some senses, how can Dawn still be a brat to Buffy after she died for her sake? Just a little irritating.
** Dawn and Buffy's father had long since abandoned them. Their mother died and Buffy was dead for a while. It's perfectly natural for someone, especially a teenager, to have abandonment issues after something like that.
*** Agreed. Plus, Buffy was still risking her life every night, and paying more attention to slaying than her. You can't blame her for wanting some attention from Buffy, as she could have died any night.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Only Three Walls, No Fourth Wall!]]
* Just a minor thing, but during the song "Something to Sing About" in "Once More with Feeling," there's a point where Buffy looks at the camera and says "and you can sing along." Who is she talking to? Is she breaking the fourth wall to talk to the viewers? Is she talking to Sweet or Dawn? It's always really distracting for me.
** Earlier, Anya mentions after her duet with Xander that it was as though the fourth wall didn't exist. She's talking to you.
** However, if you want to think of it purely in an in-universe way, then she was probably [[strike: talking]] singing to Sweet. If this Troper recalls correctly, right before she starts singing she says that she thinks Sweet knows what she's about to say -- thus, he could sing along if he wanted to. It wasn't a request, it was a statement.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:No Protective Spells]]
* Why doesn't everyone who's in the know and have the proper materials do the protective spell against the vampires to their workplace and other vulnerable spots they often visit in? Such as Giles to his library?
** The school wouldn't work. A season two episode has Angelus explicitly state the schools motto invites anybody in. It also doesn't work on public places, as you don't technically own them. If you mean the magical protection spells Willow uses occasionally, they take a sustained effort against force (one was beaten down in season 7)
** One was beaten down ''on purpose'' in Season 7. She let it fail to draw the potentials to that little Buffy show.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Out-of-Date Order]]
* Why is the Order of Byzantium so completely stuck in the Middle Ages that they use chain mail, swords and horses where they could use bulletproof vests, guns and cars? And more importantly, how no-one pays any attention to this, or the large number of horses the keep around?
** RuleOfCool
** In-universe, my impression was that the Order was from another dimension, and the "God" they worship is one of Glory's two enemies. Although, as someone mentioned in JustBugsMe/HisDarkMaterials, if you've got access to a multiverse you should probably recruit minions from a technologically ''advanced'' world.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Heat Scanners and Vamps]]
* The Initiative determined that Spike was a vampire because, unlike the students on the far side of the paper-thin wall from them, his body temperature was "exactly room temperature". How could the thermal scan even pick him up? I would have settled for some technobabble that they were pairing the thermal imaging camera with a backscatter x-ray and looking for cold skeletons (or something similar), but Spike was a human-shaped mass of blue and they never even mentioned why they could see him at all.
** Probably just DidNotDoTheResearch, but there is one plausible explanation (or HandWave) in that motion would make a disturbance on the thermal scanner, so the moving "cold object" would tip them off. Of course, this doesn't explain why he showed up as a ''person-shaped blob'' of blue, but that could be so that the viewer clearly saw what they were talking about on the interface.
*** In the episode of ''Angel'' where he fights a blind MonsterofTheWeek, it's shown that vampires create heat when they move.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Snyder's Hate of Buffy and the Scoobies]]
* In the first three (high school) seasons: Principal Snyder absolutely hates Buffy and seems to dislike Willow and Xander. While disliking Xander might be justified, since Willow is one of the top students in the school, it doesn't make a ton of sense for Snyder to hate her (then again, Snyder does hate everyone, and he is ''supposed'' to be a JustBugsMe type of character). Further, since Willow and Xander (and later Cordilla) are arguably just as involved in slaying as Buffy, why is it that none of their grades/reputations suffer? Willow seems to stay a straight A student, despite Snyder mentioning on more then one occasion that all three of them cut half of their classes in a given day, and neither Xander not Cordilia are shown having anywhere near as much trouble with their grades or (academic, not social) reputations, despite the suggestions that Buffy is smarter then either of them.
** Buffy had the attention of the Mayor, and Snyder was terrified of the Mayor. If he could find an excuse to expel her, she, and by extension the Mayor, would be somebody else's problem.
** Cordelia's actually quite clever. She just hides it. Xander perhaps not, but I don't remember it being suggested that Buffy is necessarily cleverer than him - at least not until later, when they all get their SAT results.
** Snyder seems, by the end, to be specifically under orders to persecute Buffy.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Does the Master Have a Soul?]]
* In the second episode of the first season the Master uses strange expression: "My blood is your blood, my soul is your soul." But at every point after this it's made clear that no vampire save for the two special cases has a soul of any kind.
** "Of any kind" is a bit of a presumption. Presumably, what the Watchers and the Kalderash call a "soul" is a slightly different thing to what an ancient vampire calls a soul. Clearly the vampire has some kind of animus, defined by most in-show sources as a demon but doing the exact same job as a human soul. The Master could have said "my demonic spiritual essence is your demonic spiritual essence", but "soul" rolls off the tongue better and is, from his perspective, just as accurate.
*** Wouldn't "spirit" be just as good?
** IIRC, the official Whedonverse definition of a vampire is a human whose soul has been kicked out and then had their corpse possessed by a specific type of demon. Presumably, that demon is the soul and he doesn't have his human soul anymore. OTOH, it would be pretty interesting to find out that, at some point, someone tried to neuter him by giving him back his mortal soul... only to find out that it didn't even slow him down for a second.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tara's Continued Use of Magic]]
* Just a side effect of the Seasonal Rot in season six, but Tara chewing out Willow for using magic, but never actually giving up on it herself bugs me. The writers probably needed to push the Magic=Drugs storyline, but it does bring down my opinion of Tara, given her own abuse of magic to make her friends not see demons a season earlier.
** Tara is against Willow's ''mis''use of magic, not magic in general. Tara has made one mistake with magic, and learned from it. Meanwhile, Willow tries both to use magic for every little thing in life, but also completely fails to learn her lesson when given the chance; when Tara confronts her about the forgetting spell, she promises to lay off magic for awhile, but instead repeats exactly the same actions. Magic is not drugs - that's not the point of the storyline at all. Simply that overuse of magic can lead to addiction and unpleasant consequences. For comparison, gambling isn't a drug either, but you can still get hooked on it.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:When Was Buffy in an Asylum?]]
* In "Normal Again", Buffy says that she had gone into an asylum for a few weeks after she met her first vampires. When was this? It oughtn't have been between the movie and her move to Sunnydale, because she had already been in Slayer Mode for some time and there were many witnesses to the whole thing, and it would be an incredible coincidence if she was attacked by vampires and survived prior to becoming a Slayer. I've read the canon version of what happened, but I don't have it to check if there were any fewer witnesses to the attackers actually being vampires (and no undusted bodies were in the ruins, or she would have been imprisoned, or at least not allowed out of the mental hospital). However, even in the canon version she had been training with Merrick for some time, and while it would be possible that she had a small breakdown after [[spoiler: Merrick died]], she would have had to have been completely ostracised by the people who had been terrorized by the vampires to not have ''any'' confirmation, if any who had been near them during the attack (as opposed to cowering in a corner far from the "gang of PCP addicts") had survived.
** That movie [[CanonDiscontinuity didn't happen]]. I mean it literally didn't happen in-universe. There was no Merrick, that whole movie can be disregarded. The series used JossWhedon's original script as canon, rather than the film that was produced. To make this difference perfectly clear to the viewers, in season one it's repeatedly stated that Buffy was expelled from her last school for burning down the gym. Ergo, no movie. About the asylum specifically, the impression one gets is that a few weeks or so after Buffy learned about being the Slayer, she told her parents about it, which got her committed. She stopped talking about vampires, was released, her parents tried to forget it ever happened, and Buffy went on slaying in secret. Then she burned down the school gym, was expelled, and tried to give up her responsibilities as Slayer by moving to Sunnydale. Cue season one, episode one.
*** "The canon version". I'm not talking about the movie, I'm talking about the [[WordOfGod canon]] comic. In which Merrick ''was'' her Watcher and she got expelled for burning down the gym.
*** Merrick appears in "Becoming," in a flashback.
* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slayer,_Interrupted Slayer, Interrupted Comic]] clears that up. (Although we still don't know how it happened [[CosmicRetcon before Dawn]]).
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Consecrated Ground]]
* If consecrated ground burns vampires, how do they dig their way out of graves without huge problems? I'd think it would function like holy water, where touching it just burns but too much can dust... did they just forget?
** I'm pretty certain it was never stated that consecrated ground hurts vampires. They're often seen in churches, for one thing. The only time any vampire grave caused trouble was when the Master's minions went to dig up his skeleton, and that was because Giles, Willow and Xander had performed a mystic ritual over the grave.
*** That's the incident I was talking about-- the vampires digging up the Master say (with hands smoking) "The ground is consecrated-- it burns!". But I guess maybe it's Willow, Xander, and Giles' extra protection, not the consecration, that's doing it. I guess it just seems like the vampires should know that.
*** This troper interpreted that what they meant by "consecrated" was "lots of holy water poured on the spot". Why should vampires necessarily use the standard meaning of the word, when it has much more significant meanings to them; stuff that hurts them by mystical means without being explicitly enchanted, like crosses and the holy water.
*** Maybe the consecration of graves is a specific spell that Christians once used (similar to the way the blessing used on holy water is an anti-vampire charm, and they used it as part of the funeral ceremony in place of putting all of their corpses face-down or head-down or putting burnt ash or a bag of some specific flower's petals in the grave dirt). Most funerals just don't do the spell properly any more, and if they do it's because of a fortunately placed bit of preformer error.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Any Soul-Stealer, As Long As It's This One]]
In "Enemies", how did [[spoiler:Giles get the Mayor to call on a soul-stealing demon sorceror that owed him a favor, or contact the exact demon that the Mayor had called upon]]? The former would have been a huge XanatosRoulette with some seemingly unaccessible knowledge, the second would be a huge coincidence with some seemingly unaccesssible knowledge.
** Unless he just turned up one day in the Mayor's office and said "I heard you had a problem..."
** Here's how he could do it without it being XanatosRoulette: [[spoiler:Giles being the smart guy that he is, he has a lot of connections that just seem to keep popping up that are well outside of what the Watcher's Council apparently has access to. He probably starting keeping his ear to the ground for anything the Mayor might be planning regarding Angel after Angel came back, since he knows when Angel is Angelus that's really bad news for everyone. As soon as he heard the Mayor was looking to flip Angel or something similar he called in the favor of the soul-stealer to offer its services to the Mayor.]] Which also makes the whole episode one of Giles' [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome Crowning Moments of Awesome]].
** The Mayor says something about how it was hard to summon the demon, which means he contacted it first.
*** Or that he received a communique to the effect that "there is a demon who can help you, all you have to do is summon it."
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Uhm, Slayer Jobs / Slayer Slavery?]]
Giles gets paid as Buffy's Watcher - and paid somewhat well. What does Buffy get out of it? Sure, Giles does the work to train, teach, and 'watch'... but because of The Watcher's and her calling, Buffy doesn't have the kind of time to do her education to prepare for a productive career, and any job she gets would come at the expense of her training or actual Slayer missions. This isn't a problem until Buffy has to support Dawn. They negotiated backpay for Giles, why not money to help keep Buffy and Dawn under a roof and fed? She's to do a 24/7 life and death job and not get paid - or any sort of living expense stipend? And Giles does? (I'm sure the woman who wrote her thesis on William The Bloody has a nice flat.)
* Also, Buffy has... certain skills. I'm sure she could have won lots of money as a prizefighter or as a carnival act.
** Or freaky webcam girl.
* That's pretty much it exactly. Buffy's not supposed to have an education or a job. Or family, or friends, or any life outside of being the Slayer. She's supposed to be entirely sustained by Giles, go where she's told, fight who she's told, and then die. In short, she's supposed to be Kendra. But she won't sit for that, nor should she. It's just a form of control.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Dawn is Made of Me]]
* So, in "The Gift" Buffy's suicide closes the dimensional portal even though Buffy is (as far as we know) not a Key and Dawn is still bleeding. Isn't that case of YouFailLogicForever? Even if Dawn is made of Buffy, a conclusion that Buffy pretty much pulled out of her ass, this still wouldn't have made Buffy a Key, would it? Isn't Dawn a combination of a mystical Key energy and a human? Presumably the Key part comes from her energy days, not Buffy. In other words, the cause and effect chain is in the opposite direction - if Buffy was made of Dawn she would have a case but not vice versa. And even if Buffy was somehow a Key, the blood of Dawn was still flowing when the portal closed. It would have been nice if Buffy had tried to, you know, put some bandages on Dawn first and see if that wouldn't close the portal...
** I like how Anya lampshaded the confusion in a later episode, remarking that she never really figured it out either. But here's my take on it. Since Dawn opened the portal while she was still in human form, with her blood, the portal was attuned during its opening to Summers blood (had the Key been in its energy form during the opening, that wouldn't have been the case - it happened only because Dawn stayed human through the process). So Buffy's blood resembled Dawn's enough to either work and close the portal, or to at least make the portal go haywire and collapse. Either way, the world gets saved. As for how Buffy thought of it, it was just a crazy guess, like "hey, if it wants her blood and she's my sister now, maybe mine's close enough". She wasn't going to kill Dawn, and the world as we know it was about to end, so she didn't have anything to lose by giving it a try.
*** And personally, I like to think Buffy made the portal go haywire and kablooey, that her Dawn-like blood didn't so much close it as it threw a monkey wrench into the dimensional gears and brought them grinding to a halt. To me at least, that makes more sense than her blood having exactly the same power as Dawn's, and it has the same visible outcome (the portal vanishes and everything goes back to normal).
*** Regardless of why it worked, Buffy knew it would work because suddenly all of the prophecies and portents she'd been seeing and dreaming made sense.
**** Also, the portal going haywire and kablooey explains why it KILLED her when all the demons and crap it was transplanting were getting through just fine. The energy in the portal was obviously survivable given that other things survived it just fine, but the portal having a massive cosmic Blue Screen of Death was not.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: How Can Slayers Not be Religious?]]
* Hell and Heaven definitely are proven to exist. Supernatural monsters definitely exist. Souls exist, as they can be lost and reattained. Satan is at least presumed to exist, or at least some major force of supreme evil. Vampires are negatively effected by crosses and holy water. And yet most of the characters are agnostic or atheist? It doesn't make sense that characters who have the supernatural proven to them over and over, or Buffy, who actually died and went to heaven wouldn't be sure or wouldn't believe in God. Atheists in a fair portion of the Buffyverse would have to be traditional Hollywood Atheists - they don't not believe in God, they are simply angry at him.\\
\\
Even if crosses work as a repellent based on their representation of the sun (as listed on this page), or as representations of pure, unselfish, self-sacrificing goodness (explained as that in some other series, this troper forgets which), holy water should not work. Granted, we never see vampires getting splattered with water from the Ganges, but if holy water provides specific protection from evil, and is one of the few things that can harm a vampire or other demon, then Catholic Christianity (or perhaps Eastern Orthodox - Protestant holy water is used in baptisms, rather than for an amulet effect) must be presumed to be the correct religion, as it is the only one that can destroy evil with items that their priests have blessed.\\
\\
Barring that, then certain druidic sects must be presumed to be correct, as wood has the power to destroy vampires. All around, though, the supernatural running roughshod all over creation would tend to provoke a religious reaction in at least one character, excluding ones that worship evil (Glory's little minions, Caleb).
** Christianity: Has crosses and holy water backing it up. The worship of Osiris: Has direct appeal to the God resulting in all-out resurrection of the dead. Similarly, if you appeal to Hecate, people turn into rats. If you appeal to Janus, the ''entire town'' goes crazy. These are all rather more impressive tricks than "vampires find it slightly painful". So from the perspective of the characters seeing these things, either [[AllMythsAreTrue all religions are true]], or religion is just functional magic. In the former case, picking just one could be risky (and since very few religions outside the Judaeo-Christian family specifically ban the worship of other gods, that would probably be their last choice); in the latter, it would be a bit pointless.
** There are hell dimensions, plural. It was said in-universe that the Heaven could have just been a heaven dimension, but since the body stayed on Earth (as compared to any time someone got stuck in a hell dimension), I doubt that is the case. The holy water was stated to have been blessed with a rite to harm vampires, Christianity just happens to be both an anti-vampire religion and one of the most commonly practiced religions in the western hemisphere (where Buffy, the Watchers, Faith, and [possibly temporarily, I don't know exactly where she was supposed to have hailed] Kendra live).
* Also worth noting: the crosses and holy water only work against vampires. They're utterly useless against other kinds of demons.
* This might be a case of AuthorOnBoard with Joss Whedon's personal opinions on religion. The only character in the Whedonverse who is portrayed as being a Christian is Kate Lockley from ''Angel''.
** A few lines actually implied that Riley was a Christian as well.
---> '''Buffy:''' You got here fast.
---> '''Riley:''' Actually, I'm just late for church.
** The OP kind of hit on something. It's a form of Hollywood Atheism. If there's a higher power he/she/it is making them put their lives on the line constantly and never freely giving help. Why would they worship he/she/it?
* This troper always assumed holy water to work BECAUSE crosses do. Whatever power the cross has (be it a higher power, the sun, belief, what have you), the ritual for consecrating the water imbues it with the power from the cross. In any case, while it has been proven that gods exist (Buffy has even fought one) thereby justifying spirituality, religion is another thing entirely. Atheism is unjustifiable in this setting, but I can't think of any characters who are outright atheist. Agnosticism is much more understandable; the acknowledgement of the possibility of higher powers but without claiming to fully understand what "higher powers" completely entails. Agnostic and Atheist are NOT the same thing. Also, while we're on the subject, Willow may not be Christian, but she IS Jewish. Just thought I should throw that out there. She also seems to believe "Wiccan" is a buzzword for magic-users.
* What's with the assumption that any and all characters not seen professing their beliefs on camera are non-religious? How many shows can you name where you're 100% certain of everyone's religious standing? Buffy was meant to be an icon and hero for young women especially. I don't ever want to know what real-world religious denomination she belongs to (if any) any more than I want to know what political party she's registered with -- that takes away from her belonging to everyone.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Bottomless vampire stomachs]]
* What happens to vampire food? I [[NoBodyPoops didn't think the vampires' digestive systems worked properly enough to let food go all the way through their system]], but that they only absorbed the blood and a few easy-to-absorb chemicals like alcohol and (debated) nicotine. They don't breathe, and their blood doesn't pump (which means drunkeness should be more of a psychological or mystical thing, such as a psychosomatic effect or a libation to the dead), and I thought it had been stated that vampires' digestive systems basically acted as a tank in which to store blood until they could absorb it. Do they purge their stomachs once it gets too full of stuff that isn't blood, like the vampires who eat but don't digest in some other works? Do they absorb everything, and the normally unusable stuff that can be digested is just burnt for calories or mystical energy? Does their demon poof it away? [[ImprobableFoodBudget Why does Angel even need a food budget if they don't]] ''[[ImprobableFoodBudget need]]'' [[ImprobableFoodBudget to eat]]? It makes it more confusing because Spike (possibly in addition to Angelus) has been shown urinating, but that was mostly to show respect and could have been completely voluntary, and it works completely differently, anyway (stomach to blood to kidneys then expelled, instead of just being pushed through a glorified tube while being broken down, with little bits absorbed along the way). Mostly, I just want to know what happened to Spike's Wheatabix.
** Spike has, on one occasion, mentioned how emaciated vampires look (though that was pleading for blood, so I dunno if it's true), so I would guess that what they eat is just converted into energy. Also, Angel does need to buy blood, so I'm not sure about that one. He doesn't go around killing people, or rats, and I think that even if they don't /need/ to eat, it's at least more comfortable to.
*** Right, sorry, I was referencing the entry on the ImprobableFoodBudget page, and should have made that more clear. Thanks for everything else, though.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Pack Lunch]]
* In the first-season episode "The Pack", Giles and Xander reveal to the audience that Xander remembers everything from being possessed by hyenas. Xander wasn't the only one who got possessed-- which means the evil clique at school still remembers being turned into hyenas and ''eating the principal''. This is never dealt with.
** If you got possessed and committed cannibalism against your will, would ''you'' go around yammering about it all the time?
[[/folder]]

[[folder:"Bargaining" for a Shovel]]
* How about the whole matter of not [[spoiler:digging up Buffy]] before the spell in "Bargaining"? What did they expect to happen when [[spoiler:Buffy came back to life in a buried casket]]? They do have Xander mention how stupid they were in neglecting to take that into account, but it makes no sense that they would be so so stupid. Also, in the same episode, why do they let [[spoiler:Buffybot]] patrol by herself, especially after making it clear earlier in the episode that she always needs to be supervised by one of them when she does just about anything?
** Maybe they expected her to just appear in a brand new body, right in front of them. After all, it doesn't make much sense to put Buffy back in a partially decomposed body when you can just magic up a pretty new one. Whoops.
** Presumably the spell was supposed to end by mystically returning her to the surface. It happened to get interrupted right before that point.
** Or they just didn't fully understand the magicks they were working which, to be frank, wouldn't be the first time for this crew. Willow, after all, was the only one who even knew what the ritual entailed. Even Tara only had Willow's vague descriptions. It's very possible that they actually DID expect Buffy to just appear out of thin air in a brand new body.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Something to Sing About]]
* In Once More, With Feeling, the song "Something to Sing About" gets on my nerves immensely. The song in itself is nice, but the lyrics/meaning to the song don't match it at all. It sounds like a cheery, happy go lucky song about ''wanting a reason to live''. WTH!?
** LyricalDissonance. This troper [[YourMileageMayVary loved this]], and thought that in this case this dissonance had a dual function: first, it conveys Buffy's desperate attempts to pretend that she is glad to be back from the beyond (when actually she is miserable). This struggle is crucial to early sixth season until Buffy reveals at the end of OMWF that [[spoiler:she was in heaven, not hell]]. She may appear happy, but actually listening to her or paying attention to her will reveal that she's pretty disturbed (just like this song). I think its second function (though this may just be me) is as a reference to such musical theatre greats as StephenSondheim, who I believe Whedon is a fan of. Sondheim uses the happy music/sad or angry lyrics technique to great effect with some frequency. For example, a [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gyl8a140Tc song about murdering people and baking them into pies becomes a cheery waltz]], or a [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuTtl0cetAA cynical look at marriage becomes upbeat]]. More examples of this trope can be viewed on its page, of course, but I think a good example of its success is the acclaimed musical ''AvenueQ'', from after OMWF, which used this effect throughout most of its score-- [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJJxL9utow starting with its opening sequence]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder:"Wish" Darla were There]]
* In "The Wish," where is Darla? She was one of The Master's biggest supporters in the regular continuity, and only left his side to travel the world with Angelus, who in this world was still ensouled. So where was she? It seems unlikely Angel killed here in this Buffy-less Sunnydale, as The Master probably escaped following a successful Harvest. So where'd she go? Wouldn't she be the one most likely to be attending The Master's weird "mass production blood machine thing's activation" party?
** The entire premise of vampires ruling Sunnydale in "The Wish" doesn't hold under scrutiny, IMO. Why are people still living in Sunnydale? Why haven't they called the army or at least moved out? It makes no sense whatsoever. Also in "The Harvest", The Master's rising is supposed to end the world, In "Prophecy Girl" we see the demons coming out from the Hellmouth because he escaped with the clear implication of them being ready to be unleashed upon the world. In "The Wish" however The Master is content to rule over...The Bronze. Talk about VillainDecay. Maybe Darla just found this behaviour too cowardly and boring and moved elsewhere.
** That's a problem I've had with that episode too: how much more awesome would it have been to really follow up on the what-if premise from "Prophecy Girl", to have the Hellmouth open, demons wandering the Earth and the traumatized remains of human society clinging to a threadbare veneer of daylight normalcy (in other words, kinda like what we saw in Wishworld Sunnydale, except it's like that ''everywhere''). It's tempting to say that's outside the scope of a TV show, but Joss eventually did exactly that sort of story in ''{{Dollhouse}}'', and it was incredible. But anyway, as for Darla, I'd guess that the White Hats fought and killed her in one of their early battles. The Master's disciple Luke is also missing: if Giles and the gang staked Luke and Darla early on, the Master might have captured and turned Xander and Willow into his new disciples as his way of evening the score.
*** Though now that I think about it, maybe there's a little bit of FridgeBrilliance in that first part. Cordelia wished that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, and Anya granted her wish. If the Master's ascension had caused any apocalyptic problems, though, the Watchers Council would have sent Buffy there in a hurry, and that would've gone against the wish. So maybe the wish not only {{Cosmic Retcon}}ed Buffy's original arrival in Sunnydale, it also retconned the Master's imprisonment and plans to make sure Buffy ''still'' didn't have any reason to show up even after his release. Still woulda loved to see a full-blown demon post-apocalypse, though...
** As to where the army is: Sunnydale still has its Mayor, one assumes. Whatever pact he made to turn Sunnydale into a demon feeding ground is still in effect.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Drusilla Doesn't Change]]
* The show explained that vampires are just demons that take over a human corpse, so basically when being sired the human actually dies, and a new demon is reborn in their body along with their memories. This kind of makes sense but is contradicted so often in the show, Drusilla being most notable. Why is the vamp version of Drusilla psychic and insane just because her human self was before siring?
** The show does actually say that the vampire personality is related to the human personality - explicitly in one case, in Doppelgangland, when Willow is freaked out about Wishverse Willow being so evil and skanky and gay. Someone tells her not to worry because the vampire personality has nothing to do with the human personality, and Angel goes, "Well, actually..." Buffy shuts him up, but it's actually been pretty clear from the first episodes. If vamp!Jesse has nothing to do with real Jesse, why does he go out of his way to get Cordelia? Vampire personalities are shaped by the personality of the body they get stuffed into, just with extra added evil and a rejection of social norms that allow them to express repressed elements of their personality. For people who are basically good, this involves a rejection of their despised previous persona (Jesse, and Spike, although it takes Spike awhile). For people who are already evil or borderline bad or just plain mean, like Liam or Harmony, they just get extra more so. Wishverse Willow is a lot like real, souled Willow after she becomes dark. "Bored now", anyone? With Drusilla, she's already crazy when Angel finally kills her, and she's not repressing anything. So Vamp Drusilla is still crazy but with extra bonus obsessing over dead things, blood, etc. -- This is all basically FanWank, I guess, so YMMV.
*** It may be that vampire personalities have the "distilled" versions of their mortal personalities. Vampire Xander and Willow were still together because their defining trait was their love for each other, something revisited in season six. Angelus was a sadistic monster because vampires take pleasure in pain and Liam was a hedonist. Drusilla was a loon because... well, Drusilla was a loon, but she became a kinky, slutty loon once her piety was stripped away by vampirism. Spike was a rebel because William didn't care much for his lifestyle and peers.
** Yes, there is nothing pointing to this "demon" being anything more substantial than a lack of conscience, desire to do evil and an appetite for human blood. There is not a single vampire whose personality doesn't reflect that of his human original, so obviously, it's not a case of demonic personality taking over the human body and using the human memories but case of the human personalities being twisted by the demonic influence.
** It's also worth noting that Dru as a human was pious and chaste, whereas Dru as a vampire was kinky and a big slut.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Buffy the Accidental Mass Murderer?]]
* So, for years, Buffy runs around Sunnydale happily turning vampires into dust whenever she sees them, because vampires are unredeemably evil and no good can ever come of them. Then one day, along tromps the Initiative, and with their foolish mortal book-learnin' and their silly, mundane technology, they manage to get behavior modification chip into the brain of one of history's most feared vampires. Within three years, that irredeemably soulless creature has volunteered to endure prolonged torture in order to get his soul back and not be evil. If this was possible all along, isn't that a pretty big "oops" for the forces of good? Shouldn't someone, somewhere in this story -- keeping in mind that real people have diverse ethical views -- have experienced some sort of moral crisis when they figured out that vampires are actually capable of ''choosing good'', particularly if they're given a bit of rehabilitative therapy?
** The meta answer is TheyJustDidntCare. In their quest to fluff Spike and appease his fans the writers didn't care if the whole vampire mythos could be destroyed in the process. The not so meta explanation would be that maybe the Scoobies suspected that Spike was lying - he had never intended to get his soul back, it had somehow happened in some other fashion. Of course, there is precious little evidence for that but it's a fanwank that makes that wallbanging nature of season 7 just a bit more tolerable, for me at least. Of course, Buffy took Spike word for his soul search but that's easily dismissible, since in season 7 Buffy is rather out of touch with reality, especially when it came to Spike.
** Spike is in love with Buffy at the start of season 4, even before he gets his implant. And he underwent that painful resoulification because of his love. The implant actually didn't change him that much. OTOH, his harmlessness helped him come close to Buffy and co.
** Also, Spike wasn't capable of being good until he regained his soul. Everything he did up to the end of season six was completely selfish, either because he loved Buffy or he needed the money or protection. Which was why Buffy trusted Spike in "The Gift" the most, as everybody else had the lingering doubt of whether it would be better to kill Dawn to save the world, while he had no qualms about the world being destroyed. Vampires can't choose good, the soul allows them the possibility to choose good. Without the soul, they're just purely evil. If Spike didn't love Buffy, he wouldn't have searched for a soul. So it wasn't rehabilitative therapy.
*** I thought it was pretty clear that he cared about Dawn in a sort of big brother sort of way.
*** And I thought the reason Buffy trusted Spike to protect Dawn is because just a few episodes prior to the big blowout, Spike almost gave his unlife against Glory's interrogation in order to do exactly that. Not because "Oh, he's evil, so he's cool with the apocalypse," but because he's already PROVEN he'll die for her.
** If I remember correctly, Spike wasn't even trying to get his soul back when he went to see that demon--he wanted to be made ''worse'' so that he wouldn't have to deal with the pain of loving Buffy. But the unspecific phrasing of his request (something along the lines of "I want to be put back the way I was so I can give Buffy what she deserves") could be interpreted as him wanting his soul back in order to become good, so the demon returned it anyway.
*** The entire thing was written so that it would strongly imply Spike wanting to lose the chip and the infatuation, but never outright said it. I took it that, in retrospect, the demon's only real trick was to give back souls, and that the writers intended to have people interpret it their own way (either "Spike wanted his soul back so he went to the soul-returner", "Spike got what he needed and technically asked for ('what [Buffy] deserves' is a reward) instead of what he wanted and the sorcery demon could have granted either wish", or something else).
**** They do seem to proceed from that point as though Spike was really trying to get his soul back (he talks about going through the demon trials for that purpose, Insane!Spike talks about wanting his soul back but not realizing how much it'd hurt, Angel said he only wanted his soul back to get into Buffy's pants and so on), but yeah, it definitely ''seemed'' like Spike was the victim of a JackassGenie at the time (after all, he called Buffy a bitch in the very same sentence that said he was going to give her what she deserves!). Maybe the writers themselves weren't sure which way they wanted to go with his storyline, and intentionally left it vague until the next season. Or the deliberately vague editing of the demon trials was just a RedHerring to mislead the fans about what Season 7 would involve.
*** The idea that Spike wanted his chip removed was an intentional RedHerring. This is confimed in season 7, and there's not a single line of dialouge in S6 that contradicts it -- Spike's lines are just phrased ambiguously until the reveal. The earliest hint is in the little speech he gives at the end of "Seeing Red", where stresses that Buffy "has no idea" that he "wasn't always this way"; Buffy knew Spike before he was chipped, but never knew him when he had a soul.
** Most of the vampire fighting they do is in self defense. Kind of hard to do rehabilitative work on someone trying to kill you. Also, it seems like soul process is ''very'' hard to do. The gypsy curse incapacitates all but the strongest witches. I suspect there's a reason the demon made Spike go through all, being that resouling is hard to do and he can't just do it for any jackass that shows up. In short, the resoulification isn't something that can really be mass produced and supplied to ''every'' vampire.
*** Re: self-defense, Buffy and Faith once ''burned a nest of vampires while they were sleeping''. Granted, this was Faith's influence, but it's not treated as an atrocity; we're meant to accept (in season three, anyway) that killing vampires is never really a bad thing. Same goes with attacking vampires the second they're out of the ground. I'd imagine being turned and rising from the grave might be a little disorienting -- in fact, I think Angel outright says as much -- but "stake 'em before they knew what hit 'em" is still considered an acceptable Slayer tactic. None of this is a problem if vampires are inherently evil and incapable of redemption, but it's a downer once that gets called into question, considering that technology exists which can render vampires harmless.
**** Additionally, it doesn't constitute self-defense if you go out every night LOOKING for someone to start a fight with you. What Buffy does is vigilante justice, not self-defense. Just a small note, but this troper has long since gotten tired of the term "self-defense" being expanded to include "any time a hero gets in any kind of fight".
** And, as noted, Spike didn't exactly choose to do good. Being good with a soul is just a by product of his true goal. He was in love with Buffy, and wanted her more than anything, and he knew he wasn't going to win her without a soul. He didn't give a crap about being good without his soul, hence the reason he tried to rape Buffy.
*** That doesn't mean he was incapable of good. He turned his mother out of love for her, he stayed utterly and selflessly devoted to Drusilla for more than a century, and after trying to rape Buffy, was repentant enough to go through the Demon Trials. He was capable of good beyond good as a means to an end.
*** IOW, he was a sociopath, and can do things beneficial to the people around him as long as it falls into his whims. The moment those whims change, or as long as he thinks he can get away with it, he'd still revel in the opportunity to commit sadistic acts of murder.
*** Yeah. Because he's a vampire. I'm not saying that he was a fluffy little bunny; Spike was a remorseless, sadistic killer. But that's not all he was. He wasn't a good guy, but he still ''did good.'' Consciously, by his own free will, for more reasons than "because it might get me a bit of Slayer tail."
*** The key word is repentant. By the end of "Seeing Red", Spike is supposed to be ''overwhelmed with remorse'' at having hurt someone he cared about, when previously, vampires were depicted as being ''incapable'' of remorse. Right before he goes to get his soul back, Spike directly attributes these strange feelings to the chip ("It won't let me be a monster, and I can't be a man"). The implication is that having the bloodlust of a vampire alongside some sort of emergent capacity for empathy is causing him to suffer, and that he choses to resolve this via resoulification rather than seeking a way to get rid of the chip. That doesn't make Spike a saint, but it does seem to indicate that he's reached some sort of a tipping point where geniune love and remorse may be the stronger motivators than selfish desire -- which raises the issue of whether all vampires are capable of that kind of personal growth.
**** And on the subject of Spike doing good, let's not forget when he was willing to die to protect Dawn. There is nothing self-serving in self-sacrifice.
** Of course, Angel is aware of an entire species of mercenary demons whose blood turns vampires humans in even very small doses. Granted, its not said to give back the original souls, but one wonders why he didn't try and scrounge up the money (especially as the head of Wolfram and Hart) to hire them for a blood drive or something, on the grounds that sociopathic humans are a lot easier to incarcerate/kill than sociopathic metahumans who can pass that condition on to others. Maybe they're just cautious about the blood being used against them via sympathetic magic or something?
* Joss is actually on record saying that Spike had more humanity in him from the start than most vampires, for an as-yet-unexplored reason.
** I think it was sufficiently explored through William, his former human self. Vampires carry the personality of their host in some form, and William was a very compassionate, moral romantic idealist. It carried over into Spike's personality: he's also an intensely loyal romantic idealist, with a greater sense of compassion than most vampires (not much, mind you, but when you're competing with nil) and a NobleDemon's sense of fair play. We've seen that happen at least one other time, with Gunn's sister: she was the the heart and the moral compass of their vampire-hunting gang, and when she turned, she still cared about Gunn and wanted to make him a vampire too (just like Spike did his mother).
** As for the larger question of whether Buffy's a mass murderer, though, I'd still say no. Vampires in the Buffyverse are TheHeartless. Just because the chip can force them to behave doesn't mean they have a potential for morality: it just puts them on a short leash, that's all. A rare, halfway-moral vampire like Spike or Alonna might appear every now and then, but even with the chip, they can't grow beyond that point (note that Spike realized this and went to get his soul back for that very reason). In this 'verse, they're TheVirus, created by a dying EldritchAbomination to prey on humanity. They don't have any more of an innate right to exist than a mad scientist's mutant ebola strain. Granted, all this runs headlong into questions about WhatMeasureIsANonHuman, but "soulless demonic energy possessing a corpse so that it can feed on and infect other humans" is a line I'm fairly comfortable drawing.
*** Vampirism is TheVirus, but vampires as individuals are sentient, emotional, and have varying degrees of morality. That said, they're also predators, which is where it stops being a moral problem. The number of vampires unwilling to kill humans to eat is extremely finite, with the end result that, no matter how sentient or even moral some vampires may be, they're still a constant threat to every human walking down the street. You could make the argument that vampires have the right to live as well, and maybe they do, but humans have the right not to be attacked and have our throats ripped out.
**** The number of soulless vampires that have been subject to any known attempt at rehabilitation, though, still stands at one. Even if we accept that Spike is the only vampire on earth who could possibly be rehabilitated because WordOfGod says he's special, Buffy and friends have no reason to suspect this; from their perspective, the initiative's chip has a 100% success rate. It's kind of creepy that no one feels even a tinge of regret over the number of vamps they've dusted after they're given reason to believe vampires are not as irredemably evil as they'd thought. Not even regret of the "I had no other choice but I still feel bad it happened that way" variety.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Jonathan's gun in Earshot]]
* This is a minor thing but it always bugged me: if Johnathan was going up to the bell tower to kill himself in Earshot, why did he have that big, high-powered, rifle? It seem to me if someone (especially someone as short as Johnathan) tried to shoot himself with that gun, he'd bumble around, make a complete mess of the whole task, and most likely leave himself horribly maimed instead of dead.
** My god, that was so weird. How could you even aim a rifle like that at yourself? With a scope and everything? What was he going to do, shoot his foot and bleed to death?
** No idea where he even ''got'' a rifle like that (then again, this is Sunnydale), but it's not like Jonathan is supposed to have tons of common sense. Without knowing a lot about guns, he probably would have gone with whatever he thought [[RuleOfCool looked coolest]]-- or maybe he assumed using the most powerful thing he could get his hands on would decrease his chance surviving, or having time to experience pain -- or maybe he just hated life so much that he felt that merely dying would be insufficient, and that only [[NoKillLikeOverkill splattering his entire head against the wall like a Gallagherian watermelon]] would suffice. Whichever you pick, it kind of underscores how little he's thought this through, [[FridgeBrilliance which is oddly appropriate to the scene]].
** Also why go to the clocktower?
*** Dramatic gesture? The clocktower was a secluded place on campus, and high school was at the heart of his woes.
** Some people stick the barrel of a shotgun in their mouth and pull the trigger with their feet to avoid the possibility of mere maiming that a handgun offers. Maybe he just hadn't kicked off his shoes or put a popsicle stick inside the trigger guard, and couldn't find a shotgun or preferred the idea of a rifle? As to why he was in the clocktower, he would immediately get the notice of everyone on campus not in an inner-building room with a loud enough gun, which would be more traumatizing for those he saw as bullies than an obituary that says "Johnathan[sic] what's-his-face, found dead in his basement after three-ish weeks of decomposition. The coroners guess it might have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but they were too busy with the sextuple train-passenger homicide on page three to double-check."
* Maybe someone else he knew owned the gun so it was the only one he could get his hands on.
** It was probably his dad's hunting rifle or something. Also, it should be noted that rifles and shotguns are a lot easier to get than a handgun. Handguns usually require special permits and registration, but rifles don't.
*** ...What.
* The meta reason is so that we (and Buffy) would suspect him of being a mass murderer. Neither of us would suspect him if he went to the tower with a handgun, since that's not gonna kill anybody up there. With a rifle though, it seemed definite that he was gonna start picking people off.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Anya's "I'll never tell"]]
* In ''Once more with feeling'', why is Anya so intent in "never telling" Xander about his faults? We're talking about the usually extremely blunt Anya here!
** The list of minor failings thats irks the two of them is more for comedic effect. Anya never really had a problem calling out Xander when he annoyed her (and for that matter Xander never really had a problem doing the same when Anya annoyed him). The main point of the song seems to be that they both have '''serious''' doubts about whether they can make a marriage work. Xander worries that he will never be good enough to make a good life for the two of them. Anya worries that she will grow old and become unattractive and that Xander will lose interest in her. Both issues had been played out before but apparently neither of them had ever really sat down to explore them fully.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:First Evil's First Mistake]]
* In "Conversations With Dead People", The First Evil uses the image of one-shot character Cassie to talk to Willow, claiming to have messages from Tara. Why Willow can't talk to Tara directly is Hand Waved early on, but we know that The First is lying at that point. So why can't it impersonate Tara? The First was only trying to [[HannibalLecture mess with Willow's head]] after all, surely it would have been more successful if it did.
** The easiest explanation and one which explains pretty much all of The First's actions in season seven is that The First is simply a moron who wouldn't know what a good plan was even if it came and hit it on the head.
** The meta reason is that Amber Benson declined the offer, but in-universe, maybe because denying Willow the joy of seeing Tara again, and tying it to her being a murderer, was deliberately meant to add to her sense of despair: if it wanted Willow to kill herself, dangling the opportunity to see Tara again like a carrot on a stick must have seemed like a good strategy. And using someone Willow didn't really know gave the First more leeway to say things that Tara herself wouldn't say (that Willow eventually saw through it anyway shows how quickly the First might've blown it if it'd tried to impersonate Tara).
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Problems in the Bedroom]]
* What exactly is the show's problem with sex? Every time sex is explicitly important or a plot point, it's treated as disastrous and/or a very bad idea. "Surprise", "The Harsh Light Of Day", "Who Are You", "Where The Wild Things Are", "Smashed"/"Wrecked", "Seeing Red", the list goes on. Only Anya and Xander get away with it, and even that's portrayed comically.
** Law of conservation of detail. If it doesn't serve the plot, why show it? And this is a comedy/horror/drama show, so if the sex isn't feeding into the horror, the drama or the comedy, it's not worth mentioning.
** Buffy and Riley spend basically half their time together having lots and lots of sex. It gets them into trouble sometimes, but as they are in college, and therefore horny, screwin' happens a lot. Xander having sex with Faith in "The Zeppo" didn't exactly cost him. Furthermore, Willow sleeping with Oz before the Apocalypse-of-the-Week was obviously a healthy and natural progression of their relationship (he refused to until they were both ready), Willow sleeping with Tara was almost always portrayed positively (it would've been a bit off to try to claim to be so progressive by showing lesbians as main characters if their sex consistently led to [[PsychoLesbian disaster]] -- and before you mention it, the sex in "Seeing Red" wasn't what drove Willow off the edge, it was Tara, y'know, dying), and Willow sleeping with Kennedy had no negative consequences ([[TakeThat other than]] [[TheWesley Kennedy]] being there). In summation, when Buffy has sex it's tragic and/or dramatic, when Xander has sex it's funny, and when Willow has sex it's romantic. Considering the characters and their roles in the show, it fits.
*** Above troper is on the ball. Really, the show doesn't have a problem with sex. It sometimes explores problems (plural) that are ''related'' to sex, but those are specific: "Surprise" is about sleeping with someone and then realizing they weren't who you thought they were. "Smashed" and "Wrecked" use violent sex as visual metaphor for a mutually destructive relationship. "Seeing Red" includes the fallout from Anya and Spike's tryst, which is treated as an affair since both were emotionally commited elsewhere. "Where The Wild Things Are" is actually about the consequences of sexual ''repression''. The only general take the show seems to have on sex is that it can make easy things complicated, which makes perfect sense given that this is a series about coming of age. (Also, in Buffyland, it's impossible for anything to be shown as complicated or serious without a body count ensuing, so please keep this in mind and adjust the consequences of people's actions accordingly.)
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Glory's magical nail polish.]]
* In "Tough Love," Ben is transforming into Glory. You get a close-up of his hand. No nail polish on his nails. He becomes Glory. Nail-polish on his nails. Why? It's not like they change clothes when one takes over.
** Glory's body is artificial, there's no reason to suggest that the nail polish (or other make-up) isn't just part of it. The clothes don't count presumably because the monks didn't think about it.
*** The monks thought of nail-polish and make-up? I like that answer.
**** ''They're'' the ones who worship a lady called [[MeaningfulName Glorificus]]. Maybe the vanity isn't new and they thought it was deep enough that she'd be fine with exhibitionism as long as she was properly primped beforehand, or something.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Pedestrian Fantasy]]
* Buffy was supposed to be an intelligent, athletic, and confident girl, living in the suburbs with a loving mom and supportive watcher. Was there any reason she turned twenty-two without ever learning how to drive? Granted, she was pretty busy, but you'd think your watcher would want you to be able to make it across town in a hurry when the world needed saving. Beyond that, it's a detail that seems bizarrely out of synch with the whole girl-empowerment theme of the show. Was there a meta reason for this?
** I understand it's slightly easier in America, but in Britain the driving test has a pass rate of 42 per cent. Logically, more than half the cast should be unable to drive. Buffy's casual attitude towards book learning would probably do her no favours in the theory side, and superhuman reflexes would probably throw other parts of the test off.
*** Yeah, but we drive ''way'' more than you guys. :) In the US, about 50% pass their road test on the first try, but mostly we start early and ''keep taking it until we pass'' -- you only have to wait a few weeks to take it again if you fail. In California, it's only around 10% of women that haven't learned to drive by Buffy's age at the end of the series -- more of them in densely populated urban areas than in small towns like Sunnydale.
** She DrivesLikeCrazy, this is canon. My guess is that she has some sort of mental block against learning to drive well early in the series, and later in the series (possibly as early as the aftereffects of "Band Candy") she's stopped practicing at all because the automobile damage was getting to be too expensive and too dangerous for Joyce or any other licensed adult who would willingly get in the car with her.
** By Season 7 she seems to have learned to drive off screen. In "Him" she pulls into the school parking lot in an SUV before trying to kill Principal Wood.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Cordelia Hates Weddings?]]
* I looked through the Chronology of ''Buffy'' and ''Angel'', and Cordelia was on vacation with the Groosalugg at the same time that Xander and Anya's wedding. Why wasn't she invited? I couldn't even find a meta example for that.
** The meta reason is likely that having her there would've stolen the spotlight from Xander and Anya, it would have felt like a cheap gimmick once the wedding's derailment went through, plus Anya and Cordelia would have a really weird dynamic to write around (Anya kinda knows Cordelia thanks to "The Wish", but Cordelia wouldn't know her, and it'd just be an awkward situation to deal with). I can't remember if the Groo vacation thing was written for Charisma Carpenter, but if so, she might also have been unavailable for filming. But as for an in-universe reason: the moment Anya found out Cordelia was Xander's ex-girlfriend, she probably wouldn't let her within 50 miles of their wedding.
** Anya already knew about Xander and Cordy. The fact Willow broke them up was one of the reasons Anya and Willow didn't initially get along. That aside, Cordy wasn't invited for two reasons: 1) She is his ex and it would be weird. 2) As far as we know no one has even bothered talking to Cordy in over a year (in "Disharmony"). What would be the point in inviting her. On a related note, Angel wasn't invited because Xander hates him, and Wesley wasn't invited because ''everyone'' still hates him for the Faith incident.
** Has Cordelia ever forgiven Xander, anyway?
*** It's implied at the end of season three that she did. Or at least that they were capable of rebuilding their friendship; she more or less rejoined the Scoobies and they weren't too cruel to one another. Possibly they'd have had some kind of relationship if she'd stuck around in Sunnydale rather than running off to LA, but as it is, Xander left Sunnydale for the summer not long after they'd started being friends again and Cordelia was gone by the time he got back.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Losing Faith]]
* "Band Candy", "Lover's Walk", "Gingerbread", "Helpless". Where's Faith? Wouldn't she be helpful in these situations? No wonder she felt isolated from the group.
** Reference is made at one point to Faith going off on walkabout, hence her absence from that particular episode. Of course, her going on walkabout is probably a ''consequence'' of her feeling isolated.
** True, that's in "Helpless", but the point stands elsewhere. Also, she's contacted in "The Zeppo" but is never even asked to help avert the apocalypse.
** Hm. In "Band Candy" and "Gingerbread," the adults of Sunnydale have been magically driven insane. Given that Faith is both mentally unstable and older than the rest of the cast, maybe she was part of the problem rather than the solution. Faith on band candy is a terrifying concept. In "Lover's Walk", as I recall there really wasn't a point where it would have made sense to try to contact her.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: The Strawman Corps]]
* In season six, Buffy takes a gun away from a bank teller and says, "These? Never useful." Bullshit. The Initiative used ordinary guns to great effect. But guns are evil, and, in his own words, "Magic kicks science's ass." This contradicts the end of season two, in which MugglesDoItBetter. The Initiative is a big, fat case of DesignatedVillain. Whedon, please. Could you try to be subtle? And your "Magic > Science" bit is a [[BrokenAesop Broken]] SpaceWhaleAesop.
** I assume you mean when Buffy killed The Judge with a rocket launcher towards the middle of season two, which was one instance, and hardly an "ordinary gun." And the Initiative didn't use ordinary guns to great effect, they used ordinary guns to extremely mild effect. Maggie brags about Riley having taken down something like seventeen vampires with his big fancy technology, and Riley is probably one of their better soldiers. Even Xander had a higher kill count than that armed with a pointy stick. And they usually operated in teams, and they usually had much more impressive technology than the typical handgun. So a single gun? Rarely useful against vampires and demons. As for the Initiative... they did villainous things. They experimented on Oz, they tried to kill the Slayer, they built a robo-demon-zombie and acted surprised when it turned into a huge prick. It's not designated villainy when the villain does evil shit all the time.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Robot roll call]]
* Both the Aprilbot and the Buffybot are technological wonders. How come no one thought to CutLexLuthorACheck ? I can think of tons of applications to that technology.
** Warren considered April a failure, and probably didn't see Buffybot in any better light. Warren was a huge asshole: he didn't see them as being quasi-sentient humanlike artificial beings, he saw them as sex toys, and the fact that he didn't find April to be that much fun meant that she was a defective sex toy, and thus not one that he could effectively sell.
*** Just because Warren's an idiot does not mean that everyone who interacted with his robots was an idiot. Spike could have thought of making money that way.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Ineffectual Villains]]
* It bugs me that Buffy villains are just so ineffectual.
** Angelus: This '''super evil''' and '''sadistic''' vampire can enter the Slayer's house. Oh my god, what's the worst thing that could happen? Will she die? Buffy doesn't do the reasonable thing she could do (moving to someone else's place, someone who didnt invite Angel in), but that's totally OK, because the most evil thing our sadistic super-strong villain could come up with was to ''draw her while she slept''. Furthermore, Angel lost his soul right after he slept with Buffy. And she was still there when he came back. He had an opportunity to kill her, instead, what did this sadistic, '''devoid of humanity''', killing machine do? ''He behaved like a jerk!''
*** Remember that for all his talk and pompous show, Angelus has never actually had to deal with a Slayer before. His behaviour regarding the Slayer in Spike's flashbacks shows that he had the same respect and fear towards the Slayer that most vampires who've lived for hundreds of years have learned to cultivate. He talks a good game, giving speeches about how you have to love her in order to kill her to "I axed two Slayers while you were poncing around crying into your rats" Spike, but the most likely explanation for Angelus's less than stellar behaviour is that he was still afraid of her. He just doesn't show it, because this is Angelus we're talking about; he doesn't show fear.
**** Alternately, he wasn't afraid of her but, as noted, he's still never handled a Slayer before; he may have expected his standard psychological torture tactics to work because that's just how he operates. Direct tactics aren't Angelus's bag.
*** You just aren't thinking like a sadistic 200-year-old vampire with a quasi-romantic obsession. Angel's plans did include killing Buffy eventually, but torturing her psychologically wasn't a just means to an end. It was his idea of ''fun''. If he rushed to close the deal, then he'd have to go find something else to do for next few weeks/months/years. If Acathla hadn't come along and changed his plans, he'd probably have slowly escalated his tactics until Buffy [[BreakTheCutie was driven madder than Drusilla]] and ''then'' killed her, unless she dusted him first. A girl like Buffy only comes along once a lifetime. You kill her ''right''.
*** Moreover, let's say that he did kill Buffy while he was planning to destroy the world. Buffy would go to Heaven and be spared Acathla's return. That's basically losing, as far as Angelus is concerned. Before he'd decided to destroy the world, he was planning to drive Buffy mad. He was toying with her and her friends and reminding her every day in dozens of ways that she was in love with him and he was going to kill her when he was good and ready. Angelus isn't a scrapper like Spike, he's a torture artist.
** The Mayor: Once you are invincible, why leave the job to your killable reckless, arrogant surrogate daughter? Why not do it yourself while you're invincible and [[CaptainObvious can therefore not]] be killed?
*** Old habits die hard. The mayor's a politician, and doesn't like to get her hands dirty. Besides which, while unkillable, he was no more effective in a hand-to-hand fight than the next untrained, not particularly fit, human politician. An attempt to kill Buffy would probably result in a prolonged stalemate, culminating in her chaining him up, tying on some weights, and dropping him into Crystal Lake.
*** This is a popular one. People assume that immortality or even invulnerability automatically equates to winning every fight. It doesn't. There are a LOT of ways to incapacitate someone, temporarily OR permanently, without actually killing or, in some cases, even harming them. The Mayor's a regenerator. That's the only ability he has. Under controlled circumstances, Xander could probably kick his ass. Under the far more likely uncontrolled circumstances, he's still no match for the Slayer, or probably even Giles.
** Adam: This one is especially baffling. Adam seemed to just sit there in his cave, waiting for Buffy. He's NighInvulnerable, why can't he just go to Buffy's house and kill everyone before they figure out a way to kill him? What is he afraid of? The Agoraphobia circuits keeps him from doing this? What could be more important that getting rid of the main threat to his world domination plans?
*** Adam's weakness was precisely the opposite -- he wasn't afraid. Not of Buffy, not (apparently) of anything. Since he'd beaten her in a fight she wasn't a threat to him. What she ''was'' was an important factor in his plan to have all the factions in Sunnydale slaughter one another. Also, Adam was kind of lame.
*** Adam didn't kill Buffy because he didn't want Buffy dead. It's as simple as that. She was a piece he needed in play, and she couldn't hurt him. And let's be honest, if they hadn't found the Captain Planet spell, she wouldn't have. He had no reason to kill her.
** Glory. Partly justified, as she's insane, doesn't have full control over her body, and doesn't know who or even what the Key is. Still, once she's tortured Spike without results, why didn't she try someone else? Couldn't she get her mooks to abduct someone else among the Slayer friends until she gets the information she wants?
*** Glory DID try someone else. IMMEDIATELY after that episode, she went after Tara. This prompted Willow's counterattack, prompting Glory's counter-counterattack, and kicking off the final sequence of events.
** The Master: Apparently, you couldn't care less about making sure that once the slayer's dead, she stays dead.
*** Hey, there was a prophecy. Not like they ever have loopholes or anything, right? Right?
*** ...he just KILLED the Slayer and was excited to be free for the first time in centuries. You expect him to sit around in his prison and watch the body for a while to make sure none of the friends that Slayers don't have ever show up to revive her? He thought she was dead and, let's be honest, [[FridgeBrilliance an ancient vampire probably isn't very learned on the respiratory system.]]
** Warren: Why did he have to come up with all sorts o'wacky plans to get rid of the slayer, instead of doing what he, you know, [[WhyDontYaJustShootHim ended up doing anyway]]? Why, if he couldn't just shoot her didn't he build some sort of killingbot, which he was perfectly able to do?
*** Because he didn't want to kill Buffy so much as he wanted to be a comic-book supervillain. That meant coming up with whacky schemes, and never repeating yourself. He'd done robots; he wasn't going to show such unoriginality as to try that again.
*** Just like Adam, he didn't actually WANT to kill her. His plan wasn't "Kill Buffy". The only times Warren targeted Buffy, it was either, "Long as the situation's optimal, might as well let her die," like the invisibility ray, or targeting Buffy was just part of a different objective, like sending the demon after her to get it out of his hair, or framing her for Katrina's murder so he wouldn't be a suspect. Until he walked into her yard with a gun out of anger and desperation, he wasn't explicitly TRYING to kill her.
*** Willow could wipe out an army of Buffybots all day every day. Warren was the technology arm of the Trio's technology, demonology, and sorcery trifecta; Willow had all three.
** Darth Willow: Your lover's dead and you've become an AxCrazy über-witch on a RoaringRampageOfRevenge. You want to kill everything and everyone and then, you don't, thanks to the PowerOfFriendship. Actually, this makes the most sense: rage can make people do stupid things, love too, so the love-induced wrath of a powerful witch oughta be devastating, and it's not uncommon to calm down and realise you can think things over.
*** Like you noted, rage makes people do stupid things. Love touched off Willow's rage, and love ended it. Like many, many things in this show, Darth Willow was a metaphor. In this case, for the pain of losing someone you love, and the stupid, reckless things people do to deal with that pain. And it took the intervention of the love of someone close to her, someone she HASN'T lost, to pull her back from rock bottom so that the healing could begin.
*** The Master trusted tradition and prophesy too much for his own good. Angel was obsessed with Buffy and ruled by passion.[[hottip:*:(And he was a sadist, so her wasn't really as interested in killing her as he was in torturing her which Spike actually calls him out on -- no one ever accused him of being practical.)]] The Mayor's affection for his surrogate daughter lead him to make stupid mistakes. Adam was arrogant; Glory was crazy; Warren was immature.[[hottip:*:(he wanted to be a comic book supervillain, and threw a violent tantrum when it didn't work out the way he wanted it to.)]] All of these characters had real human, emotional weaknesses at the core of their character which lead to their downfall. Stupid mistakes were made largely because they were people.
**** Basically this. Every villain had a motivation. Only a select few of those motivations were explicitly "Kill Buffy". The Master wanted to rise, The Mayor wanted to become a giant snake, Adam wanted his war, Glory wanted The Key, and Warren wanted to be Lex Luthor. The only one that explicitly wanted Buffy to die was Angelus, and he's never fought a Slayer before.
*** Exactly. Remember that killing Buffy would summon another Slayer, and so would have only temporary gain for each villain, if any. They all have their own motives and all of them very nearly succeed[[hottip:*:{{You Can't Thwart Stage One}}, after all]], except Warren, who is only dangerous when he completely changes his motivation (from "being a supervillain would be AWESOME" to "Grr!"). They all make mistakes because of established character flaws, they are not {{Villain Sue}}s.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Anya's strength of convenience?]]
* Ok, so in Season 7 we see several examples of Anya's strength as a vengeance demon. She is able to hold her own against Buffy and even willing to fight with Spike. Why is it then that when Dark Willow grabs her by the throat in the penultimate episode of Season 6, she makes no attempt to fight back. She simply screams at Buffy for help (who is conveniently unconscious for those 5 seconds, after being knocked into a table at a top speed of 3 miles per hour). Anya is a vengeance demon at this time, yet acts like a defenseless human (except she can teleport). She is even knocked out easily multiple times, despite the fact that a sword to her chest does nothing.
** Anya's strong and hard to kill. That doesn't make her invulnerable. It's less of a "Your attacks bounce off me like nothing" iron wall and more akin to vampires, ie. "Ow, that REALLY HURT, but only specific things are lethal to me." Also, the sword to her chest didn't do ''nothing'', it knocked her out for a bit.
** That still doesn't explain why she doesn't attempt to push Willow away or pull her hand off her neck when she has her by the throat. It's like they forgot vengeance demons were strong for those episodes.
** Anya had only just returned to [[BuffySpeak vengeance-demon-ing]] very recently in "Two To Go" and it's possible that the strength of said demon was coming back to her very slowly. Alternatively, it's plausible that Willow is using some spell to hold her in place, like she had tried to do to Glory the previous season. [[TakeAThirdOption Alternatively]] [[RuleOfThree again]], Anya's former fiancé's best friend is going on a murderous rampage, and Anya is simply not coping at all.
** [[WildMassGuessing Perhaps Anya being a vengeance demon and Willow being full of vengeance prevented Anya from properly attacking Willow because of some demonic law. Maybe anya couldn't harm a potential "client."]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampire Sustainability]]
* How in the bloody hell have vampires not eaten everyone on the planet? They feed probably every other night, at least once per night if they're successful and sometimes, in the case of vampires like Angelus, kill whenever they're bored. They are worse than weeds, appearing ''everywhere'' and impossible to purge successfully (despite them being completely aware that they are protected by incredibly talented vampire killers, even Sunnydale and Los Angeles are never without vampires). The method of creating a new vampire is absurdly simple, a single vampire easily capable of forming their own personal army (something which Harmony almost did). Individuals are easily capable of living for centuries with death tolls in the thousands, even Spike, a fool and a braggart who seemed to deliberately seek Slayers, managing to survive for quite some time. There were only a pathetically small minority of humans who knew about vampires and how to kill them, and even less who were actually capable of overcoming their literally superhuman abilities. When Los Angeles and the surrounding area lost sunlight, in a matter of '''''days''''' the entire city descended into chaos and slaughter, vampires feasting and turning with reckless abandon. Certainly if things got bad now a few doses of high explosive would be in order, but for the vast majority of human history the only weapons were deviations on "stick pointy end into enemy".\\
This isn't even ''considering'' all of the massively numerous, varied demons that also prey on humans, but vampires seems a good place to start.
** Actually,vampires have a number of flaws written into their "back story" that make them much weaker than they could be to survive as a species: 1) The aren't just nocturnal...they can't even operate in the day time. Given that is the time when your prey is most active this is a huge disadvantage. 2) They have numerous weaknesses against magic and religious items which are present throughout the world. 3) Their prey is at least as smart as they are which is rarely a good position for a predator to be in. 4) They are proscribed from entering a number areas w/o an invitation, and some (religious buildings) they can't enter at all and 5) Vampires possess immortality and that's something that the wealthy and powerful of the world would want more than anything. Unless they keep a low profile, vampires would be captured by the thousands and held in facilities to keep the privileged alive.
*** Wait, where do you get that vampires cannot enter religious buildings at all? Just off the top of my head, the Master is trapped in a church, Adam's vampire stooges break into a church to confront their fears, and Buffy learns about Spike's soul in a church.
*** There is little evidence that vampires kills every night. The number of people capable of killing them is higher than is being credited here and was probably much higher in olden times. Remember on [[Angel]] Holtz was tracking Angel and Darla BEFORE they slaughtered his family. Watchers were probably more active as well and as strong as vampires are most of history houses were quite flamable and in a world with no cars you're probably not too far away to find in daylight.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Maintaining the Masquerade]]
* Related to the above, why did it take so long for TheMasquerade to finally be broken? How many lives could have been saved if everyone knew not to go certain places at night or let strangers into their houses or bury people without a little decapitation? All The Scoobies had to do was capture some vampires (if the laughably incompetent Watchers could do it, they could), put them in cages and demonstrate to a large crowd (with recordings) what happens to a vampire when staked or exposed to sunlight, explaining everything about them. If no-one believes them, do it again and again and again until they do. With no bodies the worst that could legally happen to them is being called crazy, but even if only some people believe them it would have been better than nothing.

** In the Buffyverse, the human psyche is to a certain extent [[WeirdnessCensor weirdness resistant]]. Often, people who have clearly witnessed supernatural events which can't be explained rationally will simply misremember what they've seen. This effect is somewhat unpredictable, but it's enough to suggest that a deliberate attempt to unmask the world would be complicated: If 100% of the population of Sunnydale got to see the informative Vampire Safety video but only 10% where capable of processing that information, violent mass hysteria might very well be the end result. Buffy's take on the matter, anyway, seems to be that having incomplete knowledge of the vampiric threat is more dangerous than having none at all; in the series premiere, Willow asks if the police should be involved with any of this, and Buffy says that cops "would just come with guns" and get themselves killed. Four seasons later, the Initiative more or less proves her point, coming in with guns and getting themselves (and others) killed horribly.
*** That's certainly an...interesting take on the Initiative. What got them killed horribly had nothing to do with their weapons being useless; if anything, the Initiative was ''too'' effective. That's how Adam was able to set up his trap. Their weapons also demonstrated on a number of occasions throughout the season to be as effective, and in some cases, ''more'' effective than Buffy's. Their failure had nothing to do with "Guns are useless" and everything to do with being manipulated, first by Maggie, then by Adam.
**** I never said guns were useless. They're just not enough all by themselves, as any cop dispatched to the scene of a vampire attack would quickly discover. The Initiative's guns and technology were shown to be quite handy, but ultimately, the Initiative itself was overconfident in the superiority of its methods and fairly closed-minded about the mystical side of what they were dealing with. Buffy was happy to learn from the Initiative, but the Iniative failed to learn anything from Buffy, and lots of people got killed because of the whole not-listening thing. As with the cop, it's not a guns-are-bad issue, it's a knowledge-without-wisdom issue.
***** Still seems to me that lots of people got killed less because of not learning about magic and more because of a very effective trap. Even if they had an entire deaprtment studying witchcraft and learning about the Slayer line, Adam's trap still would have killed everyone.
****** Because the way that Buffy defeated Adam ''wasn't'' by contacting her ancestor spirit with a magic gourd?
******* Defeated him, personally? Yes. Stopped the massacre and saved all the lives? No. Everyone still died, magic gourd or no magic gourd, and defeating Adam after he'd already sprung the trap does nothing to stop that no matter how you do it. Also, as a counterpoint to "modern weapons are useless and magic is everything," who here remembers the Judge, whom no weapon forged could harm?
******** And as a counterpoint to ''your'' argument, I contend that ducks are not mammals because they are birds.[[hottip:*:(Seriously: I never said anything about modern weapons being better or worse than magic. I ''did'' imply that the Initiative was hubrisic, and that in their case, awesome weapons proved to no substitute for knowledge, experience, and tactical flexibility. Listing all the ways the Initiative was directly portrayed as stupidly overconfident would take forever, so I'm hoping it will suffice to mention that season four is a Frankenstein story -- if it wasn't about hubris, it'd be pretty much the ''only'' one that wasn't.)]]
********* Yes, it ''is'' about hubris: the hubris of ''Maggie Walsh'', not the entire Initiative. And that's irrelevent to the original point, which was that the Initiative was, quote, "coming in with guns and getting themselves killed". The reason we are having this discussion is because of the suggestion that trying to use guns to fight demons is what killed the Initiative.
********** But I didn't suggest that and as far as I can tell neither did the show. "They came in with guns and got themselves killed" does not automatically imply "their death was caused by their use of guns specifically". The original quote from the pilot merely implies that some random muggle cop (who knows nothing about vampires and would probably expect them to die when shot) would not be helpful in a vampire-related crisis. The problem isn't the guns, it's the ''lack of knowledge'' implied. My point was that the comment in some ways resembles the Initiative plotline, in which an organization with limited understanding of the supernatural[[hottip:*:Riley has never heard of the slayer, Forrest calls magic "medieval folklore garbage", the scientists call lycanthropy "a campfire story", demons are considered non-sentient and and without motives, everyone underestimates Adam even after he kicks Buffy's ass, etc.]] unwisely rushes in to fight demons and violent death ensues. Guns were not the point -- and I guess my communication skills must really be on the fritz this week, 'cause this is my third attempt at clarifying how not-about-guns it was. It wasn't even that much of point to begin with.)
** Also, the existing power structures come to mind. Pretty much everyone had reasons to keep the Masquerade up. The Watchers (the old ones, at least) had to avoid attention because of their [[AncientConspiracy not-so-faultless methods]] and not-so-limited assets (courtesy the aforementioned methods). A certain Mayor was native in the Masquerade and planned to stay that way. A big [[{{Angel}} evil law firm]] actually thrived on supporting the Masquerade and would find legal loopholes in the public dusting actions. And then there are friendly neighbourhood monsters like Harmony, who illustrated how not to perform the [[TheUnmasquedWorld unmasking]] by making the vamps and demons look like the victims. And then everyone with a secret Apocalypse scheduled would move the timetable. And so on. And with wierdness censores on, one of those would [[KilledToUpholdTheMasquerade take care of the talkative party]] before the message comes through.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampires and Sunlight]]
* With the exception of those with NominalImportance that manage to last a few seconds, it is almost always the case that the ''instant'' a vampire is hit with direct sunlight they burst into flames, dusted soon after. How, then, are they able to go outside without at the very least constantly sizzling, considering that, you know, sunlight is reflected ''everywhere''? Even moonlight is just reflected sunlight. Does the light somehow lose it's vampire-igniting effects after it impacts another object (which is insane considering it impacts the atmosphere)? Do vampires have a certain threshold of sunlight that they can't cross otherwise they endure CriticalExistenceFailure (also absurd considering morning and evening sun is just as dangerous as midday sun)?\\
Relatedly, does that mean that areas of the planet with regular cloudy days are vulnerable to vampire attacks even during the day? It would certainly explain why the Watchers are based in Britain despite ostensibly beginning somewhere in central Africa.
* Remember, vampires operate under magical laws, not strictly physical ones. It's only direct sunlight that gets them. Spike can stand in a shaded alleyway, lounge under a tree, or run around under a blanket, all during the daytime. After all, the night sky is filled with suns, lightyears away, and in {{Angel}}, Angel can be under the Pylean sun no problem. Clearly the nature of vampires makes it such that only a direct beam of light from our particular star kills them.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Adam's Origin Story]]
* So according to the comics, Adam was originally an agent of the Initiative. If that's so, then how come Riley never recognized him?
** The answer to that comes down to two questions: how big was the Initiative, and how long had Riley been working there? After all, do you know the faces of everyone who works for your company (including in the branch office in Poughkeepsie)? And would you still recognise every one of them if half their face was covered in demonic cybernetics?
*** [[CompletelyMissingThePoint My employer doesn't have an office in Ploughkeepsie.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:AuthorTract, WishFulfillment, PositiveDiscrimination, and other stuff]]
* Is it just me or does JossWhedon want to be a little girl with superpowers? Just look at River Tam from {{Firefly}} plus Buffy, Faith and Willow. Does he truly believe women are surperior or is he trying to veil a warrior woman fetish? The anti-military author tracts, just why? The Initiative is less of a StrawmanPolitical and more of a WindmillPolitical. Magic beats science? Does not compute! Magic has been shown to turn a sweet, wide-eyed college girl (Willow) into an apocalyptic sorceress, while science created Adam, who was easily beaten via an AssPull. Someone explain this to me.
** It's just you. A male author can, in fact, write about girls who kick ass without having a fetish or wanting to be a little girl. (Also, there's already ''two'' threads on the treatment of military/initiative above. Feel free to continue to be bugged under the existing headings.)
[[/folder]]
[[folder:Vampires on the foodchain]]
* Why are vampires so low on the official food chain? They are physically nearly as strong as most demons. There are few species that seem to really outclass them in brute strength. They are one of very few species with specific ways of being killed. If required they can get the numbers up incredibly quickly incomparisan to pretty much any threats to them. Other than possibly a vengence demons and the Deathwaw Clan I wouldn't want to be any of many species vulnerable to guns, swords and cars.
** Because none of that means anything when the demons around them can, and on various occasions have, killed them just by casually breaking their heads off. They're harder to kill than most demons, but with very few exceptions, they're not tough enough to actually win a fight with said demons, and despite their specific death conditions, what they're actually killed by is so easy (fire, beheading, sunlight) that they just die like flies anyway. They're the locusts of the demon world; they're annoying, they breathe fast, and the only way they're in any way threatening to the bigger animals is if they swarm. And even then, you can just turn the hose (daylight, for the purpose of this metaphor) on them and wash them away.
*** We see a few demons most of them clear into the uber class that casually rip off vampire heads. The only low teir demon to dust a vamp was the leader of the gang in Season six. Between Buffy and Angel we see PLENTY of demons who have absolutely no demonstrated power aside from being ugly and implied strength.
** The vampires could easily rule the wide demon community if they actually got it into their heads to do it. As the Master pointed out in "Wish", most vampires are so caught-up in the hunting routine that they overlook other things. Most of them don't care for power as long as they can hunt, kill and feed. Thus they never really bother to build power bases like other demons and happily lead insignificant unlives alone or work as minions to masters that may not be stronger than them but treat them well and provide fringe benefits like protection by reputation.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Missed Potential]]
* While this troper has some issues with how the idea of the Potentials was executed, the notion that the could-be Slayers can be identified long before being called actually explains a lot. For instance, the great difference in attitudes between newly called Kendra, who had spent some time watchered before that, and Buffy, who still had a life when called. The Potentials as shown in season 7 clearly had no training at all. Still not the big issue. The big issue is "Chosen". In one glorious spell, the Potentials all over the world get activated... What Potentials? The ones that got that way ''after'' the Watchers Council was destroyed, that had no chance whatsoever to survive the obligatory visits by the Bringers?
** Fanwanky answer: The Bringers and the Watchers could only detect those in line to be the ''next'' Slayer, when Faith was killed. So that's who got murdered/brought to Sunnydale. The spell activated everyone who had the potential to ''ever'' be the Slayer. Presumably whatever mystical randomness picks the next Slayer has an algorithm. It's worth noting at this point that there don't seem to be any older Slayers in the Season 8 comics, so presumably once you get past a certain age you've missed your chance.
[[/folder]]----