Line #10 Headscratchers/BuffySeason1


1	Headscratchers for ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer''. Spoilers abound.
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3	[[AC:[[{{Headscratchers/BuffyTheVampireSlayer}} Click here]] to return to the main Headscratchers page.]]
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5	[[foldercontrol]]
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7	[[folder: Marcy's parents]]
8	* In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E11OutOfMindOutOfSight Out of Mind Out of Sight]]" Marcy becomes invisible after being constantly ignored by her peers, and moves into the school. Fine, so her classmates don't notice her missing but what about her parents? Surely they would notice her not coming home one day and at least ask the school to announce her disappearance.
9	** Maybe the school ''did'' announce her disappearance, but nobody cared.
10	** Didn't Willow find her name as one of the most recent teenagers on a 'missing persons' list?
11	** Also, this is ''Sunnydale'', let's not forget. When the local high school paper has an obituary section, people have come to terms with the high body count and dissapearances.
12	** This is partially (possibly) addressed in Season 7. She probably didn't simply wake up one morning invisible, instead she probably faded from sight over several days, weeks, months possibly even years. It's directly mentioned by both Willow and Xander that they shared several classes with her and never noticed her and she was constantly trying to involve herself with Cordelia. We don't really know the mechanics of what happened other than it was apparently a frequent enough ocurrance that the Government (Initiative) understood what was going on and had an on going program for when someone with that particular ailment arrived. Knowing that there are either a LOT of Hellmouths or kids turning invisible because too many people ignore them has little to do with the Hellmouth.
13	** Also if she felt so ignored that she literally became invisible, it's also possible that her parents ALSO contributed to her feeling that way, and didn't even pay enough attention to her to be concerned about her vanishing from their lives. Maybe her parents were divorced and just assumed that she was with the other, being too busy with their own lives to actually bother to check. Maybe one or both fell victim to the many hazards of daily life in Sunnydale. The big point with Marcie is that NO ONE noticed her, which would probably include her parents.
14	[[/folder]]
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16	[[folder: Jesse - Lest We Forget]]
17	* 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.
18	** SunnydaleSyndrome: 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.
19	** 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.
20	*** 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.
21	** Yeah, I was just thinking about this. It's like Jesse has experienced an odd form of ChuckCunninghamSyndrome.
22	** [[AngstWhatAngst Angst? What angst?]]
23	** 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.
24	*** It's possible, (and possibly implied) that while Xander and Willow had been best friends since kindergarten, they'd become friends with Jesse maybe as late as high school. This would explain why he doesn't really feature in their recollections.
25	** Not really an explanation, but it's worth noting that it's probably because of this that [[Series/{{Angel}} our friends over in L.A.]] continue to mourn [[SacrificialLion Doyle]] long after he's dead and gone.
26	** Doyle isn't comparable. He had several episodes of characterization and a very dramatic send-off. Jesse was written into the pilot solely to be immediately killed.
27	* There's actually a trope for this: ForgottenFallenFriend.
28	** For Xander, he develops an intense hatred of vampires immediately following this. Note that he distrusts Angel and Spike when they're with Buffy but not Riley, so we can't just chalk it up to jealousy. So there is some lingering angst about Jesse dying that's manifesting as a hatred towards any vampire. For what it's worth, they did want the First to impersonate Jesse and haunt Xander but Creator/EricBalfour wasn't available.
29	*** This is outright confirmed in the comics; Xander admits that he'd only seen the face of his friend when he'd staked Jesse and remembers it every time he sees a vampire. That said, the concept is woefully underdeveloped in the show and it would have been nice for his character to see some growth in this regard, especially since later seasons often didn't seem to know what to do with him.
30	[[/folder]]
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32	[[folder:Pack Lunch]]
33	* In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E6ThePack 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.
34	** If you got possessed and committed cannibalism against your will, would ''you'' go around yammering about it all the time?
35	** Xander has also become immune to SunnydaleSyndrome, the others on the other hand presumably forgot it the way people forget being attacked by vampires and demons
36	*** Except that "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS3E20TheProm The Prom]]" references "hyena people!" so someone clearly remembered it.
37	*** Since it doesn't seem terribly likely that the events we saw in "The Pack" were connected to hyenas by people other than our heroes, one wonders what happened off-screen in this episode (or between episodes) to lead to that outburst.
38	** There isn't really a good way to deal with it. Offscreen, those kids are probably going to need massive amounts of therapy for the rest of their lives to come to terms with what they did under the effects of hyena possession. Sucks for them, but short of cutting to scenes of psychiatric treatment in the middle of random episodes later on, there really isn't anything we can do for them.
39	* There's also the fact that hyenas are matriarchal, and females are sexually aggressive while males are not. So basically, one of the female Bad Kids should have been in charge, not Xander. That, or Xander was possessed by a female hyena spirit.
40	** Also, female hyenas have a pseudo-penis that they use to have sex with males and females alike (females sexually dominate other candidates for alpha female), so the hyena spirit possessing Xander was probably female and just didn't care what gender the body it was in was. And it was just acting on its natural behavior, knowing that Buffy was alpha female of the "pack" of Buffy, Willow, and Xander.
41	** Maybe he just has vague memories of what the hyenas did, but the hyenas were in control so Xander doesn't remember the nitty gritty details. Granted it's been a while since I watched that episode, so I can't remember if he clarifies how specifically he remembers.
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44	[[folder:Does the Master Have a Soul?]]
45	* In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E2TheHarvest The Harvest]]", 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.
46	** "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.
47	*** Wouldn't "spirit" be just as good?
48	*** Spirit comes from Latin for "breath", so no.
49	** 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.
50	** He could simply be referring to the soul he once had.
51	*** Both of these last two fall through, though, because he says this line while painting a symbol on Luke's forehead that allows the Master to absorb the power Luke gains from those he feeds on. Even if someone had resouled the Master, the odds are pretty far against the same thing having been done to Luke. And there just doesn't seem to be any point in talking about joining souls that are no longer part of them.
52	*** By the way, the "re-ensouling-not-giving-a-nice-guy" kind of happened in Angel, season 1, episode 14 "I've Got You Under My Skin".
53	* Although, it would explain the oddities of his line like higher immunity to sunlight (seen with a few of them), keeping their humanity (Spike, even if he tries to bury it alot), unmatched evilness (Angelus) and more.
54	* Given the way the vampire demon thing seems to bond with the corpse it's possessing, basing its personality on it and so forth, it's likely that the vampire considers the vampire demon thing to be its soul, separate from the body, but they still refer to the body as themselves. Like we do, we consider our soul and body together to be us. I mean, you could make the case that people are bags of meat possessed by a human soul thing. It only makes sense for a vampire to call the part of him that is his metaphysical self his soul.
55	* The Master and his Order are basically a weird vampire cult. The bit about souls is just flowery language.
56	* He's not just speaking prose; he's incanting his ritual. The joining he's performing is a spell, and there's no reason to assume that the spell was written explicitly for vampires. "My blood is your blood, my soul is your soul," is a pretty vague incantation that could potentially mean any number of things apart from the "When I drink blood, you get stronger" usage the Master and Luke performed. The wording actually sounds like a lower-scale version of the Captain Planet spell for defeating Adam. It might just be that the Master recited "My soul is your soul" because that line is simply part of the incantation, and nothing more.
57	* However, as someone above pointed out, it would explain a bit. After all, when Angel sired a guy, things turned out weird due to his own soul. Perhaps The Master, in life, was an evil emperor who got sired and just just kept being an evil emperor. One of his subjects tried to put the soul back in, maybe thinking the soul and the demon would kill each other due to overloading the body, and instead, The Master just continued being the exact same guy as before. After all, how would somebody know what a soul would do to a vampire without trying it beforehand? The gypsies knew it wouldn't kill Angel(us), so it had to have been done before.
58	** There is no logical reason for this to be the case, and no evidence for it, so this has to go into the 'Wild Mass Guessing' pile. Using a single line from a spell as justification for a strange 'ensouled Master' theory is conjecture at its worst. They wouldn't have made such a big deal of Angel being given his soul if it had happened several times through history.
59	*** Agreed. Except there were likely other ensouled vampires. The Orb of Thesulah after all seems to ensoul things. Fannon claims it curses people to suffer. That however worked on Angel one out of three times. One can attempt to claim that giving him his soul back just in time to witness the world ending at his hand in S2 would qualify as suffering. No such claim holds for ''Series/{{Angel}}'' S4. Making him suffer would have been swapping him and Angelus. Letting Angelus remain in control but Angel forced to watch helpless as his evil side killed his friends and family. If we accept that then the gypsies must have cursed at least a few other vamps over the centuries. They were simply extremely rare and all dead prior to the Angel's being cursed. Alternatively they didn't qualify as heroes if you believe the Shanshu Curse was really acting up as opposed to Lindsey and Eve doing something to activate those disasters.
60	* When the Master was saying "My blood is your blood, my soul is your soul.", could he be referring to Buffy herself (or other victims) who possess both blood and a soul instead of himself?
61	[[/folder]]
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63	[[folder:Continuity in "Angel"]]
64	* Several continuity puzzles in "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E7Angel Angel]]":
65	** The first time Buffy sees Giles after fighting The Three, he has just spent hours reading up on them; why?
66	*** She probably called him from home while Joyce wasn't listening.
67	*** 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.
68	** 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?
69	*** He can't go out between sunrise and sunset. The rest of the day, Joyce is around.
70	*** Yeah, but no one but him knew that. They didn't find out he was a vampire until he left that night.
71	*** Also, they probably figured that the dude's infatuated with Buffy, enough to either wait for her or to spend all day going through her stuff.
72	*** Or that he's in danger of retaliation from the Masters's followers, so hiding at the Slayer's house is the safest bet, especially for a wounded guy.
73	** Why does Darla change from a blue CHSGU to a red CHSGU on her way from Angel's apartment to The Bronze?
74	*** Maybe she stopped for a bite to eat, then went, "You know, I like your shirt. Yoink!"
75	** Why does Buffy change from a black coat to a blue coat on her way from the hospital to The Bronze?
76	*** [[AWizardDidIt You know the answer.]]
77	[[/folder]]
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79	[[folder:Book Cage]]
80	* In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVaMmpireSlayerS1E6ThePack The Pack]]" why to they have a jail cell in the school?
81	** The shooting script refers to it as a "steel-mesh book return cage".
82	** 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.
83	** Besides, no one goes into the school library; Giles was shocked when Owen came in to check out a book.
84	** Actually, my question is, how did Buffy manage drag Xander unconscious through the school without anyone noticing?
85	*** Whether or not anyone noticed isn't the problem, whether or not they actually bothered to report it to a teacher is. Given the usual level of good order and discipline in that madhouse, the answer is "they probably didn't".
86	[[/folder]]
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88	[[folder: Teacher Deaths]]
89	* Mr. Gregory and the principal died and their bodies were found in school. You'd think that that would be enough to close the school for at least a few days. But no, the bio teacher's death results in bio being cancelled for a period and the principal being ''eaten in his office'' results in a teacher's meeting, while the school should have been immediately evacuated and at least closed for the rest of the day if there's some kind of man-eating group of something on campus. That's gross negligence.
90	** They pretty thoroughly cover in season three that Sunnydale has a very literal disease where they block and just charge forward. Considering how much stuff goes down in plain sight, like the attacks at the Bronze, in the Harvest and again in "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS3E6Doppelgangland Doppelgangland]]", and a troll later than that. Zombies at Buffy's party. Whether it's just that people have trained themselves to accept death and charge forward or if it's a spell cast by Mayor Wilkins similar to Glory's, it's established very quickly that in Sunnydale dead people happen.
91	** To quote Snyder: "Nobody's died at my school! ...This week!"
92	** To quote Oz talking about the school paper: "I usually go straight to the obits."
93	** I always figured that much of Sunnydale's population was quietly aware of the supernatural, but just kept going about their everyday lives because hey, what else are you gonna do (especially when the Mayor and Wolfram & Hart can suppress any sensational news stories)? After the fiftieth inexplicable death, anyone who hasn't already left town would keep on going with their daily lives.
94	** And it was the 90s before Columbine and before a school shooting every other month. The writers wouldn't have awareness of regular catastrophes and how schools get affected by them because the 90s were considered a boring peaceful time for the most part.
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97	[[folder: The Bronze]]
98	* In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E2TheHarvest The Harvest]]", a Friday, the Bronze is stated to have no cover on Fridays. So why is the bouncer shown receiving and counting cash from patrons as they enter?
99	** Bribes for letting underage kids in?
100	*** Unlikely, unless every bouncer who works there is utterly corrupt and willing to risk his job for chump change. We see lots of high school students regularly hanging out there, so The Bronze is almost certainly all-ages.
101	** Even without a cover, there could still be an entry fee.
102	** ... that's exactly what a cover is. Who said it, by the way? Could have meant "no cover for us" if, say, Willow was speaking to Buffy and Friday is Ladies' Night or something.
103	** Entry fee =/= cover. The former will only get you into the building. The latter will get you entry, beverages, and a flowering onion (before it got remodeled right off the sodding menu, anyway).
104	*** Cover is an entry fee. You might, if an event promoter or club manager is feeling like they need some bonus gimmicks to get people inside, get extras with your cover charge such as a drink ticket or a flowering onion voucher. Doubtful a cover charge would include gimmicks in a town where there is apparently no competition in the nightlife industry. But you never know. Maybe the Bronze's manager is super generous because he knows he's making a killing at the door?
105	[[/folder]]
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107	[[folder: Buffy's Death]]
108	* In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E12ProphecyGirl The Prophecy Girl]]", if Buffy actually died, how was Xander able to revive her just using CPR?
109	** Also, wasn't it implied that the revival somehow powered Buffy up a bit? She certainly has a lot less trouble fighting the Master and other vampires from that point forward.
110	** The simple answer is that prophesies lie. The Master puts it rather well when he tells Buffy that if she hadn't come he couldn't rise. Literally her original plan of screw that send someone who isn't prophesied to die plan would have at worst gotten someone else killed but wouldn't have let him rise. Whatever the parameters of the prophesy were apparently being unconscious and not breathing was sufficiently close to death to satisfy the spell.
111	** OP here. Apparently "sufficiently" close to death is enough to call up the next slayer (Kendra) then?
112	*** Clearly it was. It's possible that the Slayer Spell might activate from certain near death situations. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that Faith's coma qualified as close enough to dead to have activated a third slayer someplace. I know if I was a Shadow Man I wouldn't want there to be no Slayer because the one fell asleep and couldn't be awakened, which without modern technology is pretty much death anyway.
113	*** Presumably, the state of death required for the awakening of a new Slayer was clinical death (the stopping of the heart), which was, as someone pointed out before, "dead enough" for people who don't have advanced medical knowledge.
114	** There's a fan fiction that mentions this, somewhere, where Xander is treated spoken of as an Eldritch Abomination by other demons for being able to do this. On a more pertinent note, though, maybe there's a prophecy about Buffy coming back somewhere that we never heard about.
115	** Anyhow, the prophecy says "TheChosenOne will meet the Anointed, and she will not know him." But when it happened she knew perfectly well who he was.
116	*** Out of Universe I always assumed that part of the prophesy was met when Buffy and the gang screwed up and went after the Preacher instead of the child. In-Universe prophesies are tricky things as the Master tells us. Buffy didn't KNOW the Anointed in a Biblical way, it frankly wouldn't the last time that exact wording was important in these things.
117	[[/folder]]
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119	[[folder: What the hell is a techno-pagan?]]
120	* It has to be asked, and it never really was explained. In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E8IRobotYouJane I Robot, You Jane]]", Jenny Calendar states that she a techno-pagan. She never really elaborates on what powers/abilities that grants her, how, why or when she became one, or what that even means. It's only ever brought up in passing twice ever again, and Jenny is the only character we've seen throughout the entire buffyverse who seems to study it. What exactly ''is'' technopaganism?
121	** It seems to be someone who practices magic but isn't strong enough on their own to be a full witch so they form spell casting circles online. So they perform spells over the net instead of in person.
122	* It's true that Technopaganism is only directly mentioned a few times but it seems to have been fairly well defined in ''I Robot, you Jane''. A technopagan is someone who blends modern science and ancient magics. As Jenny says: Bad ole science didn't make the magic go away. It's clearly demonstrated that for the purposes of a spell that must be read scanning it into a computer satisfies the spell. (Which considering Xander was able to set a book on fire later by speaking Latin in front of the books makes you wonder how often this must happen and how Giles didn't know better.) I imagine that the majority of spells that only involve verbal components and perhaps a 'circle' of allies can be cast over the internet just as easily as they can be cast by a physical circle. Further considering Warren was good enough to make a robot that could confuse Willow when she was homing in on his soul, Professor Walsh made a Frankenstein monster so powerful that it was able to IGNORE a world altering spell I think they may have never mentioned the term Technopagan again because they weren't really clear on why Willow tapping into the internet didn't qualify.
123	[[/folder]]
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125	[[folder: Darla, The Master and Angel]]
126	* Angel has a soul that was forced on him by the Gypsies. Darla and the Master spend a fair amount of time and energy attempting to turn Angel over to their side instead of the more rational options of accepting it cannot be done certainly not the means they are employing. Angel is not good because he woke up one day and realized that vampires are evil and he wants to be good! No he was cursed with a soul and Darla knows this and presumably so does the Master. Even if he'd somehow managed to kill Buffy it wouldn't have made Angel join them again. Best case scenario he limps off to never never comeback land or commits suicide. Slightly more likely he goes on the warpath against them. No attempts are ever made to our knowledge to magically extract the soul from him. Granted flashbacks of the Master suggest that he was never fond of Angelus and all that stuff he spouted in S1 is just EarlyInstallmentWeirdness but Darla would have tried to find a witch or two and force them to fix Angelus and we see no indications either tried this. S2 has Angel (fail) trying to fool Spike into thinking he's evil and that his good persona is just an act he puts on so she doesn't bother him. Spike like Darla however knows what really happened so really both of them were terminally retarded there.
127	** In-universe, Darla knows roughly what happened but not the exact terms and conditions of the curse. Only Janna/Jenny and her uncle, both Kalderash, were presented as having any grasp of the actual terms, and even they didn't have any way of translating the actual spell to check the wording. This is enough to make her try to 'force' Angel back into the fold - after all, he's shunned other vampires for a century. By forcing him back into their habits and society he may return to the fold. They don't have enough of the details to know whether this would work or fail, so they tried it. Unfortunately later episodes 'filled out' the backstories of Angelus, Spike and Darla to a degree that stays just the right side of retcons, allowing cool flashbacks but also slightly infringing upon the tone of certain interactions from earlier on in the series. One I particularly dislike is the three other members of the 'Whirlwind' (Darla, Spike and Drusilla) visiting and largely massacring the gypsies that cursed Angelus, with Darla trying to bargain for them to change him back. This doesn't really fit with the chronologically later S1 episodes with Darla and Angel's interactions with Spike in early S2, though in 'School Hard' it is plain to see that Spike did look up to Angelus and saw straight through his claim to be a 'normal' vampire again (yet more evidence of Spike's observation skills).
128	** The simple answer is that seeking out witches wasn't an option. Darla's not strong enough threaten a witch of sufficient power to mess with souls. The Master has the power and rescources but doesn't care that much, he likes the mayhem Angelus causes but their personal relationship isn't all that great.
129	** Don't the Master and Darla mainly want Buffy to turn against Angel? That's why Darla makes it look like he was about to feed on Joyce. He's been helping the Slayer, so they try to fix things that the Slayer doesn't want his help and in fact has it out for him. One of two things hopefully happens: a) Buffy treats him like an enemy and kills him or b) he goes ThenLetMeBeEvil and joins them out of desperation. Either way, the Slayer is down a powerful ally. But [[EvilCannotComprehendGood being evil]], they didn't forsee option c) Angel confides in Buffy the truth and she accepts him.
130	[[/folder]]
131
132	[[folder: Does Season One take place across 1996 and 1997 or just in 1997?]]
133	* I always thought 1997 makes more sense. Buffy is sixteen in "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E2TheHarvest The Harvest]]" (which takes place immediately after "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E1WelcomeToTheHellmouth Welcome to the Hellmouth]]") and she turns seventeen in 'Surprise' so there ''has'' to be less than an in-universe year between the start of the series and mid-Season Two and her birthday is firmly fixed in January for the rest of the show. Buffy's tombstone at the end of Season Five has her birth year as 1981, which matches her turning sixteen very early in 1997 and the show starting almost immediately after in late January. Dialogue in "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS2E6Halloween Halloween]]" also suggests Buffy wasn't in Sunnydale before November 1996 at the absolute earliest because it is the first Halloween she's spent with Xander and Willow. However, we also have the '1996 Cheerleader Tryouts' banner in "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E3TheWitch The Witch]]" and I think some of the comics put "Welcome to the Hellmouth" late in 1996. So which is it?
134	** The comics aren't canon and the cheerleader tryouts banner could just be from the previous year and no one in the school was arsed getting it updated - what with a body being recently found on campus.
135	** Seasons 8-12 and Angel & Faith are meant to be canon, Whedon has said that outright.
136	[[/folder]]
137
138	[[folder: The Master... of what, exactly?]]
139	* Why is the Master go by "The Master", and why does no other vamp go by a title like that?
140	** The Master was mentioned to be the head of the Order of Aurelius. The Order itself is vague and undefined (because season one didn't really think in terms of the greater worldbuilding details), and once the Annointed One bites the dust, they're pretty much forgotten about, aside from being boss fights in the Xbox game, but presumably that's what he's "the Master" of.
141	[[/folder]]

Context Headscratchers / BuffySeason1