Characters / Buffyverse: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Big Bads

aka: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Big Bads

Buffyverse Character Index
Sunnydale: The Scooby Gang (Buffy Summers / Willow Rosenberg / Spike / Angel) | Big Bads | Sunnydale Residents | Sunnydale High | Vampires | Demons and Monsters | Watchers and Slayers (Faith Lehane) | Other Characters
Los Angeles: Angel Investigations (Angel / Wesley Wyndam-Pryce / Spike) | Wolfram and Hart | Recurring Los Angeles Residents | One-Shot Los Angeles Residents | Big Bads | Other Characters
Comics: The Twilight Group | Fray | Comic Characters | Boom! Studios

The Big Bads of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (including the comic).

Movie

Lothos

Lothos

"You and I are one."

Played By: Rutger Hauer

"Don't you understand? I've killed dozens of Slayers. Your life is not a blink of my eye, not a single breath. I have lived in the shadows, in the pulsing filth behind men's eyes. I have conversed with the worms that fed on my corpse and I have bathed in the blood of emperors."

A vampire king in Los Angeles, and the first major villain Buffy faced. He is responsible for the death of Merrick, Buffy's first Watcher, and was killed during a school dance; this led to Buffy eventually moving to Sunnydale.

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• Big Bad: Of the movie and The Origin.
• Canon Discontinuity: The movie's depiction. Somewhat, the comic adaptation is pretty much the same just a bit more brutal (no PG rating you see). So think of it more as a prototype version.
• Cross-Melting Aura: When Buffy tries to ward him off with a cross, Lothos grabs it, and it bursts into flames, after which he mocks Buffy for her "puny faith." However, Buffy proceeds to invoke her "keen fashion sense" by using a can of hairspray and the flaming cross as an Aerosol Flamethrower.
• The Dreaded: Lothos is famous for killing many past Slayers. Spike was considered a badass for killing two - though part of why Spike was considered so badass was because he'd performed the killings at (for a vampire) a very young age, with Giles at first dismissing him as a major threat because of his youth, and he'd specifically sought those Slayers out.
• Evil Redhead: Depicted as one in The Origin.
• Expy: One for Dracula because of his pale skin, style of clothing, aristocratic background and vampirism.
• The Ghost: Series-wise, he and his minions are vaguely referenced in the first episode.
• Hero Killer: As stated above, he's killed several past Slayers.
• Kill It with Fire: Buffy dusts him through the use of an Aerosol Flamethrower.
• Long Haired Prettyboy: In The Origin.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He's killed off before the show ever begins, but if it weren't for her fight with him and the aftermath, Buffy never would have moved to Sunnydale and formed the Scooby Gang. Effectively, Lothos is responsible for the events of the entire series.
• Sadist: Lothos's favourite hobby is killing Slayers. He does try to seduce them to the dark side first, but his manipulations are transparent and he usually gives up after the first try, immediately descending into misogyny. He also shows no care for his minions, mockingly playing the violin as his Dragon dies.
• Starter Villain: The first major vampire Buffy ever faced as the Slayer.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Lothos to Amilyn, without a word. Lothos plays a violin, then gives Amilyn a very unsympathetic smile. Then Amilyn gets killed.

Television Series

The Master

The Master A.K.A. Heinrich Joseph Nest

"Oh, good. The feeble banter portion of the fight."

Played By: Mark Metcalf

Appearances: Buffy the Vampire Slayer | Angel

"Some claim that death is our art. I say to them—well, I don't say anything to them because I killed them."

An ancient and powerful vampire; was older than any other vampire on record.

The Master was the leader of the Order of Aurelius; a vampire cult that worshiped the Old Ones, and also the sire of Darla, inadvertently leading to a long legacy of infamous vampires. The Master sought to bring about the end of the world through opening the Hellmouth underneath Sunnydale until he was stopped in 1997 by the Slayer, Buffy Summers.

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• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The leader of the Order of Aurelius and one of, if not the most powerful vampire in the series.
• Back from the Dead: In Season 8, when the Seed of Wonder brings him back so he can act as its protector.
• Badass Boast: He makes an impressive claim in "The Harvest".
  "Tonight I shall walk the Earth, and the stars themselves will hide!"
• Bad Boss: He constantly abuses his minions, particularly the You Have Failed Me card, and they're even expected to mutilate themselves in penance for failures.
• Baddie Flattery: Right after he kills Buffy, he deadpans, "By the way, I like your dress".
• The Bad Guy Wins: Right before the Reset Button is pushed, the version of him seen in "The Wish" manages to kill Wishverse!Buffy.
• Bald of Evil: It completes his Looks Like Orlok look.
• Big Bad: He is the main villain of Season 1. Though he would appear later, it is not in the same stature.
• Big "NO!": Gets a beauty when Buffy stops him from escaping his prison—the first time.
• Blood Bath: In "Welcome to the Hellmouth" he emerges from a pool of blood... while fully dressed.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: He merely drinks Buffy's blood and leaves her to drown in a pool of water rather than personally kill her, firmly believing that You Can't Fight Fate and Buffy was destined to die at his hands no matter what. Angel and Xander show up just in time to resuscitate her.
• Compelling Voice: Vocal hypnosis is one of the powers his advanced age has granted him.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Most of his fights are this due to his sheer power. He wallops Angelus with minimal effort, and merely toys with Buffy before easily killing her. In the Wishverse, he doesn't waste time snapping Buffy's neck.
• Dark Is Evil: At least since the late 20th century, he was always seen wearing a black leather Nehru jacket with a belt and matching pants and boots. In the 17th century when he sired Darla, the Master disguised himself as a priest, using a dark robe with its hood covering his face. Later in the 18th century while meeting Angelus, the Master wore a black leathery vest with long, quilted sleeves.
• Dark Messiah: In his followers' eyes. Not too far off, as him being successfully released from his prison would have had the effect of opening the Hellmouth, causing widespread catastrophe.
• Deader than Dead: When he was staked, his bones were left behind. To make absolutely sure he's gone, Buffy smashes them to dust with a sledgehammer. Counting Expanded Universe, he's had his soul destroyed twice.
• Deadpan Snarker: He has quite a dry, sardonic sense of humor, asking the Anointed One if the earthquake that preceded the oncoming apocalypse was "5.1" on the Richter scale after making an overzealous performance to accompany it, blatantly remarking that Buffy's sarcastic comment about his lair's water leakage as "the feeble banter portion of the fight" (which seemed to be an on-going feature in her slaying) and even taking the time to compliment Buffy's dress as he finally escaped his lair, pitifully remarking "And by the way. I like your dress".
• Death by Irony: A mild example. What really kills The Master is his unwavering faith in prophecy; he's deeply religious and believes that if something is written, it will come to pass. Hence why he merely drinks Buffy and tosses her into a pool of water rather than ripping her head off or cutting her throat; he thinks she was destined to die and doesn't heed his own advice that "prophecies are tricky creatures. They don't tell you everything". As a result of his blind faith, Buffy manages to come back and kill him before he can truly open the Hellmouth.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Defeated in season 1, and his revival failed in season 2, leaving Spike and Drusilla to become the main villains of the season.
  • There's also the fact that, overall, his death marks a turning point towards much more powerful Big Bad thresholds as vampires became much less dangerous for the increasingly experienced Buffy and eventually her group, with Seasons 3 and on showcasing Old Ones and gods (among others).
• The Dreaded: The Master is known as 'The Master' for a reason. His very presence inspires terror in human, vampire and demon alike. His escape was one of Buffy's darkest nightmares and preventing it Angel's top priority in season one — the unspoken belief between them is that they wouldn't be able to stop him if he got out. Fortunately, they turned out to be wrong, and he's taken out by the end of season one.
• Disproportionate Retribution: He gave Angelus a brutal beatdown for mocking him.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: He returns in Season 8, only to be nonchalantly re-killed roughly one issue after his reappearance when Twilight punches him through the head.
• Enemy Mine: They tease this in Season 8, but it never actually happens, unless you count him trying to sneak attack Twilight while he and Buffy are fighting.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The Master viewed his particular high-ranking minions, like Darla, Collin and Luke, as his "children" and nearly loses the will to carry out his plans after Darla is staked.
• Everybody Calls Him "Barkeep": His name is actually "Heinrich Nest," but nobody has called him that in centuries. It makes sense considering that he dislikes anything that reminds him of his human life.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Zigzagged. In "Welcome to the Hellmouth," the Master understands a heroic Slayer well enough to know Buffy will risk life and limb to save Jesse, and baits his first trap for her accordingly. Twelve episodes later, he never pauses to consider that the Slayer herself has her own friends who will risk life and limb for her... and is blindsided accordingly. In his defense, he though he'd already finished her off.
• Evil Is Hammy: He had moments of incredible ham:
  Yes, shake, Earth! This is a sign! We are in the final days! My time is come! Glory! GLORY! *pause* What do you think? 5.1?
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Due to his advanced age. Kakistos has similarly reached an age where his human exterior has begun to fade.
  "He has grown past the curse of human features."
• Evil Mentor: He quickly developed a close bond with the Anointed One, acting as his mentor, teaching him how to successfully run the Order in terms of punishing failure and also the power fear has and how a vampire could conquer anything if they conquered their fear.
• Evil Sorcerer: Though his magical abilities are more pronounced in supplementary material than the actual series.
• Eye Scream: He stabs one of his claws through the eye of a minion who failed him.
• Facepalm Of Doom: Essentially how he dies in Season 8.
• Fang Thpeak: Constantly, since he's always in Game Face.
• A Father to His Men: He believed the Order of Aurelius was more a family than a religious order, viewing his minions as his own children and that providing them with the responsibility to perform executions was for their own learning, even initially denying Darla the chance to kill Buffy because her desire to do so was based mainly for her own self-interest rather than for the good of the Order.
• Faux Affably Evil: Often speaks politely and seems charismatic, as a cult leader would have to be, but he's nonetheless cruel and brutal even to his own minions. That said, the Master does show some genuine fondness towards his most favored minions, such as Darla and the Anointed One, showing them paternal wisdom and affection.
• Femme Fatalons: "You have something in your eye."
• Fight Off the Kryptonite: He keeps a cross in his lair to practice this. Despite physical burning and mental fear, he can stand close enough to grab it.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Leather makes him look a lot eviler, right? Wanna bet it was made from humans?
• Hero Killer: A dreaded master vampire who manages to flat-out kill Buffy in their first real confrontation, the only Big Bad to succeed in doing so (her second death was self inflicted after the Big Bad was defeated). He repeats this feat with ease in the Wishverse.
• I Have Many Names: Word of God states that his real one is Heinrich Joseph Nest, though as noted in that link, Continuity Drift may mean that's no longer true.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In "Prophecy Girl," Buffy finally puts an end to him by throwing him through the glass roof of the school library, where he lands on the broken leg of an upturned table.
• Large Ham: Still one of the most enjoyable villains because of his theatrics and monologues.
• Limited Wardrobe: He's sealed in a cavern so he doesn't have opportunity to get more than one set of clothes. It probably smells terrible.
• Looks Like Orlok: The interesting thing is that the vampires in that world usually look like normal humans most of the time and then put on their vampiric Game Face when they're about to do some vampire shit. He's so old that he's now in permanent Looks-like-Orlok-mode, and the other vampires are pretty impressed by it.
• Macho Masochism: He places his hand on a cross, purposefully burning himself to get across the point that fear is something that can be controlled.
  "We are defined by the things we fear. This symbol, these two planks of wood, it confounds me. Suffuses me with mortal dread. But fear is in the mind. Like pain, it can be controlled. If I can face my fear, it cannot master me."
• Make Sure He's Dead: In the Season 2 opener, after thwarting the Order of Aurelius' attempts to resurrect the Master, Buffy crushes his skeleton into dust with a sledgehammer to ensure he'll never come back.
• The Master: Specifically, the master of vampires. A vampire ancient enough to have outgrown human features, who wanted to open the Hellmouth and bring about The End of the World as We Know It.
• Monster Progenitor: As the sire of Darla and, presumably, Luke and Jesse.
• Mysterious Past: The first Big Bad, one of the oldest vampires in existence, and a guy who figures prominently in the past of several other characters, and yet we never learn that much about him. Even his human name comes from supplementary material.
• No Ontological Inertia: His death causes the recently-released Eldritch Abomination that dwells in the Hellmouth to retreat.
• Obviously Evil: Just look at him. Unlike most other vampires, the Master is so ancient that he can't even feign humanity anymore (not that he's bothered; he considers human features a curse).
• The Older Immortal: The Master's exact age is unknown, but it's clear that with the exception of the Turok-Han he's the oldest vampire seen on the show. Age causes a vampire to lose their human features, and he's already lost his when he sires Darla in the 16th century. He could very well be thousands years old.
  "Very few vampires are cunning enough to live as long as I."
• Parental Favoritism: Despite this family-orientated attitude, he was prone to favoritism. His most treasured disciple was Darla, whom he viewed as a daughter, and nearly lost the will to continue his plans when she was staked by Angel.
• Pet the Dog: He stopped his men from hurting Darla and Angelus, allowing them to leave despite Darla choosing Angelus over him.
• Putting on the Reich: His favored garb includes a high-collared Nazi-style leather jacket.
• Rasputinian Death: Every other vampire turns to dust once staked, but for the Master, it takes an enormous stake to kill him. Even then, his bones remain and thus his resurrection is a possibility. Buffy ends him once and for all by smashing his bones into dust.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: As part of "living past the curse of human features," he has red, inhuman, eyes.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: He was trapped in the Hellmouth for centuries. Much of the ongoing storyline in Season 1 is his attempts to break out of his prison.
• Slouch of Villainy: The Master on his black throne, waiting for minions to report.
• Sophisticated as Hell: The Master alternates between overzealous, hammy declarations and casual quips.
  "Yes! Yes! Shake, earth! This is a sign. We are in the final days! My time is come! Glory! Glory! [Beat]'' What'd'ya think? 5.1?
• Stripped to the Bone: Unlike the rest of him, his skeleton didn't turn to dust.
• Stronger with Age: He's the oldest vampire (with the exception of the Turok-Han) seen in the show, and one of the most dangerous. He's grown so old that he can no longer pretend to be human. His great strength is attributed to his age.
• Super-Speed: Demonstrated in his fight with Buffy; she can't keep up with him.
• Tantrum Throwing: After Darla is staked, the Master senses her death and flies into a grief-stricken rage.
• This Cannot Be!: When Buffy turns up alive and well after he'd killed her, The Master is disbelieving.
  The Master: You're dead!
  Buffy: I may be dead, but I'm still pretty. Which is more than I can say for you.
  The Master: You were destined to die! It was written!
  Buffy: What can I say? I flunked the written.
• Transhuman Treachery: While this holds true for pretty much every vampire (part and parcel of being soulless, bloodsucking monsters), the Master takes it to another level, describing human features as a "curse" that he's glad to have grown beyond, forsaking his original name in favor of his title, and longing for a time when vampires can rule the world, with humans as nothing more than cattle.
• Vague Age: Exactly how old he is is unclear but given that he's already old enough to have lost his human appearance in the 16th century, he's clearly close to a thousand years old, at least.
• Vampire Monarch: He's considered by vampires to be the closest thing they have to a King.
• Villainous Breakdown: A few times. When Luke is killed and his freedom is postponed, he lets out a Big "NO!" in protest. Then when Darla is killed, he throws a tantrum out of grief and rage. His final breakdown is a little more subtle, when he just can't believe that Buffy is still alive after he supposedly killed her.
• Wicked Cultured: The Master is very well-read, having intimate knowledge of dark literature and of course, Shakespeare, whom he quotes in "The Wish."
• You Have Failed Me: He's actually a little more forgiving than most other Big Bad types, giving second chances when it's warranted and just demanding self-mutilation as penance. Not that it stops him from brutally killing even his most devoted disciples for incompetence or just plain bad luck. Of note are The Three, who offer their lives in penance for their failure to kill Buffy. The Master accepts and has Darla kill them... after he gives them a dose of False Reassurance.

Spike

See Spike

Drusilla

Drusilla

"We're going to destroy the world. Want to come?"

Played By: Juliet Landau

Appearances: Buffy the Vampire Slayer | Angel

"Do you like daisies? I plant them, but they always die. Everything I put in the ground withers and dies."

A creepy cockney vampire who sired Spike in 1880. Formerly a chaste Catholic girl, cursed with "the sight"—visions of the future. Spotted by Angelus during his heyday, he took a liking to her and set about tormenting her and killing her entire family. Then, on the day she was to become a nun, he slaughtered the convent and turned her into a vampire. Certifiably insane, Drusilla has an almost child-like demeanor, hiding how extremely dangerous she is. Currently she is the Lieutenant of Archaeus who is the Monster Progenitor of the Master's bloodline while other vampires are descended from Maloker the Old One.

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• Affably Evil: Drusilla has a certain quirky charm that goes hand-in-hand with her murderous psychosis. In the comics, she's nothing but polite to Nadira after capturing her.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Quickly drops Spike for Angelus. Drusilla is often compared to a sexual abuse victim, drawn to her powerful abusive 'father' over her caring boyfriend who was (at the time) too weak to protect her.
• Animal Lover: She had a strong attachment to nature and has a particular appreciation for animals, though she had proved incapable of caring for them on several occasions; her pet bird died of starvation, something she did not process until Spike got irate and brought it to light when she was trying to get it to sing. She also seemed to like dogs.
• Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: According to Landau, her costumes were originally intended to be a "cross between a Victorian period look and the Kate Moss heroin chic fashion look".
• Ax-Crazy: Drusilla is only turned after she finally loses her mind to Angelus' torments, when she is almost incoherent and can barely make sense of what was going on in front of her. Giving her fangs, claws, and the drive to torture, eat, and kill people only made the situation worse for everyone. The years do not appear to have improved her mental health or diminished her impulse to destroy. At all.
• Barefoot Loon: Often shown barefoot in early appearances, obviously to highlight her Ophelia-esque tendencies.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: And also very, very unhinged.
• Beware the Silly Ones: At first glance, she appears to be a harmless, babbling eccentric, yet she's held her own against Buffy, Angel and Spike, plus she killed Kendra in a straight fight.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: With Spike in the first half of Buffy Season 2, Angelus in the second half of Season 2, and then Darla in Season 2 of Angel.
• Blessed with Suck: Precognition sounds pretty cool, except it was what convinced Angelus that he wanted to torture and break her. It also results in stomach pains, fainting and knowing unpleasant things about the future that she can't change. It was actually a vision that Spike would fall in love with a Slayer which led her to become disenchanted with and leave him. As a human, she definitely thought this about herself, as she was religious, believing her visions to be an affront to God. As a vampire, she accepts her visions and uses them to change the future (the death of Jenny being a result), but sometimes she is just too insane to interpret them or act on them (as displayed when she gets set on fire by Angel despite having seen it happen beforehand).
• Bored with Insanity: She's briefly cured of her lunacy in the comics on two separate occasions and even tries to do some good for people in her own way during the latter incident by having a demon under her control absorb their emotional trauma. However, due to Status Quo Is God, it doesn't last. Though she is more lucid than before in recent years, able to converse with others more plainly.
• Break the Cutie: Angelus' methods of torture included taking advantage of the fact that she was psychic by pretending to be a priest during confession, saying such things as, "It is God's plan for you to be evil, so why not give in to His desire?" Also included was killing her entire family, sending her very nasty gifts and, when she went to a convent for sanctuary, he and Darla killed every nun in the building then had sex on the altar in front of her. Finally, when Drusilla was utterly traumatized, Angelus turned her, leaving her utterly insane for the rest of her existence.
• Chronic Pet Killer: Frequently ends up fawning over dead pets in cages. As Drusilla doesn't need to eat, she has trouble wrapping her mind around the concept of pet food.
  Spike: The bird's dead, Dru. You left it in a cage, and you didn't feed it, and now it's all dead, just like the other ones.
• Cloudcuckoolander: That's putting it very lightly.
  • Also subverted. She's incredibly dangerous, but at least some of her persona is Obfuscating Insanity as for example, she is capable engaging in serious conversations with Spike when they are alone but in front of others or when is she talking to someone who is not Spike, she speaks in riddles and insane babble.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Is both on the giving and the receiving end of this.
• Compelling Voice: She hypnotizes Kendra to render the Slayer helpless against her, by saying, "Look at me, dearie. Be in my eyes. Be in me." She follows this up by slitting Kendra's throat with her fingernails.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Drusilla, and her fellow baddies Spike and Angelus, contrast the Obviously Evil Master by being young-looking and attractive vampires, well suited for the modern day unlike the Master, who favored archaic ways.
• Create Your Own Villain: Angelus visited upon her every mental torment he could devise, ending up with... well, a pretty deranged supervillainess, all told.
• Creepy Doll: Has a plethora of these. Her favorite doll is called Miss Edith. ("Miss Edith speaks out of turn. She's a bad example, and will have no cakes today.")
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: She's usually very flighty and doesn't seem overly competent... but when she does something evil, she goes all out. Indeed, she has been shown to be quite competent and cunning at times and has the distinct honor of being one of few, if any, vampires to have fought the Scoobies and Team Angel multiple times and is still both alive and an ever-present threat to them.
• Custom Uniform: Dru's (rarely seen) game face is more snake-like than other vampires in the Buffyverse.
• Cute and Psycho: She's soft-spoken, loves dolls and has a child-like innocence and affection for her "family" which can on occasion come across as vulnerable and sweet. She's also an omnicidal, certifiably insane vampiress who has on occasion been known to slit throats with her own nails. She was led to believe she was evil by Angelus who stalked, tortured and assaulted her for years until she finally turned insane and was turned into a vampire to suffer for eternity, so by this point the "psycho" part of this trope is quite understandable.
• Daddy's Girl: Adores her sire Angelus, yet paradoxically blames all the bad things he did to her on the "Angel-beast."
• Daddy's Little Villain: Almost as evil as her beloved "Daddy." The two seem to have a lot in common, killing and making plans together, and in "Crush," Dru even shows Angelus' affinity for torture, while Spike prefers quick kills. Angelus even tells her "no one knows me like you do." Her betrayal of Spike for Angelus the moment he returns probably seals the deal. Of course, Dru and Angelus have been sleeping together since before Spike was born, but that's how vampire families seem to work. Drusilla now works for Archaeus, the founder of the vampire bloodline she belongs to.
• Dark Is Evil: After getting healed, she takes to wearing darker clothing
• Dark Mistress: Spike's "kitten."
• Depending on the Writer: There are several episodes which imply she isn't quite as insane as she's perceived, that at least some of her craziness is faked, and that she's actually much more lucid and cunning (in her own way intelligent) than she may appear. Most simply portray her as a unintelligible loon who can't see what's in front of her. It also varies whether she genuinely loves and cares about Spike, or if she simply sees him as a favored toy to manipulate and use. While the second half of Season 2, "Lie to Me" and "Lover's Walk" seem to support the latter theory, other episodes like "Crush," "School Hard," "Fool For Love" and pretty much all the comics write Drusilla as a heartbroken ex-lover who really does love Spike, albeit in her own, strange way.
• Depraved Bisexual: Is very strongly implied to have had a lesbian relationship with Darla. Also shows some feelings towards both Kendra (the final dance between them was described "almost sexualized" and "a G-rated lesbian interlude") and Lilah Morgan.
• Dominatrix: Depending on the Writer, Drusilla can either be this or a submissive. On one hand, we see her begging Angel to spank her, sulking when Angelus and Darla "won't even hurt me just a little bit," and Spike seems to be under the impression that torturing her will make her fancy him again. On the other hand, she takes great glee in tying up and hurting Angel, seems to want to "punish" Spike in "Crush," and appears to take (sensual) satisfaction in torturing him in Season 7. Granted, the last was the First simply imitating Drusilla, but it is meant to have the key characteristics of the person it is imitating.
• Doublethink: Drusilla simultaneously adores her "daddy" Angelus, and despises Angel for killing her family before siring her. Drusilla's damaged mind doesn't see any contradiction between the two.
• The Dragon: To Angel in the 2nd Season of Buffy, after he loses his soul, as Spike is bound - and then pretends to be bound - to a wheelchair, and she's restored to full strength. Clearly demonstrated in "Becoming, part II" when she leads a group of their minions to capture Giles. In Season 10 of Angel & Faith, she becomes one to Archaeus, the demon who sired her vampire bloodline, after he begins to whisper into her dreams to influence her actions, as her lack of soul renders her unable to resist him. In preparation for Archaeus' arrival in London, Drusilla begins to sire a number of teenage students to serve her and her master and later gathers other vampires after the most of the students are wiped out by Faith and Fred.
• Driven to Madness: By Angelus.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Chalky-skinned, dark-haired Drusilla is a triple-check, fitting each of the three groups most associated with this trope: villains, vampires, and Goths.
• The Empath: She had the power of empathy, which allowed her to sense, feel, and understand the emotions of others, and even learn concealed information from those emotions. For instance, when she was still human, she was able to sense Angelus' and Darla's presences at a distance, and perceive their nefarious intentions for her, which led her to herd her family away. Just before siring Spike, she sensed the passionate killer that lurked beneath his timid exterior. She could also sense Angel's presence out from a crowd of demons and realized Giles' love for Jenny by merely touching his head. The most potent application of this power was allowing Drusilla to sense past and future emotions — she sensed Spike's subconscious love for Buffy, as well as the fear of those who took refuge in Holland Manners' wine cellar when it was a nuclear fallout shelter during wartime.
• Eternal Love: With Spike. Or at least 120 years worth before it all falls apart because she senses his Unresolved Sexual Tension with Buffy.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: For over a hundred years, Spike absolutely adored Drusilla, doing anything for her. While she did return his feelings to some extent, Dru was never quite as faithful to Spike as he was to her.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: As Drusilla herself says, vampires can love "quite well, if not wisely":
  • For all the tumultuousness in her relationship with Spike, there was a lot of genuine love and affection between them, and Drusilla is deeply hurt when Spike falls in love with Buffy (despite having no problem with cheating on him).
  • She's immensely fond of Darla in a maternal and (strongly implied) romantic sense.
  • As sick and inconsistent as their relationship is (which is no surprise, considering the parties involved), Drusilla is quite fond of her "daddy", Angelus.
• Evil Brit: Originally a Londoner, Drusilla speaks with a cockney/estuary accent and luxuriates in her own evilness.
• Fate Worse than Death: The only reason Angelus didn't kill her after driving her insane was because "death would be mercy." He turned her into an insane vampire instead so that she would be stuck in a shattered state forever and he could enjoy the show.
• Femme Fatalons: There's never any doubt that she's evil, but she definitely has these. She kills Kendra by cutting her throat with a single nail.
  "I didn't like that bartender. His eyeballs got stuck to my fingers." [licks fingers]
• Fortune Teller: Shows a talent for reading Tarot in one episode.
• Hero Killer: Drusilla kills Kendra in the penultimate episode of Season 2.
• Hypnotic Eyes: She's capable of feats of hypnotism through eye contact, as demonstrated with Kendra, whom she entranced, and then with Giles.
• Hypocrite: Drusilla is heartbroken when Spike falls in love with Buffy and calls him on it even before he's become aware of his feelings, but she has historically had no problem cheating on Spike with Angelus.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Ultimately this is all she really wants, in her own twisted, evil, and bizarre way of course.
• Ironic Echo: Repeats Spike's "I'll see that you get strong again" line when she gets her strength back, and effortlessly carries him to safety.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Her theme music.
• Karma Houdini: She killed Kendra, slaughtered hundreds of innocents, turned Darla back into a vampire at the behest of Wolfram & Hart before going on a massive rampage through L.A.; despite all of this, by the end of both Buffy and Angel, she's still alive and at large. Taken to ludicrous extremes in the Angel & Faith comics, where after thwarting her plans and killing the Lorophage demon she was using to "help" people, Angel lets her escape... which leads to Drusilla attacking Faith's Slayer squad and killing one of them.
• Lost in Character: While making Giles see her as the late Jenny Calendar, Drusilla goes the extra mile of kissing him, which she gets a little too into, to Angelus' humorous discomfort.
• Mad Oracle: She had ability to foresee the future. Although her insanity makes her visions somewhat difficult to understand for both herself and others, her abilities have often served as foreshadowing to future events. Before she followed William Pratt into the alley where she turned him, she commented to Darla and Angelus that she would "pick the wisest and bravest knight in all the land" for her future "playmate". Although Spike first became one of the most notorious and violent vampires in history, after falling in love with Buffy and sacrificing his life, he truly did become the "brave knight" she had imagined. Furthermore, she was able to foresee Spike's sacrifice several years before it occurred; this was made evident when she told him that he "tasted like ashes" to her. She later had visions about Angel and Giles, during which she was able to determine that Angel had taken fragments of Giles's soul into his own body.
• Mind Rape: Invoked by Angelus, who wanted to drive her insane by putting her through every torture he could devise. He succeeded.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: She arguably sets Spike's entire Character Development in motion by dumping him over forseeing him falling for Buffy, as she dumps him well before his infatuation truly develops. That, in turn, results in him returning to Sunnydale, falling in love with Buffy, and ultimately to him earning himself a soul and becoming one of Buffy's loyalest and dearest allies. By the time she returns to take him back, he's already far too wrapped up in his feelings for Buffy to rejoin her.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Appearance-wise, she's a cross between Nancy Spungden and Kate Moss.
• No-One Could Have Survived That: Supposedly killed by an angry mob in Prague. Buffy notes they don't make angry mobs like they used to.
• Non-Action Guy: She rarely fights, preferring to use her powers of hypnosis and her tactical planning. Not that that makes her any less terrifying. When her strength is restored she can hold her own against Angel and killed Kendra in a fight.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When the crazy act drops, it's basically time to panic, as Dru shows to be pretty with it and competent. Spike found this out when as well as ditching the psychosis, she also dropped the evil, coming across as positively sane in comparison when she shows how hurt and upset she is he's fallen for Buffy.
• Older Than She Looks: Well, obviously; she's a vampire, but even out of universe, Juliet Landau was 32 when she first played Dru.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: She is the only member of The Whirlwind to avert this^note Darla (original name forgotten) and Angel (Liam) use names bestowed on them by the Master and Darla respectively, William the Bloody aka Spike (William Pratt) derived his from the insults he used to receive as a mortal poet, still going by her human first name after getting vamped. The comics confirm that her name really is Drusilla Keeble.
• The Ophelia: "Do you like daisies? Hmm? I plant them, but they always die. Everything I put in the ground withers and dies." She was driven mad by being terrorized by Angelus.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: As a result of Angelus's psychological torture, she displays behavior that suggests she is somewhat infantile. She owns and plays with a collection of china dolls that she keeps gagged, one of which she has named Miss Edith. Spike himself has observed that Drusilla is quite childlike in her speech and behavior, but unlike Angelus, he thought it endearing. When she see the Judge burning Dalton, she laughs as a girl amused by her pet dog.
  Drusilla: (Upon Spike giving her a Sunnydale student he had kidnapped, she turns her toward her dolls) You see Miss Edith, if you have been good you can watch with the rest. (The student turns to her and sees she's in vamp face. Dru smiles at her... before letting out a large growl and swiftly going for her neck)
• Sadist: Despite her Dark and Troubled Past, she's particularly vicious. When hypnotizing Giles, she find a certain pleasure to disguise herself as Jenny Calendar and was happy to imagine Buffy killed by the Judge, was excited by the human heart offered by Angelus and had a certain masochist/maternal futility to be attacked by a newly sired Darla, similar to a mother happy to see her baby making his first steps. It was also her who who told to Angelus about Acathla's existence, implying that the Apocalypse was her own idea.
• Soap Opera Disease: When she first appears in the series, she has some vague condition that is never explained beyond her being weak and frail, which is mainly portrayed through Spike repeatedly worrying that she should be resting while she is up and walking. In the canonical Tales of the Vampires, it was retroactively explained that Drusilla was tortured by an "Inquisitor" while in Prague, including the use of a magic torture chair, leaving her in a frail condition. Spike initially hopes the Hellmouth will restore her, but later learns that the blood of her sire (Angel) can cure her affliction.
• Spider-Sense: As a result of her psychic abilities, she can sense threats to her and her allies. In "Passion," she has a vision revealing to her that Jenny is moving against Angelus. In "Redefinition," she can sense Angel is watching her and Darla during their recruitment for muscle at a demon flight club.
• Stockholm Syndrome: Angelus's crimes against her defy description, yet Drusilla is very attached to him and willingly falls under his influence when he returns in Season 2 of Buffy.
• Talkative Loon: Oh boy, try to make sense of what she's saying half the time.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Implied by Spike's declared intention to "tie her up and torture her until she likes me again!" Well, okay.
• The Unfought: Unless you count her really brief skirmish with Kendra.
  • Becomes a Subverted Trope after Buffy Season 2. She gets a full fight against Angel when she next appears in Angel Season 2, and then even gets a short fight against Buffy herself when she returns for an episode of Buffy Season 5.
• Tragic Villain: At the end of the day, Drusilla is just one more of Angelus's victims. He took everything from her in the most horrific manner possible; her family, her faith, her sanity.
• Trauma Conga Line: Though a lot of it takes place off-screen/before the show takes place.
• Unholy Matrimony: With Spike.
• Vocal Dissonance: She dresses like a Goth singer, acts like a Serial Killer, and talks with an extremely soft voice.
• The Vamp: Not so much as Darla, but she does use her sex appeal to get her way or lure prey, as she did with William the Bloody.
• Vampire Lolita Archetype: Downplayed. Despite looking like an adult and debuting before the archetype was even created, she fits quite well with her childish Creepy Cute mannerisms and Victorian clothing.
• Waif Prophet: In her debut, she had been severely damaged by a mob attack that left her physically weak. She regained her strength part-way through the second season and remained somewhat prophetic, but was still completely crazy.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: During her brief bout of sanity circa Season 9, she uses a demon to remove mental trauma from anyone who asks; the downside is that they go insane as a result.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In the TV show. Finally appears in the Angel and Faith comics.
• Womanchild: As a result of Angelus's psychological torture, she displays behavior that suggests she is somewhat infantile. She owns and plays with a collection of china dolls that she keeps gagged, one of which she has named Miss Edith. Spike himself has observed that Drusilla is quite childlike in her speech and behavior, but unlike Angelus, he thought it endearing. When she see the Judge burning Dalton, she laughs as a girl amused by her pet dog.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In Season 2, Angelus attempts to plunge the world into a hell dimension by unleashing Acathla. Unlike Spike, Drusilla has zero reservations about this plan; in fact, she's tickled pink by it. Having gone Ax-Crazy because of Angelus' sadistic mind games might have had a hand in that.
• Would Hurt a Child: "What will your mummy sing when they find your body?"
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Siring Darla in Angel made her ecstatic as she believed that she wouldn't have to be lonely anymore. She enjoys the company of Darla for about three episodes before Angel sets them both on fire and Darla decides she wants nothing to do with her anymore.
  • In "Crush," she appears to win back Spike's affections... until it turns out to be a ruse and she finds herself tasered, tied up and offered as a sacrifice to prove his love to Buffy.
  • In the comics. Congratulations on restoring your sanity, Drusilla. Wouldn't it be a shame if Angel came and took it away from you again?

Angelus

See his folder under Angel

The Mayor

Mayor Richard Wilkins III

"I've got two words that are gonna make all the pain go away. Miniature... golf."

Played By: Harry Groener

"Now, Faith, I don't find that sort of thing amusing. I'm a family man. Now, let's kill your little friend!"

The folksy Mayor who concealed his satanic bargains behind closed doors. He had already achieved ageless immortality way before the series, and has been in Sunnydale since its founding. After the 'first' Richard got too old he just pretended to be his descendant (Wilkins II and III) and got reelected. It was the same guy the whole time, he just pretended it was a family legacy. Wilkins is a sorcerer who planned to undergo Ascension, becoming the embodiment of the pure demon Olvikan. The Big Bad for Season 3.

No relation to a certain psychopathic coffee salesman.

---

• Affably Evil: Best summarized by the scene in "Choices" when he gives Angel and Buffy honest and intelligent, if somewhat harsh, relationship advice and does so in a way that shows he really means it and would never want anyone to endure the same fate he did with his wife. At one point in Season 6, Xander laments that the Mayor isn't around anymore, because yeah, the man might have been an Evil Sorcerer with dark ambitions to become a demon, but the city's zoning and permitting board were so much more efficient under the man's administration, and he made sure all the potholes got filled in a timely manner too. Word of God is that none of the affability is faked; he's honestly a Nice Guy who just happens to also be an evil monster who wants to rule the world. Groener ad-libbed a bit after a group of cub scouts leave the Mayor's office following a photo-op, saying how annoying they were. Joss jumped in and said, (paraphrased), "No, he genuinely likes the boy scouts and thinks involved, social kids like that are the future of the country!" In the Spanish dub, the mayor is unfailingly polite, using Usted/Ustedes (as opposed to the informal Tú/Vosotros) and their verb conjugations whenever he's speaking with someone he isn't personally close to (in other words, when he's talking to anyone other than Faith).
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: When his ascension draws near, the Mayor makes it a point to show up in the school library just to tell the Scoobies how utterly screwed they are. It has the additional effect of highlighting how little of a threat they were to him at that point, as it emphases the fact that he could have strolled into their meeting place at any time and there would have been nothing they could do to stop him.
• Anti-Villain: Whilst unquestionably evil (his ultimate aim seems to be to grow into a big demon and eat a few dozen teenagers), he has a genuinely fatherly love for Faith. So much so that, even when she's on the other side of the Heel–Face Revolving Door, he's still the person she remembers with the most fondness, judging by her interaction with the First.
• Back from the Dead:
  • One comic story had him briefly return as a wayward spirit capable of Demonic Possession.
  • The Season 12 comics have him return, still in the form of Olvikan. As he explains, his Old One physiology enabled him to survive the explosion of Sunnydale High, and he spent the intervening years pulling himself back together.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Not the normal Sharp-Dressed Man variation, but that suit of his gives a very classy aspect, perfectly fitting his Affably Evil persona.
• Bad Boss: Implied to have shades of this, even to Faith.
  Mayor: If you fail again, well, replacing Mr. Trick was hard enough.
  • Although it's very heavily implied to have been a bluff, especially given that he rewards her failure with mini golf.
• Benevolent Boss: He treats his subordinates (both human and vampire) in a friendly and patient way, and is really upset by his deputy's death.
• Berserk Button: Hurting Faith is one of the few things to make him genuinely angry and lose his friendly nature.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He may be affable in person and benevolent in his day job, but he is still a dangerous sorcerer.
• Big Bad: Of Season 3; the preparation for his Ascension, over a hundred years in the making, serves as the main threat for the Scoobies to deal with.
• Complete Immortality: During the 100 days before the Ascension.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: The Mayor was the first Buffy Big Bad who wasn't a vampire, and unlike the insanely sadistic Angelus, he was a genuinely polite and friendly man who just happened to be evil. His relationship with his fellow villains was also very positive, treating Mr. Trick as a friend and Faith as a surrogate daughter, contrasting Angelus' cruelty to Spike and subtly abusive treatment of Drusilla (she had previously been a victim of unspeakable tortures at Angelus' hands). Simply put, the Mayor is the most human of the show's Big Bads, unlike Angelus, a creature so evil that he literally had no humanity. And while The Master, Angelus and Spike were all shadowy figures who lived in secret and were unknown to the world at large and whose plans were nothing but self-serving carnage, The Mayor is a public figure who has hidden in plain sight for at least the last century and takes his role as a public servant seriously, honestly believing his actions will benefit Sunnydale.
• Corrupt Politician: How corrupt? He sold his soul and created a town for demons to feed so he could become an immortal Old One. How exactly does he keep getting elected, year after year? On the other hand, once you get over the demonic stuff, he is a fairly good mayor. Governmental policy runs well in Sunnydale, and he keeps his campaign promises.
• Dead Man Writing: The Mayor's video for Faith.
• Deal with the Devil: He found the Hellmouth infested with demons, with whom he made a pact to avoid being killed himself. He agreed to found a town on the Hellmouth where demons could freely feed on the inhabitants of the town. In his deals with demons such as Lurconis, he sold his soul and gained immortality.
• Dissonant Serenity: Very little fazes the Mayor, who reacts to life-threatening situations and horrific scenes as if it's another day at the office... because for him, that's exactly what it is.
• The Dreaded: Perhaps not to the same extent as Angelus or The First, but it is worth noting that he was able to freak out both Mr. Trick and Deputy Mayor Alan Finch, and had control over his own personal army of vampires before he became invulnerable. Hell, he even freaked out the Scooby Gang when he casually walked into the library.
• Eldritch Abomination: Planned to become one, and he was close to success, managing to transform into his demon form. However, he didn't quite get the necessary food (that is, high school students) needed to totally ascend and was killed before he could get any further.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: His love of Faith is completely reciprocal as she adores him too, seeing him as the loving parent she never had. She is genuinely devastated upon waking up and finding out he is already dead, swearing revenge for his death.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Part of what makes his Affably Evil persona so genuine. He loved his wife Edna Mae, staying with her all the way through to her old age even as she grew bitter and cursed him with every breath. He never abandoned her. And then there's Faith, who he views as a surrogate daughter and just adores. When she goes missing, he's visibly shaken and even uttering a Madness Mantra that she'll be alright. The only time he loses his cool is when he's worried about Faith. Even losing the Box of Gavrok only leaves him mildly upset. With Faith he's shouting mad.
• Even Evil Has Standards: "Gingerbread" has him genuinely horrified at the child murders, though it's also entirely possible he was just doing what the townspeople expected of him. The fact he looks worried when the dark forces of the town are brought up only muddles things further. The Mayor does love kids, so he probably doesn't like seeing them get killed if he's not the one eating them himself. He's also a big believer in keeping his word and doesn't like when he is made to look dishonest. In fact, the only time we see say or do anything that might be considered threatening to his henchmen is when Mr. Trick says he did him a favor by accidentally getting Lurconis, the demon the Mayor had pledged a sacrifice too, killed by the gang. He tells him that he should be very careful what favors he does for him in the future.
• Evil Counterpart: To Giles, due to his paternal relationship with Faith. He also likes his scotch.
• Evil Redhead: He has thin red hair with a slight bald spot.
• Evil Sorcerer: He's not quite a warlock, but he knows his way around magic.
• Evil Virtues: The Mayor places great value on strong family units, personal responsibility, clean-living and planning for the future. He also does have a sense of honor, keeping his word most of the time, and is capable of genuine love and kindness to those close to him and who work under him.
• Family-Values Villain: He really is the pinnacle of this trope. He's made deals with dozens of different demons, founded a town specifically so he could lure in people to be killed by monsters, orders numerous thefts and assassinations (including against newborn infants as payment for a demon), and his master plan is to become a giant demon that will devour everyone in sight. But he still believes in setting a good example for the children, is disgusted by "immoral liaisons" at the local motel, and his last words to his vampire army before the final battle are "And boys? Let's watch the swearing."
  • What makes him interesting is that there's never really any hint that his personality is the mask—it remains consistent throughout, except for a brief, understandable Villainous Breakdown after Buffy puts Faith into a coma. Unlike many examples of this trope he's not really a Knight Templar or a hypocrite—he's just a generally nice guy whose chief ambition, incongruously, is turning into a gigantic demon snake. In one episode he celebrates an evil scheme well done with a hearty "Gosh I'm feeling chipper! Who's for a root beer!?" When he realizes his plan's gone amok after ascending to demonhood and finding himself face-to-face with a room full of high explosives, his last words and only response is "Well, gosh."
  Faith: Thanks, sugar daddy.
  Wilkins: (admonishingly) Now, Faith, I don't find that sort of thing amusing. I'm a family man. (jovial again) Now, let's kill your little friend.
• Feel No Pain: A showoff when it comes to his own invulnerability.
• Giggling Villain: The Mayor is usually smiling and happy, whether it's because he's sacrificing babies to a demon or reading The Family Circus.
• Good Parents: In a very twisted way, he adores Faith as a surrogate daughter and wants the best for her. He even risks losing his chance to Ascend when he finds out that Faith is missing after her fight with Buffy.
  Wilkins: Find them.
  Henchman: But sir, the Ascension...
  Wilkins: (screaming) FIND THEM!!
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: He'll rip your heart out and force feed it to a baby, but he won't stand any naughty language. Heck, his last words even portrayed this: "Well, gosh."
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Mayor is mentioned in tones of dread in Season 2, setting him up as an even bigger and badder threat than Spike or Angelus. He's been around and benefiting from the chaos in Sunnydale since long before Season 1, and even founded the town on top of the Hellmouth to serve his eventual goals, setting the stage for everything that happens in the series.
• Healing Factor: What his invulnerability manifests as.
• Hostage for MacGuffin: He kidnaps Willow and forces the Scooby Gang to hand over the Box of Gavrok, an artifact he needed to complete his Ascension. Unlike most examples, he has no intention of going back on his word and lets Willow go with no strings attached.
• I Gave My Word: He doesn't like others accusing him of dishonesty or undermining his intergrity. See Hostage for MacGuffin above.
  That's what separates me from other politicians, Mr. Trick. I keep my campaign promises.
• Immortality: His main power.
• Immortal Ruler: He is revealed to have been mayor for over 100 years via My Grandson, Myself. He gained immortality through a Deal with the Devil and founded the town over the Hellmouth so he could ascend into demonhood.
• It's Personal: For most of the season, the Mayor is aware of the activities of the Scooby gang but holds no real malevolence towards them, simply wanting them removed as an obstacle for his ambitions. Even their actions barely seem to slow down his efforts. But after Buffy puts Faith in a coma, Wilkins goes out of his way to try to kill Buffy himself while she is recovering, despite the fact that it could have completely upended his plans. Afterwards, he makes it clear he is going to use his newfound power to take revenge on the Scoobies for what they did to Faith.
• Madness Mantra: After Faith goes missing with signs of a fight at her place, he tries to reassure himself.
  She's going to be all right. She'll be all right. She'll be all right.
• Mayor Pain: He provides the name for Type A.
• Morality Pet: Faith. Even when the deaths of close henchmen doesn't bother him too much, he is genuinely distraught about Faith.
• My Grandson, Myself: He posed as his own son and grandson to hide his immortality.
• Mysterious Employer: Towards the end of Season 2 and the beginning of Season 3, he's foreshadowed as an unseen but feared superior of Principal Snyder and Sunnydale's Chief of Police.
• Neat Freak: He often delivers little speeches on the importance of cleanliness (including clean fingernails), keeps thing neatly aligned on his desk, and abhors germs.
• Office Golf: Often plays it while discussing his plans with Finch.
• Oh, Crap!: "Gingerbread." Blink and you'll miss Wilkins suddenly start looking rather uncomfortable when Joyce discusses the horrors that happen in Sunnydale. Also, his last words are "Well, gosh."
• One-Winged Angel / Scaled Up: After his Ascension.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The only time we see him genuinely angry is after Buffy puts Faith in a coma. He personally attempts to smother an unconscious Buffy to death with his bare hands, and freaks out and calls her a "whore" in front of Angel. He quickly regains his usual demeanor after Angel flings him across the room.
• Orcus on His Throne: He did precious little villainy, even counting what he delegated to his minions or Dragon; hell, Faith came to him looking for work. Being a Non-Action Big Bad limits his options, and by the time the heroes even know he's a villain he's already unkillable and just needs to wait for the time of Ascension, but this doesn't explain why he did nothing about the Master or Angelus, given their plans would have severely wrecked his plans.
• Papa Wolf: Harming Faith will bring out the worst of him. When Buffy managed to critically hurt her, Wilkins, in a fit of grief and rage, almost smothered Buffy to death in the hospital (until Angel stopped him).
• Parental Substitute: He managed to develop a close father-daughter relationship with Faith (despite attempting to send her to prison and killing her at first) and was genuinely distraught when she went into a coma.
• Permanent Elected Official: He's been the Mayor of Sunnydale three times in a row... each time posing as the son of the other.
• Post-Mortem Comeback: Dies in the third season. Sets up a contingency plan that allows Faith to pull a Grand Theft Me on Buffy in the fourth season.
• Precision F-Strike: After Faith is hurt. Naturally made even more dramatic by his usual demeanor.
  Wilkins: Misery loves company, young man, and I'm looking to share that with you and your whore!
• Really 700 Years Old: He's over a hundred years old, but hasn't aged a day since the 19th century.
• Stepford Smiler: Averted. There's nothing false about his Mr. Rogers persona; he really is that optimistic and cheery.
• Straight Edge Evil: The Mayor genuinely believes in family values; slaughtering innocents is one thing, but swearing? Not getting to bed at a reasonable time? Well, that's just downright unseemly.
• Sweet Tooth: Loves candy and Tollhouse cookies.
• Terrified of Germs: Even after becoming invulnerable.
• Totalitarian Utilitarian: Seems to be his reason for achieving Ascension—to bring order.
• Tranquil Fury: When he tries to smother Buffy at the hospital.
• Übermensch: Rather than wanting to destroy the world, he wants to attain god-like power to improve it, and has no qualms about killing thousands of people to get there. He also believes in keeping his promises and using family friendly language.
• Ultimate Authority Mayor: He has been making Sunnydale a haven for demonic activity for a century.
• Uncanny Family Resemblance: Oddly, it seems that he's pretty much always been Mayor and no one ever caught on. Well, demon sacrifices aside he IS a really good Mayor…
• Video Wills: Faith watches the tape in Season 4.
• Villain Has a Point: He discusses Buffy and Angel's relationship at length with them, pointing out that Angel's immortality, sterility, and Curse Escape Clause all mean that they basically have no real future together and Angel is keeping her from that kind of life. Buffy's mother later makes those same points, and all of it contributes to Angel's decision to break up with Buffy and leave Sunnydale.
• Villains Out Shopping: Many scenes have him playing miniature golf, discussing about his favorite comics or treating Faith like gold.
• Villain with Good Publicity: An Evil Sorcerer who was nonetheless the respected Mayor of Sunnydale.
• Villainous BSoD: As Faith's comatose condition is explained to him by a doctor, the Mayor is utterly still and clearly in shock, staring blankly ahead.
• Villainous Legacy: Long after the Mayor is gone, the heroes still have to deal with the consequences of his decision to build Sunnydale on a Hellmouth, and his personal impact on Faith remains evident in her character development going forward.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He honestly thinks life under his rule post-Ascension is for the best for everyone.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: He seems pretty happy with his immortality but notes how horrible it was to see his wife age normally and grow to despise him for his eternal youth. He says that he doesn't want Angel and Buffy to go through the same thing that he did.
• Would Hurt a Child: Every thirty or so years, he feeds newborn babies to a sewer-dwelling demon named Lurconis.
• Wrote the Book: "There's more than one way to skin a cat. And I happen to know that's factually true!"

Adam

Adam

"No one - no human, no demon has ever been as awake and alive as I am. You are all just shadows."

Played By: George Hertzberg

"I'm a kinematically redundant, biomechanical demonoid, designed by Maggie Walsh. She called me Adam and I called her Mother."

A part-cyborg, part-demon, part-human creation of The Initiative (under Maggie Walsh). He has no conscience, and he is violently curious in how things work. He is nearly unstoppable, and he tries to create the perfect race of Human/Demon/Android hybrids.

---

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Adam's mind is his own, without influence from any of the parts used to make him. Buffy notes that "the part where he's pure evil and kills randomly was an oversight".
  Angleman: Adam, Maggie would want you to stand down.
  Adam: Yes, but I seem to have a design flaw.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Buffy gets a moment of this during her dream in "Restless" when she meets a fully human version of him (George Hertzberg without the extensive prostehtics) and expresses sorrow that she didn't even know what name he went by before being dubbed "Adam".
• And Show It to You: Buffy rips out his core and shows it to him; he shuts down and she subsequently destroys it.
• Anti-Magic / No-Sell: He's immune to reality-altering magic, like the spell Jonathan cast in "Superstar."
• Arm Cannon: Eventually upgrades his right arm with a collapsible minigun/grenade launcher hybrid, which he uses against Buffy to great effect in their final battle until the enjoining spell takes effect and the Curb-Stomp Battle begins.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Rip out his battery, and he's a sack of meat.
• Back from the Dead: As a non-physical entity in the comic storyline "Note from the Underground."
• BFG: His right arm can function as either a Gatling gun or a grenade launcher.
• Big Bad: Of Season 4, after usurping the position from Maggie Walsh, his creator.
• Bioweapon Beast: Created by the Initiative as an engineered hybrid of humans, demons and androids into a living weapon that doesn't take long to rebel against his makers.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: His Polgara demon skewer, which doubles as his weapon in close combat.
• Blanket Fort: In Buffy's dream version of Adam, seen in "Restless":
  Riley: We need to build a fort!
  Human!Adam: I'll get the pillows!
• Cain and Abel: He considers himself to be a brother to Riley, and he's most certainly a Cain.
  "She taught you how to think, how to feel. She fed you chemicals to make you stronger. Your mind and body. She said that you and I were her favorite children. Her art. That makes us brothers. Family."
• Catchphrase: "Interesting..."
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Compared to Mayor Wilkins, a man who was a well-respected public figure and genuinely cheerful and polite evil sorcerer, as well as a long-lived fixture in Sunnydale, Adam doesn't (and honestly couldn't) operate in public, his polite demeanor is a façade, doesn't use magic, and he's only recently come to life (in his current form, anyway) when he first appears. Also, while the Mayor valued his minions and sought to become a demon, Adam treats his mooks as disposable, and already considers himself to be perfect.
• Creepy Monotone: He speaks in an unnervingly calm tone.
• Cyborg: A human-demon-robot cyborg.
• Dark Messiah: In a way, since he instilled loyalty and cooperation among demons and vampires. Some of his followers view him as this, with one even calling "the evil messiah guy."
• Deadpan Snarker: Although he's not normally one for quips, Adam does show a bit of sardonic humor from time to time, even in his very first word, where he dryly calls Maggie "Mommy" after fatally stabbing her.
• Death of Personality: Maggie built Adam from a dead agent of the Initiative, but once he awakens, he treats it as a birth and is essentially a whole new being; the man he once was is gone.
• Disc-One Final Boss: He is the first Big Bad to be defeated before the last episode, with the First Slayer serving as the main antagonist of the finale.
• Enemy to All Living Things: Living, dead, undead. Adam wants to create a new race of superior creatures by killing everyone else.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He seriously thinks that setting off one spat between Buffy and her friends will split them up for good, and that contributes to his death.
• Evil Counterpart: Possibly meant to be one to Buffy. Like Buffy, he was a normal "All-American" human empowered by the head of a secret organization in order to act as a living super-weapon against demons, but ultimately refuses to be the organization's tool and disbands from it (Adam albeit more violently so). Additionally, both try to sway Riley to join their cause against his previous alliance, both become regarded by those they protect as a sort of Messiah, and even their final acts in the show are the same: Adam creates an army of enlightened cyborgs like himself out of Initiative soldiers, whereas at the end of Season 7 Buffy and Willow grant full Slayer powers to every Potential, making an army to combat The First (more amusingly, both have made Spike cry due to their understanding of his ego's fragility). However, whereas Buffy was bestowed powers by an ancient magic, Adam was granted power by futuristic technology. Where Buffy protects humans but will not kill demons that are relatively harmless, Adam simply kills that which interests him enough to do so, even if the demon is on his side. Buffy's greatest fears in Seasons 4 and 5 revolve around her worrying that her powers and "destiny" will make her a demon herself, a heartless killer whose humanity all but vanishes; Adam questions this himself, but accepts the mantle with little hesitance.
• Evil Plan: His goal is to trigger a massive battle royale between demons and humans, and then use the parts from both sides to build an army of hybrid soldiers.
• Evil Sounds Deep: He speaks in a prominent baritone.
• Faux Affably Evil: He acts all friendly and witty while committing horrific acts. He also shows a very charismatic, philosophical exterior that hides a supreme arrogance and lack of empathy.
• Frankenstein's Monster: He's a human/demon hybrid...and he's also a cyborg, since he had machine and computer parts.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The comic story "Haunted" reveals he was just a random, faceless Initiative grunt killed by the Mayor.
• Gatling Good: He upgrades one of his arms into a gatling gun.
• Genius Bruiser: Smart enough to modify himself and create more like him; strong enough to tear off a vampire's head with his bare hands.
• Gone Horribly Right: His creation turns out to be this. He later states that everything he did as part of the 314 Project was as Professor Walsh intended—except for the fact that she assumed that she'd still be alive to witness it and would be the one pulling the strings.
• Jack the Ripoff: Adam shares musical taste with Charles Manson. His ultimate goal is also similar: to provoke a racial war, leaving only himself standing among the ashes. Adam is also shown to be very charismatic among vampires and demons alike.
• The Juggernaut: It's obvious that everything before the enjoining spell had no effect on him.
• Large and in Charge: George Hertzberg is huge, even having a few inches on Marc Blucas.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: "I do appreciate violence."
• Meaningful Name: The first of his kind and code-named Adam.
• Mix-and-Match Man: He was an amalgam of several of the monsters that the Initiative had captured (plus a deceased human soldier) and was taken out by an amalgam of the main characters.
  Spike: So you help me and you get this chip out of my head?
  Adam: Scout's honor.
  Spike: You were a Boy Scout?
  Adam: Parts of me.
• Monster Modesty: Maggie helpfully gave him some trousers when she was piecing him together.
• Mysterious Past: "Before Adam? Not a man among us can remember." One comic suggests that he was once a human member of the Initiative and Professor Walsh's favorite alongside Riley, and was used in the 314 Project after he was killed by a demon corpse possessed by the spirit of Mayor Wilkins.
• Narcissist: Adam speaks frequently about how superior and enlightened he is compared to every other being, and his endgame is to create a new race in his own image with the corpses of dozens of humans and demons.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: He was practically Made of Diamond. Until the finale none of the heroes' attacks even made him flinch. Besides which, he was sustained by a uranium power core, and so could continue functioning without a head; destroying him meant either utterly annihilating his body or destroying the power core.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: A Frankenstein's monster created from human and demon parts meshed together with cybernetics.
• Obviously Evil: Scary cyber-demon thing? Yeah, definitely evil.
• Oh, Crap!: His reaction to the Enjoined Buffy.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: No one remembers his real name.
• Only One Name: Maggie Walsh christened him "Adam" and nothing else. When Buffy asks a dream version of Adam his real name, he doesn't tell.
  Adam: Before Adam? Not a man among us can remember.
• Outside-Context Problem: Adam is this to the Scooby gang. Unlike previous Big Bads, Adam isn't someone explicitly tied to the supernatural, but is rather the product of super science. He was specifically built to have no known weaknesses, so he has no obvious flaw of vulnerability that the team could exploit. Worse, because he has no history and therefore nothing to research, the Scoobies have no idea what his ultimate plan is until practically the last minute when it was almost too late to stop it. In the end, it took Buffy powering up through a mystical spell to gain an advantage over him.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: Thanks to his Uranium-235 core.
• Phlebotinum Battery: See above.
• Playing with Syringes: How he was created.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: A fan of The Beatles, specifically "Helter Skelter." Then again, so was Charles Manson, as Spike dryly lampshades.
• Power Source: The Uranium-235 core.
• Psycho Prototype: He was meant to be the first of many. Then he stabbed his creator.
• Psychotic Smirk: From time to time, he sports this expression. Usually when he finds something "interesting".
• Robotic Psychopath: Adam was built to be a weapon, and as such is incapable of caring about anyone.
• Self-Made Orphan: Murders his creator, Maggie Walsh, within moments of coming on-line.
• Shout-Out: His name is one to Frankenstein, where Word of God is that the creature's name is "Adam."
• Siblings in Crime: Views Riley as his brother (since they were both Professor Walsh's "favorites") and wants to be this with him.
• Spiky Hair: He has a typical Initiative crew-cut esque hairstyle. It makes sense, since the human parts of him come from an Initiative soldier who was killed in action.
• Spock Speak: As should be expected for a cyborg, he speaks in a very clinical, gentle and logical way.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Never ever loses his cool or faux affability, yet he kills a child for the hell of it in his first few minutes.
• Super-Intelligence: In addition to all of his powers, he was a genius, often giving a scientific analysis on both human and demon psychology and nature. He also possessed extensive knowledge of the Initiative's personnel and facilities, and was a master of persuasion, easily convincing the vampires and demons of Sunnydale to team up against the Initiative.
• Super Prototype: Compare his performance to Forrest's—though he purposely made Forrest "nearly as bad" as him.
• Super-Soldier: Meant to be the first in a new line of Initiative Super Soldiers, combining the advancement of technology, the intelligence and adaptability of humans, and the superior strength and emotional detachment of demons in one big badass package.
• Take Over the World: Plans to re-populate Earth with an army of beings like himself.
• Tranquil Fury: Even at his most heinous or angry, he remains cool, calm and collected.
• Turned Against Their Masters: The very first thing he does upon activation is kill his creator.
• Two-Faced: Three, if you count that metal portion.
• Ultimate Lifeform: He certainly believes himself to be this, and wants to remake people in his own image.
• Viler New Villain: Maggie Walsh was just a scientist with evil motives who created a monster that killed her and became the next Big Bad of the season. However, since he pursued roughly the same plan as her, it’s more a case of creating a more dangerous villain rather than a more vicious villain.
• Would Hurt a Child: The very first thing he does upon escaping the lab is kill and dissect a little boy.

Glory

Glorificus AKA Glory

"Did anybody order an apocalypse?"

Played By: Clare Kramer

"Funny. 'Cause I look around at this world you're so eager to be a part of, and all I see is six-billion lunatics looking for the fastest ride out. Who's not crazy? Look around. Everyone's drinking, smoking, shooting up, shooting each other, or just plain screwing their brains out 'cause they don't want 'em anymore. I'm crazy? Honey, I'm the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind. 'Cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts."

Glory, also known as "the great and wonderful Glorificus", is an evil hellgod who has been exiled from her dimension by other hellgods. She is forced to occupy the body of a human named Ben, which reduces her powers. She regularly becomes disoriented and unstable and must drain the minds of humans in order to maintain her cognitive processes, leaving her human victims insane. She seeks the Key to return to her home dimension, not caring that her actions threaten to destroy the fabric of reality separating all dimensions.

---

• Achilles' Heel:
  • The Dagon Sphere was created to repel Glory. Although its effect was not absolute, as it was ultimately crushed by Glory herself, the sphere still reduced her potential in hand-to-hand combat with Buffy.
  • Weapons crafted and/or wielded by other deities or divine beings proved to be capable of hurting her. Olaf's hammer was so effective to the point that it forced her to revert into Ben, human and mortal. Giles indicated that it left her so weakened it would take her a great deal of time to return, but that she would eventually return one day.
  • Although she was well-versed in magic, she was also vulnerable to it when it was used against her. Willow had, on at least two occasions, harmed her with powerful magic spells.
  • Her need to drain the mental energy of humans could disorient her. When this occurred, she was often distracted by the need to drain mental energy before she could refocus on her other goals. During severe instances, she would become near-catatonic until she has fed.
  • While Glory is a nigh-unstoppable powerhouse, even in a diminished human form, Ben is completely mortal, and their lives are tied together; when Giles smothers Ben, Glory dies with him.
• Action Dress Rip: In "Tough Love," revealing another dress beneath it.
• All Women Love Shoes: She might be an evil Hell goddess from another dimension, but that doesn't mean she can't appreciate a good pair of heels. Even Dawn comments on Glory's "Nice feet".
• Alpha Bitch: She's basically an evil Cordelia, Buffy commenting on the resemblance when she first describes her to Giles. .
• Alternate Identity Amnesia: Neither she nor Ben are aware of what the other does or what happens when the other is active; this proves helpful in "Blood Ties" when Dawn admits to Ben that she's the Key. This comes to an end in the final two episodes of Season 5, when the barriers separating the two begin to break down.
• Ambition Is Evil: According to the Knights of Byzantium, this was the crux of her exile to Earth; she ruled over one of the more horrific demon dimensions as part of a triumvirate with two other hell-gods. When Glory's power, ambition and appetite for conquest and domination grew too great, her fellow hell-gods feared she would seek to overthrow them and seize power for herself, so they choose to ally and strike first. It took all their combined might to defeat her, and even then they were forced to exile Glory because she was too powerful to destroy.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: On one occasion, she explicitly threatens to kill Buffy's loved ones and friends and make Buffy watch, all while confronting Buffy herself in her own home. She tries to make good on her threat later when she's alone in a room with Dawn in "Blood Ties," but the Scoobies show up Just in Time.
  "I'll kill your mom, I'll kill your friends and I'll make you watch when I do. Just give me the Key. You either have it or you know where to find it. Obviously, this is a one-time-only deal. Next time we meet, something you love dies bloody. You know you can't take me. You know you can't stop me."
• At Least I Admit It: During a motive rant to Dawn:
  Glory: People. How do they function here like this in the world with all this bile running through them? Everyday, it's like whoo! You have no control. They're not even animals. There just these meat-baggy slaves to hormones and pheromones and their—their feelings. Hate 'em! I mean, really. Is this what the poets go on about? This? Call me crazy, but as hardcore drugs go, human emotion is just useless. People are puppets, everyone getting jerked around by what they're feelin'. Am I wrong? Really, I want to know. [...] So you're saying some people like this? Funny, 'cause I look around at this world you're so eager to a part of, and all I see are six billion lunatics looking for the fastest way out. Who's not crazy? Look around. Everyone's drinking, smoking, shooting up, shooting each other or just plain screwing their brains out 'cause they don't want 'em anymore. I'm crazy? Honey, I'm the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind. 'Cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts.
  • It's also part of the reason Dawn demands Ben turn back into Glory during "The Gift." She's sick of Ben's excuses for his Face–Heel Turn and prefers Glory over him because Glory isn't trying to make excuses for her heinous acts.
• Ax-Crazy: Easily prone to extreme violence and random mood swings in the blink of an eye, with the Scoobies outright calling her insane at least once.
• Bad Boss: Seriously, name an episode with her in it that doesn't depict her physically abusing her minions or insulting them to their faces. Said minions show Undying Loyalty regardless, even though they know full well that they'll die in the holocaust Glory's return will inflict on Earth. Of course, since she's such a Mood-Swinger, she alternates between torturing them and cuddling them at random.
  • To her credit, she goes out of her way to save her minions in battle, nearly has a breakdown when one of her "boys" is attacked by Ben, and showers them with affection when they excel; this is more than can be said for most of the other names on this list.
• Becoming the Mask: She's taken on more and more human traits over the years, much to her annoyance.
• Beware the Silly Ones: You honestly wouldn't consider her a threat, at least a major one, if you weren't aware of her strength or that she is a God in Human Form.
• Big Bad: Of Season 5.
• The Brainless Beauty: The ditziest Big Bad ever. Not that it makes her any less terrifying or unstoppable. Actually lampshaded by Buffy after Glory decapitates the Buffybot and still assumes she was the real Buffy:
  Glory: She's a robot. Did everybody else know the Slayer was a robot?
  Buffy: Glory! (makes her entrance striking her with Olaf's hammer) You're not the brightest god in the heavens, are you?
• Brought Down to Badass: It's been stated that she was considerably weakened upon being banished to Earth and trapped in human form, and she's still capable of curb-stomping Buffy and the Scoobies any day of the week. It's more than a little scary to consider that the Glory we see steamrolling everybody in sight is at less than a third of her real power.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Compared to Adam, a hideous Mix-and-Match Man who was equal parts Dark Messiah and Genius Bruiser, Glory is physically stunning, couldn't care less about the world she's in, and, while she's a nigh-unstoppable brute force, she doesn't quite have the brains to back it up. Whereas Adam was patient and calculating, Glory was impatient and unstable. Being a cyborg, Adam was unemotional, whereas Glory was delightfully hammy.
• Crazy-Prepared: You gotta hand it to her: crafting up some magic that hid her identity as Ben's alter-ego so no human could find her was brilliant in hindsight on her part. It not only kept the Scoobies from being a more proactive threat to her through Ben (as he lacked any powers and was vulnerable), but it also allowed her to effectively and unintentionally use Ben as a Trojan horse to get to Dawn at a pivotal moment.
• Cunning Linguist: She can speak any demon or human language.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The result of almost all attempts at fighting her.
• Curb-Stomp Cushion: In "Tough Love." While Willow ultimately does go down and is only saved by Buffy's Big Damn Heroes moment, she's able to injure Glory with her magic and even make her scream in pain, something not even Buffy had managed to do.
• Curse Cut Short:
  (after being teleported miles above the city by Willow) Oh, sh—!
• Dark Action Girl: She's an asskicking evil woman who defeats Slayers and vampires with ease.
• Deader than Dead: While forcing Glory to transform into Ben may not have killed her permanently, Giles killing Ben himself definitely ensured that Glory is not coming back.
• Depraved Bisexual: She gives off this vibe with her invasion of both Spike and Tara's personal space as she tortures them, not to mention the obvious subtext between her and Dawn.
• Dirty Coward: Glory's extreme arrogance and sadism comes from her admittedly justified belief that no one has a chance against her. However, when things turn against her or she faces an opponent who can hurt her, she reveals her true cowardly nature. By the time Buffy is through with her with Olaf's hammer, she's reduced to pathetically begging Buffy to stop and eventually retreats with Ben promising she will never return, not that Giles is willing to take that risk.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Glory looks like she's having an orgasm whenever she brain-sucks someone.
• The Dreaded: Those who know who Glory is are almost uniformly terrified of her. Considering how powerful and cruel she is, they're absolutely right to be.
• Dumb Muscle: Constantly underestimates her opponents and acts without thinking. The only thing that makes her a threat is that she has a lot of muscle. That being said, she has a philosophical side and is smart enough to deliver an epic Breaking Speech.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In "The Gift," she reveals to Dawn that the ritual to activate the Key can only be stopped if Dawn herself dies, so even if Buffy does show up, it may very well be to kill her rather than save her. Glory couldn't be more wrong; Buffy adamantly refuses to consider killing her own sister, even to save the world.
• Evil Counterpart: Like Dawn, Glory's an unimaginably powerful being stuck in a mortal body. Buffy also compares her to Cordelia as both share an Alpha Bitch attitude.
• Evil Is Hammy: She was just made of ham. Seriously, she might not have had a single scene that wasn't gloriously hammy. Overcompensating for your lost hell-empire will do that to you.
• Evil Is Petty: When she finds out that Buffy is the Slayer after their first fight, she is absolutely horrified and offended, describing such a face-off as "unbelievably common."
• Expy: Of the biblical Whore of Babylon. Consider her monikers ("The Abomination" and "the Beast"), her taste for luxuries, her sexy outfits, and tasting the blood of Spike, Tara, and Orlando (the Whore of Babylon is described as getting drunk on the blood of saints).
• Failed a Spot Check: The long-term version. The key to finding the, er, key is right under her nose, and of her own making: the string of insane people she leaves behind after feeding on their sanity can see Dawn for what she is, and this is exactly how the truth of Dawn's existence is eventually betrayed. If Glory had picked up on their significance sooner (Giles, for one, had surmised how the Key's true nature can be perceived), she might have found her Key before the eleventh hour.
• Fantastic Racism: She doesn't even try to hide her revulsion for humans and human things, or vampires for that matter.
• The Fashionista: Pays a lot of attention to her wardrobe, despite claiming she doesn't care about her looks.
• Fatal Flaw: Kramer, in an interview with The BBC, said Glory's strength was her lack of self-doubt: "She was completely secure in herself, focused on what she wanted and dedicated to her cause." However, her strength was also her downfall; Kramer notes that Glory was unable "to look at more than just herself".
• Faux Affably Evil: With her beauty and disarmingly nutty personality, Glory can come across as mildly sympathetic at times. Then she eats someone's sanity or tears somebody apart at random and you realize she needs to be stopped at all costs.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Glory has this with every enemy she has a face-to-face conversation with; male or female, living or undead.
• God in Human Form: The human form was not just a different personality, but a different body and gender that Glory periodically broke out of to assume her own shape and at least some of her powers.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: She's extremely short-tempered, and always took violent retaliation at even the smallest insult. For instance, she once gave Spike a massive punch when he insulted her status as a goddess, and quickly resolved to stab Willow to death when she spat on her after humoring her attempts at hurting her with magic.
• Healing Factor: In addition to her invulnerability, she could also heal from any amount of damage she received. After a brief fight with the Buffybot, Glory claimed that she started to feel a little better after being weakened by Willow's magic and the Dagon Sphere. However, she was weakened once more by Buffy with Olaf's hammer. Buffy also knew that Glory would eventually get better and go after her when she reverted to Ben again after Buffy's attack on her.
• The Hedonist: Despite claiming that she couldn't care less about the human world, she sure enjoys luxuries like fine art, mimosas, high class clothes and shoes, a large condo, and bubble baths.
• Heel Realization: Near the end of her life, she starts feeling emotions. This counts as an Ignored Epiphany, however.
• Hero Killer: Her actions indirectly lead to Buffy's death in the Season 5 finale.
• Hot God: Glory is a god, and a gorgeous one at that.
• Humanoid Abomination: Glory is a Hellgod from another dimension, trapped in the body of a sexy young woman in a red dress. Oh, and Ben.
• Hypocrite: She constantly goes on about how much she hates being human and considers human things beneath her, and yet she adores silk and has quite the shoe collection.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: In "Checkpoint," she confronts Buffy in her own home to demand the Key. While she's going on, Buffy subtly takes a fireplace poker and prepares to attack Glory with it, but Glory takes it from her before she can even swing, telling her that if she was there to fight, Buffy would already be dead.
• Immune to Bullets: Or crossbow bolts, in this case.
• Implacable Man: She will stop at nothing to get the Key. In her very first appearance, she brings down an entire building on top of her while having a hissy fit, and even that doesn't slow her down for long.
• Invincible Villain: Most of her encounters with the Scoobies end in her favor, with the Scoobies forced to retreat. By the time of "Spiral," when Glory finally discovers that Dawn is the Key, Buffy shocks her friends by declaring that they'll never be able to defeat her, and now that she knows who the Key is, they have no choice but to leave Sunnydale or die. Even when her plans are thwarted, it's made clear that Glory would re-emerge sooner or later, and there's nothing that could stop her, which necessitates Giles murdering Ben to make sure that won't happen.
• It's All About Me: Glory is concerned solely with herself and her attempts to get back to her own dimension, not remotely caring that doing so would rip apart our dimension.
• Jerkass Gods: As a god of a demon dimension, Glory fits this trope to a T. She's an Ax-Crazy Psychopathic Manchild, regularly abuses her minions physically and verbally, doesn't give a damn about anyone who's not her, and couldn't care less that her efforts to use the Key to return to her home dimension will cause a Reality Bleed that will destroy the multiverse. It's to the extent that when she realizes that the cloak between her and Ben is fading and she's beginning to experience human emotions, she freaks out because she's not supposed to feel emotion.
• Jekyll & Hyde: She plays Hyde to Ben's Jekyll.
• The Juggernaut: Even more so than Adam. Being a Physical God, Glory is pretty much unstoppable.
• Lack of Empathy: She wants to go home, and doesn't care how many people she'll kill if that should happen. This does start to fade in the Season 5 finale, due to the personalities of Glory and Ben starting to merge and swap a little.
• Lady in Red: As befits The Vamp. With a black nightie underneath (see Action Dress Rip) it's Red and Black and Evil All Over.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Regular humans instantly forget that she and Ben have a shared existence, though over time the spell weakened, and even from the beginning, it didn't work on non-humans such as Spike.
• Lightning Bruiser: Buffy's first Oh, Crap! moment is when Glory casually breaks her grip (despite Buffy having Super-Strength) and punches her across the room.
• Major Injury Underreaction: A Running Gag with the character. Every attempt by the Scoobies to punch her, shoot her with crossbows, or hit her over the head with crowbars results only in Glory griping over how rude they are or that they're messing up her hair.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Hits her towards the end of the season, when the veil between Ben and herself grows weaker. She also theorises that her human host is, subconsciously, the reason she'd sometimes chosen to play with her food instead of going for the kill. More broadly, despite her stated revulsion for the world, she isn't above embracing worldly pleasures such as bubble baths and chocolate — likely not indulgences that would have crossed her mind twenty-five years prior when she reigning as a hell god.
• Mind Rape: She eats sanity.
• Mood-Swinger: Can go from happy and calm to violent and murderous in the blink of an eye.
• Motor Mouth: Lampshaded. She really loves to hear herself talk.
• Ms. Fanservice: Aside from the occasional bubble bath scene, Glory favors wearing flattering, form-fitting red dresses. Dawn even suggesting she is prettier than Buffy (Glory also seems to appreciate her Key, describing her as "The darlingest little thing")
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: She is known as "The Beast" and "The Abomination."
• Narcissist: To an utterly ludicrous degree. She even forces her minions to constantly come up with new ways of praising her.
• Never My Fault: When she realizes that Tara isn't the Key, Glory starts ranting about how she hates being "lied to". Tara not only didn't lie, she hadn't said a word to Glory, who had just assumed that Tara was the Key and was angry over being mistaken.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Only a Troll God's hammer was able to do any lasting damage to her when used repeatedly. In her original form, she was immortal. Buffy could hit her repeatedly, and she would appear to just absorb the blows without taking any damage. Willow's lightning bolts caused her pain, but caused no visible damage as the hammer did, though she commented that Willow's assault slowed her down slightly. Neither shattered glass nor daggers could pierce her skin. In fact, Buffy mentioned that Willow was the only one of them who was ever successful in actually hurting Glory up to that point. Even when a building collapsed on top of her, she was unharmed. Similarly, she was unharmed after being hit by a truck (Buffy claimed it would not have slowed her down for more than a second). She also scoffed when Giles shot her with an arrow that simply bounced off her body and did not seem affected in the least when Xander hit her over the head with a crowbar, merely telling him to "watch the hair!" before tossing him aside. Presumably, she was either unharmed or left with minor injuries after Willow's teleportation spell during the hospital attack. However, being hit by a wrecking ball seemed to stun her momentarily, possibly due to having been beaten a bit with the Troll God's Hammer already combined with Willow's power drainage and being exposed to the Dagon Sphere.
• No Sense of Personal Space: She loves getting in people's faces.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Doesn't seem to care that the activation of the Key will irreversibly fuck up everything, possibly because she can survive (or thinks she can survive) the chaos that would descend upon all universes.
• Omniglot: Can speak any human or demon language. Her first scene has her casually switching from Czech to English in mid-sentence.
• Orcus on His Throne: She was powerful enough to kill Buffy easily, but she spent most of the season hanging around her penthouse and sending ineffective minions out to do her work for her. In her defense, she was established as not being mentally all that stable (she needed to eat people's sanity on a regular basis just to maintain any sort of coherent thought) and it's implied that Ben is the dominant of the two beings for most of the season, so Glory was unable to come out to play most of the time. Only by the last few episodes of the season is she able to come out for more than a few hours before her energy was depleted, and she spent that time being much more proactive.
• Outside-Context Problem: When Buffy is told Glory isn't just some new and powerful demon, but a god, she just gives a quiet, "Oh".
• Pet the Dog: As a result of her inheriting Ben's kindness in the final episodes of the season, she begins to treat Dawn much more kindly, even offering to order her a pizza to try and calm her down before the Big Day. Naturally, she's immediately disgusted by the empathy she's feeling.
• Physical God: A God in Human Form with Super-Strength, Super-Speed, and Nigh-Invulnerability.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: A mix of Types C and D. She's a pretty blonde girl with massive Super-Strength and Nigh-Invulnerability... and a Spoiled Brat who is prone to childish fits and extreme violence when things don't go her way. At the very end of her debut episode, she throws a blatant temper tantrum after breaking the heel on one of her shoes, which causes the entire building she's in at the time to collapse on top of her. Not to mention she's been seeking out the Key, leaving carnage and death in her wake, essentially because she just wants to use it to return to her home dimension.
• Satanic Archetype: Shares a lot in common with you-know-who—a fallen god exiled to Earth, lives in a lavishly decorated apartment, wears expensive clothes, takes on the form of someone no one would suspect and is called "The Beast" despite her followers describing her as a "shining light".
• Sealed Evil in Another World: She was originally a god who was banished by her pantheon from the Hell-Dimension she hailed from to the Human World in a human body. Her whole end-goal is to return to her world, even if she winds up collapsing reality to accomplish it.
• Sealed Inside a Person-Shaped Can: Ben was specifically born to serve as Glory's mortal prison, and Glory is able to hijack their shared body for brief periods.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Vain, smug, narcissistic, self-obsessed and self-pitying. It's a testament to the size of Glory's ego that she qualifies for this trope despite being an actual god.
• Smug Snake: Not even a tenth as smart or diabolical as she thinks she is. If it weren't for her immense physical abilities and tendency to go off half-cocked, the gang probably could have outsmarted her without breaking a sweat.
• Split-Personality Merge: The barriers separating Ben and Glory from one another begin to break down in the penultimate episode of Season 5. While they still inhabit Ben's body separately, their memories and personalities begin to merge together. This leads to Glory manifesting Ben's empathy and humanity, and Ben inheriting Glory's selfishness and ruthlessness.
• Super Loser: Glory is one of the most, if not the most, physically powerful adversaries Buffy and the Scoobies have ever faced...and she tends to spend her time consumed with self-pity.
• Super-Senses: Her super-hearing appeared when she visited Buffy to threaten her, she knew instinctively that Dawn was behind her going up staircases discreetly. She later heard her minions talking about packing her stuff up to take it to her home dimension. During this event, Glory claimed she had "God-like ears".
• Super-Speed: Her super-speed appeared as a fast-moving blur that was apparently invisible to the naked eye. This was seen when she pursued Buffy and Dawn immediately after Tara, in her insane state, accidentally revealed that Dawn was the Key. Glory easily caught up to Buffy who tried to escape her while carrying Dawn, even after Willow had used magic to slow her down. She also demonstrated some speed when in the hospital with Dawn, standing facing away from Dawn who was sitting down and then appearing next to her in a second. She did this again while in Buffy's house; Glory studied Buffy's belonging while Buffy (standing several feet away from her) reached for the fire place poker, only to find Glory right next to her. Glory also slaughtered the entire Knights of Byzantium (consisting of hundreds of highly-trained medieval knights) in mere seconds while holding Dawn in one hand, demonstrating the power she had using both strength and speed. The Buffybot commented that Glory wasn't "blurry with speed" as usual when she was weakened, indicating that Glory is often seen moving at great speeds in battle.
• Super-Strength: She possessed tremendous physical strength far beyond that of vampires, demons, and Slayers. In fact, she was considered to be one of the most physically powerful enemies faced by the Scooby Gang, able to inflict massive damage on her opponents through pure brute force and physical strength alone (usually by sending them flying through simple blows). She easily punched chunks out of cement column, caused large cracks on a concrete wall by knocking Buffy onto it, destroyed an entire brick wall with her bare hands, punched a hole through a potent force field that Willow had conjured up (though the force-field magically repaired itself after a few seconds) and caused a building to collapse on her after she repeatedly stomped her foot in a temper tantrum over a broken shoe.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: A Physical God with Super-Strength, Super-Speed, and Nigh-Invulnerability... who looks like an average pretty girl you'd see on the street. In fact, the first time the Scoobies meet her, she's casually buying items for a spell at the Magic Box. Since only Buffy (who wasn't there) knew what she looked like, the gang thinks nothing of her until they realize she bought items for a dangerous Summoning Ritual and would require tremendous power to be able to perform that particular spell; cue Oh, Crap!.
• Transformation Exhilaration: Played with, in regards to her transformations into Ben. Both of them strongly dislike the arrangement: he hates her evil personality and finding himself in female clothes at odd times, while she hates being unable to access her full power. Yet the transformation itself appears to be physically enjoyable. In one extreme example, both characters seem to experience an Immodest Orgasm.
• Unskilled, but Strong: She's nowhere near as skilled as Buffy or Spike in a straight-up fight, but given her strength and Nigh-Invulnerability, she doesn't really need to be... until the finale, when Buffy gets a hold of a weapon that can actually hurt her and absolutely clobbers Glory in a straight fight.
• Villain Has a Point: At one point she rants to Dawn about how every human being wants a way out through drinking, doing hard drugs, smoking, or doing other dangerous or thrill-seeking activities, and that she's no different but fully acknowledges that she hates the world and wants out. Given what she says, she's not entirely wrong in how she perceives some people.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: In "Checkpoint," Buffy comes home to find Glory waiting for her in her own living room. After some brief chatting, Glory threatens to kill everyone Buffy loves and make her watch unless she hands over the Key.
• Villains Out Shopping: Literally. The first time the Scoobies meet Glory, she's casually buying some items at the Magic Box. Since only Buffy (who wasn't there) knew what she looks like, they were completely oblivious that they had just met The Beast.
• Villains Want Mercy: Near the end of their final fight, while Buffy is beating her to a bloody pulp with Olaf's magic hammer, Glory breaks down and tearfully begs Buffy to stop. Of course, considering every horrible thing she had done to Buffy over the course of the season, up to and including threatening Buffy's loved ones and kidnapping and trying to sacrifice Dawn, Buffy will have none of it.
  Buffy: You're a god. Make it stop.

Warren Mears

Warren Mears

"Let's see how popular you are without a face."

^{Click here} to see Warren in Season 8

Played By: Adam Busch, Alyson Hannigan ("The Killer in Me")

"So... you guys wanna team up and take over Sunnydale?"

The leader of "the Trio". He first appears to be a fairly normal nerd, but as he gains more power, he reveals himself to be a violent, bitter, anti-social sociopath whose sole aim is to force others to give him the love and respect he believes he is owed.

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• Accidental Murder: Both of his (human) murders were accidental; Katrina Silber and Tara Maclay. Of course, he killed them while doing heinous acts (attempted rape and attempted murder of Buffy, respectively), and the only regret he shows is when he's begging Willow for his life, where he's clearly more afraid than remorseful.
• Arch-Enemy: To Willow. Funnily, he didn't start off as this: he was pretty adamant about being Buffy's archnemesis, since of course she's the big hero. He incurred Willow's wrath entirely by accident, but from there on they're vicious enemies, particularly in Season 8 (though he still despises Buffy).
• Asshole Victim: After killing Katrina and Tara, and nearly killing Buffy, Warren is flayed alive by Willow. While they still think that Willow went way too far and his death was horrific, even the Scoobies themselves agree that after everything he's done, Warren got what was coming to him; Buffy is the only one preaching Thou Shalt Not Kill, and even then, it's only because she didn't want Willow to become a murderer like him.
• Attempted Rape: Katrina points this out after he mind-controls her into being his "girlfriend". So Warren kills her to stop her leaving.
• Ax-Crazy: Warren held it together pretty well initially, but as he gains more confidence and descends deeper into evil, he starts to relish violence and death. The guy who built a fully-functioning freeze ray ends up shooting at Buffy in her backyard out of pure humiliation.
• Bad Boss: As he gets darker, he dominates Andrew and Jonathan, reserves all of the gadgets and artifacts they steal and/or make for his use alone, and ultimately leaves them to take the fall.
• Basement-Dweller: Oddly enough, since Warren seems to live in his own home. He still dwells in his basement with his friends/henchmen.
• Berserk Button: Bringing up his failure with women and that he has to resort to brainwashing for sex is a serious sore spot for him.
• Big Bad: Of Season 6 until he is killed and replaced by Willow at the end of the season.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Subverted. Theoretically, The Trio is a gathering of equals, but it's clear from early on that Warren is the nastiest of the three and the one who's really in control. After his Not-So-Harmless Villain moment below, he completely takes the center stage, with Jonathan and Andrew remaining unfortunate patsies and completely Harmless Villains.
• Big Bad Wannabe: While he is the closest season 6 has to a true Big Bad, he is still a bumbling loser whose various evil plans all fall flat on their own face, and even after he proves himself to be genuinely villainous by killing somebody this mostly just turns him into truly unpleasant rather than an actual threat. He does manage to shoot and hospitalise Buffy and kill Tara, but the latter was an accident and only manages to get him brutally murdered by a vengeful Willow, while the former gets him mocked by vampires (for being so cowardly as to resort to a gun) who cause him to panic and try to flee town when they reveal he didn't kill her. That he only did this out of desperation and embarrassment that his other evil schemes were foiled only makes him even more pathetic.
• Body Horror: When he's brought back in Season 8, he's still without skin. It goes From Bad to Worse when Buffy destroys the Seed of Wonder, wiping out magic and negating the spells holding Warren together, causing him to collapse into a pile of gore.
• Boring, but Practical: Every other villain who has come close to or outright killed Buffy was due to overwhelming power or quite smart methods. Warren simply grabs a gun and nearly pulls that off.
• Bullying a Dragon: Even when tied up and cornered by Dark Willow, Warren just can't stop himself from mouthing off to her and threatening her:
  Warren: You're really asking for it, you know that?
  Willow: I'm asking for it?
  Warren: I'm gonna walk away from this. And when I do, you're gonna beg to go join your little girlfriend.
• Butt-Monkey: His descent into villainy is a result of him being this in High School. In a truly impressive feat, Warren manages to still be one while he is the Big Bad.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He constantly goes on about being a supervillain.
• Carpet of Virility: Sports an extremely hairy chest, which is on full display during his death scene, where Willow uses magic to slowly lodge the bullet that nearly killed Buffy into it.
• Character Tics: He has a distinctive downward chopping gesture that he makes with both hands when he's annoyed. This is used for a meaningful moment when Willow is being taken over by him in "The Killer Inside Me".
• Characterization Marches On: In season five, he was simply a pathetic and misguided asshole, but not evil. His turn to villainy in season six makes more sense when you realise that he and Johnathan were meant to be followers to Tucker Wells.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Sort of. He only appeared in two episodes in late Season 5, which was supposed to be the last season. When the show was renewed on UPN, he was brought back as a major villain.
• The Chessmaster: Coldly manipulates Andrew and Jonathan for his own ends without batting an eye, is always several steps ahead of the Scoobies for a good long while and, save for Angelus, no other villain has screwed with Buffy on such a mental and emotional level. And he does it without sleeping with her.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Sold out his robot, his girlfriend and both his best friends.
• Co-Dragons: To Twilight with Amy and The General in Season 8.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Unlike Glory, an incredibly powerful but rather spacey hell-god, Warren is a physically weak Evil Genius, as well as a normal human. The Scoobies recognised the threat Glory posed from the beginning, while they underestimated Warren until he proved how vicious he really was.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: At the end of Season 6, Warren ends up getting all the skin on his upper body graphically ripped off. This didn't truly kill him (although, per Word of God, he was clinically dead for a few seconds, allowing the First to later assume his appearance). His real death, where he collapses into a pile of blood and gore after the loss of magic, is even more gruesome.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: He's a brilliant scientist, which is actually pretty tragic. He is a brilliant inventor who starts out as a kind of decent guy, and if he had moved on to be a productive member of society, he could have really improved the world. He creates a freeze ray, an invisibility gun and multiple robots that are capable of passing for human and possess superhuman levels of strength and endurance and can be programmed with memories and knowledge. If he wasn't so obsessed with power, he could have really helped society. Why he never thinks to sell his knowledge to the military and become obscenely wealthy (wealthy enough to get women) is not specified. Of course, it does fit his petty and immature character, and may have been a deliberate choice to emulate fictional villains.
  • In the Season 10 comics, Xander asks Andrew why the Trio never sold any of their obvious high tech inventions to get rich. Andrew reveals that they stole most of the base plans for such things by hacking government files and thus couldn't legally sell them, thus retroactively explaining why they never tried that.
• Dirty Coward: Whenever his own life is in danger, Warren's first instinct is to cut and run, often after redirecting whatever is threatening him towards someone else (usually Buffy). In Season 6, when his actions come back to haunt him and he realizes he has both Buffy and Willow after him, he immediately retreats in terror and his last words are desperately begging Willow to spare him.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Is utterly unprepared for the immensely more powerful Dark Willow, and is flayed alive two episodes before the finale.
• Empowered Badass Normal: When he gains the Orbs of Nezzla'Khan in Season 6.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: After he kills Tara and nearly kills Buffy, and is informed that Willow is out for his blood, he seems to honestly not understand why.
  Rack: She's gonna blow this town apart... starting with you.
  Warren: Me? What did I... What did I do to her? Beat Okay, okay. I-I shot her friend.
  Rack: I feel death.
  Warren: But the Slayer's alive! And she heals!
  Rack: She might, but somebody's stone cold. And that... is why the witch wants your head.
• Evil Counterpart: It has been suggested he's basically what Xander could have become, if things went differently. Jane Espenson pointed out than in his first appearance, his treatment of April deliberately echoes Buffy's treatment of Riley.
• Evil Genius: He's as intelligent as he is evil. Being just a human, he has no powers whatsoever and relies on his considerable intellect to get things done.
• Evil Is Petty: Practically his central characteristic. He wants to become a "supervillain" because he's a Basement-Dweller, who thinks that he doesn't have a girlfriend because women don't appreciate his genius. When he gains Super-Strength, one of the first things he does is beat up a jock who tormented him in high school and try to steal his girlfriend.
• Evil Plan: He goes through many elaborate plans, only for Buffy to foil every single one. After his final one is ruined, he jumps right to just gunning her down in her own backyard.
• Ex-Big Bad: He was the Big Bad of Season 6, and later returned in Season 8 to become a Smug Snake minor recurring villain (though he was lucky to have even temporarily achieved the status of a Big Bad).
• Face–Heel Turn: In a way. In Season 5, he is not actively malevolent, just wildly selfish and irresponsible. He tries to aid Buffy in stopping the rampage of his creation.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: He got flayed. Worse when he returns in the Season 8 comics as a body with no skin.
• Faux Affably Evil: Can put up a calm and polite demeanor, but in truth is a violent sociopath and misogynist.
• Flaying Alive: Dark Willow sews Warren's mouth shut as she tortures him, then when she gets bored, she flays him alive with a single gesture. The most infamous kill in the entire series, but also the most deserved; Warren REALLY had it coming.
• Foreshadowing: The depths of his misogyny were alluded to from his first appearance, where he specifically programmed April to feel pain whenever the two of them weren't together, and then ultimately proceeded to ditch her anyway. He even programmed her not to cry, because 'crying is blackmail'. In the episode of his death, when Rack tells him that Buffy is the last thing he needs to worry about (Willow being the first), Warren quips "Yeah, let's talk about my skin troubles!" And we all know how he what happens to him later...
• From Nobody to Nightmare: One of the better examples, although even after becoming a nightmare, he was still a relative nobody in the grand scheme of Sunnydale's evil hierarchy. Warren started as an irritating but intelligent young man who was basically just selfish... then he decides (on a whim) to take over Sunnydale with his friends. His crimes gradually progress in terms of severity, ultimately culminating in his murder of Katrina, after which he stops becoming a joke.
• Gadgeteer Genius: He was capable of building highly advanced robots which can easily pass for ordinary humans; even vampires, with their enhanced senses are incapable of differentiating the robots that he made from actual people, though their mannerisms and speech patterns were stilted and imperfect by human standards. The Buffybot he built successfully masqueraded as Buffy for several weeks when the real Slayer was dead, even fooling Buffy's friends and family. Some of his other creations, which fuse magic and technology, included an Invisibility Ray; a Freeze Ray; a small microchip capable of slowing time; a Cerebral Dampener, which stripped the will of any female within its range, rendering her a slave; and at least two jet packs.
• Grand Theft Me: Nearly succeeded in stealing Willow's body.
• Hate Sink: The previous big bads all had a charm to them and were fun in their over-the-top villainy. While Jonathan and Andrew were far too comical and pathetic to be a serious threat, Warren is easily the most loathsome of the bunch, being not just an insecure, toxic misogynist, but an unscrupulous, spineless weasel guilty of murder and attempted rape. The fact that he's a mere mortal just makes him worse.
• Heinousness Retcon: When he was introduced in Season 5, he was an awkward nerd who made a robot girlfriend to cope with his loneliness, then ditched her upon finding a real girl. He was, at worst, obnoxious, cowardly, and a bit misogynistic. In Season 6, however, he reappears and takes a deep dive into evil, being the worst member of the Trio and a self-proclaimed Supervillain who becomes an attempted rapist, nearly kills Buffy and actually kills Tara. No one ever remarks on his change, with Buffy treating him suddenly trying to kill her as not surprising in the slightest. Originally the writers had intended for him to be a lackey to Tucker Wells, who unlike him (and Jonathan) had been truly malevolent in his introductory episode, but Tucker's actor was unable to reprise his role leading to Warren being drastically rewritten as the leader and Tucker's previously unseen brother Andrew becoming the third member of the group.
• He-Man Woman Hater: Starts off as a harmless geek, but in Season 6, his anger over his inability to get a date, and subsequent poor luck when he does, leads to him descending into this.
• Hero Killer: Shoots both Buffy and Tara; Buffy only survives thanks to Willow's intervention, but Tara dies almost instantly.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: When Dark Willow catches up to him, she begins by torturing him with the very bullet he used to shoot Buffy.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: After his Not-So-Harmless Villain moment, Warren is living proof that humans can be just as bad as the monsters Buffy and the Scoobies fight every day. After he shoots Buffy and Tara, Xander even outright declares him as such to Buffy:
  Xander: He's just as bad as any vampire you've sent to Dustville.
• I'm a Humanitarian: How he and Amy survived under the Sunnydale sinkhole.
• It's All About Me: Nobody else matters to Warren. Not Andrew, not Jonathan, not anybody.
• Jerkass: One of the most prominent examples in the series.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Warren originally created a robot that would obey his every whim, but he eventually abandoned the android because he wanted a girlfriend that would be a partner in the relationship and he fell in love with a woman with her own ideas and personality. His creation of a Sex Bot and then abandoning it to "die" raises plenty of questions about his character, but he ultimately decides that he wants a woman that he can respect and interact with. In his later appearances in Season 6, he is a misogynistic bastard who tries to brainwash, and eventually kills, his ex-girlfriend because she would not submit to his desires.
• Just a Kid: What Rack thinks of him. Warren insists he's not, but Rack merely mutters an unconvinced 'okay'.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: By Dark Willow.
  Warren: I know you're in pain, but—
  Dark Willow: Bored now. (cue Flaying Alive)
• Lack of Empathy: Even before his Not-So-Harmless Villain moment, he's shown to be the one among the Trio most willing to take real risks and least willing to care about doing real harm to people. In "Flooded," he willingly gave the M'Fashnik demon they hired to rob a bank Buffy's address and let it go after her, and in "Gone," he was completely indifferent to the fact that Buffy was dissolving at a molecular level as a result of her exposure to their Invisibility Ray, even trying to speed up the process. In short, unlike Jonathan and Andrew, who thought it was all a game, Warren played to win, and wasn't afraid to cheat.
• Love Makes You Evil: His second rejection by Katrina and subsequent murder of her are what really drives him off the deep end.
• Mad Scientist: He's a great scientist able to create very human-like robots by himself in his basement; of course, when it comes to such scientific genius in Sunnydale, a lot is explained away by the Hellmouth exerting a supernatural influence. There's no denying how smart he is, though, even if he is crazy to boot.
• Manipulative Bastard: Not that it took much effort, but he played Andrew like a violin.
• Mundane Solution: After numerous failed high-tech and/or magical schemes, he just got a gun, went to the Summers house and started firing. Were it not for Willow, that would have been it; Buffy would be dead.
• No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction: In Season 5, he makes a robot girlfriend who looks and acts exactly like a real girl - except it agrees with him 100% and does nothing but try to please him. Eventually he meets someone who challenges him, disagrees with, and requires him to actually try to make her happy. Suddenly his pleasure-bot holds no appeal so he leaves her for the one that challenges him. Of course, being a spineless creep, Warren doesn't so much break up with April or even shut her down, he just leaves her to run down her batteries.
• Not Helping Your Case: When Dark Willow chases him down for shooting Tara, Warren tries to defend himself by pointing out that he didn't mean to shoot her girlfriend; he meant to shoot Buffy.
  Dark Willow: Oh. You mean, instead of killing my best friend, you killed my girlfriend?
  Warren: It wasn't personal, that's all.
  Dark Willow: Well, this is. [attacks him]
• Not Quite Dead: In the comics. To prevent Fanon Dis Continuity, please imagine it is Back from the Dead to explain how the First managed to assume his form.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: The poster boy. Warren was a pathetic nerd with a mean streak, but nothing more. Then he gets away with murder, and everything evil and savage in him got kicked into overdrive. The resulting confidence turned him into a vicious murderer with a hatred for women; he gets closer than most to killing Buffy and kills Tara by mistake. To really drive the point home, Buffy and the Scoobies initially dismissed him as nothing but a "pain in the ass," and it was only when he committed the aforementioned murder that they realized just how dangerous Warren really was.
• Oh, Crap!: His reaction when he discovers that Buffy survived the shooting.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: His main area of expertise is technology and robotics, but he's got quite a few other fields down. He knows demonology and magic, and when he resurfaces in Season 8, displays enough knowledge about biology and brain surgery to lobotomize a restrained Willow.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: From his first appearance, he shows very little regard for women, not seeing them as human beings, and as Season 6 progresses, he drops the word "bitch" regularly.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The entire reason he founded the Trio in the first place was out of boredom and to get respect. In "Seeing Red", the very first thing he does upon gaining the Orbs of Nezzla'Khan is beat up a jock who bullied him in high school, and after thwarting his latest plan, Buffy flat-out tells him to his face that he's a "sad little boy" who needs to grow up.
• Remember the New Guy?: During his first appearance in Season 5, it's noted that he attended Sunnydale High with the Scoobies, but he never appeared during the high school seasons.
• Robot Master: His major schtick is the construction of robots. First April, then a Buffybot, and finally a Warrenbot to distract Willow and help him escape.
• Sanity Slippage: Warren's mental state gradually falls apart over the course of Season 6, especially after he accidentally kills Katrina.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: During the battle in Sunnydale during the Twilight crisis, he and Amy escape Spike's airship and run away.
• Small Name, Big Ego: As he assumed his position as leader of the Trio Warren often bragged about how much better he was than everyone else, going so far as to proclaim himself Buffy's superior when they fought in "Seeing Red", but in reality basically nobody in Sunnydale outside of the Scoobies knew who he was, and as soon as the Orbs were smashed he fled rather than try and fight Buffy on his own.
• Smug Snake: Brags to anyone who will listen when he thinks he has killed Buffy. The vampires around him are only too happy to wipe the smug grin off his face when they tell that not only will Buffy be alive and well very soon, but he just killed one of her friends and pissed said friend's soulmate right the fuck off. He introduces himself to the darker elements of Sunnydale as the leader of the Trio, expecting to be recognized, but no one does. When Willow finally catches up to him, Warren briefly tries to act like a tough guy and threatens her, but he's reduced to pathetically pleading for mercy before long.
• The Sociopath: He decides to become a super villain mostly out of boredom. When his ex-girlfriend Katrina points out to the Trio that Warren's mind-control was essentially an Attempted Rape, Jonathan and Andrew seem genuinely disturbed by the realization, but Warren is unbothered and just kills her to prevent her from telling anyone. After he accidentally kills Tara and nearly kills Buffy, he seems to honestly not understand why their friends would want to get back at him as he didn't kill his victim "on purpose".
• Super Villain: Wants to be one.
• To the Pain: Willow describes in detail the damage a bullet will do as it works its way through Warren's body in slow-motion.
• Unknown Rival: His need to be taken seriously as a Super Villain gets him killed.
• Unskilled, but Strong: When Warren acquires the Orbs of Nezzla'Khan, he manages to overpower Buffy with sheer raw strength, but his combat skills just consist of basic punches as opposed to Buffy having training in hand-to-hand combat. He was a dangerous threat, but only because the Orbs stopped him feeling any kind of pain, and he would have clearly lost if he and Buffy were fighting as physical equals.
• Villains Want Mercy: During his death scene, Warren begins desperately trying to reason with Willow when it finally hits him that she really does intend to kill him. It doesn't work.
• Villainous Breakdown: When he realizes that Willow cannot be reasoned with.
• Villainous Underdog: Apart from his intelligence, Warren is a normal human being with no supernatural abilities. Despite this, he manages to do some serious damage to the Scoobies before being taken down.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: To the end, Buffy flat-out refuses to take human law into her own hands and just kill Warren, preferring to simply turn him over to the police. The other Scoobies, however, are so disgusted with him that they rally behind Willow en masse when she goes out to kill him. The only issue anyone really has afterwards is how gruesome Warren's death was, and the fact that Willow refuses to settle for just killing him.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Was on the receiving end of a lot of bullying growing up, mentioning how he used to cry himself to sleep. It's also bizarrely sad to see how none of the Sunnydale underworld knows of him and the Trio when he keeps expecting them to, largely considering him Just a Kid.

Dark Willow

See Willow Rosenberg

The First Evil

The First Evil

"I'm done with the mortal coil. But believe me, I'm going for a big finish."

Played By: Robia LaMorte, Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy, Edward Edwards, Shane Barach, Adam Busch, Clare Kramer, George Hertzberg, Harry Groener, Juliet Landau, Mark Metcalf, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Azura Skye, Kristine Sutherland, James Marsters, Danny Strong, Amanda Fuller, K.D. Aubert, Lalaine, Carrie Southworth, Nathan Fillion

"I want to feel. I want to wrap my hands around some innocent neck and feel it crack."

A unique entity that predated man and demon, apparently the personification of the concept of evil itself, manifested from all evil in existence. The First was an incorporeal presence that could assume the form of any person who had died, including vampires and persons who had been resurrected. Because of this, it appeared in various forms depending who it sought to manipulate. Its true appearance, or the one it used to portray its true appearance, was seemingly in the form of a large robed bestial demon.

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• Anthropomorphic Personification: Apparently is the personification of evil itself.
• Arc Words: "From beneath you, it devours."
• As Long as There Is Evil: This is made explicitly clear several times. The First Evil is evil itself; it can't be destroyed.
  Caleb: You're everywhere. You're in the hearts of little children, in the souls of the rich, you're the fire that makes people kill and hate, the cleansing fire that will cure the world of weakness. They're just sinners. You are Sin.
• Ascended Extra: Initially just a Monster of the Week for "Amends," way back in Season 3. In Season 7, it takes center stage as the Big Bad.
• Assimilation Plot: One of the goals of the First is to be capable of possessing mankind en masse.
• Badass Boast: Buffy is not impressed.
  The First as Jenny: I'm not a demon, little girl. I am something you cannot even conceive. The First Evil. Beyond sin. Beyond death. I am the thing the darkness fears. You'll never see me, but I am everywhere. Every being. Every thought. Every drop of hate.
  Buffy: All right, I get it. You're evil. Do we have to chat about it all day?
• Big Bad: Of Season 7. The First Evil can be described as The Big Bad.
• Breaking Speech: The other part of the First Evil's modus operandi—to torment its victims until they do its bidding, go mad or kill themselves. This bites it in the ass when it accidentally gives Buffy the idea to bestow the Slayer power to the Potentials.
• Card-Carrying Villain: To no surprise, the First is very much open about the fact that it is pure and undiluted evil, only pretending otherwise when it's carrying out a manipulation.
• The Chessmaster: It can't physically affect the world around it, so the First has to resort to manipulations to get the job done.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: It wasn't destroyed or trapped or anything like that, and is presumably still around, doing... whatever it does when it's not tormenting the good guys. Justified as it only had a very small window of becoming corporeal due to Buffy's resurrection and other events. It's still around, but without Caleb, it's not as much of a direct threat.
• Continuity Cavalcade: A living one, as it assumes the form of each of the show's previous Big Bads.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Warren was probably the smallest-scale Big Bad on Buffy, while the First's plans are apocalyptic in scale. Warren was also the most arguably banal and normal (for a given value of "normal") villain of the series, whereas the First, an eternal primordial being, is easily its most fantastic.
• The Corrupter: It makes every effort to convince Angel to lose his soul again, although it doesn't exactly mind when Angel decides to commit suicide instead. In Season 7, it, in the guise of Warren, manages to manipulate Andrew into murdering his best friend.
• Deadpan Snarker: Particularly when it's wearing Buffy's face.
• Dead Person Impersonation: The First can take the form of anyone who's died, even if they've since been resurrected.
• Double Vision: The First's favorite form towards the end is Buffy, resulting in multiple scenes where Sarah Michelle Gellar is doing just this. It also appeared a lot as Spike.
• The Dreaded: Naturally given what it is, everyone is terrified of The First and what it can do and that's before it has a very real chance of becoming corporeal.
• Dream Weaver: Among its many powers is the ability to seep into people's dreams.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Sorta. Chaos Bleeds takes place after "Amends," but before Season 7.
• Eldritch Abomination: It has no form because it is a concept—evil. It takes the forms of others because You Cannot Grasp the True Form.
• Enemy to All Living Things: Due to being evil itself. The First desires nothing but the spread of brutality across the world.
• Evil Tastes Good: "Choose a side. Our side. You know it's delicious." But, according to Willow, it's "kinda chalky."
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: The First's form is variable, but in it's first appearance, it favored the appearance of the beautiful and good-natured Jenny Calendar, and during Season 7, it most often appeared as the heroic and adorable Buffy; in either guise, the First is as evil as evil comes.
• Faux Affably Evil: Depending on who it happens to be at any given time.
• Final Boss Preview: The First seems like another Monster of the Week when it first appears in the third season, then shows up again in the seventh as the show's final Big Bad.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: This is inverted to A Form You Are Really, Really Not Comfortable With. Part of the First Evil's modus operandi—appear as a deceased loved one that only you can see, especially one that you are deeply and painfully in mourning of, and then Mind Screw you with Breaking Speeches and Hannibal Lectures until it has tormented you into either do its bidding, go mad or kill yourself.
• Fusion Dance: Does one with Caleb, giving him his incredible strength and black blood.
• Gaslighting: Since it's incorporeal, this is all the First can really do. Still, it's very good at it due to being a master manipulator.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: It wants to spread evil all over the world, because it's Made of Evil and thus it likes evil. This gets bonus points for being an Informed Ability; we are told repeatedly it cannot be fought directly, and yet does very little in the onscreen villainy department.
• God of Evil: The Bringers and Caleb certainly treat it like one.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For the whole series besides Season 7. It's Made of Evil, and exists As Long as There Is Evil.
• He's Just Hiding: In-Universe example; as the embodiment of evil, it can’t be killed, but the destruction of the Hellmouth in the Season 7 finale did severely weaken it and it disappears to attempt to regain its strength.
• Intangible Man: Eventually lets slip that its real motivation is to assemble a flesh-and-blood body of its own.
• Invincible Villain: Discussed. In "Showtime," Beljoxa's Eye claims outright that the First cannot be fought or killed. It has been around since before the universe came into existed, and will continue to exist long after everything else is dead.
• Irony: The First Evil is the last Big Bad of the (television) series.
• Made of Evil: It's more or less the personification of evil itself.
• Manipulative Bastard: It's an extremely skilled manipulator and is able to use it's vast knowledge and abilities to get people to do what it wants. It was able to convince Chloe to take her own life simply by talking.
• Mind Rape: Its standard tactic, what with being incorporeal. Angel nearly kills himself, Spike goes temporarily crazy, and Chloe hangs herself.
• Narcissist: "You think you can fight me? I'm not a demon, little girl. I am something that you can't even conceive. The First Evil. Beyond sin, beyond death. I am the thing the darkness fears. You'll never see me, but I am everywhere. Every being, every thought, every drop of hate—" Doesn't look like modesty is this thing's strength.
• Non-Action Big Bad: With being incorporeal and all, it must resort to Caleb and its Elite Mooks, the Harbingers, to get much of anything done.
• Oh, Crap!: When Buffy, who it was just taunting, gets up from a supposedly mortal wound during the Final Battle.
• Opportunistic Bastard: As revealed in "Showtime." Buffy's resurrection in the opening of Season 6 caused an imbalance in the powers protecting the Slayer line; the First took advantage of it to try to wipe it out completely.
• Orcus on His Throne: The entire season is spent warning, warning, warning that eventually an army of uber-vampires will arise to destroy the world, but it never actually happens. Finally, in the last episode... they still don't arise. Buffy and the potential slayers decide they're simply tired of waiting for them to attack and go attack them instead. In its case, being Made of Evil means it has no physical form, and must rely on its minions to actually do things.
• Perception Filter: It can pick and choose who sees and hears it.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Mostly in regards to Spike. Rather than setting off the trigger as soon as Spike is allowed to roam freely, forcing Buffy to put down one of her most valuable soldiers and causing a decent blow to both her army and her personal morale, it leaves him mostly untouched after Buffy rescues him from the ubervamp. Instead, having noticed that Buffy's exceptionalist treatment of him is causing a rift in her forces, it opts instead to wait it out and later reveal that Spike is Nicki Woods' killer to Robin. This culminates in Robin and Giles conspiring behind Buffy's back to kill Spike, growing the rift between them substantially once Buffy figures it out. It didn't fully pan out for the First, fortunately, as both Spike and Robin survive the encounter, but it does work towards splintering Buffy from the rest of her group down the line.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Possessed by its briefly-seen true form.
• Sadist: While it can't inflict physical pain (though, as a speech to Caleb shows, it would really like to), the First revels in the psychological torment it inflicts on it's victims, and cheerfully gloats about it to their friends and loved ones.
• Shapeshifter Default Form: Type 2; for most of Season 7, it prefers using Buffy's form when interacting with others.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: One of the ways it manipulates people.
• Spell My Name with a "The": The First Evil.
• The Strategist: As an immortal being, it's able to plan and execute extremely elaborate and long-running schemes to achieve it's goals and has infinite time to prepare and plan as well as come up with new plans.
• The Team: Assembles one (consisting of characters from its Wishverse-inspired "pet" universe) in the game Chaos Bleeds. Members include Adam, Kakistos, Ripper (Evil Giles), Anyanka and Vampire Tara.
• Time Abyss: According to Beljoxa's Eye, the First has always been around; it existed long before the universe, and will still exist long after everything else has died.
• Unseen Evil: An incorporeal being, it can take the form of anyone who has died (even if they're The Undead or currently alive again), which it uses to very creepy effect. Then, about three times in the whole series, we get a brief glimpse of its apparent "true" form...which demonstrates the reason for this trope. Random demony face just isn't a match for one of our beloved main characters acting like a twistedly cruel version of themselves.
• Vagueness Is Coming: It likes to make statements like this.
• Villainous Friendship: Downplayed; the First chats amiably with it's Dragon Caleb, and seems to think well of him, even after his death. Of course, after Caleb is dead, the First isn't exactly put out, as it has an army of Turok-Han to replace him. On Caleb's side, his loyalty to the First seems to be based more on religious fervor than friendship or affection.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: The First can take on the form of anything that has died at least once, including The Undead and the resurrected, such as Buffy and any vampire. In an interesting twist on this trope, the First implies that it doesn't merely make itself look like the person it impersonates, it actually becomes them, at least partially. When it appears to Faith as the Mayor, it says, "You see I am part of the First, as you kids call it, but I'm also me, Richard Wilkins III, late mayor and founder of Sunnydale".
• We Are Everywhere: The First Evil's disciples are everywhere, and the First itself can appear in multiple places at once.
• We Can Rule Together: It throws this out there with Andrew and Spike, but it's only trying to manipulate them (and succeeding, in Andrew's case).
• We Have Reserves: During "Chosen", it's not too concerned that Buffy killed Caleb for this reason:
  The First as Caleb: You killed him right and proper. Terrible loss. This man was my good right arm. 'Course, it don't pain me too much; don't need an arm. Got an army.
• Xanatos Gambit: The First's plan in "Amends" becomes this in hindsight, after watching Angel's own show. It repeatedly Mind Rapes Angel and tries to get him to kill Buffy... but it doesn't mind when Angel chooses to commit Suicide by Sunlight instead. Either way, it would be a severe blow to the forces of good; either the Slayer or a champion of the Powers That Be and the Shanshu Prophecy candidate would die:
  The First as Jenny: You aren't supposed to die. This isn't the plan! But it'll do.

Comics

Twilight

Twilight

"Look around you. The Queen is dead. Long live me."

A mysterious masked villain who leads an alliance of Buffy's old enemies and the U.S. military against the new army of Slayers that Buffy created at the end of Season 7. He has Super-Strength and Flight, and can be summoned by anyone who is marked with his symbol.

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• Dramatic Unmask: Averted and Played for Laughs (his neck was just itchy).
• God Guise: How he tricks some of his followers into fighting for him.
• Hypocrite: He is trying to bring about the end of magic, but employs several witches, wizards and demons alongside the military to do so. This is pointed out by one of the soldiers under his command. There is a reason for this. Angel is bringing all of the Slayer Organization's enemies together to slow them down and take them out.
• Necessarily Evil: Everything he does is to distract and hold back all the forces planning to attack the Slayer Organization.
• Religion of Evil: Some of his followers worship him as a god.
• Surrounded by Idiots: His Co-Dragons include Warren and Amy, and while they are not idiots, their bickering causes him a lot of headaches and trouble, and makes him Facepalm a few times.
• We Have Reserves: When the three wrathful goddesses are unleashed by the Slayer army against Twilight's soldiers, the general immediately wants to retreat. Twilight tells him no, since he wants to see what the goddesses will do to the soldiers.

Tropes that apply to the sentient dimension Twilight

• Arc Words: First appears in winged lion form in Buffy's nightmares, saying "The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen." It first seems to mean Genevieve Savidge's attempt to replace Buffy as lead Slayer, but is actually referring to Twilight replacing the current universe.
• Big Bad: Of Season 8.
• Demonic Possession: Does this to Angel.
• Genius Loci: A sentient dimension.
• Luke, You Are My Father: To Buffy and Angel.
• Make Way for the New Villains: Killed the Master and Ethan Rayne by proxy.
• Manipulative Bastard: It manipulates its own birth.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Its form in our dimension is a winged lion. The design team refers to this as a "gryphon," although that's not quite accurate, as a gryphon has an eagle's head.
• Parental Abandonment: Twilight is a bit upset by the fact that Angel and Buffy abandoned it to return to their own dimension.
• Ultimate Life Form: Considers itself this.

Simone

Simone Doffler

"We can be the agents of change and fear we were meant to be. It's who we are."

"Come back?! Haven't you heard? We're the bad guys now. People think vamps are cool and Slayers are the threat. Difference between you and me? I am a threat."

A rogue Slayer who broke off from Buffy's organization and started her own, believing that Slayers are better than other humans and that they should rule over them, no matter the cost. She also really likes guns. Simone wages a campaign against Buffy in San Francisco, blaming her for the hundreds of Slayers killed during the Twilight crisis and for not attempting to secure domination over humans—before teaming up with Severin.

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• Ax-Crazy: Partially because she is psychotically obsessed with killing Buffy. Remember when Faith was like that? Simone's worse.
• Beware the Superman: Or rather, Vampire Slayer, as in Slaypire, her goal was to turn Slayers into vampires.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: With Severin in Season 9.
• Blood Knight: When she didn't like the stance against guns, she starts by going rogue, arming up and developing an obsession with killing Buffy, and she gets worse from there.
• Body Horror: Once Simone is sired by Maloker (the progenitor vampire/Old One), her face becomes permanently locked in Vamp Mode. And unlike other vampires (whose game faces range from feline-esque to reptilian), she becomes emaciated and pale, with a face like a skeletal vampire bat.
• The Chessmaster: Has shades of this in Season 9, as she acts against Buffy through Unwitting Pawns she manages to twist around.
• Combo Platter Powers: After becoming a Slaypire, she has the combined strength of a Slayer and a vampire and is fully capable of smacking Buffy around as if she were a rag doll. We never find out if she has any other vampiric properties, though, as Buffy manages to impale her on the Scythe before Simone could escape the Deeper Well.
• Cool Shades: Wears sunglasses, even at night, rounding up her Evil Is Cool look.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: After becoming a Slaypire, she pounds Buffy in a straight-up fight.
• Dangerous Deserter: Deserts the Slayer organization to become a borderline terrorist, and takes several Slayers with her.
• Delinquent Hair: She's a terrorist with a stereotypical punk mohawk.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Wants to torture and kill Andrew just because he annoyed her when he was her Watcher.
• Face–Heel Turn: Rejected the ethos of discipline, service and sacrifice of the Slayer Organization and became a Slayer supremacist, commiting crimes as a way to demonstrate her own power.
• For the Evulz: After Slayers are outed and vilified by Harmony, Simone thrives on the fear and hate she gets from ordinary humans, and proceeds to commit crimes and acts of terrorism that only further cement Buffy and her crew's bad image.
• Gun Nut: Part of the reason she went rogue. She hated the fact that Buffy Doesn't Like Guns and refused to let any of the Slayers under her use them, and was dissatisfied with just using medieval weaponry.
• Homage: Visually strongly based on Tank Girl. This may be a conscious in-canon fashion influence on her part.
• Hypocrite: She blames Buffy for all the Slayers killed during the Twilight crisis, but is feeding her own loyal Slayers to Zompires, trying to find a way for them to be turned but still have their mind so she can become one and kill Buffy.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How Buffy manages to dispose of her.
• Kick the Dog: Beats up an old woman who had given her food and shelter when she protested Simone and her gang taking over her hometown.
• The Lad-ette: Very little in the way of "femininity", Faith herself looks like a prim and proper nice girl when compared to Simone.
• Looks Like Orlok: Once Maloker sires her, she looks just like a female Count Orlok (with an even scarier Nightmare Face, if that's possible).
• Manipulative Bitch: She is first seen in Season 9 driving a van loaded with guns, before the focus shifts to a former Vampire Vannabe who had been killing vamps then sets his sights on Buffy because of her Nice Job Breaking It, Hero actions. To cut a very long story short: the police shoot him, he turns out to have survived in the hospital where we discover Simone had sent him. She manipulates the AI personality Andrew placed into the real Buffy's body into fighting the real Buffy, who was in a robot body, and she manipulates Xander into helping her in order to save Dawn's life.
• More Dakka: She constantly wants bigger and better weapons.
• Nightmare Face: Her game face once she's turned. Her eyes are sunken and red, and it gives the impression of a starving vampire bat.
• Oh, Crap!: When Buffy shoots the lock on the Ragna Demon's cage, and locks her and her gang in a room with it.
• Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: The younger villain to Buffy's older hero. Though it's downplayed, since Buffy is still in her early 20s.
  Buffy: I've been doing this longer than you. Which means I'm more experienced, so you're done.
  Simone: And I'm younger than you. Which means I'm faster, so you're f@%ed.
• The Quincy Punk: She's the whole package of a stereotypical punk: violent, pink mohawk - rest of hair shaved bald - piercings, tanktops and military boots and pants.
• Reassignment Backfire: Rona thought transferring Simone from Chicago to Rome would soften her up. Instead, Andrew annoyed her so much she went rogue.
• Social Darwinist: Openly views herself and other Slayers are superior to ordinary humans in every way.
• Super-Strength: Part of the Slayer package
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: A villain-on-villain example, when she kills The General.
• Take Over the World: Her stated goal to Buffy. Started by taking over an island near Italy and kicking everyone off of it, beating up an old woman who had given her food and shelter while doing so.
• Trigger-Happy: Due to her unstable and violent nature, she prefers to use firearms and quickly resorts to violence over less aggressive tactics.
• Vampire Vannabe: A big part of her plan is to become a vampire with Slayer powers to kill Buffy.
• Villain Has a Point: The Scoobies really have no actual response as to why Slayers shouldn't use guns other than Buffy's personal dislike for them after she and Tara were shot. Part of her plot was to restore the Seed of Wonder. She kinda succeeds, accomplishing what Willow set out to do. And saving Dawn in the process.

Severin / The Siphon

Severin/The Siphon

""If you hadn't destroyed the Seed, I wouldn't have had to put down any of these vamp freaks down. You don't deserve the power you have so I'm going to take it."

A mysterious young man and vampire hunter, Severin is a figure in prophecy known as the Siphon. As a result, he wields the power to drain the mystical energy and powers of any supernatural being he touches, either bringing them down to normal or killing them outright.

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• Battle Aura: A manifestation of the mojo he's absorbed from vampires and other mystical beings.
• Chekhov's Gunman: He is seen in one panel in the last issue of Season 8.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Based on James McAvoy, specifically from X-Men: First Class.
• Cool Shades: Sports a pair of round glasses.
• The Dragon: To Simone.
• The Dreaded: Is the prophecied Siphon, whose coming had long been feared among the magical community.
• Energy Absorption: He can drain the mystical energy from anything supernatural he touches, and gets stronger every time he does.
• Evil All Along: Granted, he only appears to be good for an issue and a half before The Reveal.
• Healing Factor: The magic he's drained allows him to heal wounds, but drains his reserves
• Heel–Face Turn: After he understands that, even with Illyria's powers, he won't change the past and prevent the destruction of the Seed or the coming of Twilight.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the final issues of Season 9, he sacrifices himself alongside Illyria (who gets better) to help create a new Seed of Wonder and restore magic to Earth.
• Locked into Strangeness: His hair becomes blue after stealing Illyria's time-space manipulation powers.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: He's a villain with nice clothing and a luxurious apartment with a view of the San Francisco bay.
• Power Parasite: He wanted to drain Buffy's Slayer mojo and later on steals Illyria's power over time and space.
• Slasher Smile: Whenever he faces his enemies, reveling in draining their powers.
• Sliding Scale of Anti-Villains: Severin is a Type II. He wants to take Buffy's power, blaming her for newly-turned vampires becoming zompires (specifically his girlfriend) after the Seed of Wonder was broken.
• Tragic Villain: His actions are motivated by his desire to be reunited with his girlfriend, whom he killed after she became a zompire.
• Vampire Vannabe: With vampires being popular now, his girlfriend Clare convinced him they should see one to get turned so they could be together forever. Clare was vamped first and, unfortunately, she became a zompire because the Seed had just been destroyed recently.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He plans to use the Time Travel powers he Mega-Manned from Illyria to go back in time and stop the Twilight crisis from ever happening, thus stopping the rise of zompires and the end of magic. The problem is, doing so would cause an instability in space-time that would rip reality itself apart.

D'Hoffryn

D'Hoffryn

"Never go for the kill when you can go for the pain."

Played By: Andy Umberger

"Behold D'Hoffryn, Lord of Arashmaha, he that turns the air to blood and reigns te - Miss Rosenberg. How lovely to see you again. Have you done something with your hair?"

Anya's old boss, and the one responsible for recruiting and training new vengeance demons.

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• Ascended Extra: Starts off as a recurring character in the series and gets upgraded to Big Bad in the Season 10 comics.
• Bad Boss: After flirting with being a Benevolent Boss for a while, he reveals himself as this when he kills the faultless Halfrek just to hurt Anya. This bites him in the ass in the Season 10 comics, where he kills the Anya clone he had created; the other vengeance demons are disgusted that he would do so to his own kind and promptly abandon him to be killed by Buffy.
• Beard of Evil: He has a tuft of hair on his chin.
• Big Bad: Of Season 10.
• Black Eyes of Evil: He has pure black eyes.
• Characterization Marches On: His initial appearance is that of a stereotypical evil demon lurking in a creepy lair, refusing to give Anya back her powers and generally acting rather pompous. This is in some contrast to his later appearances, when he seems to favor Anya and is much more easy-going. Of course, this can be explained away by Anya's amulet having been destroyed so recently, so he was perhaps just a bit more pissed off than usual.
• Evil Mentor: To Anya and Halfrek.
• Faux Affably Evil: Often comes across as a loving, yet stern father. However, he's still a sadistic killer who you do not want to cross.
  D'Hoffryn Behold, D'Hoffryn. Lord of Arashmahar. He that turns the air to blood and rains— (turns to Willow, speaking normally) Miss Rosenberg. How lovely to see you again. Have you done something with your hair?
• Horned Humanoid: He has a crown-like ridge of horns around his head.
• In Love with Your Carnage: D'Hoffryn only offers the chance to become a vengeance demon to those who show a certain flair for pain. He's a fan of Willow, and notes that a co-worker (Lloyd) has a sketching of the flaying of Warren on his wall.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: In "Selfless," Anya wants to undo a wish she granted that resulted in the deaths of a whole frat house. D'Hoffryn tells her the price is the life and soul of a vengeance demon, and she accepts, thinking he'll kill her. He instead kills Halfrek. "Never go for the kill when you can go for the pain."
• Karma Houdini Warranty: He's last seen victorious in the series, having killed Halfrek to punish Anya before disappearing. His streak comes to an end in Season 10, when Buffy chops his head off with the Scythe.
• Manipulative Bastard: Has this to a T, especially in the comics.
• My Card: The talisman he gave Willow in "Something Blue."
  "If you change your mind, give us a chant."
• Nigh-Invulnerability: What he became after stealing all the council members' powers, including immunity to magical attacks and the redirection of kinetic energy.
• The Patriarch: Of his vengeance demon girls.
• Playing with Fire: One of his powers, which he uses to kill poor Halfrek.
• Rain of Blood: Does this when he confronts Buffy in Season 10, Issue #29.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Alternated between eloquent and crass English, even in ancient times.
• Villains Want Mercy: At the end of Season 10's "Own It" arc; when the Scoobies have pursued him back to Arashmahar and are prepared to kill him, D'Hoffryn begs for mercy, offering them each a wish if they let him go. The Scoobies all refuse, knowing that there will always be a catch.
• We Have Reserves: "I have plenty of other girls."
• White Void Room: His place of business is a featureless black void.
• You Look Familiar: Andy Umberger is one of only five actors to appear in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly.

Joanna Wise

Joanna Wise

The White House Press Secretary, and the leader of the Pandora Project.

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• Big Bad: Of Season 11.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: She ends up causing a lot of damage, including setting a storm dragon loose on San Francisco and untold destruction, solely so she could have the power of a ruler in a world that no one would have access to magic but her.
• Just Desserts: Wise is ultimately Eaten Alive by the very same storm dragon she enslaved and used in her Monster Protection Racket.
• Monster Protection Racket: As it turns out, she was the one who set loose a storm dragon on San Francisco, specifically to kick start the Supernatural Crisis Act and give her a supply of magical individuals to experiment on.

Harth Fray

See Fray

Novels

Lucien

Lucien

A vampire warlock who is several centuries old and joined the Order of Aurelius in 1942. In the novel Portal Through Time, he tries to use mystical time travel to change history so that the Master will face a different Slayer and avoid being killed by Buffy.

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• Bad Boss: He has We Have Reserves reactions to henchmen dying and doesn't tell his accomplices that the time travel spell isn't specific to times of day, which could get them burned by the sun if they exit the portal during the day instead of the night. He does save one from dying during one trip back in time, but that is largely an accident.
• Bad Liar: He is poor at maintining a steady face during a bluff.
• Cassandra Truth: In his first journey back in time, he goes to 1937 and tries to warn the Master not to enter the cavern which an earthquake will trap him inside of for the next sixty years. The Master accuses him of being a lying coward who is just afraid of the demons inside the Hellmouth.
• Defiant Captive: He offers nothing but contempt and taunts to the Scooby Gang during their first several conversations after his capture. His defiance only vanishes as Buffy prepares to toss him out into the sunlight.
• Determinator: He spends months constructing his mystical time travel device while barely sleeping. No matter how many times his trips back in time fail to save the Master (and sometimes endanger Lucien), he makes a new plan and tries again. Even when he is captured by the Scooby Gang, he yells out for his escaping confederate Victor to keep trying.
• Evil Nerd: He wears a frilly outfit that makes him “look like a villain from a gothic novel” and names his time travel device the Wand of Wells after H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: He writes down notes about his potential targets and about the time travel spell, all of which help thwart his plans when Buffy gets those papers.

Il Maestro

Giacomo Fulcanelli/Il Maestro

A cruel and powerful Italian sorcerer and the primary villain of the The Gatekeeper Trilogy of novels, which are set in late season 2. He seeks to kill a Gate Guardian who is keeping the demons of Hell and monsters from numerous dimensions from destroying the world.

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• Bad Boss: He gets his enforcers to do horrible things for him in the name of power, but is also planning to kill all of them once his plan reaches fruition. Even without that, he is constantly sending scores of minions on suicide missions or using his magic to kill anyone who voices doubts about his plans (regardless of whether he is there with them, as his powers let him spy on conversations from far away) or deviates from his instructions in the slightest.
• Dragon-in-Chief: He operates on behalf of the demon Belphegor, but he is the primary evil planner and physical threat to the heroes.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He frequently deals out brutal torture and executions to his enemies and plots to let demons spend eternity tormenting the rest of humanity, allies and enemies alike, in exchange for power and his own survival. However, he desperately bargains with Belphegor to try to save his adopted daughter Micaela from being damned along with the rest of the world (she was born after Fulcanelli made his deal, so he only thought to make the deal for himself at the time), at least until her High-Heel–Face Turn. He also had a strong relationship with his mother and was devastated by her death.
• Familial Foe: Flashbacks show that Il Maestro and his rival, the far more benevolent, Medici Court Mage Richard Regneir tried to fight each other’s influence. Fulcanelli won the political battle, but after his fall from grace, he killed Richard’s wife and only failed to kill his son by chance. After Richard and his descendants become Long-Lived Gate Guardians, Fulcanelli spends a long time weakening dimensional barriers, making their jobs harder, while plotting to eventually kill the Regneir gatekeeper and bring about the apocalypse, while also getting his revenge on the family. He makes his attempt while Richard‘s grandson is dying and also targets Richard's young great-grandson.
• Human Sacrifice: He cuts out the hearts of innocent people to retain his demon patron's favor.
• Kill It with Fire: He frequently burns people alive with his magic.
• Really 700 Years Old: He looks like a normal person, but was born over a hundred years before the court of Henry II of France (circa 1555).
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: He was a shy and kind child until his mother was burned as a witch while their whole village applauded. He was taken in by a sorcerer, who was secretly his biological father, and helped him get revenge. However, the sorcerer also physically abused Giacomo, denied him any affection, inspired him to be cruel and satanic, and smugly revealed that he was the one who sold out Giacomo's mother to the inquisition before setting his son on fire to make him unleash his full powers and cruelty. Fulcanelli grows up to gleefully do things far, far worse than what his father did, but there is a definite sense that he had a chance to be something else, only to be cruelly robbed of that chance.

Solitaire

Solitaire

A mysterious and bloodthirsty vampiric warrior and one of the main antagonists of the book Ghoul Trouble.

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• Big Bad Duumvirate: He and a group of ghouls who seduce and then murder humans are both independent major antagonists of the sole novel he appears in.
• Calling Card: He leaves solitaire cards at the scenes of his battles.
• Daywalking Vampire: He is infamous for being the only vampire who can walk around in sunlight, and no one knows how he does it, with many people dismissing his existence as a myth. The secret is that Solitaire is really a shape-shifting demon who only pretends to be a vampire to mislead his enemies.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: He has spent centuries doing little besides prowling the world in search of opponents to fight for the heck of it and resents challenges to his pride.

Celina

Cassia Marseillaise/Celina/Catia/Callia

A Slayer turned vampire who is the main antagonist of the book Tempted Champions.

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• Fallen Hero: She was once a heroic, albeit mentally damaged, Slayer who became a vampire by choice due to being afraid to die after losing a fight with a vampire.
• Pragmatic Villainy: She stops two other vampires from killing and feeding on an affluent-looking teenager, but only due to her vested interest in upholding The Masquerade.
• The Worf Effect: As an early sign of how powerful Celina is, Angel reveals that he fought her once and she staked him, but the weapon failed to pierced his heart.

Eric

A powerful Druid sorcerer who kept his powers after becoming a vampire. He is the main villain of the book Return to Chaos.

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• Brought Down to Normal: In the climax, one of Eric's enemies casts a spell to make magic inaccessible in the area they are in, causing Eric to become just another vampire. With his advantages gone, he dies at the end of Buffy's stake after an embarrassingly short fight.
• Manipulative Bastard: He uses trickery and mind-control spells to make everyone do things that further his goals, even people who think their actions are stopping what he wants.

Queen Mab

Queen Mabyana

The leader of a troop of fairies who were infected with vampirism (something Anya played an inadvertent role in) 500 years before they menace Sunnydale in the novel Little Things.

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• A Mother to Her Men: Mab is affectionate and protective toward her fairies (crying after many of them are killed), although she does have some selfish and imperious moments due to being a soulless vampire.
• We Will Meet Again: She and a handful of her followers escape at the end of the book and she muses about how she hopes to return and finally get her revenge against Anya. However, this Sequel Hook never amounts to anything, due to Anya dying in a completely unrelated incident.
• Tragic Villain: She and her followers were a Chaotic Neutral group before becoming vampires and enjoy malicious mischief in addition to how they have to kill people for blood. However, they have spent much of the last five hundred years hating how they were cursed into becoming vampires over something that (by their standards) was a Felony Misdemeanor. They were already immortal before becoming vampires, so they don’t get the longer lifespan that most vampires enjoy. Additionally, they can no longer engage in their favorite pastime of frolicking through meadows in the sunlight, and becoming soulless and having to kill for blood weighs on them at times. They are far from innocent, but the Scooby Gang find little cause for celebration in defeating Mab and her followers.

Simon

Simon

A Mysterious Informant of the Scooby Gang who appears in the novel Mortal Fear and is using them as part of a plan to conquer the world. He turns out to be made of magic-infused nanobots.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: He is a computer program mixed in with magically enhanced nanobots that were meant to cure a scientist's cancer, but instead he takes over the scientist's body and feels that his programming requires him to take over and improve the world.
• Mr. Fanservice: Once he gets his own body he is golden-skinned, extremely muscular, and never bothers to wear a shirt.
• Mysterious Informant: He tips Buffy and her friends off about lots of monster attacks in an affable but ocassionally threatening way, while refusing to reveal anything about himself. He is using the Scooby Gang's victories to gather the pieces of a mystical sword that will let him defeat his enemies.
• Super-Empowering: He can give people super strength with a set of tatoos, although it also brainwashes them.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He is willing to kill people or engineer deadly situations if it will further his odds of conquering the world and making a utopia for the survivors.