Buffy Summers

Buffy Anne Summers
High school student, college student, vampire slayer
from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, circa 1998?
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The title character in the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its spin-offs on television, in graphic novels, and in video games.

Movie

In the movie, Buffy Summers is portrayed as a self-absorbed, stuck-up teenage girl. She typically does whatever her friends think she should (not buying a jacket she liked because her friend said it wasn't cool), and is dedicated to cheerleading and shopping. Interesting to note is her lack of a sexual relationship, and her seeming disinterest in beginning one, with her boyfriend.

Buffy's life is changed when she is approached by Merrick, who tells her that she is destined to be a slayer. Their first meetings are disturbing, colored by overtones of the image of a "dirty old man" approaching a teenage girl and trying to lure her away with him. That aside, however, Merrick manages to convince Buffy that she is the Slayer, and they begin her training.

Buffy is surprisingly accepting of her new role, seeming to grow less shallow and more perceptive to the feelings of others by the minute. She rescues and is befriended by Pike, a boy she had previously mocked for his "slacker" lifestyle.

In her new role as the Slayer, Buffy finds it hard to relate to her old friends. She begins to see the superficiality of the things they worry and talk about. She shows visible irritation at the callousness of one girl, whose greatest complaint at the death of another student is that the victim was wearing her favorite jacket at the time. She attacks a male student who has frequently made inappropriate comments and physical advances toward her after he does so again, and has an argument with her friends over their callousness and stupidity in worrying about a high school dance while people are disappearing and dying in the streets.

All of her new-found compassion and awareness is interrupted when Merrick is killed trying to protect her from a vampire named Lothos. Lothos is able to control Buffy, making her incapable of protecting herself against him. She attempts to abandon her calling, feeling responsible for Merrick's death, but in the end she is exposed and cannot avoid Lothos.

The love/hate relationship Buffy has with vampires in the television show is foreshadowed in the way Lothos interacts with her. Her dreams of Lothos are intimate, and in them she is passive and vacant. This is similar to the way he affects her in real life, and he speaks to her like a long-lost lover instead of a mortal enemy.

In a later battle, and with the help of the last advice given to her by Merrick, she is able to break free of Lothos' control and take charge of her situation, defeating him in the end. Despite her obvious transformations, however, Buffy insists to Pike that she is just like other girls.

Television

The television series begins with the arrival of Buffy to Sunnydale, where she and her mother have moved to try to put their lives back together after Buffy's slaying got her kicked out of school in L.A. A notable change to her character is the resistance she now harbors toward her calling. When confronted by her new Watcher, Giles, in the Sunnydale High library, she challenges him to prepare her for the loneliness, the constant danger, and the losses entailed in being the Slayer. It is clear that this is a less innocent and carefree Buffy than the one seen previously.

Throughout the show, her character makes many developments. In the first season, she is eventually relatively happy and willing to "fulfill her calling," but also feels responsible for the safety of her two friends and Slaying companions, Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg. She is notably more compassionate, and often it is her creativity and ability to think on her feet, not her brute strength, that saves her life.

Buffy gradually loses her own optimism and innocence throughout the show, the first major evidence of this occurring in the first episode of season two, when Buffy is acting strangely mean and vindictive toward her friends. It is later revealed that she is suffering from the fact that, at the age of seventeen, she has already died once. Though she killed the Master in season one, the fact that he also killed her has scarred her deeply, and one character observes that, since they killed each other, they will always be connected.

The second such instance occurs later in the second season, after Buffy finally begins a sexual relationship--with a vampire, of all people. Her relationship with Angel seems pure, beautiful, and poetic, but it is also tragic, and the happiness he feels with Buffy leads to the loss of his soul and his return to evil. Throughout the rest of the season he torments Buffy, threatening her friends and playing on her feelings for him, until at last she is forced to kill him to save the world. In the process, she is expelled from school and kicked out by her mother, leaving her feeling very alone. Desperate to get away from being the Slayer, she disappears from Sunnydale altogether, going to work in L.A. as a waitress, under a false name.

Her calling follows her, however, and Buffy eventually returns to Sunnydale, to find that her relationships have all been damaged and that her friends and mother no longer trust her. She struggles to regain their trust in the face of many difficulties, including the return of Angel and the arrival of Faith, who is almost the anti-Buffy. Buffy's insistence on protecting Angel further divides her from her friends, and it becomes clear that they have been the source of much of her optimism and sanity the entire time.

Buffy's faith and trust are further tested by the betrayal of Giles, who secretly drugs her to remove her Slayer powers in preparation for a barbaric rite of passage. This episode is definitely one of the more disturbing, with the usually unstoppable heroine forced to fight monsters--both the obnoxious teenage boy kind and the blood-sucking, murderous kind--hampered by physical limitations that she is unaccustomed to. She is unable, for example, to defend a female classmate against the harassment of an aggressive suitor.

Season five brings one of the most drastic transformations in Buffy, as her mother dies of cancer--something Buffy cannot fight--and she is left with a younger sister to care for. The season ends with Buffy giving her life to save those she cares about, throwing herself into a portal to a Hell-dimension. The horror of her death prompts her friends to use magic to bring her back, but the Buffy who comes back is changed. She is languid, apathetic, seemingly unable to relate to those around her or muster enthusiasm for anything.

In one of the more disturbing plotlines of the show, Buffy seeks solace in a sado-masochistic relationship with the vampire Spike, and confesses to him that her friends' magic pulled her out of Heaven. Relating more to the soulless Spike than to her living friends, she enters a cycle of fighting and sex with him that ultimately goes too far when she says no and he fails to listen.

Finally, Buffy re-embraces her life and her responsibilities and begins to shape her own destiny, deciding to change the rules so that every potential Slayer can be called, instead of leaving the burden to one girl in every generation. This decision is ultimately the most important one Buffy makes. Though before it, she was physically strong, intelligent, compassionate, and self-aware, she was also following a course plotted out for her by others, occasionally resisting but ultimately returning to a compulsory occupation. The strongest feminist message in this story lies in her conscious choice to continue to do her duty, but to essentially give herself a break. Now that she is not the only one, now that no Slayer will be, there is no more need for the sacrifice of an entire life to a job, whether the "chosen one" likes it or not. She opens up the choice, not only to herself, but to generations of future slayers as well.

--Presscubjulia 16:47, 23 April 2009 (UTC)