Wall Banger/Live-Action TV/Buffy the Vampire Slayer


 * Buffy example: "Summers Blood." All through season 5, it was repeatedly stated that Dawn was the Key and that there was something that she could do that no one and nothing else could. Then, at the last moment, it turns out that Buffy could take Dawn's place and die instead of her. Granted, it happens to set up a Heroic Sacrifice (and possibly a Crowning Moment of Awesome) for Buffy. But Buffy should have had to sacrifice Dawn or watch her sacrifice herself. It would have been more poignant. made more sense.
 * That particular wall banger was lampshaded by Anya later when she admitted that she never got how the whole "Summers blood" thing was supposed to work; the scene moved on before anyone could try to explain it. Unfortunately, as much as Joss Whedon loves Lampshading and winking at the fans, pointing out the Plot Hole doesn't make it less of a plot hole.
 * Let's just say "Summers blood" is code for The Power of Love and call it a night.
 * Possible Fridge Brilliance in "Blood Ties" where both girls have cut arms and Buffy presses their hands together so some of their blood gets mixed together. So Buffy took some of Dawn's blood into herself so...
 * Well, it's never specifically said that the portal closed because of her blood; the way to close the portal with Dawn would have been to drain all her blood, but Buffy jumped right into it. I always assumed that she just overloaded it by jumping into it or something, Summers' Blood be damned.
 * The entirety of season 6 and 7 are so riddled with them to the point that some fans don't acknowledge their existence.
 * Tara's death has several:.
 * She was standing in the middle of the room on the second floor. Unless a sniper was framing Warren, that shot was one-in-a-million.
 * Worse. The bullet would either have had to materialize in mid-air, or come through the wall and not the window, for that shot to be possible. But we saw the killing from the bullet's POV, and so we know neither happened. In other words, Tara was killed by a "Magic Bullet".
 * Doubly magic, given that Willow, who was standing directly in front of Tara at almost touching distance, didn't get hit by anything despite the fact that Tara had an exit wound on her front. (Willow visibly caught a blood spatter; that means that either the bullet made an exit wound on that side or else Tara's lungs were full of blood and she was aspirating it -- and since she could still talk clearly afterwards it wasn't the latter.) So, that's two right-angle turns in mid-air the damn thing would have to make. The magic bullet that killed President Kennedy was an outright slacker compared to this one.
 * Tara's death being the cause of Willow's Face Heel Turn. Reducing such a beloved character and relationship to a Morality Chain and, indeed, Disposable Woman is appalling in itself.
 * Xander leaving Anya at the altar. Totally Out of Character and contrived for the sake of drama "draaaaamaaaaaaaaaa!".
 * The response -- "OMG XANDER IS EEEEVIIIILLLL" -- is no better. If you had just gotten mindraped, watched yourself become your worst nightmare, and finally murdered your lover, then you too might want to wait a while before marrying her.
 * I understood the thought process behind it, in that he didn't want to turn into his father (a raging, abusive alcoholic), but what bothered me is that Xander never even said anything remotely like that to Anya herself, letting her think for the rest of her life that it was her fault when they could have talked it out.
 * Hey, Buffy just came back from the dead! She's back from endless torment in hell (or so we think)! Do we run to her and hug her like we would have in previous seasons, like when Willow was thought to be dead and turned out not to be in "Dopplegangland"? No! We stand there at a safe distance and talk about her like she's not there.
 * The entire series before and after this point insisted that death is magic-proof, and any attempt to bring a dead person back is doomed to failure or much worse. Buffy is the only exception. The "supernatural death" justification felt tacked on and hollow.
 * "From beneath you, it devours." No, it doesn't. It mostly annoys or Hannibal Lectures you.
 * Or as Andrew puts it, "It eats you starting with your bottom."
 * Giles suddenly leaves for England, comes back, leaves again, and then comes back... never mind that his reasons for abandoning Buffy are so Out of Character that Tony Head himself had issues with it.
 * Dawn continues to regress to an annoying child, making everything she says a Wall Banger. How does the entire cast of characters put up with it?
 * To drive the point home, by season 7, Dawn's main source of angst was that she wasn't special like Buffy. Special! She had her chance at that!
 * Evidently the multiverse almost ending because of her isn't enough for her.
 * Dawn clearly doesn't think that being the Damsel in Distress, even if its a uniquely cosmic damsel in distress, is anything special or worthy of celebration. And let's be fair -- it's not. She's sick of being kidnap girl and wants to be a self-rescuing princess for once. This is an entirely sympathetic position.
 * Willow hops into bed with the first annoying skank who shows interest in her despite being the character who'd be the least likely to do that and then subjects us to their annoying "relationship" for the rest of the season.
 * Willow's Anvilicious "magic addiction". This plot line could have been interesting ("power is addictive" + "power corrupts") and did start that way. Then came "Tabula Rasa." After that, it was played for full after-school-special camp, reducing Willow to a painful cliche.
 * For some fans of the character, Willow's Face Heel Turn is heartbreaking Character Derailment.
 * Willow's (arguable) Chickification in the following season because she couldn't use magic for the better part of the season lest she become evil again.
 * Buffy and Spike's "love story," in particular the restructuring of the series to revolve around it.
 * The particularly mind-boggling thing about the Buffy and Spike relationship of Season 6 is that "Seeing Red," in which Spike is given a Rape the Slayer moment, was contrived by the writers because they thought the fans were starting to like Spike too much. They had given him a number of redemption moments in the previous two seasons, and so this was entirely their fault. Then they rolled a 1 on their Author's Saving Throw. Bang, bang, bang.
 * Buffy falling for Spike at all. First, Spike starts treating his love for Buffy as a real and pure crush and thinks that running Riley off is a good thing a year after being a persistent pain in Buffy's side. Then there are Spike's attempts to kill her, both before he realizes he has a crush on her and (worse) after he knows -- he brings a shotgun to shoot her once but instead just sits beside her. By the end of Season 5, Spike has earned her respect; but she doesn't show any signs that she likes him, let alone loves him. This all immediately changes in Season 6, when they have a mutual Abuse Is Love relationship, which then evolves in Season 7 to where Buffy admits that she's developed feelings for him somewhere in between being punched, punching him, and having sex. But this was to show Buffy as physically and mentally weak in Season 6, which didn't help; and its being a positive relationship or negative relationship Depending on the Writer... yikes.
 * During Spike's "pep talk" to Buffy (about Buffy being right in her deplorable past behavior toward everyone), Spike offers to kill Faith for Buffy's sake. What!? A few episodes ago, Spike was crying over all the people he had killed now that he has a soul. Now he's casually offering to kill a good guy for the sake of his "romance" with Buffy! Spike's Badass Decay was bad enough -- at least keep his characterization straight!
 * Buffy and Spike's chaste cuddling after that scene. Blech.
 * Several times prior to S6, such as in "Something Blue" and "Intervention", the concept of a Buffy/Spike relationship was Played for Laughs.
 * The premise of this show is that vampires are bad. The protagonist of the show exists to kill vampires. It's in the title. Every vamp introduced on this show is dusted, no bargaining, no negotiation, no chance for redemption, no second chance; the idea that vampires might not be bad or might be able to improve or might redeem themselves is never mentioned. It is never ever suggested that you should have moral pause before staking a vampire. But the two biggest love interests in the show for our protagonist are both vampires! So, in the Whedonverse, every single vampire is totally and irredeemably evil... except the two that Buffy slept with? If we are allowed to sympathize with Spike and Angel, then Buffy might possibly be doing wrong dusting all the vampires that aren't in the main cast.
 * Almost justified with Angel: Buffy didn't find out he was a vampire until after she saw first-hand that he was on her side, and he had already shown qualities like remorse or concern for others. Oh, and she was already crushing on him. None of that applies to Spike. He had repeatedly tried to kill her; then he suddenly showed up wanting to kill her but being unable to due to external forces, and showing no remorse at all. He wasn't helping the Scoobies because he was trying to atone for his past sins -- he wanted to kill things, and only demons were available. Somehow, he spent two entire years undusted before Buffy developed even the twisted semblance of feelings for him.
 * Giles and his "act like a general" speeches from the last season. When Buffy makes the hard and unpopular decisions regarding Spike, Giles gets on her case for not making the decision that he wanted. But he was the one urging her to take command. If he was serious about it, then he needed to accept her decisions when she took command.
 * But that was somewhat justified - based on the past, Giles assumed she would make reasonable decisions to keep everyone safe. Instead, she let her screwed-up feelings for her murderer and attempted rapist ex-boyfriend cloud her judgment and put everyone in danger for her stupidity. Giles was right.
 * After two seasons about how Buffy is so Cursed with Awesome that she'd rather be dead than have to shoulder it, we're supposed to inspired and moved by her cursing thousands and thousands of other girls with her awesome.
 * Even "Once More With Feeling" has one: Xander summoned Sweet?
 * He thought he was a spirit of singing and music, not a murderous demon. Xander's always been Book Dumb.
 * Still, it doesn't even really make sense that Xander summoned him because that would mean that info on the singing demon wouldn't be extraordinarily hard to find if it's true that Xander randomly stumbled upon it in the first place, and so it shouldn't have taken long to find info on him, and Xander also wouldn't have waited that long to say anything. I still firmly believe that Dawn really did summon him and Xander lied in order to protect Dawn.
 * Totally screwing five seasons worth of Character Development for a quick joke? The objection still stands, especially since Xander already had one magic spell go terribly wrong on him ("Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered"). He should have learned his lesson then. And even more especially because he told none of his friends what he did when the singing and dancing first started, when he must have known he was responsible for it.
 * A far more logical culprit was the nerd trio which had just been introduced a few episodes before. The three of them had been established as able to summon demons, knew spells to warp reality, had a history of esoteric villainous plans, and had a motive for continually screwing with or distracting Buffy and the Scoobies. Having them be responsible would not only have made sense, but also have fit into the continuity of that season. Yet they're nowhere to be seen.
 * Buffy's "Cookie Dough" speech.
 * "Get It Done". Buffy-Stalin calls a young girl who was scared out of her mind and who committed suicide a "weak idiot". We also learn that the Slayer's origins lie in rape. How charmingly sickening.
 * Buffy getting kicked out of her own house and having her dearest friends abandon her. Way to destroy True Companions, Joss!
 * Worse, it was Dawn who actually kicked her out, "because they needed to be united". The others were allowing her to stay, but telling her that her idea was bad.
 * Let's restate that for emphasis: The person Buffy died for kicks her out of her house, for having a difference of opinion.
 * And then, Buffy kicks some random guy out of his house and leaves him to fend for himself in the middle of the Hellmouth, at night. Why? Because "all the cool kids are doing it". Gah.
 * Plus all the Scoobies wanted was proof that Buffy was right that there was something at the vineyard. Had she gone to investigate it, she could have come back with proof and launched the attack the next day with their full support.
 * If you stop and think about it too much, the idea Buffy was actually in heaven becomes a major Wall Banger, and that just makes her angst at the beginning of Season 6 into a Wall Banger taken Up to Eleven.
 * 1) She says she knew her friends were alright, even though they would have been killed that night if they hadn't brought her back.
 * 2) If she went to heaven and it is so much better than life, then that would mean that all the times she saved people's lives, they were worse off for it.
 * 3) Willow would be right at the end of the season that it would be better for everyone to die when she ended the world.
 * Don't think about this one too much. There are so many Unfortunate Implications (Dying [or even suicide] is A-OK! If you give up on life, you spend eternity in paradise!) that it would ruin the rest of the show. If you don't think it was ruined anyways.
 * Before all of that was Season 4's "Wild at Heart", which seems to give out the unfortunate message that men are animals and have no control over their sexuality. And should be held responsible for their sexual actions anyway.
 * Any episode written by Tracey Forbes. Apparently, she has a fascination with rewriting every character to be as shallow and two-dimensional as possible (the aforementioned episodes express the beliefs that every man wants sex, college students are walking hedonistic superiority complexes, and discarding grammar equates to "Buffy-Speak"). In addition, they have heavy-handed moral proselytizing and a general vomit-inducing nigh-unwatchableness.
 * Riley and the Scoobies go out on patrol; he ends up ditching them because they hinder him. Granted, the Scoobies don't have his military training; but you'd think that spending years fighting beside Buffy would teach them such fine arts as not talking and yelling out loud while hunting.
 * On the other hand, he might have been wrong ditching them. They had much more experience hunting vampires than he did, and their continued survival meant their techniques worked for them. Vampires have abilities far beyond non-Slayer humans; perhaps the most useful way for such a human to help a Slayer is to seem like harmless bait.
 * Confirmed. In the pilot episode, Vamp-Jesse says his hearing is sensitive enough to hear earthworms moving in the ground. On "Angel", several times vamipres are shown to be able to clearly hear humans whispering to each other from over thirty feet away. With that kind of super-senses, sneaking up on an alerted vampire (sneaking up on a vampire who isn't paying attention at all is something else, but if a vampire's out hunting it is presumably alert to its surroundings) would logically be nigh-impossible without magic of some kind. So yes, the only viable strategy would indeed seem to be "Make the vampire come to you", and you do that by sticking parsley behind your ears and ringing a dinner bell, not by visibly being a heavily-armed vampire hunter looking for a fight.
 * Hell, isn't that why the Slayer is a young girl in the first place? She's designed to look like bait.
 * And in early season 4 we have a scene where a fledgling vampire walks into view behind Buffy and Willow, sees them both loaded down with weapons and visibly ready to pick a fight with the entire Hellmouth, and takes off running before either girl can make her Spot check. Clearly the 'Don't look too much like a vampire hunter if you want to actually catch any vampires' theory has something going for it.
 * Willow comforting Spike when he is unable to kill her in the episode "The Initiative". Due to the blatant sexual subtext the scene also had a heavy Black Comedy Rape element.
 * Season Three: Dead Man's Party. "Yes Buffy, we are all very aware that you are just sixteen years old and had to kill your lover - the man you lost your virginity to - in order to save the world, but running away was a stupid and selfish thing for you to do, even though it was your mother who told you not to come back in the first place and we haven't even attempted to talk to you about what happened or relate to you on any level." With friends like these...
 * Not to mention the argument never actually gets resolved. They yell at her, she yells at them, monsters arrive and are defeated, everyone hugs, everything's all better. Um, WHAT?
 * Tara knew Buffy wasn't Buffy instantly back in "Who Are You", despite never having met her before, because 'her aura was wrong'. She knew that April was a robot, instantly, despite never having seen one before, in "I Was Made To Love You" - which makes sense, because robots presumably wouldn't have auras at all. And yet she can't spot the Buffybot in "Intervention"? It should have been obvious.
 * Tara only saw the Buffybot once in the episode it showed up for the first time, for not even a minute and after just being woken up. It still doesn't make that much sense after the aura thing, but that might be the excuse for why she missed it.
 * It's not just Tara. It was funny and refreshing when, after seeing April in action, everyone immediately agreed that she was a robot -- you could appreciate that the episode wasn't going to make us wait twenty minutes while they figured that out. And a few episodes after that, the show decides it is okay to pretend these same characters wouldn't know a human from a machine that's not that great at passing for one, even though it's now trying to pass for their own best friend.
 * Being fair, they were entirely aware that Buffy wasn't remotely acting anything like she normally did. That was the entire reason they were holding an intervention in the first place. Its just that their first hypothesis was 'Buffy's having some kind of mental episode' instead of 'Robot girlfriend guy is back and built a duplicate of Buffy for some reason'.
 * Faith was perhaps the most interesting character in the show, before she becomes a psychotic male raping Blood Knight who enjoys hurting people. Every Freudian Excuse and Hidden Depths in the book doesn't make her actions any more justified or any less Squick.
 * Though a lot of tropers decided it was worth the character derailment to watch her atonement in Angel, which provided some of the best episodes and most amazing moments.
 * Agreed. With both tropers above. Her behavior in the latter half of S3 is pure one-dimensional villain territory and seriously painful to anyone who liked Faith; the revelation in Angel season 1 that Faith's continually escalating attempts to find a Moral Event Horizon to cross were actually a Suicide by Cop effort was a brilliant Author's Saving Throw on somebody's part.
 * Arguably it's foreshadowed in season 3 Buffy itself. Why on Earth would someone be happy about working for a guy who wants to re-open the Hellmouth and become a True Demon unless they're either a demon themselves (which Faith isn't, even if the Mayor's vampire henchmen are) or else they actually want to die?
 * Which leads right into another Wall Banger; notably, what they did to Faith's characterization after she left Angel and returned to S7 Buffy. Going straight from the Salvage/Release/Orpheus arc on AtS to what the Buffy show gave her to do (not much, and very little of it good, and what of it was good was still also being majorly second banana to Buffy instead of co-starring with Angel) was one hell of a whiplash.
 * You know, it would have been nice to establish that Olaf's hammer was a divine weapon before they needed it to be a divine weapon.