Buffy the Vampire Slayer/WMG

Wishverse Willow was sired by Xander, who was sired by Jessie.
In the main Buffyverse, Willow only gets picked up by that vampire due to Buffy's encouragement. Lacking that, only Jessie would have been picked up. Due to this, it is likely that Xander was turned by him, his best friend. Wherever Jessie is doesn't matter. Xander, however, clearly didn't just turn Willow. Her entire personality is different, which doesn't normally happen for vamps, not at their core. Liam was an asshole, Angelus was a major asshole. William was a hopeless romantic, Spike was a violent hopeless romantic. Drusilla was crazy, and just became crazy with a side of bloodlust after being turned. Even vamp Xander just seems to be Xander with the asshole part of him taken Up to 11. Instead, I believe he did much the same thing Angelus did with Dru. I believe that he killed her family, tormented her and broke her before turning her.
 * Cree-pee. The scary thing is this makes a certain amount of sense. But what I'm wondering is how Angelus became the way he was. He was sired by Darla. What did she do to him to make him undoubtedly the evilest, most sadistic Big Bad?
 * The personality of a vampire is based on the human's at the time of siring. All of their sense of right and wrong is stripped away and their negative emotions are cranked up a bit. Every time we saw Liam (pre-turning Angelus) he was a drunken, rude, violent, disrespectful asshole douchebag ancient equivalent to a frat boy. So, he had what little morals he had stripped away, and because his only interest even before he was a vampire was himself, he became a violent, self-serving asshole who used people much like he did in life. Basically, Angelus became so evil because he was already a violent, self-serving heartless bastard in life who only loved himself. Or, to sum it up, "Some people just want to watch the world burn."
 * That frankly makes it worse. Liam was a dickhead, we could see him becoming the monsterous Angelous. For Willow to fall so far as a vampire, or for her to be so completely off when she became a vampire...Dork Willow wasn't as bad. At least she had altruistic motives (revenge, then stop the world from suffering). Vamp! Willow just wanted to hurt people.
 * Not really, Dark!Willow was fuelled by grief...Normal Willow has done some pretty f'ed up stuff by herself - using magic to manipulate her friends and Tara, arging with Giles about magic...Arguably the influence of the magic on her, but more likely that she outright corrupts when given power. Take away her moral limitations by vamping her, and she could go very, very dark.
 * Plus, the scary thing is is that it's easy to see Xander becoming alot like Angelus. Xander is the only one of them who constantly promoted killing good guys just because of their species, no matter how many times they helped. He's constantly shown that, were he to have power, he'd most likely abuse the hell out of it. He's also the only one to actually try to use mind control to mess with someone's feelings just because he was angry. If any of them could come even close to Angelus, it's him or Giles. Combine his already existing personality with the kind of warping to it caused by being turned and you could easily get Angelus 2.0.
 * I'd go into detail over this when I put my mind back together, but Willow seems closer to Angelus than Xander. She comes across as lacking Dru's craziness and has the Torture Technician part down pat. Xander, by your reasoning of being some vampire racist, would be perhaps closer to the way Twilight portrayed himself. Orchastrate a war against the Slayers, put an end to magic, that sort of thing.
 * Dru seemed to be pretty skilled in the torture department and Willow's mind is clearly not what it was. Xander, in the Wishverse, wouldn't be a vampire racist. The point I was making is that he has shown that he has the potential to be evil even as a human and, baring Ripper, is the most Liam-like of the cast and therefor would be the most Angelus-like of the cast as a vampire (especially if he were sired by Jessie, as he'd be part of the same line as Angelus, all of whom are remarkably different from most vamps). The only reason Willow isn't completely batshit insane is because, even in Season 1, she was stronger willed than pre-vamping, pre-torment Dru (and didn't have psychic visions helping drive her nuttier than a fruitcake).
 * The personality of the vampire is very much the personality of the person... minus their conscience. Therefore the bigger the conscience, the bigger the difference in personality.
 * Having had a fresh look at this, you make a pretty good case. Looking over some of the episodes I have my own theory to add here.
 * The vampire Dalton was cruising the Bronze for chicks to bite anyway. Willow, attention-starved as she was could very well have been just as likely to be swept off her feet by a handsome young man seeingly courting her with or without Buffy's encouragement.

After five year, less, Buffy cracks. The Slayer cracks under all the crap she's been through. After two years, Dead Man's Party, it can be said that Xander and Willow crack as well to some degree. Imagine how they would be in the hell that was the Wishverse. They could have been sired by Tara and they'd be just as broken. But relationship wise yours would be the best bet as to who did who.

Anya purposely acts how she does.
She was able to get into the Cordettes easily and continued to be open about her horniness and greed for years. I think she was doing it on purpose for the lulz.
 * Considering who she was trying to get a wish out of it's possible that her spell made her personality. While there are clearly more Vengence Demons than the two we've met we also know they work all around the world. Vengence Demons probably just learn language and assume the rough appearance and mannerisms of whatever culture they are infiltrating. It's entirely possible, even probable that Anya looks nothing like Aud did and since the only thing that contradicts that are two flashbacks that could easiliy be chalked up an unreliable narrator.

In the future, Willow makes Xander, from birth, almost unkillable.
The main evidence for this is the abuse Xander suffered throughout the show. Olaf's hammer knocks him out yet it's strong enough to beat the shit out of Glory. Unless the guy has something like this going for him there's no way that could work.

Giles HAS been brain damaged throughout the show.
The results of this is the fact that over the course of the show, he becomes more and more Ripper-like, with him

Buffy/Willow is going to become canon in Season 9.
Mainly going off of stuff in Season 8, Buffy is possibly bi and is hinted to have a crush on Willow, Willow clearly has one on her, and it would piss off Kennedy, something that would make fans everywhere cheer.
 * I think this would be rather unlikely, for the time being. Willow's kind of upset over Buffy's actions at the moment.
 * Oh, and just go through all the crushes in all of Joss Whedon's works. In them, we have all of four or five non-mutual crushes, one of which still ended up with the crusher and the crushee getting together and may or may not have ended with it being mutual, one that went from non-mutual on one side to non-mutual on the other (Xander and Buffy, in that order, if you're wondering) and one that I'm not too sure about being non-mutual. Add all this up and it's very unlikely for this not to go somewhere.
 * *IF* you consider Buffy bi, wouldn't Buffy/Faith be just as likely, if not more considering the acknowledged subtext way back in Season3? And when did Buffy hint that she liked Willow in *that* sort of way? Maybe this tropette just missed out on it while read the comics?
 * While it was never said outright, when Willow denied ever having a crush on Buffy (Wolves At The Gate: Conclusion, after they got out of the sidewalk turned to water) Buffy acted much the same as Willow was. This was right after Willow grilled Satsu on what Buffy was like in bed, so we know that she is lying. Since Buffy is acting much the same, we can infer that she is lying as well. About Buffy/Faith, while hot, is unlikely since they basically hate each other). About the Satsu thing, well, even if she was lonely, she still enjoyed it. She's at least a bit bi.
 * And one more thing, if Joss did this he'd have a single break up that he could do and shatter the relationships between all of the cast, causing buckets of angst. Joss loves his angst.
 * Nah, gotta say he's going to bring back Tara somehow. Joss will want to use something that makes Conversations With Dead People look about as bad as Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered, especially since Amber Benson just knew he was going to do something horrible and declined returning.
 * Regarding the Buffy/Faith thing, was it not established in Season 6 that it was less "hate" and more "2 slayers shouldn't exist at the same time, that's why there's friction"? Or did I miss something?
 * Let's see: The time between Faith first being introduced and the beginning of the friction between her and Buffy is a common conversation point. It might be that Faith's personality had always bothered her, just the same there were times where she could have been useful...Beauty and the Beast, Band Candy and Halloween. Some say Faith is being shut out. Then she gets a new watcher, who's evil, finds out Angel is alive, goes to kill him, and fights Buffy. As you can imagine things are strained then.
 * Then she bangs Xander, which upsets Willow. Buffy tries spending time with Faith after rejecting Wesley as her new watcher but with her robberies and accidental killing it ends in disaster. Turns out Faith is not up to Buffy's moral standards, which the others point out, before Faith tries to pin the killing on her. When Xander tries to reason with her she tries to rape and kill him, disgusting even Angel. He and Buffy again attempt to get Faith to see sense, before the Council kidnap Faith, pretty much sealing the deal as far as working for the good guys is concerned. After saving Buffy from an assassination attempt she goes to work for the Mayor. After several incidents showing she is Ax Crazy she and Buffy fight one last time, where Buffy stabs her with her own knife. This was over her poisoning Angel, after a bid to get him to lose his soul, and needing Slayer blood to save him, Faith's blood. Knowing this, Faith tosses herself into the back of a passing truck.
 * Then things get interesting. There's a dream sequence where Faith is civil with Buffy, hinting at how to defeat the Mayor. This, coupled with her saving Buffy from an earlier assassination attempt, hints that she doesn't hate Buffy as such, but hates the way she is treated, and is also pretty jealous. Anyway, Faith wakes up from her coma, haunted by visions of Buffy coming after her and the Mayor, who had become a father figure. She confronts her, they fight, then Faith learns of the Mayor's parting gift for her, a device that swaps her body with Buffy's. She uses it then proceeds to basically be a Jerkass as Buffy, before feeling the calling of being a Slayer, once when she is genuinely affected at a girl's gratitude after saving her from a vampire, then when she hears about vampires holding a church full of people hostage. She goes to save the day, confronts Buffy, then when their bodies are switched back runs off. When she is wailing on and abusing Buffy in Faith's body she is actually doing this to herself, filled with a great deal of self hatred.
 * Then there's her rampage in LA and Angel's bid to redeem her. She spends time in prison to get her head together, then Willow, who had recently been a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, goes to her for help. Buffy at this time is acting nasty beyond belief, so when Faith comes in she looks good in comparison. She starts off by trying to kill Spike, not knowing he has a soul now, before wanting to sleep with him. The Slayers in training want Faith over Buffy, then Faith is interested in Robin Wood. So basically Buffy sees Faith as taking Angel, Spike, Wood and her place as Slayer from her.
 * Cue the comics where Giles hires Faith for an assassination on a rogue Slayer. Going undercover she finds herself becoming friends with this Slayer. When Faith finds out that Giles hired her because Buffy is targeted she is less than pleased. Then when she sees Buffy fighting her friend she snaps, diving for her, the two of them going out a window, into the shallow end of a pool. When Buffy accuses her of trying to kill her Faith snaps again and tries to drown her. Stuff of true romance, that.
 * Not sure how things go between Buffy and Faith but as I understand it Faith is currently watching over Angel after he was possessed, killed Giles and went catatonic. So now you know.

Unseen Nightmares during Nightmares:
(Note: It was implied that all of reality was being effected)
 * Angel: Lost his soul.
 * Angelus: Met The Joker.
 * Or met Wishverse Willow.
 * Regained his soul (the Angel episode "Orpheus" provides some pretty good evidence for this.)
 * Dawn: Everyone left her.
 * Faith: Her Watcher died (if she had already been found as a Potential)
 * Joyce: Buffy, or in the Post Dawn world, Buffy and Dawn died.
 * Buffy did "die" in this episode, so perhaps too had been affected by this like Giles was or maybe Dawn died too.
 * Wesley: His father came to see him (it was made clear that he hates his father for treating him like shit).
 * Jenny: Angel lost his soul (remember, she was sent to Sunnyhell to make sure this didn't happen).
 * Caleb: Every human being besides for him became female.
 * He became female.
 * Kendra: She became the Slayer and was awful at it.
 * Spike: Dru died.
 * Dru: Whatever it is it wouldn't make sense.
 * Arguably, Drusilla has a moment of perfectly clear sanity to comprehend what was done to her and CAN'T dust herself before her sanity fades. Afterwards Spike doesn't let her out of sight because of HIS nightmare.
 * Tara: Her family locked her up for life.
 * Her "demon" manifested before it's time. She looked gross.
 * Anyanka: Bunnies. Billions of billions of bunnies.
 * The Master: Buffy won.
 * Ben: Glory takes over their body.
 * Glory: Ben takes over their body.
 * Warren: Women take over.
 * Andrew: Star Wars no longer exists.
 * Jonathan: Same thing as Andrew.
 * The Mayor: Someone kills him.
 * Germs. Everything gets covered in germs.
 * Everything IS covered in germs.
 * Lorne: He got sent back to Pylea.
 * He couldn't sing.
 * Fred: She got found (she was most likely just sent to Pylea at this point)
 * Gunn: EVERYBODY in LA's a vamp.

Feel free to continue the list and add more to people's if you have different ideas for their nightmares.

As an alternate for the last sentence in the below WMG...
The prophecy has been fulfilled. The first bit here is fact. Joyce, who has been assumed to be the First, said that when the time comes Buffy won't chose Dawn. At one point, Dawn was believed to be a Potential. This is where conjecture comes in. There is another WMG that theorizes that she really was one and that they just made sure that the spell didn't activate her. The evidence to support this is that Xander's speech on the importance of normals seems too rehearsed. Now, here's where things get a little more proofy. In the final episode, they activate all the Potential Slayers. If Dawn was one and they purposely didn't activate her then it's likely that it really was Joyce in CWDP and that the prophesy came true. The role of the Slayer is sometimes referred to as the Chosen One. The final episode was called Chosen. If Dawn was a Potential and she wasn't activated, she wasn't chosen. Buffy would have made this call. So, to sum things up, the time came and Buffy didn't choose Dawn. One further note of proof is that were Faith to die, being the natural Slayer, the line would have one place to go if there was only one unactivated Potential. That would be Dawn. This would most likely destroy any sort of relationship Dawn and the others, especially Buffy, had. As we all know, Joss Whedon loves Angst and making his characters miserable. This would fit right in with what he loves to do.
 * But why would Buffy do that? And is even Willow powerful enough to cast a spell to unleash every single potential on the planet's powers except one, because they would take a ton of control! And why would Willow and the rest go along with that?
 * The 'how' seems pretty simple. The slayer empowerment spell wasn't an off-the-cuff thing; Willow knows exactly the sorts of energies she's going to use to do it. She just takes the time beforehand to ward Dawn from them.

That really was Joyce in Conversations With Dead People.
Too many things don't add up. First off, the First can't touch things. Dawn was bleeding from her mouth, had a cut on her face and the house was basically destroyed. That evolves alot of contact, something that he can't do. Second, lets say that for some reason he could do all that stuff. Why not do it again and again throughout the season? Even if he some limited contact ability, why not just use that to use a gun and shoot Willow in the face? It would be far more effective to just kill Willow rather than terrify and trick Dawn. Third, the First has only been seen impersonating one person in a single area. We see an all black figure that is almost certainly not human (he can only impersonate dead people) and Joyce on the couch. Another thing he never does is glow. The First doesn't glow. Joyce glows. What this adds up to is that Joyce really did come back and that the prophecy may not have been fulfilled yet.

The amulet which Spike used inside the hellmouth was meant to go to Dawn.
No higher beings ever say that Dawn is no longer the Key, it is simply assumed by Dawn and the Scoobies that that aspect of her existence was used up in Glory's attempt to return home (even though the monks believed that the key's energies would not be consumed until all dimensions were one). When Willow goes insane, she threatens to turn Dawn back into a ball of energy. The First, known for tormenting people with harsh truths, tells Dawn that Buffy will not choose her. As Angel understands it, the amulet should go to "someone ensouled, but stronger than a human" which he takes to mean another Champion like himself. But, Dawn frequently feels remorse for her oft selfish actions, and is readily able (with only Xander at her side) to defend one of the exits of Sunnydale High, and even takes out several turok-hans herself during the fight.

Someone or something caused the spell in Tabula Rasa to screw up.
Take a look at the sparks that ignite the bag. First off, they're green. Why would they be green? Second, they fly straight to the corners of the bag. Third, they ignite the entire bag. Two tiny sparks would not do that. Something MADE it do that. Top contenders would be The First Evil (remember, he was given the ability to do his S7 plan due to Buffy being brought back so logically he could act before then as well) and Tara (she had been trying to get Willow to almost completely quit magic (and I still blame her for the magic addiction plot) so why not?).

Giles is a Time Lord.
His claim that he was dying after getting beaten by Dark Willow near the end of season 6 is because, like the 10th Doctor, he though of regeneration as death. In fact, he did regenerate but due to being able to control it he kept his look. The problem is is that his personality still changed, making him a bit crueler than before. He most likely doesn't even know his origins.

Xander didn't summon Sweet.
Xander knew all too well not to mess around with magic - especially after a certain love spell nearly got torn apart by a mob of crazed woman. What actually happened in "Once More With Feeling" was that Xander realized Sweet didn't know for certain who had summoned him, and gambled on the demon being heterosexual. This is why he was Easily Forgiven for getting a few people killed - he explained later it wasn't him.
 * I've believed this since the first time I saw the episode. Further evidence: Xander had long been established as a terrible liar, so how was he able to put on such an incredibly convincing performance of "What the heck is going on here?" throughout the episode (even while singing under the influence of the spell, which supposedly compels truthfulness)? On the other hand, Dawn was visibly nervous when she asked Tara if the gang had figured out who summoned Sweet, and only sang two lines -- which were implied to be about her stealing, but could just as easily apply to her having called up a demon in a bid for attention. I think Dawn summoned the demon, and Xander, realizing this, improvised a cover story for her. Sweet most likely knew he was lying, but it provided a face-saving way for him to get out of town without appearing completely defeated, so he went along. Xander told Buffy about it later, and she was devastated, which helps explain why her mental condition continued to deteriorate between OMWF and "Normal Again".

Caleb's Soul is damned to live many different lifetimes until he learns to be a good person.
These lifetimes include Castle and Mal. He's currently on his final lifetime, Nathan Fillion. The PTB are just getting a good laugh out of it now.
 * So, wait, his current life involves portraying all of his past lives on screen? Why?
 * He doesn't know about the whole many lives thing, it's just the Power's idea of a joke. Sort of a "We were bored and this is ironic enough to be funny." It kinda goes with the general feeling that they give off through Buffy and Angel, that the Powers are assholes.
 * Caleb is already Good. Aaccording to Whedon's system of morality, Love is the greatest evil and must be punished. Nerds punished Tara. Kennedy surived because she is incapable of love. Anya died because she committed the unforgivable sin of loving Xander.
 * Um, you don't think the above statement needs to be a WMG of it's own? 'Cos as it is it's just ranting on Whedon. And Kennedy. Unprovoked. It's a bit weird.

Mayor Wilkins was a Black Thorn
And was Ascending to join the Senior Partners.

Mayor Wilkins is evil, an accomplished sorcerer and has numerous vital connections to keep him in power, just like the rest of the Black Thorn. We know from the series finale with Angel that the Black Thorn includes at least one corrupt politician who surrounds themselves with vampire lackeys. His involvement with the Senior Partners led to them offering him the opportunity to join them on their plane, which he had to Ascend into a true demon in order to do. This also explains why he was willing to give up his invulnerability.
 * He didn't 'give up' his invulnerability; the invulnerability was a side effect of the ascension ritual.

Twilight is Edward Cullen
Look at the above description of him. The fact that he calls himself "Twilight".

He scratches his skin so that Buffy won't notice that it sparkles.

He wants to kill Buffy because some of the vampires that she killed used to be his friends.
 * Who would want to be friends with Edward?

Twilight is Andrew
Twilight knows Buffy, appears human, has a strong tendency to monologue, loses his train of thought in the midst of convoluted explanations, has itchy skin, and most damning of all: he's dressed like a tacky Supervillain. Most of the plot of season 8 has been Andrew playing various mystical factions against each other and especially against Buffy Summers, the one person he knows can take on ANYTHING, in order to eliminate them in prep for his final plan. He even manipulated the vampires in Tokyo into developing the ability to remove the Slayer's powers, then assisted in their defeat using his inside knowledge of their mech's design.


 * Jossed. We now know who Twilight is. Not that it makes any sense...


 * Them Fucking did? Joss has slipped his leash.

Dawn will be instrumental to the defeat of Twilight in Season 8
Aside from the obvious parralelism in their names, theres's quite a lot of potential to support this. Twilight plans to banish all demons and all magic from the world, a truly epic task requiring unbelievable power over dimensions. Who is the only being we know with the power to literally bring about the end of the multiverse by conjoining all dimensions? Also, in the backstory of Fray we see the aftermath of a battle against demons at a huge dimensional rip, like the kind that Dawn's blood can produce under the right circumstances. I find it shockingly improbable, even with the rampant narrative causality in the Buffyverse caused by the Hellmouths, that the Key, a mysteriously created artifact that has existed for 'just this side of forever', happened to have been created for a single use during the sixty years or so that Glory would have had to live as a mortal before dropping dead. Simply put, the Key is too important and has too big a destiny to fizzle into irrelevence after some exiled hellgod fails to use it to go home. Now that the key is in the form of Dawn, she will have to find some way to either use her power to counter Twilight's or to complete Twilight's goal herself without the genocide and bloodshed his plan entails.

Cassie's name was written in a Death Note
I don't know if you remember Cassie, but she appeared in an episode of Season 7 claiming she was going to die on a certain day. On that day, Buffy rescues her from a bunch of kids trying to sacrifice her to a demon, and on the way out of there she has a sudden heart attack and dies. Now, in Death Note, you can write conditions for someone's death, but if that's not possible, they'll just have a heart attack at the appointed time. So maybe someone wrote Cassie name and 'sacrificed to a demon', and a certain time on that day, but Buffy saved her so she couldn't be sacrificed to a demon. Hence the heart attack instead.

Dawn got hit by a meteor full of Quantonium
Seriously, what the hell is a "thricewise"? It sounds like a made up word. Wanna know why? Because Dawn made it up.

Dawn was really hit by a meteor full of Quantonium. He realized that Buffy isn't used to the concept of alien beings, so she came up with a fantasy/magical explanation of what happened so she would believe her.

The reason why Dawn's clothes grew with her? Dawn's Weirdness Censor. Susan wasn't familiar with strange and supernatural events, so she had less control over the powerful abilities Quantonium grants you, hence her ripping out of her clothes. Since Dawn is more used to strange things, she exerted subconscious control over the Quantonium so that her clothes would grow with her.

The reason why she changes into a centaur and a doll is because her control over the Quantonium is merely subconscious, and thus can't fully harness her new powers.

And the reason why those two bad guys in Tokyo didn't remember building Mecha Dawn? That's because they didn't. It was built by Gallaxhar in an effort to get his Quantonium back.
 * Well, what the hell is a Krevlornswath or a Deathwok Clan. Thricewise sounds much saner that that.
 * Jossed.

Supernatural affinity among humans affects sexual orientation or orientation determines affinity for the supernatural
In real life the number of homosexual and bisexual people is numbered at around 12% but in the Buffyverse there are almost as many bisexuals and homosexuals as heterosexuals. However this only pertains to humans with supernatural affinities. The two main witches are lesbian (Willow and Tara), several Slayers are revealed to be homosexual before and after activation. Buffy herself had a one night stand with a fellow Slayer in Season 8. So perhaps a persons affinity for the supernatural is determined by their sexual orientation or their sexual orientation determines their affinity for the supernatural.
 * Almost as many? The only * confirmed, definitely gay* characters are Tara, Kennedy, Satsu and Larry (although I may be forgetting somebody). Willow is probably bi, but identifies as lesbian. Andrew is likely bi, but it hasn't been confirmed. Buffy herself is.. ambiguous at best (see Willow's comment to Satsu in the comics). Now compare this to the het crowd.
 * Andrew is clearly gay. He doesn't even care about Buffy sleeping with Satsu and is bored while the Slayers play strip poker. He's gay.
 * Bisexuality is alot more common than some of the stricter definitions of straight. especially if you define Even the Guys Want Him or Even the Girls Want Her as bisexuals

One or more of the characters is a Time Lord.

 * Buffy does come back to life a LOT. The only possible explanation is regeneration.
 * Actually can go deaper then this. the first time Buffy died she regenerated into Kendra and when Kendra died she regenerated into faith and so on all slayers are just regenerations of the same Time Lord

Recklessness is part of being a vampire
Consider: Towards the end of the series, Buffy is usually recognized on sight by attacking vampires, yet they still attack her. Seldom do you see a vampire flee, even when they're clearly losing. Nor do they tend to beg for their lives. Indeed, the psychologist vampire in "Conversations With Dead People" seemed remarkably unconcerned about the fact that Buffy was planning to kill him - he didn't even get offended by it! Both Angel and Spike regularly traveled around by day under flimsy shelter, especially Spike (often heading over to visit Buffy by day on a whim). Angel also has Chronic Hero Syndrome, which includes an element of recklessness.
 * Or being a glory hound might be part of it. Every vampire dreams of killing the Slayer and becoming famous for it.
 * Or relatively new vampires are just giddy and dumb.

Buffy and Angel are a Xanatos Gambit by the vampire population of the real world
Angel from Buffy and Angel sparked a wave of adoration and worship of the Vampire. Twilight, True Blood, and many more have all taken this devotion to the next level where Vampires are no longer the bloodthirsty and dark creatures they used to be. Without Angel to lead the way, it is unlikely that such an even would've occurred. Therefore, the character of Angel was a Xanatos Gambit by the vampire population of our earth to make vampires appear sexy and desirable so they could eventually reveal themselves and be free from persecution to kill us all.
 * We're doomed! DOOOOOOOOOMED!
 * Unlikely, considering Spike is far more popular than Angel and his fans raged when he went from a brutal killing machine to a love-sick puppy that babysat a whiny adolescent.
 * Er, still doomed if lots of people have the hots for a vampire who is a brutal killing machine.
 * And "more popular" is a bit of a stretch. Certainly, Spike's an Ensemble Darkhorse, but Angel was popular enough to get his own show. Actually, fans seem pretty evenly divided between Spike fans, Angel fans, and also with quite a few Spangel fans.
 * Alternately, it's not so they can kill us all, but so they can finally come out. Unfortunately fans of some series have them more afraid of us than we were ever afraid of them.

Buffy did not fight Dracula, who is (or was) a fictional character even in the Buffy Verse.
There is an eerie artificiality surrounding Dracula's entire appearance in Sunnydale -- his arbitrary initial appearance, his blatantly disparate power level and abilities compared to other vampires, the Marty Stu-style fascination he draws from the cast, his heretofore unmentioned past with other characters, and his oddly anticlimactic and inconclusive defeat (he's clearly not killed, and yet no one worries that he may return). And then there's the castle that suddenly appears in Sunnydale for him to live in! The key (no pun intended) to these oddities is that they all occur immediately prior to Dawn's first appearance; all of the events depicted are a sample of the invented memories created by the Order of Dagon when they inserted the Dawn persona into local reality. It has also been suggested that the monks used the blood "Dracula" got from biting Buffy for the spell they used to create Dawn.
 * Jossed (quite literally) in the Buffy Season 8 comics.

The First won.
An army of primitive vampires would not be enough to take over or destroy the world - the US military has more than enough napalm to stop them. Its plan was always to get all the Slayers activated. Activating all potential Slayers at once would end the Slayer line of succession, preventing any more Slayers being activated ever again.
 * Note that Joss's comic Fray shows a future where no Slayers have existed for a couple hundred years. (The first new one is finally activating.) It's been proposed that this is exactly how that situation came to be.
 * Alternatively, it could be planning to subvert or take over the leadership of the Slayers, turning them into its own army.
 * Alternatively again, humans are just as prone to evil as good. The First doesn't need to subvert all of the Slayers; just having a bunch of superpowerful women around for The First to play with should be plenty. Look at how much damage a single Slayer like Faith causes, and multiply that times dozens or hundreds. It also gives Buffy something to do - now she has to police these new Slayers; and it makes keeping the Masquerade in check even harder.
 * The Continuation comic book series may be heading in this direction, as Bad Slayers are a major plot point. The First hasn't shown up to gloat yet, but...
 * Yeah, this makes sense in a crazy sort of way--Buffy always said that it would "never be Spike"; and yet, as she defeats the First, she says she loves him? And then he says no you don't? There's no way this could be the real Buffyverse.
 * It makes sense at first, but then you have to remember, being a Slayer isn't genetic, it's magical. Unless the spell extends into the future, this makes no sense.
 * The original guess is Jossed by the comic book series, as some Slayers were activated after the spell. But the activation of the Slayers is the reason Fray came to pass:

The place Marcie gets taken at the end of "Out of Mind... Out of Sight" in S1 is The Academy in its early infancy on Earth-that-was.
Government functionaries who wear suits and come in pairs? Check. Teaching insane teenage girls to kill? Check. In a Joss Whedon series? Check.
 * Also, it's the same as The Men in Black organization in Dollhouse, which has the same interest in insane superpowered teenage girls.
 * That actually makes total sense. After the debacle with Adam, the government outsources the whole super-powered teenage girls business to Rossum.
 * We seriously need a fanfic using this concept. Use time travel to have Echo, the crew of Serenity and the Scoobies team up to take them down in the present and future.
 * That also explains why her getting taken was like one big Big Lipped Alligator Moment.

Slayer's powers increase dramatically after their 18th birthday
When a Slayer turns 18 they gain such an increase in abilities that they become a threat to the Watcher's Council. Why else would the Watcher's Council set up an almost impossible task to test the Slayer at their 18th birthday? It makes far more sense to let the Slayer continue to fight rather than practically force them to die then have to spend resources finding and subsequently training a new Slayer unless the Slayer posed some sort of threat to the organization.
 * Its more likely that Slayers are simply less easy to control after their 18th birthday because they've grown up. A high school age girl is much more likely to trust the authority of her watcher and do what he says without question than someone who is now an adult and ready to start taking responsibility for herself and make her own decisions. The Watcher's Council wants a Slayer who's easy to control so they make it so most Slayers don't live long enough to start thinking for themselves.
 * That makes sense because look at who Buffy fought before her 18th. Big Bad 1 + 2 were just vampires but who does she face after her 18th? An original demon, a government sponsored group of demon hunters, a hell god, the personification of dark magic, and the personification of ultimate evil. Each of these villains are drastically more powerful than the Master or Angelus so it only makes sense that she would need a huge strength boost to deal with them.
 * Remember, The Ascended Mayor was fought by an army, and killed with a C4 trap. Those demon hunters were run by the US Government. We do great with killing large armies, but give us a small guerrilla force to fight and we get our asses kicked (See: Korea and 'Nam). The hellgod was only beat due to combined effort, her being distracted and an Expy of Mjolnir. She didn't beat Dark Willow, or even fight her much, and it was Xander's little speech that got her to calm down. Plus, The First had the small problem of being unable to touch anything, and might have still been regaining his strength from that large drop in power he must have gotten when all of LA went under Jasmine's control. Really, the First lacked any power besides for the ability to influence someone.

The Slayer is Neo.
Building off of the previous WMG the world has to be kept in balance. As the Slayer grows in strength (or number) the amount and strength of the evil automatically balances the equation. Killing the Slayer while she's still young and weak (or in Buffy's case not the Slayer because Faith is THE Slayer) keeps the world world safe by keeping the evil low end. It also explains the Trio. With Buffy completely off after being yanked from heaven there was no need for enormous evil.

Dawn Summers is an avatar of Yog-Sothoth from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
One of Yog-Sothoth's aliases is "The Key" -- Dawn's known pre-human identity -- and like her, it controls access to all times and places in and out of the material universe. The Monks of Dagon and the Dagon Sphere also point to Lovecraft, as Dagon was a servant of Cthulhu. In fact, the Backstory of the series, with the Earth being home to eldritch monsters in prehistory, is all but identical with that of the Mythos.
 * Also, both Dawn and Yog-Sothoth have been described as beings of light.

Harmony Kendall is Amanda Buckman from The Addams Family movies under an assumed name.
After her (and her family's) disastrous encounters with the Addamses in Addams Family Values, the entire Buckman clan fled and changed their names to escape the family of occult-loving psychopaths which had targeted them. Unfortunately, they had been "tainted" by the Addamses' attentions and were inevitably drawn to Sunnydale. The Addams influence may have even contributed to Harmony becoming a vampire.
 * Here is a Harmony/Wednesday fic that explores this.

Willow is bi.
She only decided to turn Rick into a girl after Anya mentioned it, when she realized it would be a perfect way to cut out the competition.
 * Doesn't Willow have to be bi, canonically? Unless Joss wants fans to dismiss Willow's relationship with Oz as her being "confused", it seems like she can fall in love with either gender. Even after she and Tara were a couple, she was still describing Oz in soul-matey terms.
 * She also thought that Giles's singing and Dracula were sexy. Willow is probably bisexual but is in denial about still being attracted to guys.
 * Counter suggestion: she's probably heterosexual but Tara was an exception.
 * No, she did it with Kennedy and snake woman, I think the idea that she was into men except for Tara has been blown out of the sky.
 * Remember Restless? Much of Willow's character in seasons five and six is a costume, a new identity and new persona she built so that no one would see scared, geeky computer nerd Willow underneath. A New Willow disguise so thick that Willow herself doesn't even realize she's playing a character. Being a lesbian is part of that character; Willow herself has demonstrated that she's bi on several occasions, but she suppresses it because New Willow is supposed to be 100% gay, just like how New Willow is confident, New Willow is powerful, New Willow can get anything she wants by just throwing magic at it, etc. etc. Being gay instead of bisexual is just part of the costume.
 * In real life (whatever that is) many bisexuals are more attracted to one sex than the other; although they are attracted to both- they tend to prefer on over the other. That may be the case with Willow- who likes both; but likes girls more.
 * More likely she's bisexual, but the trauma of what Oz did, how he did it, and why he did it led her to subconsciously deny male attraction and think that she's a lesbian. Canonically, she's liked more men than women, but women have gone better for her. Which, considering Tara, says quite a bit about my gender...

Not only is Willow bi, the reason she's not into guys any more is magical backlash from the spell against Oz and Veruca.
It was a "screw these two out of ever being able to enjoy love" spell, and the candles and potions were already hovering. All the power and intent was there, but Willow just let it all slough off when she dropped Oz's photo onto the counter instead of in the fire. The spell just isn't formulated to account for bisexuality, and possibly not for homosexuality either unless the targets were each the same sex as the other, which is why Willow was still able to fall for Tara. This is also why Oz leaves- while it makes sense that he should go somewhere without humans to work on control after, the spell pushed him further in that direction, and made Willow feel worse about it (possibly) and get caught up on those feelings and what she felt for Oz any time she would have felt something remotely romantic about a guy (eventually making it magic-powered aversion therapy, like the original spell would probably have been a form of).

Warren built a robot Buffy first.
It's rather suspicious that Warren's robotic girlfriend is strong enough to fight Buffy on an equal footing -- surely it would be simpler to make a human-strength robot. It becomes even more suspicious when you realize the robot is about Buffy's height and build; and Warren admits to knowing Buffy from high school. Obviously, Warren's first robot was a copy of Buffy, super-strength included. He just changed its appearance later on, perhaps because he was afraid Buffy would discover it. This meant he could easily change it back when Spike requested the Buffybot.
 * But Warren, being the hardcore Genre Savvy Nerd that he is, would automatically aim for a robot with stereotypical Sci-Fi attributes. He probably would have made it a Do-Anything Robot with built-in lasers and jets if he had more time.
 * Besides, it's Sunnydale. Having a robot girlfriend who can punch through a brick wall is common sense, what with all those bloody muggings.

Leprechauns do exist in the Buffyverse.
Buffy insists that she doesn't believe in coincidences or leprechauns. The fact that all other creatures of folklore exist in the Buffyverse makes it a lot easier to believe that leprechauns do.
 * There's an old saying that the smartest animal in the world is the one nobody's ever seen. Apply that to the Buffyverse and there's only one conclusion. The ones pulling the strings, the ones towering above the pure demons, the First, even the Powers that Be, are... the leprechauns.
 * A number of demons, etc. on "Buffy" and Angel express derision at the idea of Leprechauns. This is not definitive evidence either way.


 * Alternatively, Leprechauns are the masters of The Masquerade, setting up the image of short, jovial, gold-giving and green-coat-wearing imps to hide the powerfully magical * but still short* beings that have been eluding capture for so long. The Scooby Gang may have even caught a Leprechaun at one point, and had the entire escapade magick'd away at the last...someone needs to write a fanfic about this STAT.
 * Powerfully * cough* livinghalloweendecorations* cough* magical but still * cough* don'ttauntthefeardemon* cough* short? The Scooby Gang may have caught a leprechaun at one point? That's absolutely ridiculous and I doubt anyone will ever write a fic with that in mind. Now excuse me while I go find some cough syrup.

Buffy Came Back Wrong.
It goes a long way towards explaining why she's such an uncaring, domineering bitch in the last two seasons. Some small part of her soul or essence was left behind because Willow's resurrection spell was interrupted by the biker demons at 99% completion. Buffy worries about this during Season 6 (when Spike's chip no longer recognizes her as human); Tara gives her some bizarre, vague Superfriends-esque explanation about "molecules", and then it's never brought up again. Tara was lying.
 * Tara was probably explaining it and being honest as best as she could but there was never enough chance for her to research further before she left the group because of the whole Willow gets high on magic thing.
 * and simplifying a lot because Buffy is, let's be frank, kinda dim.
 * You know the shot at the very end of the opening credits? The show used a different one each season, but it's always of Buffy standing alone, looking powerful and defiant. Except... in the last two seasons, it's not her at all. For Season 6, they use a shot of the Buffybot from the battle with Glory; in Season 7, it's a shot of The-First-as-Buffy from the season premiere. Did we just blow your mind?
 * That was probably an editing mistake but it's an editing mistake that works very well in your argument's favor.
 * Except that Joss Whedon planned even small details out seasons ahead of time, and is a master of Fridge Brilliance.
 * Going to Heaven, being yanked back, having your best friend go psycho on you, and then having to lead a group of scared girls against the biggest, baddest Evil ever...well, you try being warm and friendly.
 * Don't forget having to dig herself out of her own grave!

Slayers are modified vampires.
There are many supernatural abilities that would be useful if you were designing a vampire hunter. But Slayers just have super-strength, rapid healing, and mystical connections with other Slayers that influence their dreams. Just like vampires have super-strength, rapid healing, and mystical connections with other vampires that influence their dreams. Plus, the Slayer creation process puts demonic energy into a human body, which has obvious similarities to the vampire creation process.
 * In Angel, we're told that vampires are low-quality mingling of human and demon; the trip to Lorne's home world lets us see what the demon that lives in vampires looks like. Slayers may be passing along a different sort of demon with similar semi-parasitic qualities. Maybe if Buffy had gone with them on that trip, we could have seen her transform, too.
 * Buffy's powers come from distilled essence of demon. It's entirely possible that the demon(s?) used for this purpose are the same species whose descendants merged with humans to become vampires.

I always worked from the theory that the Clever Men (or whatever the hell you call the Watchers' Coucil in the dawn of time) made a first attempt with a warrior guy. It Went Horribly Wrong, he died and came back as a monster. So they tried again with a woman, and got the Slayers.

The parasitic 'demon' entities powering the Slayers, and possibly the vampires and such, are...
Goa'uld.
 * No, those slugs that hatched from eggs were Goa'uld. And it was this slug that jumpstarted Willow's magic.

Spike is braindamaged.
Spike's spikefication didn't take hold until he developed his crush on one Buffy Summers. The episode in which we first learn about this crush just so happens to be the one in which a doctor had randomly cut into his brain trying (and failing) to remove one annoying chip. Moreover, Spike's sudden crush came as quite a shock even to him. Just out of the blue. While healing. From the brain operation. His spikefication didn't start to accelerate until his Buffy-crush; this crush, and thus the entirety of his spikefication, are a direct result of the brain-cutting. His mind didn't heal correctly.
 * Well, if you want to go down this road: Perhaps the Initiative caused some damage when they put the thing in (the spikefication started in season four, after all); after the botched removal, the chip slowly started to malfunction and leak unpleasant things into his brain (explaining the continuing spikefication). It also randomly conks out in season 7 with no real explanation, but by then the damage is done.
 * The brain damage is possibly healed when he's resurrected in the final season of Angel, as his personality is closer to his old self even though he has a soul.
 * Which makes sense. The spell (or whatever) would reconstruct his "natural" body and wouldn't include the brain damage or chip for the same reason as a mouse with it's tail cut off doesn't give birth to tailless mice. Doesn't explain why his hair is still bleached though. Unless... the spell reconstructs Spike's body from Spike's idealised self-image and he's been bleaching his hair so long that it's part of that self-image.
 * I would take Spike getting closer to his original personality as perhaps being close to Angel, his rival/companion for, heck, most of the 200+ years he's been alive.

Doctor Who and Buffy share a universe.
The vampires and assorted nasties are not aliens, no. No, they have trickled through all through history. But when the Carrionites tear time/space holes in "The Shakespeare Code", they create a semi-dormant link to Quor-Toth, an alternate earth from a history where the Carrionites destroyed the Eternals rather than the Eternals banishing them. The Powers That Be are agents of the White Guardian, The Eternals, or both. The Master is... The Master, probably from the time he was stuck in his last body or else a new body he stole after "Survival" but before the movie.
 * How about this: after the Time War, the Doctor didn't want to be forgotten, so he arranged for the BBC to get its hands on a bunch of archival records from the TARDIS and release them as fiction. This is Old Who (note that Buffy predates New Who, so we don't need to explain that).
 * There was an arc in Old Who about a godlike entity, the Black Guardian, trying to get control of the Key to Time - the final part of which turned out to have been transformed into a teenage girl called Astra. Good thing the Guardian didn't notice what Glory was up to on Earth, or she might have had competition for Dawn...
 * A couple of Buffy characters cameo in the Doctor Who novels, although they also refer to Buffy as being a TV show in the Doctor Who universe (once within the same book.)
 * This is confirmed. A recent Buffy Season 8 Comic featured the Tenth Doctor and Rose ambling merrily along on the street, the TARDIS sitting behind them. It is, of course, only a background detail, but Canon, nonetheless.
 * OH MY FUCKING GOD: Vampire Daleks.
 * The Mother in the S2 episode with the giant, spine-sucking pubic lice slugs from the egss was totally a Dalek with a demon in. Unfortunately, this proves that Daleks have souls.
 * Rose is a slayer.
 * If Rose is a slayer, then Ace must be a potential who never got the call. This would suggest that, if she survived that long, she must have gotten even more badass around 2003 ...
 * In the Angel WMG section, there are some compelling arguments that The Immortal, from one Angel episode, is Jack Harkness.
 * It could be both a show and fact in the Whoniverse. Which means...
 * Developing from the Master from one being the Master from the other, it could be that the Delgado Master got trapped on Earth and was sired, his form eventually shifting to the Master we know from Buffy. His Time Lord heritage would explain why he left a skeleton when staked, from which he could later be restored. Although Buffy smashed the skeleton, he was still partially resurrected from it, becoming the decaying version seen in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ and ‘The Keeper of Traken’, at which point he stole a mortal body again.

The Initiative Airs Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the Buffyverse
After the fall of The Initiative, the government began a project to obfuscate the existance of Slayers and Demons in the world. To this end, they enlist the aid of The Wotchers Watchers to record the events of her life and turn them into a comedy/horror TV show in order to make her escapades seem like fiction. This, incidentally, is why the Doctor Who characters refer to it as both a show and to the "real" characters.

Rupert Giles was killed by Brother Lassar.
Lassar then copied his form and used it to infiltrate a school. See Doctor Who season 2/season 28 (depends how you count), "School Reunion".

Willow is one of the Powers That Be.
She merely forgot who and what she was. It explains her sexual identity confusion (the PTB's are genderless), her intelligence, and her disproportionately rapid growth of skills with both information systems and magic. It also explains why she grows arrogant the more power she uses (although this has happened in Real Life to people who gain only a little power).

Claymores are Slayers.
Female warriors created by a shadowy organisation by infusing girls with demonic/yoma power. Does this seem familiar? Demonic powers are stronger in the Claymore-verse, making the Claymores more powerful, but Claymores are at risk of succumbing to their demonic nature themselves. Also note that in the Buffyverse, there are no male Slayers known to exist; in the Claymore universe, attempts at creating male warriors were abandoned because they fell to their demonic nature too easily... perhaps the same thing happened when the watchers tried to infuse a male with Slayer power in the Buffyverse?

The real reason the Watchers are British...
Is that, as everyone knows, the best thing to have after you've given blood (or just had your neck savaged by a brutal gang of undead monsters) is a cup of hot sweet tea. Basing the operation in Britain was a shortcut to this basic survival method.
 * On the other hand, how much direct sunlight does Britain get?
 * About seventeen minutes a year. I live here and have timed it.
 * The Watchers have headquarters in an area that gets little direct sunlight so that their vampirical observations are as up to date as possible.

Tara was killed by a sniper sent by The First or some other agent of the apocalypse
It strains credibility (even within the context of the show) that the shot that killed Tara could have come from Warren's gun. Someone was trying to bring about the End of the World, and it simply coincided with Warren's attack on the Scoobies.
 * Alternatively, the second shooter deliberately framed Warren to give the Scoobies the perfect fall guy-- one who believes that he did it. While the Scoobies are chasing after him, the real killer gets to escape scot-free, knowing that Willow will go evil and kill someone for a crime he did not actually technically commit (he did shoot Buffy in cold blood).
 * The second shooter convinced Warren to go after Buffy with a gun, and even asked him to do it at a specific time under the pretense of getting a good look, or else used magic or hypnosis to go after Buffy at the time specified.
 * This 'second shooter' would have had to follow Warren because Willow uses Tara's blood to find the person who killed Tara, not Warren specifically.
 * Redirect Spell.
 * This was Jossed in-episode by a follow-the-bullet cam.
 * The shot came from the grassy knoll.
 * Was there a cameraman named Zapruder for that episode ?
 * When did this follow the bullet cam scene happen (and which episode of the several that followed Tara's death)?

The Watchers and Slayers are headquartered in a tropical region or a desert for near-constant vamp-killing rays.
This would explain the origins of several different religions that hail from desert, semi-arid, or tropical regions.
 * Note that this is compatible with the Watchers being British. The UK might not get that much sun, but there were a few hundred years when the British Empire was full of tropical regions and deserts. Even now, they could have headquarters in Gibraltar.
 * Then again, California is full of deserts...
 * The imperial connection was always how I figured they transitioned from African shamans to stuffy Brits.

Willow Didn't Restore Amy to Human Form
The "Amy" Willow supposedly restored is a demon who took advantage of Willow's mental state during the "magical addiction" arc to manifest as Amy, disposing of the real Amy by eating her, absorbing her, or squirreling her away in a Hell Dimension.

The first time we see Amy Madison (S1), she's a meek, frightened girl trapped in her mother's body. Later (S2), we see her using not-especially-powerful magic to fake good grades and botch a love spell (aided by Xander's mixed feelings); then we see her change herself irreversibly into a rat (S3). Three years later (S6), we see Willow finally figure out how to change Amy back; in a peculiar use of her powers, she somehow magically devises the spell to accomplish that.

While the restored Amy is superficially similar to the girl Willow knew in high school, she's markedly more powerful than before, at the lower end of S6's Willow's power range. She's also amoral; she mind-controls pretty girls to be smitten with Willow. Then she shifts over to outright hostile and evil by cursing Willow in S7

Considering Willow's resurrect-Buffy spell, made carefully during a saner time, may have been flawed, there's no reason to assume that the wildly off-the-cuff rat-to-Amy spell worked as advertised.
 * Hmm. This would also explain why she was intimately familiar with Sunnydale's underground magic scene (for example, Rack's literally invisible opium den hideout).
 * If this is true... then Amy may be one of the most Woobieful characters in the Buffyverse. Her mother steals her body, she gets stuck as a rat, and now she's in a hell dimension? Jesus.
 * I think that I'd like to dispute this. In S 4 x E 09 ("Something Blue"), we  before  . If anything, I believe that brief moment gave Amy but a taste of what it'd be like to be human again, so this example (for lack of a better term) might give some sort of credence to your idea.
 * Amy wasn't restored to human form because the spell that Willow used to reveal a way to de-rat Amy used a power of a demon, so the actual spell not only restored Amy, but also put a demon in her, producing a creature in many respects similar to a vampire, hence no conscience and a massive powerup.

Amy's time spent stuck as a rat messed with her mind.
Her greater recklessness and lower inhibitions explain why her magic seems more powerful-- she was not holding back anymore.
 * You'd think that if Amy had already possessed the sort of powers she and Willow showed in 6th season, she would have come up with something better than "irreversibly turn into a rat" when people tried to burn her at the stake.
 * Well...yanno... spells tend to go really wrong in Sunnydale.
 * I got the feeling from that particular episode that she was trying to turn the townspeople into rats, and that something Hansel and Gretel had done caused the spell to backfire, literally.
 * This troper's housemate suggested after watching Graduation Day that the thing that really messed with her mind was having to be there in the room whenever Willow had sex.

Harmony never had a soul, not even as a human
This is why her personality got slightly better (taking her appearances in Angel into account). Becoming a vampire simply gave her a taste for blood.
 * Alternatively, Harmony is an ensouled vampire; but because she wasn't that nice a person to begin with, no-one, not even her, ever noticed.
 * Her main personality trait as a human - her petty sadism and meanness - vanishes after she becomes a vampire. Vampire Harmony is only mean towards her enemies or when angry, and is most respects is a nicer person (in an amoral drink your blood way).
 * This probably has a great deal to do with losing her soul. According to Angel, despite all the horrible things he did as Angelus, he never felt any malice toward his victims. Harmony was mean because she desired to be popular and thought she was better than everyone else. Vamp!Harmony is a nicer person because she no longer cares about those things.
 * Maybe a soul isn't necessarily a good thing - just a personality-defining thing that mortals have and vampires don't.
 * Not having a soul as a human would explain why the Scooby Gang is so blase when they learn she has become a vampire. There was no tragedy; a soulless monster has now become a demonically inhabited monster.
 * Or else Harmony's flaw was that she just didn't listen to the little voice in her head that told her what was right and wrong. Now that her human conscience has been replaced with demonic evil and right and wrong are inverted, she still doesn't listen to it.
 * I figured Harmony never had a personality of her own. She is an incurable follower, which made her a perfect Cordette in high school, and when she was on Angel she tried to get accepted by the heroes until a villain stood up and told her what to think, whereupon she immediately caved. Twice.

Vampires take on the "shape" of their host personalities.
Drusilla was already insane when she turned, so vamp Dru is also insane. William was a determined idealist, and he kept his idealism until Angelus finally stomped on it and remade him as Spike. Liam didn't have any defining traits, which let Angelus's demonic side kick into overdrive (which, ironically, is what gave Angel a belated sense of purpose once he got his soul back). Harmony's big personality trait is that she wants to belong, and so, even as a vampire, she's still seeking validation and trying to get people to like her. ""What we once were informs all that we have become.""
 * Liam's main trait was his hedonism. Angelus took that, added an extreme lack of conscience, and ran with it.
 * Backed up, if not outright confirmed, by Darla's line in the Angel episode The Prodigal:

Tara faked her own death or killed herself off
Remember, Tara was the mysterious spirit guide in Buffy's visions before. She came in and did her thing to shake up the Scoobies (Willow ended up plowing through her evil to become an uber-powerful White Witch); and then, when it was time, she 'left'. At the very least, Tara was an agent of the Powers That Be.

Tara is fighting evil in another dimension
The First could imitate any dead person, but it did not assume the shape of Tara when trying to tempt Willow towards suicide in "Conversations with Dead People" - instead, it awkwardly assumed the guise of a ghost who claimed to be in contact with her, as if there was something special about Tara that would prevent it from doing so.

There was: at or after her death, Tara ascended as a servant of the Powers That Be. Ever since, she's been a glowy spirit-entity working to make the universe a better place.
 * The commentary on that episode simply says that they did the weird secondhand-tempting thing because the actor that played Tara couldn't do it then.

The Prize from Highlander is to become The Slayer
When The Gathering ended with only one immortal remaining in the late 1990s, that Immortal (Amanda) gained vast physical power beyond a normal Immortal and nigh-omniscience. Unfortunately, Ahriman/The First killed her. The Prize then passed to another but was twisted so that the "omniscience" portion was not accessible to a mind as small as that of a mortal human - only someone with centuries of context or or the free association of the unconscious (for example, someone who is dreaming) could gain its vast knowledge.
 * The Watchers found out about this and promptly began lying to this new Prizeholder about pretty much everything.
 * That doesn't work. There were male Highlanders and there can't be male Slayers.
 * And who told you that there can't be male Slayers? The Watchers.

Xander is another female Slayer.
The line diverged before Buffy drowned. Xander has been called as well. This is how 'he' can survive getting beaten and broken and stabbed in the eye and so forth. Everyone tolerates Xander's male delusion; it's harmless compared to, yanno, Angel going balls-evil.
 * Alternatively, Xander has girly parts. Faith and Anya never said anything because they are kinky that way.
 * What about "His penis got diseases from a Chumash tribe"?
 * Maybe he's an XXY carrier with Xander-shaped bits on one X and the Y and Slayer-y bits on the other X.
 * That could make a good fanfic...
 * There are Real Life conditions only seen in girls that are X-linked dominant with a lethal recessive form. For example, Rett Syndrome in girls causes an acquired form of severe autism, and in boys causes a severe degenerative brain disorder that kills them in infancy. It could be that being a Potential is genetically determined by an X-linked gene, which is fatal unless you have a normal allele as well - or else Potentials without a normal allele have something really bad happen if they're ever called (maybe they turn into a demon?). Therefore, an XXY guy would be just fine as a Slayer, but would never get called because the Slayer spell was designed to only call girls. Principal Wood could be an uncalled male Potential, which would explain why he managed to hold his own fighting vampires.
 * If this is the case, how did both the coven and Willow miss him when looking for Potentials in Season 7?
 * The Y chromosome shields him from detection-- the spell was only looking for fully-female Potentials.

Buffy was hand-picked by the Powers That Be to be the Slayer as part of a Gambit Roulette to replace the ineffective Watchers' Council with the more powerful Scooby Gang.
Normally, the Slayer is picked at random from the few thousand or so Potential Slayers active at any time. However, the Powers That Be deliberately intervened to ensure that Buffy was picked over all the other Slayers because they knew she was different. They knew that Lothos would kill Merrick before he had a chance to "properly" train Buffy - she would learn on her own. They knew she would end up in Sunnydale (being from Los Angeles, she would inevitably be drawn towards the Hellmouth). They knew that Buffy would never accept orders from the Council - or anyone else. They knew she would recruit civilian allies who would become powerful warriors in their own right. Eventually, this would have led to a power play between the Watcher's Council and the Scooby Gang, which the Scoobies would win. This came to pass in "Checkpoint". It is likely, that had a new Slayer been called prior to the destruction of Sunnydale (say, if Faith had died in prison), the new Slayer would have been brought to Sunnydale.

Twilight has a hold over .
Think about it. The man's already. Why would you trust a guy who's done that to ? Answer: Twilight has.
 * Or, alternatively, he's a triple-agent just pretending to be working with Twilight while loyal to the good guys.
 * For a minute, this looked like it would be about Cullens.

Faith is one of Xena: Warrior Princess's many incarnations.
She's proactive and has the whole fall and redemption thing going on...

If Buffy turns evil, then Spike will be compelled to kill or redeem her, or else lose his soul.
Angel got his soul as a curse. Therefore, he loses his soul whenever it stops being a curse--that is, when it makes him happy.

Spike got his soul "so Buffy can get what she deserves". So he should lose his soul if Buffy ever doesn't get what she deserves.
 * This would be considerably easier if he were still in regular contact with Buffy. Right now, it's possible that he could lose his soul and no one would even notice (since ensouled!Spike isn't as different from soulless!Spike as Angel is from Angelus).
 * Alternatively, Buffy must always be miserable unless she turns evil, or else Spike will lose his soul. The stipulation here is that he has his soul so that "Buffy can get what she deserves", so if she ever DOES get what she deserves, the contract will be ended, and his soul returned to where it belongs (wherever that may be).
 * So, when someone finally punches her in the face and tells her to shove the general bullshit up her ass he'll lose his soul?

Slayer healing abilities are not limited to physical injuries.
They also extend to mental scars. All of the Scoobies are Woobies to some extent, but Buffy takes the cake. Yet none of the trauma she suffers ever lasts more than a few episodes. The exception is the scarring from her death and resurrection, but she even recovers from that by Season Seven. Apparently, Slayers are mentally tough as well as physically - which would make sense, given their job description.
 * It would also explain how Faith recovered from her coma. A normal human being would have remained in that coma forever.
 * This ability would presumably be linked to the endorphin rush slayers receive on dusting a vamp, or as Faith puts it, feeling "happy, hungry and horny."
 * The cause and effect could be reversed here, though. Slayers who don't have the resilience to deal with the sort of things they see die even sooner than average, and therefore don't get shows made about them.

The Watcher's Council has been outright evil since forever
They do their thing to knock off the competition. They do good as a propoganda machine. Saving the world means that there is a world for them to screw around with, like how Lex Luthor has assisted in saving the world because it's where he keeps all his stuff.
 * It would also explain so much more. When, for the first time in history, there are two Slayers, who shows up? First, a psychopathic nutjob who faked being a new Watcher because of a paperwork error. Sure. Uh huh. Nobody calls to say 'Hey, Giles, one of our female watchers went insane'. Then the person they DO send is an ineffectual loser who nearly wets his pants in his first fight.
 * It also would explain the homicidal mania they display if a Slayer has an eighteenth birthday.
 * Heck The Watcher's Council is almost certainly going out of their way to make the Slayer ineffective. In fact...

The True Purpose of The Watcher's Council is to Prevent the Slayer From Becoming Powerful
And they might be working for The First. Everything they have ever done has been to prevent Buffy from making a move she knows she ought to from the start, and they never seem to do anything to help her unless she uses considerable pressure. A few Watchers were chosen to join the council and establish a pretense of being good protectors of The Slayer, chosen because the council believes they will be inefficient in preparing The Slayer for her duties.

The Watcher's Council is (Partially) a Fraud
The Watcher's Council was one of many occult orders founded by self-interested Victorian would-be wizards in the late 19th century. Unlike most, they gained power and prominence for successfully finding real occult knowledge. Then, they lucked out big time, and discovered either the Slayer Line, or the means to create/activate it. Getting their hands on a form of mystic champion they could control put them over the top. The whole story about the origins of the Slayer and how the Watcher's Council exists to aid her in fighting evil? Mostly invented, for the benefit of better controlling the Slayer. Also why they try to kill off Slayers that get to old; younger Slayers are easier to control. The handful of decent Watchers are basically dupes, who joined the organization off their propaganda and haven't been told the real truth of why the order exists: the power and profit of its inner circle.

Kennedy knew about Willow's sexuality before they even met.
In "The Killer In Me", Kennedy describes the process of figuring out a girl's sexuality ("flirting in code"). The process she describes is slow. But Kennedy was coming on to Willow pretty quickly, and Willow couldn't have been giving off a lot of signals without us noticing. Most likely, Giles briefed the Potentials on the situation in Sunnydale on the way over, and either told them about Tara or simply mentioned that Willow was lesbian.
 * Or he told that to them to see who would bunk with her because they might find it awkward.

One of the minor Slayer powers is the ability to function without sleep.
Throughout her career, Buffy is shown as getting by with very little sleep. In the first three seasons, she usually gets back from patrol well after midnight, but she manages to get up in the morning for school after what can't be more than a few hours of sleep. It is also unlikely that she compensates by sleeping in on weekends - Joyce would have noticed if Buffy was normally getting up at around three in the afternoon on Saturday. More likely, the most important functions of sleep - healing and processing of nutrients - are taken care of by Slayer healing. Buffy needs sleep mostly for psychological reasons.
 * In Season Seven, the Potentials are shown as talking all night, leading to Xander's comment that "Potentials can get by without sleep". This comment may have been in jest, or it may have been a reflection of reality. Perhaps even Potentials have the ability to function with minimal sleep.
 * In conjunction with the "Slayers are humans mixed with Vampire power" theory above, this might explain why Vampires get their sleep at night, despite being nighttime creatures. They only need a little, and at that time of night, nobody is around anyway.

Potential Slayers aren't chosen by fate. They just fit the profile.
The gist of this theory is that it takes a certain mix of physical and mental characteristics to handle Slayer power, beyond being female. All the Potentials, and all the girls activated in "Chosen", seem to fit a certain physical profile - adolescent, good physical shape. Beyond that, there is probably a common set of mental traits that Slayers must have, probably including bravery, mental fortitude, good instincts, and a spine of steel. Most people wouldn't be tough enough to handle what the Potentials do; but they do it, only breaking down under extreme stress. In the end, there are only a couple thousand people in the world who meet all these requirements.
 * Hypothetically, it could be possible to identify a Potential without magic but with a battery of sophisticated physical and psychological tests.
 * This could tie in to how the Watchers locate Potentials. They've infiltrated the psychiatric community, and altered the majority of common psychological tests to pick up on traits that might indicate a Potential. If a girl fits the profile, she's flagged for further investigation, probably involving magic.
 * Or maybe there is a secret test, hidden in SATs...
 * The age requirement probably only applies to the ability to receive the power. At least three Slayers made it to their early twenties with no loss of powers (Buffy, Faith, and Nikki Wood).
 * And odds are, more would have if the Watchers hadn't had a policy of killing 18-year-old Slayers.

Tara was an evil force in human form
From the first moment she showed up, Tara preoccupied Willow; and she was the one who really got her into magic. Without Tara, Willow would have come close to being the powerful witch she wound up as; but we saw how Willow fell over the edge in season 6. That was Tara's intention all along, to turn Willow evil. Note how Willow never had displayed any attraction to females before she met Tara, then turned exclusively lesbian - Tara has psychological powers and tapped into Willow's brain and enhanced her attraction to women and depleted her attraction to men. She also does this to Oz, making him angry enough about Willow & Tara to turn into a werewolf about it - henceforth ruining his chance at getting Willow back and eliminating him as competition.

Tara may have intentionally screwed up the 'you will not see' spell to wreck everything for the Scoobies. While her family were sexist bastards, Tara thought they had figured out what she was; her smile at the end of Family was not happiness at having people care about her, but a smug smirk of victory. Beth's obsessive belief of what her family says about the women in it could be put down to Beth having some idea of Tara's true nature, and the 'demon' thing has an easy justification.

Tara leaves Willow when the magic addiction gets out of hand, and this is said to be her trying not to get hurt. But it could be Tara trying to mess with Willow's head and make her even worse, spiraling the magic thing out of hand. For a couple of episodes, it works. They get back together when Willow seems to be doing better... only for Tara to die next episode. Coincidence? Tara organized her "death" (which was probably more like going back to whatever evil dimension she came from) simply to push Willow completely over the edge, which worked. Her psychological powers may have been what convinced Warren to come after Buffy, and shoot Tara (an accident, but she still could have manipulated it).

Plus, she's so goddamn nice, she has to be evil.

Xander has a subconscious deathwish.
He's basically so determined to fight the evil despite logic that it comes off as strange. The Zeppo is full of evidence for this: he seemed to have jumped directly in the demon's path for no reason. Buffy and Faith say outright that he'll get himself killed, and he seems okay with their saying it. He also avoids telling the others about the zombie issues, not even a passing mention - did he want to face it alone, where he had way worse of a chance?
 * It could also be interpreted as a desire to help his friends and a lack of training. He didn't tell them about the zombies because they were busy preventing the apocalypse and wanted him kept out of it.

Also, in the bomb scene, he seems almost stalling with all his talk to Jack. He also seems slightly taken aback when Jack dismantles the bomb. Hell, he says outright: "I like the quiet."
 * I don't think he expected his plan to work. Also a psychological attack does take time. In that case the "I like the quiet" line makes more sense.

Restless contains a few hints too, with Dream!Giles calling Apocalypse Now, which is probably meant to be a metaphor for Xander's life or just life, "overrated". Also, Dream!Joyce offering him "rest", which could mean god knows how many things. Even in Grave, he puts himself in the most dangerous situation possible - standing between a uber-powerful witch hellbent on global destruction and the same global destruction. He wanted to save the world and his friend; but he seems almost baiting her to make her attack him, so did he want to save himself?
 * Another thing to note is something David Fury said. According to him, Xander's soldier skills, obtained in "Halloween", have faded from lack of use. Fair enough; Xander rarely handles anything gun-like after that episode. Unfortunately, people seem to forget that he had a competent level of hand-to-hand combat skill. This also fades, bringing him to his lowest point, his slap-fight with Harmony. That's right, he let a useful skill deteriorate despite constantly being in the fray. He's either a creative Death Seeker, has Medium Awareness and is going for comedy at his own expense, or is trying to be The Millstone.
 * In "Grave" the only way to make her stop is to force her to acknowledge an emotion other than pure rage. Xander did that when no other chacter could.
 * He willingly sleeps outside on Christmas when he knows better. I think we can safely strike "subconsious" off this guess.
 * Or maybe he just considers various demons to be better company that his drunk parents.

Anya created the second Hellmouth in Cleveland through Cordelia's wish.
In the Season 3 episode, "The Wish," Anya created an alternate reality where "Buffy Summers never came to Sunnydale," as Cordelia wished. To make this happen, there had to be a reason for Buffy to not go there, since the Powers That Be would have compelled the Slayer to go to the Hellmouth to fight its evil. The answer: have the Hellmouth be somewhere else. The problem was that this would seriously disrupt the time stream; Sunnydale was built where it was by Mayor Wilkins centuries ago because there was a Hellmouth there. The best way to grant Cordelia's wish and maintain a Stable Time Loop was to create another Hellmouth for Buffy to be sent to by the Powers. In the series finale, "Chosen," we learn from Giles that the Hellmouth in Cleveland exists in that reality too. So this part of the wish wasn't limited to the "Wishverse."
 * Everything reverted when her power was broken so the Hellmouth existed before the reality warp.

Willow accidentally stole a part of Giles' soul when she stole his borrowed magic
Hence his horrible Character Derailment in season 7. Willow took the "true" magic from him, which comes from the essence of humanity; when she did that, she took some of his humanity. (She does turn into the mentor figure of the group.) Giles knew this would happen when he decided to dose her with the true magic. That's what he meant when he told Anya he was dying - he wasn't physically dying, but the Giles she and the gang knew would soon be gone.

Spike is homophobic
Think about it. Whenever other vampires suggest 'feeding' off males, he freaks out. His hatred for Angel comes from that one time; Angel remembers and wouldn't let him forget it. This explains the numerous poofter comments about Angel beyond simple insults.
 * It's also possible that Angelus raped him "that one time," and that resulted in his homophobia. It makes sense because Angelus was big on rape, and Spike was tame as far as vampires go before he joined the Scourge of Europe.
 * If there was any fic going with this premise, somebody should totally link it.
 * However, when Spike mentions "that one time", it sounds off-hand and nothing to really be concerned with, nothing traumatic like rape.
 * This troper firmly believes that after a certain amount of time Spike would merely cease to care. Or at least make a show of doing so. (And if you've formed enough of a... psychological callus, I guess, around the subject, it's not impossible to make light of being raped.)
 * "Whenever other vampires suggest 'feeding' off males, he freaks out" - um, when did this happen?
 * Joss has explicitly said that neither Angel or Spike had any such prejudices, and the implied liaison was consensual, if it happened at all.
 * Spike has sired at least one male vampire, Holden Webster.
 * Two. Billy Fordham as well.
 * The fact thatt Spike never once showed any sort of negitive reaction to Tara & Willow's relationship points to the fact that he isn't homophobic. When he first found out, he quite literally shrugged it off and proceeded to go about his buisness.

Tara is tied to 'The Key'/Dawn somehow
Glory herself mistook her for it. She always seemed bonded with Dawn; when she died, Dawn's response was a physical breakdown - she didn't move for what must have been hours, possibly even a night. The timing is also suspicious - Tara appears the year before Dawn does and dies the year after the business with Glory ends. In Restless, Tara plays the cryptic mentor, giving foreshadowing of Dawn's arrival: "Be back before Dawn".
 * Yeah, Tara and Dawn have a connection. It's just not mystical, it's the fact that when Buffy died Tara basically became Dawn's mommy. And then she died. So that's three mother figures that have died in a row. Not to mention this one in particular she finds in a pool of blood in her own home. You'd be traumatized too.

When Dawn dies, another person will be created to be 'The Key'
The Key seems like something eternal; it's not going to be destroyed. But Dawn is human and will live out a human life. When she dies, it has to go somewhere. It is now bound to our world and human form; so upon losing one, it creates another. However, as it's not guided by the monks anymore, the creation will probably not be done so well - not created into a family like Dawn's, things like that. 'The Key' will probably wind up being the new Chosen One for the magical world.

Alternatively...

Dawn cannot die a natural death
As mentioned before, for this theory, the Key cannot be destroyed. The ritual Glory performed would make it lose its human form, but not destroy it. Apart from this ritual, the Key will stay around, and it will stay in its human form - Dawn. We do see her age over the 3 years she's on the show, and the human form of the key does seem completely human, following human processes - so this will be Age Without Youth.
 * However, it's worth mentioning that aging is not the same process as maturation. It is entirely possible that one won't happen, while the other will.

Memory spell caused Joyce's brain tumour.

 * Monks of Dagon cast the memory spell to plant fake memories about Dawn. After being mind-raped, Joyce catches brain-cancer. Coincidence???
 * I was just about to post this, looks like I got beaten to the punch ages ago. It makes sense; while the spell affected a lot of people, it effected Joyce the most; it had to rewrite a TON of her memories, far more than anyone else except for Buffy, who's a Slayer and can handle it better. The modification of 14 years of memories was a lot for her brain to handle, and so a tumor formed. Willow and Xander are fine because they only had a few years of memories rewritten, and most of the past few years wouldn't have focused a lot on Dawn anyway, so not nearly as much had to be changed.
 * Monks' spell is clearly related to Glory's forget spell and Jonathan's Superstar spell.

Darla was a slayer when she was alive
Vampires tend to be the inverse of the people they were in life. Drusilla was innocent and completely tormented as a human, devious but happy as a vampire. William was weak and timid as human; Spike is brash and headstrong. Liam was full of human weaknesses, and Angelus had no humanity in him. Harmony was petty and cruel as human, and nice as a vampire.

One thing we notice about Darla is that she rarely uses violence to secure her victims, preferring to lure them - completely opposite to a slayer.

In the flashback of her turning in Darla, she doesn't seem shocked to see The Master in full vamp face. He seems to have sought her out to turn into a vampire, which he would not do if there was not something special about her. Making a slayer a vampire seems like a good recipe to make a powerful vampire.

She appears to have no memory of her human life or name. She may have repressed these memories because of the dissonance between her lives, and to try to get rid of any leftover instincts telling her to destroy vampires, including herself.

Her breakdown when returning to human is odd, since it doesn't seem to be from guilt or anything one would expect to come with a soul. This is the return of all those slayer instincts, telling her to destroy vampires, which still includes her by her way of thinking.

She also doesn't seem to lose much strength on her return to human form; vampire strength is replaced by slayer strength. She is the first vampire we ever see on BtVS, which should mean something. In the end, both times she dies, she is killed by a vampire, not the Slayer or any human: She's killed by Angel in Angel and by herself in Lullaby.
 * It's actually implied in the Angel episode "Epiphany" that she was a prostitute. Which of course doesn't rule out her being a Slayer, but still.
 * A profession where she goes out mainly at night in the "wrong part of town"? It's the perfect cover!

Plus, it'd be cool.
 * In some expanded universe materials of questionable canonicity, the Master turned a Japanese Slayer named Yuki Makimura a few years after he sired Darla (which could be indicative of a pattern); and there is a space of a few months between Yuki and the known Slayer before her in which the identity of the Slayer is unknown. However, a lot of this comes from material which is not officially canon but does not directly contradict canon, so take it with a grain of salt.

When Dawn sacrificed herself to save the world, Buffy couldn't deal with this last loss and went into catatonia for a summer - the summer she spent "dead". When she was awake again, she created an elaborate fantasy where she saved Dawn. However, how much she hated herself for what happened to Dawn crept in; hence how angsty things got in the last two seasons. All her friends do horrible things (Willow's Face Heel Turn, Xander leaving Anya at the altar, Anya's return to vengeance) because she blames them for what happened to Dawn as well. "Normal Again" is her subconscious hinting to her conscious mind what has happened, but more blame issues (towards her friends) interfere. Buffy's delusions paint a picture of Dawn living a normal life, not being "the key" anymore; but Buffy does not believe she could ever take care of Dawn properly, hence Dawn's isolation and kleptomania in season 6.

By season 7, Buffy is starting to forgive herself and everyone else for Dawn's fate; hence everyone's morality improving - Willow's return from the dark side, Anya's return from vengeance, Spike gaining his soul - and herself, living again.

The Big Bads for seasons 6 and 7 are both symbols of what caused Dawn's death. Willow is their not defeating Glory in time, failing to save her. The First is simply the big mystical force of death. Death follows in the delusions, hence Tara - Buffy may not even have known Tara had regained her sanity before Dawn's death, giving extra meaning to that choice for a death. Willow in season 6 is picked to commit the worst crimes because of the magic, which Buffy no longer trusts because of the magical ritual and portal that led to Dawn dying. When the Potentials are activated, it means, for Buffy, that she will be less of an evil-apocalyptic-demon-magnet and not so special - and henceforth give Dawn a safer life. Buffy may or may not recover from her insanity.
 * This makes a lot more sense than one of the newer theories that Buffy has always been in delusions. Buffy just isn't creative enough to craft 7+ years worth of fake memories but if 5 of those years had been real and then she became insane it would make more sense because she already had enough knowledge of real demons to basically make up a few instances later.
 * One problem with both of those theories. Angel. Why? Because, Buffy isn't creative enough to create Angel Seasons 3, 4, and 5. Especially 5. Not to mention the fact she still hated Faith as of S5. Faith being turned to to save the day and becoming one of the good guys...plus the fact that Buffy would have had to create a few of his flashbacks, and the whole WW 2 thing doesn't seem like her kind of thing, plus the whole weird Illyria time flashing thingy.
 * Going with this whole theory, it's possible that Buffy's hallucinations of Season Six and onward were in 'real time'. While it makes sense Buffy probably wouldn't think-up Angel Seasons 3, 4, and 5, Buffy's opinion of people could have changed over time. After Dawn dies, Buffy hates herself and even the others for failing to save her, thus all the Character Derailment in S6 (although why Dawn went through some is a little strange). She didn't really get to know Tara, so she was the only one who couldn't go through derailment. However, ultimately, Tara was killed because Buffy didn't want herself or Willow to be happy. By Season Seven, however, Buffy begins to forgive everyone, even Spike and Faith. Of course, since she's so used to death but didn't want any of her friends to die, she came up with the Redshirt Army, the Potentials. Spike probably died because she never really stopped hating him or her hate was enhanced by Spike's Attempted Rape of her, even if it was just one of her hallucinations.
 * Actually Joss thinks that Buffy was creative enough to make the whole thing up plus all of Angel. According to him though, the delusions were in fact from ''Normal Again'.

Buffy's life is a delusion created by the First
A fairly new theory is that Buffy's adventures always took place in her head and that none of it is real. The problem with those theories is that Buffy has never shown much creativity and so it is unlikely that she'd have the ability to invent an entire life that detailed for herself. What happened is that she was activated as a Slayer and she did burn down her school gym. The First realized that Buffy would be an ultra powerful slayer but he couldn't risk letting a new slayer get chosen, so he put Buffy into a state of delusion. All the adventures that would've happened to her happened in her head which allowed her to think that she was fulfilling her goal. Meanwhile, the Watcher's Council went crazy trying to find the Slayer while the Master and the Mayor divided Sunnydale between them, the Initiative fell due to these two unstoppable forces fighting against them, Angel retreated to LA because he couldn't fight alone, Glory got to the Key and used her armies to conquer the world before Dark Willow cleansed all other evils from the earth. Ultimately the First made a deal with Dark Willow and the two ruled over earth for eternity. All the while Buffy continued to be a mental patient who never realized her potential.
 * I doubt the Master would ever strike a deal with the Mayor. The Mayor might have approached the Master, I just doubt the Master would agree to it, thus making the Mayor send someone to kill the Master. Glory didn't want to conquer the world; she just wanted to go home, but that would release all sorts of demons into the world. If Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, there would be no Dark Willow. Just Vamp Willow, who would be under the Master's rule anyway. The First would not have been able to build an army without Buffy being brought back to life. So there'd just be the Mayor and Glory who won. MAYBE the Master. If the Mayor hadn't already disposed of him.
 * You mean the Master and or Glory who won. It seems self evident that in the Wish the Mayor was dead or dealt with. Before the count down to Ascending a he was simply ageless not invulnerable. Master comes up and kills him dead. Glory is a wild card here because honestly there lots of places to hide a key that less conspicious.
 * Solid point that it seems self evident that as of year three it seems the Master would have won without challenge. We don't know the limits to what the Key could be made into. I assume there is a reason it wasn't made into say a satelite. If it was made into ANYTHING kept on earth the snake spell would have worked to locate it. Thing is who knows what the Master would have done in that situation. He seems pragmatic enough that he might have opened the portal, let Glory go home and kill/destroy the key and be done with it. The kink in the hose for me is what reason do we have to believe the Initiative wouldn't have still created Adam and either A hoped to control him (Maggie Walsh was a lot of things but suicidal and stupid weren't on the list) or B much like in many Godzilla flicks cut him loose anyway thinking the situation can't get any worse?

Buffy's life is actually a novel or series of novels written by Dawn.
While Buffy may not be creative enough to invent her detailed life, Dawn probably is. Having moved to a new town at the age of ten or so, isolated and probably socially awkward, she creates a fictional alter ego for herself. Older, prettier, and supernaturally powerful, Buffy (a name that would probably seem appealing to a ten year old) is supposed to be cool and popular, and yet is suspiciously unable to choose the right outfit for a party, because Dawn would have no idea what to wear. Her only friends are sweet but dorky, possibly based on people in Dawn's real life social circle.

Eventually, Dawn begins to view all this as Old Shame. (Note the burning of years' worth of diaries upon the discovery that Dawn is the Key.) Not ready to give it up, she tries to improve the series by introducing new characters and settings and a more impressive villain, and by changing Willow from a shy nerd to a badass lesbian witch. (She portrays more and more magic use, possibly having gotten into schoolgirl Wicca on the side. Also she clearly doesn't understand homosexuality yet.) She also writes herself in (as herself, not her idealized big sister) and falls into many of the traps common to writers at that age--Dawn-the-character is the sort-of long-lost sister of the main character, mysterious and more than she seems, the center of everyone's attention with the fate of the world in her hands, which is supposed to result in her death but doesn't. Spike is friendly with her and allows PG romantic tension with the most attractive (to a young teen) character, and even Glory is nice to her toward the end (hilariously).

The Buffyverse version of Joss Whedon is a member of the Scooby organization in the Season Eight comics
In "The Long Way Home", we see a Slayer reading Joss's Fray comic. Therefore, Fray exists in the Buffyverse. However, the comic itself was written by someone with detailed knowledge of the Slayers and the scythe. The chances of someone outside the organization having that knowledge are virtually nil. Most likely, the Buffyverse Joss is a warlock or technician who works for Buffy. He wrote Fray in his spare time, and it is published exclusively within the organization.
 * In addition, he also wrote "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" in order to help obfuscate the existance of an actual Vampire Slayer named Buffy, and to give hope to people who have encountered demons.
 * Note: It's the panel where Andrew complains about being bored while three Slayers play strip poker in the background. A fourth is farther back, reading it.
 * Or perhaps he fell through the universes and is our Joss.

Harmony is amazing in bed
There's no other reason why Spike would have tolerated her for that long.
 * She was a cheerleader and the second most popular girl in the most popular clique in the school. All this adds up to Harmony being a sexpert
 * Makes sense, as stated above, Spike put up with her for that long. Furthermore, Hamilton looked awfully satisfied after bedding her towards the end of Angel S5.

Drusilla went by another name as a human
It's unlikely that a girl from a normal 19th-century English family would be named after Caligula's sister. Also, the others in the Scourge of Europe took new names as vampires. Angelus and Spike picked theirs, and Darla was named by the Master. The Master must have required them to change their names, so...

Faith is a Doll who went off assignment
The Council found out that Echo was the new Slayer. Rather than try to take on the Dollhouse (a powerful organization), they paid a hefty sum to have her put out on indefinite assignment. They trained Echo's current handler as her Watcher while the Council researched ways to transfer the Slayer power to someone else. Faith's entire backstory is invented. Topher was given a little too much leeway on that part and built in her street origins to give her additional combat instincts.

The problem occurred when Kakistos killed Faith's Watcher/handler and Faith ran. Without the handler, there was no way to recover Echo. The Dollhouse gave up and charged the Watchers an additional astronomical sum for the loss of their Doll.

Faith is a Doll ON assignment
Wolfram & Hart contracted with The Rossum Corporation to imprint Echo as a slayer and send her to gather intelligence about The Scoobies, and later Angel, for them.

Slayers cannot be turned
Think about it. There is nothing in canon to indicate that any Slayers were ever turned. We see some vampires planning to turn a Slayer, but we've never heard of a Slayer who did get turned. Most likely, the Slayer demon reacts badly to the vampire demon, causing the Slayer to simply stay dead. Any vampires that tried to turn a Slayer and failed probably wrote it off as a botched turning.
 * Well, there was a Slayer in Japan who got turned by the Master, but Joss didn't write her, so it isn't canon.
 * What about Harth then? He's at least half a slayer.
 * Something went wrong with the reactivation of the Slayer line.
 * Unlikely. Buffy briefly becomes a vampire in season one because of that psychic kid. Giles likely would have mentioned it if that was otherwise impossible.
 * Means nothing. They were in a terrible rush, Giles didn't have time for a biology lesson at the time. Not to mention the scene cuts out shortly thereafter. Notice Buffy never mentioned that fear again. Likely Giles did tell her it was impossible and she got over it.

Ampata from "Inca Mummy Girl" was a slayer
Oh, c'mon. She was a Chosen One who described herself "one girl in all the world"... The writers obviously want us to think this.

Caleb was a Hell God like Glory
He's just as Implacable as she was, and we are never told what he is. Also, there's the irony of the religious God - the religious evil god, for that matter. The scythe was like Olaf's hammer, connected to a power older and greater; it could defeat even Caleb/Glory.
 * Caleb's power comes from the First. Notice that he was stronger when he did that melding thing with it in the episode "End of Days," and he spoke like they had done it before.

Ted was the first sign of Buffy's insanity, as seen in Normal Again
It's straightforward. Ted threatens to have her committed; Buffy freaks out and kills him. That was her subconsciously trying to break out of the fantasy. When it's revealed that he's a robot, that's just another level of delusion she creates to protect herself.
 * Another variant: Ted was one of the few characters who, like Joyce, is a real person and not one of Buffy's hallucinations. Buffy was being briefly released from the institution and met her mother's new boyfriend Ted. Ted realized that Buffy still believed in her hallucinations. Naturally, the result of this is that Buffy began to be paranoid about Ted's intentions, and attack him, and believe that he was a robot. When Buffy attacked Ted, she was put back in the institution.
 * However, it's shown in Normal Again that if Buffy did indeed have a mental breakdown, her parents never divorced, and remained married until at least Season 6.
 * It's possible she dated Ted when on a trial separation, a daughter who was institutionalized is sure to be a major strain on any marriage.
 * I don't think so. If any of the hallucinations were real then they would have carried over into other episodes. Picture Toys in the Attic where the crew hallucinate a monster killing them all and we get a picture that it was Buffy just reacting to the poison, courtesy of The Trio\Joss trying to Break the Cutie. Again.

Cordelia was a Potential
Think about it. She is brave (mostly), she never backs down, she seems to attract trouble of a supernatural variety, and she stops rationalising the supernatural away quickly. She stood up to Lyle Gorch, got mistaken for Faith in the same episode, and feels a bond with Buffy even though she doesn't have much in common with her. Also, Xander and Angel both fall for her, and we know that they both like Slayers. Nobody ever found out because, by the time Buffy activated all the Potentials, she was in a coma; but the infusion of Slayer power was what allowed the Powers That Be to let her come back to help Angel one last time.

This means that poor Xander has never had a girlfriend that wasn't SOME sort of magical creature.
 * After Cordelia became part-demon, then 'ascended', and then was possessed by Jasmine, that ceased to be true in any event.

Bloodline makes a difference for vampires
Most vampires are dispatched fairly easily by Buffy or even mere mortals. However, a number of Vampires put up a much better fight, nearly matching the Slayer and other luminaries. These vampires are Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusila. All of them are descendants of The Master, who was the only creature to ever kill Buffy. The Master was tougher than other vampires, and his brood were naturally tougher as well.
 * The Master also bears a definite resemblance to the First Evil's "pure" uber-vamps. That would imply that he was one of the first vampires and thus his blood is less "corrupted" by humanity. So his descendants, being 2nd- or 3rd-generation vamps while most are probably something like 1000th-generation, explains why they're so much stronger.
 * The Master can speak while the ubervamps seemingly can't so he's not one of them but he might be a close descendent. Say, 2 generations removed from the ubervamps.
 * The "bloodlines matter" theory would also explain why some vampires seem capable of emotions beyond self-interest and hate, but others are basically cannon fodder. The Master's line tends to throw vamps who are more emotional, better fighters and are smarter. Think about it - Dru and Spike are capable of love, and Darla and Angelus are vicious way beyond normal vampires. That kind of nastiness comes from intelligence. I figure Harmony got turned by someone from Aurelius's line, too; there must have been a lot of that bloodline wandering around Sunnydale since they'd had the Master locked in the sewers for decades.
 * This is pretty much canon (at least in Broad Strokes), since the line to which Angelus belongs has (and, I believe, is confirmed to have) greater resistance to sunlight (Angel gets little more than a skin-deep flesh wound and some Battle Fatigue from weak-but-direct sunlight over a few seconds or more, Spike can sprint around the campus under his jacket or a blanket and get where he's going relatively unscathed beyond some steam and a few nasty knuckle burns).

Each episode in season 5 symbolises the cards in the Major Arcana from Tarot
(warning: This will be long)

501 Buffy vs. Dracula  (I - The Magician: person with great power, held in respect and awe) Dracula, the famous vampire of famous power, who the Scoobies are drawn to. Also the introduction of Dawn, the ball of energy which can destroy the world. Power.

502 Real Me (II - The High Priestess: Intuition, inner wisdom) Dawn becomes Buffy's heart and figure for her intuition over the course of the season, and this episode is dedicated to showing us who she is, and hence showing us what the heart is, what the intuition is for. Buffy's inner wisdom is all about Dawn.

503 The Replacement (III - The Empress: Intellectuality, nurturing of ideas, creativity, abundance and luxury) The episode tries to usher Xander into maturity and full life, showing ideas fulfilled in his other self, equaling rewards. Xander has to follow this card.

504 Out Of My Mind (IV - The Emperor: Stability, structure, authority and power, the concrete and tangible) Everything the Initiative was meant to be, stability and structure, also BR, meant to be stable. All that stability falls by the wayside, and Riley loses this. Riley has lost the concrete and the tangible.

505 No Place Like Home (V - The Heirophant: Loving, giving advice to those seeking it, kindness and protection, blessing) â€œLove, kindness and protection,â€� is now what Buffy's duty to Dawn is, she becomes the spiritual leader for Dawn, even if Dawn does not know it. She leads the energy-ball-turned-little-sister through the world.

506 Family (VI - The Lovers: romance, fulfillment and peace, need for guidance, choices)' Willow and Tara are deeply in love (romance), Tara finds her place in the Scooby gang (fulfillment), and resolves her â€œdemon halfâ€� (peace). Also, she has the choice over how to deal with her demon, family and friends, but the years of brainwashing have hurt her considerably, leaving her with a need for guide to put her back in the world.

507 Fool For Love (VII - The Chariot: concentration, willpower and determination) Willpower, determination â€“ this episode focuses on why Buffy lives, why she clings to life, unlike other slayers: where does Buffy's determination come from? She has the power to keep living, in spite of the implied deathwish, because of the things she has. So she decides to survive.

508 Shadow (VIII - Strength: courage, conquering your fears, being brave in the face of hardship) Joyce has brain cancer, and Buffy can't do anything about it. She is forced to be brave in the face of hardship. Also, the 'monster' haunting Joyce may represent fear.

509 Listening To Fear (IX - The Hermit: solitude, contemplation and thought. Wise from past experiences) Ben is alone, despite sharing a body, left to think his unique situation over. This makes him the wise man, who does what seems like the bad think because his life has driven him to thinking he has no other choice. Yay Ben.

510 Into The Woods (X - Wheel of Fortune: twists of faith and lifeâ€™s unexpected changes. Emotional rollercoaster) Twists of life: Buffy did not expect anyone to like getting Vamp Bites, and certainly not her boyfriend to be one of them. Riley probably didn't expect to be one of them either. The Wheel of Fortune spun for them both and landed on dark, strange, place.

511 Triangle (XI - Justice: fairness, impartiality, balance and legal issues, consequences, responsibilities, difficult choices) Willow and Anya have to find a balance in their lives (i.e. how to properly share Xander). Anya also has to deal with the consequences of having turned Olaf into a troll, and both her and Willow have the responsibility of taking care of him after accidentally summoning him.

512 Checkpoint (XII - The Hanged Man: Caught between opposites, spiritual revelations, freedom of the mind) Buffy gets caught between having to do all she can to save the world, and having to fulfill the Council's quotas and tests. These are the opposites she's confronted with, but a spiritual revelation shows her the Council is about her, not the other way around.

513 Blood Ties (XIII - Death: Endings, letting go of the past) In a way, this is the death of Dawn as she discovers what she is, hence marking her more than what she was, destroying what she was. This is the end of her innocence, showing her as a new, dangerous thing: she is no longer an innocent little girl. Yet the Key has to let go of the past, and become Dawn Summers, not a ball of energy, which is what Dawn does in the end.

514 Crush (XIV - Temperance: calm, balance, finding the middle way, compromise, forgiveness and patience) This episode flings Spike's love for Buffy out into the open, showing the need for compromise, forgiveness, etc. Buffy needs to accept how Spike feels, Spike needs to accept her rejection, and the strange ambivalent place in life. Spike cannot truly be a monster by the side of his deranged ex-girlfriend, he cannot be a good man by the side of the woman of his dreams, so what can he be? What is he?

515 I Was Made To Love You (XV - The Devil: Addiction, obsession, desires) April was created out of Warren's desires, this episode is all about desire. When we cannot fulfill our desires naturally, we create a way to, but it feels hollow, empty. The fact the â€œvillainâ€� symbolised by this card is such a harmless, slightly sympathetic thing (for now, I am not taking season 6 into account) shows that the devil is in all of us.

516 The Body (XVI - The Tower: sudden change, emotional breakdowns, chaotic situations, tearing down of belief) Shows a very sudden change â€“ the sudden death of Joyce, which destroys Dawn's naivety (what she has left of it, anyway), puts Buffy into a depressive state that lasts until her death (and gets worse after that), and basically screws everyone up.

517 Forever (XVII - The Star: guidance, spiritual renewal, hope, potential, possibilities) This episode shows some hope after Joyce's death, that the remaining Summers girls can't just cling to her memory, they have to live on â€“ and, they can. The world keeps turning.

518 Intervention (XVIII - The Moon: secrets, mystery, subconscious, confusion, things aren't what they seem) Buffy is not as she seems, as she is not Buffy, she is a robot duplicate. Spike is not as he seems, as he has the nobility and courage to keep the secret for the sakes of others. And we have the mystery and secret of the First Slayer's words. â€œDeath is your gift.â€� The moonlight shines and everything looks different under it.

519 Tough Love (XIX - The Sun: Promise, energy, ruination, casting down from heights) Tara starts off with promise, she is growing for confident, has a happy relationship with Willow, is a valued member of the Scooby Gang â€“ then the reverse comes in, Glory's ruination of Tara. Not death, but being driven into insanity that throws her down from what she was becoming.

520 Spiral (XX - Judgement: The past is the past, rebirth, resurrection, final choice, change) The Scoobies have to make a choice here, to cast aside their pasts, their fighting instincts, their current issues, to forsake it all and just run so they don't die, so they have a chance of saving the world.

521 Weight of the World (XXI - The World: completion, full circle, reckoning to come) Buffy has decided to complete it, has decided she wants it all over and rushes herself to the inevitable conclusion, she decides it's over, cuts herself off from the world, and Glory escapes with Dawn. Buffy has deciding that's the ending of this story, but we know it isn't. The reverse of the card proves to be salvation as Buffy is drawn back into the real ending, to save the world, and face the consequences of doing so.

522 The Gift (0 - The Fool: the new soul, the blank slate free from society) Buffy becomes the Fool here, freeing herself of the world's needs, but by death. She commits what is possibly the world's most foolish act: self-destruction, suicide, for love. Love for humanity and love for her sister drives her, she gives the gift of death and becomes the â€œfool for loveâ€� as episode 7 put it. She is no longer influenced by the world.


 * Insightful. I tip my hat to you.

Dawn was a Potential after all
Hey, if Buffy's blood is good enough to get the portal to close, Dawn might well be a Potential. She's pretty damn good at fighting (She holds of Bringers for quite a while in Never Leave Me, and impresses even Buffy in the season 6 finale), brave and refuses to leave the supernatural weirdness (End Of Days). There happened to be another Potential behind the door, so everyone dismissed her once they found out. No-one noticed in the big battle because, well, Dawn wasn't expecting it, and was concentrating on the battle, so she didn't pay attention to an energy surge or whatever becoming a Slayer is meant to feel like - probably put it down as an adrenaline boost.
 * Alternatively, Dawn was a Slayer even before the mass awakening. While the Slayer line proper now passes through Faith, Dawn is in many respects a magical clone of Buffy. Upon her death, Dawn activated and joined the others in slaying, and while successful, there were just too many near misses to suit the Scoobies, so bringing Buffy back was an imperative. So they tricked Dawnie-TVS and locked both memories and powers away, something they came to regret when Buffy-bot was all glitchy and especially later on when the biker demons showed. Once back, Buffy forbade without comment ever reawakening Dawn. The spell in S7 was a very near miss. Willow made damn sure the scythe-spell went around Dawn. Xander had a ready-made speech about the worth of 'normals' all set up in case of the near miss, as well.

The convoluted Xanatos Gambit in Time Of Your Life was Willow committing suicide.
"Time Of Your Life Part 4" .... the most important thing about death isn't who dies â€¦ it's who kills them.â€� It's relatively easy to infer from Future Willow's dialogue that she's very bored with life. When Harth asks her what's the goal of her plan her answer is "Death, of course" and tellingly doesn't say whose. Clearly over the centuries (do we know how many) she has gotten bored and wants to die, but she's not going to actually commit suicide, she'd far rather die at the hands of her old friend. So she summons Buffy from the past and manipulates events so that Buffy has no choice but to kill her.
 * This Troper already assumed that was the case after reading that issue.

Hank Summers' absenteeism has something to do with Dawn
In the first season, it is absolutely established that despite the Summers being divorced, Hank still cares about Buffy, she spends weekends with him, he keeps her for the summer between season 1 and 2. He misses taking her to the ice show in season 3, because of a business meeting, but that is sort of understandable. He still seems like a decent guy, and he's barely mentioned in season 4. However, in season 5, he's suddenly off in Spain with his secretary, "living the cliche", and the divorce starts to be squarely blamed on him. This comes off as a massive Retcon, but it follows with the other massive Retcon... Dawn! Hank Summers leaving the family the way he did had something to do with Dawn's appearance and life, possibly in some kind of attempt to protect her.
 * One possibility : Imagine you're Hank, abroad on a business trip. Maybe he was in a major holy spot or magic-interfering spot when Dawn is retro-created. Suddenly, demands for child support double, letters arrive about how she drives Joyce and Buffy crazy, and Hank wonders WTF is going on. He stays away, thinking his family back home has lost it, and makes the excuses he has to.
 * Or maybe the area covered by the magic retcon was limited to only what the monks thought would be necesary. Only the U.S. or California or even Sunnydale inmediate surrounding area. Just enough to alter the memories of everyone who could possibly have interaction with Dawn, and fake the legal papers and database entries to stablish Dawn's existence. They simply forgot about Hank being in Europe and so the spell didn't reach him. I'll be also pretty freaked if people tried to burden me with a child I knew couldn't possibly exist, and would give little to no credibility to anything they'd say to me, including news about my ex-wife death.
 * It would have to include LA, as Angel and the rest of Angel Investigations get memories of her and they were in LA, so he was either out of LA at the time or this is Jossed.

The end of Normal Again is true, but Buffy's still the slayer
The revelations of vampires, demons, etcetera, combined with the amount of duty weighing on her, and not being able to tell anyone - this got too much for her, and she created a whole fantasy world.
 * Normal Again, true? Buffy did a tip-top job of creating a spin-off then. And there are things that just don't work--Buffy is imagining Spike dreaming of Buffy? Buffy can get into her friends' and enemies' heads whenever the series switches point of view? Normal Again was an interesting episode but the idea that Buffy's imagining the whole thing just doesn't make sense in the 'Verse.
 * That's why I theorize...
 * Nah. It was all the demon and The Trio.

The demon in "Normal Again" doesn't really create hallucinations, but sends its victims mentally to alternate universes.
So what really happened is that soul of the Buffy of the "normal" universe was killed, and the "actual" Buffy's soul put into her body. Cake and eaten too!

Warren dressed up as a Mad Scientist in the Halloween episode
Explains how a sophomore engineering student could build a robot, or all the gadgets he built in Season Six. Just as Xander retained the full knowledge of a soldier, Warren retained the knowledge of a mad scientist.
 * Additionally, he retained those skills because he continued to use and build upon them, whereas Xander let them atropy and eventually forgot them.

The demons that turned Sid into a puppet in "The Puppet Show" are the same demons that turned Angel into a puppet in "Smile Time".

 * Jossed by "The Puppet Show". Sid was turned into a puppet by the demons that he was trying to hunt. That's why he died when he killed the last one. They might have a relation to them though.
 * Jossed again in Chaos Bleeds where he returns to help Buffy. Though we also get Faith being broken out of prison by Ethan Rayne to find some keys that The First wants, so make of that what you will.

Warren is the son of the original Ted
Creator-Ted set some of his sperm aside for the android to one day impregnate a woman with. Warren spent his childhood doing maintenance on the android, and watching as each new family they hooked up with were killed, turning to blame the women in misguided grief. Explains his skills, his persona, and his basic beef with Buffy.
 * Where did he go after Robo-Ted was killed, though?
 * Robo-Ted had a stash of cash, either stolen somehow from female victims, earned, or inherited from Creator-Ted. Warren took this, hacked what he needed to buy a house, and went to Sunnydale High with parents eternally on vacation, something the good people of the town would never notice or care, save for that one worker Dawn and Buffy were saddled with. Warren would know how to work the system. This meant taking crap from the bullies and jocks, so as to go unnoticed until he was 18. Combined with a childhood of seeing Robo-Dad hooking up and killing off women, it could explain a lot.
 * Robo-Ted is apparently a superb salesman so he must earn money. Apart from the odd bit of repairs and the occasional replacement clothes, he doesn't have many expenditures.

Twilight's goal is to stop Willow from becoming a god.
Willow's power has continued to increase over time. She is almost certainly the most powerful witch on the planet now, and there's no reason that this would stop. Soon, Willow will achieve clairvoyance, which will put her in a position to literally answer prayers. She'll attract followers, mostly witches who believe she is a goddess. Eventually, she'll make a decision to accept the role of a deity. Kennedy will probably end up as High Priestess of Willow or something.

There are a million reasons why Twilight might be opposed to this, and he seeks the end of magic to put a stop to Willow's rise to power.

Twilight is Dawn
What does ending all magic do but get a young girl her older sister's full and undivided attention? She has access to magic, contacts with demons and government types, and knowledge of her sister's organization and methods. There's also the name connection.
 * I think someone said something somewhere about "the closest betrayal" in relation to Buffy and Twilight. Who's closer to Buffy than her sister?
 * "When it matters, Buffy won't choose you. She'll be against you." This came to pass, somehow, Dawn's mad and wants revenge, or just to stop whatever happened (note - this troper doesn't actually read the comics, she's just going on what she's heard).
 * Word of God says that vision was The First.
 * Jossed. We know who Twilight is now. Not that it makes any more sense than this WMG...

Twilight is actually Caleb.
The only reason a comic book villain wears a mask is because the audience-- the readers-- have already met his true identity. The comic has re-introduced virtually EVERY single male character since the beginning of the series, with the exception of Buffy's father.

We know Twilight is incredibly strong. We have no proof that Caleb * couldn't* fly. And the red gash on Twilight's mask is vertical-- resembling a bloody stain left behind by someone who has been previously cut in half from the gut-on-upwards? We've only seen the side of Twilight's neck, not the front. Who's to say he hasn't been re-stitched and resurrected by the First?
 * Furthermore, during Buffy's fight with Twilight the first move she makes is an upward-swing groin-strike. How does he respond? He blocks it perfectly, and responds with something like "that isn't going to work a second time". The only way that sequence makes ANY sense is if A. Twilight is indeed some sort of uberCaleb or B. Twilight was just sorta hanging around in the background watching during Buffy's final fight with Caleb.
 * Jossed. Your version is better though.
 * The line he used was "I know that move, Slayer" and the only way he would "know that move" is if he was Caleb. However, it's been Jossed, Twilight is not Caleb..
 * If you hadn't worked it out by now, Buffy had played with his balls at least a couple of times.

Twilight is Ben.
If Warren can survive being skinned (or come back, or whatever happened), itâ€™s conceivable that Ben could survive being smothered. We know that he at least had some magical knowledge (he summoned the Queller all by himself) and itâ€™s conceivable given how fast Willow progressed that in two seasons he could reach Twilightâ€™s level. The reason he doesnâ€™t have Glory anymore is because his temporary death was enough to get rid of her. His motive for taking on the Slayers is revenge and his desire to get rid of all things supernatural comes from the fact that Glory and her minions made his life hell.
 * Alternate about Glory: his temporary death suppressed her deep, but she's coming back, and he wants to get her gone for good, as well as pure revenge.
 * S7 Josses that, as one of the forms The First takes is Glory.

Spike is a different type of vampire, evolutionary speaking
We see from the Uber-Vamps in season 7 the vampires do evolve. Spike always had more capacity for human emotion than any other vampire we see (genuine love for Drusilla, Buffy, Dawn and his mother in flashbacks) - vampires are evolving to become more emotional (probably to make Slayers less likely to kill them), and Spike is the result of that process (which has been going on for ages). Also note, how the one guy I remember we know he sired (Holden from CWDP) is very much of the Affably Evil variety; he honestly wants to help Buffy with her issues, while trying to kill her. The mutation is passed on.

The reason Buffy's friends believed she was in Hell was because her soul was in Glory's home dimension.
Glory's "friends" really cleaned up the place since they kicked Glory out.
 * The reason it was so different after Glory was exiled was because one of her co-rulers would eventually go by the name Jasmine. Buffy's feelings of perfect happiness, the exact same thing everyone under Jasmine's spell experienced, were due to Jasmine converting that dimension into her paradise, magnified several magnitudes by it being Jasmine's home reality where she had managed to perfect the spell. After Jasmine left however it collapsed again into the hell dimension it was originally.

Rupert Giles is related to Giles French of Family Affair
Both Giles and Mister French oversaw girls named Buffy. French consulted a seer in the employ of the Council, and took a job with Bill Davis, hearing that an American girl named Buffy would be a Slayer of great importance one day. By the time he discovered his error, he was a part of that ersatz family, and like his younger cousin would one day, chose his charges over the Council. French was named for Rupert's family, considered the main line.

Dr. Walsh from season 4 is a terrible psychologist
Her assumption that Buffy has no strong male role model is based on correlation, not proper statistics. She assumes that Buffy being an active woman is a weakness on her part, but it's the only thing that keeps her going as a Slaon having that knowledge are virtually nil. Most likely, the Buffyverse Joss is a warlock or technician who works for Buffy. He wrote Fray in his spare time, and it is published exclusively within the organization.
 * In addition, he also wrote "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" in order to help obfuscate the existance of an actual Vampire Slayer named Buffy, and to give hope to people who have encountered demons.
 * Note: It's the panel where Andrew complains about being bored while three Slayers play strip poker in the background. A fourth is farther back, reading it.
 * Or perhaps he fell through the universes and is our Joss.

Harmony is amazing in bed
There's no other reason why Spike would have tolerated her for that long.
 * She was a cheerleader and the second most popular girl in the most popular clique in the school. All this adds up to Harmony being a sexpert
 * Makes sense, as stated above, Spike put up with her for that long. Furthermore, Hamilton looked awfully satisfied after bedding her towards the end of Angel S5.

Drusilla went by another name as a human
It's unlikely that a girl from a normal 19th-century English family would be named after Caligula's sister. Also, the others in the Scourge of Europe took new names as vampires. Angelus and Spike picked theirs, and Darla was named by the Master. The Master must have required them to change their names, so...

Faith is a Doll who went off assignment
The Council found out that Echo was the new Slayer. Rather than try to take on the Dollhouse (a powerful organization), they paid a hefty sum to have her put out on indefinite assignment. They trained Echo's current handler as her Watcher while the Council researched ways to transfer the Slayer power to someone else. Faith's entire backstory is invented. Topher was given a little too much leeway on that part and built in her street origins to give her additional combat instincts.

The problem occurred when Kakistos killed Faith's Watcher/handler and Faith ran. Without the handler, there was no way to recover Echo. The Dollhouse gave up and charged the Watchers an additional astronomical sum for the loss of their Doll.

Faith is a Doll ON assignment
Wolfram yer. Her judgement is probably based on her own psychosis, a jealousy of her strength over her creations, Adam and Riley, who she treats like sons. Saying she has no father figure is a direct blight on Giles, even if she doesn't know it, and completely out of line.

...What? Is there a rule that all WMGs have to be so out-there?


 * Isn't this one pretty much confirmed when she screws up so badly at almost all of her manipulations?

Potentials are part Saiyan.
They have obscene amounts of energy(I got tired just watching them run around) and as Slayers they get huge power boosts after near-death experiences.
 * There's a 'Buffy's Blonde Dye Job' joke in here, somewhere.

The dragon seen escaping the interdimensional gateway at the end of Season 5 is the same dragon from the Angel finale.
It looks pretty much the same, and anyway, how many big dragons could possibly be flying around out there? I mean it's not like it got sucked back in when Buffy closed the gateway.
 * Considering that it's doubtful City Hall remained something out of Alien without someone noticing after a while (even Sunnydale has its limits), it probably did get sucked back. No Ontological Inertia tends to occur when magic is involved.

When Conner has a vision of his mother in Angel "Inside Out", it was actually the First.
In this episode, the "Ghost" of Darla shows up to convince Conner not to shed innocent blood, thus hastening the birth of Jasmine, who would attempt to bring her own brand of world peace. It fits The First's MO perfectly: Appearance of a dead person, intangible, seen only by the intended target, trying to manipulate them into doing what it wants. The time line matches up; The First was fixing to unleash its own apocalypse, and Jasmine's plan for world domination was obviously going to be a problem in the long run. And Darla claims to be sent by the Powers? Please. That would be a complete 180 on the PTB's stance on Darla up until then.

One of Anya's demonic powers was the ability to blend in with normal humans
In her first, Demonic appearance, she can blend into humanity and can even lie after she becomes human, she reverts back to the ignorant liar we know and love. The conversion was so powerful, her memory changed so she always was that goofy and stilted of a speaker.

Like some other corrupt local politicians, Mayor Wilkins wins elections by counting the votes of people who died a few months or years before election day.
However, in the case of Sunnydale, all of these dead voters actually did cast their votes, on the day of the election.

Dawn is the reincarnation of Nona Mecklenberg.
Furthermore, BtVS and The Adventures of Pete and Pete are couniversal: Pete and Pete is just a more kid-friendly portrayal of the world on other side of the Masquerade. (Wellsville seems sufficiently far from any hellmouths that most of the expressions of supernatural weirdness would probably be more benign than those on BtVS.)

It would make perfect sense for the monks who created gave the Key human form to use the qualities of a recently deceased person rather than making a new persona from scratch. (Would you trust a bunch of monks to create a believable pre-teen middle class American girl?) Suppose that this depends on who had passed away most recently at the time of the creation of the Key, and one Nona F. Mecklenberg of Wellsvile, America happened to pass at just the right time, possibly due to a home disaster involving yard tools and the younger Pete Wrigley. The newly-formed Dawn retained the form and personality of Nona (let's assume Nona got a little less weird as she grew up and got over the thing with the arm cast). The aging between the two series matches perfectly.

Wolfram & Hart has been expelled from this dimension.
They would have been a priority target for the Slayers, and once the L.A. branch was eliminated, the Slayers would have had no reason not to simply wipe the law firm off the face of the Earth. And while Wolfram & Hart is powerful, they don't have the ability to stand against an army of Slayers. Or Willow Rosenberg. Or Willow Rosenberg and an army of Slayers.
 * This would explain why everyone from the Slayer organisation is so weird toward Angel during season 5 of his own series. The Beast destroys the LA branch, the Slayers wipe out the rest of this dimension's WRH offices and then Angel takes control of the resurrected LA branch (which, for all they know, he may have resurrected)? No wonder everyone's questioning his loyalties.

The battle of the Hellmouth was the biblical Armageddon. Good won.
As of now, the forces of good include an army of several hundred Super Soldiers committed to the cause of righteousness, and a witch of near-deific power. Wolfram & Hart may have been destroyed (see above), and the First is in retreat. Evil is still present in the world, but it is weak. Buffy's enemies consist primarily of those who don't want an army of Action Girls with superpowers running around, not forces bent on destroying the world.

The First's attempt at an apocalypse in Season Seven was a last-ditch gambit to stop Jasmine
Jasmine would have wiped evil from the Earth, which would be bad for the First. And with mass media, Jasmine could easily take control of the bulk of the human race. So the First tried to take out the Slayers so Jasmine would lack a champion (it either wasn't counting on or didn't care about Angel), and then open the Hellmouth, unleashing an army of Turok-Han that would be immune to Jasmine's powers. The result would have been an apocalypse anyway, so it was a good thing that Buffy stopped it. This merely explains why the First was pulling this shit under the nose of Buffy "I eat apocalypses for breakfast" Summers, rather than waiting for her to die and leave the Hellmouth unguarded.

Twilight is Edward Cullen!!!!!!
Or as my actual theory goes, Twilight is a reincarnated Tara. Following on from the magic bullet theories above, about a mystical assassin sent to destroy Tara, she was actually a much more powerful witch than anyone assumed, and her death was only temporary, and when Willow turned crazy the outpouring of magic returned Tara from death. Horrified to see what Willow was turning into, she went into hiding and formulated a plan to keep Willow from ever becoming too powerful, which is now being played out in Season 8.

Twilight is multiple people, including all of the above.
Joss Whedon is a fan of comic books, as are a lot of people who write or Season 8. When Hush is introduced in Batman: Hush, he is being played by multiple members of Batman's rogues gallery, each dressing up (Two-Face, Clayface, Tommy Elliot). The writers of Buffy Season 8 took this idea and ran with it, making Twilight every villain who might not be dead from the Buffyverse. This includes Glory/Ben, Professor Walsh, Ethan Rayne (I know it looked like he got shot in the head but come on, this is Buffy), and anyone else you could possibly conceive of. They will all be revealed to have been part of a mass conspiracy, all aimed at destroying the slayers and Buffy, not even for an evil goal, but simply to get back at her and kill her.
 * This idea is vastly superior to the one that actually showed up in the book.

Buffy and Dawn share a soul
A lot is made of the fact that Dawn was created from Buffy from her blood, that the connection is close enough for Buffy to be able to close Glory's portal. Now if the Key is just some non-sentient mystical energy that was transmogrified into a human it still leaves us a soul short, and Dawn is clearly not soulless. So the monks establish the shared soul with Buffy.

Buffy's death didn't matter because Dawn was still alive and the link was still there. What will be interesting is what happens when they both die - will Dawn's conciousness cease to exist or will it merge back into Buffy's concious to reunite the soul into one identity.

Spike has his original human soul, while Angel does not
Spike-with-a-soul is hardly very different to Spike-without-a-soul, or much different (in his base characteristics) from William. Angel is nothing like Angelus or Liam. Angel's soul was randomly plucked from the 'ether' and put into him when he was cursed, and isn't the same one that Liam possessed when he was alive. It's possible that he recieves a different soul each time he is re-cursed, as well -- it would explain the slight personality shifts he went though after each time:
 * Before Buffy and pre-season 2, Angel was more hands-off and neutral than anything, and preferred to wallow in his guilt rather than do anything about it, for the better part of an entire century.
 * After Willow restored him the first time, his 'second soul' during the early episodes of Angel was more brave and outgoing, and got off his ass and decided to become a good samaritan. Quite a shift from his rat-eating self of the past...
 * When he was reensouled again during Angel season 4, he became a bit more morally forgiving and willing to get his hands dirty to achieve things; namely his willingness to take over Wolfram & Hart.
 * Given that it's a soul curse not some sort of partial ressurection, I think this is pretty obvious.
 * It helps that Spike specifically wished for the other demon to "make [him] what [he] once was". A vampire cursed with some random soul isn't William.
 * How is ensouled Spike like William? Aside from the poetry, they are nothing alike. And pre Buffy Angel was a lot like Liam: kinda pathetic and self-obsessed.
 * Living off rats in a dumpster isn't self obsessed. From what we know of Liam, which admittedly isn't that much, he probably would've gotten over the guilt of killing people within a decade or two. Or, even if he didn't, he'd still be boozing and whoring it up in Vegas.
 * It is self-obsessed, just with ones own grief, guilt etc. The main impression I got of Liam was self-destructive, which fits preBuffy Angel to a tee.

Thaumogenesis demons are possible because they and other demons siphon off energy from their victims.
The first "brought into being as a result of trying to bring a human back to life" demon would have required a human sacrifice to set up the "bring someone back" spell, and would have gained being by taking any of the energy that wasn't taken up in the "destruction" (see: atom-splitting) of the sacrifice's soul by dragging the human back from the afterlife. The demon started out comparatively weak, but gained more and more power with each act of destruction. Demons since then can be generated by doing something that results in thaumogenesis by taking a demon's worth of energy from the pool of excess siphoned energy, as well as the energy required to drag the person back from the dead if you don't use enough of a sacrifice. The only way to completely destroy all demons (at least without divine intervention of some sort) is to bring enough demons into existence and destroy them before they can pay back their quota, as well as all the other demons, and never again try to bring someone back from the dead.

Joss Whedon is lying about Twilight being Angel.
Angel being Twilight... makes no sense. When has Joss ever divulged information about his work prematurely? What would be the point? The disclosure feels like a ruse. What better way to hook your audience than to lead them in one direction and promptly surprise them with something completely different. That's certainly in Whedon's repertoire.
 * Oh please gods, let you be right. I'm more or less ignoring season 8, since I found the end of season 7 to be perfectly satisfying, but I heard about this and it pisses all over everything in Angel's story EVER.
 * Buffy Season 8 is contemporaneous with Angel Season 5. I've seen Angel Season 5 - Angel doesn't have that kind of free time!
 * Angel S5 is set immediately after "Chosen", whereas it's stated very clearly as the start of Season 8 that it's been 18 months since "Chosen".
 * It doesn't quite mesh because, shouldn't the World already know about the supernatural beacuse hey ...all of LA is aware of it because they retained their memories. Also in the current storyline Angel is a big name in Hollywood with a movie to his name. Instead the Harmony storyline in Buffy season eight is meant to be the first time the general public take an interest in Vampires. Angel already had a fanbase by then and a movie. Timelines do not add up. In the end unless the Both After the Fall and Buffy season eight end up in the same pages fans could easily write it up to Fanon Discontinuity.
 * Angel Season 5 also went on for quite a bit longer in-universe time than it did on TV.
 * Sadly, . And yes, it makes no sense at all. This WMG page has several better ideas.

Rebirth.
This troper has the theory that Dawn is the reincarnation of the character Celia, who was a cousin to Buffy who died when she was eight.

Slayers are Jinchuriki
In Naruto there are people who have demons sealed into them. These people are known as Jinchuriki and there are many things about them in common with a slayer such as the origin of the powers, the demon showing itself with a psychical feature such as whiskers which is much like the ever-elusive slayer birthmark mentioned in the first movie as being shaped like an athame (ritual knife). Also if the Slayer is a jinchuriki and with the age of the power and the amount of people who have been hosts it is easy to believe that a slayer would be a match for a Naruto-verse jinchuriki. Also that the new slayers could be pseudo-jinchuriki like the character Sora.
 * ... this is canon. The Slayer Essence is a demon. Sealed into a human. A Jinchuriki is just a fancy name for a human with a demon sealed in them. Its true that in Naruto the Jinchuriki all have tailed beasts, but that's not a hard and fast rule. We've seen other demons, after all, they're just far less powerful.

Andrew made up Season 8.
In Season 8, Andrew is suddenly part of an entire squad in Rome, despite being mostly useless in Season 7. Twilight looks more like a comic book supervillain than any Big Bad so far. Xander is compared to Nick Fury. Dawn fights a giant Mech version of herself in Tokyo, which Andrew guides her through, even saying "My giant-sized teammate is fighting a mechanized version of herself in the streets of downtown Tokyo...I've been preparing for this day my entire life!". Andrew suddenly becoming a legitimate member of the Slayer organization, along with the comic book and sci-fi tropes, make the whole series make more sense if imagined by Andrew.
 * Jossed in Angel S5. He shows up with a small platoon of Slayers. There's no way he made up AS 5.

The First is the Ebon Dragon
(Glories on the Most High spoilers ahead) Either long after  or he escaped into an alternate dimension. However, he can only manifest as incorporeal dead people because  But as the Primordial concept of darkness and evil, he kind fits the First Evil's portfolio.
 * Wouldn't that make Slayers a specific exaltation of a Dawn Caste Solar? That makes sense because a slayer has to die for there to be another slayer. However when Buffy came back after the Master killed her, she got a different exaltation.
 * Slayers could also be a different exaltation completely.

The sixth season is purposefully mocking the continuation of a show that should have ended with Season Five
The Scoobies pulled Buffy out of heaven - ie. Buffy the show had finished and ascended to TV heaven, but Meddling Executives pulled it back onto our screen. Also see Buffy's comments in "After Life", that she was "Finished. Complete." The show was finished, but was forced to continue. The season's message that "life is hard" was code for "thinking up new and decent storylines is hard". Dark Willow trying to destroy the world to end humanity's suffering was a plea for the show to be cancelled so that the viewer's suffering would end. And then there's the whole of "Normal Again".

Once More With Feeling is all a metaphor for Joss' feelings about the show being Uncancelled
This was the impression that I had after watching the episode, and was surprised to find no mention of it on the web. I'm either a genius, an idiot, or it's common knowledge. Anyways, here's how I see it, song by song:
 * Going through the motions: The song is all about how Joss has run out of both enthusiasm and fresh ideas. By this point he was working heavily on Angel and developing Firefly. He felt there was nowhere new to go and nothing new to do. He was simply "going through the motions" on the writing (this could explain the lazy "magic addiction" storyline). The end lines, "I can't even see/if this is really me/and I just want to be/Alive" reinforce how confused he is, and how he just wants to write quality television.
 * If We're Together: About his (perhaps false) confidence that with the rest of the Mutant Enemy crew, they'll be able to get through the problems all the same. The song is a gung-ho "We can do anything" number, but as the rest of the episode shows, all of the characters were phoning in the confidence. They all have serious doubts about where they're going. This could be Joss saying that he knows the crew ultimately depends on him for leadership, and that their presence doesn't help his feelings of disassociation.
 * Under Your Spell: Joss describing how much he does love the show. A sweet love ballad, this tells us that even though he's lost, he does love Buffy and is permanently "under her spell." Buffy was the first feature screenplay he ever sold, and the first show he ever had. He deeply loves Buffy. You never forget your first.
 * I'll never tell: All about how Joss feels guilty about wanting to do other things. Despite wishing he could develop other projects, he feels "engaged" to Buffy; that he must stick it out to the end. But, of course, he'll never tell anyone about it. This would explain why he's never confirmed any of this WMG in an interview (either that, or the WMG is totally false).
 * Rest In Peace: Joss pleading with the show to leave him alone and let him rest in peace. He desperately want to leave, to "take [his] love and burry it in a hole six foot deep," he he can't make himself do it. As Spike is uncontrollably in love with Buffy the character, Joss is uncontrollably in love with Buffy the show. Lines toward the end express how he feels he gives everything to the show, and gets nothing in return: "I know/I should go/But I follow you/Like a man possessed/There's a traitor here/Beneath my breast/If my heart could beat/It would break my chest/But I can see/You're unimpressed/So leave me be/And let me rest in peace." After the song, Buffy walks away, leaving Spike in a grave. "What? You're leaving?!" Spike yells after her. This is Joss further expressing how, even if he could shake Buffy, he'd be drawn back to it.
 * Standing: Giles talking about standing in Buffy's way of growing into an adult it really taking on the voice of the show, standing in Joss's way of growing into a more versatile writer. Joss feels he's grown as much as he can with Buffy. The more complex character relations of Firefly were a taste of what he could be doing, but now he's back writing Buffy. After working for years on the show, what has he got in return? More Buffy. Joss is expressing how much he loves the show but feels it's in his way.
 * Under your spell/Standing (reprise): The earlier love song, about how much Joss loves Buffy, is now turned into a song declaring how he can't escape. He could have let the show just end after season 5 (as he had planned to do), but once it was picked up by UPN he was powerless to leave. He's under it's spell, and feels he has no control, the same way Tara feels she has no control with Willow.
 * Walk Through the Fire: Like it or not, Joss is decaring that he's here. He'll walk through the fire (the fire can be both writer's block and disassociation) and let it burn. "I touch the fire and it freezes me/I look into it and it's black/Why can't I feel/My skin should crack and peel/I walk a fire path." These lines from Buffy about how she feels nothing sonce coming back clearly echo Joss' feelings since the show came back. After going through the horrible pain of killing his creation at the end of season 5, anything else he does with Buffy feels hollow. "Now through the smoke/She calls to me/To make my way across the flame/To save the day/Or maybe melt away/ I guess it's all the same." The "she" is not just Glory, but the show. It's calling Joss like the Siren's song. His show has been uncancelled, and he can either "save the day" (i.e. continue making groundbreaking television) or "fade away" (let the quality slip and have the show end as a joke). Joss seems to agree with Neil Young, that it's better to burn out than fade away. The finale of season five was burning out, and now he feels he's doomed to let the show fade away. And with his indifference, he feels it's all the same. Spike's lines, "I hope she fries/I'm free if that bitch dies/I'd better help her out" continue the theme of wanting the show gone, but still doing everything he can to keep it going.
 * Something to Sing about: Joss' feelings of alienation are brought to the forefront. "There was no pain/No fear no doubt/'Till they pulled me out/From Heaven/I think I was in heaven." Constantly fighting with the network had caused pain, and he was always afraid that they would wreck his wonderful creation. With Buffy over, he was finally free from the pain and fear, and doubts about whether his writing was the best it could be. Then the show came back, pulling Joss from that heaven. Or, at least, what he thought was heaven. He still doesn't know if it was better to have the show cancelled or back on the air. Hence, his doubts about "heaven." Buffy pleads for the demon to give her something to sing about, as Joss is pleading for something to write about, as he feels the show has run it's course. It no longer gives him the sense of satisfaction it once did.
 * Where do we go from here: Joss (and by extension, Mutant Enemy productions) wondering where he go's from here. "The battle's done/And we kind of won/So we sound our victory cheer." He succeeded in getting the show back, and is knows he should be happy. But where does he go from here? Like season 8 of Stargate SG-1 or season 4 of Babylon 5, he tied up all the plot threads. He brought his work to a satisfactory conclusion. Now he has to keep it going after the "battle" (i.e. narrative) is done. "Why is the path unclear/When he know hope is near/Understand/We'll go hand in hand/But we'll walk alone in fear." The show is back (hope) but the path of where to take it is unclear. Joss will work with the cast and crew he loves (the hand in hand part), but he knows he'll be walking alone in fear, since he's the creator, head writer, and executive producer. He feels he may be the only one with doubts.
 * Coda: "This isn't real/But I just want to feel" Buffy sings right before making out with Spike, actions that will change the show forever. Perhaps Joss is saying that he knows Buffy/Spike isn't meant to be, and he's just doing to get some kind of emotion going in a show that's otherwise lifeless to him. The episode ends on a question, "Where do we go from here?" The words are left echoing on the screen.

Spike is bisexual
As proven in the basement in "Sleeper" and with Holden Webster (who might also be bi since he had a girlfriend before being turned), Spike didn't just pick up women every night he went out. . Let's not forget 'that one time' with Angel
 * ALL vampires are technically bisexual. The process of becoming a vampire removes inhibitions and fear so afterward if they see someone they find attractive they no longer have any reason not to go for it. Though that's more functionally bisexual than actually bisexual.
 * Wait, what? The process of becoming a vampire removes inhibitions/fear, yes. This means that a previously-bisexual vampire who had been closeted or in denial (especially the older ones who lived in less liberated times) would then likely act on any attraction instead of just socially acceptable ones. However, being vamped wouldn't make someone bisexual if they were straight - or gay or asexual, for that matter. It doesn't change a pre-existing sexual orientation.

Ben is Glory
Wait, what? You're saying Ben knows something about Glory?!
 * Confirmed. Ben would have been the next host for Glory had Giles not killed him.

Buffy's "heaven" was a drug induced hallucination
Buffy's description of "heaven" sounds more like being high than an afterlife. All a false sense of everything-is-just-absolutely-perfect and how she "knew" everyone she cared about was all right (while they were barely surviving against the vampires and then the demon biker gang showed up).

So, Buffy was actually somewhere entirely different (Glory's hell dimension maybe) all drugged up and is subsequently suffering from withdrawal after being resurrected. "Dawn: Was mom there?"
 * It doesn't have to be drug induced anything. All of the stuff she talks about can be attributed to how she died. The connected to everything part could be because the portal was a breach in all the dimensions. Her not remembering her mother being there, despite being sure she was, could be because as she died she thought about seeing her mother in heaven. Basically it would be her final thoughts stretched across the entirety of the time she was dead, because she was at peace with how she was dying.
 * It's hardly like a pocket prison dimension that traps you in an illusion of happiness is anything new in the Buffyverse. Wolfram & Hart used The Dimension Of Fake Suburbia to keep prisoners on ice in season 5 of AtS.
 * I forget which fanfic it was, but there was one that had Buffy's certainty that she'd been in Heaven exploded by one Armor-Piercing Question:

Slayers can't be turned.
Dracula's mojo was working on Buffy right up until she tasted his blood, then she snapped out of it and kicked his ass. Hypothesis: Slayers metabolize vampire blood and use it as a powerup. (I haven't read Season 8 yet, so this may well have been Jossed already...)

Twilight is Angel.
Nah, you're right, that's just stupid.
 * I think Angel was fake Twilight. The real one made him go bad.

Dracula performed the same spell that Jonathan did in Season 5.
The one that turns you into a paragon. Think about it, Dracula is a huge Marty Stu character with all the traditionally expected powers of a vampire, along with the way of causing spontaneous admiration in people, as well as a talent to find a nice castle to live in, wherever he goes. Perhaps he used to be an ordinary if old vamp, and his spell retroactively altered history to create the novel and subsequent adaptations made of his exploits. He still keeps losing, because he was trying to fulfill the classic vampire clichés too hard, becoming unbeatable, but still doomed to be defeated in fights with against vampire slayers. Being evil he probably doesn't care what his counterpart monster does, or perhaps he's locked it in some crypt somewhere. Or perhaps he's actually constantly on the move to keep ahead of it.
 * Given that he's evil, maybe his counterpart monster is a force for good?
 * Maybe his counterpart is Van Helsing?
 * Or the Slayer. Since it retroactively reshapes the world there is no way of knowing how much history is real or how many people have cast the spell.
 * Or the Immortal. I need someone to blame for that awful, over-the-top character who can supposedly make a fool out of Angelus and Spike.

The Gentlemen in Hush have never won. Because...
Aside from the aforementioned fairy tale where the princess somehow got her voice back, there was also a very small village (maybe eight or ten people) who tested the "swords don't harm them" myth and ended up whittling their numbers down to six or fewer, including victims who had already been taken, in an effort to avoid a potential Fate Worse Than Death and keep the world from ending. These Gentlemen were the (part of the) group that didn't get headsplattered by the princess's voice, and decided to come to a larger town so it would be easier to take seven hearts by going different places around the town (being less predictable so the victims would be less likely to have prepared ahead of time) and get all seven before there was an evacuation or mass death. Whether any Gentlemen still exist who haven't won and/or are still searching for hearts (depending on whether getting the seven would end their search or not) is a Riddle for the Ages.

The Gentlemen were taking the hearts as part of a game, and a human voice isn't fatal to them.
The most receptive or most mystically important person gets the announcement: "The Gentlemen are coming. You can't talk. You have until we get seven hearts to figure out how to stop us. These are the rules. Game on." If you don't stop them, they Kill'Em All. If you do stop them, they play off their head asplodey endgame sequence and go to another town. smashing their box may have caused them to not offer a prize, or the prize may be something less noticeable but still substantial (like luck, or not being slaughtered).

The Gentlemen were taking the hearts for the good of the towns.
The people whose hearts they stole could have been returned to their original condition (plus a bit of trauma and minus their Masquerade blinders, both of which can be fixed), after the seven hearts are used in a ritual to give everyone in the town permanent immunity to disease and a slight increase over their human Healing Factor. Nice Job Breaking It, Heroic Mimes. They just can't express it because of their Starfish Language, and the little girl's ghost keeps foiling their plans (or they've succeeded before, and Buffy's Slayer premonitions really messed up again).

The hearts would have been used to turn the Gentlemen human.
Lose grey skin and metal teeth, gain the ability to actually use your affluence for something more than hiring homicidal mutes. I'd say it's a fair trade.

Paragon![name below where spoilermarks work] was telling the truth as he knew it the whole time.
had been made a paragon in that universe, and not just to look like one to everyone else. When the monster started getting hurt was the first time he realized the truth, and before that all he knew of the demon was that it made him less capable when he attacked it. It could be assumed that the spell told him the curse scar was what he said it was, if gaining the mark actually was part of the process of casting.

Giles has a hint of incubus or siren blood, or more likely has in the past (probably when he was still Ripper) attempted to magically augment the results of his singing.
Hence why every heterosexual female in the coffee shop, as well as the bisexual female(s) and the explicitly (but arguably not necessarily) lesbian female swoon over his voice, but the only other male present starts to get the wiggins.

The Cheese is the dream.
Spoilered so as not to ruin the effect of learning it through the episode, in case someone’s not had a chance to see the Season Epilogue episode. Not because I think it’s supposed to be a Shocking Swerve or anything. The Cheese Man is a benevolent demon or spirit. He made a space for the cheese, opening a pathway through Willow (during the head/heart/spirit/hands spell, which called upon the Slayer demon) so the dream could enter the four of them and help protect them from. He tells Xander that “[the cheese] will not protect you” because even in dreams, even dreams from the Cheese Man, there are things in the Buffyverse that can harm you (such as the First). He tells Giles that he wears the cheese, the cheese does not wear him either because Giles must be the important one to survive the dream; If he lets the dream be the important one... well,, in possessed body, dream wears you), or because the cheese man is the one who brought the dream, he is not merely a part of it. The Cheese Man’s appearance in Buffy’s dream is him reminding her, “Hello, ‘’cheese’’”, and from then on she is more strongly, lucidly in control. In a meta WMG (to unjoss the jossing, one might say), the meaningless of the Cheese Man was wrought into meaning by Joss’s free-form writing, trying to make it as dreamlike as possible instead of pre-planning as meticulously as possible. This manifested itself in the Cheese Man’s intended lack of meaning coming to mean the dream, the episode, itself.

The Cheese is love.
Not just in a romantic way, but a way of comfort. Tara is Willow’s space for the cheese (yes, yes, sexual innuendo all around), and Willow’s love for Buffy, Xander, and Giles allowed her to act as the crux of the spell in the previous episode (her part of Spirit). Xander loves Anya (and lusts after everyone else, though his particular form of love for Buffy has changed as their relationships progressed), but even though she does love him, she’s incredibly selfish. Xander’s love for and from everyone else is not going to protect him from the outside world, since his friends will lose their connection if he doesn’t strike out on his own as they did, and Anya may leave him if he’s broke for too long. Giles sees his parental love for Buffy as an obligation, and isn’t sure if he loves her because he’s a watcher (the cheese wears me) or because that is who he is and how he feels, and is not sure if he has room in his life despite being Buffy’s (now-unofficial) Watcher for her (you can wear more than one slice of cheese, but you cannot be worn by more than one slice of cheese, or the attempt will tear you apart). This is exemplified in his meeting with, because unlike Buffy (who loves cheese), she was never allowed even artificial cheese-like substance—  In Buffy’s dream, the Cheese Man brought up the cheese to confirm to her that she had people who loved her, and whom she loved, despite what   was saying about how a Slayer, Buffy, or any Slayer, must always be alone.

Buffy (and perhaps slayers in general), for one reason or another, finds beds, particularly empty beds, to be symbolic of things lost, particularly positive relationships.
For one example, she stabs Faith while they're making a bed in Faith's dreams. In one of her dreams, everyone she cared about deserted or was taken away from her, and there was a lot of focus on Willow's empty bed. She references along with her friends, her lack of being alone, that one of the ways she's different from the First is that she doesn't sleep on a bed of bones. This may hark back to the First's having to literally sleep on a bed of bones after she had been ripped from any semblance or possibility of having a human relationship when the original Watchers' Council stuck a demon in her soul, or it may just be because of negative relationshippy things that have happened in beds in her past ( dumping her,   sleeping with her when she was both vulnerable and unusually trusting then denying they had a relationship, Faith being stuck in a bed, comatose, because of their complete inability to get along and Buffy subsequently being instrumental in the death of the only family Faith felt she had ever had). Could also be Rape as Drama, but I don't see evidence for that (especially since all of the times I recall that a bed has been allegorically relevant, it was a lack of something or someone. That is, being empty or [in Faith's dream's case] just-made).

Slayers are immortal.
In the same way as vampires, Type III, only they have a weakness to blood loss or loss of certain internal organs instead of crosses and (to a greater degree than humans and slayers) sunlight. The main difference is that they (probably) get to age. Alternatively, they don't age. The Crucible is to take out any Potentials who were turned early enough that they would be incapable of surviving, and as a bonus a, say, fourteen-year-old Slayer wouldn't have to excuse why she still looked like she did as a mid-adolescent when in her twenties.

Buffy would have been immortal except for the Thaumogenesis demon as long as it existed.
If the Scooby Gang had sealed it instead of sending it back or making it solid so Buffy could kill it, Buffy could be rocking the the road to hell and back and never have to worry about so much as getting her heart ripped out.

Buffy has been immortal since Bargaining.
For one thing, that's why Buffy doesn't register as a human anymore, based on Spike's chip (though we really don't know how it works). Humans normally get a 1-way ticket past Anubis, and the ritual invoked Osiris to tell him that you're supposed to go back to earth if your friends want you so much-- but doesn't give you a new ticket. You can die, but your ba and ka will still be stuck on earth and may as well continue moving around, slaying demons, breathing.

The Urn of Osiris was meant to be broken during the ritual. The spell went perfectly, if in a bit of an unorthodox way.
It's just lucky that the closed circle was only necessary for the first part of the spell. Step 1: Witch calls to Osiris. Step 2: Osiris checks out the lay of the mindscape (which requires the circle). Step 3: Osiris starts pumping energy into the urn, using the witch as a conduit (does not require the circle). Step 4: The urn gets smashed before the witch dies (neither of which require the circle). Step 5: The energies built up in the urn go to the corpse and rebuild it. I'm sure that vomiting up a snake had something to do with the changeover between steps 2 and 3.
 * That would explain why the urns were so rare.
 * Original poster here: WMG: When Willow calls on Osiris a season later without an urn, she basically plans to do the same ritual, but forgoing the formalities and using herself as both conduit and battery, dumping the energy straight into the corpse from her own personal reservoir. Either because she is powerful enough to even think of trying it or because Osiris doesn't bother with steps 2 onward, Willow's will is all she needs to keep Osiris from accidentally frying her brain, and possibly the scenery, in step 2.

The Toth demon from the episode The Replacement was sent by The Watchers Council.
Why would a demon who can split people into two actively search for the Slayer? Because he was contracted by The Council to split Buffy into the young adult who lives a normal life and the killing machine like how the first Slayer was, without humanity, so that the council can control the Slayer without those pesky human emotions interfering. Makes perfect sense.

Amy was so much more powerful after being re-humaned because she was living in Willow's (and eventually Willow and Tara's) room.
You turn into a rat for three years and get stuck next to a person, and later a couple of people, who are practicing spells all the time and see if you don't become a familiar-by-proxy or accidentally soak up some unshielded magic thanks to sitting inside the shield.

After Buffy was Resurrected, Tara started working for The First.
It's said that The First was able to do what he did in S7 due to the resurrection, but this doesn't explain where he was in S6. However, if he appeared to Tara and was able to fool her, he could use her to destroy the gang's chances of beating him. All she had to do is get Willow to stop using magic, which she did. The First's plan was successful, but then Warren killed Tara, messing up his Xanatos Gambit. This would also explain why Tara turned bitchy in Season Six, as she was actively trying to get Willow to stop using magic, as she could stop him if she became skilled enough (as we saw, activating all Potentials and all).

Dawn has some Slayer Abilities.
She has shown that she is actually pretty skilled and strong, and I just don't think that just watching Buffy could allow her to be able to do things like that roll and kill thing (which, without Slayer abilities, takes alot of training). It would make sense, as she is basically an altered clone of Buffy, with either close or identical DNA, and the same soul. If the Slayer selection has something to do with the soul, it would make sense for her to be at least partially a Slayer, as other magical things (see: reality warping bubble dimension thing at the end of Season Five) think of them as the same person.

Buffy's "Heaven" was the Perfect Matrix.
After dying, her soul was put into a new meatsuit in another dimension: The Matrix Universe. She was a person in the Perfect Matrix that later failed, hence the Heaven feeling.

Buffy Ascended when she died the second time.
For those of you who have seen Angel, this will make much more sense. During Angel's second fight with Skip, Skip mentions that nobody has left Paradise before, which is where Cordelia had ascended to. He then goes on to say that there was one person who had, a Slayer. This is said in Angel Season 4, which takes place during Buffy Season 7. The whole Paradise thing would also fit with the whole "I think I was in Heaven" thing. It's unlikely that Skip was lying, as it's unlikely he knew that Angel knew Buffy.

Spike/William the Bloody has/had Asperger's Syndrome and/or high-functioning autism.
He had trouble with communication and understanding people, and displayed similar signs to someone with Asperger's Syndrome being thrust into a social situation in what little I've seen of the flashbacks. This caused him to develop an unusual reaction to losing his soul, as did Liam and Harmony. While Liam and Angelus were hardly different, Angel seemed to have a completely different soul (completely different souls), and Harmony, instead of becoming evil, lost her petty sadism and meanness and gained mere immorality. Spike, on the other hand, lost the part of him in which he didn't store the key to social interaction. While most humans just listen to their equivalent of an inner demon, William had to build up a mental library of how to act, so he a) didn't lose it all when he got vamped and b) got well over a century of practice. He got his soul back, which didn't do the same thing Angel's souls did to/for Angelus, but just gave him that little touch of empathy he needed to (along with the aforementioned practice) have a shoulder angel chirping at him about what he shouldn't have done and when he should feel remorse for something he is doing.
 * While William/Spike may have been following a social and moral to-do list, it probably wasn't due to autism or aspergers. Both are characterized by an general inability to make deep personal connections and a striking lack of eye contact, among other things. Spike had neither of those problems. People with those syndromes also tend to be very 'logical', and would most likely not understand or enjoy poetry.
 * People with autism an Asperger's Syndrome are drawn to patterns. They have difficulty, but not an inability in making deep personal connections. While very logical, they can still understand and enjoy poetry as much as the next person.
 * Point in case, the troper who made the original guess, has made personal connections as deep and (relatively) as rarely as Spike, and enjoys well-written systematic poetry and metaphor but isn't very good at formulating it to properly evoke the desired emotions in readers. Oh, wait, who does that sound like? William the Bloody-awful-at-poetry, would you say? It's certainly not necessarily the case, but he's the most likely character I've found after Near on any WMG page here (which is not to say that there arten't better examples, just that I've not seen or am not recalling them).

Anyone who significantly interacts with the Slayer can subconsciously emit a wall of silence when needed.
This would explain why they never get strange looks when talking about Slayer things.

Glory is to human self-loathing as The First is to human evil.
She didn't just hate humans and being human because of being stuck in their dimension, it was because that was what she was. The First couldn't physically interact with mortals because evil cannot cause harm in and of itself, it can only drive people to cause harm, whereas self-loathing can directly cause harm... one form of which is angry, fearful, stressful insanity. Sound familiar? It's fortunate that using one of her offensive abilities allowed her to heal from the strain of being trapped in the mortal realm. This is backed up by some of her names, which include "the Beast" and "the Abomination" (Glory, Glorificus, is an Ironic Nickname that helps her deal with everything, as does her cult of simpering demons).

Bunnies
Shortly after becoming a troll, Olaf retuned to Aud's cottage, devoured most of her bunnies alive, and made merry sport with their more attractive she-kits.

Anya's attempts to suppress the horror have eventually warped into a pathological hatred and terror of all things bunny.

The Season 8 Comics are actually one massive Take That against Stephanie Meyer perpetrated by a grumpy Joss Whedon
Buffy ended with all the potential slayers of the world becoming active slayers, a scenario in which bright young women all over the globe come into their own powers and take their place in male-dominated society. Then, during the critical years of transition, someone or something called Twilight comes along and causes the superficial, reality-television-obsessed masses to reject these female heroes and become infatuated with sexy, soulless vampires. It's directly stated that Twilight "signifies the death of magic" and the end of the Slayer line, the latter of which has always represented female empowerment in the Buffyverse. And the big reveal? , to whom Ms. Meyer almost certainly owes a debt of plagiarism gratitude. Was this one too obvious to qualify as Wild Mass Guessing?
 * A little.
 * Even if it wasn't originally meant to be a Take That against Twilight, it certainly became one. Compare this cover of Last Gleaming, Part 1 to this cover of the New Moon DVD.
 * It's certainly a sly nod to Twilight. It's not insulting though, so I don't think it's meant as a Take That.
 * The cover isn't insulting, but in the season eight comics, Twilight is an evil entity possessing and manipulating Buffy's protagonists in order to transform the world into one where magic is dead and women are less empowered. That's negative. Also, it's more than just a nod -- the idea that Twilight is using Buffy and Angel for its own selfish purposes and leaving a screwed-up society in its wake provides the main plot for the entire season. This troper is surprised and a little confused that more people aren't making a fuss over this. Did I miss the fuss?
 * I think I get the story now, but please correct me wherever I'm wrong.

Twilight is Angel. Angel figured he'd create this perfect world for Buffy. No pain. No suffering. All she's gotta do is sacrifice her family and friends. Buffy took that about as well as you'd expect.

Now on it's own that might not be such a big deal. But if we took it as a comparison to Belle all oooh oooh turn me into a vampire, I love Edward so much I'll happily sacrifice my humanity then yeah, maybe, perhaps, I can see where fans are going with it being a Take That. Buffy is way better than Belle in any case.

Dawn will die.
Only the original four can stay. Either she's written out or killed. They killed off Joyce, what's stopping them from killing of her?
 * The only thing is perhaps Joss Whedon and how he likes to defy audience expectations. What else can be done to Buffy and co before he kills them? After three seasons even I'n Genre Savvy enough to recognize his signature style. Perhaps he thinks having Dawn live would either be more of a surprise or a Fate Worse Than Death, considering.
 * Nah. The entire reason he created Dawn is because he wanted Buffy to have a sister for a good long while beforehand. If anyone is going to die now, it's Xander. Though

Dawn will NOT be killed.
Because she shares a soul with Buffy, she counts. Ignoring the parts where Buffy dies, this meshes nicely.

Tara represents Jesus, Kennedy represents the Antichrist.
Think about it. Tara sort of gave Willow inner strength and tried to save her from the dark side. When she was killed, maybe she died for Buffy's sins?

Kennedy is the opposite of Tara and universally disliked. People fear that Willow is getting too powerfull and will go evil again. Kennedy represents Dark!Willow's influence, and is the Antichrist because she's practically undoing the innocence of Tara's memory.
 * May I remind you that we tend not to mention that little arc (magic addiction) because it was retarded?

D'Hoffryn was behind the break-up of Xander and Anya
The guy who masqueraded as Older Xander turned out to be an ex-victim of Anyanka with a magic doodad. How did he escape from his hell-prison, and how did he get his hands on the doodad? How did he know to show up at just the right moment, and know just the right things to say to scare off Xander? These things were beyond his capacity, even as a demon; but easily within the power of the head of the Vengeance Demons. And what was D'Hoffryn's endgame? The return to the fold of his favorite, Anyanka. It worked (for a while).

Miss Kitty Fantastico was a Slayer...
Faith died for a few seconds in prison. Courtyard fight, demonic incident, autoerotic asphyxiation... whatever. Before she was revived, Miss Kitty Fantastico was activated. Then, Miss Kitty Fantastico was killed. 9 times. The entities who decide such issues were a little bit confused about the math, and that is why immediately after her death there were suddenly 81 Potentials living in one house.


 * There may have been even more cat deaths/ Potential callings than that, when one bears in mind that Miss Kitty Fantastico was the pet of Willow during the time period that she was most liberal with her magic useage. Hmmm.. explain to Tara that the lighting-bolt William Tell game didn't end well, or...?

The Gentlemen were Heartless.
...And you know it.
 * Ow.

Tara will be revived in the comics.
was supposed to haven in the show, but now they can do it here without worrying about actors.

Angel being Twilight makes perfect sense.
This troper would like to point out that there's no reason it would have been anyone else. The entire character is Joss lampshading his role in the pussification of vampires. Think for a moment, who was the first vampire who stalked a teenage girl and watched her sleep and was totally obsessed with her? Angel. Who made that popular? Angel. What did this cause? It getting ripped off and being used in a book series that has ruined vampires. We already know what that series is called. Make sense now?
 * Also, it could just be more along the lines of, "Hey, kids, remember the *original* Edward? What about the original Bella Swann, Buffy Summers? You know, normal girl turned superhuman who gets involved with a good vampire? Well, guess what, if the other author knew what she was doing, she would know that vampires getting jiggy with girls in such a sappy manner is grounds for the apocalypse. Of stupidity."

Spike never wanted his soul back. He just wanted the chip out of his head.
When he went to Africa to "give Buffy what she deserves", he meant he wanted to shed his Badass Decay and be the Big Bad again. Getting his soul back was the biggest gotcha of all time.
 * In fact, it might be obvious enough to not even qualify as WMG. He was pissed at Buffy when he left for Africa, and was pretty horrified when he got his soul back.
 * But his chip didn't work with Buffy anyway. The incident that caused him to leave was when he nearly raped her, and when he realized he was hurting her he ran off in horror.
 * The fact that the chip didn't work on Buffy wasn't the point. In fact, it was part of the problem. Their intense sexual relationship lacked boundries to the point where they didn't have a safe code. It's very likely that Spike didn't realize she actually meant "no" this time. To follow that logic, he stopped because he misinterpeted and thought Buffy was just brutally putting him down again. He fled in anger and, this confrontation being the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, left for Africa to get his chipp removed. Yes, it didn't work on Buffy. More importantly though, it left him defenseless to Willow and Tara, the most powerful witches in Sunnydale.
 * Better theory: Spike himself didn't really know what he wanted when he was resouled, just that he wanted things to stop being so fucked up.

The gypsy curse was meant to give Angel eternal suffering even in heaven.
If he felt enough remorse to ever get into heaven (not just his soul, his conscience, but all of his self), they thought it still wouldn't have been enough. Without a soul, he would only be tormented by his existence in heaven, and he would lose his soul as soon as he experienced a moment of perfect happiness.

In "Normal Again", both the Asylum and Sunnydale are real places.
The Asylum is wherever Buffy was after she fell into the portal created by Dawn in Season 5. She described the place she went to as being a place where she was at peace, which could be The Asylum.(If you define "at peace" as not having to cope with the stresses of being The Slayer.) When she was resurrected, the spell didn't bring her all the way back because the ritual was interrupted. Thus, half of her was in Sunnydale and the other half was in the Asylum. When the demon stung her, the poison created a situation where she was forced to choose between one dimension or the other. She ultimately chose Sunnydale, which caused the Buffy from the Asylum to shut down. I suppose the consequence of this theory, although we never see it, is that Buffy eventually disappeared from The Asylum all together.

Angel is a repressed sadist, even while he has a soul.
In the Buffyverse, a soul is basically a conscience, making one feel guilty about doing evil. Spike loses his soul and still loves his mom, loves Dru, and needs to be coaxed by Angel into his more monsterous activities. After he gains his soul back, after he gets over the insanity from suddenly feeling the guilt of thousands of murders, he's basically a slightly softer version of the same person. The only thing his soul gives him is the ability to know right from wrong. Angel, on the other hand, loses his soul and immediately begins torturing, murdering, and apocalypsing like he's trying to win an evil contest. But all he's lost is restraint - meaning he always wants to do those things, he just doesn't because he'd feel guilty about it.
 * Spike's ability to love isn't that atypical. Willow and Xander in the Wishverse were clearly in love, for example. The Master was very affectionate towards Darla and The Annointed One. Angelus is the strange one for being as much of a monster as he is. There are a lot of very bad vampires out there, but most of them retain some measure of humanity. Angelus didn't. The reason that Spike is clearly Spike but Angel is nothing like Angelus is because the demon that took over William's body is less evil than the demon that took over Liam's body.

The Buffybot was borderline sapient--and in love with Spike.
When Willow reprogrammed the Buffybot to operate in full-time Slayer mode, she apparently still had a few quirks relating to Spike, even though Willow assured him that she'd purged all the sexbot subroutines from her system. She actually did--it's just that Buffybot had fallen for Spike on her own. Her programming clearly has her showing affection to Willow and Dawn, and she seems to love Dawn as much as she would if she were actually Buffy. And for the past three months she's seen Spike guard Dawn during every waking moment. She knows that Spike loves Dawn, has been tortured for her, and would probably die for her. Which leads her to love Spike as well. The reason she expresses it so strangely is because, well, she's a sexbot. She's basically speaking in her first language.

Buffy was never in any Heaven.
Now, this might just be insanity, but perhaps she was completely wrong about being in heaven. Normally major things in the Buffyverse have a prophecy about them. Yet the resurrection of a Slayer which directly caused The First Evil to be able to start to try to take over the world which directly caused every Potential Slayer to be activated along with the recovery of an ancient Slayer weapon (I refuse to call it a scythe) never had one. Or did it? If you were a Hellgod or demon or whoever and you learned that an entire army of demon killing badasses was going to be created due to a Slayer being resurrected you'd want to stop that, right? Now, logically you could just lock up and torture every Slayer who dies to try to prevent that, right? No, that would be an awful idea. Think for a moment, you torture a Slayer and then she comes back to life. Chances are the first thing she'll want to do is get enough people to kick your ass three ways to Sunday. So, what is a hellgod or demon to do? Well, what about making her not WANT to kill demons or even live? Take away her will to fight? The best way to do that is to make her life a living hell if she's ever resurrected. So, you take away all her worries and make her the happiest being alive, err... dead. That way, she will most likely kill herself upon returning to life, stopping her from ruining your life ever again. After all, Buffy felt like everything would be fine and all would be good while she was dead. Yet her friends were suffering and if she didn't come back they would have all died. Clearly it was all a lie to try to sabotage her. It almost worked, too. Unluckily for them, you really cant fight prophecies.
 * If only this was cannon (it would be awesome but will never happen). BTW I agree 100%.

Willow was just using the laptop as a keyboard and screen when reprogramming the Buffybot.
It was modified so that the accessory end of the USB cable could be plugged into the laptop and the computer end could be plugged into the Buffybot, because the buffybot was the computer, and the laptop was just a human-interface peripheral. (This is pretty much just to explain away a special effects error with the USB jack referenced on the Buffybot page of the Buffyverse wiki, it doesn't really matter in the big picture.)

Giles knows a spell that lets him predict whom any magic-user is fated to marry.
This would be a fan-fic if I wrote fan-fiction, I think.
 * He foresaw that Willow will eventually marry some white hat, which is why he has unshakeable faith in her essential goodness and was willing to stake the fate of the world on it.
 * He foresaw that Anya would never be married, which is why he didn't bother flying in for her wedding.
 * He introduced a number of magic-users to their future spouses in exchange for "a favor at a later date," hence his hold over the mage the Mayor summoned to remove Angel's soul.
 * He knows that he himself will end up marrying Olivia, the old friend he has a fling with in Season 4. He believes his continued failure to woo her over the past thirty years means they'll get together too late to have children, hence his dream of her weeping over an empty baby carriage in Restless.

Warren will become a vengeance demon
This is mostly based on just the show itself, though I don't know if it's actually made impossible by the season 8 comics. Anya became a vengeance demon who avenges wronged women against men. Given Warren's issues with women, he probably considers himself wronged by women and could be given the job to avenge wronged men against women. Warren and Anya are actually pretty similar--consider what Anya tried to do to Xander after the failed wedding (I can just imagine Warren making a woman's breasts rot off the same as Anya tried to do to Xander's penis).
 * Well, as of 8.39,

Dawn has at least some of Buffy's powers.
She manages to do things that a normal human couldn't due more than occasionally. For example, she hears Buffy and her mother talking at an almost whisper level in S 5 E 2. It just doesn't seem logical that she was yelling across the house and was about normal talking volume due to distance yet she could hear them at an almost whisper volume. However, if, due to being based on her DNA and basically having identical souls she got some of her sister's abilities, even on just a minor level, it would explain some of the things she does, like the roll in Season 6 (you don't learn how to do something by just watching someone, not that well. It takes practice).

Cassie and Drusilla are distant relatives.
Cassie's got the same talent as Dru, without the fainting and stuff. Coincidence? I think not...

All rockers of Sunnydale High are werewolves.
In 'The Pack,' Xander sniffs out a group of greasy rocker guys, saying to the pack, "Dogs." It's assumed he means the hot dogs the rockers were eating, but really he's recognized them as brothers. Oz was only the first of Sunnydale musicians to become a wolf!
 * If they were werewolves then, clearly Oz isn't the first Sunnydale musician/werewolf, since he didn't become a werewolf until the middle of season 2 when his baby cousin bit him.

Season 6 was a massive Deconstruction of the series
The focus of the season was the main character's journey to adulthood. There was no long story arc or ancient evil to face. The bad guys are a bunch of nerds who never outgrew their childhood hobbies, symbolizing the fans who only liked the show's sci-fi and supernatural aspects. The real villain is not defeated by the strongest wizard or the mightiest warrior but by the comforting words of a friend. The season ended with Buffy affirming that she wants to live and Spike gets his soul back because the show is not about death or killing but the protection and sanctity of human life and that the world is a beautiful place to be despite all the hardships and tragedy we all face.

The Mayor purposefully kept Sunnydale as a Cell Phone blackspot
We hardly ever saw anyone using cell phones in the early days of the show, despite them becoming popular and everyday tech around that time. Since Wilkins created Sunnydale as a demon feeding spot he probably abused planning and construction laws to make sure phone coverage was severly restricted so no one could dial 911 from a graveyard and save themselves from the vamps.
 * Um, let's look at this proposal logically. 1. It doesn't take a vampire that long to kill a person unless they play 2. Cop response time equals one unmoving corpse and possibly an extra meal for the moving one. 3. If cops are in the know about vamps WHY would they risk trying to save some idiot from a vamp? Best wait for dawn when it's safer. 4. mayor killed in 1999. 90s cell-service reception was crap anyways.

The Prophecy from Season 1 didn't actually say Buffy was going to die, directly.
Okay in order to get this you need a quick history lesson in death euphemisms.

In the bible (for example) and other ancient texts there is a connection between breathing and life, a baby isn't alive until it takes its first breath, when you stop breathing you die. This makes sense because before the advent of CPR and respirators once you did stop breathing you were dead.

Now here is where the WMG comes in that the Prophecy didn't say the slayer would die, it said the slayer would lose her breath or her breath would go out. This would be interpreted by any human with the proper background information as being killed but doesn't mean the slayer would stay dead. It would just be assumed by the prophet who made the prediction that she couldn't be revived.
 * She died enough that Kendra was called. Why would the prophecy in question be ambigous?

Season Six is all in insane!Tara's head.
Season Six, Season Seven, Season Eight, and the upcoming Season Nine are all in Tara Maclay’s head during her brief insanity stint in Season Five. This is why there is all the Character Derailment—not because she doesn’t know her friends well, but because she is technically insane and her mind is not able to represent them properly at first. In fact, you can even compare it all to a Fanfic of sorts!

The Tara in this imagined verse is completely sane, but even though this is all in the insane mind of someone, it doesn’t make the someone in that imagined universe insane. In fact, the Tara seen in S6 may be the remaining threads of real!Tara’s sanity. So her death in Seeing Red is…oh God. There’s another theory for Tara dying near the end of Season Six even though I’m proposing this is all in insane!Tara’s head, but I’ll get to that later.

Once More With Feeling was the saner part of Tara’s mind desperately trying to lighten things up, but insane!Tara would just not give up…

Now, I suppose we must talk about Season Six Willow. It’s possible, in the real version of in this theory’s version of The Gift, she sensed the beginning of Willow’s dark magic, and knew that it would corrupt her over time. Also, Tara may have subconsciously, or maybe even consciously, felt hurt that Willow hid their relationship from the Scoobies for so long. These oh-so-small doubts in her Love Interest are why, in insane!Tara’s post-Gift imagined-universe, Willow went through massive Character Derailment and even turned out to be the Season’s Big Bad.

Theories for Tara’s death if Season Six and onward was all just a world inside insane!Tara’s head: It was to punish imaginary!Willow; it was symbolic the last remaining thread of her sanity; even insane!Tara hates S6 that much; etc.

Season Seven has characters a lot more in-character. Insane!Tara has become even more insane by the point she began imagining S7, but oddly her characterizations of her friends became more stabilized and less all over the place as they were in S6. Kennedy, as Tara’s complete opposite, was made because insane!Tara felt bad for putting Willow through S6. (Remember, this is all in Tara’s head!)

(Now, it’s likely that all the events of Angel’s show that are set post-The Gift on the Buffyverse timeline are in Tara’s head, but since Tara never met any of those in Angel Investigations—even Angel, I don’t think!—I’m not sure how I can fit them into this theory…)

Robin Wood was introduced so that the Buffy of insane!Tara’s imaginaryverse would have hope that, since Robin is the son of a Slayer, Buffy herself could eventually have a family of her own. Maybe.

As for Faith’s return, Tara may have seen the goodness in her during the Buffy-Faith body-swap incident in Season Four, when Tara saw Faith’s aura, so her redemption and all that was because even insane!Tara thinks of her as an Ensemble Darkhorse.

Chosen was the finale, meant to be a happy ending for Tara’s friends. However, something went wrong, and insane!Tara’s insanity increased exponentially. The result of that? Season Eight.

(Not too sure about Anya’s death in Chosen, though, since Tara never really seemed to have anything against her…)

It is revealed in Season Eight that

Finally, because I firmly believe that Season Nine, in some way, shape, or form

Back in reality, either Buffy stays dead or doesn’t, but either way, the actual events in the Buffyverse post-The Gift were a lot different. You can think up whatever you want for that, if you want. My work here is done.
 * Congratulations, you've fulfilled roughly 70% of the fan's wishes.
 * And lest we forget, "insane" doesn't equal "disconnected". She percieved Dawn's true nature, after all. It's entirely possible that she actually got to visit team Angel in this reality, probably twice: first time before the existence of Conner was revealed to team Angel (probably that time we saw Willow bring the news... make it the gang), then again after it (else how would she know of Angel doing it with Darla? Her appearances in early Season 3 are Retcons). Conner himself exists in reality, but we have no clue to his real character. Given all that, she could have made up Angel Seasons 3 through 6 based on her sketchy idea of him and his team, hence the mess with Conner, Angel/Angelus split personality Wall Banger and Angel's accepting of Wolfram & Hart.

There have always been more than one Slayer

 * We know that Glory has only been on Earth for roughly 20 years. (which really begs the question of why ancient monks were gaurding the key, why they knew ANYTHING about Glory. . .and you know this probably belongs in the justbugsme page now that I'm giving it thought. But once she's told that Buffy's the slayer she instantly knows what one is and calls it common. Unless they have slayers where she's from (and likely that the activate all cheat code was entered) why would a being from another universe know about something as incredibly rare as a Slayer unless they had them where she came from? The chances that in Ben's 20 years of life that he/she randomly ran into a slayer is incredibly low. For starters of those twenty years it's spend 5 as Buffy Summers. If she'd met any of the previous slayers she most likely would have killed them and the Watcher's would have been making plans, serious plans to stop her.
 * Except that everyone in the underworld knows of the slayer; heck, even Forrest knew what a slayer was, even if he didn't believe she was more than a tall tale. And just because Glory hates our world doesn't mean she's ignorant of it. Slayers (and other champions from our world) have a habit of stomping on other dimensional powers' plans; see Angel in Pylea and Holtz and Connor in Quartoth for a couple examples of mostly-human champions causing trouble off their home turf.

Giles hung out with John Constantine a bit during his Ripper days.
And possibly played with Mucous Membrane on occasion.

The Trio's choice of James Bond actors
Reflected their own personalities.
 * Warren liked Sean Connery because he was charming yet ruthless. Warren is ruthless without the charm.
 * Jonathan liked Roger Moore because he was smooth with women.
 * Andrew liked Timothy Dalton because he had edge, something Andrew obviously lacked.

The reason the love spell went screwy in "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" is because Cordelia was already in love with Xander
Because she was already inlove, the spell bounced off and affected the whole town. During the course of that episode, she actually felt the same level of emotion as all of the "crazy" women. She was just already used to it so her behavior didn't change at all.
 * It doesn't track; the spell's actual effect wasn't love... it was uncontrollable desire. And we already have a damn fine reason given in the episode: Xander's motives weren't pure. He was trying to make Cordelia love him so he could hurt her the way she hurt him. Strangely enough, the goddess Amy invoked wasn't pleased.
 * That can happen when you try to invoke Diana for a lust spell.

Various famous people through time have preformed the Paragon spell.
These people would include General George Washington (badass motherfucker who managed to lead a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits against the British Army and then proceeded to lead a country), Adolf Hitler (managed to take over Germany just via charisma, most likely broken at some point, hence his horrid leadership), Gene Simmons (leader of the rock band Kiss, massive asshole who's still loved, bedded over 1000 women and counting while still in a stable relationship with children) and more. Most of them were smart enough to tone down the awesomeness they get out of it, but Jonathan was, to put it nicely, a noob.

Buffy in season seven was actually The First.
We know that The First likes to pretend to be Buffy, right? Well I have a theory that there's a bit of Mind Screw for the audience here, in that there are times where we see who is meant to be Buffy, but it's actually The First. How else you explain her bitchiness tearing the team apart? Get It Done, I'm looking at YOU.

Dracula is the same Dracula from Castlevania.
And this explains the castle. Creature of chaos, indeed. It can appear in Sunnydale.

Xander and Dracula had sex while Xander was under his thrall.
Xander said that Dracula had turned him into a "Spider eating man-bitch," which can have some connotations. He also referred to himself as the "Butt Monkey" that same scene. Although that scene named the the phrase Butt Monkey as a trope, if you think about it, it does sound kind of dirty. "Butt Monkey" has also been used in the scene in season six, where Andrew and Jonathon were in prison. Jonathon comments about a man in an adjacent cell "That guy's been looking at me. I think he wants to make me his butt monkey. ... I hear they like the small ones, little hands like their girlfriends'" That indicates that the phrase may have some more sexual meanings.

Faith and Angel will become canon in the comic series.
Think about it. Angel needs to be rehabilitated in exactly the same way he once helped her, they're staying in a small house together with him permanently in a bed, they're both single, they've kissed before and it was hot, and no one else intends to come near them for the foreseeable future. Two hotties in isolation together? Suuuure nothings going to happen. Plus, they're co-starring in the 25-issue Angel and Faith comic series.
 * At the very least Buffy's gonna think it and she'll get pissed. Faith's realized that she's pushed away every guy who's ever been the least bit decent to her, given all they've been through Angel would be a prime candidate for love interest. Now, if that's going to happen, might Xander get a shot with Buffy?

With Joss Whedon not on the reboot, Buffy will be far far less tortured.
Nuff said.

The Annointed One was Vampire Jesus.
According to our You Fail Religious Studies Forever page, Christ means "The Annointed One", so a Vampire who's name is literally Christ and is a vampire would be their Jesus. Spike is too badass to let something like being the Vampire Messiah get in his way, though.

Anya was raped by a Wolpertinger.
The Wolpertinger is a mythological creature that looks like a rabbit, but has the antlers of a roebuck, the wings of a jay and the feet of a duck. They also have a thing for hot chicks, namely humans. Though, who's to say that one didn't get confused?

Eric and Chris Epps were recruited by the Initiative.
Eric and Chris, if you don't remember, were the brothers who found a completely sciencey way to bring the dead back to life in "Some Assembly Required" (S2, E2). During the episode, they committed four counts of grave robbing, one count of kidnapping, a count of breaking and entering, a count of arson, at least two, likely more, counts of attempted murder and at least one count of theft. So, they get arrested, but the Initiative notices their work. As their research was destroyed, they make them an offer. We'll wipe the charges, get you out of that shithole house and give you the life of your dreams, and in return, you help us with a project. The result being, of course, Adam.
 * Also, we know the Initiative has existed since early World War 2 and knows Angel. So, it's likely they were watching Sunnydale, as Angel was there. So we can almost certainly put them at the scene (Angel showed up after the building burnt down). Visually, Adam and their creations are similar. Plus, they could be tried as adults at their age. With a list of charges like that, with that many witnesses combined with them admitting it, it's likely they'd get life in prison.

Along with the above WMG, Warren was also recruited.
Warren has the skills and knowhow to create super strong, human-like machines. Previously, we saw Ted, an extra strong, human-like machine. Perhaps Warren was taken in by Ted, and raised to take care of and repair him. After the events of "Ted", Warren was alone, and brought into the Initiative to work on their zombie robot demon soldier, having the most knowhow they could find.
 * This makes even more sense when you think about April and the Buffybot. To build something like that can't be cheap. However, if you've got the US Government giving you a nice retirement package, it's alot easier to do.

It's Angel's fault Buffy became the Slayer
Before Willow did her thing with the Scythe, which Potential became the next Slayer wasn't as random as it appeared. The Potential who is closest to a vampire at the moment of the previous Slayer's death becomes the next Slayer. We see a flashback of Whistler showing Buffy to Angel at what appears to be the moment she is called.
 * That's the moment she met her first Watcher, not the moment she was called. The Counsil had overlooked her completely until after she was called.

The Old Watcher's Council was more competent than they appeared.
In Sunnydale, there was at least one apocalypse per year that Buffy prevented. Considering there is more than one Hellmouth on Earth, and Buffy doesn't go to each one routinely and put out the demon and vampire uprisings going on there, the Watchers do their share of the heavy lifting, we just don't see it. There's also the fact of the two Watchers we see for a long enough time, both become badasses rather than dead, Robin Wood could be included in this as he was raised by a Watcher and he is a badass as well. That Watcher Academy training must be good for something. Also consider that in season seven, Quentin Travers was rallying the Watchers to war, which would have been an ally that would have put Buffy's side over the edge against the First, so of course the First had Caleb destroy the Watchers, they were a far greater threat than Buffy was. This also explains why there isn't a bunch of Watchers in Sunnydale, seeing as how she was the only Slayer for the longest time, their resources were deployed elsewhere.

== Warehouse 13 (and by extension, Eureka and Alphas) takes place in the "Normal Again" world from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Beatrix Potter was the pen name of Anyanka the Vengeance Demon. == Anya/Aud's worst nightmare was something happening to her beloved bunnies. As her experimentation with mycological toxins for vengeance purposes during the increasingly technological Edwardian era turned back on her, giving her nightmares about her bunnies being put in dangerous situations, harmed, and worse, her fear evolved from bunnies being harmed with her unable to help into a fear of the bunnies themselves (a sort of Pavlovian response).

Magic clearly hasn't overrun the world in Normal Again as it had in the Wishverse and the "What if Buffy died" verse, so the bureaucratic confusion amongst various government agencies ensures that the Secret Service and DCIS are unaware of the Watchers and the Slayer, and the British are still ticked about Warehouse 12 being moved so the Slayer and most Watchers don't know of the existence of the Warehouse. Most of the creators of artifacts put their own brand of energy into the artifacts by the focus and near-ritualistic repetition of what they did (see: witchcraft and its demon-worshipper equivalents), strengthened (or even changed outright) by their public image. Alphas are probably unrelated to magic, and more closely tie into the Mad Science of Eureka and Warren Mears.

As for the thing in Sector 5? It is (among other things) the heaven-dimension equivalent of a Hellmouth. Beauty, comfort, energy, and a Mad Science field come from it the same way dark feelings, demons, and an increased magical field come from the Hellmouths.

Long story short? Anya's afraid of bunnies because of a series of increasingly bad trips back in the nineteen-aughts.

Dawn was made helpless so Buffy would protect her better
The monks had the power to change reality so drastically that everything and everyone is Dawn's made-up life knew who she was: memories were made out of thin air and documents were changed to fit the new reality. So why not make Dawn a badass? The monks purposefully made Dawn so helpless in order to guarantee that Buffy would do her absolute best to protect Dawn. If Dawn had the slightest bit of competence then Buffy would not be protecting Dawn to the best of her abilities because she would trust Dawn not to be a total screw-up.

Willow is a spark.
The magic addiction arc is her going into her madness place.

Rupert Giles is descended from Uther Pendragon, and the Watchers Council is the continuation of the Knights of Camelot.
Regarding Giles, descent from Uther Pendragon would explain the strong physical resemblance between the two men, his large personal library of ancient magical texts, the collection of medieval weaponry, and above all his ruthless streak. We know that Giles' father was a Watcher, and since the Council didn't seize all his books and weapons after they kicked him out, we can assume that these items are family heirlooms.

Of course, once the Uther/Giles connection is established, the Knights of Camelot/Watchers Council becomes even more apparent. Both organizations are dedicated to standing against black magic, see stability and order as paramount concerns, and have no problem with using extreme measures to carry out their mission. Plus, it would explain why the Watchers Council is based in Britain; it existed there long before it became the Watchers Council, and the prestige of the Camelot lineage would go a long way towards convincing Slayers and fellow travelers from around the world to place themselves under the Council's leadership, regardless of its geographic location.

Once More With Feeling is all a metaphor for Joss' feelings about the show being Uncancelled
This was the impression that I had after watching the episode, and was surprised to find no mention of it on the web. I'm either a genius, an idiot, or it's common knowledge. Anyways, here's how I see it, song by song:
 * Going through the motions: The song is all about how Joss has run out of both enthusiasm and fresh ideas. By this point he was working heavily on Angel and developing Firefly. He felt there was nowhere new to go and nothing new to do. He was simply "going through the motions" on the writing (this could explain the lazy "magic addiction" storyline). The end lines, "I can't even see/if this is really me/and I just want to be/Alive" reinforce how confused he is, and how he just wants to write quality television.
 * If We're Together: About his (perhaps false) confidence that with the rest of the Mutant Enemy crew, they'll be able to get through the problems all the same. The song is a gung-ho "We can do anything" number, but as the rest of the episode shows, all of the characters were phoning in the confidence. They all have serious doubts about where they're going. This could be Joss saying that he knows the crew ultimately depends on him for leadership, and that their presence doesn't help his feelings of disassociation.
 * Under Your Spell: Joss describing how much he does love the show. A sweet love ballad, this tells us that even though he's lost, he does love Buffy and is permanently "under her spell." Buffy was the first feature screenplay he ever sold, and the first show he ever had. He deeply loves Buffy. You never forget your first.
 * I'll never tell: All about how Joss feels guilty about wanting to do other things. Despite wishing he could develop other projects, he feels "engaged" to Buffy; that he must stick it out to the end. But, of course, he'll never tell anyone about it. This would explain why he's never confirmed any of this WMG in an interview (either that, or the WMG is totally false).
 * Rest In Peace: Joss pleading with the show to leave him alone and let him rest in peace. He desperately want to leave, to "take [his] love and burry it in a hole six foot deep," he he can't make himself do it. As Spike is uncontrollably in love with Buffy the character, Joss is uncontrollably in love with Buffy the show. Lines toward the end express how he feels he gives everything to the show, and gets nothing in return: "I know/I should go/But I follow you/Like a man possessed/There's a traitor here/Beneath my breast/If my heart could beat/It would break my chest/But I can see/You're unimpressed/So leave me be/And let me rest in peace." After the song, Buffy walks away, leaving Spike in a grave. "What? You're leaving?!" Spike yells after her. This is Joss further expressing how, even if he could shake Buffy, he'd be drawn back to it.
 * Standing: Giles talking about standing in Buffy's way of growing into an adult it really taking on the voice of the show, standing in Joss's way of growing into a more versatile writer. Joss feels he's grown as much as he can with Buffy. The more complex character relations of Firefly were a taste of what he could be doing, but now he's back writing Buffy. After working for years on the show, what has he got in return? More Buffy. Joss is expressing how much he loves the show but feels it's in his way.
 * Under your spell/Standing (reprise): The earlier love song, about how much Joss loves Buffy, is now turned into a song declaring how he can't escape. He could have let the show just end after season 5 (as he had planned to do), but once it was picked up by UPN he was powerless to leave. He's under it's spell, and feels he has no control, the same way Tara feels she has no control with Willow.
 * Walk Through the Fire: Like it or not, Joss is decaring that he's here. He'll walk through the fire (the fire can be both writer's block and disassociation) and let it burn. "I touch the fire and it freezes me/I look into it and it's black/Why can't I feel/My skin should crack and peel/I walk a fire path." These lines from Buffy about how she feels nothing sonce coming back clearly echo Joss' feelings since the show came back. After going through the horrible pain of killing his creation at the end of season 5, anything else he does with Buffy feels hollow. "Now through the smoke/She calls to me/To make my way across the flame/To save the day/Or maybe melt away/ I guess it's all the same." The "she" is not just Glory, but the show. It's calling Joss like the Siren's song. His show has been uncancelled, and he can either "save the day" (i.e. continue making groundbreaking television) or "fade away" (let the quality slip and have the show end as a joke). Joss seems to agree with Neil Young, that it's better to burn out than fade away. The finale of season five was burning out, and now he feels he's doomed to let the show fade away. And with his indifference, he feels it's all the same. Spike's lines, "I hope she fries/I'm free if that bitch dies/I'd better help her out" continue the theme of wanting the show gone, but still doing everything he can to keep it going.
 * Something to Sing about: Joss' feelings of alienation are brought to the forefront. "There was no pain/No fear no doubt/'Till they pulled me out/From Heaven/I think I was in heaven." Constantly fighting with the network had caused pain, and he was always afraid that they would wreck his wonderful creation. With Buffy over, he was finally free from the pain and fear, and doubts about whether his writing was the best it could be. Then the show came back, pulling Joss from that heaven. Or, at least, what he thought was heaven. He still doesn't know if it was better to have the show cancelled or back on the air. Hence, his doubts about "heaven." Buffy pleads for the demon to give her something to sing about, as Joss is pleading for something to write about, as he feels the show has run it's course. It no longer gives him the sense of satisfaction it once did.
 * Where do we go from here: Joss (and by extension, Mutant Enemy productions) wondering where he go's from here. "The battle's done/And we kind of won/So we sound our victory cheer." He succeeded in getting the show back, and is knows he should be happy. But where does he go from here? Like season 8 of Stargate SG-1 or season 4 of Babylon 5, he tied up all the plot threads. He brought his work to a satisfactory conclusion. Now he has to keep it going after the "battle" (i.e. narrative) is done. "Why is the path unclear/When he know hope is near/Understand/We'll go hand in hand/But we'll walk alone in fear." The show is back (hope) but the path of where to take it is unclear. Joss will work with the cast and crew he loves (the hand in hand part), but he knows he'll be walking alone in fear, since he's the creator, head writer, and executive producer. He feels he may be the only one with doubts.
 * Coda: "This isn't real/But I just want to feel" Buffy sings right before making out with Spike, actions that will change the show forever. Perhaps Joss is saying that he knows Buffy/Spike isn't meant to be, and he's just doing to get some kind of emotion going in a show that's otherwise lifeless to him. The episode ends on a question, "Where do we go from here?" The words are left echoing on the screen.

Dawn is a Slayer
I'm kind surprised that I haven't seen this yet. When Buffy died in "The Gift", it DID call a new Slayer; Dawn. Nobody realized because they were always trying to keep Dawn out of harm's way, and so she didn't get a chance to fight. The first time she gets to do anything isn't until the season 6 finale, "Grave", where she fights surprisingly well against the earth demon things that Dark Willow summons to kill her and Buffy; she says that she watched Buffy fight, but Dawn's never even held a sword before. Then we do see her fight in season 7, and she's a lot more competent than you'd think she'd be, given that she had no training. The finding spell that Willow used ignored Dawn and went to Amanda because it was only looking for Potentials (or alternately, it DID find Dawn too, Dawn and Amanda just happened to be standing a few feet away from each other without realizing). So Dawn is another Slayer and no one realized.

Normal Again was real...
...And Buffy's favorite tv show was Angel. She watched it all the time before developing severe schizophrenia, and it became part of her hallucination. In her delusions, her favorite hero was the man she was always meant to be with and who loved her as much as she loved him. Many characters that appeared in Angel appeared in her delusions, such as Cordelia, Wesley, etc., though most of her delusions were made up by her (Willow, Xander, Giles, etc.) Therefore, Sunnydale being all in her mind doesn't contradict the existence of Angel because it was never real to begin with, it was always a tv show.
 * But how could there be Angel without Buffy in the first place?
 * It wasn't that she inserted herself into the show, it was that she put herself in the show's universe and changed it so that she was Angel's love interest and whatnot. The original show was mostly the same show that we watch, except that Buffy inserts herself in crossovers and her brain made up the whole thing with Angel losing his soul to her (in the original show she watched, it was really someone else as part of the backstory). In fact, Buffy may have had her entire delusion based on this backstory in Angel that was never really fleshed out.
 * But that would mean that Buffy shouldn't have been in episodes such as Sanctuary, which means that if Buffy's not real then Faith shouldn't be a part of it either, and...owwww...
 * Okay, going by the evidence here's what seems to have happened. Buffy's actions and hallucinations: real (see her comment about her friends forgiving her and Willow saying she thought an insane asylum was an escape from the real world.) Insane asylum: fake.

The "loser preacher" who seduced Lily was Caleb
One of her fake surnames is "Houston", implying that she's at least visited the deep south (Caleb once murdered a choir girl in Tennessee). Before graduating to serial murder, Caleb was already a defrocked priest who rebelled by forming his own shoestring sect. When Lily got away from him, it drove Caleb into such a rage that he went on to continually murder blonde girls of Lily's approximate age (i.e. Betty from Knoxville) until eventually being tapped by The First.

In Willow's dream in "Restless" when she sees Harmony repeatedly trying to bite Giles' neck just before the play
. . . and Giles keeps telling Harmony to "stop that" she's actually processing a buried memory of a time she walked in on Harmony hitting on Giles in the Library.

Buffy's uncle is Jack Bauer.
Buffy's watcher in the film was Donald Sutherland. Buffy's mother of course was Kristen Sutherland. She tortures a vamp by shoving a cross down it's throat. Who could have taught her that? The Trope Namer for Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique perhaps, Keifer Sutherland?

Olivia left Giles because she wanted children.
In Restless, Giles' dream has Olivia pregnant and pushing a pram, but later she's no longer pregnant and she's weeping over the empty pram. It's possible that Olivia left Giles because she wanted children and he was either unwilling or unable. Alternatively, they had got pregnant and she lost the baby. The second theory, one wonders if he had known before she left, or if maybe he had found out after or never found out at all, and his subconcious was telling him. Or warning him.

The Powers That Be consist entirely of future Big Bads, protecting the Earth from the current Big Bad so that they can take it over later.
They help Angel out because he tends to be important to their long-term plans, and help random do-gooders like Buffy because they need the world intact for them to feast on later. They act like angels when appearing to heroes because that just works better. Earth survives by the same principle that prevents crabs from climbing out of a bucket: whenever one gets close to escaping, the others pull it down.

Buffy Took a Level in Jerkass because of Faith

 * Faith stole Buffy's body at the height of her Jerkass ways. Even though it wasn't for long the good in Buffy worked it's magic on Faith and rather than running like she intended she goes out to be a hero. When things get back to normal Buffy would later changed her personality, to the point where she is compared to Faith. The reason? The poison Faith left when she stole Buffy's body infects her. The same as the goodness in Buffy led Faith to reform.

Joyce's death was a direct result of Dawn's existence.
There's always a price for magic, but giving life and human form to The Key is apparently repercussion-free. However, not 2 episodes after Dawn's introduction does Joyce's illness make its first appearance, suggesting some sort of link between the two. It would be interesting if Dawn's existence required the death of Joyce, and would pile on a steaming heap of angst onto the poor girl if she ever found out, as Joss is wont to do.
 * Fridge Brilliance maybe?