Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Headscratchers/Season 3: Difference between revisions

*** What the above troper said. If Buffy or Giles had asked the Council to give Buffy a salary after her mother died they would have told him to sit on it, so they sure as hell weren't going to give Faith a salary when she could have gotten at least a part-time job (however crappy) during the day. She's unemployed, 17 years old, and a high school drop-out, yet she lives at the motel, travels around, feeds herself, and buys trashy outfits. Her philosophy of "Want. Take. Have." AKA stealing, could explain it, but I think she'd need a more reliable source of income for all that. It is true however that Faith's situation in early season 3 makes Giles look at best distracted by other concerns (Buffy's drama) and at worst callous. The obvious explanation for it is that the writer's didn't think "how come the only adult who has no other dependents doesn't at least visit Faith to see how she's doing?" therefore Giles doesn't think of it either. Probably if he dropped by her motel sometimes people would think he's her pimp or her john. As for Giles not showing her any affection, I give you her first interaction with Giles where she hits on him, when Xander saves her live she has sex with him, and she hugs the Mayor suggestively and calls him "Sugar Daddy" when he gives her a new apartment. Any man that's nice to her, clearly due to her bad experiences with men in the past, she interprets it as a ''quid pro quo'' situation and she responds the way she thinks they want her to. It isn't that Giles doesn't have the will power to gently turn her down, it's just that when someone's brain has been screwed with as spectacularly as Faith's was, it's very difficult to help them correct their thinking to what's healthy without some kind of therapy, and what therapist could Faith have possibly talked to? Giles openly giving an underprivileged, emotionally damaged, orphan teenager money, hugs and "private talks in his office" looks so much worse than when he does those things for Buffy, whose mother knows about their relationship. Faith might have felt like he thought she owed him something and grown resentful of this so-called debt. If he or Buffy pissed her off she likely would have turned on him on a dime, as she did to Buffy a quite a few times, even used his generosity against him to get him arrested (she IS kind of crazy and doesn't think of consequences). He had Buffy and the gang over at his place before they graduated high school because he trusted them as his friends. Giles didn't have Faith over at his house because he barely knew her and she had so many trust issues, and she betrayed them about four months after meeting them, not really enough time for him to let someone get close, let alone for Faith to let someone in. Yet Faith has a certain respect for Giles, if the "canon" Season 8 comics are included (I haven't read much of those because my walls can't take that kind of abuse but I know the general Giles and Faith storyline) along with the few interactions the two characters get in the show. She is ''pissed'' when she finds Giles critically injured in "Revelations". She appeared to want the kind of relationship with the Mayor that Buffy had with Giles, but she never blames Giles for what happened to her. She both verbally and physically lashes out at Buffy, Willow, Xander, Angel and Wesley, but never attacks Giles. Here is my fanwank, based on what we see of their relationship: it's possible that he was her source of income until she broke with the group for good, and all of their scenes were off-screen. If Giles has Buffy in the library to witness him handing over cash to Faith (so there's no paper trail), and Joyce knows about it (Joyce was the one after all who wanted Faith over for dinner more than once) he has people to back him up if something goes awry. In Season 1 of "Angel" she picks Wesley to torture over Cordelia because she has no personal grudge against Cordy - she blames her problems partially on Wesley for his failure as her Watcher and for turning her in to the Council:

 

 

(Continued) Giles '''was''' her Watcher, but she seemed to regard him as really Buffy's Watcher, which is the way the gang all seemed to secretly feel. Wesley is her Watcher for three episodes, during which they hardly talk, and he made more of a negative impression on Faith than several months of Giles "ignoring" her. Faith's fall was inevitably going to happen at some point even if Giles and the Scoobies had spent all their free time trying to make her feel special and wanted. The responsibility for Faith's turn to the Dark Side lies with the people who traumatized her as a child, not with the reticent British men hired to train her and who didn't give her free shit in return for her constant disappearances and attitude of "back the fuck off". It's entirely possible that Giles did neglect her, but I don't think their later interactions bears this out. Giles has a habit of giving people a lot of space to work personal problems out on their own (such as "Dead Man's Party", "The Freshman", uh, Season 6), just as he insists on privacy when it comes to his own issues ("The Dark Age"), but ultimately he's there for people in trouble, to help them physically, emotionally or financially, even when they're not Buffy. It's truly unfortunate that the writers barely fleshed out Giles' relationships with characters other than Buffy and Willow, and stopped giving a crap about writing him in character by mid-Season 7 when Faith came back on the side of good.