Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Fridge: Difference between revisions

* Season 7. Buffy is acting like a bitch, [[Up to Eleven]]. One would think she had gotten over the dying and resurrection by now, and for a time it looked like she had. She is so bad that the potential slayers want the newly arrived, reformed [[Ax Crazy]] [[Psycho for Hire]] Faith to lead them. The brilliance comes in that they are over the Hellmouth, Faith had been gone for three years, the cops are trying to kill the good guys, and Buffy had, aside from brief excursions, been over the Hellmouth for seven years, which would be working overtime to make her evil, crazy or dead. All her attitude, all of how much like First Evil! Buffy she is becoming, is because she had been on the Hellmouth too long and it is affecting her.

* It always annoyed me how much Buffy babies Dawn, especially in season five. At fifteen (the same age Buffy was when she was called as the Slayer), she's not allowed to stay home even for an hour or so without a babysitter (something that most kids start doing as preteens), she's often protected from truths she would be better off knowing, and she's discouraged from even helping the Scoobies with research. Of course, she's not very mature for her age, but a lot of that seems to be the result of her being treated like a child rather than the cause. Then I realized that, at the time when this is most prevalent, Buffy is cracking under the pressure that's been piling up on her over five years as the Slayer. There, in her house, under her care, is a naive fifteen-year-old who's suddenly been drawn out of her happy teenage life by the discovery of a connection to the supernatural that she neither fully understands nor wants. Sound familiar? Buffy sees herself in Dawn, and she's trying to give her the safe, sheltered adolescence that she, in hindsight, wishes she had had, even if others can see that it's not what Dawn wants or needs.

** And another [[Fridge Brilliance]] to go along with that: Buffy was tasked with protecting the Key at all costs. If the Key was just a physical object, it'd be a standard protection deal, but she's a 15 year old girl. So Buffy's task of protection goes beyond that of mere physical protection, she's compelled to protect her emotionally too, from things that might hurt her if she found out (such as being the Key, or even just the facts of life).

* One thing that was bugging me was magic. It seems like anyone can start picking it up (Dawn cast the resurrection spell in "Forever" and even Buffy used it to enter a trance in "Shadow"), so it was kind of bothering me that for something that seems pretty accessible, only Willow, Tara, Amy, and Jonathan seem to be doing it. And then I realized; of course many more people are using magic, the Magic Box has a steady stream of customers. Some seem to just be buying stuff as novelties, but you do see customers that are clearly buying spell components. And then it also hit me that just because magic is a key component of the show, it doesn't mean that they're gonna show us every single magic user in Sunnydale; even if they know about magic and demons, that doesn't mean they're gonna get involved with slaying, or even use magic all that often outside of their own home. So the magic = homosexuality connection (it was more prevalent before magic = drugs started) makes even more sense when you consider that there might be hundreds or even thousands of magic users in Sunnydale, but you couldn't tell from appearance.