I think one of the worst moments in buffy history is them framing xander's speech about riley in into the woods as like... correct in any way. it makes you really dislike Xander (even more). Buffy's boyfriend literally cheats on her with vampire prostitutes lol and then tells her that if she doesn't forgive him on the spot he's leaving forever. and then we're supposed to buy that Xander is correct in saying that it's all Buffy's fault and that she should run after Riley to beg him to stay?

It's sooo infuriating how Riley is framed as 'the one who got away' when really he's 'the one who was so cripplingly insecure that he couldn't handle his girlfriend being stronger than him and having her own problems because he's made his entire identity about his girlfriend instead of getting the fuck over himself'

the real reason why xander doesn't want buffy to dump riley's ass as she should is so clearly because he projects onto riley. subconsciously he thinks that if someone 'normal' like riley can be with buffy then he also has a shot. newsflash it wasn't riley being 'normal' it was riley being an insecure condescending freak just like u

The period of time that Buffy and Spike are regularly having sex is possibly the one time troughout the entire series that they act the least as a couple.

I’ve been rewatching Buffy and for sometime now I’ve been contemplating far too much about the characters hogwarts houses and I keep getting baffled by Willow. She changes soooo much I almost had forgotten! Later seasons she’s a gryff or raven but am I the only one who sees a veryy solid hufflepuff (with Ravenclaws love of learning) in the first 2/3ish seasons????

Well, if we are using sortinghatchats' method, Willow is a (unhealthy at first) Snake primary, Bird secondary with a Badger secondary model. Hope it helps!

butterflies and sleepy vamps

romantic dinner

buffy and drusilla are broken mirror reflections of each other and buffy hates that bc drusilla is the physical representation of angels violent past that they can no longer try to ignore and also both girls that angel targeted and seduced bc they were young, pure (virginal), and special (buffy chosen as a slayer and dru with her psychic sight) and while buffy is used as an ideal that angel can redeem himself drusilla is used as the ideal of the depths of his cruelty and buffy hates being reminded of how similar they are bc it blurs the line whether angel is that dissimilar to angelus. also buffy and drusilla have the same birthday. and they should kiss

Buffy the Vampire Slayer | 03.19 | Choices

Kendra is such a prime character to explore black girl horror like. Particularly when it comes to the aspect of adultification of black girls and what that means for a black girl chosen to be part of the Slayer line which inherently accelerates that. The only slayer we know to have been a (single) parent is Nikki, also a black woman. Or that the slayer line was founded by forcing the gift (curse?) upon a black girl against her will. That "you never had a watcher" line when Giles has his brief interaction with Sineya went straight to my heart. Like you could argue about the relatively parental role of Watcher but it's supplementary. It wasn't always there. And the isolation is. UGH.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) dir. Fran Rubel Kuzui

It's so weird that in angel s5e2 they do a little flashback to Spike's blaze of glory moment in the last episode of Buffy... but they leave out Buffy saying "I love you". It's such a blatant omission, the ONLY omission from that scene, that it feels totally deliberate and kind of dishonest. Considering a lot of the Spike and Angel moments in S5 revolve around their jealousy and rivalry towards each other, and a LOT of that is to do with Buffy like... Why would you leave it out? It's a pretty big moment for Spike's character in general.

As far as I recall they don't even mention it, they just mention the fact that Spike and Buffy have had a lot of sex compared to bangel's ONE disastrous time (that they remember) but it does kind of cheapen it for Spike. A big motivation for him not leaving LA could have been him not wanting to hold Buffy to her words, since he clearly doesn't believe that she loves him (even though she does, as per Whedon). He presumably thinks she only said that to make him feel better in his final moments, because she wouldn't have to actually follow through on her words. Which is sad. But it makes much more sense as a motivation than the weird 'it cheapens my moment of glory' excuse like since when does spike give a shit about that

In Season 1's Witch Buffy insists on defending Amy's apparent use of magic, even when she thinks she's been cursed by a life-threatening spell that Amy cast on her. "It's not Amy's fault," Buffy tells her friends, "She only became a witch to survive her mother".

This is an interesting moment for a couple of reasons. It's one of the last few times on the show that anybody will stand up for Amy Madison, a character who, despite going through multiple horrific experiences through the course of the show, is treated with considerably less sympathy or respect than .... well, take your pick, honestly: I'm not sure I can think of a recurring character the show consistently has less empathy for. But also, of course, Buffy is factually wrong: it wasn't Amy who cast a spell on her at all, but rather her mother Catherine who, we later learn, used magic to steal her daughter's body "a few months ago" and imprisoned her in own home in an attempt to relive her own high school glory days.

But it's also, I think, a possible bit of unintentional foreshadowing. Later on in the show, Amy will go on to become a witch. Not just any witch but, by the standards the show will later adopt, a surprisingly powerful one: already by her second appearance Amy seems to be able to cast spells that the Willow Rosenberg of Season 3 and 4 would have struggled with (the turning people into a rat and back one in particular), and Willow is clearly meant to be some sort of prodigy.

The show never bothers to ask how or why this happened. Amy presumably had access to her mother's old spell books (in the same way Willow was initially teaching herself from Jenny Calendar's notes), but until some point in Season 3, when she starts doing magic with Willow and Michael, Amy doesn't seem to have had any one else helping her. (Although one slightly depressing possibility raised -- I think unintentionally -- by Season 6 is that Amy was already going to see Rack as early as the high school seasons: how else would she know how to find him in Wrecked only days after being turned back into a human and after having been trapped in the form of a rat since Season 3's Gingerbread?).

But, again, why is Amy doing this? We know a lot about why Willow wants to become a witch. We can guess why Tara -- whose own relationship with her mother is almost the exact opposite of Amy's -- became a witch. What about Amy herself? What is her motive? There are much easier ways to cheat on tests, surely. Are we supposed to assume that being an evil witch is hereditary or something? (Certainly the show hadn't quite yet decided what it wanted witchcraft to be a metaphor for, for all that Amy's second appearance literally begins with her asking Willow if she's planning to attend the school's Valentine Dance.)

Well, consider how Witch ends. Buffy and Catherine are fighting, Catherine casts a spell to ensure that Amy "never makes trouble again", the spell backfires and Catherine vanishes. The audience know what happen to her, but none of the characters ever find out ("There's been no sign of her?" Buffy asks Amy after she's got her own body back.) Maybe Amy wasn't quite as confident about not having to worry about her mother anymore as she claims to be. Maybe she was worried that her new idyllic life with her father wouldn't last for long (and... well, it doesn't). Maybe she was afraid about what would happen to her if her mother ever came back looking for revenge and Amy still wasn't strong enough to defend herself.

So maybe Buffy was right after all. Maybe Amy did become a witch to survive her mother.

The Worst of the Worst: IMDB’s 10 Worst Ranked Episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (insp.)

I think that the Thing that gets people about btvs when they talk about 'bad' characters and forgiving characters for their evil misdeeds is that the show is fundamentally about being a human... in completely unhuman conditions. Like especially when we talk about Spike and spuffy, there's always people asking 'but how can you excuse ___' and the thing is, its not about excusing certain behaviors, but rather giving them context that wouldn't exist in our world. Like spuffy s6 is super toxic- they hit each other, use each other, generally are abusive, and while that behavior is not excusable or forgivable, the context is that we have two characters who are literally mortal enemies trying to sort out complex human feelings for each other.

Its about taking flawed humans and putting them in fucked up situations AND THEN also taking away their soul, giving them a soul, giving them superhuman strength, giving them trauma that a human in the real world could never ever have because the supernatural conditions that perfectly aligned to fuck them over simply don't exist in reality. And in doing all of this, the show stretches the limits of the human condition, asks what ifs that we can't pretend to know the real answers to. Thats whats so great about the show, but also kinda hard to wrap your mind around, especially as a first time viewer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer | 4x22 "Restless"

my sensitive king <3