u/FaveStore_Citadel

Buffy trains hard and is normally portrayed as a technically skilled and gifted fighter but I’m a little curious whether it actually makes a huge difference.

Take Kendra for example. When she first meets Buffy, they’re both equally matched in terms of supernatural abilities, but Buffy has only had about two years of fighting experience and training whereas Kendra has presumably received martial arts training her whole life. Nonetheless, they’re almost evenly matched when they first fight due to the misunderstanding.

Then there’s Faith, who spends considerably less time training and slaying than Buffy and likely wasn’t identified by watchers and educated in fighting as a potential just like Buffy. When they face off at the end of s3, Buffy has had over three years of experience where she’s been constantly training and slaying nearly every night, and Faith has only had about a year of experience as a slayer, during which time she’s not shown to be particularly disciplined about clocking in to patrol and training. Buffy should be a considerably better fighter, but they’re still almost evenly matched and Buffy just barely beats her.

Then there’s the episode Helpless, where we’re shown that despite her skill, without her powers Buffy is pretty solidly outmatched by even regular men who are bigger than her.

The most solid conclusion you can draw is that most slayers have a very narrow range of combat ability and any training and skill they tack on that only slightly nudges their competence.

I just saw a reel about the 100 and it took me back to when I binged the first 3 seasons in 2016 and because nobody I knew was getting into it, I had to make a Reddit account (a different one) to discuss it. I’m feeling so nostalgic. Lexa is still one of the coolest characters I’ve ever seen on TV and I can remember how gutted I was at her death. I kept watching the show till it ended and liked it till the last season but nothing beat s3 for me.

The first episode is a great example. She can jump high enough to easily swoop over the school gate, a feat she’s never shown repeating throughout the series. And then less than ten minutes later, this lower body strength seems to have given up on life when a vampire grabs her leg as she’s trying to climb out of the sewers and instead of being able to kick it through the earth’s crust as the previous scene established, Xander has to yank her back.

This is probably the first major test of whether hardline leftists can win close elections against republicans. Maine is sort of another one, but I feel like it’s a lot more noisy as a signal because of candidates quality. Platner could lose and the left could still credibly say this wasn’t a referendum on his policies, he was just a bad candidate and if he wins, liberals could also credibly say the partisan lean of the state made it so instead of his politics.

Regarding, AES, if he wins, it’ll be a major victory for the left, and the Dem establishment will be forced to acknowledge the left as a coalition partner instead of pesky insurgents who never actually help against the GOP. Moderate dems in purple districts and states can no longer fend off primary challengers from their left by claiming that they’re not suitable for winning the general election, and will have to turn left themselves to remain competitive. I believe the party in general will shift to the left noticeably and suddenly, without fear of electoral consequences. Their donors will complain obviously, but realistically, they’ll realize that having moderate politics is far more electorally riskier than losing donors.

If he loses, it would be the first Dem senate loss in the state in 32 years, and the ramifications will be chaotic.
Moderates and the Dem establishment will try much harder to squeeze out leftists from the tent, claiming that their presence is pushing out more voters than it’s pulling in. The left is now entrenched enough in deep blue cities and states to resist it, and I predict the infighting will be spectacular and uglier than anything we’ve seen so far because both camps will become much more aggressive. The GOP may also sense a political opening here. If the writing on the wall seems to show that the left isn’t going anywhere and the Dems are going to keep nominating unpopular candidates in races they can’t win, they might take chances with inviting former Dems to their tent for their post-Trump political identity, not exactly by moderating as a whole, just maybe by signalling that if liberals align with the GOP on guns, FP and immigration, they can survive in their party. Fetterman might be really important here. If he shifts party, keeps his current positions and still wins a GOP primary, the GOP might believe that their base is willing to forgo ideological purity testing to attract significant chunks of former Dem liberals unhappy with the new direction of their party.

When Xander leaves Anya at the altar, people understand she’s heartbroken but nobody really understands how it basically erased the only identity she’s built for herself since she became human. Then she becomes a vengeance demon again because it’s the last identity that fit but it doesn’t feel as smooth as it used to now that she’s been human for the past three years, so she does minor vengeance spells until Halfrek peer pressures her into escalating and she kills all those frat boys. At which point Buffy has decided to slay her because it’s her duty to, Xander is desperately begging Anya to stop, willow wants to save her but is trying to find a workaround so she directly summons dhoffryn to ask him to take away her powers, and in the fight at the end, Anya doesn’t explain herself, she’s ready to fight Buffy to the death, but when dhoffryn shows up she offers to give up her life to reverse the vengeance spell. It’s not just because of guilt, its implied there’s a lot of identity displacement mixed in, that she feels she cannot be a human, cannot be a monster, so why should she even exist? We see in the episode how much of her sense of self is manufactured, ambiguous, timeless, a little amorphous. She used to love bunnies, she used to support communism, is her fear of bunnies or love for money really a reflection of her psyche or just characterizations she’s constructed?

The final scene is that Anya has lost her powers, lost Halfrek, lost any orientation whatsoever, and Xander tries to apologize to her because he assumes this is all grief from him leaving her, but she just rebuffs him that no he really doesn’t understand.

And the show leaves it at that. Nobody really ever does understand her except the audience, because she never even has the tools to translate her emotional architecture into a recognizably human language people can understand. I don’t agree with the criticisms of “Anya is narratively neglected in s7 after selfless”, because I think that’s the point. Anya can’t talk about her feelings because they’re vast and intricate and so different from what anyone else can relate to and she’s not a people person. Anya probably never really established a solid identity for herself because she was building on a thousand years of swampland. Anya still tried to, and died living that identity. S7 is full of redemption. Spike’s, Willow’s, Andrew’s, Faith’s to an extent. But Anya’s is by far the most psychologically rich redemptive arc and they accomplished it in a single episode.

In s6e22, Grave, Buffy and Dawn fall inside some kind of crypt excavated by dark willow’s fireball.

They simply cannot get out all night, which already seems suspect because Buffy has crazy parkour skills (like when she scales the school in Earshot).

They’re stuck there while Xander is knocked out, remain stuck when Anya arrives in the morning, cannot get out even when Buffy finds out the world is at risk.

But once the crisis is over, they finally somehow manage to climb out.

Is there any way to explain this other than creative liberty????

Personally, I think if you’re not the slayer and digging around the initiative, Walsh wouldn’t be that terrible.
She was strict, yes, also super rude to Willow after Oz left and Giles when he talked to her about Buffy, but Buffy seemed interested in her class, she recognized Buffy’s contributions and asked her to lead a discussion, and didn’t hold it against her when she called her out for being cold to Willow.

Snyder’s biggest advantage over Walsh is he’s not homicidal, not creating a grotesque cyborg in the basement, and not overly attached to his subordinates. If those are dealbreakers, sure, he’s preferable to Walsh. But in a purely academic environment, I think Walsh would be more tolerable.

It got me thinking when she proposed to Nick because his accident reminded her of everyone she’s lost. She’s lost a lot of people, though some hit deeper than others. Here what I think it would probably be

1. Obviously Derek

2. Also obviously Lexie

3. Her mom

4. Deluca and then 5) George, though they’re closely ranked

5. I think Mark

6. Susan Grey, kind of, because Susan was kind to her and she was just reconnecting with Thatcher and his family

7. Doc the dog???

8. Thatcher a little bit

Am I forgetting anyone?

Joss and the writers had always made it clear that they prioritized emotional coherence over tight detail-oriented consistency, which usually worked in the show’s favor but there are instances where I think they overdid it at the cost of characterization or plot. My two least favorite examples were Helpless and the Turok Han downgrade in Chosen.

In Helpless, I think it’s more forgivable because their intent was to show Buffy at her most vulnerable and there’s not many ways they could’ve accomplished that if they remembered she’s actually a trained fighter who routinely punches far above her weight class even taking slayer powers into account and shouldn’t be scared of regular creeps on the streets even if depowered. I wish they would’ve gone a different way but I understand why they didn’t, since they’d be telling a completely different story otherwise.

The Chosen issue was more grating because I feel like they could’ve written around the ubervamps’ established power level and still pulled off what they were intending. They just had to show the slayers down in the Hellmouth taking more brutal hits and not have regular people like Anya and Robin Wood killing them so easily (in fact they could’ve replaced them with bringers for the above-ground portion of the fight easily). And how powerful the ubervamps were was in my view very integral to s7’s narrative. It explained why Buffy felt so isolated all season and convinced of her own exceptionalism as a leader, because she understandably felt (and Giles stated outright) that literally nobody other than her could stand a chance against what the First was throwing at them. It explained why the Potentials trusted Buffy for so long, because she took such a massive personal risk with total confidence to protect them. It explained why the stakes felt so much more dire after the reveal the First’s army contained thousands of the same creature that folded Buffy more than Glory ever did. In fact as early as two episodes earlier, the show was relying on the ubervamps to raise stakes, when the Potentials got trapped with Faith under the tunnels after the explosion and it looked like they were ubervamp lunch for sure till Buffy showed up to rescue them.

It was imo completely unnecessary to throw all that away in the last episode and go “sike they were actually made of confetti all along”.

(If she reached Dawn in time or if Spike managed to beat Doc and didn’t have to die)

She’d still have to deal with adulthood and Joyce being dead in s6, but without her depression keeping her off her game, I think she’d probably handle the Trio sooner before they became a bigger threat. And there’d be no First without the resurrection, so unless there were special threats post-2003, I imagine she’d probably just spend her years fighting regular vamps and occasional demons to keep Sunnydale safe until dying but I do think she’d try to live some semblance of a normal life (maybe go back to college in s6 like she wanted but couldn’t because dying made her miss the reapplication deadline).

Giles I think would’ve probably still left like he wanted to for the last two years, but it’s not completely beyond the realm of possibility that she’d ask the Council for another watcher to help make her job easier.

Willow I think might’ve kept her magic under better control if she didn’t have to overextend herself keeping Sunnydale safe or with the resurrection. Still s4 and s5 both hinted at control issues, so I think she’d still have to reckon with it eventually, though maybe not in the same way she canonically did.

Spike would’ve been in a really weird position in s6 if he still had strong feelings for Buffy but she wasn’t interested in sleeping with him. He’d probably get up to some mischief (Buffy didn’t stake him for the last two years so I don’t see why she’d do it now). Eventually though the chip would start malfunctioning like it did in s7, Buffy would choose to fix it instead of remove it and he’d be very displeased about letting her have that kind of control over his life. I think his story would end with him either crossing a major boundary and getting dusted or seeking a soul out of boredom or to impress Buffy.

I’d see Xander and Anya’s story play out mostly the same, but without Anya dying to the First, there’s a chance they’d get back together eventually.