Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (12 page)

In season seven, the closest thing we have to a reappearance of Tara occurs when Willow becomes romantically involved with one of the new ”slayers-in-training” named Kennedy. (For the record, I find Kennedy to be bossy, bitchy, and nowhere near as beautiful and dreamily sublime as Tara. It’s like comparing apples and ugli fruit.) When Willow feels her attraction to Kennedy growing, she experiences an unusual transformation; she becomes, to all outward appearances, Warren. In other words, she takes on the mantle of Tara’s killer, because her unexpressed rage, guilt, and most of all, her sense of betrayal, take over her Willow persona. Other characters, in discussing the source of the “big bad” that is destroying Sunnydale and, by implication, the world, agree that it was Buffy’s coming back from the dead “not right” that engendered this new evil. Anya matter-of-factly states it was Willow’s insistence on resurrecting Buffy that has brought them all to where they are now; and this, to Willow, means a burden of unbearable guilt. Heavy stuff for a witch who nearly destroyed the world and everyone in it; far more terrifying for her is the prospect that she was even indirectly responsible for Tara’s murder.

In “Conversations with Dead People” (7-7), Willow is contacted by Tara through Cassie, a dead girl who claims to know Tara, who says Willow is not allowed to speak to her because of what she did. But there is deception and cruel manipulation here, as several characters are made to confront their worst insecurities and fears: From Beneath You, It Devours. This suggests karmic turmoil to the extreme, and the California Crew of Light is adept at nothing if they aren’t good at speeding up their own karma. But for two lovers to have had the recognition these two did at the beginning, such instantaneous comfort and tension and heat, bespeaks a timeless and enduring connection, a love that spans ages and incarnations, steeped in karmic debt, a ritual bound to circle round and repeat itself until they get it right.

And so we wait for the fawn to be reborn in spring, dappled in green light beneath the weeping willow. Then winter comes and the scattered does provide cover for the king stag. Starvation threatens and acorns vanish. The riverbed creaks and melts. The elf queen metes out death and punishment and is lonely. The forest floor is fragrant and damp with decay. The bluebells push through again. It always happens, it will never not happen.

N
O MATTER WHAT THE GAZELLES
may think, lions are good for gazelles, as naturalists have long observed: lions cull the herd by eliminating the weak, the slow, the stupid. Without lions, the genetic quality of gazelles would diminish and the increasing numbers would over-graze the veldt; resulting in starvation and a far more radical culling of the herd than lions achieve. Of course, the lions have a big advantage: gazelles aren’t carnivorous. If they were, their battles would be a lot more hazardous for the lions. In other words, the lions would be in the same situation Buffy is, a predator after a prey that can fight back on more than equal terms. Nevertheless, Buffy is good for vampires for precisely the same reason that lions are good for gazelles. The stupid, the crazy, the ravenous all fall to her stakes, and their numbers are kept in check, preserving the intelligent, the capable, the formidable. Just as among lions the lioness is the principal hunter, the female human is the most effective vampire slayer.

And just as the relationship of predator and prey is a very close one, so is Buffy’s with those vampires who are clever enough, sensitive
enough,
human
enough to know that she is an opponent worthy of their steel, and appreciate her as such, because of their esoteric ecological ties. She also knows that they are opponents worthy of her steel, and that, like it or not, they are deeply dependent on one another. The few who comprehend her necessary role in vampire existence fall under her spell, and only they have the capacity to command her attention and respect. Whether it is the Byronic Angel, the sardonic Spike, or the arrogant Dracula, those vampires who manage, through understanding and skill, to avoid her attack end up in a complex relationship with her, a recognition of the bond they share, and which both vampires and Slayers accept, sometimes with relief, sometimes with attraction, sometimes with repugnance, but always with mesmeric intensity. Theirs is a mutual understanding that goes to the heart of Slayer and vampire alike. It is more than sexual attraction—although that always plays a part in vampiric folklore—that binds them together, it is their shared role in the metaphysical ecosystem of Joss Whedon’s
Buffy
universe.

From the beginning, Whedon has maintained the premise that the Slayer’s role is to keep vampires in check, and it is stated directly in the voice-over of the opening credits of the first season:
She alone will stand against the vampires
. Simple math shows that she would be unable to rid the world of vampires, but, if she keeps on the job of necessary destruction, the vampires will not overwhelm humanity, and the worst of the vampires will be stopped before they can do anything too damaging to Sunnydale—and, by extension, the world. This view has remained consistent from the start and continues to shape the direction of the series, twisting and turning around this central point. Through that consistency of vision Whedon keeps the escalating high-jinx from flying off into incoherence, which has happened to many other series with a paranormal element in its structure. When Whedon wants to show the delicacy of this metaphysical ecological balance, he steps outside his vision via an alternate universe, such as the universe where Willow is a black-corseted vampire with an inclination to boredom. In the Buffy-less Sunnydale, the vampires have run amok, and they are using up humans at such a profligate rate that starvation will be upon vampires in less than a generation, for their human nourishment will be exhausted. By the same token, in a vampire-less universe, Buffy would be a young woman facing those problems that confront almost all young women, a capable person with a lot of determination, but not unique as she is as the Slayer. Or perhaps she would be in a
mental hospital, as Whedon has posited. For Buffy to be Buffy, she needs vampires. For vampires as a species to survive, they need Buffy.

Buffy lives at the Hellmouth for just the same reason as lions wait at the waterhole—that’s where the prey is. If vampires are going to congregate anywhere, it will be at the Hellmouth, and she’ll be there to waylay them. She must be close to the trouble in order to keep the situation in hand. By the same token, vampires—and all other manner of unpleasant supernatural creatures—are drawn to the Hellmouth because it seems to nourish them and give them increased energy. The nightly patrol that Buffy undertakes is like a lion on the prowl, and is done in the preferred leonine-predator way—one or two deputies to drive the prey to the Slayer. The Scoobies are essential to the predator routine that Buffy has developed to deal with her slayage, and their presence reinforces her hunting and the obligations of predation.

Which is why Riley could never sustain a relationship with Buffy—he was one of a band of competitive predators, working on her territory and after the same prey. Unlike Buffy, he was part of a pack-like, secret, large group of young males trying to horn in on Buffy’s job, and turning themselves into targets in the process. To make matters worse, the commander of the all-male group was Professor Maggie Walsh, who was on a campaign to eliminate all Buffy’s myriad prey, which would disrupt the universal balance of Slayer and vampire. For Buffy to join the Walsh Crusade, she would have had to accept Walsh’s authority and agenda, which she could not do, for it would upset the balance of prey and predator. She made her own perverse superman in the hope of perfecting the non- or hyper- human—Adam, her manufactured son and murderer. All this reflected Maggie Walsh’s hubris and her zeal, by which she was able to excuse all her excesses and justify the enormity of what she had undertaken. The result was Walsh’s attempt on Buffy’s life; she could not continue her extermination project without upsetting the balance of the Buffy universe.

That intrinsic conflict was the underlying reason Riley felt that Buffy didn’t love him—he didn’t have the intense bond that Buffy had with her prey, and in time came to resent the lack of it, to be jealous of the profoundly intimate predator/prey relationship he would never be able to share. Even though he rejected his primary pack, he could not break away from such institutions entirely, and when his loyalty was put to the test, he remained with his pack rather than with Buffy, to help her on her hunt. Strong as his devotion was, he could not cope with the equivocality of the Buffy/vampire nexus. His own experimentation with
vampires revealed his desire to know that predator/prey bond, although he couldn’t sustain the relationship in the manner that Buffy and vampires enjoy. Making himself a victim could not come close to Buffy’s reciprocity with vampires, no matter how many demons, vampires, and other supernatural critters he and his fellow “soldiers” have neutralized. That Riley chose to remain with his own pack isn’t surprising, given his own predatory inclination coupled with his absolutist philosophy, though it was a great disappointment to Buffy.

In most folklore throughout the world, vampires are few in number, hunting sometimes in small clans, but more usually alone or in pairs. Folklorically, the most packlike creatures are the werecreatures, which are often said to pursue isolated humans or communities in formidable groups, while vampires tend to cut out one or two humans from the community, wooing them rather than terrorizing them in order to establish a mutual dependence, hence the heavy erotic punch that vampire myths tend to possess, helping to create the fascination with which the vampire is imbued. And the vampire hunters in folklore often have some tie to the vampire, such as blood relation, abandoned lover, or penitent and/or confessor. Buffy may not have blood relationship to her vampire prey, but she is born to this task, assigned by fate to preserve humanity from vampires—she is destined to spend her life in pursuit of her prey in the best predator tradition. It is appropriate that her recognition of the First Slayer validated the predator image—that Neolithic hunter with the spears and shamanistic bodypainting—and the task of devoting her life to this calling. From the inception of Slayerdom, the Slayer has been a hunter: in other words, a predator. Buffy may be uncomfortable with the primitive First Slayer, but she is aware that they are linked in purpose, and that predation is crucial to the mission.