halfamoon | Day 13: Meta - BtVS

Title: Buffy Summers: the Weight of a Slayer’s Crown
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Character: Buffy Summers

Content: Meta (590 words)
Written for:

halfamoon, a great fest celebrating female characters
Theme: Day 13: The Ruler

Other links: Crossposted to SquidgeWorld

There’s a moment in late season seven that over twenty years later still strikes as disturbing and remarkably out of line.

It’s a scene where someone who has known Buffy for years dares to claim that she “didn’t earn” her position as a leader, that her power was “handed” to her, and—to top all that nonsense—that she’s simply “luckier” than everyone else. To add even more insult to injury, nobody even argues with this take (not her sister, not her friends, not her former Watcher); instead, they start piling on.

That one speech in Empty Places is, if you ask me, the most spectacularly wrong reading of Buffy ever delivered by someone who should simply know better. It’s a strikingly wrong interpretation and it painfully reveals how even those who are closest to Buffy can misunderstand the depth, meaning, and weight of her role.

Let’s start from the basic concept that Buffy didn’t receive a “gift”; she survived an imposition and learned to make the best of it, in spite of everything.
The Slayer legacy isn’t an inheritance: it’s a grim burden placed on teenage girl after teenage girl without their consent, which comes with the eerie realization of being destined to an early death sentence.

Buffy did not “earn” her role as the Slayer, but nothing about that role is lucky. What Buffy did earn—through great personal loss and suffering—is the authority she wields. Her leadership is fully earned, because it isn’t the automatic byproduct of some mystical power that was passed on to her; it’s the result of years of choosing the so-called “greater good” over her own interests and happiness.

The misguided idea that her power and position were “handed” to her, completely disregards the fact that Buffy has spent her whole life paying the cost of being in such position. If others mistake her hard-earned authority for entitlement (like they all did in late season seven), that says far more about their discomfort with her strength than it does about her character.

Because Buffy is a “ruler” who never asked for a crown, yet carries it with resilience. She leads because she must (“in every generation there is a Chosen One”), but also because, with time, she comes to realize and accept that no one else can hold the line quite like she does.

The Slayer legacy—the heavy crown she has to carry—affects her in many ways. It isolates her, it forces her to grow up too fast, and demands sacrifices that no teenager (or young adult) should have to make. But it also shapes her boundless compassion, which she always shows to others more than she ever does to herself. Buffy’s hard-earned leadership is built on responsibility, on the stubborn belief that protecting others (the whole world, in fact) is more important than her personal fulfillment.

The Slayer line may have chosen her through some mystical process, but the leadership she wields is something she forged: every decision, every loss, every time she stood between the world and its end, giving her life twice for the mission—those are the things that made her a leader.
And none of that was just “handed” to her.

So this is my final statement against that undermining, disrespecting speech: Buffy’s authority was earned fair and square, through every drop of blood and every tear she poured on the battlefield.

And she certainly isn’t any luckier than anyone else.
She simply learned to be stronger.