At that point, Dawn had become the de facto victim of the Scooby Gang, a role that had previously fallen to Willow (before she powered up) and Xander in the early years. One of Dawn’s contemporaries,
24‘s
Kim Bauer received similar ridicule for what the audience saw as her constant ineptitude that required her father, Jack, to rush in and rescue her time and time again. In both cases, the writers were leaning too heavily on the characters as plot devices. A hero needs someone to save, but if they are constantly saving the same person it reflects poorly on that character.
The fact that both Dawn and Kim also happen to be teen girls only makes the audience more primed to pounce on any perceived weakness. This goes double for Dawn, who existed in a universe where teen girls regularly saved the world. Casting characters like Dawn and Kim as the proverbial damsels in distress reinforces the idea that young women are less capable than their male counterparts. Pop culture has trained us to believe that teen girls in action driven narratives are nothing more than plot devices, and when the truth is more complicated than that, our kneejerk instinct is to rebel. From action films, like 2009’s
Taken, which used the kidnapping of a retired CIA agent’s teen daughter to get the former agent back into the business of killing bad guys, to the most recent season of
Homeland, which catapulted Agent Brody’s daughter
Dana to the top of television’s most hated characters list, teen girls are consistently perceived as the albatrosses around the heroes’ necks (and in the case of Agent Brody, I’m using the term “hero” very, very loosely). The question becomes is this a problem that lies with the writers or with the viewers’ perception of whose story is the most valuable?
Teens are angsty; it’s just a facet of growing up and one that most of us can relate to. As BTVS progressed, Dawn went on to struggle with kleptomania and feelings of abandonment as one parental figure after another failed her. Because the audience had seen Buffy and her friends grow up sans parental guidance for the most part, Dawn’s desire for stability was seen as another failing on her part, when in truth it was a natural response for a normal teenager to have. Unfortunately for Dawn, Sunnydale never had much room for normal behavior.
Unlike her older counterparts, Dawn’s teen years weren’t hyperstylized or couched in metaphor.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a teen series at heart, and one that deftly handled issues of young adulthood, but Dawn was the series’ first actual teenager. Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn, was the same age as the character she was portraying. By comparison, when the series began in 1997, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicholas Brendon, and Alyson Hannigan were all in their twenties and the visual contrast to their early appearances and Dawn’s is striking. It’s not just that they look like adults (which they do, especially when compared to Trachtenberg), it’s that they live in a world heightened by danger that requires them to behave as adults. Right from the start, Buffy, Xander and Willow were tasked with averting an apocalypse, and outside of Buffy’s Watcher, Giles, parental figures played little to no role in their day-to-day lives. Even as they went through the motions of typical high school life, it was hard to view them as teenagers.
Dawn was all teen, all the time. In her first showcase episode, “Real Me,” we see the world through her eyes: she confesses to having a crush on her big sister’s best friend (Xander), she expresses her frustration for the way Buffy regards her as “her dumb little sister,” and her deep desire to be perceived as an adult, despite the fact that she is still very much a child. By all accounts, Dawn is entirely average when we take her former key status out of the equation, and being average in a world populated by slayers, witches and vampires is a thankless job. She may have lived in the same extraordinary world, but Dawn never had to deal with the crazy in the same hands on way Buffy and the others did until very late in the series’ run
