Faith: Evil or victim?

Neither. I do not believe Faith to be inherently evil nor do I believe that she should be called a victim. She experienced a set of tragic circumstances that affected her world view but she is no less culpable for her choices because of her history. Terrible or unusual life circumstances might make it easier to make poor choices, but they are choices none-the-less and therefore the responsibility of the person making them regardless of motivation.

Sure, she did experience a "perfect storm" of bad early life plus great power, but she has demonstrated (at least in Angel and Season 7) that she is capable of making good choices. That alone says to me that she is not evil by a long shot nor is she a perpetual victim of her past. She made choices, which at every point in their execution were her full responsibility.

Obviously, I am a big fan of William Glasser and Choice Theory.
 
I think that most of you have a victim oppinion. I think she is both. She is a victim and a evil. Equally.

I am reading right now Go ask Malice. It's a book in form of Faith's Diary. There you can read about her time as a loner and about her hard childhood with her drunken mom. That changed her. She learned that on the street you will find your way much better if you are evil. But she is a hero too, because she knows a lot about loyalty and courage too(if she wants)! She learned about that on the streets too. But she learned to archieve her goals with evilness and crime. Even if her goals are good, she often trys to archieve them with a wrong way. But she can be a real friend who is there for you, in bad as in good times if you accept her the way she is. Or that's just the way my oppinion of Faith is right now.
 
I never saw Faith as truly evil. She made some truly evil choices, but I honestly felt horrible for her and understood why she took a path of evil vs. a path of righteousness. She only wanted love and acceptance; she wanted to feel like she belonged somewhere and that someone cared about her. They Mayor was the first person to ever give her this and she jumped at the chance to have that in her life.
 
She kept getting screwed over and played by everyone. So I guess that makes her a victom. Ironically, she was one of the most vulnerable characters and very trusting at the start. She trusted the new watcher straight away. She trusted Buffy and her friends until she felt they would be happy to have her take the full blame for accidentally killing the deputy mayor and spend the rest of her life in jail while they all lived nice happy herio lives. She was a sucker for the Mayors praise. It's just sad and such a waste.

She had too much power and no direction or guidance. Being a slayer meant killing things to her, people, demons, whats the difference?! She was all happy and ready to kill Angel because he's a vampire, but Buffy stopped her. Because Buffy saw the human side in him. I think she saw the demon (metaphorically) in people. She saw their evil sides. So to her it is not wrong to love the Mayor (in no sexual way) because Buffy loves Angel. To her it is not wrong to kill people who hurt and kill other people (the guy she shot with the cross bow was evil, the demon guy could have been evil in the past, the volcano man was being pervy so I think he just pissed her off) because she wasn't shown much affection she probably didn't have much of a connection to anyone. She probably though it was dog eat dog. The sad thing is she saw no humanity left in people, but she saw it in the Mayor. She was messed up.

So yes, victom. If she had Giles as watcher and someone looking out for her welfare she props would have been fine. And she hated what she did, hence why she wanted to kill herself/ have Angel kill her.
 
Some great points being raised here!! I agree with a lot that has been said already!

Ultimately she demonstrated she's not "evil" by redeeming herself. That scene in Sanctuary when she is locked up for the first time, that half smile she does shows she is finally discovering some sort of peace and contentment in repenting her past actions. She transforms this kind of passive repentance to an active one by coming back to help Angel and in Season 7 of BtVS against the First Evil. Her rejection of it as the Mayor and her active fight, her help in preparing the Potentials all shows that ultimately she isn't evil - she's good.

It interesting to think about what is revealed in Season 7 and also in S5 about a Slayer's nature. We discover that a slayer's power derives from demons, from darkness itself so maybe Faith as a Slayer had a deeper propensity to this side than Buffy did and felt it more than other slayers had.


I LOVE discussing Faith!!!!!
 
I don't think Faith is evil. I really believe that she is just a very messed up girl who couldn't handle the stresses that life placed upon her, and that, and her weakness as a person, caused her to make some truly horrible choices that she simply wasn't equipped to deal with. However, I don't think she's evil.

At the same time, there's too much water under, or perhaps over, the bridge to really label her as a victim either. In some ways she was without question, but sooner or later we all have to be accountable for our actions, and Faith eventually reached that point.
 
I also believe that Faith is not evil. In addition to concurring with all of you that her life experiences left her heavily damaged emotionally, I feel that she decided to act on her rage and run from her fears. While she shouldn't have internalized these traumas, either, she ideally should have sought out someone who could help her cope with them or triumph over them. Unfortunately, Faith never had this option. So, she didn't have many other options than kill others or kill herself, and she succeeded with the first and tried to accomplish the second. While I wish that all of this would have been clearer in either "Buffy" or "Angel", it is satisfying to speculate and analyze Faith for ourselves 😀.
 
I don't believe in evil. I believe in choices. And Faith made hers knowingly and enthusiastically. Dana was a victim of her life. Faith was not. She had it pretty shitty and decided to take it out on the world. That isn't a victim to me. Not by a long shot.She chose her path because of how it made her feel. For awhile I think Faith felt pretty damn good, empowered, untouchable. But just as Angel warned her, that feeling slips away and your conscience kicks in. It anything I feel like Faith lived her life at this furious pace and she spent all her time trying to outrun herself. If she kept enough distance between her actions and herself, maybe she wouldn't feel it. When eventually her actions did catch up with her it seemed like she was so ill prepared to deal with her life, her self, that she hurt other people. Like, that was her release, that was her expression of pain. It's incredibly effed up but that's how I've always viewed Faith. She wasn't evil and she wasn't a victim, she was trying to outrun pain and in doing that she became pain.

It's interesting to think how being called must have effected her. Slayers are essentially instruments of pain. I wonder did that create a sense of validation for her, especially when hurting others? As if she was doing what she was built for.
 
Gum Gnome33
Gum Gnome33
[No message]
K
Kanazaka
[No message]
AnthonyCordova
AnthonyCordova
[No message]
On that last point, I also think that her newfound status as a slayer was also a release. Because she knows that she is stronger than other people, she feels justified in her belief that she is better than them, too. It's also why she feels that she is above the law; she isn't fully human, so she doesn't need to obey human laws. That's not an excuse for her actions, but it leads her to feel mostly free from any lingering moral obligations. Thankfully for humanity, her human side wins out in the end.
 
Victim, mostly.
She started out as a victim, damaged, but still trusting. Until that trust was damaged. I think she was corrupted, and allowed herself to be corrupted by the choices she made. i.e she did evil things, but she's not evil, she's redeemable.
In a world where there are shaky lines drawn between different types of demon (some are evil, some are not- do some have souls?) it's hard to say if anybody (apart from vampires I guess) is truly unquestioningly evil.

Ultimately she is good, because in the end she made the right choice and went to prison willingly.
To be honest she is the only character I really saw truly repent their old life and the bad choice's they made. Not Willow, or Andrew or Spike (chipped Spike, that is).

Faith is one of the characters who actually deserves the forgivness she (eventually) recieves, a lot of others get an easier pass.
 
I would say neither. I don't believe she was evil at all, but she did evil things. I don't think she was a victim either, she had awful things happen to her, but she's the one that let those things dictate her life and decisions. She might have been a victims concerning some things, but every one has probably been a victim at some point.

For example, you are a victim if you are raped, you are a victim if your family is murdered or if someone beats you up, you are a victim if you are being bullied. And Faith was a victim when it came to her poor childhood. But, you are not a victim if you isolate yourself even when other offer help, you are not a victim if you murder someone by accident and don't accept the consequences, you are not a victim if you make the decision to help an evil mayor wanting to destroy the world.

Like I said, she did evil things, and those were most definitely drove by circumstances, but very few people who were victims actually turn to the dark side, this is a decision made by the person. Some people with a similar background as Faith don't end up the way she did. And don't get me wrong, I do understand why she "lost it", but we can't just say that she was a victim either. And the most amazing thing about Faith is that she actually ends up owning to her mistakes, she doesn't consider herself a victim anymore than I do.
 
R
Robb Stark
[No message]
Definitely a victim. After she accidentally killed someone, she did feel guilt, but she didn't know how to cope, so her phase of being evil was her trying to cope. Even after that, she felt that since she had started down the dark path, she couldn't come back. It wasn't until Angel intervened that she started her path towards redemption.
 
Kurai said:
Definitely a victim. After she accidentally killed someone, she did feel guilt, but she didn't know how to cope, so her phase of being evil was her trying to cope. Even after that, she felt that since she had started down the dark path, she couldn't come back. It wasn't until Angel intervened that she started her path towards redemption.
Click to expand...

This is my issue with the word victim in this case. Faith was not a victim for killing someone, it was an awful accident but that doesn't make her a victim. She wasn't the one that was injured of kill. It's like a driver accidentally hitting a pedestrian. The pedestrian is the victim, not the driver. Her way to cope was wrong, that doesn't make her a victim either. I guess we could say that she was victim of unfortunate events, that I completely agree with, but that doesn't mean we should victimize her for going off the handle if that makes sense.
 
I guess you could argue she was a victim when she became the slayer- she got all this dark power (which is cool) but also with that comes the urge to kill. Being left with pretty much no guidance (Gwen Post and Giles, not so much) surprise the 18 yrs old abuses her dark superpowers.
When she killed Finch, in the heat of battle, it was reckless, but it was also an accident. ButI think a part of her, the part that gets off on killing (just like Buffy does...) that enjoyed taking his life...and then everyone starts calling her a straight-up murderer? I'd go with being a victim of her own power, yeah.
 
Chosen Enemy said:
...but do you think that Faith, as much as she presents herself as an evil Slayer (or the show claimed her to be for a long while), she's actually a girl who got lost, and does things as a result of her poor life? She's actually not evil at all, she only wants to be loved and be accepted. Do you agree with that claim?
Click to expand...

Firstly, I think how Faith sees herself and how the show portrayed her, and their intention with her character, are/were very different: Faith saw herself was a badass, exempt from responsibility because she was "special", one of the Chosen ones. She used this status as an excuse to do immoral, reckless things. Later, she realizes the error of her ways, and actively works to redeem herself.

Her role in the series, however, was to be Buffy's foil, to give the viewers a glimpse of what Buffy would be like without the support of her family and friends. Faith, like everything in the series, is a metaphor for what can happen when people are left to their own devices without anyone holding them accountable.

In regards to your question, it's neither. Characters are seldom that simple in the Buffyverse. She is not a victim nor evil. Rather, Faith is an individual, a complicated one at that, who's made choices, some bad some good, and who is paying forever for them.

I do agree that Faith wants to be loved and accepted, especially by Buffy.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom