This has probably been discussed before but I couldn't find anything. I'm wondering how there were any potentials left in the world to become activated during the final battle. In "Bring On The Night", Giles says, "There were many more like them all over the world, but, um, now there's just a handful, and they're all on their way to Sunnydale."
I haven't read any of season 8 but in the beginning it says the slayer count is up to 1800. 1800 is more than a handful. How did all these girls manage to escape being murdered by Bringers or sent to Buffy? The First is supposed to be the ultimate evil with endless resources but it overlooked 1800 potential slayers?
Maybe I missed something somewhere or maybe it's explained in season 8, but that has just never made sense to me.
I don't have a very good answer to this, just a thought mainly. The girl that were considered 'potentials' were all of a similar age, I'd say between 15-18 which puts them in the age range of how old Buffy was when she was called. Maybe the First was only trying to wipe out those who were actually potential candidates for the next slayer. Most of the girls in the montage in 'Chosen' only look about 10-12, so they would be unlikely to be called up at such a young age.
I'm not even sure if this makes sense, I hope you catch my drift though. Basically that the girls who are 'slayers' in season eight, were the younger ones when the spell was cast, so not a direct threat to the First at the time of season seven who was more interested in the ones who of the age at which a Slayer might be called.
^ That makes sense. Although a lot of girls in the montage of "Chosen" were teenagers too.
It's also possible that Giles was mistaken. Perhaps there were some Potentials that were untraceable by the Council. Perhaps there were some they just didn't know about, for whatever reason, and so "just a handful" was an incorrect estimate.
I know it's not canon or anything, but from Pretty Maids All in a Row I got the impression that the Watcher's Council had some way to determine who was going to be a slayer. That system, however, was not really 100% perfect, so it didn't find every single potential. My guess would be that the First had the same information, and thus also missed the same (hunfreds of) slayers.
Maybe I'm making this up...it's a long time since I've read that book. Well, but the potential slayer thing is either like that in the book, or I just made up the part about the slayer determination system because it sounded logically.
@sco: In PMAIAR there's potentials as young as 9 or 11...so that's definitely not it.
MumrikNope, it was definitely in the book, I was going by the same logic.
There's a difference between Potentials and potential Potentials. Potentials are the smaller group of girls who could be called when the Slayer dies. The spell in Chosen didn't just activate them, however. They were very specific about that - anyone that ever could be, or could have been, a Slayer was activated. This would include the young girls of 12, 13 etc. and the housewives Andrew's advert speaks to in the comics. These people weren't Potentials, as they were too young or old to be called. Kennedy herself says that she was on the edge of being too old herself. If she passed that indefinite mark, she would have stopped being a Potential, but she would have been activated by the scythe.
Since S8 is set a while after S7, it would be possible that some of the girls too young to be a potential could be active slayers, but it looked to me like most of the new slayers that Buffy was using were in the Kennedy range of just too old.
I don't think that the whole "Slayer Army" thing has been either very well thought out properly presented. A few Slayers, even as many as a dozen or so, would be a manageable number to portray in a series. It allows for the equivalent of an elite strike team of U S Navy SEALS dedicated to fighting the demons, vampires, and so forth. With an army of thousands, any imaginable Big Bad can simply be overcome by wave after wave of howling, cussing, spitting Slayers. It makes it so that if a Slayer gets killed, it's not really a big thing, because there are another couple of thousand waiting to take her place, That's why, to me at least, Season 8's Big Bad, if Twilight doesn't turn out to be a red herring, is so underwhelming. How could he stand up against an army of Slayers?
My theory is similar to some of the others above, but what the hey, I'll post anyway...
I think that the Watcher's council had identified a number of potential Slayers. These are the ones that the Bringers targeted to kill in order to wipe out the slayer line. However, when Willow did the spell it was soon discovered that more potentials than were ever anticipated actually existed and thus they all became slayers. Further, I would assume that when a slayer dies another group of potentials are created under the terms of the ancient slayer creation magics, however, with the Sunnydale spell they bypass the potential stage and automatically become slayers keeping the numbers growing.
I think Flannen & Kristine answered the question best. After all, look at Buffy herself, she hadn't been raised by a Watcher like Kendra was before being called. The Watcher's Council only knew about so many Potentials (the ones like Kendra).
I don't think that the whole "Slayer Army" thing has been either very well thought out properly presented. A few Slayers, even as many as a dozen or so, would be a manageable number to portray in a series. It allows for the equivalent of an elite strike team of U S Navy SEALS dedicated to fighting the demons, vampires, and so forth. With an army of thousands, any imaginable Big Bad can simply be overcome by wave after wave of howling, cussing, spitting Slayers. It makes it so that if a Slayer gets killed, it's not really a big thing, because there are another couple of thousand waiting to take her place, That's why, to me at least, Season 8's Big Bad, if Twilight doesn't turn out to be a red herring, is so underwhelming. How could he stand up against an army of Slayers?
Well, kind of a big point in S8 is that now there's a difference between being "A slayer" and "THE Slayer."
Your critique would hold true against vampires too, but there are vampires, and then there are the guys like Angelus, Spike, Dru, Darla, the Master, Dracula and Kokistos who are drastically superior.
It wasn't a big deal to Buffy to kill a vampire, but those guys were ongoing threats to her.
Pretty Maids All in a Row. It's an official Buffy novel (though that doesn't make it canon), set around World War 2, focussing on Dru and Spike in that time. Specifically, Spike and Dru are out for the blood of potential slayers in that book, that's why I thought it would be relevant for the question.
a Slayer gets killed, it's not really a big thing, because there are another couple of thousand waiting to take her place, That's why, to me at least, Season 8's Big Bad, if Twilight doesn't turn out to be a red herring, is so underwhelming. How could he stand up against an army of Slayers?
That's probably why he's trying to make Buffy doubt herself. In case she's weak, her army is weak.
And as we see, the public is turning against the slayers, which is probably part Twilight's doing. He's not putting himself in a position where he can be overwhelmed by the army of slayers.
It doesn't make any sense to me that there should be a definite number of Potentials, capable of being Slayers. Or that one becomes a Potential at a specific age. It seems as if many are trying to judge a situation by a bunch of rules. Why should the First had been able to kill every Potential around the world in such a short space of time? It managed to miss those who made their way to Sunnydale. And the Watcher's Council was unable to do the same. They missed Buffy, until she became the Slayer. And she became one at the age of 15.
I would have thought there would be easily about 2000 potential slayers, roughly evenly spread throughout the world. That way wherever evil is going to appear in whatever country thats where a slayer can be called. Seeing as its to do with fate and all. The WC i suppose were just wrong assuming there was only a few.
There's a difference between Potentials and potential Potentials. Potentials are the smaller group of girls who could be called when the Slayer dies. The spell in Chosen didn't just activate them, however. They were very specific about that - anyone that ever could be, or could have been, a Slayer was activated. This would include the young girls of 12, 13 etc. and the housewives Andrew's advert speaks to in the comics. These people weren't Potentials, as they were too young or old to be called. Kennedy herself says that she was on the edge of being too old herself. If she passed that indefinite mark, she would have stopped being a Potential, but she would have been activated by the scythe.
Since S8 is set a while after S7, it would be possible that some of the girls too young to be a potential could be active slayers, but it looked to me like most of the new slayers that Buffy was using were in the Kennedy range of just too old.
Not the case. You HAVE to be a potential to begin with to ever have any hope of becoming a slayer. They make this very clear.
---------- Post added at 01:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:59 PM ----------
there is one potential slayer who just happens to be native to Sunnydale; Amanda. Sunnydale has about 36,000 (or 38,000?) people. Not a very large statistical sample, but lets go with it. If one in 40,000 people is a potential slayer, then there were originally about 150,000 of them. Out of this, The First achieved a 98.8% kill rate before Buffy was able to respond. Pretty effective; comparatively, The First really did miss just a few.
I always considered the reason for so many slayers to be Joss finding the concept of an army more interesting to write about than a small squad so he slightly revised the effectiveness of The First's attempt to end the slayer line. After reading some of the above posts, the idea of potential Potentials, where some of the girls are either too young or too old, is certainly an interesting one which I haven't given much thought about before, but I still feel that it doesn't quite explain it. I mean, The First wasn't just trying to eliminate those in the slayer line who were in their teens and twenties, its goal was to end the line entirely. Wouldn't it make sense to kill the really young ones first who are both extra defenseless and unknown to the Watcher's Council so killing them won't alert its adversaries to its intentions?
Not the case. You HAVE to be a potential to begin with to ever have any hope of becoming a slayer. They make this very clear.
---------- Post added at 01:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:59 PM ----------
there is one potential slayer who just happens to be native to Sunnydale; Amanda. Sunnydale has about 36,000 (or 38,000?) people. Not a very large statistical sample, but lets go with it. If one in 40,000 people is a potential slayer, then there were originally about 150,000 of them. Out of this, The First achieved a 98.8% kill rate before Buffy was able to respond. Pretty effective; comparatively, The First really did miss just a few.
Actually, Lindsey is right. As he pointed out, it was stated on the show that only a specific age group qualifies as a Potential (probably ranging somewhere from 12/13 to 19/20), which makes sense since there would be no point in having a three year old Slayer, the same goes for a fifty-something one.
So we have three groups (four if you include Slayer); Potentials, potential Potentials (age groups under 13) who will grow up to be Potentials and women wo used to be Potentials but were never called, grew too old and thus ceased to be Potentials. However, they still had the power to be a Slayer in them if other rules than the ones set by the Shadowmen applied.
These other rules were set when Willow did the Scythe spell, which did what Buffy said in her speech in "Chosen", "from now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer ... will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power will have the power, can stand up, will stand up. Slayers - every one of us."
This includes not only Potentials but also potential Potentials and not-anymore-Potentials.
What you've stated just applies to the standard Slayer rules, set down by the Shadowmen. The rules of the Scythe activated Slayers are an entirely different thing.
I also don't understand your math. You took the entire population of Sunnydale, including women outside the Potential age group and men. I'm not a math brainiac but I'm fairly certain that does not make sense. For your equasion to make even a slight sense you would have to exclude the men and women over and under the Potential Slayer age.
We really don't have any numbers to go by
except for the 1,800 Slayers Buffy mentioned in issue 1 of S8
. Amanda just happened to be a Potential living in Sunnydale because it was relevant to the plot of that episode but it's not really something we can go by to do the math.
(If you want to make a drinking game out of the times I used the word "potential" in this post - feel free to do so.)
Actually, those facts are included in the fact that only 1 in 40,000 PEOPLE is a slayer. If you have 100 female soldiers, for example in a city of 1 million, or if you have 50 male and 50 female soldiers, you still have 100 soldiers, and the makeup of the population of the city does not matter. I am talking about slayer to human ratio, their gender does not matter. If there is one slayer in 40,000 people after Buffy activated all the potentials, than there is one slayer in 40,000 people, it does not matter if they are all female.
Think of it this way. There are 6.7 billion or so people on the planet. Say 10,000 of them can fly. There are about 3.4 billion women on the planet. Say only women can fly, and 10,000 women can fly. Does this change the ration of flyers to people, the difference in these two equations? No, because there are still 6.7 billion people in the world, it's just a different way to look at it. The same is true for age group. If, say, 8% of the population has the demographic qualification to be a slayer (about 3000 in Sunnydale), then the ratio of Slayers to people remains the same.
But we are leaving something out. Have you ever seen a truly heinous looking Slayer? Perhaps you have to be attractive, or at least charismatic as well.
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