Question I really like who Buffy became in season 7. IMO She's a warrior general! Am I alone?

[Fool for Buffy]

Buffy is flawed in season 7; there is no doubt about it, but I stand by her. She, understandably, becomes too engrossed in the war and loses sight of what's important. Temporarily. And the Scoobies call her out on it. All of that is fine. What's not fine is that the Scoobies kick her out, after she had spent her entire life forgiving them for betrayals much worse and more foolish.

Overall, I think General Buffy is great though. She believes she will win despite terrifying odds and circumstances, she manages to keep nearly everyone safe until she's ready to fight, and she ends up coming up with the plan to turn those bunch of little girls into an army.
 

The end of the story the series told us since seven years should have ended about Buffy and the scoobies. If this was the case, I would have no criticism to do.

And it did. Willow used magic to her fullest potential for good. Xander did was Buffy needed, just like always, and still ended up fighting there with her like he always wanted. Giles betrayed Buffy in season 7, but he still gave her the support she needed when it was time for the plan. Does Spike save the world? Yes. Is the story too much about Spike? I'd say absolutely not. The hallway walk was perfect, because it was the culmination of the series, the main four walking together and each person walking off to play their role.

 

[Antho]

And it did. Willow used magic to her fullest potential for good. Xander did what Buffy needed, just like always, and still ended up fighting there with her like he always wanted. Giles betrayed Buffy in season 7, but he still gave her the support she needed when it was time for the plan. Does Spike save the world? Yes. Is the story too much about Spike? I'd say absolutely not.

I'm sorry I have a different vision of things but I wish I have yours 🙂 because it is sooo much better

 

[Bite-me]

So I guess the real issue is ... how is this portrayed? Is the show supporting her behaviour and actions up until the decision to activate? Or critiquing it? Or is it objectively trying to give us a balanced picture of both the good and bad?

The show is critiquing it like Buffy did every year prior but functioning under a false assumption which she could only come to take upon herself. I disagree with the people who say it is like Buffy has learned nothing in S7. She took everything with her, if others felt this way, it was absolutely the writers job to make this theme more apparent.

Buffy learned from "Lie To Me" that it is not simple white and black hats, from Angel that redemption is worth it, that revenge is wrong, vengeance demon or mother. That Anya was suffering and was attempting to end her life. From Faith and S6 that the burden of slayer hood can put you in touch with a darkness that can sink you, piled high among the responsibility of living in this world and living a conscious life. That the utilitarianism of the Watchers and the Watchers Council was wrongly misguided. From the past seven years and Graduation Day that rebellion is necessary, from her friends that no one can do it alone.

While Giles may have followed Buffy from his fatherly love for her, he was very much a product of the system, as he was sending a innocent out every night to face her death for their own sake. His S7 betrayal was inevitable. compared with Buffy's unorthodxy, learning from Dawn willing to make a sacrifice on her own, what true selfless sacrifice looks like.

The writers should have done more call backs and made them more apparent, the simple conceit would have focused the core five more centrally in each episode which the fans desired.

Under this concept more could have been made of the episode title "Lies My Parents Told Me" Buffy's red herring line to Faith that "Slayerhood, that's a burden we can't share" should have come earlier in the season and their should have been more of similar, validated perhaps by the fact I had not noticed the centrality of this line some thirteen years after the airing.

The full circle theme is apparent in the mistakes Buffy makes functioning under the underlying false assumption but within the individual episodes there should have also been more callbacks to the episodes and more evident clues becoming more perceptible towards the end, so that the revelation had the "of course" effect of why didn't I see coming. And the payoff more enjoyable with the rewatches over the years, cause while the build up make it very much a revelation, in retrospect we know how it ends and do not get to the same pay off cause we don't relive the very first surprise .

The finale theme though fits nicely with the maxim “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”

 

[The Bronze]

Get Riley in to blow the place up? This is Sunnydale, the government are well aware of what is there and the dangers. What did they do? Ran and left Buffy to it.

As for General Buffy, she was set up to fail from the moment Giles dumped the potentials on her and told her they're your problem now. Go through the season and see how many times everyone is telling Buffy it's all on her, rather than the group responsibility they used to take.

She definitely made some mistakes, mostly treating potential slayers as almost slayers rather than next to useless. Teaching them self defence made sense but they should never have been involved in missions. I'd give her maybe 6 or 7 out of 10 in a ridiculously tough spot.

 

[RomanticSoul]

As for General Buffy, she was set up to fail from the moment Giles dumped the potentials on her and told her they're your problem now. Go through the season and see how many times everyone is telling Buffy it's all on her, rather than the group responsibility they used to take.

There is enough OOC and crappy characterization to go around for everyone. It's not just Buffy.

 

[EarthLogic]

Buffy learned from "Lie To Me" that it is not simple white and black hats, from Angel that redemption is worth it, that revenge is wrong, vengeance demon or mother. That Anya was suffering and was attempting to end her life. From Faith and S6 that the burden of slayer hood can put you in touch with a darkness that can sink you, piled high among the responsibility of living in this world and living a conscious life. That the utilitarianism of the Watchers and the Watchers Council was wrongly misguided. From the past seven years and Graduation Day that rebellion is necessary, from her friends that no one can do it alone.

I agree that Buffy has been learning these lessons every year and they are carried through to S7, but perhaps they're not played out as well as they should have been?

The writers should have done more call backs and made them more apparent, the simple conceit would have focused the core five more centrally in each episode which the fans desired.

This is what I was getting at. There seems to be so much confusion and argument amongst fans about Buffy's behaviour in S7, about whether she was acting rightly or wrongly, that it makes me wonder whether it was down to a failure of writing that many viewers felt that Buffy was acting in ways that betrayed or regressed her character.
(I'm basing this off vague memory and what I've seen of discussions online, because I really can't remember the bulk of S7 so haven't yet formed an opinion myself.)

I think the problem lies with the fact that at the end of the day Buffy is our hero. We experience everything through her and are supposed to identify with her to some degree. IMO this works well from seasons 1-5. In S6 I feel utterly sorry for her, but while I can still identify with her at times there is also degree of distance - I can't always tell what is going through her mind like I could with earlier seasons. This is more so the case with S7: it seems like her thought process is never revealed to us. Instead we watch her make these poor tactical decisions but we're at one remove so we don't understand why. If they intended for us to view Buffy as locked in a maze of wrong decisions because she is still operating within the system perpetuated by the WC, then like you say, there should have been better clues laid down to alert us to that.

 

[DeepBlueJoy]

Oh, and please let me stipulate something. I think season seven was a dog's vomited breakfast. Horrendously written and out of character was the norm. Buffy is still my hero. A hero who could have taken the power of the scythe and the power of the Shadow Men -- and it might have won her the war all alone... but Buffy was willing to share her power -- in spite of how she'd been treated by those same potentials.

Of course, she made mistakes. Even the best trained, experienced warriors/leaders make big ones, because you don't go into any fight fully prepared; because a fight is not a static event. She wasn't trained very well for leadership. She wasn't trained for it at all. She was discouraged from learning about modern weapons, though she clearly used them willingly in the Initiative. Giles was, fundamentally, a creature of the council. Her only vision of an organizational leadership structure was... The Initiative. To call them dysfunctional would be to insult dysfunction.

 

[PaulParmar1]

Loved Season 7 & General buffy!
Honestly Buffy was so strong in Season 7 & the later seasons Buffy is my fave🙂
So real & amazing

 

[Antho]

I think season seven was a dog's vomited breakfast.

First reaction : 😵😵😵😵😵😵😵😵😵😵😵😵😵😵

And I imagined, then my reaction is : 😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

 

[Bite-me]

I don't know, it is always worth it to critique a work of art but at the end of the day I still watch and enjoy season 7 as much as any season of Buffy. And it was on for seven years no doubt your favorite season will partially be influenced by nostalgia and whatever year you were peak adolescent so that gives the earlier years a advantage. If I had to guess I would say the latest fans and oldest new fans of the show enjoy the later seasons more or most. The Files it was not.

 

[RomanticSoul]

This is what I was getting at. There seems to be so much confusion and argument amongst fans about Buffy's behaviour in S7, about whether she was acting rightly or wrongly, that it makes me wonder whether it was down to a failure of writing that many viewers felt that Buffy was acting in ways that betrayed or regressed her character.
(I'm basing this off vague memory and what I've seen of discussions online, because I really can't remember the bulk of S7 so haven't yet formed an opinion myself.)

There were/are plenty of hardcore Buffy (the character) fans who completely ignore S7 in order to continue to love the character. Some even tried to come up with their own head canon to make sense of Buffy's actions that Season. Most just can't though because it is as you said, nothing was given to us so that we could understand where she was coming from. Hell, the actress who plays the character had no clue who Buffy was anymore. If she doesn't know how can Whedon Co. expect us to get her?

 

[Mrs Gordo]

Btw, I've not forgotten you wrote that Angel could take Buffy in a fight 😛

I don’t know how I missed this the first go ‘round. And I know you made this same comment when you read my story. I want to clarify that I do not necessarily think that Angel could take Buffy in a fight. I think that season 10 Buffy might have that perception though, especially considering the many years of experience he had running his own crew, saving the world, and their run in together during Twilight. Angelus was supposed to be a worthy opponent for Buffy in the early seasons. And she struggled but ultimately beat him. I don’t think it’s far fetched for her to question how she would fare against Angel who has Angelus’ strength, fighting prowess, but who isn’t arrogant so as to stop to taunt Buffy. But let me be clear. Just because I write a character thinking something doesn’t mean that’s what I think. I wrote a bunch of stuff between Buffy and Spike I think isn’t true. It’s what I think the character believes at any given moment and that’s what I write. I personally think Buffy would win a fight against Angel maybe 8 or 9 times out of 10 times.

 

[Ethan Reigns]

My thoughts are based on what I heard in one class in high school when a teacher mentioned that she had gone through WWII in England and things were looking very bleak because no one knew how anything was going to turn out. It made me realize that many of the multiple choice selections are based on the fact that we knew how things did turn out. But the fact that things turned out all right does not mean that everyone made the correct decisions along the way.

My response is closest to these:

• She should have deferred to her friend's feelings; she was reckless, she just got lucky
• I hate everything season seven, including the portrayal of Buffy

with the exception that instead of deferring to her friends' feelings, she should have deferred to her friends' legitimate concerns. I don't put much faith in feelings because feelings are usually based on unresolved issues and desires within a person and are as likely to promote self-destruction as self-improvement because they tend to draw a person away from reality. Having Spike around after he was triggered into killing again without consistent restraint was reckless. This wasn't a case of plot armour, it was a case of plot Kevlar topped with active armour in the form of two MacGuffins, the scythe and the medallion. Her decisions were all the more pathetic when we recall the real General Buffy in Season 3 expertly deploying forces against the mayor. Now we have the decline and fall of Buffy, so obvious that even Faith legitimately asks, "Am I the good slayer now?" and for the first time, it doesn't sound ridiculous.

I won't say I hate everything about Season 7 because there were some good parts in there but the general sense is one of following the rise and fall of Buffy after reaching her leadership peak in Season 3. Her statement that "we just became an army" is about as eye-rolling as if she had said "we just became a ballet troupe". Sorry, it's not as easy as just saying it. Even the villain was lame - Buffy called him "the taunter" at one point. What Buffy did do that was right was suggest the mobilization of the reserves in the form of activating all of the potentials in the world at once. This changes the game forever - the Watchers' Council was destroyed and the "one girl in all the world" chant we have been hearing from Season 1 has now become obsolete. In its place is the option for each slayer of dealing with the monster world or not and the availability of many slayers to handle things simultaneously. But this was only suggested by Buffy - Willow was the one who actually implemented the plan.

To be fair, I did like "Chosen" and it did show that Buffy still had the physical capability to be the best fighter of the slayers and the ending was spectacular with Sunnydale falling into a sinkhole never to be lived in again, but this is not the result of great decisions made by Buffy. It's a result of plot armour and bad writing. And the prospective slayers slit their hands to open the seal of Danthalzar? Why didn't anyone have trouble holding a weapon with a slit hand? And where did these wounds go by the end of the episode? Like I said, bad writing.

 

[Dora]

Why was S7 bad....... simple, Whedon was not around , Sarah had completely lost who the character was in S6, Buffy was no longer Buffy , not sure who she had become and found myself no longer caring
A total overdose of Spike , a large part of S7 was just trying to make Spike interesting, remove Spuffy from the last two seasons and what do you do with Spike , where did he help with overall plot in either Season ? certainly with the First
On the plus side there are some good episodes in S7 before CWDP after that........ Thankfully SMG left and they called it quits....... before Marti Noxious did even more damage

 

[WillowFromBuffy]

before Marti Noxious did even more damage

Do you have to be so crass?

 

[Dora]

Do you have to be so crass?

Maybe not.....but she has on her twitter page I ruined Buffy.... she was show runner for the last two seasons 6 was basically about her life, bad boyfriend , depression , force sex, multiplied by whatever the writers came up with
S6 lots of controversy later part of S7 total mess
She presided over the character destruction of the core four to enable Spuffy to happen , she presided over the horrid sex in S6 ( never shown as vivid thrusting, Anal etc before by any couple or in S 7 ) , the Attempted rapes, Buffy twice ( Spike/ Shadow mans Demon ) I can go
I know Whedon had input the horrid sex was mostly down to him and his issues with SMG, but really did we need to see JM just in a sock for no real reason..... No , this was BTVS the content and writing was way higher than some soap opera, but that is what she turned it into
MN presided over the last two seasons of BTVS thankfully there was not an eighth , to me the brilliants of the first five seasons are lost ( Best 2 and 3 ) because of 6 and 7 , The brilliance of Buffy season 1 speech about only being sixteen, to having unwanted sex against the wall by the rubbish bin at DMP , her row with her Mum killing Angel etc in bargaining, to being sodomized in the bronze, the hero Buffy jumping off the Tower to save the world to the Buffy placing Spike in Smashed, the Buffy sitting on the table in the Library ( Earshot ) to the miserable gross thing she became in 6 never to recover in 7
I agree with MN she did ruin Buffy and altering a few letters gives me Childish amusement

 

[thetopher]

She presided over the character destruction of the core four to enable Spuffy to happen , she presided over the horrid sex in S6 ( never shown as vivid thrusting, Anal etc before by any couple or in S 7 ) , the Attempted rapes, Buffy twice

Okay, just...could you tone it down a bit?
I mean, this is coming from a 100% (okay 90) non-fan of the Spuffy ship but what you're saying is quite frankly a bit much.
The story line was clearly not to everyone's taste but there was no malice or bad intent here, the writers were just telling a story.

 

[Taake]

Please don't lecture other members about their posting, if you see something that bothers you, report it and the staff will handle it.

 

[Anyanka Bunny Slayer]

Let's get real. Buffy was the furthest thing from a general. Slaying vampires and spewing witticisms hardly counts as battlefield experience. Yes, she was the Slayer and she could inflict considerable damage on her foes, but she did NOT have what it takes to lead a fighting force into battle. Not that she even had a fighting force! A bunch of idiotic, whimpering, uncooperative teen Potentials is what she had to work with. And my God, those girls were useless.

A true general has nothing on their mind but winning the war...they're not moping around, occasionally making goo goo eyes at a vamp they were involved with. Buffy was too self-absorbed and worn out to lead ANYBODY into battle. Besides, by S7 she was so freaking underweight I'm surprised she could even hold her head up.

 

[DeepBlueJoy]

Please disagree politely. I'm amazed at how much some people seem to hate Buffy and are still fans, but to each his/her own. Anyway, we all have strong feelings, so let's just be civil about whatever we say and remember it's JUST a TV show, it's not real. I'm here for fun. Hope the rest of us are too.

O.P.