Is Buffy your favourite character?

[Bluebird]

A lot of people's favourite character seems to be everyone except Buffy herself. Me included. Why do you think this is? Is she too hard to relate to to be your favourite? Or is it something to do with her character?

For me, I think it's because I can't relate to her as much as others. I find her funny and generally a great tv character to have but nothing stands out so much as with Xander or Willow. : totallyo

 

[Mozzymandias]

For me she was never as interesting as other characters were, she was the slayer and that was it. Take Willow though, who i find much more interesting, she starts as a timid high school teen and we see her grow into and adult and gain more power in magic. She turns bad in Season 6 which shows another side of her and then we see the recovery period in seaosn 7.

Buffy just didn't have the charcter development many others had for me mainly because she had to be the slayer from the beginnig of the series till the end, unlike Willows character which had the progression over seven seasons.

That's why she isn't my favourite character anyway.

 

[Urgent Power]

I LOVE Buffy, as a character and as a person. I can relate to her, more than I can to Willow (for example).

I think that in the beginning people actually did like her. But maybe she became too control freaky and very... kind of a hard person. And it might be because she's a Slayer, slayer-er and slayer-er each season. That slayer job made her a General, not "one of them". She started losing her humanity. Well, maybe not humanity, but it took a lot from her, that made her seperated from the others. So maybe that's harder to relate to. Her decisions during the series might have made people dislike her, because they see a side of her they don't like.

That's just guessting work. Personally, I adore Buffy, no matter when and where.

 

[Crazy Flakes]

I love Buffy as a character, don't get me wrong, I just don't find her as interesting as the others. I think the whole superiority complex was the main factor that made her less likable for me, but again, that's just me...I do think the whole development thing was a universal issue, though. Sure, she became more Slayer-y as the show progressed, but she didn't change quite as much as most of the people around her. That also might be why Willow and Spike, who probably went through the most drastic changes on the show, are among the most popular characters.

 

[sk]

I would say that I rate the big 4 quite equal.
Have a hard time saying that I like one more than another.
Maybe it because I don't really relate to any of them.

I am big fan of the gang though, I like it when they are working together, helping each other and when they are good friends.
Love the small simple scenes when they are just hanging out, or are just doing research together.

Thats what make the show so great for me, not one single character.

/SK

 

[Spuffy78]

I love Buffy. There's just other characters like Spike and Faith who I suppose I can relate more to.
Although her character as Buffy and The Slayer progressed it didn't progress like Spike or Xander and already stated earlier Willow.

 

[Skanky Vamp]

She was too goody-two-shoes for me. I liked her in Anne and some of the later episodes, when she started putting people in their place instead of letting them run over her and think they were equals.

 

[Tranquillity]

Buffy is number two or three for me. I think it's harder to love 'The General' than it is to love one of his men. She wasn't always so high on my list of favourites - the more I watch the show the more i see and appreiciate Buffy's perspective.

 

[Primal Slayer]

While Buffy is generally my favorite. I think people like other charecters like Willow and Xander more because they are more relatable and went through much more charecter development then Buffy did during the series.

 

[Parcae]

I suppose there are two reasons why I view Buffy as one of the less interesting characters:

1. She lacks depth. I don't mean here simply the extent to which she changes from season to season; she changes far more than Giles, for example, and Giles is pretty much universally agreed to be hewn from solid essence of awesome. I mean that it's much harder to deconstruct her character than some of the others. Xander, for example, looks rather superficial if you only see one or two episodes, but if you add together his appearances over the course of a season (particularly one of the earlier ones), he proves to be full of hidden contradictions. Is he primarily motivated by love of his friends or by abstract morality? How is one to reconcile his rather casual attitude towards sex with his evident capacity for forming deep and long-lasting personal bonds? Does his evident attraction to powerful women conflict with his protective nature? And so on.

Buffy, by contrast, is hard to analyze in depth. Her central dilemma, the desire to reconcile a normal life with her destiny, repeats itself in episode after episode and season after season.

2. The show repeatedly invites us to consider her as a hero rather than as a character. The point here is not whether her actions are unambiguously good, but whether the authors wanted us to consider her as such - for the answer to the former question is often Maybe whereas the answer to the latter is invariably Yes. A case in point is Giles' implicit suggestion in late season 5 that it might be better to kill Dawn rather than to allow Glory to use her to destroy the world. Buffy's defense of Dawn is presented as morally unambiguous, and the show (as always) gives its hero an easy out by giving her a third option - that of killing herself rather than either killing Dawn or allowing the world to suffer. This sacrifice might itself be seen as selfish - Buffy is leaving the slayer line in the somewhat unreliable hands of Faith, risking the whole of humanity in order to save her sister. But this point is never addressed in the show, which, indeed, repeatedly avoids addressing any of Buffy's morally ambiguous decisions (with one or two exceptions, mostly connected to Angel and Spike).

3. Her superpowers provide an excuse for lazy writing. I may expand on this further at some point, but I think the treatment of superpowers in BtVS deserves its own topic, so here I'll confine myself to pointing out that the season arcs of BtVS regularly follow this pattern:

a. The season Big Bad establishes its credibility by kicking Buffy's butt.
b. Buffy regains her self-confidence and reciprocates by kicking the Big Bad's butt.

Nothing in particular has changed between a and b - no voyage of self-discovery, no logical breakthrough. This can be seen particularly starkly in Prophecy Girl, in which it is never explained how Buffy goes from being effortlessly beaten by the Master to effortlessly defeating him - she simply states that she feels powerful. In contrast, most movies following this pattern provide some breakthrough between a and b; for example, The Matrix makes it clear that it is Neo's ever-increasing confidence in his destiny which enables him to go from being an ordinary guy to one-handedly defeating an Agent. And so Buffy's victories rarely correspond to any personal development, leaving her stunted as a character.

 

[atticus]

Yeah, Buffy is my favorite character. Why?, well because she saved the world- a lot.

 

[itsxpaperdoll]

For me it's, apart from all the other things you guys already named, also that there's just so much of her. I mean, with Spike, or Faith (or even, o my, Angel) there's something like "yay! There he/she is!" when they come along. Same with Anya, and even Willow and Xander. But because everything is about Buffy, after a while I just get a bit unaffected by her appearance. That's why I like it so much when something different happens to her, like dying, being depressed or her thinking she is in a mental hospital. I think the writers keep a good balance with this most of the times but sometimes there's just too much Buffy around. And that's one of the reasons for me why she's not my favourite character, I guess.

 

[caitaintdead]

Well I love Buffy. When I was watching the show as a pre-teen and early-teen I wanted to be her. Then, when I was an older teenager I began my love affair with Spike, as I got older I fell in love with Giles's character. There's something in the way that my feelings towards the characters have evolved. I just don't know what it is right now.

 

[La Luna Unita]

To add a little to what Parcae was saying above, I disliked Buffy in Seasons 1-6 and I believe it had to do with exactly the repetition of dilemma and destiny that is described above. However, in Season 7 when the characters all finally ganged up on her and, Slayer or no Slayer, flat out refused to entertain her notions of what they should be doing, somehow it helped to change my attitude. I don't really have a logical reasoning for it beyond the fact that their abandonment of Buffy jolted the show out of the regular "Scoobies follow the Slayer" routine and at that time I appreciated her determination and strength anew. Those facets of her personality finally seemed real to me and not the byproduct of a healthy self-esteem fostered by the love and caring showered upon her by her friends. In other words, she was the same girl when removed from her comfortable environment and it convinced me of who Buffy really was.

I still agree, however, that she remains the most shallow character with the least development on the show.

 

[Fake Shemp]

i really REALLY didnt like her for many years, do now... but in no way favourite still


i think it was because when the show was on television everyone assumed you loved Buffy and i was like no Willow rules.... i think it was a defence thing that made me not even consider her character.

 

[sosa lola]

I used to hate Buffy... but not because of the show, because of the Buffy-bashing I read in fanfic. Right now she's my favorite female character, even though I like Xander, Spike and Giles more.

 

[Relic]

I've always loved her and she always will have my favorite character spot.

I like them all really, just like sk73 said. but buffy is the one that i like the most. they were all heroes and made some good and bad choices. They seemed very real and relatable.

The one big difference to me is that Buffy didn't have a choice in her gig, it was birthright. You could maybe argue Xander and Willow and Giles were more the hero's because they chose their lifestyle to make the difference while Buffy was born into it...and thats part of the reason why i love them too.

Buffy was the one who had to deal with it everyday though, it was her more her life than her lifestyle and in that regaurd she's sort of a martyr. I admire and feel sorry for her. I've always cheered her on and wanted her to have somewhat of a normal life, to be an exception to her power and actually live through it all.

Plus she does cool flips and stuff.

 

[Sweetescape]

Buffy wasn't my favorite character she was wayyyy down on my list of characters i loved to see in an episode. I found her to whiny for my likeing seriously! she grated on me, always repeating her mistakes ie Vampire Boyfriend!!! and never really growing as a character in my eyes.

You could have easily plucked season 1 Buffy and plonked her into any of the other seasons( maybe not season 6 or 7), full of doubt and self loathing and the whole i'm the slayer rubbish when she has (by the later seasons) a very powerful witch and great frinds who have proven themselves that they can deal with whatever the hell mouth throws at them.

I loved the characters i could see grow in front of my eyes like Xander and Willow i had some kind of connection with them, i cared wheather they lived or died. Which i didn't with Buffy which is probably wrong.

 

[Ulrikke]

I agree with many of the points here. Another reason, for me at least, I think is the fact that she's the main character and you sort of see everything through her eyes, so you sort of 'forget' that she's also a character. Sort of the same reason you wouldn't (generally, lol) consider yourself your best friend.
(The same is true of the Harry Potter series, for example; beause he's the protagonist and we know everything he thinks and does I can't consider him my favourite character. It's more like I'm him when I read and thus I end up loving characters like Remus and Sirius more)

 

[Urgent Power]

I don't know why you're all saying Buffy's character hasn't changed and developed. I just saw season 1 and that is exactly the thing I noticed, only the other way around. In season one, all Buffy cared about was clothes and boys. She didn't want or take the slaying very seriously. She was so much like a kid, she WAS a kid, and she acted like it. Then I look at season 7, the last season, and surprise surprise, she's not a kid anymore. She became a General, grown up (grown up especially when her mother died and she had to be Dawn's mom), she took slaying more seriously, and that all that mattered to her. She put all the other things aside. Dating wasn't her first priority anymore. She dated, but the world came first.

She went from a brat kid who got exited of a piece of clothing, to a responsable teenage who got kicked out of her home and living alone in the big city, plus killed her first big love so the world could keep on living. To a senior who's looking forward to her college years, to a grown-up (even Joyce said that) that takes her studdies seriously plus the slaying, even when she didn't want to, but understood she has to because that's her destiny, to a mother to Dawn, understading that she has to sacrafice herself to save the world, then when coming back from the death, she had even more responsability, she took a job when she understood she didn't have the choice, her life was a bitch and she didn't want to live (after season 1, Prophecy Girl, where she says she wants to live) Her eyes got open to so many things, and especially life itself. To a General who's heart-blocked by the seriousness of her destiny, she wasn't Buffy that we came to know (and love?)

Wow, there is so much more to say on this subject, but I won't bother you no more. My point however is, Buffy did develop, she did change, and her character is so deep and complicated that there is no room to tell it all. Every episode you watch you can pick up stuff from Buffy that prove she has a whole world inside her, not just a shallow character. I think she's more complitated than anyone else on the show. She is the Slayer, what's so empty about this character?