Spoiler! The Shadow Men

[AngelAmongUs]

Buffy: "You think I came all this way to get knocked up by some demon dust? I can't fight this. I know that now. But you guys? You're just men. Just the men who did this... to her. Whoever that girl was before she was the First Slayer." Shadow Man: "You don't understand." Buffy: "No, you don't understand! You violated that girl, made her kill for you because you're weak, you're pathetic, and you obviously have nothing to show me."

Is activating all the potentials not a violation because they won't have to fight if they don't want to?

Was it being infused with a demonic essence that was the violation or having to fight alone?

Is the Shadow men's only crime not infusing more girls at a time with the power?

That they put too much on the shoulders of one person?

 

[Ethan Reigns]

When the Shadow Men said, "You don't understand", I wish she had let them explain so we could see whether there was logic or nonsense behind the statement. Having her tied up the same way Spike tied her up alongside Drusilla in his cave is certainly intended to give the impression of violation but there may have been some reason we haven't thought of why the slayer must be female or why there should only be one. A man can dust a vampire just as easily as a woman but perhaps demonic energy can only be captured in estrogen (an idea many of my male friends and several of my female friends would endorse wholeheartedly).

I was not among those who thought activating the potentials was a violation because all of the capabilities given to the girls were positive and at the time it happened, the potentials were being hunted. They had improved strength and fighting capability and they had already been set aside as special (since not many women in the world were potentials), so declaring a girl to be a potential (the mechanism of which has never been explained) may have been the violation, if there was one.

Demonic power is dangerous but not necessarily bad in the Jossverse. Clem is an example of a demon who served a purpose providing a temporary shelter for Dawn and Joyce and was never shown to harm anything other than kittens.

Having to fight alone was a burden, but having to fight in secret was even more of one until the fateful first day when Xander overheard Buffy and Giles talking. Then they gradually enlarged the circle of people who knew what was going on and we had the core four. If they kept it down to one person just because they thought they could dominate one but not more than one, then what they did was wrong. If they kept it at one for a good reason (and we never see a good reason), then it would not be wrong, but Buffy never let them explain.

 

[white avenger]

Activating all of the Potentials throughout the whole world was not quite as irresponsible as giving a kindergarten class a few dozen loaded shotguns to play with, but it was certainly close. If Buffy had only activated the girls there in Sunnydale, who at least had some idea of what was happening to them, that would have been sound strategy, considering the enemy that they were facing at that moment.

Yes, what Buffy did to all those hundreds of girls was no less of a violation of those girls than anything that the Shadow Men ever did, with the exception of the fact that she did it on a global scale, not just to one single girl at a time.