Why is a Slayer supposed to be a Lone Wolf?

definition of insane

definition of insane

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Just reading through the "how many times does buffy die" thread, it occurred to me (and probably has been discussed before so this is my bad), that I really don't get why slayers are traditionally on their own.

With the exception of their watchers, they're supposed to be alone. Why? Surely it would make more sense to have a team to fight evil at the front line. The Watcher's Council itself was basically an International organisation and they only have one tool in all the world? And then despite have all these resources, they have one watcher per slayer or slayer in training and that's it?

And surely Buffy is not the first slayer to want friends, to have a life. Nikki had a kid...why couldn't she have friends to help her out?

I just don't get it.
 
I think (and I'm ripping of the Lord of the Rings here) that to be a Slayer is to BE alone. No one else can really understand the responsibility. That was what Buffy struggled with the whole time. When it comes right down to it, she's the only one who can do the things she does. She was lucky to have friends who were strong in their own way. I think Slayerness comes with some antisocial behavior that Buffy was constantly having to fight. I mean, look at her in "The Wish." Could you see that girl EVER working with someone else?
 
I think it was the Watcher's Council as opinion as a whole. The Slayer must work in secret as they wanted to keep the 'ops' secret. The ignorant members of the council since the very first Watchers believed that friends and family distract from the calling.
For example in Choices when Willow is kidnapped, Buffy wanted to save her friend and was willing to give the Mayor his power back (the spiders) and risk Sunnydale to save her. The council wanted the Slayer to remain in a world of black and white, no gray areas. And in that situation would have wanted her to sacrifice Willow for the greater good.
Having no friends would allow to think in that way. And I think they believed family gave the Slayer too many ties to this world, plus I think in one of the novels it mentioned how the Council thought family could hold the Slayer back and restrict her.

It was a load of bull really and I think only Giles (and possibly Nikki Wood's Slayer since he seemed compassionate enough to quit the council and raise Robin when she died) ever realized this. I mean Giles and Buffy were the best Slayer/Watcher team ever but the Council were too stuck in their stodgy, it-has-been-this-way-since-the-dawn-of-time, the-slayer-must-work-alone ways to realize it.
 
Even with the LoTRs analogy....the only person to successfully deal with the Ring was Frodo, and he had Sam. 😉

I just think logistically, having one person to deal with the fighting is unrealistic (yes, I get we're talking about Buffy here). Even with the council behind them, other than training and research when they feel like it, what else do we see the council doing?

Emotionally, it's also not going to work. If the goal is to help the helpless and you emotionally detach yourself from them, surely sooner or later you just wouldn't care anymore. Sort of like when Angel went from caring Angel to not caring Angel. You stop helping the helpless.

Maybe it a control thing. You can control one slayer with a whole organisation better than you can control a group (obviously), but is that really for the greater good in terms of a bigger picture? I don't think so.
 
And then there was the potentials, who all became slayers. The mythology doesn't specify that the chosen one has to be alone, that she can't have an army of slayers to help her. It only states that the chosen one is alone.
 
Some good points have been made in this thread so far. I want to add the posibility of the demon inside the Slayer has something to do with her loneliness to the list of potential reasons. Most Slayers might not have been aware of the fact that their strength came from a demon source, but I think that somehow they knew they were actually different deep down. Their collective memories might have included the rape of the First Slayer.
 
To point out the obvious, the original opening of the show refers to the Slayer as the "one girl in all the world," and "she alone will face," the demons, vampires, and all of the other booger bears that go "bump" in the night. Whedon designed the Slayer to be the lone warrior in the tradition of Lancelot du Lac and Ogier the Dane. Granted, Lance had the other Knights of the Round Table, and Ogier had the rest of Charlemagne's court, but ultimately they were lone warriors, so powerful that no force could stand before their righteous power. Like them, , she defended the weak and stood for the forces of good. There were certainly others who did the same thing, but she, like her predecessors, both Slayers and Knights, were the ultimate force to oppose evil. They were the John Waynes of the supernatural world. They might die, but it always took overwhelming odds to kill them.
 
B
Blondie Bear
Booger bears! Ha!
definition of insane said:
Even with the LoTRs analogy....the only person to successfully deal with the Ring was Frodo, and he had Sam. 😉
Click to expand...

True, but he still felt very alone. He didn't think Sam could possibly understand what he was going through, although Sam did seem to have a good idea. Sort of like Buffy and her pals, wouldn't you say?
 
Which makes her fortunate to have the friends that she had, BB...just like Frodo was fortunate to have a friend and loyal and as understanding as Sam. Looking at Conversations with Dead People, yes Buffy and Holden figured out the inferiority and superiority complex...which would make one anti-social and alone. But my arguement is that other than the prophecy or what have you saying so, there's no real reason that a Slayer should be alone. Those witch doctors were just pretty lame really, leaving the fight to a girl they essentially sacrificed to a demon.
 
B
Blondie Bear
Very true.
And, when you think about it, while people helped (and even did some slaying themselves) Buffy often did kill the baddie on her own. Because she just has the strength, her ALONE can stand up to them and defeat them, but the others had a much higher risk of being killed.

I'm not saying at all that was always the case, i mean, it took all four of them to defeat Adam, but for the MOST part Buffy did the major killings.

I just think her being the lone wolf just being because, for many centuries up until Chosen, there was only allowed to be the one in existence at any one time (until things when kaflooey with her dying and coming back, bet the Watchers Council was seriously flummoxed when THAT first happened!).

And of course, most slayers im sure found it near impossible to find companions because of many people's disbelief and lack of understanding their burden. Buffy had some extraordinary friends that they stuck by her like that.


Oh and the Adam thing made me think, if she WERE alone, would she have been able to defeat him some other way or would she have died? thats an interesting thought.
 
I think without her friends Buffy wouldn't have made it to face Adam. I mean yeah it had been that way since the dawn of time- Slayer working alone and in secret- but it was Buffy defying this rule and having a circle of support is what kept her alive all those years.

It's like Spike said in School Hard 'Slayer with family and friends, that sure as hell wasn't in the brochure'.

But if she had made it to fight Adam, without the rest of the core four I think she would have failed, read: died. Adam was undefeatable. They were only able to reach his weakness after all by mixing ALL of their talents. With only Buffy's gifts Adam would have definitely had the advantage I think.
 
Well by that reckoning, Buffy wouldn't have made it past Prophecy Girl, if Xander wasn't her friend and hadn't followed her, she'd be lying in a pool of water and ick and not breathing or living.
 
Good point....haha. Actually, if Buffy didn't have her friends etc we just found a different way into the Wishverse. She would have died in Prophecy Girl, the Master would have rose, had his little hell on earth and probably moved towards his blood factory thang we saw in The Wish.
 
Maybe the Watchers Council was afraid of what the Twilight organization is afraid of? That if there was more than one Slayer, they'd consider themselves "better" than the rest of the world and try to conquer it.
 
That theory does sound very Travers-y, TC. And it would make sense- I mean they are one of the few people who know how truly powerful the Slayer could be and they would perhaps know the potential of control and power a Slayer would have with a support system.

I also got the feeling it was that sort of reason that was why they had the Cruciamentum. I mean a Slayer makes it to 18 and the good guys risk her life on purpose? Maybe they wanted to make sure the Slayer didn't last too long because a very experienced long-lasting Slayer would start to realize where the real power lies such as Buffy did in Checkpoint (and partially in Graduation)
 
Actually that kinda does make you wonder, doesn't it? How many slayers would the watcher's council have gone through if not all of them made it through Cruciamentum? It does seem like a crazy idea...and what the heck is it really supposed to prove, other than be like almost another pointless rite of passage?

I knew there was a reason I didn't like those guys! 😉
 
More than likely, when the Shadow Men created the First Slayer, she was only intended to be a protector for their villiage/family group/region/whatever. Then, as the human population began to spread throughout the world, it became more and more obvious that more defenders were needed, but by then the magic required to create new Slayers had been lost.
 
B
Blondie Bear
Sounds reasonable.
I always thought that the Slayer was designed to be expendible. She was viewed as the 'tool' of the council rather than a uniquely gifted girl with super powers. A long living slayer would be more likely to challenge her boundaries and the authority of the council and more likely to lose her aninimity (both of which happend to Buffy) and the council couldn't have that - so the slayer was told to worke alone in secrecy and was practically guaranteed a short tour of duty and this was exaclty what the council would have wanted. The girl would have been kept in her place and when she died a new one was instantly chosen.
 
But in an overall sense, that's kind of a strange way of going about trying to save the world by fighting evil with just one person. I guess that was the whole idea of my original post.

Surely though, Buffy can't have been the only one to defy the authority of the council. Which just now makes me wonder, what about the others before her that might have "quit" the cause. The council really didn't do anything to persuade her otherwise when she said she was done with them. I could almost see the council sending someone or something after a n unruly slayer so they could shape the next one. It's just an interesting little situation.
 
I think (like a lot of other people, I'd assume) that the reason the slayer is supposed to be alone is to protect people. Friends, civillians, no one is ever supposed to know about demons really except for the Slayer and her watcher (and the watcher's council, etc. either way, it's not something that was supposed to be made public).

By getting friends and family involved, as we witnessed on many occations of btvs, you put them at risk. They are a weakness. If a Slayer's Mom or friend is taken, she's more likely to dive into risky situations to save them, many of which could easily get them killed. If a slayer were to icolate herself and work alone, she is essentially the only person she has to watch out for; which allows her to focus soley on the good of the world. She doesn't have to worry about her boyfriend being captured or leaving behind a family if she dies, all she has to focus on is her calling, plain and simple.

And yes, this may mean that the slayer doesn't have backup, could die quicker. But at the same time (from the watcher's council's perspective) they are expendable. One dies and there's always another one to take her place. They are thinking about what would be the best way to protect the world-- not the slayer. Just look at the Glory scenario in s5. Buffy had a choice-- her sister or Dawn. And there was a huge chance that any other slayer would have picked Dawn, taken a chance. Same with the Angeus issue, dozens of innocent people died because she was too emotionally attatched to him to do her job.

Now, none of this is my personal opinion on the subject (obviously!), but I think it's really the reason why the slayer is only ever meant to be one girl. It's the safest option, if you look at the big picture. And although it would have been neat to have the army of slayers from day one, that would have seriously upset the balance of power in the buffyverse (as season 8 so accurately describes).


And I agree about unruly slayers. As we saw with Faith, I'd imagine that the council would have done their best to "dispose" of any that became a threat to humanity. As for Buffy, she was technically doing her job, but I think the reason that they didn't kill her is that they really would have had to get rid of Faith first. I mean, they could have taken out Buffy all they like, but as long as Faith was alive there would not have been anyone to take her place. At least with her standing, there was SOMEONE looking out for the world.

I always assumed that if they had succeeded in killing Faith, they would have eventually came for Buffy.
 
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