Why only one slayer?

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Faith/willowfan

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why did the shadowmen only make one slayer, maybe it was because they didnt have enough power to do so but willow did because we know she had more power than them but then again it seems like they didnt really use their own power but the power of whatever demon they used to create the slayer
 
I think it had to do with control, which is why Willow's spell at the end had major feminist undertones. The shadowmen figured that they could control one scared little girl, but if they made too many, pretty soon the slayers would see that they had greater powers than the men who created them and want their own lives, like Buffy did at the ent of season three, rendering the shadowmen irrellevant at best.
 
Maybe they didnt have enough power to create more than one, at that time anyway...
 
i agree it had something to do with their will to control the slayer. but of course, the true creation of the slayer is a yet another mystery we wish to have known.
 
Because they knew that the Chosen One sounded a hell of a lot more mysterious and cool than the Chosen One Thousand! 😉

Truthfully, you could put it down to any number of reasons within the story including the need for control or lack of neccessary power at the time, as have both been mentioned, but the only real reason is because it made for a much more interesting concept from a storytelling point of view for Joss.

Many great television series concepts including Highlander, Stargate, The X Files, Farscape, etc, have featured logic flaws in their basic concepts. The fact is that if the Shadowmen had truly wanted to defeat the evil demonic forces they created the slayer to combat then it would have made a lot more sense to create an army of them from day one. Certainly more than one anyway.

For the sake of the story though you just have to accept that they couldn't do that, and not worry too much about the reasons.
 
There are a couple of tidbit additions to the Slayer mythos from the Whedon endorsed graphic anthology Tales of the Slayers, and the Whedon written comic mini-series Fray.

In Fray it's pretty much stated the slayer is called to battle the vampires.

At the time of her calling, the original demons have been banished to other realms. Vampires appear and are referred to as a disease. The Slayer appears to be created originally to control that disease.

In Tales of the Slayers, the original slayer wanders from village to village battling vampires. She is distrusted and feared. Even the Shadowmen have lost contact with her. They do not appear to have any kind of control over her.

It's interesting that the Guardian in End of Days tells us "the shadowmen became the watchers", because we don't see any evidence of that in Tales of the Slayers. This must have happened afterwards, as well as the addition of managing demons other than vampires, and guarding the Hellmouth being added to the list of Slayer chores.

To me all this kind of adds credibility to the extrapolation from the text that only 1 slayer was created, because they feared her power. They thought they could control 1.

Originally the Shadowmen gave the slayer just enough power to handle the vampire plague. I leap to this conclusion because we discover in Get it Done, the Shadowmen had more power to give her if they had wanted to give it. We know her power was feared because Tales of Slayers tells us so. From the same source we know she appeared to be beyond the control of the Shadowmen. That doesn't mean they couldn't destroy her at that point if they'd wanted to. It only means they did not have control over her movements.
 
See, this is why i really have to get around to reading the Tales of the Slayers comic books. They are the only official canon that i'm unaware of.

Sounds like they are well worth the read too.
 
really does. and i haven't read those too. really have to do that sometimes.
 
I think a part of it has to do with the balance between good and evil.

Look at the devasting effects having two slayers caused. Now imagine how badly the balance is screwed now that there are two hundred slayers.

I think to answer this question fully we would have to know how the power is transfered to the girl whether biologically, spiritually or mystically. Or all or any combination.

That has always bugged me.
 
Actually the consequences of what Willow did in Chosen when she activated all the potentials could make for an excellent central theme for a new series or movie.
 
I think the shadowmen created only one slayer for a number of reasons. One being that they knew that all of them could potentially control this one girl. It was a time when women weren't acknowledged for having the aptitude to learn and question authority and they felt it would be easiest this way.

The other reason is lack of power. Willow alone was more powerful than those men combined. It took a lot out of her to do the spell. These men may not have been able to make the slayer as powerful should they have created more than one.

::chucks in 2 cents::
 
eset said:
I think it had to do with control, which is why Willow's spell at the end had major feminist undertones. The shadowmen figured that they could control one scared little girl, but if they made too many, pretty soon the slayers would see that they had greater powers than the men who created them and want their own lives, like Buffy did at the ent of season three, rendering the shadowmen irrellevant at best.
Click to expand...

Esset, I'm inclined to agree with you. If you would observe the Watchers' Council, they seemed very concerned with their ability to control each Slayer. I never could understand why the Shadowmen would choose a young woman or adolescent girl, and not a male to become their Slayer. But a girl would make more sense. Naturally, they would believe that despite supernatural powers - a young girl in a patriarch society would be easier to control than a male.
 
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