Buffy Summers
Buffy Anne Summers is the title character in the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the television show of the same name (though it should be noted that, being different interpretations of an original concept, these are actually two seperate entities, as explained below). The character was introduced in the financially unsuccessful movie in which she was played by Kristy Swanson. She gained popularity after being transferred to the small screen where she was played by Sarah Michelle Gellar.
- The television show does not recognize the events of the movie as canon; it is intended to be an independent realization of the same concept rather than a continuation of the movie's plot. This article deals with the character of Buffy Summers from the television show only.
At the beginning of the show Buffy is a teenage high school student, a vampire slayer and the daughter of a divorced single mother, Joyce (father is Hank Summers). She struggles to reconcile her life as a teen — and all of the usual difficulties that entails — with her destiny as the "chosen" defender of humanity against "vampires, demons and the forces of darkness". She often professes a desire for a "normal" life but, gradually, as the series progresses, accepts her fate. As the Slayer, Buffy has superhuman physical abilities such as super-strength and -speed. She also possesses a psychic link to Slayers before her and a minor clairvoyance that presents itself through vague dreams.
History
Buffy Anne Summers is a popular teenage girl who lives in Los Angeles. She's a cheerleader and more or less the queen of the school. Her idyll is shattered, however, when she begins to have strange dreams about women from different eras fighting monsters. Buffy is approached by a mysterious man named Merrick, who explains that he is a Watcher, one of many who watch over the "Slayer". In every generation, a Slayer is born; one girl in all the world with the physical strength and skill to fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. When one Slayer dies, the next is chosen.
When the previous slayer, India Cohen, died (she is never mentioned in the television show; her adventures are chronicled in the text The Book of Fours), Buffy was chosen to become the new Slayer. With a little training and strong effort, Buffy was able to defeat her first vampire foe Lothos, who killed Merrick. When vampires attacked her high school, Buffy set fire to the gymnasium to kill them. With that, Buffy is expelled from Hemery High and moves, with her mother, to the small town of Sunnydale, California.
Buffy enrolled in Sunnydale High (filmed on location at Torrance High School), where she met Xander Harris, Willow Rosenberg, and her new Watcher, Rupert Giles, who had been sent by the Council of Watchers to replace Merrick. She also met Cordelia Chase, a popular but arrogant, condescending, and patronizing cheerleader. The first season focused on Buffy's fight against The Master (vampire) and his protégé, the Anointed One. The season ended with Buffy's death at the hands of The Master, her resuscitation by Xander, and her subsequent (apparent) triumph over the Master.
The second season centered on Buffy's forbidden love for Angel, who is eventually revealed as a vampire with a human soul. It also introduced the new Slayer, Kendra, who was "called" as a result of Buffy's death. Buffy lost her virginity to Angel, which resulted in the vampire losing his soul, and becoming obsessed with killing her. At the end of the season, Buffy dispatched Angel to Hell and ran away from home, working as a waitress in a restaurant called Helen's Kitchen, after the infamous section of New York, Hell's Kitchen. She later returned to Sunnydale.
Season 3 introduced a renegade Slayer, Faith, who was "called" after Buffy's initial replacement, Kendra, was killed by Drusilla, a sometime-paramour of Angel and William the Bloody, also known as Spike. In a terrible struggle, Buffy stabbed Faith, but the rogue Slayer escaped by falling from the roof of her apartment, into a passing flatbed truck.
In Season 4, Buffy and Willow, having graduated from high school, attended UC Sunnydale, while Xander, also having graduated, worked at various odd jobs, finally becoming a carpenter. At the university, Buffy encountered her second lover, Riley Finn, a member of a covert military organization, The Initiative, which was collecting demons and vampires in an effort to create beings ("demonoids") with superpowers. Their affair did not last, and Buffy next took up with the vampire Spike.
In Season 5, Buffy defeated an evil god, Glory, who sought to kill Buffy's long-lost sister Dawn, a cosmic "key" given human form by a group of monks in order that Dawn might both be hidden from Glory and protected by the Slayer. Buffy dies a second time when she sacrifices herself by leaping from a tall tower built by crazy people to save Dawn.
According to Joss Whedon, the show's creator, the theme of the sixth season was "Oh, grow up!". Brought back from the grave by a spell cast by Willow, Buffy returned to fight a trio of nerds in Season 6. The finale pitted Buffy against Willow, who temporarily turned to the dark side in the process of seeking revenge against those who killed her girlfriend, Tara.
The Seventh and final season saw Buffy thwart The First Evil by converting every potential slayer in the world to an actual slayer, at the price of the complete annihilation of the evacuated city of Sunnydale.
After the events of the final season, Buffy's continued presence was felt in the spin-off series Angel. Even though she is not physically seen, the episode Damage contains a reference to Buffy, when Andrew explains sharply to Angel that his orders to take the psychotic Slayer Dana with him came from Buffy herself. Buffy is the title character of "The Girl In Question", the penultimate Angel episode, but only appears as a brief shot of someone presumed to be her (and not played by Gellar).
Buffy started out as a carefree, superficial, and rebellious teen and ended up as a world-weary but powerful and self-confident young woman who, having survived not only attacks by vampires, demons, and monsters but also the death of her mother, passed her power to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Slayers.
Romances & Friendships
The gradual change in her character was marked by constant failed relationships - first betrayed by Angel and forced to kill him, and later forced to confront him again, attempting to reconstruct a relationship only for them to decide they had to part despite their love. This had been preceded by a string of romances with failures and supernatural villains, and was followed by a relationship with Riley that ended in him very suddenly abandoning her. Buffy's final major romance was with Spike, who she had long considered an enemy and rejected - but with whom she had passionate sex after her resurrection. The relationship became a sort of masochism - and in a fight with a young and particularly psychoanalytical vampire, in the episode "Conversations With Dead People", Buffy was forced to confront her tendency to pick men who would hurt her so that she didn't have to commit. In the same conversation, Buffy realized that, in regards to her friends, she had a superiority complex about which she had an inferiority complex. After having worked out those issues, Buffy now tries again, slowly with Spike (who now has a soul) until the last episode, when the relationship ends due to a glorious death scene.
Buffy's best friends were Willow and Xander. However, her role as Slayer forced her to be alone, and she had to separate herself to some degree. Giles became the father to Buffy, as her own father was never around, and it was with him she felt able to share some of the weight of her Slayer responsibilities. Giles' own life meant that for large periods of time he was forced to leave Buffy on her own, however. Buffy's relationships with the other "Scoobies" is difficult to determine. She becomes close to Tara, tolerated Cordelia and showed little about what she thought of Oz and Anya. In Dawn, Buffy had for the first time a relationship that involved responsibility on her part outside the role of Slayer, and she was very overprotective. Dawn also helped alleviate some of Buffy's isolation, by being a part of her actual family. However, Buffy again felt betrayed in Season 7, when all the Scoobies agreed on a virtual vote of no confidence.
Creative Origins
In part, Buffy is modeled on Shadowcat of Marvel Comics' X-Men, showing much of her spunk and at the same time, occasional wish for a normal life. In addition, the character was born, so to speak, of Whedon's annoyance at having a blond teenage girl ending up as the victim of a horror movie monster. He decided to invert this stereotype and make the monster the victim of the blond teenage girl... but the legend of the Slayer goes beyond Buffy...
Buffy is not just A vampire slayer, she is the latest in the "long line of mystical warriors" known as THE Vampire Slayers. Legend speaks of Large Demons known as "The Old Ones" who walked the earth. Some of these demons were as tall as skyscrapers and were ferociously powerful. But they lost their purchase on this dimension and were driven out by certain magicks. The way was being paved for human beings. The last demon to leave was a smaller demon that fed off the blood of humans. It mixed its blood with the human's and a new demonic breed was born called the Vampire. Many other demons bred with humans through some particular method causing the more "tainted", "human hybrid forms" of demons that walk the earth today. The Vampires, though not the strongest of half-breeds, spread quicker than possibly any other half-breed demon and still far surpassed the strength and speed that the strongest and fastest human could ever hope to achieve (In the episode The Bargaining Part I, a Vampire that would be considered by others to be a weakling grabs a one ton dumpster casually by the handle while running and sends it spinning out towards the Buffy-bot, who THEN easily defeats him). The head elders (the Shadow-Men) of each village decided to take some action and create a power slightly stronger than the Vampires but one that they might be able to control. They took the power, essence and might of a demon. And they channeled it... into a young girl they had chained to the earth. The girl had no choice. This became her sacred duty and responsibility. For only SHE had the power to stand successfully against the forces of darkness. She was the first Vampire Slayer. However being only slightly superior to Vampires and other halfbreeds, the Slayer's life was often brutal and short-lived. The Shadow-Men (whose descendents went on to become the Watchers) had foreseen this and imbued this power with another spell to guarantee that it would live on. Like the First Slayer, there were hundreds of girls in each generation that had the potential to carry this power within their bodies. They tended to be girls who were physically fitter than most of their peers. When the First Slayer died in battle, the power was transferred to one of the potential girls. Down over the millenia with each girl inheriting the power...
Powers and Abilities
Buffy has various abilities which are well beyond Human norms. Prominent amongst these is her great physical strength. Depictions of her strength have been rather inconsistent throughout the history of the show. At the high end, Buffy has been shown able to lift a metal portcullis which many teenagers were unable to budge, bent a steel rifle barrel with little effort and bent prison bars to assist in a jail break. On one occasion she was able to pick up two Harbingers - servants of an evil force who are equal in size to Human males - and throw them across a room in opposite directions. Faith, a Slayer with abilities similar to Buffy's, was able to punch through concrete with her bare hand, pick up the Vampire Angel with one hand and easily throw him across a room as well as lift him over her head into the ceiling, and pick up a 200 lb. barbell with one hand and use it as a weapon. As a result of such incidents high end estimates of Buffy's strength imply that she could lift up to ten tons, making her some one hundred times stronger than would be expected for her size.
However, on other occasions Buffy has struggled to carry a single Human. Additionally, many episodes have depicted ordinary Humans as being able to at least hold their own with Vampires, implying that Vampires have no more than two or three times the strength of a Human at most. Whilst Buffy is generally stronger than the average Vampire, she does not show the level of physical dominance that would be consistent with high end estimates of her strength.
Buffy's apparent physical weakness in selected situations underscores her more human qualities, symbolizing her struggle with the aspects of her life that she shares with normal young women. For example in the episode in which Buffy starts college, she is beaten up by a female vampire. This reinforces to the audience her feelings of being a lonely young girl on a big, unfriendly college campus, after having been the hero in high school.
Since Buffy's physical strength derives from supernatural sources, it is at least conceivable that her precise level of strength is dependant on her state of mind and that she is quite literally weaker when emotionally disturbed or otherwise unfocused.
Her strength allows Buffy to perform superhuman feats of agility beyond any Olympic medalist. She can jump the height of maybe 30 feet and the length of a street and perform extreme acrobatics of all kinds unreplicable by any Olympic athlete.
Beyond her strength, Buffy also has superhuman reflexes and speed. She has shown herself capable of dodging - and even catching - arrows and knives in mid-flight. She has also outmaneuvered bulletfire from a machine gun fire from a Cyberdemonoid. We've also seen how fast she can run and evade an enemy when she outdodged a superhuman agent of The First Evil.
Her body is substantially more durable and resistant to impact or trauma than an ordinary human. She is difficult, though not impossible, to bruise and has never been seen to suffer a broken bone. Her skin can be punctured by ordinary weapons such as knives or bullets. Buffy recovers from even very severe injuries in remarkably short periods of time.
Buffy's senses appear to be heightened. Details are rare, but the degree of enhancement seems to be rather limited - indeed it is possible that she merely happens to have good but normal eyesight, hearing, etc. She has been seen to locate attackers whilst in the dark or blindfolded, though it is not clear if this is a result of hightened hearing or some form of extrasensory perception.
Buffy has natural general fighting skills. Her watcher trains her to hone these talents, and to teach her specific fighting skills, such as various martial arts. The training helps her to battle the occasional demon whose physical strength outclass her own. In general, her super-strength suffices.
Her last power is a limited prescient ability. This manifests itself in occasional prophetic dreams, often presaging some dire event.
Buffy and her friends refer to her various abilities collectively as "The Slayer package".