Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Independence and Adulthood
By Connor Watts
Author’s note: This article contains spoilers for all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
As a child, and even as a teenager, I was scared of growing up. I didn’t know what “being an adult” entailed—but I thought it meant grudgingly carrying out responsibilities, such as working in a dissatisfying job, paying bills, and, maybe, raising children through much sacrifice. I now know from conversations with my peers (not to mention the noticeable strain of anti-adult sentiment in today’s meme culture) that I was not alone in my misconceptions. All I wanted was to remain young and carefree—until I realized that avoiding maturity has very undesirable consequences. After that, I was keen to remedy my anxieties about growing up and find guidance to help me on the path to maturity. It may surprise you to learn where I found these things and what they’ve taught me.
I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) when I was only six years old. Seeing Buffy and her friends combat the various mystical creatures that plague Sunnydale (the fictional town in which the series takes place), I was captivated by a relatable hero overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges. I was filled with a sense of empowerment and grandeur during these early encounters—and I still am. Although the show’s rich metaphors and deep philosophic messages greatly impacted my development, it’s only now, at twenty-six years old, that I think I can fully appreciate and express what Buffy has to offer—and it offers a lot—particularly on the topic of growing up.
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Vampires, the series’ most prominent antagonists, are themselves metaphors for permanent adolescence: For the most part, they do not age physically and, because most are hedonistically single-minded—pursuing transient pleasure without regard for the future—they do not mature mentally either. Conversely, the slayer role is the show’s metaphor for adulthood. By choosing to exercise that power responsibly in pursuit of her values, Buffy matures in every respect. She is sixteen when the series begins and twenty-two when it ends. These years are crucial in Buffy’s development from adolescence to adulthood—as they are for everyone. Each episode of Buffy shows the viewer something important about what it means to be an adult: what types of people to trust and associate with, what and how to value deeply, the importance of ethical choices in life, and an awareness of the inescapable consequences of one’s actions, to name only a few.
I re-watch the series annually and have done so since I could afford to buy my own DVDs. This year, for the first time, I noticed what I think is the key lesson in Buffy: Being a successful adult means choosing and pursuing one’s own rational values—that is, choosing individualism—in the face of various common pressures to conform. I have identified four kinds of these pressures with which Buffy takes issue: familial, social, fatalistic, and political. Indeed, the series goes to great lengths to show its viewers how these are toxic and why they must be avoided if one is to become an adult and flourish. Let’s take a look at how the show depicts and critiques these pressures.
The first of these influences is the pressure to conform to the demands and expectations of one’s family. The Master, the main antagonist in season one, is the paternal “father figure” of a vampiric “family,” and he demands strict conformity to his dictates. Unlike other vampires who are trapped in perpetual adolescence, the Master is a metaphor for all of the bad things that children often associate with adulthood (as Mark Field notes in his excellent book, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality).1 For instance, not only is he old and wrinkled, as the head of his “family” (the Order of Aurelius), he is strictly traditional and cantankerous. Like the head of a religious household, he reads scripture to his vampiric “children” and is keen to punish them—often sadistically—for their mistakes.
The Master’s demands for conformity and his own tendency to conform to tradition lead to his demise. For instance, during his first battle with Buffy, he uses hypnosis to paralyze her and force her to conform to his will. But, by their second battle, Buffy has learned to resist this power.
The Master also conforms to the predictions of his elders, relying on their prophecies in his plans to defeat Buffy. He’s astounded when, having thought Buffy to be dead, she returns to confront him. “You were destined to die! It was written!,” he protests. Buffy coolly replies, “What can I say? I flunked the written,” before bringing the Master to his demise.
The Master’s followers also suffer as a result of their unquestioning obedience to their leader and to the prophecies of their elders. After the Master’s death, their conformist inclinations lead them to blindly follow Spike (a vampire known for his rash hedonism) into battle, which many do not survive. By the end of season two, the Order of Aurelius is destroyed—and they have their shared sense of obedience to their “family” to thank.
Characters throughout the series engage in such family-centered conformity, and it always has negative consequences. Take, for instance, Buffy’s controlling would-be stepfather, Ted, who goes so far as to lace his baked goods with drugs in order to make Buffy’s mother and friends compliant. After Ted tells Buffy that he will not stand for her “malarkey” in his house, it is revealed that he’s a robot, and Buffy defeats him.
The manipulative Mr. Maclay also fails in his attempt to control his daughter, Tara, through psychological manipulation. In trying to keep her servile and “with her family,” he lies to her, telling her that she is part demon.2 Buffy, recognizing such attempts to engender conformity and submission, quickly comes to Tara’s aid, exposing Mr. Maclay as the lying tyrant he is and freeing Tara from her oppressor. Over the course of these episodes, Buffy—and viewers—learn a crucial lesson about the path to adulthood: Happy, confident people do not surrender to their families’ demands.
The second type of conformity the series warns viewers against is social conformity. In the episode titled “Halloween,” Buffy and her friend Willow both choose Halloween costumes in response to different social pressures, and both of them nearly die (Willow technically does) when a spell transforms them into the characters that their costumes depict. Buffy becomes a vulnerable, 17th-century noblewoman, the embodiment of what she thought she had to be to please her boyfriend, Angel (a 240-year-old vampire who, unlike most vampires, happens to have a soul). And Willow becomes a ghost—the embodiment of her desire not to be seen, which stems from her feelings of social inadequacy. By the end of the episode, Buffy has learned to be more comfortable with her own identity—confidently eschewing the demure, glamorous, ultrafeminine ideal she thought Angel expected of her. When Buffy’s friend and guide, Giles, breaks the spell, Buffy beats a vampire in a fight and announces, “You know what? It’s good to be me.” Likewise, Willow is pleased to be back in her own body and begins to learn that she does not have to conform to the “geek” persona ascribed to her by the likes of Cordelia, a socialite fellow student.
Similarly, in “Earshot,” Buffy acquires telepathic powers that help her learn to resist social pressures to be “normal.” Her telepathy reveals that many of the people around her regularly think about how they do not fit what they believe to be social norms—and they chastise themselves for it. She learns that chasing social standards of “normality”—such as having a “perfect” body and being popular—is pointless and destructive. Those who pursue such standards typically give up what really matters most to their happiness and sacrifice their identities.
This message is also the central theme of “The Zeppo,” in which Buffy’s friend Xander struggles to carve an identity that is not shaped by social expectations—including those of his friends. When he successfully stops a group of students from blowing up the school, he learns to be content with his lack of superpowers and to not define himself by the opinions of others.
In “Nightmares” and “Restless,” we again see that, despite her incredible intelligence, Willow struggles with the “geek” label ascribed to her by her peers. Though it takes Willow longer than it did Xander to free herself from the shackles of her peer-prescribed identity, she gradually does so. She gains confidence as she learns and accepts that she is a lesbian and, after becoming a witch, learns to cast spells. These episodes teach us that maturity and happiness require relying on your own judgment and not the opinions of others.
This brings me to the third category of conformities with which the show takes issue: what I call “fatalistic conformity.” By this, I mean the belief that one is doomed to conform to the reputation established by his previous actions. The character arc of Faith, another slayer, is the show’s best example of how some people screw up their lives by believing that they can’t break the “mold” they’ve created for themselves earlier in life—that their deeds today inevitably will conform to their misdeeds yesterday.
In season three, Faith appears to be a dark-side version of Buffy; she is what Buffy, a preternaturally strong warrior, might have been had she tried to avoid growing up and taking on new challenges and responsibilities, particularly those associated with her choice to be a slayer. In “Bad Girls,” Faith’s out-of-control hedonism—notable from her motto, “Want. Take. Have.,” and her blasé attitude toward stealing—lead her to accidentally kill another person. Her reaction to this is one typical of a child who doesn’t understand how her actions affect her future or her psyche: She evades responsibility for as long as possible in the hope that the situation will go away—and she even tries to blame Buffy. When Buffy tries to convince Faith to accept responsibility and that she is capable of good if she chooses to pursue it, Faith evades the matter by changing the subject. After a vampire attack cuts short their conversation, Faith flees the scene and takes the side of Richard Wilkins (the demonic mayor of Sunnydale). Thereafter, Faith conforms to her own characterization of herself as a killer and proceeds to murder a number of people on the mayor’s command. This soon becomes second nature to her.
After eight months in a coma, following a battle against Buffy, Faith awakens and continues to conform to the established narrative that she is—and has no choice but to continue being—a killer. Only when she swaps bodies with Buffy in order to escape jail does she begin to understand the true purpose of her slayer powers. Faith, while still inside Buffy’s body, flies into a rage, attacking her own body. Repulsed by the sight of herself, she shouts, “You’re nothing! Disgusting, murderous bitch! You’re nothing!”3 Faith, once back in her own body, then leaves for Los Angeles, eventually turns herself in to the authorities, and serves her prison sentence. By the time she returns to Sunnydale, she has learned that her past—and people’s impressions of her—need not continue to determine how she acts. Faith learns that making moral choices and resisting pressures to act immorally are essential to happiness in life.
Faith’s acceptance of fatalism was encouraged by the mayor—the main antagonist of season three—whose position is significant in identifying the final type of conformity that Buffy warns viewers against: political conformity. In “Homecoming,” the mayor tells Mr. Trick (his aide), “Children are the heart of a community. They need to be looked after. Controlled. The more rebellious element needs to be dealt with.”4 He goes on to say, “The children are our future. We need them. I need them.”5 Mr. Trick responds, “Well, if the ‘rebellious element’ means who I think it does, that problem may take care of itself this very night.”6 The Mayor’s response is illuminating: “So I’ve heard. Very enterprising, this idea of yours, SlayerFest.”7 The “rebellious element” is the slayer power—which, recall, is a prominent metaphor for adulthood. The paternalistic mayor sees the freedom of adulthood as a problem that must be corrected.
This is evident in his earlier dealings with Faith. Throughout the third season, Faith demonstrates that she has psychological issues that seem to stem from her childhood—evidenced in part by her references to her alcoholic, abusive mother. The mayor enjoys using Faith—and acting as a twisted fatherly figure to her. She craves stability and is susceptible to being controlled. The first thing the mayor does when he recruits Faith is move her into a lavish apartment. Her appearance thereafter is also noticeably more polished. The mayor showers Faith with luxuries in order to purchase her loyalty and thereby maintain control of her; he is aware of the servitude that a false sense of security can engender, and he takes advantage of this.
Compare, for instance, the way in which Giles advises Buffy and the commanding way in which the mayor has Faith do his bidding: Whereas Buffy and Giles have a relationship based on mutual respect, the mayor and Faith have a master-servant relationship, in which he issues orders that Faith unquestioningly carries out. This highlights a key way in which paternalistic, political institutions can encourage us to conform: by offering us “security” in exchange for our obedience.
The mayor’s corruption is mirrored, to some extent, in Buffy’s relationship with the Watchers’ Council, which trains slayers—but views them as mere instruments in the fight against evil. As author Mark Field points out, in “Helpless,” the council attempts to assert its control over Buffy by having her take on a foe without her powers—a battle they seem to think she will not survive.8 She succeeds, and in a fitting moment of “graduation,” as Buffy puts it, she disassociates from the council, demonstrating her autonomy.
The council reappears in season five when Buffy is desperate for information on Glory, the season’s main antagonist. The council makes her jump through numerous bureaucratic hoops for this information before Buffy reminds the Watchers that they need her—and that they cannot force her to be an obedient pawn. Unlike Faith in season three, Buffy resists conformity, refusing the purported security that the council offers. Fittingly, both the Watchers’ Council and the mayor succumb to the same fate: Both are blown up.
The series best depicts the destructiveness of political conformity with the Initiative—a government institute established in an attempt to use operant conditioning to control the supernatural creatures that roam Sunnydale. The unquestioning groupthink of the institution’s personnel is immediately obvious in “The Initiative.” When Buffy joins the organization in the middle of season four, she quickly realizes the extent to which its soldiers are molded by the institution’s scientists to think and do whatever their senior colleagues tell them. When Buffy questions orders, the Initiative leader, Professor Maggie Walsh, attempts to have her killed.
That Maggie is a college professor is significant, especially considering her creation, Adam—a Frankenstein-like monster comprised of human, demon, and cyborg parts. As Field notes, Adam is a metaphor for many of today’s students, who are victims of unintegrated course content.9 Maggie intended Adam “to become the first in a new breed; the paradigm case of what society could create unencumbered by the individual struggle to create one’s own self.”10 Both Adam and the Initiative are metaphors for the conformity encouraged by modern education. Many students are not taught how to think but what to “think.”
To fully understand the series’s view on this subject, it is important to note that Willow, Xander, and Giles each represent a metaphorical aspect of Buffy herself: spirit, heart, and mind, respectively.11 Willow, Buffy’s metaphorical spirit, is the emotional core of the group and is who Buffy turns to most for motivation and comfort. Xander’s notable strength and courage make him Buffy’s metaphorical heart. And Giles’s vast knowledge makes him Buffy’s metaphorical mind. These metaphors are made explicit in “Primeval,” in which Buffy’s friends cast a joining spell. This merges them with her, creating a more powerful version of Buffy, who is then able to defeat Adam. His destruction at the hands of the Buffy-Xander-Willow-Giles hybrid can be viewed as the victory of the integrated individual over the confusion brought about by disintegration that young people experience and the resulting tendency of some toward conformity.
The Initiative, the Mayor, the Watchers’ Council, the Master, Ted, and Mr. Maclay all demand mindless conformity from others. Their defeat is a testament to the important lesson Buffy teaches about being a successful adult: Follow your own rational judgment. Or, in the words of Buffy herself: “I don’t take orders. I do things my way.”