APPLICATION FOR KANNAGARA
Mar. 27th, 2029 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
at_stakePLAYER INFO
Name/Nickname: Val
Age: 24.
Journal:
AIM/MSN/IM: Kikoujutsuka [AIM/Skype/plurk]
Email: yumejin[at]gmx[dot]net
CHARACTER INFO
Name: Buffy Anne Summers
Canon: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Point taken from canon: Season 6, Episode 20 (“Villains”).
Age: 21.
Gender: Female.
Appearance: Buffy is short, standing at about 5'2“ or 5'3” (according to what google has to say of the actress, Sarah Michelle Gellar). Her weight fluctuates a bit over the series, but she is generally skinny, with a slender body type. At this point in canon, especially, she has a tendency to look worn; like a person who doesn't eat or sleep as much as they should and is under a lot of pressure. The way she carries herself is very feminine, with her limbs close to her body and a flowing elegance to her movements. Her hair is currently a golden blonde with lighter highlights, going to about her shoulders in wide curls. She has a round face with big green eyes and full lips. Her skin is tanned and she uses a range of makeup, from classic red lips to shiny gloss, from more natural to more shimmery colors. It is evident that she takes great care in her appearance and she prides herself on her fashion sense, which is feminine and not always practical, but generally she will choose different clothing for her nighttime activities than for school or work.
Here's a picture. http://i187.photobucket.com/
Background: http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/
Personality: Being the Slayer changes you.
This is the key to understanding Buffy, for there is no part of her character that is not influenced by her destiny.
The traditional definition of her role in life is that she is the only one of her kind, and furthermore, that she live for her calling only, kept away from the rest of humanity and employed to save it by the Watcher’s Council, an organization with worldwide activity in whose service the Slayer lives and works.
Of course, Buffy was never quite traditional. Unlike most other Slayers, she did not know who she was, or indeed that vampires and demons even existed, until her first Watcher found her after she was called. She lived an average life as a Californian high school student, a daughter, a friend and occasional girlfriend.
Thus, it was only natural that her new destiny, responsibilities and the expectations set to her by a stranger would have a huge impact on her.
I'm the Slayer. Slay-er. Chosen One. She who hangs out a lot in cemeteries?
One of Buffy's trademarks are her puns and quips and her flippant attitude to just about everything. She is utterly irreverent in the face of even the most formidable opponents and almost always has a witty comeback in store. She makes a habit of laughing in the face of death and gruesome, horrible misery and as such, her sense of humor can be quite black at times (sometimes crossing the line to dude, not funny with her peers; especially when joking about her own death). It's her way of dealing with the things she sees every day and a clear display of confidence, asserting herself into a position of power and undermining her non-nonsense approach to things she clearly doesn't approve of, be it vampires or regular people being jerks. When she's out of quips, it's usually sign that something is severely wrong in Buffyland. Most notably, it happens when her self-confidence is low. When something or someone has bested her, she will often go through a period of low self-esteem, but find herself again in the last minute and prevail.
Being the Slayer makes you different.
A lot of high school students and young adults experience the feeling of being fundamentally different from their peers. This, only amplified, is what Buffy experiences due to her Slayerness. Buffy is, by nature, prone to overthinking and, yes, even brooding, and thus lives with a high consciousness of this. Her calling is a large, everlasting presence in her life, and in fact she often experiences it as almost a second life altogether, seeing as she’s taught to keep it a secret from most people around her. This means, of course, that she often has to come up with explanations for various things: her absences, the occasional case of scruffy appearances, and most of all, the strange happenings around her. She is a terrible liar, so we often see her fumbling awkwardly with excuses (“Angry puppy!”). Keeping up appearances means she’s always got something or another on her mind, not helped by the fact that she doesn’t have the greatest attention span. So quite often, she will be distracted and clumsy as a result, running into people, dropping things etc. Buffy is altogether quite happy to let this be the first impression people get of her: nice, distracted, a little awkward and clumsy -- for she is very invested in presenting herself as non-threatening. This is in part to mask her actual strength and the fact that in the world of demons, she is about the most threatening thing around, and in part because she yearns to be “normal” and average, to not be cut off from the California girl part of her. For if there’s one thing about slaying that she’s torn about, it’s the fact that it’s her identity.
Slaying is not a job, it’s who you are.
Seeing as she was called at age fifteen, Buffy did hot have much of a chance to develop an identity of her own, and besides not the time and energy to keep one up afterwards. Thus, “the Slayer” is, in fact, what she defines herself most by. This is at once a source of pride and one of shame. Saving the world every night is quite neat, and there is a part of Buffy that relishes her power, the ability to feel like she’s right in her element, like there’s something that no one in the world can do better than her. Yet it is not a part she is known to enjoy very often, because it also causes her anxiety that this should be all she is, all she could ever hope to be. She’s got her life cut out for her, and it’s not by her own design. So she feels cheated: she was chosen. She did not choose. She does not get to make her own future.
Which may be a large part of why she is so protective of Dawn once Dawn is in her life, so eager to protect her from all things Slayage. So absolutely sure to place Dawn’s life above her own. Dawn gets the life Buffy never had, and Buffy was destined to die young anyway. But the girl part of her, the part tied to daylight, will live on in Dawn.
This is also something that, for a long time, weighs heavily on Buffy: her mortality. The absolute certainty that she would die young, painfully, and just another entry in the Watcher’s diaries. That she was going to have no future. She realizes that she is basically canon fodder and bemoans this fact often.
Being the Slayer makes you lonely.
Buffy’s friends and family are a vital part of her life, and what anchors her to the world. Yet she feels -- and, fairly enough, often sees -- that no one else can really understand her position. She’s The Only One, she’s been trained with this in mind, and both in the daily (or nightly) grind and in a crisis she often faces off against her foes alone. She is fairly stuck in this mentality, though, and often cuts herself off as well, making the whole thing a bit of a vicious circle. As time passes, she closes herself off from others emotionally more and more, and it becomes hard for her to express her feelings at all -- at least in words or in displays of affection. She mostly expresses herself through action: doing something for a loved one or hitting the punching bag when angry. This is an act of self-preservation, for Buffy is by nature a person who feels quite intensely. She sees a lot of gruesome things, experiences a lot of loss, and often has to make incredibly tough decisions, so in order to not completely break down, she tries to keep herself from getting too emotionally involved in the first place. It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t care. Buffy always cares, which is her whole problem here. She will keep a certain emotional distance from the people she cares about in order to do her job in a crisis. When she does have a breakdown, she tries to keep it to herself and cries in private so as to be able to show a strong face to her loved ones. This point, in particular, becomes very important to her. It gives her the feeling that she is in control of herself and the situation, even if the situation is uncontrollable -- especially then, in fact. This whole process doesn’t go unnoticed by herself, and on more than one occasion, she feels she gets in danger of losing her humanity because of it.
I am the law.
Conventionally, the Slayer is subject to orders from the Watcher's Council, or her personal Watcher giving her orders in their stead. Buffy is an independent spirit, not to mention a spoiled rich kid and former popular cheerleader, which does come with a certain sense of entitlement, an expectation of being her own boss in her personal social circle, though she has long ceased to take this entirely for granted. As such, she has always refused to do what she's been told, and her demeanor has always made it clear that she would not be ordered around by her Watcher, instead developing a less unequal partnership in which Buffy has more of a say in decision-making. As time passed, Buffy rejected affiliation to the Council altogether, not to mention grew up into a woman, relying less and less on Giles' leadership. Instead, both due to her own inclinations and the tendency of the Scoobies to look to her to take the lead and make the decisions, Buffy has become the judge, jury and executioner in terms of supernatural happenings. She is not entirely safe from letting this get to her head and thinking her own word unquestionable or wanting to enforce it as such, which is a theme that will be heavily explored in Season 7, thus in the future of her current canon-point. For now, what still mostly guides her is the flipside of that, which is her strong feeling of responsibility, and that eternal companion: guilt. Buffy's feelings of guilt influence and drive her throughout the whole series. Sometimes, she feels guilt over things that were out of her hand, such as Angel losing his soul after they slept together or the death of a woman, which she thinks happened at her hands as an accident during a demon-fight (but was in fact made to look like that by the real perpetrators). One of her iron rules is to not kill humans; she may see herself as the law when it comes to demons, but the human world has its own rules that are outside of her jurisdiction. It is also her massive guilt complex which keeps her from completely embracing her calling – if she lets herself go too much and starts seeing slaying as fun, someone might get hurt in the process. Resulting from this comes also a certain readiness to judge or even be jealous of others who let loose where she doesn't allow herself to.
Every Slayer has a death wish. Death is your gift.
Doing what she does and seeing what she sees, Buffy has an intricate relationship with death: as someone who deals out death, someone who occasionally wants it, and someone who has died twice. “Making” death is the whole point of her calling, and there is a primal, demonic part of her that enjoys it. She definitely has a violent streak in her (which surely Spike's nose will readily attest). On the flip side, her experiences and the constant responsibility she has to shoulder start weighing heavily on her as she gets older, and she starts to experience combat fatigue. There are definitely times when she's had a death wish; a wish to just plain rest. A little ironically, this wish especially strong after she has been brought back to life in Season 6. Having experienced ultimate rest in what she calls heaven, Buffy misses all the more painfully what she's lost. As a result of that and the traumatic experience that is the clash of suddenly having to live her life again, she sinks into a deep depression, mostly characterized by a constant emotional numbness and apathy which she seeks desperately to escape, to the point of starting a violent, self-destructive relationship; which also serves an expressly self-destructive purpose as it answers to her intense self-loathing at the time. It should be noted that the tendency toward depression is something that has been within her all along, in her tendency to dwell on things and deal with her troubles alone. Buffy's responses to the most extreme trauma are emotional numbness, at one time going to the point of catatonia, on the one hand; and a tendency to lash out at others on the other. Her most vulnerable places are very close to the part of her that can be downright nasty in her choice of words.
Love. Give. Forgive. Risk the pain. It is your nature.
Her human side is extremely important to Buffy. It is a part of her she is never willing to give up, especially not to do her job. She is very much a caring person at heart and has a strong instinct to help. If there is trouble somewhere, she'll be running towards it in order to solve it. Whenever someone is under her care, she will make protecting them a priority. This happens for her most intensely on a personal level, with the people she loves, whom she will get upset and angry about if they are hurt. And while she does care for the world at large, she definitely has a tendency to prioritize the lives of those she loves most before more objective concerns, such as when she hides Angel's return from a hell dimension in spite of what he's done to her friends as Angelus, or when she refuses to sacrifice Dawn in order to save the world, even if that may mean the apocalypse. Her feelings do occasionally cloud her judgement or make her vulnerable, and it's because she cares so much that she reacts by closing herself off. Her connections to her friends and loved ones are the most important aspect in Buffy's life, and in fact the sole reason she still is alive. She'd have stayed dead in Prophecy Girl if not for Xander being around to resuscitate her, and most definitely after The Gift.
Abilities/Strengths: Most apparent about Buffy is, of course, her Slayer strength. She has several times the strength of an average adult human being and is also stronger than most vampires and demons. Her speed is also enhanced, and she is very athletic and moves with near-acrobatic mobility. She has accelerated healing which takes care of most battle wounds.
As a Slayer, she also has the innate ability to sense the presence of vampires, though this was never Buffy's strongest skill; other Slayers have been better at it. Furthermore, she has very specific dreams, which sometimes retell the lives of past Slayers and at other times double as visions, warning of things to come in the near future. (Or not-so-near; she has received dream-hints of the arrival of her sister two years before it happened. This was an isolated case, though.)
Beyond that, her seven years of battle experience have served to hone an intuition which has always been one of her strong points: she has a sense for where evil may lurk and is able to read ominous signs correctly.
She also prides herself on her keen fashion sense.
Buffy is, while not studious, quite intelligent. This is evidenced, on occasion, on an academic level, such as by her near-perfect SAT score or the fact that she is once asked to lead a discussion group in her college class. Mostly, though, it shines through in a more hands-on manner, which is more her style: she's good at putting two and two together and at “thinking on her feet”, often improvising during battle.
Weaknesses: On the purely physical side, there is a drug that is capable of stripping a Slayer of her powers, making her a normal human female. Her fighting skills also fluctuate with her mental and emotional state, with low confidence, turmoil or surprise causing her to slack or let down her guard.
Beyond that there are a large number of personality flaws already outlined in the personality section. There's all her Slayer-related complexes, both the sense of superiority and righteousness she sometimes evidences, sometimes when it's not justified; and her insecurities, which may cause irresponsible behavior such as running away from home. There's her guilt complex and the jealousy of others less plagued by their conscience than her. There's her increasing unwillingness to let anyone new get close to her emotionally.
There's her tendency to lash out when vulnerable, which causes her to seriously hurt those around her, such as her sexy dance with Xander in When She Was Bad, by which she manages to hurt Xander, Willow and Angel all at once; her biting comments about her death to her friends in Season 6; or her vicious persecution of Faith after she aligns herself with the Mayor, and later after their body switch. Later on, this leads to her downright cruel, abusive behavior towards Spike, showing that she has it in her to beat an intimate partner half to death in an alley.
Defining Quote(s):
“If the apocalypse comes, beep me.” – Season 1, Never Kill A Boy On The First Date
"I may be dead, but I'm still pretty. Which is more than I can say for you." – Season 1, Prophecy Girl
"I-I was... just thinking, wouldn't it be funny some time to see each other when it wasn't a blood thing." – Season 2, Reptile Boy
“If you're gonna crack jokes, then I'm gonna pull out your ribcage and wear it as a hat.” – Season 2, Becoming Part II
"They never just leave. Always gotta say something." – Season 3, Band Candy
"I hate it when they drown me." – Season 3, Bad Girls
"Yeah, I'm also a person. You can't just define me by my Slayerness. That's... something-ism." – Season 3, Choices
"And the thing is, I like my evil like I like my men - evil. You know, straight up, black hat, tied to the train tracks, 'soon my electro-ray will destroy Metropolis' bad." – Season 4, Pangs
"Well, a man that worships chaos and tries to kill you is a man you can trust." – Season 4, The I in Team
"I see one more display of testosterone-poisoning, and I will personally put you both in the hospital." – Season 4, The Yoko Factor
"Oh yes! Like how the cow and the chicken come together even though they've never met. It's like Sleepless in Seattle if, if Meg and Tom were, like, minced." – Season 6, Doublemeat Palace
“I am the thing that monsters have nightmares about.” – Season 7, Showtime
“Any apocalypse I avert without dying? Those are the easy ones.” – Season 7, Lies My Parents Told Me
Action Writing Sample:
[The video starts, and peering into the camera is a pretty, but worn face. Tired, stressed, and entirely humorless. Also full of hard, sharp concentration. For once, Buffy is all business.]
'Kay, so I saw this phone thing lying around. Sorry if it's someone else's, I'll give it back, but right now I'm in a bit of a hurry.
So, whoever receives this, care to tell me what the deal is? I mean, waking up in a Disney movie, complete with woodland creatures frolicking, and a hyper-modern phone lying next to me is not what I'd call subtle with the weird, so can we please skip right to the part where you tell me what you want from me?
[Impatience and sarcasm start coloring her expression and speech.]
I'd stay and play your fun little game with you, but I gotta say... I really don't have time right now. Maybe another time – okay, not really. Let's just get to the point, okay? Please and thank you.
Third Person Writing Sample:
Here is how it goes: waking up in the oasis of peace and Disney-perfection she will (probably soon) come to know as Himorogi is, all in all, a very idyllic experience. One might even say heavenly. So for a brief moment, Buffy considers she might have died and gone to heaven, or some version of it (she is not the expert on dimensions by far, but she knows there are a lot of hellish and probably also a lot of heavenly dimensions), again, but there are a few things that tip her off.
One, she doesn't actually remember dying, and timeless and static and warm-and-fuzzy-feeling-y as her last experience was, she remembers being aware of her situation. Dead. Not alive. Not in the world. Just her essence: happy, loved, comfortable, at rest. This is also different: her last experience was not nearly so physical. Certainly, the roots digging into her back are not all that heavenly.
Two, once she's sat up and taken a look around, she notices a very out-of-place, shiny object not far from her. It is a very strange middle-of-the-woods heaven-dimension that has really advanced cell phones. Okay, maybe not that strange, considering what she has heard of the world without shrimp and the world that is all shrimp, but unusual enough.
Three, now that she is fully awake and conscious, she's getting that strange, old feeling she never could quite put a name on (intuition, instinct, Spidey-sense – Slay-ey-sense? No, that sounds too much like “slayee”, which is a phrase otherwise occupied) that tells her that something supernatural and potentially evil and/or nasty is afoot.
So, three very convincing points for no, no, never ever, and also nuh-uh.
Which conclusion causes her to put her head in her hands and groan audibly to herself, because wow, talk about bad timing. But then, she has a track record with that, so she's not so much surprised as – well, pretty thrown-off still. She was so in the groove – if that is something you could ever say or even think about having just seen your best friend flay someone alive, but there was a certain frame of mind she was in, that concentration and resolve that gives her the ability to march on through whatever may come. And now it's broken, and she doesn't know if she'll get it back ever again. If she'll be able to do what she has to when the time comes. Because this? High up on the list of hardest things she's had to do in her life, and the list is not short. Willow has been one of her two best friends since that fateful sophomore year at Hellmouth High™, and though they haven't been so close lately and Buffy has long harbored a guilt-ridden grudge against the friend who so presumptuously brought her back from her very cozy final resting place, she's never once thought about cutting Willow out of her life, or even imagined a life without her in it. Little good it does that her guilt is assuaged somewhat by just how much it tears her apart to think of losing Willow forever. That is a real threat, just on the brink of becoming an irreversible truth, and the most bitter pills of all to swallow is the dawning, though yet suppressed realization that really, there is fuck-all Buffy can do about it. The truth, the real truth of it is (and that, too, stings a little – okay, a lot), Willow has become far more powerful than Buffy ever will be. And she seems disinclined to listen to reason.
These are the truths that slam into her now, here, with a violence that the treacherous blue sky did not prophesize.
So yeah. This would be why she's now mentally swearing at the Powers That Be (always good to blame those) for screwing with her yet again. As they do. On her more mystically-inclined days, she feels a little like the Powers' personal plaything is all she's ever been. (“More” being relative – her “less” mystically-inclined days still involve a very vague concept of “destiny”. You can't really go entirely non-mystical if you live half your life walking in darkness, side-by-side and face-to-face and fangs-to-stake and whiskey-bottle-to-kitten-
She's really hoping for that.
Name/Nickname: Val
Age: 24.
Journal:
AIM/MSN/IM: Kikoujutsuka [AIM/Skype/plurk]
Email: yumejin[at]gmx[dot]net
CHARACTER INFO
Name: Buffy Anne Summers
Canon: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Point taken from canon: Season 6, Episode 20 (“Villains”).
Age: 21.
Gender: Female.
Appearance: Buffy is short, standing at about 5'2“ or 5'3” (according to what google has to say of the actress, Sarah Michelle Gellar). Her weight fluctuates a bit over the series, but she is generally skinny, with a slender body type. At this point in canon, especially, she has a tendency to look worn; like a person who doesn't eat or sleep as much as they should and is under a lot of pressure. The way she carries herself is very feminine, with her limbs close to her body and a flowing elegance to her movements. Her hair is currently a golden blonde with lighter highlights, going to about her shoulders in wide curls. She has a round face with big green eyes and full lips. Her skin is tanned and she uses a range of makeup, from classic red lips to shiny gloss, from more natural to more shimmery colors. It is evident that she takes great care in her appearance and she prides herself on her fashion sense, which is feminine and not always practical, but generally she will choose different clothing for her nighttime activities than for school or work.
Here's a picture. http://i187.photobucket.com/
Background: http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/
Personality: Being the Slayer changes you.
This is the key to understanding Buffy, for there is no part of her character that is not influenced by her destiny.
The traditional definition of her role in life is that she is the only one of her kind, and furthermore, that she live for her calling only, kept away from the rest of humanity and employed to save it by the Watcher’s Council, an organization with worldwide activity in whose service the Slayer lives and works.
Of course, Buffy was never quite traditional. Unlike most other Slayers, she did not know who she was, or indeed that vampires and demons even existed, until her first Watcher found her after she was called. She lived an average life as a Californian high school student, a daughter, a friend and occasional girlfriend.
Thus, it was only natural that her new destiny, responsibilities and the expectations set to her by a stranger would have a huge impact on her.
I'm the Slayer. Slay-er. Chosen One. She who hangs out a lot in cemeteries?
One of Buffy's trademarks are her puns and quips and her flippant attitude to just about everything. She is utterly irreverent in the face of even the most formidable opponents and almost always has a witty comeback in store. She makes a habit of laughing in the face of death and gruesome, horrible misery and as such, her sense of humor can be quite black at times (sometimes crossing the line to dude, not funny with her peers; especially when joking about her own death). It's her way of dealing with the things she sees every day and a clear display of confidence, asserting herself into a position of power and undermining her non-nonsense approach to things she clearly doesn't approve of, be it vampires or regular people being jerks. When she's out of quips, it's usually sign that something is severely wrong in Buffyland. Most notably, it happens when her self-confidence is low. When something or someone has bested her, she will often go through a period of low self-esteem, but find herself again in the last minute and prevail.
Being the Slayer makes you different.
A lot of high school students and young adults experience the feeling of being fundamentally different from their peers. This, only amplified, is what Buffy experiences due to her Slayerness. Buffy is, by nature, prone to overthinking and, yes, even brooding, and thus lives with a high consciousness of this. Her calling is a large, everlasting presence in her life, and in fact she often experiences it as almost a second life altogether, seeing as she’s taught to keep it a secret from most people around her. This means, of course, that she often has to come up with explanations for various things: her absences, the occasional case of scruffy appearances, and most of all, the strange happenings around her. She is a terrible liar, so we often see her fumbling awkwardly with excuses (“Angry puppy!”). Keeping up appearances means she’s always got something or another on her mind, not helped by the fact that she doesn’t have the greatest attention span. So quite often, she will be distracted and clumsy as a result, running into people, dropping things etc. Buffy is altogether quite happy to let this be the first impression people get of her: nice, distracted, a little awkward and clumsy -- for she is very invested in presenting herself as non-threatening. This is in part to mask her actual strength and the fact that in the world of demons, she is about the most threatening thing around, and in part because she yearns to be “normal” and average, to not be cut off from the California girl part of her. For if there’s one thing about slaying that she’s torn about, it’s the fact that it’s her identity.
Slaying is not a job, it’s who you are.
Seeing as she was called at age fifteen, Buffy did hot have much of a chance to develop an identity of her own, and besides not the time and energy to keep one up afterwards. Thus, “the Slayer” is, in fact, what she defines herself most by. This is at once a source of pride and one of shame. Saving the world every night is quite neat, and there is a part of Buffy that relishes her power, the ability to feel like she’s right in her element, like there’s something that no one in the world can do better than her. Yet it is not a part she is known to enjoy very often, because it also causes her anxiety that this should be all she is, all she could ever hope to be. She’s got her life cut out for her, and it’s not by her own design. So she feels cheated: she was chosen. She did not choose. She does not get to make her own future.
Which may be a large part of why she is so protective of Dawn once Dawn is in her life, so eager to protect her from all things Slayage. So absolutely sure to place Dawn’s life above her own. Dawn gets the life Buffy never had, and Buffy was destined to die young anyway. But the girl part of her, the part tied to daylight, will live on in Dawn.
This is also something that, for a long time, weighs heavily on Buffy: her mortality. The absolute certainty that she would die young, painfully, and just another entry in the Watcher’s diaries. That she was going to have no future. She realizes that she is basically canon fodder and bemoans this fact often.
Being the Slayer makes you lonely.
Buffy’s friends and family are a vital part of her life, and what anchors her to the world. Yet she feels -- and, fairly enough, often sees -- that no one else can really understand her position. She’s The Only One, she’s been trained with this in mind, and both in the daily (or nightly) grind and in a crisis she often faces off against her foes alone. She is fairly stuck in this mentality, though, and often cuts herself off as well, making the whole thing a bit of a vicious circle. As time passes, she closes herself off from others emotionally more and more, and it becomes hard for her to express her feelings at all -- at least in words or in displays of affection. She mostly expresses herself through action: doing something for a loved one or hitting the punching bag when angry. This is an act of self-preservation, for Buffy is by nature a person who feels quite intensely. She sees a lot of gruesome things, experiences a lot of loss, and often has to make incredibly tough decisions, so in order to not completely break down, she tries to keep herself from getting too emotionally involved in the first place. It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t care. Buffy always cares, which is her whole problem here. She will keep a certain emotional distance from the people she cares about in order to do her job in a crisis. When she does have a breakdown, she tries to keep it to herself and cries in private so as to be able to show a strong face to her loved ones. This point, in particular, becomes very important to her. It gives her the feeling that she is in control of herself and the situation, even if the situation is uncontrollable -- especially then, in fact. This whole process doesn’t go unnoticed by herself, and on more than one occasion, she feels she gets in danger of losing her humanity because of it.
I am the law.
Conventionally, the Slayer is subject to orders from the Watcher's Council, or her personal Watcher giving her orders in their stead. Buffy is an independent spirit, not to mention a spoiled rich kid and former popular cheerleader, which does come with a certain sense of entitlement, an expectation of being her own boss in her personal social circle, though she has long ceased to take this entirely for granted. As such, she has always refused to do what she's been told, and her demeanor has always made it clear that she would not be ordered around by her Watcher, instead developing a less unequal partnership in which Buffy has more of a say in decision-making. As time passed, Buffy rejected affiliation to the Council altogether, not to mention grew up into a woman, relying less and less on Giles' leadership. Instead, both due to her own inclinations and the tendency of the Scoobies to look to her to take the lead and make the decisions, Buffy has become the judge, jury and executioner in terms of supernatural happenings. She is not entirely safe from letting this get to her head and thinking her own word unquestionable or wanting to enforce it as such, which is a theme that will be heavily explored in Season 7, thus in the future of her current canon-point. For now, what still mostly guides her is the flipside of that, which is her strong feeling of responsibility, and that eternal companion: guilt. Buffy's feelings of guilt influence and drive her throughout the whole series. Sometimes, she feels guilt over things that were out of her hand, such as Angel losing his soul after they slept together or the death of a woman, which she thinks happened at her hands as an accident during a demon-fight (but was in fact made to look like that by the real perpetrators). One of her iron rules is to not kill humans; she may see herself as the law when it comes to demons, but the human world has its own rules that are outside of her jurisdiction. It is also her massive guilt complex which keeps her from completely embracing her calling – if she lets herself go too much and starts seeing slaying as fun, someone might get hurt in the process. Resulting from this comes also a certain readiness to judge or even be jealous of others who let loose where she doesn't allow herself to.
Every Slayer has a death wish. Death is your gift.
Doing what she does and seeing what she sees, Buffy has an intricate relationship with death: as someone who deals out death, someone who occasionally wants it, and someone who has died twice. “Making” death is the whole point of her calling, and there is a primal, demonic part of her that enjoys it. She definitely has a violent streak in her (which surely Spike's nose will readily attest). On the flip side, her experiences and the constant responsibility she has to shoulder start weighing heavily on her as she gets older, and she starts to experience combat fatigue. There are definitely times when she's had a death wish; a wish to just plain rest. A little ironically, this wish especially strong after she has been brought back to life in Season 6. Having experienced ultimate rest in what she calls heaven, Buffy misses all the more painfully what she's lost. As a result of that and the traumatic experience that is the clash of suddenly having to live her life again, she sinks into a deep depression, mostly characterized by a constant emotional numbness and apathy which she seeks desperately to escape, to the point of starting a violent, self-destructive relationship; which also serves an expressly self-destructive purpose as it answers to her intense self-loathing at the time. It should be noted that the tendency toward depression is something that has been within her all along, in her tendency to dwell on things and deal with her troubles alone. Buffy's responses to the most extreme trauma are emotional numbness, at one time going to the point of catatonia, on the one hand; and a tendency to lash out at others on the other. Her most vulnerable places are very close to the part of her that can be downright nasty in her choice of words.
Love. Give. Forgive. Risk the pain. It is your nature.
Her human side is extremely important to Buffy. It is a part of her she is never willing to give up, especially not to do her job. She is very much a caring person at heart and has a strong instinct to help. If there is trouble somewhere, she'll be running towards it in order to solve it. Whenever someone is under her care, she will make protecting them a priority. This happens for her most intensely on a personal level, with the people she loves, whom she will get upset and angry about if they are hurt. And while she does care for the world at large, she definitely has a tendency to prioritize the lives of those she loves most before more objective concerns, such as when she hides Angel's return from a hell dimension in spite of what he's done to her friends as Angelus, or when she refuses to sacrifice Dawn in order to save the world, even if that may mean the apocalypse. Her feelings do occasionally cloud her judgement or make her vulnerable, and it's because she cares so much that she reacts by closing herself off. Her connections to her friends and loved ones are the most important aspect in Buffy's life, and in fact the sole reason she still is alive. She'd have stayed dead in Prophecy Girl if not for Xander being around to resuscitate her, and most definitely after The Gift.
Abilities/Strengths: Most apparent about Buffy is, of course, her Slayer strength. She has several times the strength of an average adult human being and is also stronger than most vampires and demons. Her speed is also enhanced, and she is very athletic and moves with near-acrobatic mobility. She has accelerated healing which takes care of most battle wounds.
As a Slayer, she also has the innate ability to sense the presence of vampires, though this was never Buffy's strongest skill; other Slayers have been better at it. Furthermore, she has very specific dreams, which sometimes retell the lives of past Slayers and at other times double as visions, warning of things to come in the near future. (Or not-so-near; she has received dream-hints of the arrival of her sister two years before it happened. This was an isolated case, though.)
Beyond that, her seven years of battle experience have served to hone an intuition which has always been one of her strong points: she has a sense for where evil may lurk and is able to read ominous signs correctly.
She also prides herself on her keen fashion sense.
Buffy is, while not studious, quite intelligent. This is evidenced, on occasion, on an academic level, such as by her near-perfect SAT score or the fact that she is once asked to lead a discussion group in her college class. Mostly, though, it shines through in a more hands-on manner, which is more her style: she's good at putting two and two together and at “thinking on her feet”, often improvising during battle.
Weaknesses: On the purely physical side, there is a drug that is capable of stripping a Slayer of her powers, making her a normal human female. Her fighting skills also fluctuate with her mental and emotional state, with low confidence, turmoil or surprise causing her to slack or let down her guard.
Beyond that there are a large number of personality flaws already outlined in the personality section. There's all her Slayer-related complexes, both the sense of superiority and righteousness she sometimes evidences, sometimes when it's not justified; and her insecurities, which may cause irresponsible behavior such as running away from home. There's her guilt complex and the jealousy of others less plagued by their conscience than her. There's her increasing unwillingness to let anyone new get close to her emotionally.
There's her tendency to lash out when vulnerable, which causes her to seriously hurt those around her, such as her sexy dance with Xander in When She Was Bad, by which she manages to hurt Xander, Willow and Angel all at once; her biting comments about her death to her friends in Season 6; or her vicious persecution of Faith after she aligns herself with the Mayor, and later after their body switch. Later on, this leads to her downright cruel, abusive behavior towards Spike, showing that she has it in her to beat an intimate partner half to death in an alley.
Defining Quote(s):
“If the apocalypse comes, beep me.” – Season 1, Never Kill A Boy On The First Date
"I may be dead, but I'm still pretty. Which is more than I can say for you." – Season 1, Prophecy Girl
"I-I was... just thinking, wouldn't it be funny some time to see each other when it wasn't a blood thing." – Season 2, Reptile Boy
“If you're gonna crack jokes, then I'm gonna pull out your ribcage and wear it as a hat.” – Season 2, Becoming Part II
"They never just leave. Always gotta say something." – Season 3, Band Candy
"I hate it when they drown me." – Season 3, Bad Girls
"Yeah, I'm also a person. You can't just define me by my Slayerness. That's... something-ism." – Season 3, Choices
"And the thing is, I like my evil like I like my men - evil. You know, straight up, black hat, tied to the train tracks, 'soon my electro-ray will destroy Metropolis' bad." – Season 4, Pangs
"Well, a man that worships chaos and tries to kill you is a man you can trust." – Season 4, The I in Team
"I see one more display of testosterone-poisoning, and I will personally put you both in the hospital." – Season 4, The Yoko Factor
"Oh yes! Like how the cow and the chicken come together even though they've never met. It's like Sleepless in Seattle if, if Meg and Tom were, like, minced." – Season 6, Doublemeat Palace
“I am the thing that monsters have nightmares about.” – Season 7, Showtime
“Any apocalypse I avert without dying? Those are the easy ones.” – Season 7, Lies My Parents Told Me
Action Writing Sample:
[The video starts, and peering into the camera is a pretty, but worn face. Tired, stressed, and entirely humorless. Also full of hard, sharp concentration. For once, Buffy is all business.]
'Kay, so I saw this phone thing lying around. Sorry if it's someone else's, I'll give it back, but right now I'm in a bit of a hurry.
So, whoever receives this, care to tell me what the deal is? I mean, waking up in a Disney movie, complete with woodland creatures frolicking, and a hyper-modern phone lying next to me is not what I'd call subtle with the weird, so can we please skip right to the part where you tell me what you want from me?
[Impatience and sarcasm start coloring her expression and speech.]
I'd stay and play your fun little game with you, but I gotta say... I really don't have time right now. Maybe another time – okay, not really. Let's just get to the point, okay? Please and thank you.
Third Person Writing Sample:
Here is how it goes: waking up in the oasis of peace and Disney-perfection she will (probably soon) come to know as Himorogi is, all in all, a very idyllic experience. One might even say heavenly. So for a brief moment, Buffy considers she might have died and gone to heaven, or some version of it (she is not the expert on dimensions by far, but she knows there are a lot of hellish and probably also a lot of heavenly dimensions), again, but there are a few things that tip her off.
One, she doesn't actually remember dying, and timeless and static and warm-and-fuzzy-feeling-y as her last experience was, she remembers being aware of her situation. Dead. Not alive. Not in the world. Just her essence: happy, loved, comfortable, at rest. This is also different: her last experience was not nearly so physical. Certainly, the roots digging into her back are not all that heavenly.
Two, once she's sat up and taken a look around, she notices a very out-of-place, shiny object not far from her. It is a very strange middle-of-the-woods heaven-dimension that has really advanced cell phones. Okay, maybe not that strange, considering what she has heard of the world without shrimp and the world that is all shrimp, but unusual enough.
Three, now that she is fully awake and conscious, she's getting that strange, old feeling she never could quite put a name on (intuition, instinct, Spidey-sense – Slay-ey-sense? No, that sounds too much like “slayee”, which is a phrase otherwise occupied) that tells her that something supernatural and potentially evil and/or nasty is afoot.
So, three very convincing points for no, no, never ever, and also nuh-uh.
Which conclusion causes her to put her head in her hands and groan audibly to herself, because wow, talk about bad timing. But then, she has a track record with that, so she's not so much surprised as – well, pretty thrown-off still. She was so in the groove – if that is something you could ever say or even think about having just seen your best friend flay someone alive, but there was a certain frame of mind she was in, that concentration and resolve that gives her the ability to march on through whatever may come. And now it's broken, and she doesn't know if she'll get it back ever again. If she'll be able to do what she has to when the time comes. Because this? High up on the list of hardest things she's had to do in her life, and the list is not short. Willow has been one of her two best friends since that fateful sophomore year at Hellmouth High™, and though they haven't been so close lately and Buffy has long harbored a guilt-ridden grudge against the friend who so presumptuously brought her back from her very cozy final resting place, she's never once thought about cutting Willow out of her life, or even imagined a life without her in it. Little good it does that her guilt is assuaged somewhat by just how much it tears her apart to think of losing Willow forever. That is a real threat, just on the brink of becoming an irreversible truth, and the most bitter pills of all to swallow is the dawning, though yet suppressed realization that really, there is fuck-all Buffy can do about it. The truth, the real truth of it is (and that, too, stings a little – okay, a lot), Willow has become far more powerful than Buffy ever will be. And she seems disinclined to listen to reason.
These are the truths that slam into her now, here, with a violence that the treacherous blue sky did not prophesize.
So yeah. This would be why she's now mentally swearing at the Powers That Be (always good to blame those) for screwing with her yet again. As they do. On her more mystically-inclined days, she feels a little like the Powers' personal plaything is all she's ever been. (“More” being relative – her “less” mystically-inclined days still involve a very vague concept of “destiny”. You can't really go entirely non-mystical if you live half your life walking in darkness, side-by-side and face-to-face and fangs-to-stake and whiskey-bottle-to-kitten-
She's really hoping for that.
