buffy weepfest
disclaimer: le duc casually launched the challenge of compiling ``a list of Buffy moments that make me weep'' knowing full well i could not pass up on the opportunity of indulging in my favourite obsession. i suspect our picks may be quite different. afterall, my heart is made of stone when it comes to anything angel-centric so needless to say buffy dispatching her miserable vampire lover into a hell dimension had me cheering ``good riddance'' rather than hiccuping in violent sobs. so off i go......
1. The Wish
a humiliated Cordelia, unbeknowningly, ``wishes'' to Anya (a vengeance demon) that buffy summers had never come to sunnydale. result: the most moving episode of buffy. in this alternate reality the town is in the hands of the master and his cronies who have set up camp at the bronze, sunnydale's only nightspot. willow and xander are leather-clad sadistic vamps. an emasculated angel is locked in a dungeon as kinky willow's sex/torture toy. buffy when she does rock up from cleveland is a heartless and cold cynic. The master, sensing her death wish, snaps her neck in one crack of the wrist. oz stakes dominatrix willow. cordi, desperately trying to take it all back, dies anti-climatically. the scoobies, you see, never were. in such a world you casually slay your best friend, kill the love of your life, with reckless abandon.
2. Selfless
I will confess to my bias. No character in Buffy breaks my heart as much as Anya ("You speak your mind, and are annoying""), the 1,000 year-old vengeance demon turned human against her wishes only to learn to love the unfathomable human race and ultimately sacrifice herself for it. not just once. but twice. there is one moment, and it's a fraction of a second, when she's fighting buffy half-heartedly and lays herself on the floor putting her arms down, a crucifix on the ground, willing almost begging the slayer to end her pain by ending it all. of course the tragedy is made all the more poignant by hilarious flashbacks to anya in her bunny-loving days as a norwegian milkmaid.
hearbroken at xander dumping her at the altar, anya gets her old powers back. but, she finds, wreaking revenge just isn't that much fun anymore and when she unleashes a heart-devouring spider into a frat party, she knows she's not leaving buffy any choice but to go after her. our anya, nobly, tries to take it back, and the ending foreshadows her death which won't happen till later.........
“You should have killed me.” whispers Anya.
D’Hoffryn chuckles. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. ‘From beneath you, it devours.’
3. Chosen
I will be brief, staying on the Anya motif. Well, in short she gets sliced in half. suddenly. unexpectedly. the genius was exactly in that. no build-up. very much like the buffy neck-snapping moment, it's seeing life end in an instant. that is what makes it so powerful and moving. 
4. Help
A young girl, Cassie, has a premonition she will die. Buffy becomes convinced instead that there is some supernatural, demonic explanation that can be superseded. So many deaths in Buffy are reversible. but there are three glaring and very banal examples when all the superhero powers in the world are of no use. be it the cancer of buffy's mother, or tara's fatal gunshot or very simply the case of this eerie and precocious teen, strangely resigned and composed about her fate. her clairvoyance also foreshadows other important events when she looks at Spike and whispers:
“She’ll tell you. Someday she’ll tell you...” 
5. Once More, With Feeling
When buffy moves to sunnydale we surmise that her parents have separated and buffy is raised by her mom, sees her dad from time to time. her relationship with giles, her watcher, evolves over the seasons until he, for all intents and purposes does become a father to her. there are several touching moments between them where their rapport is tried and tested. in the famous musical episode, it is giles swansong to buffy that tugs at my heartstrings...when he realizes he has to let his slayer go...``I wish I could lay your arms down and let you rest at last, Wish I could slay your demons, but now that time has passed....''
there are OTHER moments of course, and no doubt i will be going back to this list and adding a few more, here and there. but for the time being. this will do. le duc, over to you............
5 comments:
This requires much, much more thought on my part, but another one immediately springs to mind, stimulated by your last post: it's where Giles kills the lovely Dr Ben, God-Glory's alter ego. The scene emphasises the limitless depths of Giles' love for Buffy, of his determination to do anything to protect her, even something that he - and we - find repugnant. As you wrote, he has become her father.
Oh, alright, a couple of others off the top of my head: the death of Joyce is extraordinary. The use of sound (and silence) in that episode is breath-takingly good, unlike anything else I can think of on telly. Buffy is truly isolated and alone, powerless.
I also grew very fond of Anya, especially her attempts to come to terms with the limitations of humanity, and her Cordelia-style incomprehension of the concept of tact. Her death was terrible.
But another death also hit me hard: Giles returning to his house to discover the corpse of Jennie Calender. The Baroque styling of her death was monstrously cruel.
Damnit: I'm going to be thinking about nothing else for ages now...
YUP.
i was RATHER fond of jennie calendar (until through my internet research found out that the actress who plays her is a born-again christian nut and that sort of quelled my enthusiasm) and her death at the hands of angel...was remarkable as was grief-stricken giles' thirst for vengeance. just as our jenny was going to put the world to right and reverse the curse of her Kalderash gypsy clan. the horror of seeing that Computer diskette slip through the cracks of the desk. after her death, giles would never again have a love interest (i don't count that abomination that came later...even her name escapes me.)
truth be told. i think the ``yellow crayon'' scene between xander and willow might have brought a tear to my eye. buffy running willing toward her sacrifice and diving into the abyss (to the dismay of spike) was marred only by annoying dawn piping up.
i actually think there are several faith moments that are incredibly sad but fall just short of tear-inducing. all her failed father/mother figures. she is constantly being screwed over and over. when buffy stabs her, i felt it.
buffy marathon : episodes 1-6.
bloody hell, and there was I just watching it with G & T in hand... seems almost sacrilegious...
yeah dawn seems to ruin nearly every scene where she opens her mouth.
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