So the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series makes a very big deal about taking human life. Angel’s diatribe to Faith on the subject… Faith’s turn to darkness after an accidental death … killing a human is repeatedly spelled out as a no-no. Even though they sort of give Willow a pass on it later.
Anyway.
I was watching Episode 5.20 Spiral yesterday.
Spoilers ensue.
While the Scooby Gang is fleeing Sunnydale in a stolen RV, they are assaulted by mounted Knights of Byzantium. The Knights make a heroci effort to attempt to stop the bus, and Buffy crawls out atop the vehicle to do battle with them.
Now, several of them are tossed off the vehicle and could’ve ended up with broken necks… and later, indeed, a surrogate leader of the Knights confirms ten of his men are dead… but Buffy distinctly buries an axe into the chest of one of the Knights.
And rest assured, they are human. Spike’s chip activates when attempting to fight one later.
And yet, in the Sixth Season, the Nerds of Doom make Buffy all wiggy by convincing her… she’s killed again? Even later in the Fifth Season, Giles exterminates Ben/Glory saying that Buffy never could.
Buffy can kill humans in self-defense and to protect others. The knights were trying to kill her sister and would have killed her if they got the chance.
With Ben, he was innocent. He didn’t kill, and regretted what Glory did. Buffy wasn’t going to be able to kill him.
In the sixth season, the person Buffy thought she killed was also innocent, an accidental death of (from B’s perspective until she found out the truth) a bystander. It was parallel to Faith’s murder of the mayor’s henchman, and had even less justification.
Just my opinion–I think Buffy’s deal about taking a human life applies to innocent human beings. She was defending herself, Dawn and the scoobies from the Knights…not taking the life of someone at a distinct disadvantage against her abilities. She wouldn’t have killed Ben because she would see him as a victim, not an aggressor. Just the same as she wouldn’t kill Spike after he was neutered.
Buffy can kill in self-defense and to protect others?
Faith took a human life and the Watcher’s Council freaked.
Buffy suggested she was tempted to kill the “humans” responsible for the children’s deaths in ‘Gingerbread’ but Giles said she couldn’t do that.
I suppose my point is that she could’ve disabled these fellows without killing them… and when she did kill some of them, she showed not a moment’s remorse.
Nor was she ever chastised about it in the slightest … of course, her remarks later in the season that she’d let the entire Scooby Gang die… moreover, she’d kill them all… rather than allow them to kill Dawn to save the planet… barely got comments from the gang. In all fairness, I suppose she died before they could chew her out.
More accurately, Faith took a human life, lied about it, and tried to frame Buffy. I think if she had come clean and said, “It was the middle of a fight, I didn’t realize he was human, I’m sorry,” she probably wouldn’t have ended up in manacles. There probably would have been some repurcussions, but nothing that serious. Also, I wouldn’t use the Watchers Council as the moral base-line of the Buffy universe. Giles, who had already been fired by the Council for being too soft on Buffy, and the rest of the regulars, were much more forgiving.
At any rate, I think what we’re really seeing here is Buffy maturing as a supernatural hero. When she was in high school, she saw things in black and white: there are demons, and there are humans, and you kill all of the demons, and none of the humans. By college, things are much grayer. She’s dated one vampire already. She’s been betrayed by the Watcher’s Council. She’s found herself on the hit-list of a secret, human-run government agency. Heck, half the things that have tried to kill her in her life time have been set on her by otherwise perfectly normal humans. She’s got Spike hanging around, and can’t seem to bring herself to kill him, God only knows why. She knows about Willy’s bar, but doesn’t burn it to the ground so long as the demons inside behave themselves. By the time she’s fighting armored knights on top of an RV while fleeing from a Hell God, I rather thinks distinctions like “monsters/humans” have gotten pretty fuzzy.
In other words, it’s not a character inconsistancy, it’s character growth.
The rules Buffy’s operating under seem roughly similar to what the law permits as self-defense. The Knights were attacking with deadly force. She’s a Slayer of demons and vamps - not humans. And although Giles told her she couldn’t kill the humans in “Gingerbread,” he meant “in cold blood.” Certainly if she were under attack by the killers, she could have dispatched them. And of course, it’s all theoretical: [spoiler]There were no kids and no deaths.
[/quote]
Her comments about Dawn are at least defensible: a cold calculation might say it’s best to kill a 15-year-old girl in cold blood to save the world, but it’s arguably better to lose lives in battle but not murder.
And it does get at least some comment:
Giles: “Not exactly the St. Crispin’s Day speech.”
I wish Buffy wouldn’t violate the Prime Directive so often. I swear, I think she thinks it doesn’t apply to her! But it applies to EVERYONE in Starfleet.
I don’t think of it as an inconsistency within Buffy herself… more like an inconsistency with the series.
“Killing humans is wrong, unless you’re Buffy and you really feel like it.”
:dubious:
Then again, I feel Buffy gets far too much special consideration as a person. Yes, it’s her show, but … ech.
Then again, almost every major Buffiverse character has killed a human at some point. Joyce, Dawn, Xander, Groo, and Cordy being the exceptions that I think exist… any one with evidence to refute one of these, please step forward.
Inconsistency in the series? How so, exactly? All of these “rules” about who a Slayer can or cannot kill are individual moral choices of the characters, not laws laid down from on high. Buffy may say she doesn’t kill humans, but when the lives of her friends and family are on the line, she’ll bury an ax in some guy’s ribcage without hesitation. That’s not series inconsistency, it’s character depth.
And, although it never happens on screen, I wouldn’t be surprised if Groo has killed a human at some point in his life, considering the background he comes from, and the way humans were treated there.
Ben was not an innocent. He summoned the Queller demon to kill off Glory’s brain-drain victims when, as we learn, their essences could possibly have been separated out from Glory. He also betrayed Dawn and fed her back into the hands of Glory’s minions.
But those who’ve said that Buffy can kill humans to defend herself or others are correct.
Okay, I’m just as big a Buffy fan as anyone here, but…who the hell is Groo?!
My take on the monks… They were clearly involved in the supernatural world, human or not… I think Buffy has been given “permission” to exact justice in the supernatural world, but not the human world. She’s not allowed to go vigilante on human matters, but she’s a judge of supernatural matters. She has authority granted by the state of the undead, but not the State of California.
This doesn’t solve the Faith conflict, as she clearly killed a supernatural-related dude, but I think it puts Warren into perspective–He was just a normal college kid who shot another kid. Completely outside of the realm of the supernatural–that’s why Buffy couldn’t go after him, and why (Osirus?) wouldn’t interfere either. There are different areas of jurisdiction. So, I think I disagree with Miller. Buffy’s moral code is very strong, but there are still things she can and cannot do as ordained by whoever grants slayerness. One example–when she wiped out the nest of vampires Riley was playing with, she was clearly following the will of the Council, but she was still doing something morally wrong.
And as everyone’s already said, the monks and Faith’s victim were killed in the heat of battle. Ben and Warren’s deaths were premeditated assassinations. I’m still of the “OMG, that’s so cool! Go Giles!” mindset about Ben, though.
**The Groosalug ** was Cordy’s hunky boyfriend from her stay in Pylea (Angel).
As for Ben being an innocent…sure, we know that. But Giles didn’t. He saw Ben as an innocent. That is why he killed him…because Buffy wouldn’t have been able to.
Osiris couldn’t raise Tara from the dead. That had nothing to do with wether Buffy can or cannot kill humans, it was entirely a matter of how magic works in the Buffyverse. Using magic to bring back someone who died of non-magic means gets you shambling reanimated Joyce zombies.
The problem with that is, we know who grants slayerness: the original pre-historic proto-Watcher’s Council and a chained demon. Neither of which is in any sort of a position to be dictating morals to anyone else. The seperation between “human” and “supernatural” was purely something Buffy did to try to create distance between her life as a normal teenager and her life as a vampire slayer. It doesn’t have any sort of supernatural authority to it.
And I disagree that wiping out the vampire brothel was morally wrong, although Buffy’s actions clearly stemmed from upset over Riley’s infidelity, and not a desire to go out and fight the good fight. Her less-than-pure motives don’t alter the basic morality of killing a den full of soulless blood-sucking vampires, though.
Inconsistency of theme. I had previously found it almost heavy-handed the way they hammered in the ‘don’t kill humans’ message. Then, suddenly… whoops! Forget all that.
Groo could have. We’ve never seen him do it. And I bet most cows in Pylea weren’t even remotely powerful enough to be pitted against the mighty Groosalugg.
Saltire : I was aware of possessed-Cordy kill … but I’m chalking that one to Jasmine’s tally. To do otherwise would be like giving Buffy a kill if Faith had gone on a rampage while visiting Buffy’s body.
Oh, pah. Indirectly causing deaths? Pishposh. That doesn’t count. Otherwise we have to let Dawn share Glory’s kill-tally. And chalk up Warren to Buffy, since she saved Willow’s life that time and made it possible for Wil to kill Warren.
I’d call it evolution of theme, and didn’t see it as being at all sudden, but the inevitable result of things that happened in season three (killing Faith, in particular, and the ambiguity of how to treat the re-souled Angel) and season four (when the human-run Iniative was the little bad, and Spike was suddenly a reluctant, albiet unreliable, ally). From season one, the entire show got progressively darker and darker, until the last two season were almost unbearably heavy, and this change in moral priorities for Buffy was part and parcel of that.
Guess we’ll just have to disagree on this one.
Yeah, but he was pretty firmly under the thumb of the evil, human-hating religious cabal that ran the dimension. I can see them ordering Groo to massacre a bunch of “cows,” just for the hell of it, and Groo going along because he didn’t know how not to follow orders.
Knights. The monks were completely different and Buffy didn’t kill any of them.
There’s no evidence that the deputy mayor was anything other than human. Additionally, Faith killed at least one person in Los Angeles with no known supernatural connection (the guy she beat up for his cash and apartment; we know he died because Angel could enter his apartment without an invite).
Huh? Buffy had broken from the Council more than a year prior to taking out that nest and didn’t become involved with them until two episodes after that. And then, she was acting as a free agent, not as an instrument of the Council. I’m confused as to why you would think Buffy’s taking out that nest was morally wrong.
Season 7 Buffy would’ve killed Ben, no question. I’m not unconvinced that Season 5 Buffy wouldn’t have killed him, but her priority at that point was getting to Dawn. I got no beef with Giles killing Ben (except that Ben was nice eye candy).
