I came in late to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. One thing that always intrigued me but I never knew: Why was Anya afraid of bunnies? And was “fear” the right emotion, or was it disgust, revulsion, or something else?
Thanks,
J.
While it’s never outright stated, I think it’s clear that it’s because she associates them with her husband, an abusive Troll named Olaf (played by the redheaded guy from ER). Well, I think she turned him into a Troll, actually. When they were married, he was human. He shows up in one episode, fully Trollish, with rabbit pelts hanging all over him, suggesting that he was a rabbit hunter of some sort. It was his jerkishness that made her take up the career of Vengeance Demon, specializing in Women Done Wrong.
Maybe she was a descendant of Tim…
Who wouldn’t be, with the… big… sharp… pointy… teeth…
Thare Killars!
In the Anya Flashback episode (“Save the children! And your knitting!”), her house was just packed with bunnies. It looked like the “Buffy with Tribbles” episode, only bunnies. That’d be enough to give anybody the willies, particularly since they weren’t in cages.
Plus, they’ve got them hoppy little legs and twitchy little noses and what’s with all the carrots? What do they need such good eye sight for anyway!
He was a troll hunter when he was a human. After being made into a troll, he seemed to take to it quickly enough (as shown in a season 7 flashback, I think). She turned him into a troll because he was having an affair with a “barmaid with load-bearing hips”.
She did seem to enjoy the company of rabbits quite a bit back then before she became a demon.
EDIT: A further thought, “load-bearing hips” are often thought to be representative of child-bearing ability, while rabbits are associated with fertility. Just a thought.
I believe she bred rabbits for meat during her original mortal lifetime and the rabbits were extremely prolific, doing as rabbits do. When her husband cheated on her, I assume she associated the rabbits both with her former life and with the prolific rabbity activities that both her bunnies and her husband engaged in.
For the same reason that in the early 20th Century she was an ardent admirer of Communism but in the early 21st she was a virulent Capitalist, or that when she was introduced in season 3 she was a sophisticated presence who knew of such cultural references as Prada bags and W Magazine but in season 4 and after was a social klutz with no knowledge of contemporary popular culture. Because a) someone thought it would be funny and b) Anya was the most frustratingly-in-retrospect written character on the show. Take for example her big emotional moment from “The Body.” She throws an emotional fit over the notion that Joyce will never have any more fruit punch or brush her hair and can’t understand why Joyce can’t just step back into her body and be alive again, which was very heart-rending the first time through, but upon reflection and subsequent viewings makes absolutely no sense, coming as it does from a woman who had spent the last ten centuries killing untold thousands of people, none of whom likely stepped back into their bodies afterward.
“There’s nothing we can’t face… except for bunnies”.
Yeah, Otto might be the closest to the right answer here. “Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Chances are the writers didn’t try to think up a reason, or even remember these things from one episode to the next.
I think I know the real reason, or the behind the scenes and not in the storyline season anyway. Just a guess on my part, but…
Somewhere back in the day when I used to watch Donahue now and again (not sure if it was during summer off of school or if it came on after or what) Phil’s guests were two Russian girls (former acrobats maybe with a traveling circus or something) who defected from Soviet Russia to the Free World. They got to tell about their harrowing escape into the wilds of… suburbia or something… to get away from those who were chasing them, and how nobody spoke their language, and they had heard such horrible things about the evil capitalists so weren’t sure what they had gotten into. And this whole story about how scared they were and yay capitalism ended with what they thought was the most horrific part of the tale: How they were just hiding out behind some random house somewhere and suddenly this giant rodent appeared and scared them senseless.
(Paraphrased through decades of memory:)
Phil: Rodent? I guess some get big, what was it doing?
Girls: Well, it was huge, the biggest rodent we ever saw, and it just came up to us, and we didn’t know what it was going to do, and we held onto each other and cowered into the wall and tried to kick at it.
Phil: Like a large rat? I can see how that would be scary…
Girl 1: Oh, it was horrible.
Girl 2: Huge!
Girl 1: Coming right at us!!
Girl 2: And walked in this completely creepy way!
Girl 1: And had Really Big Ears!
At which point Phil just tried to stifle laughter and gave a big “silly ex-Soviet girls” grin and the girls were like “what? what?”.
Between the name Anya and the rabbit thing I imagine someone saw that episode of Donahue and remembered it as fondly as I do.
Idle speculation, but I’d put money on it.
nitpick: Rabbits arent rodents. They are lagomorphs. The difference has to do with the # of teath and the method of chewing IIRC.
Not that Anya would know or care.
Brian
You expect Soviet refugees who were ignorantly fearful of the bunny-beastie to know that it was a lagomorph and not a rodent? 