Five by five

[dolorosa_12]

Day Three: A female character you hated but grew to love

I thought about my answer to this question for ages and ages, and in some ways, it's the most difficult for me of all the questions in the meme. I tend to either love female characters instantly, or feel indifferent or neutral towards them, and my opinion very rarely changes. But then I remembered the circumstances under which I watched Buffy, and my answer became clear.

Back when I was in high school, all the girls in my friendship group watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it aired. I was late to jump on this particular bandwagon, and only started watching around Season 3, catching up by binge-watching VCR recordings of the previous two seasons at my then best friend's house over one weekend. So when I first encountered Buffy, Faith was just being introduced as a character, and I couldn't stand her. She just seemed so ungrateful. She'd rolled into Sunnydale and instantly become part of an amazing group of friends, and unlike every other Slayer before her, was able to share the load. Buffy's mother adored her, Buffy relished patrolling and fighting the forces of evil as part of a Slayer duo, and everyone seemed to welcome Faith into the Scooby Gang fold. And she repayed them by murdering a human, resenting Buffy for just about everything, trying to steal her boyfriend, and joining that season's Big Bad as he attempted to bring on yet another apocalypse in Sunnydale. I couldn't understand why Faith had made the choices she had, and the fact that Buffy and the Scoobies seemed so admirable to me simply underscored Faith's betrayal even further. My opinion of Faith remained low as I watched the rest of Buffy and then Angel as they aired.

And then, about four years later, I impulse bought the Buffy and Angel boxed sets, and I suddenly had an entirely new perspective on Faith. The thing that did it for me was the body-switching double episode in Season 4. Buffy had put Faith in a coma at the end of Season 3, and she had subsequently woken up and returned to wreak havoc. The body-switching allowed her to torment and traumatise Buffy, and she did some truly horrendous things to her, but what really opened my eyes was the final fight scene. The two are still in each others' bodies, and Faith, in the guise of Buffy, is absolutely pummelling Buffy, screaming abuse at her — but of course what she is actually doing is beating her own body and face to a bloody pulp. It was like a lightbulb going on in my brain: Faith's actions are all motivated by a kind of self-hatred. Suddenly she became a lot more sympathetic, and her 'ungrateful' behaviour in Season 3 made sense: here she was, a beautiful, strong, demon-slaying teenage heroine, and all people did was tell her to be more like Buffy and try to mould her into a more accommodating, less abrasive, and frankly, more middle-class version of herself. But why should she have to be like Buffy? Why should she have to be second choice, and second best?

Her subsequent redemption arc on Angel and Season 7 of Buffy is brilliantly done, but the most credit should go to Sarah Michelle Gellar and Eliza Dushku for absolutely killing it in the body-swap episodes. They made transformed Faith for me from a character I considered unsympathetic, ungrateful and unlikeable into one of my favourite characters on the show, and someone whose poignant story was tragic, believable and worth telling.


Day Four: A female character you relate to
Day Five: Favorite female character on a male-driven show
Day Six: Favorite female-driven show
Day Seven: A female character that needs more screen time
Day Eight: Favorite female character in a comedy show
Day Nine: Favorite female character in a drama show
Day Ten: Favorite female character in a scifi/supernatural show
Day Eleven: Favorite female character in a children’s show
Day Twelve: Favorite female character in a movie
Day Thirteen: Favorite female character in a book
Day Fourteen: Favorite older female character
Day Fifteen: Favorite female character growth arc
Day Sixteen: Favorite mother character
Day Seventeen: Favorite warrior female character
Day Eighteen: Favorite non-warrior female character
Day Nineteen: Favorite non-human female character
Day Twenty: Favorite female antagonist
Day Twenty-One: Favorite female character screwed over by canon
Day Twenty-Two: Favorite female character you love but everyone else hates
Day Twenty-Three: Favorite female platonic relationship
Day Twenty-Four: Favorite female romantic relationship
Day Twenty-Five: Favorite mother/daughter and/or sister relationship
Day Twenty-Six: Favorite classical female character (from pre-20th century literature or mythology or the like)
Day Twenty-Seven: A female character you have extensive personal canon for
Day Twenty-Eight: Favorite female writer (television, books, movies, etc.)
Day Twenty-Nine: A female-centric fic rec
Day Thirty: Whatever you’d like!

Comments

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

I love this analysis of Faith, and agree 100%. Faith has a lot of self-loathing, and I think while in some ways she was more of an ideal slayer than Buffy, she was also not the ideal teenage girl - neither was Buffy, but Buffy still "fit in" society better. She had a family, she had a favorite teacher, she had friends - I can't imagine Faith really had friends. Maybe the kind of friends Cordelia had, except people who were closer to Faith in personality, but that's different from what Buffy, Willow and Xander had. I think Faith wanted to have that with Buffy, but she was also a little jealous of her, and so she tried to make Buffy more like her, except that backfired horribly. :/ (Oddly I'd argue Cordelia was similar. I think she wanted to be part of the Scoobies more than she'd let on, and she knew Buffy was a version of her with super powers and actual friends and stuff. Now I wish we'd had a scene with Faith and Cordelia together, even though I think Faith would've had even less patience with her, and vice versa.)

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely right — it's a toxic mix of jealousy, self-loathing and a kind of frustration on Faith's part that her best is never going to be good enough, because everyone will always compare her to Buffy.

And that's a very interesting point about Cordelia. I think if the Xander-Cordelia relationship hadn't ended the way it did, Cordelia would've eventually ditched her other friends completely and become a fully-fledged member of the Scoobies. She was on a trajectory of increased self-confidence and desire for truer friends, but the problem is that she entered the group (as something other than an occasional victim to be rescued or source of transport) as Xander's girlfriend, and nobody was going to take her side in the breakup, even though she was in the right.

I wish we could've had some more Faith/Cordelia scenes in Angel once they'd both grown up a bit, to be honest.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

You're right about Cordelia's place in the Scoobies, and while I understand given that Cordelia wasn't the nicest to them and everything, they also didn't exactly open up to her. I also have a head canon that some of Cordelia's worst behavior was because of everything going on with her parents, and of course she resented that the Scoobies weren't there for her even though they didn't know. :/

Yeah, I wish we'd have more Faith/Cordelia scenes too. Really Cordelia's character was wasted in general though - I know they had to work with Charisma Carpenter's pregnancy, but I wish they'd done it differently. (It also bothered me that they went and killed Fred in a similarish way - it's safe to say the last season was not my favorite.)

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't get me started on Cordelia's arc on Angel. One of the most disappointing character assassinations I've ever seen on TV.

I like the first and second seasons, and some scattered episodes later on, but the later parts of Angel made some narrative choices I've never quite forgiven.