Quote:
Originally posted by sum1
Yeah they weren't random, they were potentials. As in they had the potential to become slayers, not as in they were definitely going to become slayers. Only some potentials become slayers. It's been stated that the potentials that were made slayers by Willow's spell were hundreds or thousands in number. Do the math. Unless they were all to be slayers for only a really short time each (much shorter than usual for a slayer), there's no way they could all get to be slayers one after the other, not unless some were to become slayers when they were a few hundred years old or older.
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Exactly. The argument that "they were all going to become Slayers anyway" is nonsense. A few of them would have been chosen, but most of them would have lived out their lives as normal (or maybe slightly above average) women.
I have no problem with strong women. I do have a problem with JW deciding to contradict one of the central messages of the show in the last episode and trying to pass it off as "radical feminism".
For seven seasons, we were repeatedly reminded how unfair it was that Buffy had had the possibility of a normal life ripped away from her when she was drafted to become the Slayer. Nobody gave her a choice - one day the job was shoved into her lap and that was that. In case we missed the message, we got it beaten into our heads in
Get It Done. Forcing a girl to become a demon fighter without her consent is
wrong.
Fast forward to
Chosen, and here's Buffy doing the
exact same damned thing to every available girl on the planet. It was sickening. Sure, JW had her make a big speech about "making a choice". What choice? Did any of the potentials get the chance to say "no thanks, I'd rather not go fight Ubervamps in the Hellmouth"? If so, we certainly never saw it on screen. I'm sure many of them, Kennedy for example, would have said "bring on the juice!". But I'm not sure Rona would have jumped that way - the Rona I saw wanted no part of the Slayer gig and might well have gone for the "bus ticket out of town" option
if it had been offered to her. Which it wasn't.
Let's try to be charitable, though. Let's assume all the girls in Sunnydale, who had seen Ubervamps and fought Bringers, who knew what The First might do to the world, sucked it up and decided to join the fight. Great! Those girls were in a position to see what being a Slayer was all about and make an informed choice. Buffy and Willow are in the clear - they've done nothing wrong, in fact they've done something very good. Cheers all around.
Except...what about all those other girls, all around the world? None of them had any idea what was done to them, by whom, or why. They weren't needed for the battle in the Hellmouth, none of them were or were going to be anywhere near Sunnydale. They certainly had no opportunity to decide whether or not they
wanted to have their lives changed. Dawn and Willow's exchange at the end of
Chosen (We have to find them!) implies that they were going to be drafted into the Slayer Army. Even if they weren't, the conferring of Slayer powers makes these girls freaks in their own societies. Some might be fine with that, but you can't say that doing that to them
without ever asking their opinion in the matter isn't a violation.
I think even JW eventually figured out that he'd screwed up with that spell. Witness Dana, the superpowered psycho murderess in
Damage. Yay Buffy and Willow, I'm sure her victims were thrilled by the Girl Power. And note that when Angel proposed the Big Battle to his fellow FGers in
Power Play, he was meticulous in spelling out that they were probably doomed and he couldn't order them to do it. It's nice that JW finally figured out what the word
choice means. It's too bad he had to ruin the BtVS series finale first.