source #1

For my first primary source, I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s episode “Graduation Day: Part 1” and one thing that I noticed, aside from the abundant amount of allusions relating to high school, was that love was in the air in four different cases.

The first wasn’t exactly the same as the others. Faith, the new slayer in town, and the mayor, who aspires to destroy Sunnydale at graduation, have a ‘father-daughter’ type of love- both metaphorically and possibly literally. In one scene, the mayor calls Faith a “firecracker,” and she says that’s what her mother used to call her, and then she told a story from her childhood about jumping off of a rock and how the older kids were “too scared to do it.” The mayor responded “not you though,” not in a tone that said “I understand the story,” but rather “you were always that way.” What is the point of this relationship? The point is to not only keep the viewer on edge, but to keep Buffy on edge as well. Their joint force plans to kill the whole graduating class and to distract Buffy in the process by trying to kill Angel. Well, let’s just say Buffy was so on edge that she almost fell off a cliff.

The second case is this sort of awkward love between Wesley, Buffy’s new watcher, and Cordelia. They’re in the discovery phase, does she like me? Does he like me? I’m sending him this signal, does he get it? In this first episode, they do nothing but flirt, we find out more about this relationship in the next episode, and that is that, after kissing, they’re not meant to be.

Next up is the lovable Willow and her boyfriend, Oz. This is really nothing more than a typical high school relationship- between a witch and a werewolf. This is the only clear-cut, simple relationship on the show. He loves her, she loves him, end of story. If only everything else in high school were that simple.

Possibly the most complicated case of love to ever exist is that between Buffy and the man she was created to destroy, Angel. Though broken up, it is painstakingly (no pun intended) obvious that they were meant to be together. Buffy is so hurt by the breakup that when she sees Angel, they start talking about the mayor’s plans (the ascension) and begin fighting. Eventually, Buffy says “I just want this to be over,” something that, on the surface, seems plausible because she doesn’t want her fellow classmates to be killed, but underneath the surface, is something that can never truly end because she is too attached to Angel. Just after that, Angel is shot by the heart with a poison arrow. Buffy is upset while she’s trying to find a cure because she feels like she is wasting time. So when Wesley comes in and says that The Council (the watchers of the watchers) can’t help Angel with the cure, Buffy says “I’m watching my lover die.” However,, with all that is said between the torn lovers, it is what is not said that makes the difference. If a picture says a thousand words, then Buffy and Angel’s eyes say a million. They, I believe, can have a whole conversation just by looking at each other and not speaking and still know what they said. If their eyes say “love,” then they words don’t have to.