Anya, Friend of Buffy

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Spoiler warning: It’s been 20 years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired, but if you still plan to finally watch it someday then be warned: This essay is like the forward to an English literature book—revealing Anya’s story.

Yesterday I was musing; for some reason I thought of Anya, a pretty blond who joins the gang partway through the Buffy series… Wha—? Truth hit me like a blow. Suddenly I understood Anya in a way I hadn’t before, not even after seeing that entire TV series twice.

Tonight I’m thinking sadly of Anya. She always wears nice, bright cotton clothing. Never hiding behind clothing too-sexy, or clothing too-big, or clothing matte black. If you have come across Anya on Youtube, it’s probably for her tearful monologue from trying to understand the death of Joyce. Of course Anya is troubled: Although born human, for over a thousand years Anya lived among “vengeance demons,” as a demon herself. After so long she has even forgotten her last name, she’s forgotten about mortality. How innocent she is. Here’s the link. 

Anya is newly human—a naïve human. At the TV script level, I mistakenly thought she was a comic relief, the person to state the obvious, to see the elephant in the room that everyone else was closing their eyes to. An “elephant,” as you know, is a metaphor for something people “agree” not to face, such as, say, the addiction of a scary father. Buffy, of course, is a show where monsters are often metaphors for scary people in real life. Anya, over a thousand years ago, survived a relationship, but at the price, I’m sure, of becoming a vengeance demon. 

Anya's story, I now realize, represents people who don’t recover. Not everybody makes it.  

Until feminism came along during my youth, domestic horror was often an elephant: Sometimes it still is, along with child abuse and photographing undressed children. Sometimes, as if the elephant has turned invisible, it’s not unknown for powerless women and children to “go into denial.” Back in the 1970’s, our whole society was in denial. That’s when believers in women’s liberation began their kitchen “consciousness raising” meetings. Remember? They strove to help each other discover “unbelievable” things they and their society hadn’t been ready to face. They de-cloaked words like “sexism.” At the same time, even after their consciousness raising, according to someone who was at those meetings, child pornography rings were not on anyone’s kitchen radar screen…

While Anya would not have called herself a feminist, for over a thousand years she protected women, granting their wishes for something bad to happen to their powerful abusers. Heads chopped off? Entrails pulled out? A vengeance demon can do that for you.

Being newly human, Anya can be as self-absorbed as a child, innocently hurting people’s feelings—but never on purpose. Buffy Summers and the rest of the nerdy “Scooby Gang” accept her as a friend who, like them, is never mean to anybody.

Anya has a queer flaw: a morbid fear of bunnies. For example, she’s tearfully upset one day when “some twisted person” has left a stuffed bunny in the old basement. One Halloween, when her friends dress scary, Anya costumes in a furry baggy onesie as a rabbit, complete with big ears. A friend sits beside her: “That’s scary?” She answers softly, “It’s scary to me.”

In the Buffy musical episode where something has is enspelled everyone into singing, and while the Scooby Gang is theorizing about who or what that something is, Anya rocks out, “Bunnies! It must be bunnies!” Funny to us, not to Anya. Here’s the link. 

What Anya (no maiden name) wants is what any young lady would want: to settle down with the love of a good man. She is happy to be engaged to her live-in lover. She and him sing about their relationship having things that “I’ll never tell.”  Here’s the link. 

To understand Anya, I think of alcoholics. Many addicts in Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, believe they are only one day away from relapsing into the “stinkin’ thinkin’” that leads to the “drinkin’.” Meaning: their denial and addiction. As I understand it, addicts don’t go straight until they perceive their insanity, accept responsibility, and atone. Every issue of the monthly AA Grapevine begins with a person’s story of the drinking years, presumably to remind herself of “how it was.” So readers won’t forget their insanity.

But Anya has forgotten. As for Buffy and the others, nobody around Anya notices how queer her innocence is. I saw a brief scene—unknown to her friends—from long ago when Anya was first human, back in her Viking days, a scene where bunny rabbits rested and gently hopped on the shelves of her thatched cottage: She picked one up and kissed it. I thought quietly: “That doesn’t make sense.” But moving pictures allow no time for reflection; I brushed aside my doubts as the scene changed to another day.

How can a person have been a vengeance killer, and then NOT have remorse, take responsibility, and atone? Atonement is what addicts call “making amends.” The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer understands this: Offstage, a former vampire slayer named Faith has recovered from her ego-filled darkness. She’s a convict in the state prison. Even though Faith has the super-power to leap over her prison wall, she won’t. Faith accepts “doing time” as part of accepting her responsibility. Supporting her is a vampire named Angel, with a new soul, who is himself atoning for his previous two centuries of soulless evil. He is, in Faith’s words from AA, her “sponsor,” meaning: the person further along “in recovery,” who helps her stay on the path.

Anya is different. She doesn’t go “straight and clean,” not really. Because she stays in denial, untouched by her centuries of vengeance. How? By fleeing from truth into innocence… The terrifying bunnies? Here’s what I now understand: They are her distraction, her substance abuse, her mental defence—Better to fear bunnies than face her bloody past.

Again, the Buffy show is a metaphor for how people may react in real life. I know. For I know my own fearful dear Anya.  

Anya loses her lover—she cries to heaven from her gut. Her friends try to sympathize, but none of them have walked in her darkness. None know how to be her sponsor—and Anya doesn’t even realize she needs one.

In time, she relapses to her dark side. Vengeance. Anya just can’t stop herself from reaching for a sword and stabbing abusers again… and so someone else has to stop her— her friend Buffy. They meet; they fight. A lost girl sings her last song. Here’s the link. 

It’s sad… how I obviously have my own dark blots of denial, since it took me so long, right up until a moment of musing, to understand the bunnies—I forgot my own Anya. Tonight I shall pour a glass of red wine, I shall grieve for her and me and all the lost children.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2017

Footnotes:

~ Part of addressing the gender “power imbalance” was feminists teaching traditional ladies how they could avoid the horrid label of being “aggressive,” while being something new under the sun: “assertive.” Remember?

~If a former abuser is having trouble turning over a new leaf, if he or she is baffled as somehow they keep reverting to saying not-nice things, then a mantra for a new lifestyle is: “If it’s not nurturing, then it’s abusive.” Seldom is there a neutral middle ground.

~Andrew Vachss, the writer with the eye patch, has a book series about an ex-convict who fights child abuse. If the first book in the series seems a little dated, that’s because it is. Vasch couldn’t get published for years because no editor would believe there could be such a thing as a child abuse ring of grown men and women, secretly living among us.

~I like TV nerds. I wrote Silence and Three Nerd Heroes, archived May 2013. Also, I wrote about two fictional screen characters in my essay Two Imaginary People archived December 2012.

~Today I linked to Youtube—but not to improve my SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) and not from any ignoble motivation to increase my web traffic: Traffic? Who cares?

Part of the reason I seldom present Web links on a silver platter, not even to my own essays, is that I once, by request —but not a “polite proper sentence” request, only a “stupid sentence fragment” instead— made some links for fans of the (Joss) Whedonesque site, only to realize too late I was casting pearls before swine.  Je regrete. (Archived January 2012)