Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 1: Accepting Responsibility
The moral case for accepting responsibility even when you don't want to.
Author’s Note: For those interested, Living with Consequences (season 2) and Choosing Your Future (season 3) is currently available for paid subscribers.
What makes people take responsibility for things?
So much of life is random and unexpected, it's hard to say that anyone should take responsibility for anything. Your life is out of your control on so many levels. No one chooses to be born, they don't choose their parents or their siblings, if any, and they don't choose the circumstances under which they grow up. It's all chosen for them, often before people come into existence at all or have any ability to make decisions for themselves. Most people have to wait until they are at least teenagers to have some level of freedom to make their own choices. Even then, people are far from free since there are people who constrain you in your options. There's a certain amount of classes you have to take in high school which cover certain topics you have to learn. If you don't pass on those fundamental subjects, you will ultimately fail to move on to the next stage where you have far more choices.
The fact that people don't have choice until later on suggests a very strong reason to believe that you don't have responsibility for anything. You are not responsible for your actions because so many of your decisions weren't made by you. They were made by someone else. Other people bear the responsibility for what they chose for you rather than yourself. You can only be held accountable for the decisions you make, and as a teenager, you are given some ability to choose for yourself what you do and don't want to do. As a result, you have to take responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Everything else is the fault of someone else. When you get that freedom to make your own decisions however, it's natural to want more. You want to be freed from the necessity to be held back by what other people think you should do. It's one of the benefits of having freedom.
One of the drawbacks of this type of freedom however is that you have to live with what happens as a result. If you make the wrong choice, that's on you. If you do something that hurts you or someone else, you have to live with all the ways it affects your life and the lives of those around you. Doing so is an extremely difficult thing to come to terms with. For a lot of people, it's better not to do so. To separate yourself from the consequences and put it on things you have no control over. Whether it's the other people involved in it, perhaps the victims, or the system which allowed it to happen in the first place or even god for some people. And why wouldn't you? Rejecting the idea of responsibility seems like the obvious thing to do.
“Why can't you people just leave me alone?”
“Because you are the slayer. Into each generation a slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a chosen one, one born with the strength and skill to...”
“With the strength and skill to stop the spread of their blah blah blah... I've heard it already.”
Buffy exemplifies this on so many levels. After being given the freedom to make her own decisions, she's given the responsibility of having to deal with vampires, demons and the forces of darkness. The one girl in all the world who has this responsibility which puts an incredible pressure on her. A kind of pressure she doesn't necessarily want. Very few people would want it if they had someone come to them and offer it to them. It's why people don't go into professions like police, firefighters, doctors and nurses or even politicians. Only the people who feel a real calling for such a job ever really go into it. Largely because the cost of failure is so high. Which makes Buffy's rejection of her job as The Slayer entirely understandable. Doing it means that people's lives are on the line if she doesn't do something about vampires and other demons.
“If you don't go out, it's the end of the world. Everything is life or death when you're a sixteen year old girl.”
Especially at such a young age, living with this powerful responsibility can seem like it only has down sides. She sees the other people around her who don't necessarily have the same burden she does and can't help but be envious. At least in the beginning, Cordelia and the way in which she lives is everything that Buffy dreams of being. Just another popular girl who only has to think about things like whether to go to class and what to wear to The Bronze or even how to find a guy who likes her back. Buffy wants to live in a world where that's all she cares about. But she can't. No matter how much she craves living that way, that choice has been taken from her. Which isn't to say that she's going to stop trying to have it. Her attempts to do things like join the cheerleaders, have a nice normal date with an ordinary guy and even have a prom just like everything else are all about trying to avoid her responsibility.
“Clark Kent has a job, I just want to go on a date.”
Of course, the problem is that avoiding responsibility doesn't mean that the responsibility will go away. All it means is the normality she craves and the vampires and other supernatural creatures she's supposed to be fighting will end up merging together. Until she doesn't really have any other choice but to accept her destiny. Her love life and her school life become very much the same. Instead of falling for a normal guy like Owen or Xander, she falls for Angel. The dark and shadowy guy who is really all about fighting vampires and demons. Someone who doesn't have a life outside of that world where he can do the average things Buffy often wants so badly.
“Do you remember when you said I was like two different people? Well, one of them has to go, but the other is having a really, really good time and will come back. I promise.”
At the same time, she learns that while there are sacrifices she has to make in order to accept the responsibility she's been given, it doesn't mean she has to give up everything. It may not be exactly the way in which she would've wanted, but it still has some of what she wants. She's even able to have friends, so long as they know about her other important work like Xander and Willow do. Maybe she won't necessarily be the most popular girl in school the way Cordelia is, but by merging the two sides of her life, she's able to build at least two real friendships initially. Because of friends like Willow and Xander, Buffy has a chance to be normal. To talk about things like boys and shopping and all the other things normal people do. She even does many of them with Willow and Xander.
Buffy's friends go through a similar process although in many ways from the other side. Neither Willow or Xander have to take up the cause being offered to them. They aren't destined in any meaningful sense to take on the burdens of fighting against evil. Beyond the knowledge that things like vampires and demons exist, they don't need to find ways to help Buffy. Initially, Buffy even tries to stop them from doing it. She does her best to exclude them from her own responsibilities. Only allowing them to help in ways that won't get them hurt. However, once you see what's out there, it's hard not to get wrapped up in it all. Particularly when people they care about like Jessie end up on the wrong side of it.
Giles is accepting his own responsibility in this at the same time. Yet despite his age difference, he's in many ways having just as much difficulty with the situation as Buffy and her friends. The way in which he has to deal with Buffy and her uncertainty around accepting her burden leaves him with difficulty. Being someone who has accepted other types of responsibility, he assumes other people around him would also do so. Especially since he's dealing with Buffy who he doesn't have to explain the situation to. That has already been taken care of by Merrick, her previous Watcher. His problem is to understand why someone wouldn't want to accept responsibility for a burden. To see in Buffy what he can no longer see in himself. Learning that there's more to life than simply fighting evil in whatever form it takes. He's lived so long in that world it's the only thing that's become important to him. It's exactly this type of obsessive way of being which is what Buffy's trying to avoid by rejecting her destiny.
While Buffy is trying to figure out how her greater purpose and burden can be made more normal, her friends are looking for a greater purpose that goes beyond the everyday normal. In many ways, they are on opposing sides of the journey. Each of them searching for what they crave most. What they find is that a combination of both can be the most beneficial for everyone involved. Obviously, it puts Xander and Willow in more danger to spend time with Buffy and her Watcher Giles, but there are many situations where if not for them, Buffy may not have gotten out of it alive. Their knowledge of the ordinary lives in the school and other dynamics gives Buffy insight into what she should and shouldn't look out for. Whether it's who Amy was and what normal behaviour for her usually is, or research around demons. They give her something she otherwise wouldn't be able to find.
“You're the slayer and we're like your slayerettes.”
It gives her a sense of normalcy when so much of her life is not normal. This ability to merge the responsibility of who she is and what has been placed on her by things she can't control allows her the space to understand how important both are. Balance her life out in a way she hasn't had up until this point. So much so that she's willing to head straight into danger. Namely, when she's confronted with the ultimate burden of what taking on vampires and demons is supposed to lead to... her own death.
“I'm 16 years old... I don't want to die.”
Tragically for all slayers, the type of life she's been chosen to live involves a brutal life and death fight Buffy can't avoid. Or at least that's the way in which she's supposed to go. The consequences of such a brutal and violent fight is that either those she's fighting against die, or she does. At some point, the only possible outcome is she will end up on the losing side. In this situation though, she finds her death literally written in a prophecy which she can't avoid. Not if she wants to keep the world from ending. She really has no other choice in the matter.
What gives her the strength to finally accept all that her responsibilities and suffering for what it is and take that final step. To see the sacrifice she's making as something noble, worthy of her life being given up. Buffy has made the transition from doing everything she can to avoid responsibility for her actions and even the actions of others, to taking it on herself. Not only for her own benefit but for the benefit of others. It's a profound and powerful message that everyone can learn from.
That's far from the only lesson about taking responsibility for your actions. It's only the very beginning of the process. We're going to get into some of that process in the next piece.
Check out the show on Hulu as well as Amazon and Disney Plus.