The Buffyverse Character Countdown (#28)

#28.

Hero: Dawn Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Seasons 5-7)

I’m not going to make any friends with this one.

Dawn is a character who regularly splits fan opinion. Many consider her a shift to the status quo whose retconned character status makes her one of the most frustrating characters in the series. Others consider her an ingenious plot element who eventually becomes her own autonomous character, full of quirks that make her at least likeable, if not outright heroic at times.

As for me, I can’t stand Michelle Trachtenberg.

Dawn is Buffy’s sister, only introduced in Season Five of the series. However, Dawn’s actual identity is that of a mystical ball of energy known as the Key, the only thing capable of bringing the demonic Glorificus back to her hell dimension. Protecting Dawn is the main goal of the Scoobies throughout Season 5, even if they aren’t aware of her origins until the very end of the season. The Key’s human form, that of Dawn, is an actual character in her own right, unlike the past two heroes to "grace" this countdown. She’s your average teenage girl who just so happens to have a superpowered older sister. Dawn has the same insecurities as many teenagers, even enduring the death of her mother and suffering from mentally unhealthy defense mechanisms such as kleptomania and an impulse towards self-harm. She’s decently developed, and she introduces a new perspective to the narrative that makes Season Five one of the very best in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Even when Buffy the Vampire Slayer took place in a high school, it never quite felt like a child's drama. With the introduction of Dawn, we see how certain elements that the audience has come to accept and expect are wholly alien to a child.

Unfortunately, I can’t stand Michelle Trachtenberg as an actress, so, no matter how well Dawn is written in Season Five, I simply stand her presence whatsoever. Trachtenberg’s neutral expression invariably strikes me as petulant and whiny; it might not even be her fault, but she adds excessive angst to a character who, for the most part, is honest and straightforward. It must be a personal tic of mine, but I can’t stand a single inflection that Trachtenberg gives, even when she’s acting her heart out in episodes like “The Body.” Dawn’s childishness makes sense from a narrative perspective, but I personally don’t find it pleasant to watch. Throw in the fact that she leaps into the narrative without any introduction, and one's got a character who upends the plot to an uncomfortable degree.

The other major problem with Dawn is her uselessness throughout Seasons Six and Seven. Throughout Season Five, Dawn both provides a child's perspective of the plot and functions as a symbol for Buffy’s inner child and latent moral virtue. However, in Season Six, there’s really nowhere for Dawn to go. Most of her stand-alone episodes feel like re-treads of themes Buffy herself learned in Seasons One and Two; they function more as filler than as anything else. The rest of the time, Dawn serves as a liability, alternatively wasting the cast's time as someone to be protected as opposed to someone truly capable of slaying on her own or simply wasting time. While she's more empathetic to reformed villains like Andrew and Spike than most of the other heroes, she is not needed to make that point, since the audience has already built up ties of empathy with nearly everyone in the cast aside from dawn; if Buffy and the other Scoobies are being too harsh on someone, we're generally perceptive to it. By the end of the series, Dawn is ultimately far too annoying and pointless to be considered one of our role models. 

Dawn is a worthwhile character, but when one factors in the whiplash of her first appearance, the subpar performance of Michelle Trachtenberg, and her ultimate uselessness in later seasons, she definitely falls down a lot of pegs. I’d like to praise her for the genuinely strong elements of her characterization – she is the rare child character in a television series who doesn’t suck – but she feels too much like a rehash of ideas from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's first three seasons than a character in her own right. She might be the best of Buffy’s inner child, but she’s still one of the weakest heroes in the series. I wish I didn't have to be mean to the child, but Dawn can consider this a time out.

Villain: Amy Madison (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2 - "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," Season 6 - "Smashed," "Doublemeat Palace")

Of all the villains occupying the lower echelons of the list, Amy might just be the most complex. The writers of Buffy never quite give Amy much explicit development, even as compared to other tertiary members of the Buffy cast. However, when one considers Amy’s arc over the course of six seasons, one eventually discovers a rather rich and fascinating character. Indeed, her characterization and Elizabeth Anne Allen’s performance are so strong to lift her up into a higher level of the list, but her character’s pitiful final appearance in the series holds her to the bottom. Amy might not be the most menacing or threatening of antagonists, but she is an enjoyable foe in her own right.

The first time we encounter Amy in the third ever episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she plays the role not of the villain but the victim. In “Witch,” we witness Amy’s psychotic mother trap Amy in her older body and domineers over her, trying to relive her high school years whilst taking Amy’s body for a joyride. Throughout this episode, Amy is as timid as characters get, and it’s up to Buffy and her crew to put a stop to the elder Madison’s charade. Yet, as satisfying an antagonist as Catherine Madison is, it is Amy who ultimately proves to be the bigger threat. For, in disposing of Catherine, the Scoobies don’t quite anticipate the monster they have created.

Throughout Seasons 2 and 3 of Buffy, we notice that Amy has inherited her mother’s powers. Without any authority figure to keep her in line, Amy has decided to use these new abilities to take the easy way out of life, cheating on her homework assignments and performing various mental manipulations and prankster hexes. Her acts might not be as overtly evil as her mother’s, but the selfishness underlying her actions appears to be hereditary. Amy’s awareness of the consequences of powerful magic lead her to be more cautious than her mother, but she’s no less dangerous if let completely loose. She eventually serves as the conduit for a love spell gone horribly wrong in “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” turning the entire female population of Sunnydale to turn into lovesick zombies devoted to tearing Xander and Cordelia to pieces. Amy’s antics come to an end at the conclusion of “Gingerbread,” in which she turns herself into a rat and becomes trapped in that form until the middle of Buffy’s sixth season; in fact, there’s a running gag of the Scoobies treating her as their pet.

Amy’s villainy returns with a vengeance in Season 6. With Willow becoming increasingly dependent on magic to feel energized, she uses her magic to restore Amy back to her human form. After doing so, Amy becomes a magical enabler of sorts, indulging Willow’s every magical impulse, no matter how petty or dangerous. She and Willow cause no end of chaos in the Bronze, indulging their high school impulses in spite of their now considerable maturity. She even introduces Willow to the magical drug dealer, Rack. It’s in the episode “Doublemeat Palace,” though, that Amy’s main act as a complete antagonist comes into play; she gives Willow an uncontrollable final burst of magic after Willow has sworn off the dark arts entirely. This action ultimately tarnishes Willow’s relationship with her friends and has huge consequences for the season. After this point, Amy departs from the Scoobies’ lives for the remainder of the series. Unfortunately for Amy's character arc and standing as a villain, her mumbo-jumbo feels extremely forced and narratively unwieldly; “Doublemeat Palace” is arguably the worst episode in all of Buffy, and Amy’s actions tie into a particularly terrible plot.

Taken together, Amy’s villainous actions have an only tangentially threatening component; she’s definitely a danger to the Scoobies, but she’s not openly antagonistic towards them, unlike most of the other villains in the series. This lack of genuine danger is what ultimately places her so low on the list. However, there is a really juicy character hidden within the subtext of Amy. When facing off against Amy, the Scoobies are fighting a witch who has never really grown up outside of indulging her every impulse, like a rat. When one combines this impulsiveness with an inferiority complex, reasonably generated because of Willow’s superior mastery of magic, and Amy's magical addiction, one’s got an unpredictable monster who could have become a Big Bad had she been given more screen time. However, these juicy bits of potential are never quite brought into the text, existing only as subtext. Despite all her rage, Amy is still just a rat in a cage.