The Buffyverse Character Countdown (#10)

#10.

Hero: Rupert Giles (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Seasons 1-7)

Cue the torches and pitchforks.

Not putting Giles in the top five Buffyverse heroes list might seem like sacrilege, but it’s a decision I stand by 100%. Unlike the top nine characters on this list, most of Giles’s personal development takes place prior to the events of the series. His developments within the show are fantastic, and I love them, but to suggest that Giles’s growth is as complex as that of Willow’s or Xander’s or Cordelia’s or Angel’s is utter poppycock. I say this with only the highest level of affection: I love everything about Giles. However, unlike the other members of the top ten, I don’t think Giles necessarily transcends all of the tropes from which he’s constructed. He might be one of the most delightful characters in the series, but my personal joy from his exploits only goes so far.

Once a teenage renegade known as “Ripper,” Giles eventually came to accept responsibility for his actions and became a member of the Watchers’ Council after the demon known as Eyghon, accidentally released by Giles, killed one of his childhood friends. Giles took on a completely different persona, polishing his speech, magic skills, and overall personality such that he becomes a consummate professional dedicated to his job. However, unlike the Watchers who have preceded him, Giles never quite loses a sense of his personal values and grows to care for Buffy as a father figure. Throughout the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles looks out for Buffy’s best interests as both a teenage girl and as the savior of the world. He does inform her of priorities, but he rarely oversteps his grounds into dictatorial territory like Gwendolyn Post, Quentin Travers, or Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. The moments when Giles does betray Buffy’s interests – particularly by being complicit in the Cruciamentum in “Helpless” – are central to forging their relationship, and his choice to abandon the Watchers’ Council in order to be with Buffy is a massive factor in his favor. Even after Buffy’s graduation, he never quite shifts out of the position of supportive parent and mental guardian.

Since Giles’s character arc is more or less fully realized by the beginning of the series, his personality is best explored in chunks; I’ll thus explore the following in ascending order of complexity: his relationships with the rest of the cast, his romance with Jenny, his Ripper side, and his relationship with Buffy.

Giles offers wonderful contrast to each other main member of the Scooby Gang. To Willow, Giles is not only an initial crush, but he’s also an intellectual and spiritual mentor. Throughout the earlier seasons, she strives to be both as intelligent and as morally admirable as Giles. His relative moral perfection also puts him at dire odds against the emergence of Dark Willow; seeing as Giles often represents Buffy’s superego, whereas Willow often represents her ego, his face-off against Buffy’s ego in “Grave” is one of the most intense in the series, even if it’s frighteningly one-sided. Giles treats Buffy’s id, Xander, with much more contempt, often making him the butt of his British smarm. However, he is a far more responsible father figure for Xander than Xander’s own parents, and he does develop an affection for him that’s rather touching. His open antagonism towards Spike is always a source of great comedy, especially in the Season Six episode, “Tabula Rasa.” Even his relationship with Anya is fun, for, despite the fact that Giles is the one who defeats Anyanka in “The Wish,” he ends up serving as a mentor figure in Anya’s quest to rediscover her humanity and even becomes her employer at the Magic Box. Any conversation with Giles is practically guaranteed to have great character development and sparkling wit.

Yet Giles’s most delightful relationship is that between him and Jenny Calendar. Most people tend to rank Jenny and Giles towards the lower end of the Buffyverse romances, but I actually think it’s one of the richest and most satisfying. While Giles is often trapped in the past, unlike the “technomage” Jenny, he does have a latent ability to connect that Jenny herself struggles with. He might not be particularly confident in his sexuality – or, at the very least, he represses his sexual interests – but Jenny works to inspire more confidence within him. Giles is often able to function only as a parent, but Jenny opens his heart to friendship. Moreover, much like Tara and Willow, the Buffyverse romance commonly cited as the best, Giles and Jenny do get into significant arguments over the course of the series, even breaking up temporarily after Eyghon returns and possesses her. It’s their commitment to trusting one another and caring for the other Scoobies that brings them back together and makes the episode “Passion” so painful. The scene in which Giles discovers Jenny’s corpse laid out on his bed, followed by the moment when he calls and informs Buffy and Willow of her death wrecks me every time. Speaking of which…

“Passion” also brings us perhaps the most terrifying moment in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – not the scene in which Angelus hunts down Jenny in the school, but when Giles unleashes his Ripper personality upon the House of Aurelius. He sets their lair on fire and very nearly gets himself killed all whilst he beats Angelus across the face with a burning branch. He’s determined to destroy them whilst destroying himself as well, very nearly abandoning Buffy to a parentless life in the name of revenge. Their tearful embrace at the conclusion of the fight is my favorite scene in the entire Buffyverse, and it’s the height of Giles’s character. Throughout the series, we see glimpses of the Ripper personality emerge, coming to a peak in the denouement of “The Gift,” in which Giles remorselessly murders Ben, the human half of Glory, in the name of saving his foster-daughter. In Seasons Six and Seven, he shows an increasing willingness to use violence to stop more dangerous threats to reality; the temporary death of Buffy really does kill a part of the light-hearted Giles we’ve come to know and bring out Ripper in full.

Given the strength of their relationship throughout the series, the traumatic effect of this death makes perfect sense. Buffy might have several powerful bonds with her friends and love interests throughout the series, but none of those bonds ever feels quite as strong as the one she feels for Giles. While her romances always reek of crippling dependency, her relationship with Giles is entirely symbiotic: she gains the father figure she lacks (editorial note: Hank Summers is such a dick) while he finds an attachment to the world outside the Watchers’ Council. The two trust each other more than almost anyone else in the series, each grounding the other when crises start to spiral out of control. My personal favorite moment of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season in a scene in which Giles starts laughing after Buffy recounts all of the traumatic events that have happened over the course of the season and Buffy eventually joins in. In addition to being a crucial moment of relaxing the tension of “Grave” and highlighting the sheer absurdity of the season’s plot, it also perfectly encapsulates Giles and Buffy’s father-daughter relationship. Sometimes humor is the only response we have left to cope with tragedy, and Giles’s choice to laugh in order to bring some small measure of joy to Buffy’s life is beautiful in its way. Given that Giles represents Buffy’s superego, her mind, and her call to adulthood, his ability to add perspective to situations makes him an invaluable part of her life. In the early seasons, he’s often the one who must create hope for Buffy and others to carry forward; in later seasons, he even makes the decision to leave Sunnydale in order for Buffy and her friends to find hope of their own.

There’s so much more of Giles that couldn’t be captured in one blog post: his love of rock music, his ownership of the Magic Box, his diverse style of humor, his antipathy towards American culture (outside of rock and roll, of course), his esoteric references, his habit of getting knocked out in fights, his various showdowns with series villains, his dynamic with Ethan Rayne. There’s just so much packed into one mentor figure. The only issue with these elements is that, for the most part, we have seen them before in different mentor figures in other fictional works. I love all of these bits, and they’ve rarely come together so perfectly as Giles, but I ultimately must concede that I like Giles more than the sum of his actual narrative parts. He might be the most delightful character in early Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he isn’t quite as rich as other series mainstays.

    

Villain: Warren Mears (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Seasons 5-6)

I hate Warren. You hate Warren. Everyone hates Warren. He’s one of the most loathsome characters in the entire series. He’s a murderer, an attempted rapist, a misogynist, a twerp, a self-entitled git, and, to top it all off, he’s human: he actively chooses to be evil as opposed to being naturally evil like vampires and demons. In addition to Connor, he’s the character most Buffyverse fans want to punch in the face. So, then, why is Warren so high on this list? Simple: he’s a villain who earns our hatred. He’s not a hated villain for what he does wrong; he’s a hated villain for what he does right. He’s scummy by design. More importantly, though, Warren actually does have an important symbolic and narrative function in Season Six. For this monster of a man comes from a source male Joss Whedon nerds wouldn’t suspect: their own ranks.

Labelled as a tech geek throughout high school, Warren went on to refine his skills in technical school. Ignored by women throughout his life and feeling resentment towards the entire sex, Warren decides to build himself a robot girlfriend; that said, while functional in the bedroom and compliant with all of his demands, Warren is unable to feel affection for his creation, since it lacks a soul. When he (somehow) manages to get an actual human girlfriend, he leaves his machine to run rampant. He ultimately turns to Buffy and her friends to stop his robot girlfriend, April, from destroying him and everything else in her path; while they manage to stop April, the machine effectively breaks up Warren and Katrina by revealing that Warren is, in fact, a creep so reliant upon being sexually gratified that he’d build a robot woman without a will of her own to service him whenever he wants.

In Season Six, he decides to have his revenge by becoming a supervillain and taking over Sunnydale with the assistance of Jonathan and Andrew. Most of his schemes are pathetic until he comes up with a cerebral dampener that makes women more pliable to his will. He uses this device to very nearly rape Katrina. However, when the device malfunctions and a restored Katrina threatens to call the cops, Warren trips her and causes her to break her neck. Unlike his lackeys, Warren feels no remorse for his murders and forces his fellow Trio members to cover up his crimes. Mears eventually tries to make his villainous break by stealing some magical orbs of super-strength and invincibility, magical objects so powerful that he can fight toe to toe with the Slayer. Thanks to Jonathan’s intervention, Buffy manages to put a stop to Warren’s charade, but the slimeball escapes. In his next appearance, he stoops to a new low and guns Buffy down, accidentally shooting and killing Tara in the crossfire. By the time Dark Willow tracks Warren down, tortures him, and strips him down to his flesh, the audience genuinely wishes for this misogynistic madman to pay.

It’s essential that we establish this head on: Warren is always a bad person throughout Buffy the Vamprie Slayer. There are a disturbing number of Buffy fans who only think Warren goes bad after he tries to rape Katrina. Here’s the thing: Warren’s actions are but the byproduct of an ideology of entitlement and misogyny. Warren thinks himself entitled not only to female companionship, but to companionship on his terms and lopsided in his favor. To this end, he is willing to do anything: murder, rape, or, most interesting of all, construct his own female companion. While the issue of gendered robots is a can of worms in and of itself, Warren’s decision to make April a subservient, brainless clod is disturbing in and of itself; this is, implicitly, what he thinks all women should be to him. Of course, Warren is entirely wrong: not only is he not entitled to a woman’s subservience, he’s not entitled to a woman’s companionship whatsoever. No man is. The only transition Warren truly makes is that from “bad person” to “complete monster.”

For male Buffyverse fans, Warren is an unpleasant dose of reality inserted into Buffy’s sixth season. Sure, most male geeks and nerds don’t go around raping and killing people, but they do operate within a culture that absolves itself of the “trappings” of misogyny while still embracing its core. People like Warren think the only misogynists in the world are the jocks who openly beat their significant others and lord their physical superiority out over others. Warren’s belief, implicitly, is that if he rejects jock culture, then he rejects sexist culture. Compared to the jocks who pick on him, he’s a “nice guy.” All the while, he’s content to play his video games wherein he gets to rescue the princess as a reward for winning the level, read the comic books where female deuteragonists die for the sake of developing a male protagonist, and watch the sci-fi films in which every guy gets a girl in the end, waiting for the magical day when reality gifts him with a woman to solve all of his inconveniences. When reality pops Warren’s bubble and reveals to him that women aren’t toys to be played with, he lashes out, hides himself within his own world, and tries to defend his masculinity with weapons and violence. He’s a shell of a human being who, instead of taking on the responsibility of living in the real world and respecting women as equals, actively chooses to become the monster he should implicitly reject. Warren truly is a rancid, extreme reflection of the male nerd culture that surrounded Joss Whedon during the years prior to the release of Buffy’s sixth season and still plagues him to this day.

Warren’s deeds, motivations, and analogy all score him major points on the villainy scale. Adam Busch even offers the character a delightfully slimy performance; he could have been cast as Billy Blim on Angel and I wouldn’t have blinked. The only truly lacking component to Warren actually comes from outside of his character: he lacks a proper opponent. Xander, a character who grows to overcome his childhood sexism and respect those around him, would have been the perfect member of the Scooby gang to take Warren down and serve as his enemy throughout the season; after all, Xander is construction worker – a career often stereotyped for misogynistic behavior. Using them as opposites would have set up both a delightful contrast and a defiance of traditional narrative conventions. Sadly, though, Warren’s defeat at the hands of Dark Willow merely serves to highlight the evils of a more powerful Big Bad rather than develop Warren’s themes. Still, there’s never been a more rightfully loathed villain in the Buffyverse than Warren. We wanted him to be hurt for killing Willow… even if we didn’t necessarily want him skinned alive by one of our favorite heroes.