The Buffyverse Character Countdown (#6)

#6.

Hero: Anya Jenkins (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Seasons 3-7)

Anya’s the best. Good night, everybody!

OK… I guess maybe I can do more analysis than that.

If I were ranking the characters of the Buffyverse purely on the basis of personal preference, Anya would make my top three, no questions asked. She’s a testament to the principle that comic relief in dramatic television should never be arbitrary; it should instead enhance the themes of the overarching narrative. There is no other character in the entire Buffyverse who is as consistently fun as Anya, yet her personal arc and her thematic resonance is such that she's just as impactful as she is enjoyable. She is also one of the rare side characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer who completely transcend the comic relief role and earn main character status; unlike Tara, Riley, and Oz, all of whom occasionally feel shoe-horned into the main cast as “Buffy/Willow’s significant other,” Anya is more than just “Xander’s girlfriend.” Were Xander to have departed for the show for any reason, Anya would be able to remain part of the main cast without losing her essence. She’s a delightful character from top to bottom.

After losing her vengeance demon powers for good after the events of “The Wish” and “Doppelgangland,” Anya finds herself in dire straits. Not only is she rendered mortal and trapped in a human body, but she is also trapped in a world where she barely remembers the rules of humanity… and she’s failing high school math. Left without a date to the prom, she ends up asking Xander out, even developing slight feelings for him thanks to him actually being decent to her during the event. It’s been so long that Anya has received any kindness from anyone that this one moment hooks her into Xander’s life. She tries to free herself from the emotional bond, but she can think of only one way to end it all: having sex. Needless to say, Anya’s attempt to purge Xander from her system with a one-night stand goes about as well as Xander’s attempts to date Buffy in Season One. The two don’t get along particularly well at first, viewing each other mostly as a physical release from a stressful life, until the episode, “Hush,” in which Xander openly punches Spike in the face when he perceives that he has killed Anya. Thereafter, their relationship gets stronger and stronger, from them dating regularly, co-habitating, to becoming the most level-headed couple in the entire Buffyverse. Indeed, Xander even asks to marry Anya, and she says yes: something neither Giles and Jenny, Willow and Tara, or Wesley and Fred can claim.

Yet Anya is in no way limited by her relationship with Xander. She’s able to forge unique relationships with each member of the Scooby Gang that would have formed whether or not she was dating Xander in the first place. Despite her being a former demon, Anya gets along remarkably well with Buffy; the two only ever come to odds during the events of “Selfless,” one of Anya’s villainous episodes. She’s the only member of the Scooby Gang who shows any tolerance for the chipped Spike. She and Giles have a great student-mentor relationship, as he instructs her in the technicalities of adult living and makes her the manager of the Magic Box in Season Five. She’s one of Dawn’s primary mentors and caretakers. Most fun of all is her antagonistic relationship with Willow, who deems Anya to be a selfish, evil being (more likely than not because of her own protectiveness of Xander). At the very least, Willow is frustrated that Anya is utterly unable to pick up the rules of human empathy in a timely fashion and needs to be re-instructed entirely as to how one must live in human society. Of course, Anya fires back with her own blunt communication and sarcasm, never giving Willow an inch and refusing to be bullied into being anyone other than herself.

And what a self Anya possesses. For an ex-demon trying to learn how to be human again, Anya has enough delightful quirks and tics to fill up the character sheet of anyone else in the series. She’s terrified of bunnies. She prefers to run from confrontations as opposed to face them directly. She has apparently had sex with Vikings in the past (and, oddly enough, finds Xander comparable to them). She’s a second-wave feminist. And, of course, she loves capitalism, even performing the “Dance of Capitalist Superiority” before closing the Magic Box everyday (it’s basically a combination of the monkey, the Gangnam style, and the dougie all while holding large wads of $20 bills). Had Anya first come onto the air today, the Internet would have broken with the sheer number of memes to be made from her lines.

More importantly, though, all of Anya’s quirks have a narrative function. On one level, they’re all part of the process of a demon trying to become human and embrace the rules of society. It makes sense that Anya’s dialogue and mannerisms are blunt and often insensitive to human social parlance. This conflict comes to a head in “The Body,” in which Anya delivers quite possibly the most heart-breaking speech in Buffy the Vampire Slayer history: being trapped with horrendous grief yet not knowing either the proper way to express it or even understanding how it comes to be. Yet even Anya’s individual tics even have a more complex function. Anya’s love for capitalism – a system of fixed exchange – connects particularly strongly to her former demon powers, in which she constantly made trades and deals. Thus, Anya’s loving money isn’t just a silly quality that we like to laugh at; it’s a connection she’s making to her past life.

We also recognize that Anya, though human, can be dangerous and volatile in her own right. She might not be the most powerful member of the Scooby Gang, but she can more than hold her own in a fight, being a competent spell caster and a half-decent sword wielder. Far more foreboding, though, is what happens when her emotions are left to run riot. When Xander leaves Anya at the altar in Season Six, she seeks out her old boss, D’Hoffryn, and gets her vengeance demon powers back. While in a state of disarray, she ends up having sex with a soulless Spike and alienating herself with Xander completely. She’s so willing to prove herself as a vengeance demon once again that she commits the villainous acts of the episode, “Selfless”; though she repents and sacrifices her powers, her immortality, and even her best friend, Halfrek, in the name of doing the right thing, it’s terrifying to think that our cute comic relief character could become so hardcore so quickly.

Beyond her strict character arc, Anya serves a symbolic function in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She first takes prominence in Seasons Four and Five, the seasons in which Buffy herself is striving to become a functioning adult in addition to being a functional Slayer. Buffy must negotiate the rules of university, of co-habitation, of sisterly responsibility, in addition to the normal rules of vampire slaying, just as Anya is re-learning the rules of human social interaction. Anya is the living avatar of those growing pains. She might be hilarious, but she embodies a very real and difficult struggle.

Every moment of hero Anya in the series is perfect, from her first asking Xander out to the prom to her participation in the final battle. To make her character that much more fascinating, Anya even sacrifices her life in “Chosen” to save Andrew from one of the First Evil’s bringers. Her death is abrupt and anti-climactic, but it does well to highlight the brutal, insensitive nature of all-out war – this is, after all, the theme of Season Seven. Everything about her character works. Honestly, it’s only because the top five heroes are indisputably the most important heroes in the entire Buffyverse that Anya misses out on this list, but she manages to beat out everyone else purely on the basis of how incredible she is. Feel free to dance the “Dance of Capitalist Superiority” in commemoration of such a wonderful character.

 

   

Villain: Drusilla (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2, Season 5 - "Crush",  Angel Season 2)

One television villain trope I personally cannot stand is the “token psychopath.” You know these guys: the new Big Bad who’s different from the last several simply because he or she is insane, as if insanity came in only one breed. Heck, Buffy the Vampire Slayer even has a few of these characters who show up as “monsters of the week”: Zachary Kralik (“Helpless”), Marcus (“In the Dark”), Dana (“Damage”). However, there’s one Buffyverse psychopath who breaks the mold entirely: Drusilla. Dru is so many shades of screwed up that she cannot be easily classified as one type of psychopath or another, but she’s got more personality and flair than any “token” psychopath. She’s got a perfect backstory to justify her twisted nature, a vicious streak sufficient to murder several crucial characters, and a powerhouse performance from Juliet Landau to make her one of the most memorable antagonists in the series, even if her achievements within the narrative aren’t the most significant.

Drusilla stands as a living testimony to the evil of Angelus, the only member of the House of Aurelius more psychotic than she is. Once a girl destined for sainthood, Drusilla had the gift of prophesying the future. However, the young girl wasn’t quite good at knowing when her powers were being manipulated by others for sinister purposes. In particular, Angelus sought to systematically kill everyone around Drusilla, from innocent bystanders, to her family, to an entire convent of nuns who took her in. All of the murder and torture that Angelus put Drusilla through left her a babbling lunatic unable to make sense of the present or the future. It’s in that moment that Angelus killed and sired Drusilla, producing one of the most dangerous vampires on record. While Darla used seduction and Angelus used brute force, Drusilla used psychological warfare and hypnosis to lure dozens of innocent victims into her fangs. One of these so happened to be a young poet named William, who would later take on the name of Spike. The two would eventually break off from Darla and the recently ensouled Angel to form their own villainous group.

Drusilla’s first appearance on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most cryptic entrances in the series. According to Spike, Drusilla is weakened when she appears, but she still has an ominous effect on all the vampires around her: no one wants to stay close to this vampire for very long, with the sole exception of Spike. In the first half of Season Two, she doesn’t do much more than provide cryptic exposition, but the roles reverse in “What’s My Line,” as Spike manages to use Angel’s blood to restore Drusilla to full power at the cost of his own mobility. As opposed to Spike, whose plans mostly involve straightforward attacks against the Slayer, Drusilla tends towards activating demons more powerful than herself, treating them as tools for her amusement as she pits them against the Slayer like a vampire puppetmaster. Drusilla swiftly becomes the lackey of Angelus once he comes back to full vampiric evil, but her own menace holds true. Angelus might be the straightforward threat, but Drusilla is the one to be feared.

In “Becoming, Part 2,” we get to see the full extent of Drusilla’s evil. She singlehandedly defeats and murders Kendra, using her powers of hypnotism and her lethally sharp fingernails to tear open the second Slayer’s throat. She then manages to draw out information from Giles by taking on Jenny’s appearance that Angelus was unable to do himself. Much like a viper, she prefers to catch her prey off-guard rather than attack in a linear path. Indeed, if it weren’t for Spike’s interceding and taking Drusilla away from Angelus himself, Drusilla likely would have been able to kill Buffy as she tried to defeat Angelus.

Even after her fall from grace as a Big Bad, Drusilla remains a threatening vampire at large. She’s called in to re-sire Darla in Angel’s second season, even teaming up with her grandsire to cause a good amount of damage to the Los Angeles population before she gets set on fire and driven away. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s concurrent fifth season, she returns to try and recruit Spike for the reforming Order of Aurelius, murdering dozens of people during her stint in town. Of course, this episode serves more to develop Spike’s newfound anti-hero status, but Drusilla’s insanity proves fun while it lasts. Plus, unlike every other major villain in the show, she gets away pretty much scot free for her actions. She’s so unpredictable and sly, in spite of her insanity, that she’s just too hard to stop.

The best element of Drusilla’s character, though, is definitely Juliet Landau’s performance. Quite arguably the single best performance in the entire Buffyverse, Landau has to capture the essence of a character who is existing at multiple moments in time and who has undergone more torment than any other character in the series. She communicates this brilliantly, with off-color glances, non-sequitur babbling, and often infantile whispering and hissing. She's practically a vampiric Cassandra, drawing out the classical allusion that's hiding within the subtext. She brings to life the purely animalistic elements of vampires in the series, effectively distilling everything we know about vampires into one character. It’s a powerhouse work, and she steals every scene she’s in, despite her sharing those scenes with other very formidable antagonists.

It was honestly a hard choice between Drusilla and the #5 entry as to who would rank in the sixth spot. On the one hand, Drusilla carries the insanity schtick way better than the villain ranked next on the list, and she did set the template for deranged villains in the Buffyverse. That said, the next villain’s greater accomplishments and threat level were lightyears ahead of Drusilla’s, and the villain also had a greater connection to Buffy herself. Ultimately, I felt the villainous tropes between these two characters were distinct enough such that the #5 villain’s qualities won the day.  Yet Drusilla’s place in the Buffyverse rogues’ gallery is pretty much set in stone: she’s as twisted as villains on this list get.