Tweet
Not one of my best...but my first.
Disclaimer: Neither Buffy nor any of the other characters she's talking about are owned by me. They are the property of Fox Studios and Joss Whedon. This fictional work is for entertainment purposes only.
{I tend to take unorthodox positions. This brief work contains several. Buffy purists who might take offense should not read this.
oke: }
(Buffy likes to make speeches. This memorial speech was given four days after the closing of the hellmouth in a motel room ten miles out of Sunnydale.)
We're here tonight to honor the demons.
I'm guessing some of you won't be comfortable with that. I'm not comfortable with that. I don't like to think of it. It's true that most of the time we knew her, Anya was human. It's true that in the last year of his...life, Spike regained his soul. I don't mean to pass that over in any way.
But still we have to recognize the uncomfortable truth. That our friend Anya spent twelve hundred years as a vengeance demon, granting wishes that wreaked havoc on the lives of everyone who met her. That our friend Spike fed on human blood for over a hundred years. And yet we cared for them...respected them...loved them.
Anya stood by our side for four years. She fought with us against Adam. Her ideas gave us hope against Glory. She stood up to Willow and helped us try to bring her back, at a time when, by all normal reckoning, she ought to have stood against us on Willow's side. And, just four days ago, she gave her life defending the world, and a friend...another former enemy who's still here with us today, because she saw the good in him.
Spike's an even harder case to deal with. No sooner had he come to Sunnydale than he tried to kill us all. And yet, even without a soul, he stood with us. Without him, Acathla would have swallowed the world. Without him, Adam's army would have conquered everything. Without Spike, Glory would have shredded the dimensional boundaries and destroyed us. And without him, the hellmouth would be open and the world overrun by ubervamps. We're all in more debt to him than we can hope to repay. We're so in debt we want to make excuses. We want to say that he only wanted to save his meal ticket. We want to say it was a chip controlling him. Well, it's true, every word.
But let's be honest here. Are we going to claim, even for a moment, that somehow our motives in saving the world were pure and noble? We live here. Our friends, our family live here. We saved our own skins, people. Absolutely, yes, it was more than that. So prove it. Prove that we're the unselfish ones. I was the Slayer, people. The one and only. And the first time the world was on the line, I walked away. I was ready to let the world burn rather than put my life at risk. Did I learn anything? Four years later, I crossed that line again. I was ready to let hell overrun the world just so I could say I didn't kill my sister--even knowing she would die anyway.
I just learned, weeks ago, that all the powers that make me and every Slayer special come from a demon spirit forced into an innocent girl when the world was young. I'm sitting here with a mystical ball of energy that nearly destroyed the world and three practicioners of the black arts. The only one of us who's remotely normal--I think--draws demon women to him like iron filings to a magnet. Who are we kidding, people? Who do we think we're fooling? What makes us better?
I'll tell you what makes us better. It's got nothing to do with what we are. It's got nothing to do with whether we're demons or humans. It's got nothing to do with a soul we have or don't have. It's what we do. It's how we live. It's the lives we save. So no more illusions, people. No more colored glasses.
Spike and Anya--beyond all the huge else they've done--force us to be honest with ourselves. That's their legacy. The truth. And now they're gone. We could forget what they taught us. Only thing is, I'm living proof they might be back. So let's not make them mad. Remember them. Learn from them. Honor them.
Honor our demons.
Disclaimer: Neither Buffy nor any of the other characters she's talking about are owned by me. They are the property of Fox Studios and Joss Whedon. This fictional work is for entertainment purposes only.
{I tend to take unorthodox positions. This brief work contains several. Buffy purists who might take offense should not read this.
oke: }(Buffy likes to make speeches. This memorial speech was given four days after the closing of the hellmouth in a motel room ten miles out of Sunnydale.)
We're here tonight to honor the demons.
I'm guessing some of you won't be comfortable with that. I'm not comfortable with that. I don't like to think of it. It's true that most of the time we knew her, Anya was human. It's true that in the last year of his...life, Spike regained his soul. I don't mean to pass that over in any way.
But still we have to recognize the uncomfortable truth. That our friend Anya spent twelve hundred years as a vengeance demon, granting wishes that wreaked havoc on the lives of everyone who met her. That our friend Spike fed on human blood for over a hundred years. And yet we cared for them...respected them...loved them.
Anya stood by our side for four years. She fought with us against Adam. Her ideas gave us hope against Glory. She stood up to Willow and helped us try to bring her back, at a time when, by all normal reckoning, she ought to have stood against us on Willow's side. And, just four days ago, she gave her life defending the world, and a friend...another former enemy who's still here with us today, because she saw the good in him.
Spike's an even harder case to deal with. No sooner had he come to Sunnydale than he tried to kill us all. And yet, even without a soul, he stood with us. Without him, Acathla would have swallowed the world. Without him, Adam's army would have conquered everything. Without Spike, Glory would have shredded the dimensional boundaries and destroyed us. And without him, the hellmouth would be open and the world overrun by ubervamps. We're all in more debt to him than we can hope to repay. We're so in debt we want to make excuses. We want to say that he only wanted to save his meal ticket. We want to say it was a chip controlling him. Well, it's true, every word.
But let's be honest here. Are we going to claim, even for a moment, that somehow our motives in saving the world were pure and noble? We live here. Our friends, our family live here. We saved our own skins, people. Absolutely, yes, it was more than that. So prove it. Prove that we're the unselfish ones. I was the Slayer, people. The one and only. And the first time the world was on the line, I walked away. I was ready to let the world burn rather than put my life at risk. Did I learn anything? Four years later, I crossed that line again. I was ready to let hell overrun the world just so I could say I didn't kill my sister--even knowing she would die anyway.
I just learned, weeks ago, that all the powers that make me and every Slayer special come from a demon spirit forced into an innocent girl when the world was young. I'm sitting here with a mystical ball of energy that nearly destroyed the world and three practicioners of the black arts. The only one of us who's remotely normal--I think--draws demon women to him like iron filings to a magnet. Who are we kidding, people? Who do we think we're fooling? What makes us better?
I'll tell you what makes us better. It's got nothing to do with what we are. It's got nothing to do with whether we're demons or humans. It's got nothing to do with a soul we have or don't have. It's what we do. It's how we live. It's the lives we save. So no more illusions, people. No more colored glasses.
Spike and Anya--beyond all the huge else they've done--force us to be honest with ourselves. That's their legacy. The truth. And now they're gone. We could forget what they taught us. Only thing is, I'm living proof they might be back. So let's not make them mad. Remember them. Learn from them. Honor them.
Honor our demons.
Comment