seanessay.com a music video essay
It’s been over 20 years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired, but if you still plan to finally watch it someday then be warned: This essay is like the forward to an English literature book such as Anna Karenina—revealing Anya’s story.
I wrote it intending that, as Buffy says in the musical episode, through the fourth wall, “you can sing along” to this essay by linking to each song as it appears.
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I know my own “Anya…” Tonight I’m thinking sadly of the fictional Anya. She always wears nice, bright cotton clothing. Never hiding behind clothing too-sexy, or clothing too-big, or clothing matte black. If you have come across Anya on Youtube, it’s probably for her tearful monologue from trying to understand the death of Joyce. Of course Anya is troubled: Although born human, for eleven hundred years Anya has been a vengeance demon. After so long she has forgotten mortality, has even forgotten her last name. How innocent she is.
Anya’s character arc, I now realize, represents certain addicts: Not everybody makes it.
While Anya would not have called herself a feminist, for over a thousand years she protected women, granting their wishes for something bad to happen to their powerful abusers. Heads chopped off? Entrails pulled out? A vengeance demon can do that for you.
Anya has a queer flaw: a fear of bunnies. For example, she’s tearfully upset one day when “some twisted person” left a stuffed bunny in the old basement. One Halloween, when her friends dress scary, Anya costumes in a baggy onesie as a rabbit, complete with big ears. A friend sits beside her: “That’s scary?” She answers softly, “It’s scary to me.”
There is a famous Buffy musical episode: Something has ensorcelled everyone into singing, and while the Scooby Gang is theorizing about who or what that “something” is, Anya rocks out, “Bunnies! It must be bunnies!” Funny… but tragic for Anya.
What Anya “lame-ass made up maiden name” Harris wants is what any young lady could want: to settle down with the love of a good man, like Mr. Harris. She is happy to be engaged to her live-in lover. They sing about their relationship having things that “I’ll never tell.”
To understand Anya, I think of alcoholics. Many of the addicts in Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, believe they are only one day away from relapsing into the “stinkin’ thinkin’” that leads to the “drinkin’.” Relapsing into denial and ego. As I understand it, addicts don’t go straight until they “admit” things. Every issue of the monthly AA Grapevine begins with a person’s story of the drinking years, presumably to remind herself of “how it was.” So she won’t forget her insanity.
But Anya has forgotten. As for Buffy and the others, nobody around Anya notices how queer her innocence is, nor grasps the pathology of her fear of bunnies. Nor did I. A brief scene from long ago shows Anya as human, back in her Viking days, a scene where bunny rabbits rested and gently hopped on the shelves of her thatched cottage: She picked one up and kissed it. I thought quietly: “That doesn’t make sense.” But moving pictures didn’t allow me time for reflection…
How can a person have been a vengeance killer, and then not have Remorse, not take Responsibility, and not make Repairs, that is to say, atone?
Atonement is what addicts in AA call “making amends.” The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer understands this: A former slayer named Faith has recovered from her egotistic darkness. She’s in prison. Even though Faith has the super-power to escape, she won’t. Faith accepts “doing time” as part of accepting her responsibility. Supporting her is a vampire named Angel, with a soul, who is himself atoning for his previous centuries of soulless evil. He is, in Faith’s words, her “sponsor,” meaning: the AA person further along “in recovery.” He helps her stay on the path.
Anya is different from Faith. She doesn’t go “straight and clean,” not really. She stays in denial, untouched by her centuries of vengeance. How? By fleeing into innocence. The terrifying bunnies? Here’s what I understand at last: They are her distraction, her defence— Better to fear bunnies than to face reality.
The Buffy show is known for being a metaphor for how people in real life may be monstrous. As for the Anya metaphor, I know her.
Anya loses her lover—from her gut she cries to heaven. Her friends try to sympathize, but none of them have walked in her darkness. None know how to be her sponsor— and Anya doesn’t realize she needs one.
Anya relapses. Vengeance. She just can’t stop herself from reaching for a sword and killing abusers again… and so someone else has to stop her— her dear friend Buffy, who has to grimly grab her own sword and head out the door. They meet. They fight—And in a flashback to the musical episode, a lost girl is so happy…
I’m sad how it took me so long to understand how Anya’s bunnies related to my own dear Anya, surviving by defending herself against knowing her childhood abuse—although I know she would half want me to forget how she did so: Don’t look at me! Don’t know!… Tonight I shall pour a glass of red wine… and grieve for her and me and all the broken children.
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Sean Crawford
East of Eden
January 2021
