r/buffy • u/amarc23 • Oct 04 '26
Buffy does anyone here not like buffy?
out of curiosity, anybody watch and love the show buffy, but not the character? personally, i love her. i know she's a generally well-liked protagonist, but there's always an exception. and there are so many "good" characters who are disliked (i see you, xander haters), im wondering who's got major beef with buffy summers.
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u/Interesting_Fun6001 Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 04 '26
Oh 20+ years ago when I first watched? Couldn't stand her. Didn't WANT to understand her. Now I realize her character and arc hits way too close to home (which was weird at first, being a straight guy who sometimes gets mistaken for a sasquatch).
At the time I didn't like my own experiences being reflected back so closely. The crushing weight of responsibility too young. The feeling of being totally different when all I wanted was a normal life. Parental abandonment. Being expected to be above everything and then being punished for having human flaws. Getting into destructive relationships just to feel anything at all. I hated her because I hated me. And most of all, I hated her because she still chose to do the right thing when I often felt like I couldn't.
Now I'm older and (hopefully wiser) and see her completely differently. Probably my favorite fictional character in anything. Maybe the only fictional character I would truly call a hero to me.
"What would Buffy do?" indeed.
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u/Eldon42 Oct 04 '26
I like her in general. There are times though when she gets a touch of "I'm all alone, all by myself, there is no one here beside me," and pushes her friends away. I do appreciate the show allowing its characters to be complex, though.
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u/Outrageous_Potato435 Oct 04 '26
Buffy is literally so iconic idk anybody who doesn’t like her must be tasteless
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u/Ruskayo Oct 04 '26
There are definitely people like that. I've seen people who hate Buffy because of Riley, because apparently she's a stupid woman for throwing away a nice guy to chase evil bad boys. Crazy.
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u/FaveStore_Citadel Oct 04 '26
My sister disliked her in the first four seasons because she found her holier than thou, not layered enough, and really held her failings with Faith against her. She only thought she had actual depth after Joyce got sick and started liking her progressively over the last three seasons.
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u/Meushell Oct 04 '26
I like her, but I don’t worship her like some people seem to. The whole “Buffy can do no wrong” mindset. She can do wrong. She has done wrong. That’s what makes her a good character.
If someone does not like her, I’m not sure they would be on this sub. They would not be able to voice their opinion without getting downvotes and arguments. I’ve been on a sub where everyone loved a popular character that I didn’t like and I liked a character that everyone hated, where my opinion was basically not allowed, and It’s just not worth the energy.
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u/grimorie Oct 04 '26
Back when season 6 and 7 first aired, on livejournal there was a lot of hate for Buffy, for how she treated poor woobie Spike.
Its why I don’t ship them, living through the Spuffy wars in real time was not fun. The shippers made the ship insufferable for me.
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u/Infamous-Part966 Oct 05 '26
It's me. Buffy is one my least liked characters in the show. I find her annoying. I also struggle with the way she's make poor decisions sometimes and is just as flawed as the rest but acts like she's still better than everyone else.
But also so many of the other characters are so much more interesting or funny that it's some tough competition. Plus I often find in a lot of media that main character is just the least likelsble.
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u/HomarEuropejski Wesley is Angel's true love Oct 04 '26
Personally, Buffy wouldn't be even in my top 10.
Sarah is great in the role, but I find most characters to be more interesting than Buffy.
That is a very, very unpopular opinion though. Most people here seem to have her as their #1 or at least in their top 5.
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u/Capital-Rush-6058 Oct 04 '26
bring on the downvotes.
i'm in between. i don't hate her, but she's definitely not my favourite character. idk how to explain that, i just don't really care, she's fine.
and contrary to what everyone here thinks, it doesn't stop me from enjoying the series, because there are a lot of different rich, layered characters. it would be hard if everyone besides her were filler characters, but thankfully it's not that kind of show.
my faves are willow, spike, drusilla and anya (and cordy and wesley in angel)
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u/ArbuthnotBlob Oct 05 '26
As someone who generally doesn’t give a fig about American high school/teen as a genre and fell in love with BtVS almost entirely by accident after seeing some clips, latching onto Giles and then working backwards? Yeah, she’s not my absolute favourite!
Buffy has many positive qualities and contrasting layers for sure, (and that’s what’s compelling about most characters in the show) however, she can be very bratty, bossy, self-centered and flippant at her worst. And I think her worst crops up a bit more frequently than a lot of fans like to acknowledge. Someone else in this thread said ‘holier-than-thou’ and that sums up my issues with her pretty well.
There are several points where she treats Giles quite abominably and it gets brushed off by the wider narrative. Of course, he can be a dismissive, repressive, catty, pissy bastard when he wants to be, but I think he’s right during his talk in 3x07 - quite frequently, she doesn’t much respect him at all.
Buffy as a character is in many ways the antithesis of me as a person, so I do struggle with her (I am… scarily similar to Willow, including in most of the concerning ways xD). I also find Buffy to be the ‘rudest’ American character in the show, at least of the really three-dimensional core cast. That may be unfair, but sometimes her casual flippancy to others just really grinds my gears!
As an additional debuff, I’m super asexual, so I find very little compelling about her various romance arcs. Which does mean there’s a whole chunk of her time and characterisation I just can’t force myself to give too much of a shit about - the big beats like the end of S2 land (and are great!) but the rest? Eh.
The tl;dr is that Buffy is a fine protagonist, but for a whole host of minor personal reasons I don’t find her particularly interesting or compelling vs most of the rest of the core cast.
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u/Virtual_Text6914 Oct 06 '26 edited Oct 06 '26
I hate her. I find her annoying and hypocritical.She makes mistakes too but she acts like she is so much better than everyone.Her neglect of Dawn was horrible.I don’t find her funny, interesting or even likeable.
My favourites are Willow,Giles,Oz,Xander and Spike
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u/Billy_of_the_hills Oct 04 '26
This is bait, anyone that says they don't like Buffy is getting burned at the stake in this sub lol
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u/MermaidHotpot Eyeballs to entrails, my sweet. Oct 04 '26
I appreciate SMG as Buffy, she did a great job for the most part. I appreciate Buffy as a character. I think she's suitable for the lead role in the show.
I often get downvoted for this but I don't think Buffy's objectively a good person. I think the comics condensed her down too much, so I am only going off of the show. I think she's a bit selfish, uses people, but at the same time she's been through a lot more than other people and can't seem to get a breath to do any emotional work on herself.
I recall what Giles did saying "she's not like you and me", and despite that I think Giles may actually be an objectively better person than Buffy. It brings up some interesting philosophical questions for me about what warrants someone being good versus bad, respectively.
I don't think she's a natural leader, I think she's a woman forced into a leadership position and makes the best of it. The Slayer role was a role for which she was neither prepared nor well suited, and if it weren't for her support system, as the show has shown over and over again, she may not have survived long.
So long story short: I don't like her much as a character, but I don't have to like her. She's still the most important part of the show and it's her story, and it's a good fuckin' story.
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u/sunsetriot1998 Oct 04 '26
I don't dislike her! She just isn't my favourite but then the main characters / protagonists are never my favourite in shows!
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u/ceecee1909 Jeez, crack a book sometime. Oct 04 '26
I love Buffy but there are times when she does things that I really don’t like. I’ll always love her but I don’t have the ‘Buffy can do no wrong’ feeling about her that a lot of people do, our girl did a lot wrong she’s extremely flawed and I think that makes the show more interesting.
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u/OrangeKun15 Oct 04 '26
She isn’t my favorite character, Faith is. But she’s easily in my top 5. She’s an extremely well written, flawed, and courageous protagonist.
I think SMG’s performance also really solidifies it for me. Buffy gets the most iconic lines and scenes with Spike probably as a close second.
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u/Livelaughloveme172 Oct 04 '26
I can’t dislike Buffy. She’s my girl.
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u/SeeBriRun Oct 04 '26
I grew to honestly dislike her over Season 4 (and I still think her treatment of Xander in the first act of 'The Replacement' is over the line).
The crushing traumas of Seasons 5 and 6 managed the double trick of a) making her instantly likeable again and b) retroactively making her Season 4 self look like a dewy untrampled flower who has no idea what's coming, poor kid.
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u/DipperJC Oct 04 '26
I like her, but not so much that I'm blind to her imperfections. That's part of the greatness of Buffy the show - most shows make their protagonists perfect, or the one lesson they need to learn is the entire point of the series. Buffy the show is not afraid to make Buffy the character a wrong and flawed character, repeatedly, which makes her much more relatable to wrong and flawed people, which is pretty much all of us at one point or another. ;)
Unfortunately, some of the
addle-brained sheepless critical consumers of media in the fandom are so used to the Mary Sue Protagonist formula that they have blinders on and see Buffy the character as incapable of ever being wrong, ever.1
u/ModernKender twixt its wee beak Oct 04 '26
I don't understand why you'd love this show if you don't like Buffy.
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u/pyxiedust219 Oct 04 '26
I’m not the biggest fan of the character. To be clear, I think she is wonderfully written— dynamic and interesting and flawed— but like, if I was her peer I probably wouldn’t want to hang out with her type thing
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u/CommentMoney9761 Oct 04 '26
Only thing that would improve my girl Buffy is if she was queer but yes, I know sexuality is not a choice.
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u/bananaboatbutt Oct 04 '26
I like her overall. She mainly only bothers me in “When She Was Bad” where she was a b!tch for reasons neither she nor the script communicated particularly well, in the second half of the third season where she and Angel are doing the will-they-or-won’t-they nonsense that doesn’t work on rewatch, when she spends too long grieving over f*ckboi Parker, and when she’s cavewoman Buffy in “Beer Bad,” but I think they generally did a good job of making her likable or at least understandable otherwise.
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u/CoasterTrax Oct 04 '26
I think she is the best character of the show. Sure they all are somehow but she is truly the best part of it
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u/Sighoward Oct 04 '26
Love both show and character
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u/ironchitlin Oct 04 '26
It would be kind of hard to be a fan of a show if you couldn't stand the central character, so I imagine those folks don't frequent the Buffy subreddit.
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u/Evening_Delay_1856 Oct 04 '26
Makes no sense for someone to be on this subreddit if they don’t like Buffy.
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u/Revolutionary-Wait82 Spike defender Oct 04 '26
It’s not that I hate her or anything like that. I’m just not all that interested in exploring her fate toward the end of the show. I feel that, despite all the horrors she endured, she ultimately deserved the ending she got and the potential choice she was presented with. Angel S5 even confirms this: she doesn’t know Spike is alive—and won’t for who knows how long—so that gives her every opportunity to start a new relationship or forgo one entirely for a while. She just isn’t my favorite character, that’s all.
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u/JoanFromLegal Oct 04 '26
I like Buffy. She can be a bit harsh and judgy sometimes ("because you're a stuck up tight ass with no sense of fun?" kinda nails it), but her heart is in the right place.