itsnotmymind | (Reply)

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I'm not being clear... what I mean is, I get the impression that when Buffy thinks about things like this, it's more or less "I did a bad thing, and that makes me a bad person. If I want to be a good person, I must never do that thing again." And maybe sometimes she gets as far as "I did that bad thing because I was depressed." But she wouldn't really ask herself "OK, I did a bad thing because I was depressed. Why did I do that particular bad thing rather than any of the other bad things I might have done? Why do I feel bad about this thing I did, but not about that other thing, which some people might argue was actually a worse thing to do?" She seems to me like someone who's intensely critical of herself, but not analytical, if that makes any sense? So she often ends up repeating the behavior she feels bad about, because she doesn't understand what's driving her to do it in the first place.

And one of the reasons she doesn't analyze is because she IS so self-critical; thinking about it makes her feel so guilty and down on herself that in order to function she just represses everything.

I think her conversation with Holden was probably the deepest self-examination she ever did, and yet there's some contradiction in there; she tells him she thinks she's the worst, but only an episode or two later she tells Spike that she doesn't hate herself any longer. Did something change between those two episodes? Was she lying to Spike? I don't think she way lying to Holden -- she had no reason to, since she was going to kill him. Did the writers just not communicate?

I don't know. Buffy is complicated.