FIC: Desperate Choices or Why Buffy Robs Banks

[angearia]

Title:  Desperate Choices
Summary:  Buffy robbed a bank in Season 8?  What could possibly lead her to do such a thing?  Set during the summer after Chosen.
Spoilers:  None, except you know that bank?  Yeah, Buffy robbed it.
Warning:  None.
Word count: 2,151
Rating:  G
A/N:  When Dawn left for college was never made clear in the time between Season 7 and

Comments

[angearia]

Thanks for reading, hon!

[rahirah]

And sadly, it would have taken like, three flashback panels to establish something like that...

[angearia]

Thanks for reading! Does it justify it? Or at least explain it enough? It makes sense for me. This is my natural conclusion for why Buffy would rob a bank based on what she spends the money on and her protective, self-sacrificing nature. She always shoulders too much responsibility.

[rahirah]

It makes perfect sense. Now, if we can only explain how she made the leap from electric bills to helicopters and Scottish castles... *g*

[angearia]

Haha I'm never gonna be done explaining possibilities through fic, am I? :)

[angearia]

Thanks! Glad you liked it. :)

[aaronlisa]

I really like your backstory for why Buffy robbed a bank.

[angearia]

Thank you!

[2maggie2]

Nicely done. It could have gone that way. But like Barb says we still need to get to an army and a castle and so on. And how about ... hitting up Angel for Wolfram and Hart resources; or just asking the families to continue to financially support their world-saving daughters! At this scale you just need them to be able to meet basic needs. That shouldn't be *so* hard. It's the army that's the problem. That's what requires bank robbery on such a large scale.

[angearia]

Thanks for reading.

hitting up Angel for Wolfram and Hart resources ...because they're evil?

or just asking the families to continue to financially support their world-saving daughters!...this is an assumption of privilege. Would single mother Joyce or Faith's absentee, dissolute parents strike you as ones capable of funding an organization like this? I take it that Buffy's line of "legitimate resources" is coming from the few families who are willing to help. But not everyone can. 500 slayers. The majority of them probably come from low to middle-income households where the families can barely for college let alone support an international organization slaying evil

[angearia]

Also not to put too fine a point on this, but some of the things I reference in my story actually happened to me when I was a kid. The power going out in the middle of winter when I lived in Minnesota. My phone line being cut off. My dad worked two jobs to support my brother and me while struggling under a crippling debt accrued from my mom's bad health and high medical bills - to say it was a struggle sometimes feels like a huge understatement.

It's a huge assumption to say that every Slayer's family can afford to send money to fund the Slaying. It's the equivalent of sending a Slayer to private school. The majority of those 500 girl's families probably can't do this. Most families in America can't do this and we're supposed to still be one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

[2maggie2]

But not every family needs to be capable of financing their daughter. It's a collective effort. All you need is enough girls from families that are not economically stressed, and a few from families like Kennedies which are quite wealthy to get together enough money to feed and clothe everybody. Private schools all across America manage to do this all the time.

Anyway, I've posted an alternate scenario over at BF. And the key point is that there are multiple scenarios possible -- each with different implications for how we judge Buffy's actions to date. It's not that yours is wrong or not possible. It's that it's not the only possible path to BtBR.