(Meta) Thoughts on Faith
This is a post about the Slayer from Boston, not musings on religion, just in case you were wondering. :-) For some reason I've got into the habit of writing things, but never actually getting around to posting them, so this is partially an attempt to break that. Also, the story about Faith I wrote two or three weeks ago, 'Fair Exchange Is No ( Read more... )
One thing that struck me:
It might even be that's why she in particular was Chosen rather than one of the other Potentials: because her life was in imminent danger.
I think it's pretty clear that Faith wasn't tracked down by the Watchers' Council until late in her life, and possibly even after she was Called
One could fanwank that these two are related - that the Council have a pretty good idea of the various potentials, but choose to focus on the ones that can be good Slayers (the Kendras and Kennedys, trained from early on) and hope that they get Chosen. The less than ideal ones (for their purposes) aren't approached or trained, but every once in a while, one of them will get Chosen, possibly as a result of being in the wrong place and company at the right time like Faith in this fic, and the Council gets caught unawares. Of course, it's mostly a moot point whether the "good" potentials are more likely than the "bad" ones to get Chosen - with no back-up, most of the "bad" ones don't last long anyway.
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My thoughts on how Slayers get Chosen vary depending on what mood I'm in at the time. On the face of it, numbers suggest that most Slayers are like Buffy, unidentified until they're actually called - or as you say, they might never get discovered by the Council at all, and end up being killed soon after they're Chosen. (Especially if you accept the movie as canon, and say that Lothos and his minions were deliberately hunting down new Slayers ever since the Middle Ages.)
On the other hand, the direction of the narrative tends more to suggest that Slayers like Kendra are the norm, and Buffy is the exception: "A Slayer with family and friends wasn't in the brochure". How to square the circle?
It's possible, I suppose, that the Council can actually influence who's Chosen in some mystical way - that it's not entirely random, but some Potentials really are more likely to become Slayers than others. Either the Council can affect that by some sort of ritual preparation or blessing or discipline; or that the amount of 'Potential' in a girl can be measured by whatever mean they use to track them down in the first place, and they concentrate on the ones with most. Of course, since the Council knows a lot less about these things than they like to think they do, they often get it wrong.
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