Week 10

How does Buffy deconstruct traditional literary notions of good and evil?

The Buffy series was notorious for the changing faces of the various characters, as they would follow their own wants, needs and desires in accordance with the situations presented to them. Good and evil are defined by the Free Dictionary as being "of moral excellence; upright" and "morally bad or wrong; wicked", respectively. However, the characters in Buffy can be both good and evil at the same time, or they can be doing something inherently evil, in order to do a good act or for what they perceive as good.

An example present in the episode "The I In Team" was when Buffy joined up with the secret group called the Initiative, who were supposedly doing "good" by capturing demons and monsters. Unfortunately, those lines were slightly blurred when the viewer finds out about Walsh's ambiguous motive behind the Initiative's goal, which was to create a creature using parts extracted from the captured demons , with help from Buffy. This in turn made Buffy leave the Initiative, along with Riley doing so only because of his morally unambiguous feelings towards Buffy (he goes back to them later on). Therefore, throughout this episode, traditional ideas of good and evil are very much blurred, and are sometimes unrecognisable to almost be neutral.

The next example is in the very next episode  "Goodbye Iowa" where Buffy and the viewers find out about Walsh's hidden project (the creature mentioned previously) and the consequences associated with it. The creature named Adam escaped and is wandering around causing havoc, a la Frankenstein, and being the supposedly evil character he is. He then comes across a boy playing in the woods. Adam asks him deep and meaningful questions about who he is and what the boy is, after which the boy calls him a monster. After killing the boy, we can see that Adam, being the creation he is, has no morals and therefore does not care about who he kills, so long as he finds out about himself and what his purpose is. The line between good and evil then becomes slightly blurred when Buffy and Riley go back to the Initiative and confront Dr. Angleman about Walsh and Adam. Angleman is killed when Adam appears from the ventilation ducts and stabs him in the back, and once he escapes, the other Initiative soldiers take Riley back with them, effectively switching the Initiative's position to evil.

Overall, the notions of good and evil switch constantly within the Buffy universe, as characters who stay the same throughout the series would be very boring to watch and relate to. Also, it would mean no progress through the plot, as there would be no real character development associated with the changing of alignment.