HG131 said:
Well, if they kill everything else, they'd have the resources. Besides, you know they're most likely secretly getting ready for a backstab. Even if they aren't, sooner or later the Slayers WILL be able to kill them.
True, but do you think all of these demon clans/races/book clubs who have agreed to cease hostilities will just wait around until everything else has been wiped out? No. As soon as they can see which way the wind is blowing, they'll turn on the Slayers. After supposedly wiping out most of the other demons, Slayer ranks will be
seriously depleted, and will probably be easy pickings for any of these demon groups. Consider that, for there to be an official ceasefire, the Slayers would have considered these groups powerful enough to be very dangerous to them. If they were all to turn on them at once...
HG131 said:
Hmm, good point. However, Wes turned out to be pathetic (it took ALOT of character development on Angel for that to change), and most humans kinda look pathetic when facing vamps or demons. I'd assume while they have a few badasses, it's most likely mostly people like S3 of Buffy Wesley. Remember, the Slayer is activated wherever they're needed the most, and is supposed to go to wherever their Watcher sends them (Remember Kendra?). Buffy was a special case, not really going places normally, having friends and family and a Watcher who barely gave a damn about the rules.
Wesley was pretty pathetic, yes, although he could always fight; he just got in his own way with his insufferable personality. Giles, however, went toe-to-toe with Angelus and beat him up with a baseball bat. Merrick (Buffy's first watcher) was equally capable of beating down vampires. Gwendolyn Post (Faith's watcher, the one who stole the glove of...something. Mynigon?) was able to handle herself in a fight, and once she got the glove she was kicking ass with it. The reason most of the humans on Buffy have looked pathetic when fighting vamps/demons is because they lack training, which as we've already discussed, the Council would naturally give their Watchers. Take Robin Wood; expert hand-to-hand fighter, been killing vampires and demons for years, and why? He was trained by a Watcher. At the end of the day, Watchers are intended to be field operatives, training and accompanying the Slayer. Nobody, least of all an ancient institution that is
very much aware of how dangerous the world really is, send operatives into the field without combat training.
Slayers are not always called where they're "needed the most". Buffy was clearly needed the most in Sunnydale (hence her staying there, brief stints to LA not included, for seven years; the whole time, the Hellmouth was warming up to the Big Finale) but she was called in LA. It took maybe a year before she was moved to the place she was needed. Giles didn't send her to places not because he didn't care about the rules (he did, in the early seasons. A lot) but because A) she was clearly needed more in Sunnydale and B) she probably wouldn't have gone. Remember when Kendra first appeared and mentioned the Slayer's Handbook? Giles says he had a copy, but after meeting Buffy, decided that she was unlikely to bother with it.
An interesting side-note; in 'Something Blue', where Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale and is transported to an alternate reality where the town is controlled by vampires, Giles requests that the Slayer come to help, and the Council (or presumably her Watcher) sends her. So not only is Giles, as a Watcher, expected to fight vampires even without a Slayer (see my earlier point), but it also means that Buffy is so radically different in the alternate timeline that she'll actually follow the Council's orders
. I always start stuff from the beginning, I have an obsessive need to fully understand the plot entirely for anything I watch, play or read (which is why I never gave up on Lost, and am such a Halo fanboy...).
