2. Buffy Summers - Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, I saw the movie of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and knew that my younger sister used to watch it with her best friend. I saw the swim team episode in my RA's room my freshman year of college. I didn't really feel the need to see the rest of the series. Then my roommate/friend Meisha sat me down and made me watch "Hush." I crawled up the couch in about two seconds flat when the Gentlemen appeared in Giles' window. I had my hackles raised by the little nursery rhyme about "You'll die screaming, but you won't be heard." I agreed to eventually give it a try. My next try was "Once More With Feeling" and it was after laughing my way through "Walk through the fire" that I decided to start from the beginning. I spent my entire high school career despising bimbos, so originally thought that I would really dislike Buffy Summers. Boy was I wrong. I say this a lot about fictional characters and should just stop pre-judging them in general. One of my favorite parts of the series is the Prom episode. It's not just that Buffy only dresses up like a pretty pretty princess AFTER she's defeated the hellhounds or that she gets to dance with Angel. It's the part about the Class Protector after the speech given by the young man whose suicide she prevented. I echo Giles' comment that "I had no idea that children, en masse, could be gracious." I will say that her babytalk bugs the crap out of me. I've lived in California and never found that anyone needs to use as many diminutives and ditzisms as the cast of this show. Buffy is particularly fond of sounding like someone who never made it out of middle school, yet can get away with lines like "Some of us are going with demons, but I think that's a valid lifestyle choice." I can put that pet peeve aside in the face of the person who dies twice for her cause, moonlights as a vampire slayer, tries valiantly to keep a stable relationship with some boyfriends that make my most psychotic ex look well-adjusted and graduates with the class with the lowest mortality rate in Sunnydale High history. She will fight to the death--and does so on more than one occasion--and it's no surprise that she is there to defend Sunnydale until it is literally nothing more than a hole in the ground. When she temporarily dies in Season 5, her gravestone reads, "She saved the world a lot." Over-simplification has never been more true to the actual life of a person.