10 Most Gut-Wrenching Buffy The Vampire Slayer Moments From Buffy The Vampire Slayer
4. Buffy saying to Giles "I'm 16 years old, I don't want to die"
The finale of season 1 saw the first of Buffy's two deaths, but it wasn’t the emotional peak of the episode. That came a few scenes earlier. After Giles learns from a prophecy that Buffy will die fighting big bad of the season ‘The Master’, he tells Angel what he has learned. Not realizing Buffy is in the next room, she overhears everything.
One of the defining features of the show was how incredibly realized Joss Whedon made his characters and this scene perfectly encapsulated that. Buffy laughs, then screams, then cries, saying to Giles “I’m 16 years old, I don’t want to die”. With all her strength, athleticism, her responsibilities as a Slayer, it was easy to forget just how young Buffy was at this point. She was just a teenage girl with her whole life ahead of her, so to get told it was all getting ripped away was truly poignant.
Buffy as a character had very few weak moments throughout the entire show, so when she did it really hit home the huge task she was forced to do, from such a young age. It wasn’t her fighting abilities, her power that made us fall in love with her, it was the moments like this. The moments where she truly was just a high school girl.