Who is Buffy Summers?

[Buffy Summers]

Buffy Summers once thought she was your average teenage girl...but one fateful day, a man named Merrick approached her and told her...she was the Chosen One. Into every generation a Slayer is born. She alone will have the power to destroy the vampires, demons, and evil. She is the Slayer. She got expelled from her school in Los Angeles because she accidentally burned down the gymnasium to kill a bunch of vampires. So she moved to Sunnydale. She thought it was just because of her mom's job transfer. There was actually another reason...Sunnydale was the Hellmouth. She had been given a new watcher and was put there to fight the evils there.

Buffy begins to accept the responsibilities and dangers of her calling as the Slayer after moving to the small Californian town of Sunnydale. She becomes best friends with Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg, and meets her new Watcher, Rupert Giles. Together, they form the Scooby Gang, and work together to battle various supernatural occurrences which plague Sunnydale High. In the season finale, Buffy battles the villain known as the Master, and is drowned in the process. She is resuscitated by Xander after Angel is unable to as he "doesn't breathe," and rises to defeat the vampire.

In the next year, Buffy continues to come to terms with her destiny, finds forbidden love with benevolent vampire Angel, and clashes with new villains Spike and Drusilla. In the episode "Surprise", Buffy loses her virginity to Angel, an event which triggers the loss of his soul and unleashes his evil side, Angelus. His sadistic alter-ego, Angelus, proceeds to subject the characters to mental and physical torture for the remainder of the year. In the final episode of season two, Buffy is forced to reveal her identity as the Slayer to her mother, and send the newly-good Angel to hell in order to save the world. She then leaves Sunnydale in the hopes of escaping her life as the Slayer.

Season three sees Buffy reconnect to her calling, her friends, and her family after her departure, as well as make difficult life decisions regarding her relationship with the resurrected Angel. She must also deal with the introduction of rebellious new Slayer Faith, who becomes increasingly destructive and disloyal over the course of the season. In the season finale, Buffy is forced to stab Faith to save Angel's life, and lead her classmates into a climactic battle against the demonic Mayor of Sunnydale. Angel then leaves Sunnydale in hopes Buffy can have a more normal life without him.

In the fourth season, Buffy balances her Slayer duties with her new life as a college student at UC Sunnydale. She experiences some difficulty adjusting to college life, and becomes increasingly disconnected from her friends, who all seem to be moving in different directions. Buffy eventually finds a new love interest in the form of Riley Finn, a soldier in the demon-hunting government task force known as the Initiative. She briefly joins forces with Riley's team, until they discover one of the Initiative's experiments, Adam, is creating an army of demon-human hybrids. Buffy literally unites with her friends to defeat Adam in a spell which invokes the power of the First Slayer.

In season five, Buffy battles the hell-goddess Glory, and fully embraces her destiny for the first time. A younger sister named Dawn mysteriously appears in Buffy's household, her existence having been seamlessly integrated with memories of the other characters. Buffy suffers emotional turmoil throughout this season, including the realization Dawn is not actually her sister, the deterioration of her relationship with Riley, the discovery that Spike has become obsessed with her, and her mother's death from a brain aneurysm. While on a quest to learn more about her nature as the Slayer, Buffy is told "death is her gift, a message she has difficulty understanding until the episode "The Gift", in which she sacrifices her own life to save Dawn's by diving into Glory's interdimensional portal and closing it.

Season six depicts Buffy's struggle with depression and loss after being ripped out of Heaven by her friends, who perform a spell to bring her back from the dead. Forced to take a mundane and degrading job slinging burgers at the Doublemeat Palace, she begins suffering from extreme depression and self-loathing, embarking on a violent sexual relationship with the vampire Spike which leaves neither satisfied and spawns dire consequences for the both of them. As the season draws to a close, Buffy is forced to battle her best friend when Willow becomes psychotic with dark magics after the human, Warren shoots and kills Willow's girlfriend Tara and wounds Buffy in the process. She then tries to destroy the world to end all suffering, although Xander gets through to her in the end. Buffy then promises to change her self-destructive behavior in order to be there for her sister.

In the final season of the show, Buffy is confronted with the threat of the First Evil and becomes a reluctant leader to the Potential Slayers, who are initially respectful of her, but become increasingly more alienated by her tactics and decisions throughout the season. She unexpectedly becomes emotionally close with Spike, who has sought out his soul in an effort to prove himself to her. In the show's final episode "Chosen", Buffy shares her power with her fellow Slayers before leading them into an epic battle against an army of Turok-Han vampires. She also confesses her love to a disbelieving Spike before he sacrifices himself to save the world; as he dies, Buffy escapes Sunnydale's destruction with the surviving characters.