Buffy’s Most Sympathetic Monsters Aren’t Vampires

Spike and Angel are important vampire characters, defined by their redemption arcs and their romantic relationships with Buffy. Both characters go through the process of becoming ensouled, which restores their humanity and theoretically should make them more sympathetic than other monsters. However, Angel’s brooding isolation and Spike’s romantic bravado keep them both feeling larger than life, which makes it hard for them to feel bad about their plight.

Anya Jenkins is one of the core characters in the later seasons and one of my favorite characters. For most of her time on Buffy, Anya is a former vengeance demon grappling with the realities of human pain, relationships, and mortality. Watching her learn what it means to be human makes her one of the show’s most sympathetic characters, as she is firmly entrenched in mundane life without fully understanding it. 

While Anya is the best example of a sympathetic vengeance demon in Buffy, their motives and abilities make them more relatable than vampires generally. Anya and her best friend Halfrek became vengeance demons because they’d been wronged when they were human, giving their violence a twisted sense of justice and understandable motives. The fact that they grant the wishes of wronged women, albeit with violent irony, adds to the sense that they’re misguided but not pure evil. 

Even the demon Clem, who has no human origin, is often more sympathetic and relatable than Buffy’s vampires. Unlike vampires, who appear human most of the time, Clem is visibly monstrous, with large pointed ears and face covered in skin flaps. Despite his appearance, Clem is personable and kind-hearted, making him easy to feel sympathy for when humans mistreat him. 

The rules for vampires in Buffy are fairly clear, if inconsistent, with their capacity for good directly linked to whether or not they have a soul. Demons like Anya and Clem, on the other hand, don’t have any rules governing their morality. While the morality of a vampire is decided by outside forces, Clem and Anya have a degree of moral agency which makes them easier to sympathize with and relate to. 

While the spinoff Angel delves into this concept more explicitly with good demons like Lorne and Doyle, Buffy only really explores the subject in the episode “Selfless.” That episode deals with Anya’s return to working as a vengeance demon, slaughtering a fraternity, which leads to a full-blown fight between Buffy and Anya. In the end, Anya chooses to undo her slaughter and return to being human, which, despite being truncated, I find more heartfelt and nuanced than Spike’s very similar arc in that season. 

Spike is my favorite character in Buffy, and I love many other vampires, but I’ve always found their binary morality and over-the-top personalities too alien to generate genuine sympathy. Demons like Anya and Clem, who have moral autonomy and more grounded personalities, are much more relatable, making it easier to feel for them. I hope that if the reboot ever happens, it will spend more time exploring the characters who fall somewhere between humans and monsters.