jedibuttercup

Buffy Summers (B:tVS)

First and foremost, I will always love Buffy because she is a hero.

A damaged one, yes, by the end of the series. And not perfect; she makes bad decisions. But underneath everything, she is almost always trying to do the right thing; she feels her calling in a way that very few people in the Buffyverse do, and always comes back to do what she knows to be her duty even if once in a while she does pause to act out a little first.

She also has a quippy sense of humor, and is a smart girl even if circumstances never really lead her to develop that. In her younger years, she would have fit in perfectly with the Cordettes; but even at the beginning of her time in Sunnydale she can already see how shallow they are and chooses to hang out with the more out-cast crowd instead. She loves her mother, even when her mother hurts her, and her relationship with Dawn is a lot like my relationship with my brother was before he got old enough to be interesting to talk to.

Those aren't all the reasons, of course. And I think many of the reasons I love Buffy are in fact reasons that I love Wesley Wyndham-Price, too; they are each my favorite character on their respective shows, and all kinds of parallels can be drawn between them, which I won't get into here as I have neither the time or space to write an essay on the subject. But that kind of dedication, getting back up every time you get knocked down and coming back to the cause, really does it for me. I ended up yelling at the Scoobies a lot on the TV the sixth and seventh seasons for handling her in all the wrong ways and just making everything worse, and still she came through to save the day in the end.

That is, in fact, why I detested the few mentions we got of her in Angel's fifth season; there had to be a lot of story we weren't getting, because all her character growth would be totally undone if she just went to Rome to party and hook up with yet another ambiguously evil boyfriend, and that really annoyed me.

Elizabeth Swann (PotC)

I love Elizabeth Swann because even in an era where female freedoms were severely curtailed, she still has the guts to reach out and try to attain what she really wants-- and also, by the end of the second movie, she's learning where to stop, that a completely free life has consequences that she doesn't really want to face. The Elizabeth at the end of the first movie might have married Will, but I don't believe her wanderlust would have let her be happy with him for more than a few years; the Elizabeth at the end of the second movie has grown up enough, I think, to be capable of "happily ever after".

I don't see her love for Will being changed at all by the whole arc with Jack and the compass in the second movie; I think that was a side effect of her being plenty attracted to what he represents but not necessarily to him in particular. Kissing Jack as she chained him to the mast was kissing what he represents goodbye, as well as being a personal farewell; of course she regrets doing it afterward, since she isn't completely cold-hearted, but it was a turning point for her personal development.

Aside from all of that, she is tough, and resourceful, and fierce in defense of what she loves, and she is beloved of Will Turner, my favorite character in the movies.

Hmm. Explanation enough? =)