Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayers - Prologue, Righteous, The Innocent

The prologue to "Tales of the Slayers" begins appropriately enough with the First Slayer, the very first girl transformed and given the legacy of the slayer, to kill and drive back the demons who had been attempted to infect men in the form of vampires and those who attempted to blend among humanity and pray on men.

When the First Slayer first appeared in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Season Four finale, "Restless", when the summoned spirit of the First Slayer offended by Willow's joining of the Scooby Gang together to battle Adam in the destruction of The Initiative. Since then she appeared as a sort of spirit guide to Buffy in "Intervention" and "Get It Done".

Written by "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon, the prologue displays the role of the First Slayer which in brief encapsulates her life and the legacy of the slayers, needed to destroy the demons and yet feared as a demon herself, the First Slayer wanders the desert, silent and unspeaking, killing only over and over again, mourning her fate and the fate of all the slayers, the generations of girls stretching forward through time who would come after her.

This sums up the destiny of the slayer, a teenage girl martyr who saves mankind and is rejected by it, who wanders from place to place and bears the impossible burden of her destiny, knowing that sooner or later she must die and increasingly resigning herself to her fate. It is a destiny that rebounds throughout "Tales of the Slayers". The First Slayer formed by the Shadow Men, the mystics and mages who d welled both in the world of the spirit and the world of the here and now, in service to a fearful humanity, superstitious and vulnerable, greedy and flawed, as the bulwarks against the demonic forces which haunt the night.

The Prologue is followed by "Righteous", also written by Joss Whedon. Rendered in poetic form, with artwork by Tim Sale (artist on Batman: The Long Halloween), "Righteous" forms a kind of medieval lay relating the story of an unnamed medieval teenage girl, a reluctant religious slayer who accepts her destiny and fights in the name of divinity becoming a kind of vampire fighting Joan of Arc, who meets Joan of Arc's fate when she is burned to death at the stake.

Like the First Slayer, the medieval slayer is dedicated to fighting the demons and like her, she is ostracized and demonized (ironically) and meets a sad end. Told through the lens of her Watcher who has guided and trainer her to this task, "Righteous" like "The Innocent" which follows it, is preoccupied more with human evil than demonic evil.

The slayer confronts what appears to be her nemesis in the form of St. Just, a vampire overlord who destroys and slaughters entire towns. She confronts and defeats him but by demonstrating the impotence of the town's priest, the slayer frustrates and enrages him. A drawn scene shows a girl, who may or may not be the slayer, pushing a man or boy under the eyes of the priest at the church. This scene may have been intended to show a girl modeling herself on the slayer behaving assertively and the priest therefore determining that the slayer herself must be killed for serving as a role model to girls. Or it may have simply demonstrated that the slayer's very existence touted conventional patriarchal male authority.

In doing so she helps doom herself and is burned at the stake. Thus she is seized while asleep in the middle of the night and burned at the stake, as Buffy herself nearly was in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Season Three episode, "Gingerbread".

On the stake she cries out, as much to her watcher who is restrained and helpless to aid her, as to God. Deciding that the townfolk themselves are damned, the beaten Watcher opens the gate to the town allowing the horde of vampires brought by their leader, St. Just, inside to slay everyone. The name St. Just becomes fitting as the godless town which murders their defenderess and celebrates her death is dealt with through a harsh form of justice.

Vampires play a limited role in "The Innocent", the weakest of the three, penned by Amber Benson, who played Tara, Willow's girlfriend, on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Taking place during the French Revolution, Claudine is a French slayer in love with her watcher who dispatches her on assignments against vampires. But her Watcher has other targets in mind and sends her to murder an aristocrat in front of his family, telling her that he is a vampire. Sickened and despairing at having been made into a murderer by him, Claudine confronts him and goes off to the water, possibly to drown herself.

The key theme in "The Innocent" is human evil, which cannot be extinguished easily with a stake or in a struggle against a vampire. Human evil is far more pervasive and corrupts even those who would battle it, weaving its way into human nature and human society in order to destroy it from within.

Claudine who had intended only to defend Paris against vampires who murdered humans, found herself tricked into becoming a murderer to serve the aims of an ideology. The medieval slayer who had intended to defend humanity in the name of God, found herself brutally murdered by people claiming to serve God, while ushering in their own damnation. The First Slayer, with whom the legacy of the slayers had first begun, faced a hostile human community of villages, which viewed her a demon herself, driving her away into the wasteland where she grew mute, isolated and determined to be all alone on her own.

All this serves to counterpoint Buffy's own struggle, her reliance on friends and her Watcher, who enable her to transcend any and every other Slayer who had come before her and to do what no other Slayer before her had ever done, break the cycle of the isolation and the demonization of the Slayer by opening up the gift, the power of the Slayer, to every girl around the world.