Buffy/Angel and Side Characters

Protagonists are great, but what are they without a compelling cast of characters around them to help drive the story forward?  It's not exactly uncommon for characters that aren't the protagonist of a given story to become fan favorites.  Characters like Zuko from The Last Airbender, Daryl from The Walking Dead, Auron from Final Fantasy X, and Elsa from Frozen are just a few of the side characters that are adored by most fans of their respective stories far more than their actual protagonists.  A good side character can really strengthen a story, and even better if it's a full set of good side characters.

But what makes good side characters?

There's no single, definitive answer to this question.  However, after having finished both Buffy and its spinoff Angel, two crucially important things the show does well stood out: character growth and character agency.  They seem simple, yet can be hard for writers to balance in with everything else they have to juggle in making their stories work.

We're already juggling the protagonist's character arc, the themes we want to implement, plotting for each individual episode, the overarching plot we wanna tell, and studio interference, and now we have to worry about side characters, too?!

We'll start with character growth.  Most television shows have their side characters remain essentially the same until a certain episode specifically focuses on a specific side character.  Said episode either reveals more about them or changes something about them.  These episodes are great for making sure the side characters aren't forgotten, as it can be difficult to pay attention to them during the average episode of the series.

If you go through the list of Buffy and Angel episodes, however, you'd be surprised to see how few episodes are dedicated specifically to a certain side character.  Yes, at specific points of different story threads certain characters might be extra active (more on that in a moment).  In terms of episodes focused entirely on a single character, though, there are very few.

Quite simply, they don't need those episodes.

What Buffy and Angel do so well is weave arcs for their side characters into the plot of almost every single episode.  There's no need to slow down the main story thread of a given season to focus an episode entirely on Willow, Xander, or any other side character when they are constantly facing their own challenges and growing throughout the series, often in ways that tie nicely into the main plot.

To get at what I mean in detail, let's look at Willow.

This is my favorite scene from How I Met Your Mother!

Willow starts out the series as a mousy nerd who lacks confidence and is really only good with computers.  To say her character changes drastically would be an understatement.  However, what's important to note is that the change doesn't happen over the course of a few Willow-focused filler episodes.  Instead, we see her gradually change.

By the second season she's a little more confident and helping Giles with research.  By the third season she's started on a path to become a witch and has come out of her shell enough to date Oz.  By the fourth she's gained some skill as a witch and is dating a woman, Tara, with whom she has a romantic relationship similar in dynamic to her earlier friendship with Buffy, except her role is reversed: she became confident enough that she is the Buffy to Tara's past Willow.  By the fifth she is one of the strongest members of the group, managing to actually hurt Glory, while also helping take care of Dawn.  By the sixth she starts to abuse her powers, eventually leading to magic addiction, which she gets under control until Tara's death.  In the seventh she is recovering from her magic addiction and suffering remorse for all she did as Dark Willow, reluctant to use her powers even when necessary.

These changes would've been impossible to organically implement if most episodes of the series didn't give at least a little attention to Willow.  Throughout the whole series we see her growing through the challenges she faces and the choices she makes in response to those challenges, growing ever so slightly each time.

Or growing really quickly in the case of some characters.

This is true for every member of the main cast in both Buffy and Angel, especially those who stick around for the majority of the series.

But none of that growth would've been possible without the characters always having something important to do throughout each season.  That brings us to character agency.  As I mentioned in my post about the problem with the Canto Bight story thread in The Last Jedi, character agency "means how much a character's choices and actions affect the plot.  Not in the generic, big picture summary of a character (Poe Dameron fights the First Order as a Resistance pilot) but in the minute-to-minute minutia of the story (everything Dameron actually does on screen)."

So, Buffy being a Vampire Slayer has nothing to do with character agency.  However, every time we see her slay a vampire (or slay some other sort of demon, or choose to use mercy instead, or protect a demon being unfairly hurt, or even doing something innocuous that later has serious consequences) she is exercising character agency because her actions affect what's going on around her. 

What's great about this series is that every character has agency.  Of the core group, Giles uses his experience with the supernatural and research abilities, Willow uses her computer and magic skills, and Xander uses his humor and willingness to fight even when he doesn't have magic powers.  Hell, at the end of season six he literally saves the world.  How's that for agency? 

Seriously, this friggin doofus accomplishes more in two minutes than 99% of any side character ever will.

It's not just the long-term cast, either.  Take Tara, who shows up midway through season four and dies toward the end of season six.  It'd be easy to have her just be nice to everyone and leave it at that, but throughout the series she both changes and has agency.  Change-wise, she begins as a meek, timid character, as mentioned above.  However, she gradually becomes more sure of herself, even becoming a surrogate parent for Dawn alongside Willow.  When Willow starts dabbling in dark magic she stands up to Willow, even dumping her when the line is crossed.  There's no way the Tara of season four would've been able to stand up for herself like that.

In terms of agency, Tara helps out with the magic duties of the group.  While Willow surpasses her talent-wise, her experience with magic allows her to often be a guide of sorts in Willow's growth as a witch.  It doesn't stop with her magic skills, however: she offers emotional support like no one else, often being the most nurturing person on the show; it's no coincidence she's the first one Buffy tells about her affair with Spike.  She also exercises agency in helping Dawn as a surrogate parent, as well as directing Willow in her path to recovery by breaking up with her.

Basically, Tara both helps drive the plot and grows in the process.

I'm just posting this picture to slyly brag about the time I met Amber Benson,

the actress who played Tara (we share a birthday!).

I've talked mostly about Buffy, but let's look at a character from Angel.  It'd be easy to trace the change characters like Wesley or Cordelia go through, but let's take a look at someone who joins later and doesn't have as distinct a role as everyone else: Lorne.

Lorne, the art and music loving demon with a seemingly infinite amount of personality, starts out as the owner of a nightclub who is neutral in the battle of good versus evil.  He's more concerned with his nightclub than fighting the good fight.  When Cordelia is taken to his home dimension of Pylea, however, he reluctantly joins, thereafter helping Angel's team whenever he can.  Eventually he becomes a permanent member of the cast, helping without complaint until the fifth season, where he becomes the character most uncomfortable with the way the team has changed while running Wolfram & Hart.  After being instructed by Angel to kill Lindsey, he informs Angel he's leaving afterward because of his disdain for killing.

Lorne's growth as a character is connected to everything he does for the team.  The most obvious way he contributes is his ability as an empath demon to read the aura and immediate future of those around him.  But he did so much more than that, too.  He was the one character who never let his anger or despair make him an angsty doofus, and he often acts as the moral conscience of the group, especially during season five.  The emotional labor he put in to always be supportive of his team was unrivaled by anyone else.  Related to this, he was second only to Cordelia in helping Angel raise baby Connor.  He also often figured out things the rest of the team couldn't, such as figuring out when Wolfram & Hart bugged the hotel.

Long story short, even Lorne, who was the last main character to join the cast and didn't actually fight, exercised agency in his contributions to the team and grew in the process.

All while also always having a cocktail at the ready.

So there you have it.  While these are by no means the only two criteria for good side characters, they are quite important.  Making sure your characters contribute gives the audience a reason to root for these characters, while making sure they change helps keep things fresh.  Together, this powerful combination can make any character great...

...except maybe Connor.

Thanks for reading!

Profiles of Badass Women: Luisa Moreno

Every International Working Women's Day I try to write a post about women who deserve more recognition for the work they've done to make the world a better place.  I wasn't able to do one last year because grad school got too intense, but the year before I wrote one about Gioconda Belli, a revolutionary, poet, and feminist.  This year I decided to go with labor leader and civil rights activist Luisa Moreno, who became most active during the years of the Great Depression and World War 2.

 Luisa Moreno

Moreno was born August 30th, 1907 in Guatemala City (I'll let you guess what country that's in).  As a teenager, a time when most of us are worried about dating and proving to our peers how great our musical tastes are, Moreno was already organizing.  She created La Sociedad Gabriela Mistral, which successfully fought for the right of women to gain admittance into Guatemalan universities.

In her later teenage years she moved to Mexico City to look for work as a journalist while writing poetry on the side.  While there she continued fighting for women's rights.  She also met and married her first husband, Angel de León.  The two moved to New York City in 1928, where they gave birth to their daughter Mytyl.  Moreno worked as a seamstress in Spanish Harlem to help pay the bills.

It didn't take long for Moreno to gravitate toward both labor and Latinx rights causes.  In 1929 this wacky little thing called the Great Depression happened.  You may have heard about it.  To put it mildly, it sucked during this time for anyone who wasn't wealthy, and even moreso if you weren't white or male.  Instead of buckling in the face of economic turmoil, however, Moreno led the charge to organize her fellow garment workers (most of whom were Latina) into a union to help weather the storm of the Great Depression.

 On the Latinx rights side of things, Moreno and her husband Angel both became active organizers.  In 1930 they protested the movie Under a Texas Moon, which portrayed Mexican Americans as lying womanizers.  Police violently repressed these demonstrations, which led to the death of one of the main organizers, Gonzalo González.  This only intensified the protests, which Moreno credited with really opening her eyes to the severity of the violence Latinx people faced in the United States.

Good thing issues of Latinx representation in film is a thing of the past, amirite??

These events kicked off two decade of tireless organizing in the US by Moreno.  She organized around both labor and Latinx issues.  At first she did so in addition to her day job, but in 1935 the American Federation of Labor hired her as a professional labor organizer.  She moved to Florida with her daughter while leaving Angel behind, as he had become abusive.  She also joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a representative of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) and organized workers, predominantly female workers of color, around the country.

In 1937 she moved to San Diego, California, where she remained for the rest of her time in the United States.  Her accomplishments during her time in San Diego were too many to recount here without making this post the length of a book, but I'll quickly run through some of her biggest highlights.

In 1939 she helped organize El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (the Spanish-Speaking People's Congress), commonly known as El Congreso, which was a California-based civil rights group for people of Latin American descent in the United States.  El Congreso was notable in comparison to other Latinx groups like LULAC because it had a strong working class/labor element and didn't focus on Americanization/respectability politics the way other such groups did.  El Congreso advocated not only for the civil rights of Latinx people, but also labor rights.

In 1940, due to her tireless organizing for the UCAPAWA, her way with words, and her background in journalism, she became the chief editor for the Spanish-language UCAPAWA paper.  The same year, she spoke for the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB), where she gave a speech commonly known as the Caravan of Sorrow speech about the plight Mexican immigrants faced, a speech which sounds like it could've been made yesterday. Here is an excerpt:

"These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California's industrialized agriculture, the sugar companies and the large cotton interests, that operate or have operated with the labor of Mexican workers."

That speech has Paul Rudd levels of good aging.

During the World War 2 years, young Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits, known as Pachucas/Pachucos, created a wave of fear among white America, and both police and off-duty sailors acting as vigilantes brutalized them.  Luisa Moreno was incredibly active in defending them and organizing grassroots campaigns around police brutality toward both Latinx and black communities.

As the end of World War 2 gave way to the Cold War, however, anti-communist hysteria started to gut the labor movement and other leftist elements of people who weren't of a more moderate, liberal persuasion.  At the same time, Operation Wetback (which was as horrible as the name implies) deported waves of Mexican and Mexican-American people back to Mexico, as well as people of Latin American descent society assumed to also be Mexican.  Those active in the labor movement were particularly targeted, combining both racism and Cold War paranoia into one ugly, ugly package.

Luisa and her new husband Gray Bemis, a former sailor and member of the Socialist Party of America, received numerous threats from both vigilantes and the government.  On November 20th, 1950, they left the United States for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.  They stayed there for almost a year, then returned to Moreno's home country of Guatemala.  Upon their arrival friends from the Guatemala Confederation of Labor welcomed them.  At the time Guatemala was led by democratically elected, FDR New Deal-inspired president Jacobo Arbenz.  Things went well until 1954, when the United States CIA overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz and replaced him with military dictator Castillo Armas in what the CIA called Operation PBSUCCESS.

They returned to Mexico and her husband died a few years later.  Despite all the hardship she faced, she spent the next couple decades still fighting for labor and civil rights in Mexico, Cuba, and Guatemala.  She kept doing so until her health began to fail her in 1985 after suffering a stroke.  Her brother brought her back to Guatemala and she died November 4th, 1992 at 85 years old.

Here's her picture one more time, just so we remember what awesome personified looks like.

Luisa Moreno fought tirelessly for almost half a century to make the world a better place for countless people.  She exemplified intersectionality before it even became a word.  Her story serves as an important reminder that civil rights, women's rights, and labor rights are both important in a world where racism, sexism and classism are often interconnected.  Her story also connects to a broader story of civil rights and labor organizing in the 1930s and 40s, a time we often only associate with suffering and war.

Luisa Moreno was a true hero.  Rest In Power, Luisa, and thank you for all that you did.