I'm biased.
So. So. So. Biased.
My favorite episode is 7x05 Selfless.
The reason this is my favorite episode?
Shall be answered in a pic spam, gushing, and video embedding that I feel the need to actually do a cut.
This episode it all about Anya and the formation of how she becomes who we know now. From Aud the loving and giving woman who defines herself by her relationship with Olaf.
She then takes the moniker of Anyanka and lives through the job of vengeance. She becomes vengeance.
We see the demon from within at the frat house where she brought the power of The Wish out again slaughtering an entire fraternity of men.How she is trying to hide behind the job, the vengeance, but her speech of who she is falls flat... because she doesn't know who she is yet.
We get a flash back to the musical episode Once More With Feeling and a lost song emerges. Anya is again defining herself through her relationship with a man. Specifically Xander. The song is rife with jokes of her character, call backs to the previous episodes and the couple's song in OMWF, and then my entire complaint of how her hair in OMWF was actually warm brown dissolves as they hit me in the gut.
She opens the door to the balcony and we're transported back to Hells Bells and the events in it. This is where I sobbed while Beth was asleep on the lofted bed beside me in college. The sensory reaction I had to this was an overload. Her hopes and dreams of being a Mrs., being with Xander, were not as she dreamed. As as Buffy is wont to do, they break the song in the ending line to take us back to this image.
That image was my icon on so many boards. I loved that the knife went straight through her heart, because Anya doesn't react from anything other than what she feels. In this instant when they close up on her face and we see a tear.. has Buffy actually killed the last bit of demon? What did she release?
The ending scene when she tells D'Hoffryn to take her as the collateral for the frat boys being restored. We see another piece of Anya being taken away and what remains?
Acceptance of who she could become. This episode is most likely not on the top ten of many Buffy viewers lists, but it is my favorite. Drama, angst, fighting, song and dance, romance, comedy and the strength to continue.
I even made a video to try and work through my feelings about this episode.
Oh, other things happen and there is a B storyline in there, but really, this is all a love letter to Emma Caulfield and she deserved it.
*All images taken from Screencap Paradise
Ceasing Ramble.
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