Absolutely hate the received wisdom that Buffy Summers is not "book smart" or that she doesn’t care about doing well in high school. How little attention are you paying to the show if that’s your take on the character?
- When she first arrives in Sunnydale, one of the first things Buffy does is make friends with Willow Rosenberg, explicitly because she wants to hang out with somebody smart and get caught up with the classes she’s already behind on.
- After seeing her permanent record in her sophomore year, one of Buffy’s teachers (Teacher’s Pet’s Dr. Gregory) tells her that she has “a first rate mind” and that he “know[s] you can excel in this class”.
- Buffy had a favorite teacher (Homecoming’s Ms. Moran) whose class she says “changed her life” and whose failure to remember her the next year obviously upsets her a lot.
- When she gets the ability to read minds in Earshot, one of the very first things she thinks to use it for is showing off in class to impress her teachers.
- After Buffy comes back to Sunnydale for her final year of high school, one of the terms Principal Snyder insists she meets to be accepted back is a “glowing letter of recommendation from any member of our faculty who is not an English librarian”. Since she doesn’t get kicked out again, we can presume she got one (even if not from Ms. Moran or the late Dr. Gregory).
- In Lovers Walk we find out that Buffy got a 1430 in the SATs. That’s a score which means Buffy probably outperformed at least 95% of people who took the test in 1998 (when the average for college-bound seniors was 1017).
- In Choices, Buffy gets accepted into Northwestern, and is clearly heartbroken that she isn’t able to go.
- Buffy Summers spends practically all her free time in school hanging out in the library.
Yes, Buffy often struggles in school. She’s often absent, and doesn’t always have the time to do the homework. And when she is in class, she’s often late or too tired to concentrate.
But the reason for this isn’t that Buffy “isn’t smart”, it’s because – spoiler warning, I guess, for those of you that obviously managed to miss it - she’s a vampire slayer. She effectively has a whole full-time job, a whole secret life that means she doesn’t have time to do homework or prepare for tests; something that keeps her awake all night so she can’t focus on her schoolwork the next day. When she comes out as a Slayer to her Mom, in Becoming, one of the things she tells her she wishes she were doing rather than having to save the world is explicitly “studying”.
And she does all the stuff above anyway. How do you think she’s managing that if she’s not really smart?
Yes, Buffy isn’t quite as academically talented as Willow. Yes, she often makes self-deprecating jokes about how poorly she’s doing at school (telling her Mom before parents’ night in School Hard that her teachers will be impressed that she always brings a pen to class “ready to absorb the knowledge”; worriedly asking Giles before an English makeup exam in Faith, Hope & Trick whether they “give you credit just for speaking it”).
But these pretty obviously are jokes. Buffy’s problem in School Hard is with Principal Snyder, who’s threatening to expel her because he blames her for “starting fights” and is worried she’s going to burn down a building, not with any of her actual teachers. Not with her academic results. Buffy passes the English test she was worried about, in fact she passes all her required makeup tests. She does this even without Willow’s help.
The only time we see Buffy actually completely fail a test is in Nightmares, which ... isn't anymore real than the conversation she has with her father later that episode. It's one of her nightmares being brought to life; because Buffy does care about doing well in school and is afraid that she won't.
Yes, Buffy finds some classes boring – but so does Willow. Many high school classes are boring, no matter how smart you are. Yes, Buffy struggles with some subjects (like French) more than others. (It’s probably not a coincidence that learning a foreign language takes much more time and practice than many other subjects.) But nothing in the text of the show suggests that Buffy is not smart and motivated, or that she wouldn’t be doing really well in high school were it nor for the fact she’s a Slayer.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The show repeatedly tells us that Cordelia Chase is who Buffy was in her old school in LA. Cordelia’s popular, she’s on the cheerleading team, her parents take her on expensive holidays. These are all presented to the viewer as things Buffy used to have, and would still have if it weren’t for her Calling.
And Cordelia’s also really smart. She has teachers who praise her for doing the reading and answering questions in class and who offer to help her with her homework, she looks forward to the SATs because she “do[es] well on standardized tests” (and while we don’t learn her exact score, from Xander’s reaction it’s clearly meant to be impressively high), she boasts in Lovers Walk that she has a lot of experience in covering up how well she’s doing academically. We learn in Choices that she got offers from Duke and Columbia and USC.
That’s who Buffy is. That’s what she’d have been doing in high school if she wasn’t the Slayer.
Literally what show are you watching if you don’t spot that?
