While Buffy the Vampire Slayer has no such famine of on-screen fatalities, the one that make the hardest was Buffy’s mother Joyce, so why did the creators kill off her character? Up until season 2 , nobody in the normal world besides the Scooby Gang knew about Buffy Summers’ extracurricular activities as a teenage monster killer. For many years, Buffy had to straddle the two worlds of her regular dwelling life and the one where she and her friends hunted the cruelty thrusts terrorizing Sunnydale.

One of the most human, stunning times from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was when the entitlement persona came home to find her baby, sees wide open, dead on their couch. Buffy suffered so many events that would traumatize the average teenager, but nothing hit harder than her mother’s death. Joyce had been suffering from cancer for the past year, so while there had always been a sense of dreaded, Buffy never expected it so suddenly after seeing her perfectly normal that same morning. After Buffy called 9-1-1 and aimed CPR on Joyce, the doctors informed her that her father suffered a brain aneurysm.

Related: Why Buffy The Vampire Slayer Ended After Season 7( Was It Canceled ?)

The death of Buffy’s mother in season 5 was quite abrupt to the characters and audience, but Joyce’s performer Kristine Sutherland had known about her character’s impending demise since season 3. Sutherland revealed on a Buffy DVD extra she was somewhat eager to leave the series because “shes been” planning on traveling throughout Europe, a journey she began during her remarkable absence in the fourth season. The writers had intended for Joyce to be killed off to reenact a major change in Buffy, changing her season’s dynamic with her priorities on family and the realization she can’t kill everything that could harm the ones she enjoys. Show pioneer Joss Whedon told Metro.co.uk he knew he would kill Joyce because he had tragically lost his own mother and wanted to explore grief with the specific characteristics in a similar way.

While Joyce didn’t compassion the relevant recommendations of the peril her daughter was set up in at any appropriate moment, she became proud and supportive of Buffy and who she was destined to be. As the most constant character and sole support system in Buffy’s life outside of the Scooby Gang, Joyce’s death was heartbreaking to the audience as much as it was to Buffy. The teenage vampire slayer wasn’t a stranger to fatality before “The Body” episode, ” but it was usually at the sides of a ogre she could have killed herself, whereas her powers were useless against cancer. While it’s traumatizing for any child to lose a parent in such a way, for Buffy it meant a distinct change in her reference, one that led to her deciding to sacrifice herself in Buffy’s season 5 finale.

Joyce’s death signaled a change in Buffy where she roughly lost view of her morals and the breakup of her relatively ordinary family life with her mom and her intersperse being hunting horrifying men. Before the gang would do the same for Buffy at the end of the fifth season, Buffy momentarily thought about applying the group’s death-defying knowledge to make her momma back from the tomb, though she wisely backtracked and accepted how large-scale a mistake it would have been. While Joyce’s death instilled a sense of mortality in the ones she loves that Buffy had always impeded beforehand, it removed many of the dual-world bookings Buffy the Vampire Slayer had expressed in the entitlement heroine.

Next: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Should Have Ended With Season 5

Read more: screenrant.com