There is a conversation that has been running, quietly and persistently, since Faith Lehane first appeared on screen in season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It has always been more visible in certain corners of fandom than in the mainstream, but it has never gone away: something about Eliza Dushku’s performance, and something about the writing, and something about the specific charge in the air whenever Faith and Buffy shared a scene, that made a great number of viewers suspect that the show’s account of Faith’s sexuality was not the complete one.
The comics have now made it official.
Issue eleven of The Vampire Slayer — Sarah Gailey and Hannah Templer’s ongoing alternate-universe series from BOOM Studios — contains a moment that has been circulating rapidly across social media since its publication. Faith confronts an out-of-control Willow, in the grip of her darker impulses, and finds herself unable to focus. The reason, she acknowledges, is her attraction to Willow — specifically, to this “dark, scary version” of her. She describes Willow as “wicked hot.”
It is, as confirmations go, not especially subtle. It is also not trying to be. The Vampire Slayer has consistently shown more interest in expanding the queer dimensions of the Buffyverse than the original television series was permitted to. Xander has already been reimagined as queer in this run. Willow’s bisexuality — which Whedon has since admitted was always his intention but was suppressed by network executives in the late ’90s — was part of the fabric of the series from the start.
Faith’s sexuality on the television show was coded rather than explicit. She had romantic and sexual relationships with men throughout the run, but the subtext in her interactions with Buffy was dense enough that fan discussion never really needed to supply much imagination. The show got close, occasionally — the knife-fighting scene in “Enemies,” most obviously — and then retreated. The comics are not retreating.
What is particularly interesting about this confirmation is where it comes from. Gailey and Templer’s series is not a nostalgic exercise; it is genuinely interested in what the Buffyverse’s characters would look like with the constraints of late-’90s network television removed. The answer, increasingly, is that they look like what long-time fans always suspected.
Faith was always the Slayer who refused to perform. She refused to be selfless, refused to be grateful, refused to manage herself for other people’s comfort. It would be strange, now that the comics have the freedom to be honest, if her sexuality turned out to be the one area where she was performing after all.
It was not. She is wicked hot about it, apparently. Good for her.
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