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Some well-meaning soul got me "Pretty Maids All in a Row" for Christmas. Now, the books are, as we know, non-canonical, but it had a number of potential slayers being trained by watchers across the world under the auspices of their watchers and unltimately the Watcher's Council. As a result of circumstances, the potential slayers are gathered together in the Council headquarters, where they are attacked and systematically eliminated by a demon. It all goes wrong when Spike disobeys orders and kills the current slayer, at which point her powers transfer to one of the slayers-in-training, and when she is killed they transfer to another, until eventually the big bad is beaten down by a succession of slayers. In this instance, the girls are normal humans until their predecessor dies, at which point they are *instantly* granted Slayer strength, speed, etc.
I think one thing that has been made clear repeatedly is that Buffy's journey into Slayerdom is highly unusual. She appears to have "slipped the net", which is why her watcher was not assigned to her in childhood but only when she actually *became* the slayer (although changing attitudes to letting middle-aged men hang out with your daughter may also be a factor here). It is possibly as a result of this that her attitude and performance are so different, a difference commented on implicitly or explicitly by almost every Council member she has ever met, including Merick and Series 1 Giles. Giles himself seems rather unusual for a Watcher, although much of this can be attributed to the effect Buffy has had on him. Presumably until he was assigned to Buffy he was not watching another potential Slayer, so he was presumably (is there backstory here?) a reserve or research Watcher, who is as hacked off at the beginning of S1 to be uprooted and sent to LA as Buffy is to see him. Buffy's strength, and the reason she is not dead yet, has always been her unconventionality; she and Giles were clearly idiosyncratic in their approach.
Whether this is mere dumb chance (the Council presumably has methods either genealogical or magical to detect potential Slayers, and for some reason she was not found), or indicative of a different relationship to the primal force of the Slayer is another question. |
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