Buffy was the blueprint for carrying too much. The homework, the heartbreak, the apocalypse — all handled with a witty one-liner and an exhausted smile. She was the first woman on television I saw literally holding the world together while the men around her debated morality in the background. Every season, she saved them all. Every season, they still found new ways to make her apologise for it.

She was the emotional backbone, the logistical planner, the crisis manager, the friend, the sister, the leader, the punchline. And she never stopped long enough to ask if anyone else wanted to try carrying the load.

It’s funny: the show wanted us to think the monster was always outside the house. But if you watch it now, you realise the monster was in the writer’s chair.

There’s a particular fatigue to watching Buffy as an adult — especially as someone who’s spent years being the responsible one. She keeps showing up. Keeps burying her grief under a quip. Keeps forgiving people who use her, need her, worship her, and then blame her.

Her reward for saving the world? A funeral scene where her friends finally notice how tired she is.

What once felt empowering now reads like a manual for burnout. Buffy was expected to lead, nurture, empathise, kill, and forgive — all while maintaining a perfect sense of humour. She didn’t just slay vampires; she managed everyone’s emotions about the vampires.

Before I had the language for “emotional labour,” I had a girl with a wooden stake and a forced smile.

And that’s the bitter twist, isn’t it? The show that gave us one of television’s most enduring feminist icons was built by a man who treated the women on his set with cruelty and control.

You can see it now — in the way female characters are written to be both powerful and punished. How intimacy is often framed as corruption. How every act of feminine strength is followed by some kind of narrative penalty.

It’s hard not to watch those choices differently now. The constant testing of Buffy’s morality. The endless suffering of Willow. The way every woman’s trauma became a spectacle for the men in the room to react to. It’s the sort of writing that insists, we’re empowering women, while quietly muttering, but only on our terms.

Once you know the truth about the man behind it, you start spotting the seams — the places where empathy was imagined but never felt.

Rewatching Buffy now feels like walking through the ruins of a house you once thought was safe. You still recognise the rooms. The dialogue still hits. The metaphors still work. But you can feel the rot in the foundations.

It’s complicated, loving something made by someone who would’ve seen you as disposable. The show taught a generation of women and queer viewers that survival was sacred. That the chosen one could cry, fail, die, and still get up. And yet, behind the scenes, the person who wrote that story was exploiting the same vulnerability he turned into art.

Maybe that’s why Buffy still resonates — because it was always about surviving men like him. She didn’t just fight demons; she fought systems. She fought the assumption that power had to be masculine, that leadership had to be loud, that empathy was weakness.

Even if the man behind it didn’t mean for it to be feminist, the audience made it that way.

When I think about what actually made Buffy special, it wasn’t him. It was Sarah Michelle Gellar’s restraint. Alyson Hannigan’s heartbreak. Amber Benson’s warmth. The quiet, consistent work of women taking a script written through a male gaze and infusing it with humanity.

They carried the same emotional load their characters did — turning a show about trauma into one that could actually help people survive theirs.

Buffy didn’t invent emotional labour because she wanted to. She did it because no one else would. And that feels truer now than it ever did.

I can’t unsee what I know about the show’s creator, but I also can’t erase what the show gave me. It taught me that carrying too much can be heroic and harmful at the same time. That survival doesn’t always feel triumphant. That sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is resting your sword and saying, someone else can save the world tonight.

Buffy taught me how to hold it all together — and, years later, how to finally put some of it down.