selenak

itsnotmymind asked: Which Torchwood character is most like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? And which is most like Faith?

I don't think they map exactly, especially since both Buffy and Faith change throughout the show(s). (Plural since Angel the series has important Faith character development.), so it's also a question of "Buffy and Faith at which point?" You can, however map individual traits and situations.

For example, there's the Suzie and Gwen situation in season 1's They keep killing Suzie. In this particular scenario, Suzie's resentment of Gwen, her seeing Gwen as an ursurper of sorts, her life force stealing and her nihilism have some overtones of the Faith vs Buffy situation ca. Who are you?. However, Suzie in general doesn't strike me as much Faith-like. (With the caveat we only see her in two episodes whereas we see a lot more of Faith.) In the Torchwood pilot, Suzie isn't the outsider looking to join a group, Gwen is. Suzie is an experienced professional, longer and more experienced that all other Torchwood members save Jack, which is one of the reasons for her depression and rage. I think Faith being the younger Slayer, and in a situation where everyone is already friends and she has to deal with the implicit comparison to Buffy, is important to her character, as is the poverty and the loss of her first watcher. (Now we don't know the kind of background Suzie comes from per Torchwood, but there is no indication that it is comparable.) And of course Suzie never makes that step that Faith did, in what is arguable both shows (i.e. BTVS and AtS) most succesful redemption story, which is to stop blaming everything on someone else and taking responsibility for her own deeds, and actively atoning for them.

Aside again from the different socio-economic and professional background (Dr. Owen Harper comes across pretty affluent in his pre Torchwood flashbacks, and he certainly isn't poor in the present day action, either), Owen works as a better Faith analogue in that he has way more of a permanent chip on his shoulder, he has Faith's hinted at abusive backstory with his mother. He also shares the mixture of self loathing and occasional hubris, and the use of sexuality as a way to channel issues and avoid rather than make a connection. (Also, while neither character would see themselves as committing rape, Owen's actions in the pilot and Faith's in Buffy's body and earlier her reaction when Xander tries to talk with her certainly fall in the lack of consent category.) Owen has Faith's near- suicidalness at different points in the show, but also her eventual capacity to acknowledge guilt and responsibility and act on it.

Now, despite his s1 affair with Gwen, I would say that if Owen has a focus on another regular character that shares some emotional beats with the Buffy/Faith relationship, it's not Gwen, and definitely not Tosh or Ianto, but Jack, from the moment Jack showed up at Katie's grave to recruit him into Torchwood, wihich is why the scenes with Jack - the hospital visit in the last but one episode, the shooting and the forgiveness in the s1 finale, and mid s2 their conversation in the prison cell after Owen's resurrection - are arguably some of the most intense featuring Owen.

It's far harder for me to find a good Buffy equivalent on Torchwood. Gwen post s1 works - she's become the de facto leader in Jack's absence, as she will again at different points post s2, and she's the character we see develop most from the pilot to the end of Miracle Day, a development of which the "newbie to seasoned veteran moving on to the mentor department" is but one. Gwen has something of Buffy's ability to not look away when seeing something she thinks call for intervention, of her practical compassion and on the other side of the emotional scale something of the self centricity, too. But her relationship with Rhys, the ups and downs through which it goes through the show's various seasons and the way she and Rhys make it work (people defining the relationship through a single s1 episode as if nothing ever happened after the time Gwen used retcon on Rhys are to my mind being about as logical and fair as if someone would define the Londo and Vir relationship on Babylon 5 solely by the s3 episode "No hiding place" with everything else later ignored) has no equivalent in Buffy's life; conversely, Gwen doesn't have to deal with the whole "Chosen One" deal. (No, Buffy can't "not" be the Slayer, to use Joyce's phrase from the s2 finale that was a deliberate callback to an outing scene, just as a similar phrase in X2 said by Bobby Drake's mother had. But Gwen could at any point of the show have chosen to quit Torchwood.)

Jack does, in that his immortality post Doctor Who's s1 finale makes him an outsider and a potential superhero. And perhaps there is something in the difference between early DW Jack and Torchwood Jack that goes with the difference of Buffy the pre-Slayer activation teenager who says herself she was basically early Cordelia and Buffy after the experience of death, killing, resurrection, Slayerness. And certainly later Buffy, with her increasing inability to confide what's really going on with her to her friends, and Jack's inability to tell his team what's going on with him both in the first season and at other point in the show do share another shared trait. Lastly, there's Buffy's quippyiness, which if any Torchwood character has it, it would be Jack. And yet - Jack, as a person, still strikes me as too different from Buffy to really call him a ckise Buffy analogue.

So I guess my final answer is for Faith, Owen, and for Buffy, I don't know.

The other days