Is she evil, is she an antihero, is she misunderstood, is she a villain? I don't think there's a single answer to this. It depends entirely on when you ask.

I find Faith interesting since she's pretty much the only character on BtVS who actually acknowledged her own misdeeds - without mitigation or magical excuses or special pleading or some plot contrivance allowing her to avoid the consequences. Angel and Spike (and Anya, to a lesser extent) always had the 'it was the demon' excuse. Willow's evil deeds were always inspired by love and/or loss, and as such were generally portrayed almost sympathetically. Giles largely made his peace off screen pre-series. Xander, Dawn, and so on confined themselves to relatively petty misdeeds that earned a good admonitory finger-waggling and could then be conveniently forgotten by next episode. Faith never had it so easy. Because she was, from a scriptwriting perspective, expendable, the writers could afford to have her alienated in a deep, long-term way from the rest of the group, and to portray her character development in a more plausible, less contrived manner. This made her a lot more complex and difficult to pigeonhole than the main cast, who (to be honest) were the merest cardboard cutouts initially, and were fleshed out on an ad hoc basis over time later on.

I'm not sure you can stick a single label on Faith. None of them fit, or at least none of them fit all the time. She's rather like a real person, in that regard. Reality resists easy categorisation.

IMO, after she went to the Mayor she was mostly a villain. What she was feeling, all her issues, all of that, doesn't excuse her from what she did. Even if you ignore what she did, her actions helped who knows how many students die.

However, was she evil? Angelus like evil?

No. She was a conflicted character, neither a saint nor a demon, though her actions placed her mostly on the villain side of the spectrum.

If she was real, in the real world, I probably wouldn't want her out on the streets, and I really wouldn't feel like she wouldn't go off the deep end again.

In the BTVS Universe? Well, everyone's redeemable I think. She was the small leagues of evildom.

do you mind if I post this over at the Faith shippers community? I think this might be a good question to start off the community.

And I'll give you my answer when I get to work. It's too detailed to go into when I have to leave.

Depends what point in time you're talking. Faith's been everything at one time or another. "Intrinsically evil" -- not unless you think she was "born bad", though I might be misunderstanding.

I recall someone else saying she was at her most evil when she tried to strangle Xander, but I'd classify that as more a desperate moment, like torturing Wesley. I'd say she was her most consciously and unapologetically evil from "Choices" to "Graduation Day": Completely dedicated to Mayor Wilkins, even if she didn't give much of a rip one way or the other about his plans for the rest of the world, and willing to do anything for him without a second thought.

I love Faith for a lot of reasons, but mostly it's because Angel, like Willow, she knows just how good that blurry line tastes. SMG made me like Buffy despite myself, but Faith will always be number one in my book. It's the same thing that made me love Xena -- someone who embraced their darkness, rejected it, and finally came to terms with it will *always* be more interesting to me than someone who's always tried to do the right thing.

"...LIKE Angel, like Willow..."

*runs off buttering fingers*

Faith struck me a screwed-up, angry person screwing up and lashing out because she didn't feel she could do anything else, and it wasn't until she got a taste of what a non-screwed-up life was (by trading places with Buffy in "Who Are You?) that she began to realize how different she was from what she should be.

This isn't really going to contribute in a helpful way - it's more a random thought that's stray in my brain which is not a lot to do with your question and I'm sure has been discussed on BBB or something - but he-ho!

Having watched The Wish for the first time in ages the other weekend when Cath was visiting (btw, she recognised you on the Starfury Serenity dvd!:)), I had my usual moment of thinking about nature/nurture in the Slayer world. All is good if the slayer is nurtured, but when too much is left to nature the slayer (Faith or Wish Buffy) becomes a darker character. Is this something to do with who they are in terms of their human character not being able to cope with the loneliness/ work of slaying, or to do with the demon element that gives them their slayerness becoming too dominant because there isn't enough humanity around them to nourish their human side?

In either case, I don't think Faith is solely responsible for her wrongdoings. The Watchers Council share some of the culpability, the slayer is their 'instrument' so they should have taken better care of it!

I want to ramble on this more and make it make proper sense, but sadly that in-tray (otherwise known as the piles on my desk) is giving me reproachful looks so I'll have to get on with boring stuff now instead:(

Was she intrinsically evil? No more than anyone else. Yet to say she wasn’t really evil is as dangerously simplistic as to say she WAS simply evil.

She had impulses. She acted on them. Some of them were bad: not just mistaken, but malicious, deliberately destructive, murderous. These were evil acts, meaning she was — by choice — giving herself over to evil. During that phase, she wasn’t a misunderstood anti-hero, she was a villain. She knew it herself.

So the main thing to consider when trying to decide which category fits Faith is: which Faith? Faith at what point in her life? During Angel Season 5 we had opportunity to see that many of the same characteristics were still there, but by this point she’d had a couple of years to come to terms with those aspects of herself and learn to make choices. Upon her first (Buffy Season 3) arrival in Sunnydale, she had issues but was still trying to operate — to some extent — within the good-guy role. Toward the end of Season 3, she wasn’t just doing evil things, she was actively and consciously embracing evil. That’s NOT something that can be blithely overooked.

More than anybody else in the Buffyverse, Faith serves as an illustration that choice matters. She made bad choices, tried to avoid the consequences, went down a bad road and became a bad person. Somewhere along the line, she hit a wall, started realizing just how much she hated herself, and reluctantly and painfully began the journey back. By choice. She paid the price for her previous actions, and kept paying until the time came when duty called for her to do something else … and then made sure that neither she nor anybody else forgot what she had been and done. She took responsibility, and everything that came with it.

Was she evil? Yes, at one point. Was she misunderstood? I’d say incompletely understood. Was she a heroine? Eventually. This is a complex, multi-layered personality, and the best treatment of her will take this complexity into account and work to let it show.

I never liked early canon Faith much. Season 3!Faith is stupid, self-serving and vicious, which basically equates to evil.

As the show moves on, she wises up and opens up to the world more, removing two of the qualifications for the evilness, and the viciousness becomes something she can harness for the Slayage. That's when she becomes an interesting character for me.

All the world loves a villain. ;-) Face it, Darth Vader, Brian Dennehy's Cobb in Silverado, hell, even Spike. They are our darkest desires put to film. Ultimately, how you feel about them reflects how you feel about some of the hardest (philosophical, moral, practical) issues of life.

Some of the greatest works of art have been written by authors entirely removed from the impulse to do wrong. J.R.R. Tolkien never had a grip on the voice of evil, except for Saruman, who's sin was simply pride. Tolkien understood pride. Think of the Shakespearean villains who were entirely motiveless masks, like Iago. Greed, in Regan or Goneril, Shakespeare could understand. Sheer malice was beyond him.

I think Milton's Satan is intriguing because Milton was a Protestant: some of the Protestant pride in taking on Rome powers Satan's charisma.

So, Faith. I love S3 Faith. She is mildly sociopathic, yes. And family, society and the Council failed to protect her from many things, as one must expect institutions run by mere mortals to do. But Faith, finding herself in a hole, kept digging. And part of the reason she stayed there was the Mayor. God! The way he treated Faith! So concerned, so paternal, so real. I'm sure it was like heroin to her. Their relationship, just the two of them, is so pure that, though the Mayor is unrelievedly evil, I grieve for him when Faith is in a coma. Nevertheless, she chose to stay. She could have run off, offered to take herself out of the Mayor's fight in exchange for some financial support (cynical? Yes. So?). (I don't remember if she was wanted by the police at this time.) But she didn't.

Choking Xander was a lashing out at someone who pitied her, something Faith could never accept (weakness) and always wanted (deep down, she knew she was deprived and damaged). Torturing Wesley was simply a tool (I would understand if Wesley refused to be comforted by this). She wanted to die (suicide by cop) at the hands of someone she respected.

Awww it makes me sad when people call Faith evil or the villain!

I don't think Faith was really evil or good just completely human. She had so many hard knocks in her life (even from the little we got canon-wise it didn't seem as if Faith exactly had the best upbringing) and because of her attitude she probably was ostracized for most of her life. After her watcher died she made a last ditch effort to 'fit in' with Buffy, thinking she could finally have somewhere to belong in the world only to be ostracized again. Not only did her and Buffy disagree on anything but Buffy was outright jealous and super protective of the things she held dear with no room for Faith in the mix.

Because she's human and sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures I think she turned to Wilkins because she literally had nothing to lose. Buffy and friends had for all intents and purposes turned their back on her. You remember the first person she killed was a mistake and Buffy really didn't make that easy on her at all for her own reasons whatever they might be. The problem with Faith is despite her 'I need to be alone cause I was created to be that way' philosophy she is constantly, desperately seeking approval, a place where she fits in the world. The Mayor offered her what Buffy couldn't and so when she couldn't beat them she joined them figuring that at last she not only had her place in the world as number one but also someone who despite being evil really cared very deeply for her. I could go into all of Faith's daddy issues but that's an entirely different conversation ;)

In the end she realized that she'd made the wrong decision but didn't know how to escape the hole she'd already dug for herself and so she actively went seeking the only out she knew figuring Angel would finally give her some of that peace she could never find on her own.

So was Faith evil? I don't think so. I think Faith just wanted to be loved and she was desperate so she acted out in a way that could be conceived as evil.

This is an opinion, not an attack, but I really did feel I had to respond.

“So was Faith evil? I don’t think so. I think Faith just wanted to be loved and she was desperate so she acted out in a way that could be conceived as evil.”

At the end of Season 3, just before taking a knife in the gut, Faith was working to aid her mentor in killing all the graduating class and much of the town. She talked about it. She knew what was going down. If anybody else — not just the adorable bad girl — plotted to kill hundreds, worked to bring about Columbine-times-thirty, most of us would have little trouble recognizing it as evil.

In my own post, I stated that it’s simplistic and deceptive to characterize Faith as simply evil. She was always more than that. But at that point in her life, she certainly wasn’t any less.

For me it depends. In reality, I'm a completely forgiving person. I've dated people who have done far worse than most of what Faith did and they did it to ME. They're a sociopath - but I forgave them.

I didn't view anything they did as evil, because they were an unhealthy and sick individual who needed help.

On the Buffyverse, things can be painted in different ways. Season three, Faith is compared to Buffy a lot - and this version of Buffy is a better-than-thou-never-say-a-dirty-word version that I loathed, as compared to who she was in the latter half of season two.

In terms of storyline, Faith was the villain to the gang, but - I, personally, didn't think of her as much of a villain. She was working with the mayor, he accepted her - something she never quite had with the gang - and she would do anything that kept her under the mayor's praises.

I'm not the bestest person to answer this stuff because I'm TOO forgiving. But, I've forgiven people who've done stuff waaaaay worse than she did, so, no, Faith is not evil to me.

I think the primary distinction between Faith and Angel(us) is the matter of the soul. Faith, in S3, has a soul but tries to act as if she doesn't. Both of them know - intellectually - that their acts are evil. It doesn't, inherently, feel wrong for Angelus to do evil. Whereas with Faith, it does feel wrong to her. And that, for me, is where she crosses the line from doing evil to being evil.

So to me, her acts of evil are more significant because they involve a greater element of informed choice. By the same token, I consider Angel's choices to commit evil acts (such as in AtS-2) to be more morally signigicant than the evil acts he commits without a soul.

Meant to comment on this ages ago!

Faith I think is far more complex than that, and the Angel/Angelus dichotomy is totally inappropriate. With Angel/Angelus, although a great deal of the personality is the same, it's in some sense a different person "in the driving seat" - the human soul vs the demon. The demon's always there in Angel, but the soul has a chance of overcoming that (though sometimes he slips).

With Faith it's fundamentally the same person throughout - it's her understanding of herself and her world that changes. But she, like the rest of us, carries within herself the potential for both good and evil at all times.

When we first meet her, she is an angry, confused, abused, messed-up young woman who's been given enormous power and doesn't think about the consequences of the way she uses it. One might say that her background has not given her any way of doing so. It's always been her against the world. She's like a tinderbox which only needs a spark to set it ablaze, and it's the accidental killing of the Deputy Mayor that does that.

That doesn't mean she doesn't have free will, or that she's not responisble for her subsequent actions. She is. She chooses to become a villain. We can understand the reasons hy she's so messed up, but it's still her choice. That's what we get from Willow in Choices - "You had an unhappy childhood - well boo-hoo!" oslt.

What I think lays the ground for her eventual redemption, compared to other human 'villains' such as the Mayor and Warren, is that her evil is not motivated by desire for ultimate power or by malice, but because she's never seen anything to make her believe that any other way of relating to people and understanding herself is possible. The potential for good was always there, but no-one had ever drawn it out. (I think Buffy really did try to reach out to her in S3, but not very effectively, and the others didn't help much either, and it was really too little, too late.)

I wonder about that shared dream in Graduation Day 2, where she gives her power to Buffy and advises her on how to beat the Mayor - thus inadvertantly betraying the one person who had shown her kindness, albeit in a twisted way. I tend to think that it really was a brain share, and so we were seeing something at a fundamental level of Faith's subconscious, the untapped potential for good she wasn't even aware of.

What enabled Faith to change, enabled her to see that there was another way of living, was first the experience of being Buffy, and then of course of Angel's refusal to go along with her 'suicide by Angel' plan, and his persistent belief in her, that it was possible for her to change.

The word 'repentance' is often misunderstood, as just meaning 'being sorry', or saying 'gosh, now I realise how wrong the things I did were'. The Biblical Greek word for 'repentance' is metanoia, 'change of mind' that is a complete upheaval of the way you see the world, the way you see yourself. Faith always knew what she was doing was 'wrong', but that didn't have any meaning for her, because of her understanding of herself and the world. Almost everything she'd experienced up to then seemed to confirm that understanding. The events of TYG to Sanctuary shook up her world and her way of thinking to the extent that it made that metanoia possible - and she made the one key choice to seize that moment, to act on that new understanding, when she gave herself up to the police, accepting that her actions had consequences and that she had to face them.

So she emerged from prison ready to be a true hero, no doubt still messed up and hurting from a lot of things, redemption still a work in progress, but with her view of the world and her place in it transformed.