While Buffy the Vampire Slayer had no shortage of on-screen deaths, the one that hit the hardest was Buffy’s mother Joyce, so why did the creators kill off her character? Up until season 2, nobody in the normal world besides the Scooby Gang knew about Buffy Summers’ extracurricular activities as a teenage vampire killer. For many years, Buffy had to straddle the two worlds of her normal home life and the one where she and her friends hunted the evil forces terrorizing Sunnydale.

One of the most human, shocking moments from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was when the title character came home to find her mother, eyes wide open, dead on their couch. Buffy experienced so many events that would traumatize the average teenager, but nothing hit harder than her mother’s death. Joyce had been suffering from cancer for the past year, so while there had always been a sense of dread, Buffy never expected it so suddenly after seeing her perfectly normal that same morning. After Buffy called 9-1-1 and attempted CPR on Joyce, the doctors informed her that her mother suffered a brain aneurysm.

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The death of Buffy’s mother in season 5 was quite sudden to the characters and audience, but Joyce’s performer Kristine Sutherland had known about her character's impending demise since season 3. Sutherland revealed on a Buffy DVD extra she was slightly eager to leave the series because she had been planning on traveling throughout Europe, a trip she began during her notable absence in the fourth season. The writers had intended for Joyce to be killed off to enact a major change in Buffy, affecting her season’s dynamic with her priorities on family and the realization she can’t kill everything that could harm the ones she loves. Show creator Joss Whedon told Metro.co.uk he knew he would kill Joyce because he had tragically lost his own mother and wanted to explore grief with the characters in a similar way.

Buffy and Joyce in The Body

While Joyce didn’t love the idea of the danger her daughter was placed in at any given moment, she became proud and supportive of Buffy and who she was destined to be. As the most constant character and sole support system in Buffy’s life outside of the Scooby Gang, Joyce’s death was heartbreaking to the audience as much as it was to Buffy. The teenage vampire slayer wasn’t a stranger to death before "The Body" episode," but it was usually at the hands of a monster she could have killed herself, whereas her powers were useless against cancer. While it’s traumatizing for any child to lose a parent in such a way, for Buffy it meant a distinct change in her character, one that led to her deciding to sacrifice herself in Buffy's season 5 finale.

Joyce’s death signaled a change in Buffy where she almost lost sight of her morals and the separation of her relatively normal family life with her mother and her alternate life hunting horrifying creatures. Before the crew would do the same for Buffy at the end of the fifth season, Buffy momentarily thought about using the group’s death-defying knowledge to bring her mom back from the grave, though she wisely backtracked and acknowledged how big a mistake it would have been. While Joyce’s death instilled a sense of mortality in the ones she loves that Buffy had always prevented beforehand, it removed many of the dual-world reservations Buffy the Vampire Slayer had expressed in the title heroine.

Next: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Should Have Ended With Season 5