Characterization
Actress Eliza Dushku describes Faith as the "working class" Slayer, a reason she feels so many people identify with her. She was written as a sympathetic character; with Doug Petrie claiming "I connected with Faith early on. I love that character. She's totally tragic." According to Petrie, "The whole key to Faith is that she's in pain. If you took that away, she would be a monster. But she's so lonely and so desperate, and all of her toughness comes out of trying to cover that. That's what real monsters are made of. No one thinks they're really a monster." Petrie claims Faith's main motivation is to find a family and friends; she sees treacherous Watcher Gwendolyn Post as the mother she never had, the Scooby Gang as the friends she never had, and the Mayor as the father she never had. "So she's always looking for a family and always coming up short and making these horrible choices, and it drove her insane" says Petrie. "Plus I think she was missing a couple of screws to begin with. 'If you don't love me, you will fear me,' is kind of her m.o. She's not a stable girl, but a fun one." Petrie describes the character's name as "wildly ironic", due to her cynical nature. According to Petrie, "She's the most faithless character we've got. She doesn't trust herself or anyone around her. We try to do that a lot with our monsters. It's much more fun if you look at it from their point of view."
Writer Jane Espenson believes one of the reasons why Faith elicits sympathy from the audience is the touching father/daughter relationship between her and the Mayor, comparing their affection for one another to that between vampires Spike and Drusilla in the earlier season. The writers wanted to make both Faith and the Mayor as human as possible by showing they need connection and love as much as the heroic characters. Eliza Dushku claims Faith's bond with the Mayor stems from his being one of the few people in her life who does not put her down, which is something she has battled with her whole life; Dushku goes on to say Faith's misplaced trust in the Mayor "leads her into being more crazy".
In the Angel season one episode "Sanctuary", Faith forms a bond with the vampire-with-a-soul Angel; executive producer David Greenwalt explains Angel can help her because he alone is able to understand the suffering she has been through and how to help her atone for her sins. Faith is then able to return the favor in Angel's fourth season, when she is the only one determined to defeat Angel's soulless alter ego Angelus without killing him in the process. Actor David Boreanaz explains, "I think having a character like Faith come back at a pivotal point when she finds out Angelus is loose is really, for her character, a way of saying: 'I'm paying you back, Angel, for saving me, therefore, I'm gonna save you.'" The writers believed it would be an interesting dynamic to have former "bad girl" Faith play a heroic role against the show's now villainous protagonist, Angel.
"Much as I love Buffy, I'm way happier writing flawed, damaged people who don't always make the right decisions. Faith is such a complex, beautiful character."
—Brian K. Vaughan explains what attracted him to the character.Faith was brought back for the final season of Buffy, because, according to David Solomon, "she had been such a crucial character at a very specific junction in the series that there would be no way to tie it up without her." However, in season seven the dynamic between the two Slayers has changed. As Rebecca Rand Kirshner explains, " is no longer such a complete opposite of Buffy. And there's sort of a subtler and more complicated dynamic between them". As Buffy struggles with her unwanted position of mentor to the Potential Slayers, the writers used Faith to create an outside conflict about Buffy's leadership abilities. Although Faith is questioning Buffy and her choices she is making, she is no longer an enemy to her either. In the episode "Empty Places", the Potentials lose trust in Buffy and appoint Faith as their leader instead, a decision that literally blows up in their faces. As Drew Goddard explains, "Faith is like the cool aunt that everyone loves, because the cool aunt doesn't have the responsibility of raising the children. She just gets to show up and have fun. The problem is, Faith is not ready to lead. She's damaged in her own way. She's just beginning to pull herself together. As much as she wants to be Buffy, she has to learn how to become Faith."
When writing Go Ask Malice, author Robert Joseph Levy encountered a number of issues to negotiate in writing a back-story for Faith. One of these was retaining the mystery of the character; Levy explains many aspects of Faith's background, such as her delinquency and promiscuity, are supposed to be assumed by the viewers of the show, and he didn't want to spell everything out by writing a "case study" of her. In order to do something non-traditional, Levy chose to tell the story in a diary format, watching many episodes of the television series to get a hold on the natural cadence of her voice. He reveals he looked to Faith herself in order to overcome his fear of writing such a popular character, "She's not hesitant and in a lot of ways, I took a lot of inspiration from the character itself in terms of creative process — to really go for it and be strong in my choices".
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