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Anya Jenkins
Full Name: Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins, aka Aud, aka Anyanka
"Real" Name: Cecily Underwood
Room Number: F12
Roommate: Hinamori Momo
Age: 1143, appears 21
Hair Color: brown
Eye Color: brown
Height: 5'5"
Main Language: English
Secondary Languages: Old Norse, Swedish, Latin, French, Russian, Romanian, Ancient Babylonian, Ancient Sumerian, various demonic languages, (possible others not mentioned in canon)
Other Characteristics: when fighting, using her powers, or just getting annoyed, Anya can revert to her demon form
Powers and Abilitles
Anya has all the typical powers of a vengeance demon. She has heightened physical abilities, including strength, speed, and agility. She is an effective fighter with most manners of weaponry. She can also teleport, and can heal very quickly. She has a psychic sense to identify grieving or scorned women, and can sense whether or not a vampire has a soul. Furthermore, she has a basic knowledge of magic, and has been seen to participate in Willow’s spells as both a primary and a secondary. She is very adept at summoning demons and using curses. While her pendant is intact – even if it not on her person – she can grant any wish made in her presence.
At Landel's, her teleportation and the power of the wish are revoked completely, and she can't perform any magic. She still has her physical powers, but they are lessened - they're about on par with highly talented professional athletes.
BACKGROUND
Aud was born in 860 in Sjornjost, Sweden. Because of her tendency towards literalism, she was shunned to a certain extent by the people of neighboring villages (“Take your beads and literal interpretations to the other side of the river!”). By age 20, she was either dating or married to a Viking warrior and troll-hunter named Olaf (their exact relationship is unclear). They had a relatively happy life together, although it’s implied that Aud was never completely satisfied. She occupied her time by breeding rabbits, which she decided to give as gifts in exchange for kind deeds.
Everything changed when Olaf began cheating on Aud with a bar wench, Rannveig. In retaliation, Aud turned Olaf into a troll. He was driven out of town and then locked away inside a crystal by witches. Aud’s spell, which was fairly creative and advanced, attracted the attention of D’Hoffryn, Lord of the Vengeance Demons. D’Hoffryn turned Aud into a vengeance demon, and changed her name to Anyanka. He gave her a pendant in which she could store the power of the wish: she would have the power to grant any wish made in her presence.
Over the next eleven centuries, Anyanka traveled the world exacting vengeance. Though most vengeance demons didn’t specialize, Anyanka did – she only went after men who had wronged women. She became quite well known for her inventive cruelty, and it is implied that she was D’Hoffryn’s favorite. In 1199, she visited the Koskov Valley, where she witnessed an Ascension (a mortal becoming pure demon) for the first time. A sorcerer took on the form of a pure demon, and wiped out an entire village, leaving even Anyanka shaken. But it didn’t slow her down in the least. She briefly dated Count Dracula in the 1580’s, and was present at the Salem witch trials in the 1690’s.
In the late 1800’s/early 1900’s, Anyanka became friends with a fellow vengeance demon, Halfrek. “Hallie,” as Anyanka referred to her, specialized in children wishing vengeance on their parents. Anyanka and Hallie became the best of friends, and even started the Russian Revolutions together in 1905. At a banquet near the burning Kremlin, Anyanka declared to Hallie that she was a firm Communist, and that starting the revolution was the right thing for Russia. Hallie, and it’s implied D’Hoffryn as well, was thoroughly impressed by Anyanka’s dedication to the job and her coldhearted ability to cause utter destruction.
Anyanka continued to punish unfaithful men for the next century, including a man named Stewart Burns, whom she met in 1914 in Chicago, IL. She turned Burns into a monster and trapped him in a hell dimension.
In 1998, she took on the persona of Anya Emerson, a student at Sunnydale High School in Sunnydale, CA. This was the school attended by the fabled Vampire Slayer, Buffy Summers. But Anyanka was more concerned with the Cordelia Chase, May Queen and formerly the most popular girl in school. Cordelia had lost her popularity when she started dating Xander Harris, one of Buffy’s friends and a total loser. Xander had cheated on Cordelia with his best friend, Willow Rosenberg, which resulted in Cordelia being impaled by rebar, staying in the hospital for a week, and burning all her photographs from the past year. Unfortunately for Anya, getting close to Cordelia meant getting close to Harmony Kendall, who had replaced Cordelia as the most popular girl in school. Harmony felt she had found a new best friend in Anyanka, but Anya secretly looked down in the shallow, ditzy blonde – a fact she confided in Cordelia. Like Harmony, Cordelia also felt she had found a new best friend in Anya, and Anya reciprocated by giving Cordelia her pendant, saying it was a good luck charm. She persuaded Cordelia to wish ill on Xander, but Cordelia was sure that the root of her problem was Buffy. She wished that the Slayer had never come to Sunnydale, and Anya granted her wish.
Sunnydale became a hellish place, in which vampires had overrun the town and it was not safe to leave one’s house after dark. Xander and Willow were vampires, working for Buffy’s old nemesis, the great vampire lord called The Master. They killed Cordelia, and her body was brought to Buffy’s Watcher, Rupert Giles, who ran the high school library. Giles recognized the significance of Anya’s pendant, so he took it from Cordelia’s body and destroyed it. The world reverted to the way it was before, with Anya trapped in mortal form. Desperate to get her power back, she first begged D’Hoffryn for help, but he refused. She tricked Willow into helping her retrieve her pendant from the alternate reality, but their spell backfired and Anya remained stuck. Her efforts resulted in a vampire siege on the local club, the Bronze, and Willow’s near death, neither of which Anya cared about.
The woes of a normal teenage life began to overcome Anya as she struggled to complete 12th grade. She complained that she was failing math, but more desperate was the search for a prom date. She bullied Xander into taking her, and completely against her will had a good time. Attempts to see Xander again proved fruitless, though, as he was not interested in pursuing a relationship with a former demon. When he informed her that the Mayor of Sunnydale, Richard Wilkins III, was planning an Ascension for himself during the high school graduation, Anya panicked. Remembering what happened in the Koskov Valley, she planned to flee to Aruba, and asked Xander to go with her. He refused, but she was determined to at least get a kiss from him before she left. He continued to refuse her advances, and she went to Aruba, never planning to return.
The Mayor was defeated, and Sunnydale was (relatively) safe once again. Buffy and Willow went on to college at UC Sunnydale, Cordelia moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, while Xander was working a series of odd jobs and living in his parents’ basement. After spending several months in the safety of Aruba, Anya returned to Sunnydale because of her unresolved feelings for Xander. She convinced him to have sex with her, assuming this would make her feelings go away, but no such luck. Instead, her feelings increased, and she and Xander began dating. Buffy, Willow, and Giles did not approve of Anya at first, but she eventually became a member of the team, despite her incredible tactlessness and lack of repentance for her past crimes. She aided them in researching and fighting demons, and by the end of Buffy’s freshman year in college, Anya was sitting in on all the meetings of the “Scooby Gang” (the name for Buffy’s group of friends). Early in their relationship, Xander invited Anya to a Halloween party and told her to wear something scary. She showed up in a bunny suit, because “bunnies scare [her].” This becomes a running gag, with Anya reacting negatively to any sightings or mentions of bunnies.
Xander and Anya were often called upon to baby-sit Buffy’s little sister Dawn, who had a huge crush on Xander and therefore didn’t like Anya much. While the three of them were playing The Game of Life, Anya was surprised to learn that money meant she was winning. From then on, she was a devoted capitalist, abandoning her communist leanings. She became so obsessed with money and adept at manipulating it that Giles gave her a job as a clerk at his store, The Magic Box. She also got involved with online trading, and tripled her money quickly.
When Buffy came up for review by the Watchers Council, Anya was forced to invent a full name and life story for herself. She became Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins, born on the 4th of July in Southeastern Indiana, “where [she] was raised by both a mother and a father.” She complained that everyone used to call her “our little patriot.” Later on, however, this ceased to become just something she made up – she actually became a staunch patriot when she decided that capitalism was the American way, and that to be capitalist was to be American. She also started identifying herself as an American citizen (which was not technically true – she was Swedish).
Anya and Willow, because of their complicated relationship with Xander as well as completely incompatible personalities, didn’t get along at all. Willow had become gay in college, and wasn’t romantically interested in Xander, but was still his best friend and worried that Anya would break his heart. Anya, on the other hand, was afraid that Willow would turn back to boys and steal Xander away from her the way she’d stolen him from Cordelia. The two quarreled angrily and often, until Xander couldn’t put up with it anymore and admonished them to resolve their differences. They agreed to work on a spell together in peace, but Anya’s interference caused the spell to go wrong, and Willow accidentally summoned Olaf the troll. Olaf went on a rampage through Sunnydale, destroying both The Magic Box and The Bronze, but Willow, Anya, and Xander defeated him. Anya confessed to Willow that she was deeply in love with Xander and would never hurt him.
Meanwhile, Buffy’s relationship with her new boyfriend, Riley, was falling apart. They weren’t communicating well, but no one noticed except Riley and Xander – not even Buffy. Xander watched the relationship disintegrate because of a lack of communication, until Riley finally left town. After Riley’s departure, Xander realized he didn’t want to make the same mistakes that Buffy and Riley made. He immediately went to Anya and professed his love for her.
Several times, Anya was forced to deal with her own mortality – something deeply frightening for her. A dislocated shoulder made her realize that she could have as few as fifty years left – a short time for someone more than a millennium old. She wanted to rush into marriage, puppies, kids, and boats with Xander, but he calmed her down and convinced her that they had time for all those things later. When Buffy’s mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, everyone assumed Anya was being callous because she didn’t care. But after Willow shouted at her for being unfeeling, Anya broke down and confessed how deeply traumatized she was about mortality.
The next time the gang faced an apocalypse, Anya chose to stay and fight, rather than run like she had last time. She explained to Xander how worried she was for his safety and her own, but she was so in love with him that she couldn’t leave. He surprised her by proposing to her only hours before the battle. She accepted, but on the condition that he gave her the ring after they survived the apocalypse and defeated the villain. In the fight, Xander was nearly crushed by falling rocks, but Anya pushed him out of the way and was injured in his stead.
Buffy was killed saving the world, and in the months following her death the rest of the gang tried to pick up the slack. Giles, having no more use as a Watcher with the Slayer dead, moved back to England. Anya had always looked up to Giles as a father figure, and clung to him in times of great emotional stress, and was sad to see him go. However, she was quite histrionic about the fate of the shop – she demanded full ownership, which Giles gave her. The gang was no match for the hordes of demons descending on Sunnydale, and they decided to resurrect Buffy. Anya, Xander, Willow, and Willow’s girlfriend Tara performed a complex and draining spell to bring Buffy back. They succeeded, and Giles immediately returned. Anya expressed regret about this because it meant the shop wasn’t entirely hers anymore. But it became apparent that Buffy didn’t need Giles – she had to grow up without him always being there to fix things for her. He returned to England.
Anya was impatient for Xander to announce their engagement, but he was determined to find the exact right moment. When they finally did announce that they were getting married, the gang threw them an impromptu party. Their comments about marriage and children and life together forever gave both Xander and Anya second thoughts. When Riley briefly returned with his new wife Sam, Xander became jealous of the wonderful wedding they had had. With both his family and Anya’s demon friends staying in their apartment, he and Anya spent much of their time hiding the bathroom, giving both of them time to reflect. Xander told Anya that their wedding was probably going to be awful and he couldn’t wait to get it over with, but that their marriage would be something completely different and he couldn’t image his life without her.
At the wedding, an already-nervous Xander was haunted by visions of his future self, who told him that marrying Anya was a terrible idea – she would never be faithful and he would become abusive to her and their kids. It turned out that “future Xander” was actually Stewart Burns, who escaped from his hell dimension and was getting revenge for what Anya did to him. But the doubts Burns planted were already in Xander’s mind – he was terrified that he would become like his alcoholic, abusive father, and he didn’t want to do that to Anya. So he left Anya at the altar. She was comforted by D’Hoffryn, who finally offered to restore her powers. She accepted, and became a demon again.
Anya returned to her former life of granting wishes to scorned women, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore. She desperately tried to get someone to wish ill on Xander, because she could not enact vengeance on her own behalf. But no one did. One night, she and reformed vampire Spike were getting drunk at The Magic Box, and wound up having sex. Buffy’s self-proclaimed “arch-nemeses,” Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan, had installed a camera that recorded the whole thing. Xander saw the tape, and was horrified that sleeping with Spike was how Anya chose to get revenge on him. She told him that it wasn’t vengeance – it was solace.
When Warren murdered Tara, Willow was driven mad by grief and absorbed all the power of the books at The Magic Box. She channeled this power into Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew’s destruction, and succeeded in murdering Warren. Buffy cajoled Anya to help Jonathan and Andrew, who were more or less innocent, and Anya agreed to teleport ahead of Willow and get Jonathan and Andrew to safety. As punishment for helping them, D’Hoffryn revoked her ability to teleport, except on “official business.” Giles returned to Sunnydale just in time, and faced Willow in The Magic Box. The store was demolished and Giles nearly killed.
With The Magic Box gone, Anya had few remaining ties to humanity, and grew more and more apart from the gang. She returned fulltime to vengeance, but her spells were fairly basic and hardly anyone died as a result of them. Out of concern for her friend, Hallie visited Sunnydale, and told Anya that the rest of the vengeance demons, who had once respected her highly, were now calling her “soft-serve.” The Scooby Gang was hardly pleased by Anya’s vengeance spells, however. On one occasion, they had to hunt a demon she released. But she was still willing to help them, especially when they had to save a no-longer-evil Willow from a flesh-eating demon. Because of her ability to sense vampire’s souls, Anya was the first to know that Spike had gotten his. The vampire didn’t want anyone to know, however, so he beat her up to stop her talking. They had a fight, which Xander feebly objected to, and Anya agreed not to tell anyone Spike’s secret.
But Anya was determined to make her way back into D’Hoffryn’s good graces, and she knew it will take a bloodbath to make him respect her again. When she slaughtered an entire fraternity, Buffy decided it was time to put the vengeance demon down. Xander tried to dissuade Buffy from killing Anya, tearfully admitting that he was still in love with her, but Buffy was resolute. Xander ran ahead to warn Anya that Buffy was coming to kill her. Hardly caring, Anya threw Xander aside violently and fought Buffy. During the fight, Buffy ran Anya through with a broadsword.
And then she woke up at Landel's.
PERSONALITY
Anya is “a feisty waif, with a fiery temper and a vulnerable heart, that she hides even from herself.” Though this description is given by Andrew, the resident melodramatic over-exaggerating storyteller, it’s more or less accurate.
The first thing anyone notices about Anya is her tendency towards literalism and tactlessness. She doesn’t grasp the subtleties of metaphor, and never refrains from speaking exactly what’s on her mind, no matter how selfish or even hurtful it is. When she and Andrew are comforting an injured girl, they pass a bottle of alcohol back and forth over her bleeding body, discussing the potential loss of life in the coming battle. When the girl tries to say something, Anya cuts her off, explaining in a soothing voice that, “Talking will just make you die faster.” She also does not grasp many of the technologies of the modern world, and is very literal in her interpretations of things like cars. When she and Willow are driving after Olaf, she admits that she’s never driven before, and explains that she’s “going to press the left pedal now. I expect us to stop.” Smiling, she slams on the breaks in the middle of an intersection, causing Willow to be slightly panicked about their chances of surviving the car ride. It can be assumed that she’s like this because a millennium of being a vengeance demon made her lose contact with her humanity, but it’s implied that she possessed these traits to a certain extent even when she was human.
Anya is also very bitter about a lot of things, and isn’t afraid to say so. After Buffy stabs Anya through the chest, and Anya becomes mortal again, the gang captures an apparently insane Spike. Anya bitterly suggests to Xander, Willow, and Dawn that they stab Spike through the chest, because that’s what they do to their friends now. However, Anya never carries other people’s grudges for them. On several occasions, she completely forgets what she’s done to various cheating boyfriends – she has no recollection of Stewart Burns, who she sent to a Hell dimension, and can’t remember turning anyone into a giant worm even after it destroys half of Sunnydale. It’s implied though that, at least in the later seasons, Anya is lying about not remembering these things, and is merely putting up a blasé front for the gang. However, she is shown to have a profound disinterest in people she doesn’t know, except on a professional level. In one episode, she is attempting to get a wish out of a girl, but is bored and annoyed by the girl’s long rambling speech about how she hates her boyfriend.
Patience is not Anya’s best quality. In fact, she barely possesses it at all. She will often push people to get to the point, especially girls she’s trying to get wishes from. When one girl speaks for several minutes about her boyfriend’s follies and then asks, “Do you want to know what I wish?”, Anya enthusiastically replies, “Boy do I ever!” Her tone of voice and her constant eye-rolls through the girls’ speech hints at the fact that Anya is not one for putting up with people for too long if they’re not doing anything interesting. In another episode, Xander counsels her to be patient, and she replies, “I was being patient. But it took too long.”
Another of Anya’s foibles is her preoccupation with material things. She often speaks about how she loves money, and is tactless at parties when others are receiving presents. At one of Buffy’s birthday parties, Anya compliments the robe Tara and Willow gave Buffy, saying, “It’s so pretty! I wish it were mine!” She even invents a Dance of Capitalist Superiority, which she likes to perform while closing the cash register at the end of the day. While Xander is putting off announcing their engagement, Anya whines that she can’t wear her ring, but she wants to because it’s pretty. Most of the gang is put off by her obsession with money and material possessions, especially Willow. After a particularly trying day with Anya, Willow mocks her, saying, “I love money better than people! People can so rarely be exchanged for goods and/or services!” When a high school jock puts a love spell on all the girls, they each go about proving their love for him in their own unique way. Anya’s way of proving her love is to rob a series of banks, proving that part of her really does equate love and money.
Because of her normally stilted and frank way of putting things, Anya is rather a bad liar. When Willow sees her coming out of a frat house, she asks Anya what she’s doing there, and Anya histrionically insists how she has a new boyfriend who lives in the frat house and they just had LOTS OF SEX. When the Watcher’s Council lists Buffy’s friends, including a former vengeance demon, Anya shouts loudly, “WILLOW’S A DEMON!?” Other times, her lies can be overly detailed: when asked where she grew up by the Watcher’s Council, she tells them: “South East Indiana, where I was raised by both a mother and a father,” and explains that people used to call her “our little patriot… when I was younger and therefore shorter and smaller than I am now.” She can also be neurotic and has a tendency towards histrionics. When she discovers a toy bunny in a box, she shrieks aloud and frantically tries to explain to Xander that a higher power is trying to tell them through bunnies that they’re all going to die. When a spell is put on the entire town so everyone must sing their innermost thoughts, Anya performs a loud rock song in which she rails against bunnies, saying they must have cast the spell.
Anya is also a neurotic and needy girlfriend – in one episode, she becomes convinced that Xander doesn’t love her just because he was too tired for sex one night, and in another she is paranoid that his only interest in her is sex. When confronted with Faith, the girl Xander lost his virginity to when he was eighteen, Anya becomes jealous, even though she (Anya) and Xander have been broken up for nearly a year and Faith has clearly moved on. Anya is also very open about her sexuality, and has no problem discussing it in graphic detail in front of others. In one episode, Buffy and Riley say they need to have a talk and head for the exercise room in the back of The Magic Box. Anya asks if they’re going to have sex, and tells them that, “there’s this funny things with the vaulting horse you can try.” After she and Xander have broken up and Buffy’s house is crammed full of potential Slayers readying for the fight against the First, Anya is giving them a lecture, which she interrupts to let them know that she and Xander had fabulous break-up sex on Spike’s basement bed. One night, while everyone’s sleeping, Anya and Xander are eating ice cream in the kitchen and hear Faith have sex with her new boyfriend Wood, and Willow having sex with her new girlfriend Kennedy. Anya complains that it’s unfair that others should get to have sex and not her. She and Xander wind up having sex on the kitchen floor. She is also somewhat insecure about sex, and when she is refused sexually, usually questions her hair.
There is also an inventive streak of cruelty in Anya. She usually embellishes on wishes, as in the case of the girl who wished that her ex were a worm. Anya went one step further and turned him into a giant worm monster. Hallie and D’Hoffryn were always quick to praise her bloodbaths, and Hallie even referred to the Russian Revolutions, which Anya started in 1905, as a work of art. When Anya is questioning a frightened Andrew, she beats him up to get information, and then enthusiastically turns to Xander for approval of her brutality. When a girl wishes for a group of frat boys to feel what it’s like to have their hearts ripped out, Anya summons a demon that literally rips hearts out, putting the boys through screaming agony and finally leaving their mutilated corpses in pools of blood. She further delights in the destruction of Sunnydale after Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come. Giles confronts her in the alternate reality, and she says, quite pleased with herself, “This is the world we made. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Anya is also insecure, and deeply in need of validation. She defines herself through her relationship with other people: first with Olaf, then D’Hoffryn, then Xander. She is always “Olaf’s girlfriend,” “D’Hoffryn’s favorite,” or “Xander’s girlfriend.” When Xander leaves her and D’Hoffryn once again revokes her powers, she finds herself completely adrift, with no one to define herself by. She asks Xander who she is, and he tells her she’s a dope for thinking she’s nobody. She tearfully replies that being a dope is a start.
But in spite of all this, Anya still manages to be a fundamentally good person. Her greatest fear, other than bunnies (of course!), is death. After being alive for a millennium, more or less invulnerable to harm, death is not something she is prepared to cope with, and even a minor injury will send her into a downward spiral of worry. She often complains to Xander that one day she’ll get old, and is not looking forward to the day when her “teeth are stuck in [her] mouth with an adhesive.” After Buffy’s mother dies, Anya demands to know if they’ll be in the same room with the dead body, and if they’ll cut the body open. Willow tells her to shut up, but Anya suddenly bursts into tears, explaining that she doesn’t know why “there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why Joyce can’t just get back in it and not be dead anymore. It’s mortal and stupid and no one will explain to me why.” But in spite of this fear, Anya repeatedly offers her life for her friends and the greater good. She saves Xander’s life in an apocalypse by pushing him out of the way of a falling pile of stones. Though she could have died, she was only injured. The second time she offers her life is her first real act of repentance for her years of murder and mayhem. She asks D’Hoffryn to return the lives of the frat boys she killed, and he tells her a vengeance demon must die to reverse the spell. She asks him to kill her, and when he kills Hallie instead, she tearfully tells him that he should have killed her instead of Hallie. In the final episode, she and Andrew face off against the forces of darkness together. She jokingly tells him that she’s terrified, and she thought he’d be the terrified one and she’d be sarcastic about it. But even though she’s terrified, and her own mortality is the thing she fears most in the world (except for bunnies), she fights anyway. This time, it really does cost her life.
She also proves time and time again that her love for Xander, and filial love for Giles, are completely genuine and unconditional. Her near sacrifice of her life for Xander is something she would never normally do, but he is the one person she loves enough to actually face death for. In explaining to him why she’s staying for the apocalypse instead of running away like she would have done in years past, she tells him that it’s because she loves him so much, she can’t leave him. When The Magic Box is destroyed, she does not immediately think of her livelihood, but of Giles’ safety. She rushes to his side and, weeping, begs him not to be dead.
In the face of the apocalypse, Anya also proves that she is quite intelligent. She leads the gang in coming up with different ideas and solutions of how to fight the current Big Bad, a goddess named Glory. Several of her suggestions are key to defeating Glory, including coming up with different weapons that can be used to repel and/or hurt the goddess.
When Andrew teases her about her love for humans, Anya vehemently denies it. But when he presses the issue, she tells him that she thinks humans are “amazingly screwed-up… I mean really, really screwed-up in a monumental fashion.” She goes on to list all of humanity’s greatest flaws – their materialism, fear of mortality, and complete insanity for killing each other – which are really her own flaws. But she also admires humans because “when it’s something that really matters, they fight.” And when it really matters, Anya fights too. She is more or less someone struggling to deal with being human, and all the inherent flaws that come with it. She deals badly with her humanity at times, but in the end proves that she is willing to lay down her life for the people and beliefs she holds dear.
AT LANDEL'S
Visit Anya's profile.
"Real" Name: Cecily Underwood
Room Number: F12
Roommate: Hinamori Momo
Age: 1143, appears 21
Hair Color: brown
Eye Color: brown
Height: 5'5"
Main Language: English
Secondary Languages: Old Norse, Swedish, Latin, French, Russian, Romanian, Ancient Babylonian, Ancient Sumerian, various demonic languages, (possible others not mentioned in canon)
Other Characteristics: when fighting, using her powers, or just getting annoyed, Anya can revert to her demon form
Powers and Abilitles
Anya has all the typical powers of a vengeance demon. She has heightened physical abilities, including strength, speed, and agility. She is an effective fighter with most manners of weaponry. She can also teleport, and can heal very quickly. She has a psychic sense to identify grieving or scorned women, and can sense whether or not a vampire has a soul. Furthermore, she has a basic knowledge of magic, and has been seen to participate in Willow’s spells as both a primary and a secondary. She is very adept at summoning demons and using curses. While her pendant is intact – even if it not on her person – she can grant any wish made in her presence.
At Landel's, her teleportation and the power of the wish are revoked completely, and she can't perform any magic. She still has her physical powers, but they are lessened - they're about on par with highly talented professional athletes.
BACKGROUND
Aud was born in 860 in Sjornjost, Sweden. Because of her tendency towards literalism, she was shunned to a certain extent by the people of neighboring villages (“Take your beads and literal interpretations to the other side of the river!”). By age 20, she was either dating or married to a Viking warrior and troll-hunter named Olaf (their exact relationship is unclear). They had a relatively happy life together, although it’s implied that Aud was never completely satisfied. She occupied her time by breeding rabbits, which she decided to give as gifts in exchange for kind deeds.
Everything changed when Olaf began cheating on Aud with a bar wench, Rannveig. In retaliation, Aud turned Olaf into a troll. He was driven out of town and then locked away inside a crystal by witches. Aud’s spell, which was fairly creative and advanced, attracted the attention of D’Hoffryn, Lord of the Vengeance Demons. D’Hoffryn turned Aud into a vengeance demon, and changed her name to Anyanka. He gave her a pendant in which she could store the power of the wish: she would have the power to grant any wish made in her presence.
Over the next eleven centuries, Anyanka traveled the world exacting vengeance. Though most vengeance demons didn’t specialize, Anyanka did – she only went after men who had wronged women. She became quite well known for her inventive cruelty, and it is implied that she was D’Hoffryn’s favorite. In 1199, she visited the Koskov Valley, where she witnessed an Ascension (a mortal becoming pure demon) for the first time. A sorcerer took on the form of a pure demon, and wiped out an entire village, leaving even Anyanka shaken. But it didn’t slow her down in the least. She briefly dated Count Dracula in the 1580’s, and was present at the Salem witch trials in the 1690’s.
In the late 1800’s/early 1900’s, Anyanka became friends with a fellow vengeance demon, Halfrek. “Hallie,” as Anyanka referred to her, specialized in children wishing vengeance on their parents. Anyanka and Hallie became the best of friends, and even started the Russian Revolutions together in 1905. At a banquet near the burning Kremlin, Anyanka declared to Hallie that she was a firm Communist, and that starting the revolution was the right thing for Russia. Hallie, and it’s implied D’Hoffryn as well, was thoroughly impressed by Anyanka’s dedication to the job and her coldhearted ability to cause utter destruction.
Anyanka continued to punish unfaithful men for the next century, including a man named Stewart Burns, whom she met in 1914 in Chicago, IL. She turned Burns into a monster and trapped him in a hell dimension.
In 1998, she took on the persona of Anya Emerson, a student at Sunnydale High School in Sunnydale, CA. This was the school attended by the fabled Vampire Slayer, Buffy Summers. But Anyanka was more concerned with the Cordelia Chase, May Queen and formerly the most popular girl in school. Cordelia had lost her popularity when she started dating Xander Harris, one of Buffy’s friends and a total loser. Xander had cheated on Cordelia with his best friend, Willow Rosenberg, which resulted in Cordelia being impaled by rebar, staying in the hospital for a week, and burning all her photographs from the past year. Unfortunately for Anya, getting close to Cordelia meant getting close to Harmony Kendall, who had replaced Cordelia as the most popular girl in school. Harmony felt she had found a new best friend in Anyanka, but Anya secretly looked down in the shallow, ditzy blonde – a fact she confided in Cordelia. Like Harmony, Cordelia also felt she had found a new best friend in Anya, and Anya reciprocated by giving Cordelia her pendant, saying it was a good luck charm. She persuaded Cordelia to wish ill on Xander, but Cordelia was sure that the root of her problem was Buffy. She wished that the Slayer had never come to Sunnydale, and Anya granted her wish.
Sunnydale became a hellish place, in which vampires had overrun the town and it was not safe to leave one’s house after dark. Xander and Willow were vampires, working for Buffy’s old nemesis, the great vampire lord called The Master. They killed Cordelia, and her body was brought to Buffy’s Watcher, Rupert Giles, who ran the high school library. Giles recognized the significance of Anya’s pendant, so he took it from Cordelia’s body and destroyed it. The world reverted to the way it was before, with Anya trapped in mortal form. Desperate to get her power back, she first begged D’Hoffryn for help, but he refused. She tricked Willow into helping her retrieve her pendant from the alternate reality, but their spell backfired and Anya remained stuck. Her efforts resulted in a vampire siege on the local club, the Bronze, and Willow’s near death, neither of which Anya cared about.
The woes of a normal teenage life began to overcome Anya as she struggled to complete 12th grade. She complained that she was failing math, but more desperate was the search for a prom date. She bullied Xander into taking her, and completely against her will had a good time. Attempts to see Xander again proved fruitless, though, as he was not interested in pursuing a relationship with a former demon. When he informed her that the Mayor of Sunnydale, Richard Wilkins III, was planning an Ascension for himself during the high school graduation, Anya panicked. Remembering what happened in the Koskov Valley, she planned to flee to Aruba, and asked Xander to go with her. He refused, but she was determined to at least get a kiss from him before she left. He continued to refuse her advances, and she went to Aruba, never planning to return.
The Mayor was defeated, and Sunnydale was (relatively) safe once again. Buffy and Willow went on to college at UC Sunnydale, Cordelia moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, while Xander was working a series of odd jobs and living in his parents’ basement. After spending several months in the safety of Aruba, Anya returned to Sunnydale because of her unresolved feelings for Xander. She convinced him to have sex with her, assuming this would make her feelings go away, but no such luck. Instead, her feelings increased, and she and Xander began dating. Buffy, Willow, and Giles did not approve of Anya at first, but she eventually became a member of the team, despite her incredible tactlessness and lack of repentance for her past crimes. She aided them in researching and fighting demons, and by the end of Buffy’s freshman year in college, Anya was sitting in on all the meetings of the “Scooby Gang” (the name for Buffy’s group of friends). Early in their relationship, Xander invited Anya to a Halloween party and told her to wear something scary. She showed up in a bunny suit, because “bunnies scare [her].” This becomes a running gag, with Anya reacting negatively to any sightings or mentions of bunnies.
Xander and Anya were often called upon to baby-sit Buffy’s little sister Dawn, who had a huge crush on Xander and therefore didn’t like Anya much. While the three of them were playing The Game of Life, Anya was surprised to learn that money meant she was winning. From then on, she was a devoted capitalist, abandoning her communist leanings. She became so obsessed with money and adept at manipulating it that Giles gave her a job as a clerk at his store, The Magic Box. She also got involved with online trading, and tripled her money quickly.
When Buffy came up for review by the Watchers Council, Anya was forced to invent a full name and life story for herself. She became Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins, born on the 4th of July in Southeastern Indiana, “where [she] was raised by both a mother and a father.” She complained that everyone used to call her “our little patriot.” Later on, however, this ceased to become just something she made up – she actually became a staunch patriot when she decided that capitalism was the American way, and that to be capitalist was to be American. She also started identifying herself as an American citizen (which was not technically true – she was Swedish).
Anya and Willow, because of their complicated relationship with Xander as well as completely incompatible personalities, didn’t get along at all. Willow had become gay in college, and wasn’t romantically interested in Xander, but was still his best friend and worried that Anya would break his heart. Anya, on the other hand, was afraid that Willow would turn back to boys and steal Xander away from her the way she’d stolen him from Cordelia. The two quarreled angrily and often, until Xander couldn’t put up with it anymore and admonished them to resolve their differences. They agreed to work on a spell together in peace, but Anya’s interference caused the spell to go wrong, and Willow accidentally summoned Olaf the troll. Olaf went on a rampage through Sunnydale, destroying both The Magic Box and The Bronze, but Willow, Anya, and Xander defeated him. Anya confessed to Willow that she was deeply in love with Xander and would never hurt him.
Meanwhile, Buffy’s relationship with her new boyfriend, Riley, was falling apart. They weren’t communicating well, but no one noticed except Riley and Xander – not even Buffy. Xander watched the relationship disintegrate because of a lack of communication, until Riley finally left town. After Riley’s departure, Xander realized he didn’t want to make the same mistakes that Buffy and Riley made. He immediately went to Anya and professed his love for her.
Several times, Anya was forced to deal with her own mortality – something deeply frightening for her. A dislocated shoulder made her realize that she could have as few as fifty years left – a short time for someone more than a millennium old. She wanted to rush into marriage, puppies, kids, and boats with Xander, but he calmed her down and convinced her that they had time for all those things later. When Buffy’s mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, everyone assumed Anya was being callous because she didn’t care. But after Willow shouted at her for being unfeeling, Anya broke down and confessed how deeply traumatized she was about mortality.
The next time the gang faced an apocalypse, Anya chose to stay and fight, rather than run like she had last time. She explained to Xander how worried she was for his safety and her own, but she was so in love with him that she couldn’t leave. He surprised her by proposing to her only hours before the battle. She accepted, but on the condition that he gave her the ring after they survived the apocalypse and defeated the villain. In the fight, Xander was nearly crushed by falling rocks, but Anya pushed him out of the way and was injured in his stead.
Buffy was killed saving the world, and in the months following her death the rest of the gang tried to pick up the slack. Giles, having no more use as a Watcher with the Slayer dead, moved back to England. Anya had always looked up to Giles as a father figure, and clung to him in times of great emotional stress, and was sad to see him go. However, she was quite histrionic about the fate of the shop – she demanded full ownership, which Giles gave her. The gang was no match for the hordes of demons descending on Sunnydale, and they decided to resurrect Buffy. Anya, Xander, Willow, and Willow’s girlfriend Tara performed a complex and draining spell to bring Buffy back. They succeeded, and Giles immediately returned. Anya expressed regret about this because it meant the shop wasn’t entirely hers anymore. But it became apparent that Buffy didn’t need Giles – she had to grow up without him always being there to fix things for her. He returned to England.
Anya was impatient for Xander to announce their engagement, but he was determined to find the exact right moment. When they finally did announce that they were getting married, the gang threw them an impromptu party. Their comments about marriage and children and life together forever gave both Xander and Anya second thoughts. When Riley briefly returned with his new wife Sam, Xander became jealous of the wonderful wedding they had had. With both his family and Anya’s demon friends staying in their apartment, he and Anya spent much of their time hiding the bathroom, giving both of them time to reflect. Xander told Anya that their wedding was probably going to be awful and he couldn’t wait to get it over with, but that their marriage would be something completely different and he couldn’t image his life without her.
At the wedding, an already-nervous Xander was haunted by visions of his future self, who told him that marrying Anya was a terrible idea – she would never be faithful and he would become abusive to her and their kids. It turned out that “future Xander” was actually Stewart Burns, who escaped from his hell dimension and was getting revenge for what Anya did to him. But the doubts Burns planted were already in Xander’s mind – he was terrified that he would become like his alcoholic, abusive father, and he didn’t want to do that to Anya. So he left Anya at the altar. She was comforted by D’Hoffryn, who finally offered to restore her powers. She accepted, and became a demon again.
Anya returned to her former life of granting wishes to scorned women, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore. She desperately tried to get someone to wish ill on Xander, because she could not enact vengeance on her own behalf. But no one did. One night, she and reformed vampire Spike were getting drunk at The Magic Box, and wound up having sex. Buffy’s self-proclaimed “arch-nemeses,” Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan, had installed a camera that recorded the whole thing. Xander saw the tape, and was horrified that sleeping with Spike was how Anya chose to get revenge on him. She told him that it wasn’t vengeance – it was solace.
When Warren murdered Tara, Willow was driven mad by grief and absorbed all the power of the books at The Magic Box. She channeled this power into Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew’s destruction, and succeeded in murdering Warren. Buffy cajoled Anya to help Jonathan and Andrew, who were more or less innocent, and Anya agreed to teleport ahead of Willow and get Jonathan and Andrew to safety. As punishment for helping them, D’Hoffryn revoked her ability to teleport, except on “official business.” Giles returned to Sunnydale just in time, and faced Willow in The Magic Box. The store was demolished and Giles nearly killed.
With The Magic Box gone, Anya had few remaining ties to humanity, and grew more and more apart from the gang. She returned fulltime to vengeance, but her spells were fairly basic and hardly anyone died as a result of them. Out of concern for her friend, Hallie visited Sunnydale, and told Anya that the rest of the vengeance demons, who had once respected her highly, were now calling her “soft-serve.” The Scooby Gang was hardly pleased by Anya’s vengeance spells, however. On one occasion, they had to hunt a demon she released. But she was still willing to help them, especially when they had to save a no-longer-evil Willow from a flesh-eating demon. Because of her ability to sense vampire’s souls, Anya was the first to know that Spike had gotten his. The vampire didn’t want anyone to know, however, so he beat her up to stop her talking. They had a fight, which Xander feebly objected to, and Anya agreed not to tell anyone Spike’s secret.
But Anya was determined to make her way back into D’Hoffryn’s good graces, and she knew it will take a bloodbath to make him respect her again. When she slaughtered an entire fraternity, Buffy decided it was time to put the vengeance demon down. Xander tried to dissuade Buffy from killing Anya, tearfully admitting that he was still in love with her, but Buffy was resolute. Xander ran ahead to warn Anya that Buffy was coming to kill her. Hardly caring, Anya threw Xander aside violently and fought Buffy. During the fight, Buffy ran Anya through with a broadsword.
And then she woke up at Landel's.
PERSONALITY
Anya is “a feisty waif, with a fiery temper and a vulnerable heart, that she hides even from herself.” Though this description is given by Andrew, the resident melodramatic over-exaggerating storyteller, it’s more or less accurate.
The first thing anyone notices about Anya is her tendency towards literalism and tactlessness. She doesn’t grasp the subtleties of metaphor, and never refrains from speaking exactly what’s on her mind, no matter how selfish or even hurtful it is. When she and Andrew are comforting an injured girl, they pass a bottle of alcohol back and forth over her bleeding body, discussing the potential loss of life in the coming battle. When the girl tries to say something, Anya cuts her off, explaining in a soothing voice that, “Talking will just make you die faster.” She also does not grasp many of the technologies of the modern world, and is very literal in her interpretations of things like cars. When she and Willow are driving after Olaf, she admits that she’s never driven before, and explains that she’s “going to press the left pedal now. I expect us to stop.” Smiling, she slams on the breaks in the middle of an intersection, causing Willow to be slightly panicked about their chances of surviving the car ride. It can be assumed that she’s like this because a millennium of being a vengeance demon made her lose contact with her humanity, but it’s implied that she possessed these traits to a certain extent even when she was human.
Anya is also very bitter about a lot of things, and isn’t afraid to say so. After Buffy stabs Anya through the chest, and Anya becomes mortal again, the gang captures an apparently insane Spike. Anya bitterly suggests to Xander, Willow, and Dawn that they stab Spike through the chest, because that’s what they do to their friends now. However, Anya never carries other people’s grudges for them. On several occasions, she completely forgets what she’s done to various cheating boyfriends – she has no recollection of Stewart Burns, who she sent to a Hell dimension, and can’t remember turning anyone into a giant worm even after it destroys half of Sunnydale. It’s implied though that, at least in the later seasons, Anya is lying about not remembering these things, and is merely putting up a blasé front for the gang. However, she is shown to have a profound disinterest in people she doesn’t know, except on a professional level. In one episode, she is attempting to get a wish out of a girl, but is bored and annoyed by the girl’s long rambling speech about how she hates her boyfriend.
Patience is not Anya’s best quality. In fact, she barely possesses it at all. She will often push people to get to the point, especially girls she’s trying to get wishes from. When one girl speaks for several minutes about her boyfriend’s follies and then asks, “Do you want to know what I wish?”, Anya enthusiastically replies, “Boy do I ever!” Her tone of voice and her constant eye-rolls through the girls’ speech hints at the fact that Anya is not one for putting up with people for too long if they’re not doing anything interesting. In another episode, Xander counsels her to be patient, and she replies, “I was being patient. But it took too long.”
Another of Anya’s foibles is her preoccupation with material things. She often speaks about how she loves money, and is tactless at parties when others are receiving presents. At one of Buffy’s birthday parties, Anya compliments the robe Tara and Willow gave Buffy, saying, “It’s so pretty! I wish it were mine!” She even invents a Dance of Capitalist Superiority, which she likes to perform while closing the cash register at the end of the day. While Xander is putting off announcing their engagement, Anya whines that she can’t wear her ring, but she wants to because it’s pretty. Most of the gang is put off by her obsession with money and material possessions, especially Willow. After a particularly trying day with Anya, Willow mocks her, saying, “I love money better than people! People can so rarely be exchanged for goods and/or services!” When a high school jock puts a love spell on all the girls, they each go about proving their love for him in their own unique way. Anya’s way of proving her love is to rob a series of banks, proving that part of her really does equate love and money.
Because of her normally stilted and frank way of putting things, Anya is rather a bad liar. When Willow sees her coming out of a frat house, she asks Anya what she’s doing there, and Anya histrionically insists how she has a new boyfriend who lives in the frat house and they just had LOTS OF SEX. When the Watcher’s Council lists Buffy’s friends, including a former vengeance demon, Anya shouts loudly, “WILLOW’S A DEMON!?” Other times, her lies can be overly detailed: when asked where she grew up by the Watcher’s Council, she tells them: “South East Indiana, where I was raised by both a mother and a father,” and explains that people used to call her “our little patriot… when I was younger and therefore shorter and smaller than I am now.” She can also be neurotic and has a tendency towards histrionics. When she discovers a toy bunny in a box, she shrieks aloud and frantically tries to explain to Xander that a higher power is trying to tell them through bunnies that they’re all going to die. When a spell is put on the entire town so everyone must sing their innermost thoughts, Anya performs a loud rock song in which she rails against bunnies, saying they must have cast the spell.
Anya is also a neurotic and needy girlfriend – in one episode, she becomes convinced that Xander doesn’t love her just because he was too tired for sex one night, and in another she is paranoid that his only interest in her is sex. When confronted with Faith, the girl Xander lost his virginity to when he was eighteen, Anya becomes jealous, even though she (Anya) and Xander have been broken up for nearly a year and Faith has clearly moved on. Anya is also very open about her sexuality, and has no problem discussing it in graphic detail in front of others. In one episode, Buffy and Riley say they need to have a talk and head for the exercise room in the back of The Magic Box. Anya asks if they’re going to have sex, and tells them that, “there’s this funny things with the vaulting horse you can try.” After she and Xander have broken up and Buffy’s house is crammed full of potential Slayers readying for the fight against the First, Anya is giving them a lecture, which she interrupts to let them know that she and Xander had fabulous break-up sex on Spike’s basement bed. One night, while everyone’s sleeping, Anya and Xander are eating ice cream in the kitchen and hear Faith have sex with her new boyfriend Wood, and Willow having sex with her new girlfriend Kennedy. Anya complains that it’s unfair that others should get to have sex and not her. She and Xander wind up having sex on the kitchen floor. She is also somewhat insecure about sex, and when she is refused sexually, usually questions her hair.
There is also an inventive streak of cruelty in Anya. She usually embellishes on wishes, as in the case of the girl who wished that her ex were a worm. Anya went one step further and turned him into a giant worm monster. Hallie and D’Hoffryn were always quick to praise her bloodbaths, and Hallie even referred to the Russian Revolutions, which Anya started in 1905, as a work of art. When Anya is questioning a frightened Andrew, she beats him up to get information, and then enthusiastically turns to Xander for approval of her brutality. When a girl wishes for a group of frat boys to feel what it’s like to have their hearts ripped out, Anya summons a demon that literally rips hearts out, putting the boys through screaming agony and finally leaving their mutilated corpses in pools of blood. She further delights in the destruction of Sunnydale after Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come. Giles confronts her in the alternate reality, and she says, quite pleased with herself, “This is the world we made. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Anya is also insecure, and deeply in need of validation. She defines herself through her relationship with other people: first with Olaf, then D’Hoffryn, then Xander. She is always “Olaf’s girlfriend,” “D’Hoffryn’s favorite,” or “Xander’s girlfriend.” When Xander leaves her and D’Hoffryn once again revokes her powers, she finds herself completely adrift, with no one to define herself by. She asks Xander who she is, and he tells her she’s a dope for thinking she’s nobody. She tearfully replies that being a dope is a start.
But in spite of all this, Anya still manages to be a fundamentally good person. Her greatest fear, other than bunnies (of course!), is death. After being alive for a millennium, more or less invulnerable to harm, death is not something she is prepared to cope with, and even a minor injury will send her into a downward spiral of worry. She often complains to Xander that one day she’ll get old, and is not looking forward to the day when her “teeth are stuck in [her] mouth with an adhesive.” After Buffy’s mother dies, Anya demands to know if they’ll be in the same room with the dead body, and if they’ll cut the body open. Willow tells her to shut up, but Anya suddenly bursts into tears, explaining that she doesn’t know why “there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why Joyce can’t just get back in it and not be dead anymore. It’s mortal and stupid and no one will explain to me why.” But in spite of this fear, Anya repeatedly offers her life for her friends and the greater good. She saves Xander’s life in an apocalypse by pushing him out of the way of a falling pile of stones. Though she could have died, she was only injured. The second time she offers her life is her first real act of repentance for her years of murder and mayhem. She asks D’Hoffryn to return the lives of the frat boys she killed, and he tells her a vengeance demon must die to reverse the spell. She asks him to kill her, and when he kills Hallie instead, she tearfully tells him that he should have killed her instead of Hallie. In the final episode, she and Andrew face off against the forces of darkness together. She jokingly tells him that she’s terrified, and she thought he’d be the terrified one and she’d be sarcastic about it. But even though she’s terrified, and her own mortality is the thing she fears most in the world (except for bunnies), she fights anyway. This time, it really does cost her life.
She also proves time and time again that her love for Xander, and filial love for Giles, are completely genuine and unconditional. Her near sacrifice of her life for Xander is something she would never normally do, but he is the one person she loves enough to actually face death for. In explaining to him why she’s staying for the apocalypse instead of running away like she would have done in years past, she tells him that it’s because she loves him so much, she can’t leave him. When The Magic Box is destroyed, she does not immediately think of her livelihood, but of Giles’ safety. She rushes to his side and, weeping, begs him not to be dead.
In the face of the apocalypse, Anya also proves that she is quite intelligent. She leads the gang in coming up with different ideas and solutions of how to fight the current Big Bad, a goddess named Glory. Several of her suggestions are key to defeating Glory, including coming up with different weapons that can be used to repel and/or hurt the goddess.
When Andrew teases her about her love for humans, Anya vehemently denies it. But when he presses the issue, she tells him that she thinks humans are “amazingly screwed-up… I mean really, really screwed-up in a monumental fashion.” She goes on to list all of humanity’s greatest flaws – their materialism, fear of mortality, and complete insanity for killing each other – which are really her own flaws. But she also admires humans because “when it’s something that really matters, they fight.” And when it really matters, Anya fights too. She is more or less someone struggling to deal with being human, and all the inherent flaws that come with it. She deals badly with her humanity at times, but in the end proves that she is willing to lay down her life for the people and beliefs she holds dear.
AT LANDEL'S
Visit Anya's profile.
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