She upsets it even further by calling all the potentials to be slayers.

But we don't know it upsets the balance. It's not at all implied by the text that it's an inevitable result. Who says calling a potential is the same as bringing a slayer back to life twice? Joss didn't, and I'm willing to take his absence of word for it.

She allows for the loss or death of her friends' SO's.

Huh? Has she been shown to be insensitive to the deaths of Scoobs? She fought for Oz, fought for Tara -- I don't get your POV.

She's shown some sensitivity, but they're acceptable losses. I'm thinking of when Jenny and Tara died, and pretty much the only thing she was thinking about was keeping Giles and Willow from killing people.

They didn't specifically say that calling new slayers would have the same effect as bringing back Buffy would, but they have said that there's a common demonic power source for slayers. There was never a moment of consideration that with the information presented, one could draw the conclusion that Buffy's plan could have dire repercussions. One of the show's strengths has been dealing with consequences, even good deeds have their share of pain and side effects. Buffy won the battle, but they didn't show that she won the war.

I don't know if the point is that she won or lost-- I took the point as being that she doesn't have to fight alone anymore.

The Battle's Done, and we kinda won, but the path is still unclear...Where do we go, from here?

But does she have the right to shanghaii others into her army? And there's a whole bunch of issues now that she isn't alone. With more power comes more responsibility. What if a couple slayers go bad at a time? There's no more Council, just an ineffective Giles and her and an old school bus, so there's girls all around the world suddenly having the urge to walk around at night with fence posts and being targetted by the biggest of bads. Buffy didn't even transfer a handbook with basic advise first. And I think this goes back to the issue previously in the season where Buffy made a big deal out of her right to refuse the extra shot of demonic power. She didn't get to choose whether she'd be a slayer - nor did the first. The one in power did. Now Buffy was being just as bad as those guys in the cave who created the first slayer, deciding to throw one of the world's biggest and worst responsibilities onto a bunch of others to make it easier for herself.

Do you have an alternative suggestion, Madrigal?

Right now, there's been no implication that a) the balance is upset enough to allow the FE to do its will (the opposite, in fact -- it might be shoddy storytelling, but it seemed clear to me that the FE is majorly set back) and that b) the activated women need to spend the rest of their lives slaying.

I think the point was that they were empowered. Not drafted. Just because you can, no longer means you must. That's the big change. There will be enough women to fight. Some can just keep cheating at softball.

They didn't specifically say that calling new slayers would have the same effect as bringing back Buffy would, but they have said that there's a common demonic power source for slayers. There was never a moment of consideration that with the information presented, one could draw the conclusion that Buffy's plan could have dire repercussions.

I have to agree with Madrigal, in some wise. The logic of the situation sort of requires that, for the good guys getting more powerful, the bad guys would have to get more powerful.

I was twiddling around with the idea that the Slayer is female because she basically drains out 2% of the strength of every woman living at any given moment -- and that the final redistribution was a giving-back of that strength, and returning them all to an even, fighty playing field. It keeps the female empowerment theme in the fore, although it also manages to imply that women have historically been oppressed because they actually are wimpy. I haven't come up with a way around that one, yet.

What I wanted was what people mentioned as the third option - I wanted to see a solution that wasn't the typical sort of battle. The whole idea of non-corporeal bad guy was that Buffy would have to use something other than just her strength and weapons to defeat her. I wanted some new revelation about slayers, something of Buffy's inner strength and self to be the thing that took out Mlle Buttmunch. I mean, I hope there was a reason that they changed the title of the series from just "Slayer" to "Buffy: the Vampire Slayer" - because it's not just about a slayer slaying demons, but about Buffy herself and what she herself brings to the struggle.

The logic of the situation sort of requires that, for the good guys getting more powerful, the bad guys would have to get more powerful.

Except the FE was planning on winning, so it was at least theoretically possible to win, if not forver vanquish. And the hellmouth was getting more powerful, which implies the FE was getting more powerful.

Hmm. I guess there's just a fundamental disagreement here.

I think Buffy radically changed the struggle, and that no other slayer would have done so in her place, for a multitude of personal and defining reasons.

If that doesn't get your name above the title, what can?

The FE got an opportunity because Buffy lived. That's all we were told. Did it have an opportunity because there were two slayers? We don't know. Would it have an opportunity because there were hundreds? Still with the not knowing, and I don't see a concrete implication.