Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deservedly celebrated for its feminism, for giving the world an unapologetically female action hero and making her iconic. But the show’s feminism goes deeper than just creating a Strong Female Character and sticking her in the center of the poster.

What makes Buffy so subversive even now, 20 years after the show’s debut, is that it made Buffy herself the subject of traditionally masculine storytelling tropes. Buffy’s love interests get fridged; she holds the weight of the world on her shoulders; she has what would have been manpain if a standard action hero like Batman were experiencing it. And she does it all as a tiny, blonde former cheerleader, as the embodiment of the girl her genre usually kills first.

Most action stories prioritize the male hero’s pain over everything else

Male action heroes tend to make their way through a pretty standard set of narrative tropes. They’re usually motivated by peril that threatens the women in their lives: The Supernatural boys have their dead mother and a variety of dead girlfriends; Batman has his dead mother and his various dead and/or treacherous girlfriends; the Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who has the vanished Rose Tyler.

And sometimes, male action heroes are haunted by the memory of the terrible things they’ve done. The Vampire Diaries has repeatedly zoomed in on Damon Salvatore’s tortured face while a woman weeps on the floor in her underwear next to him: He must be in so much pain, the subtext goes, for him to hurt her so badly. The Doctor broods over the races he extinguished in order to save the universe. On Buffy itself — and even more so on its spinoff, Angel — Angel and Spike are tortured by the memory of all of the people they’ve, well, tortured (and raped and killed and eaten).

Always, the male action hero must struggle with the responsibility of being the only person who can stop the spread of evil across the world. He’ll stand broodingly on a rooftop, dressed in billowing black, gazing out over the city he has sworn to protect. All of those lives, depending only on him — how could any one man bear such a burden?

It’s fine for individual stories to focus on men. But having too many stories about men and none about women sends a bad message.

These tropes — often mockingly described in fan circles as “manpain” tropes — depend on a belief that the male action hero is more important than anyone else in his story, and that any pain and misery felt by other characters is subordinate to the male hero’s. In stories that are built on these tropes, female characters do not have worth in and of themselves; they are valuable only insofar as they can add to the male hero’s pain. Moreover, the male character’s pain is unique: Other characters in Batman’s universe may have lost their parents, but Batman’s pain is deeper and truer than theirs could ever be.

In individual stories, that series of tropes is fine and makes perfect sense. The hero’s pain will necessarily be more important to the audience than other characters’ pain, because the hero is the audience’s point of view character. Supporting characters are designed to prop up the hero’s story, not the other way around.

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But if you step back and examine these stories as contributors to an overall trend, things get murkier. Action stories are disproportionately built around (white, usually straight, usually wealthy) male characters, so their pain is disproportionately privileged over that of other characters. Female characters are disproportionately tortured and killed as part of stories about male characters, instead of being granted their own stories.

It’s not the individual stories that are troubling so much as it is the overwhelming accumulation of them. They send a message, and that message is: Here are the characters who deserve your empathy. Here are the people in the world whose pain really and truly matters. They are (white, straight, wealthy) men.

On Buffy, Buffy’s pain is the most important thing in the world

But on Buffy, the action hero is a girl. It is her pain that is the most important, and her story that other characters support.

So Angel and Spike are repeatedly kidnapped and tortured to motivate Buffy. She’s constantly haunted by guilt over the various awful things she’s had to do: sending an innocent and trusting Angel to hell, accidentally colluding with Faith to kill a bystander, beating Spike to a bloody pulp while he tells her that “you always hurt the ones you love.”

And she feels the crippling responsibility of her destiny painfully. At the end of season five, when Glory kidnaps Dawn, it sends her into a catatonic state. “Buffy,” Willow tells her, “you’ve had the weight of the world on your shoulders since high school. And I know you didn’t ask for this, but you do it every day.” How, the subtext asks, could any one woman bear such a burden?

Buffy is a specifically feminine archetype at the center of masculine action hero storylines. That’s hugely significant.

Buffy’s manpain is subversive not only because she’s a female character, but because of the specific female archetype that she represents.

Buffy creator Joss Whedon has always said that Buffy is based on the archetypal blonde girl who gets killed first in every horror movie. In his DVD commentary for the first episode, he says, “The idea of Buffy was to subvert that idea, that image, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim.”

As described by film scholar Carol J. Clover, the blonde girl of horror is a foil for the brunette Final Girl who will survive to the end of the movie. The blonde is feminine where the Final Girl is tomboyish, and sexual where the Final Girl is virginal. For those crimes — those specifically feminine crimes — she must be punished. When you see a cute blonde cheerleader having sex in a horror movie, you know the monster is about to kill her horribly.

As a character, Buffy fits horror’s blonde archetype perfectly. She’s unapologetically hyper feminine; she adores fashion and makeup and shopping; she longs to be a cheerleader. But not only does she not die first when Buffy’s monsters come calling, she kicks their ass and saves the day. And while Whedon’s track record on sex is less revolutionary — his characters tend to experience horrible emotional pain whenever they jump into bed together, regardless of their gender — Buffy does at least get to have sex without dying or sacrificing her protagonist privilege.

Buffy Summers is a living embodiment of the kind of femininity that horror and action traditionally despise, that they erase or disregard or destroy on sight. But on Buffy, her particular archetype is combined with the brooding, manpain-riddled action hero. Buffy is blonde and high femme and sexual, and her pain is still the most important thing in the world.

When Buffy says, here are the people in the world who deserve your empathy, whose pain really and truly matters, it’s pointing at the kind of girl whose story is very rarely taken seriously. Twenty years later, that’s still a powerfully subversive message.