...from "The Monster Book"
Published August 2000, transcribed by Nathan George.
First Appearance: "The Wish," season three
Other Episodes: season three: "Dopplegangland," "The Prom," "Graduation Day, Part One." season four: "The Harsh Light of Day," "Fear, Itself," "Pangs," "Something Blue," "Hush," "A New Man," "The I In Team," "Goodbye Iowa," "Who Are You," "Superstar," "Where The Wild Things Are," "New Moon Rising," "The Yoko Factor," "Primeval," "Restless."
Key Relationships: The demon D'Hoffryn transformed Anya into a vengeance demon many centuries ago. When the amulet that held her power was destroyed, she became a human again. As a human, she is the girlfriend of Xander Harris.
Unique Attributes: As a demon, and now as a human, Anya has the power to imagine horribly agonizing and creative methods of death and torture for the males of the species. As a demon, she could appear to be human but also had a monstrous visage.
Most Monstrous Moment: In "The Wish," Anya gave Cordelia Chase her wish-that Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale. The town transformed into an alternate reality where vampires ruled. When the amulet that held Anyanka's power was destroyed, all reverted to normal.
Current Status: Anya is fully human, involved with Xander, and a bit skittish around the members of The Initiative, as she is uncertain how they feel about ex-demons.
Eleven hundred and twenty years ago, a girl named Anyanka became involved in the occult, specifically with a demon named D'Hoffryn.
In the season-three episode "The Wish" (which also gave us, albeit briefly, a nasty "mucus-y demon" that Buffy quickly dispatched), Anyanka was drawn to Sunnydale by the despair of Cordelia Chase. Cordy had caught her boyfriend, Xander Harris, kissing Willow Rosenberg. Anyanka let Cordelia hold an amulet that contained the focus of her wish-granting ability. Without realizing the power in her hands, Cordelia wished that Buffy-whom she blamed for all her woes-had never come to Sunnydale.
That wish altered reality, Cordelia found herself in a very different Sunnydale, a dark and frightening place where vampires ruled the night-including vampiric versions of Xander and Willow-and no human went out after dark. The Master was running this vampiric kingdom and had created a machine that would drain the blood from humans, a vampire assembly line, so to speak. In that darn world Willow kept Angel as her pet, torturing him for leisure, and she and Xander were the Master's pride and joy.
Cordelia knew what had gone wrong, what had changed, and tried to explain what had happened, but she was quickly killed by Xander and Willow. Fortunately, her words and the amulet, which she still had, inspired Rupert Giles and his group of vampire hunters to research Anyanka. Giles realized that Cordelia's claims of another reality might be true, and that destroying Anyanka's amulet might return things to normal. He took a huge leap of faith and smashed it. All was returned to the way it had been before, though not before Oz had staked the vampire version of Willow, and Buffy-never having been trained by Giles-was killed by the Master.
There was one major consequence of those events that remained in this reality: with her amulet destroyed, Anyanka, also known as Anya, lost all of her demonic power. In the episode "Dopplegangland," she appealed to D'Hoffryn to restore her power.
Anya pleeded with D'Hoffryn to create a fold in time so that she could change the events that had taken place. D'Hoffryn refused, telling her that her time had passed. Anya then went to witch-in-training Willow and asked her for help to create the fold in order to retrieve something very special to her. Not yet aware of Anya's true nature, Willow agreed to help.
The spell failed. Partially. They were not able to retrieve Anya's amulet before it was destroyed. Instead, however, the vampiric version of Willow was drawn into Buffy's reality. Eventually, she was sent back (just in time to be dusted; see Vampires: Vamp Willow) Thereafter, Anya had to come to grips with the truth of her situation. The millenium-old demon was merely a girl again, subject to raging hormones, the whims of high school teachers, and unable to even order a drink at the bar.
Now fully human for the first time in a thousand years, Anya had to learn to deal with life of an eighteen-year-old girl. One facet of her new life that distracted her endlessly, and disturbed her deeply, was the relationship between females and males. Anya found herself drawn to Xander, and had an overwhelming urge to ask him to the prom.
She offered very helpful information to Buffy and the others when they went up against the Mayor in the two-part season three finale "Graduation Day," though she fled town rather than face the Mayor.
In the fourth season Anya was back, and quickly became more deeply involved with Xander. Though her age and her experienced as a demon give her a very strange perspective on almost everything-and her former demon status sometimes complicates their relationship-the couple have become boyfriend and girlfriend.
"We never intended for her to be a running character," notes "The Wish" writer Marti Noxon. "But [Emma Caulfield is] such a good actress. And it's fun having this disgruntled ex-demon around...who's sort of assimilating. We also need a Cordelialike character around who would tell it like it is, who doesn't suffer fools gladly and is very opinionated. And that's Anya."
