While Buffy Summers’ extracurricular activities as a teenage vampire killer. For many years, Buffy had to straddle the two worlds of her normal home life and the one where she and her friends hunted the evil forces terrorizing Sunnydale.
One of the most human, shocking moments from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was when the title character came home to find her mother, eyes wide open, dead on their couch. Buffy experienced so many events that would traumatize the average teenager, but nothing hit harder than her mother’s death. Joyce had been suffering from cancer for the past year, so while there had always been a sense of dread, Buffy never expected it so suddenly after seeing her perfectly normal that same morning. After Buffy called 9-1-1 and attempted R on Joyce, the doctors informed her that her mother suffered a brain aneurysm.
Show creator Joss Whedon told Metro.co.uk he knew he would kill Joyce because he had tragically lost his own mother and wanted to explore grief with the characters in a similar way.
While Joyce didn’t love the idea of the danger her daughter was placed in at any given moment, she became proud and ive of Buffy and who she was destined to be. As the most constant character and sole system in Buffy’s life outside of the Scooby Gang, Joyce’s death was heartbreaking to the audience as much as it was to Buffy. The teenage vampire slayer wasn’t a stranger to death before "The Body" episode," but it was usually at the hands of a monster she could have killed herself, whereas her powers were useless against cancer. While it’s traumatizing for any child to lose a parent in such a way, for Buffy it meant a distinct change in her character, one that led to her deciding to sacrifice herself in Buffy's season 5 finale.
Joyce’s death signaled a change in Buffy where she almost lost sight of her morals and the separation of her relatively normal family life with her mother and her alternate life hunting horrifying creatures. Before the crew would do the same for Buffy at the end of the fifth season, Buffy momentarily thought ing the group’s death-defying knowledge to bring her mom back from the grave, though she wisely backtracked and acknowledged how big a mistake it would have been. While Joyce’s death instilled a sense of mortality in the ones she loves that Buffy had always prevented beforehand, it removed many of the dual-world reservations Buffy the Vampire Slayer had expressed in the title heroine.