Onlies.

My SOGP got me season 2 and season 7 of Buffy for my birthday.  We watched season 7 right away, and then season 2.  When we got to the end I went out the next day (on one of my non-working days between assignments) to purchase season 3, which we are watching now.  I just want to be clear that we are pretty steeped in Buffy right now.

What has caught my attention before, because I am one, is that all the lead characters seem to be only children.  Buffy starts out as one; we hear about Willow, Zander and Cordelia's parents, but never about brothers and sisters; I don't think Giles speaks of  siblings.  Joyce may have a sister because Buffy talks about her aunt.

I know the crop of kids currently hitting the post-secondary circuit, known as The Millennials, tend to be onlies with high expectations and parents with very serious unwillingness that their only offspring should either be chewed up by the beaurocratic gears of the post-secondary system or dealt a bad hand by "just one of those things."  I wasn't sure that the Buffy generation was part of the Millennials, but I guess they are/were.

What I'm wondering is whether the writers deliberately chose the characters to be onlies, or if it just happened because it is fantasy and it is a simpler universe without all the supernumerary characters.

I was the only only child of my friends and aquaintances when I was in highschool, and siblings were a big deal to everyone.  I have wondered what the culture would be/will be like when most of the students are onlies.  What assumptions will change?  The only one I can think of is the pity in response to the "no" answer to the question, "Do you have any brothers and sisters?"  But I'm sure there must be more.

In the fantasy Buffyverse, the characters all struggle with the centre-of-the-universe issue, and really seem to need each other  more strongly - they behave like a family of siblings (as I understand it from the outside).  In that kind of culture - do parents need to worry about with whom their only offspring forms sibles?

Anyways.  It is interesting to me, but the implications of meaning for the Buffyverse depend on the why of the onliness.