> I hate that we have to pretend this character was there because the characters were brainwashed into fake memories

There’s like two episodes where we “pretend she was there” and the whole time the show is like “she’s tricking everyone!” The show never asks you to believe Dawn was always around and we just didn’t notice. They even have Joyce mention how she’ll be happy to have the house to herself again when Buffy moves back to the dorms at the beginning of the Dracula episode so that we know that Dawn didn’t exist at the beginning of the episode.