But why? Larry had a secret. A secret he didn’t want anyone to know about. So he bottled up his emotions and set them on the high road to eternal denial. It was something he probably learned to regret...though we don’t know all or really any of his internal emotions throughout the series to verify that with absolute certainty. All we have here to go on is how much of an external impact his learning of self-worth had on his actions. And by judging simply based on the few episodes he graced us with, we learned quite a bit indeed of his slow but gradual improvement as a human being.

The idea was played off by humor, but Larry was a closet homosexual who worked his way to becoming a star football player for the Sunnydale Razorbacks. This suburban youth earned his reputation of popularity by basically putting on a show twenty-four seven, playing up to the traditional role of a bully that so often associated itself with being a popular athlete. But was Larry really such a prick in real life? Of course not. Life wouldn’t be interesting if things were truly that simple.

Nope. Larry was a guy who had very little self-confidence. Emphasis is put on the ‘was.’ When we first met him, he was bullying Xander and then getting his ass kicked by Buffy. We didn’t really think too much of him at first, but he did provide a somewhat meaningless character installment for those first few seconds of airtime. We then saw that this was merely foreshadowing for his showing back up and getting pummeled by GI Joe Xander later in the episode. It made for a climactic angle at such an unclimactic point of the show. And thus the episode ended...and we thought we’d seen the last of this football star.

But that wasn’t the case at all, fortunately. He later would show back up and fool the Scoobies into believing he might be a possible werewolf-bite victim...and hence a werewolf himself. We found that he seemed to give off an extreme chauvenist vibe in this episode, and at first he did seem rather cartoony in his antics. Again, Biff Tannen school reference. But even so, considering his characterization, it became a bit believable. Larry must have just been an all-around horrible person. A person who had absolutely no respect for anyone who didn’t wear a letterman jacket.

But fortunately for all of us, and also fortunately for Larry, this little suspicion would lead to a spiral of events which would forever change Mr Blaisdell and put him on the high-road to not only athletic achievement...but also personal achievement. In the short transition of two episodes, Larry went from being a bastard to a hero. Not only would this change the way we saw him as a character, but it would also change the very way in which the character functioned as an individual. A simple conversation with Xander Harris proved to bring out the gay in Larry...and earned himself some badly needed self-confidence.

After this little encounter, Larry got the chip off his shoulder, the plank out of his eye, the corkscrew removed from his belly, the needles yanked from his fingernails, the rope undone from his neck, the crowbar taken out of his ass, the screwdriver....Well, you get the picture. Point is, Larry got over it. He became a new person, and he became a newfound ally to the forces of fighting evil. Amazing how much a character can change in such little air time.

It just goes to show that yet another once minor character proved to be a complex fix in our Buffyverse. It’s one of the fascinating truths of this former series. Even the extras were interesting. And that’s saying quite a bit.

In Season Three, we saw our new Larry develop even farther. No longer was this guy a bully or a prick....Rather, he was a respectable student and an overall friendly guy to be around. We unwound the secrets and broke through to a brand new person. And that is something quite incredible. Even more incredible is when we learned that Larry had even more great attributes...some of which the everyday world would never even learn about. In The Wish, we saw Larry in a world where the Hellmouth was in a state of swelling. Was Larry running? Was Larry hiding? No. He wasn’t. He was fighting. Even after losing his friends in battle, Larry still rose to the calling. And he did quite considerably well. With a little help from Oz, he even staked one through vampire Willow. Quite a fete, if I do say so myself.

And it was after this that we knew for certain Larry was a genuinely okay guy. He proved it by that simple glimpse into a possible alternate reality. We saw Larry for who he was on the inside...for the very first time. And then we knew Larry was the type of guy who would give his all for a cause...and that he eventually did.

Shortly before his untimely death, we saw that Larry had fully “come out” in public. He was “out” in high-school, which not only was a brave move for such a formerly peer-pressured youngster, but also a hell of an icon for millions around the world to look up to. Larry became a leader, a person who put his own feelings above what others might downgrade him for, and no longer treated the younger and smaller classmen like garbage. In fact, Larry openly aided Jonathan Levinson, the class geek, as his team prepared to get dynamite together for graduation night.

And then came Larry’s end. Graduation Day, 1999. Standing at the far end of a front row in his class, Larry Blaisdell heroically used a flame thrower weapon against the evil Mayor as the politician quickly became a giant snake trying to eat the students. Larry continued to use that weapon, even as others scrambled for their lives to get out. He stood there, taking aim and taking focus, letting the giant reptile have at it. But unfortunately Larry’s attempts proved to be more painful for the Mayor than possibly even the Scoobies would have imagined. For after taking in quite a number of burns, the Mayor eventually came forward with an attack of his own, using a quick whip of his newly-grown tail to fly Larry across the school yard...slamming everybody’s favorite football player against the concrete flooring...and soon afterward, Larry Blaisdell had passed away.

And that was that. Larry was dead, and we never saw him again. Buried somewhere off in one of Sunnydale’s many cemeteries, he’d go down in the history books as a heroic casualty in the former Sunnydale High’s most daring battle ever. Larry...complex, yet very real.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that this hard-headed bully from “Halloween” would eventually find himself working alongside Buffy and the Scoobs to down the Mayor of Sunnydale. It’s hard to look at him and know in our guts everything that we know now. But it’s still true. And Larry did eventually get from Point A to Point Z. Though his life was short, and his screen time even shorter, it provided a key essential to the death of the Mayor. And because Larry put the good of the many above the good of the few, he will always be a champion in the immortal series which is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

So, what would have happened had Larry survived? How different would Sunnydale have been? Is it possible he would have joined our Scoobs as a contributing member to saving the world? It seems likely, being as how he jumped at the chance to aid the White Hats in the alternate reality universe. Larry didn’t really seem the type who would simply turn his back on his fellow man...especially after learning of the dangers that mankind faced.

No. Larry was a hero, and he would have proved it ten times over. It’s nice to see a show that depicts a high-school football player as something more than a meathead jock. And even though that was all we got from his initial episode, the complexities that were Larry Blaisdell came out in full force soon afterward, and we got a glimpse into something more dynamic. The character Larry did a great deal in regards to television’s depiction of high-school jocks and closet homosexuals...and surprisingly all at the same time. Looking back, whenever one thinks or remembers the Sunnydale Razorbacks, they’ll probably remember Larry more than they will Frankenstein Daryl or the kid with the magical letterman jacket who got all those girls to like him. Why? Because unlike the other football characters, Larry proved to have a pinch of something more inside of him. When it came down to being tough in the face of danger, Larry didn’t flinch. And that was the difference. It’s true that Spike was a reformed bad and that Willow came out of the closet later in the series....But before either of these events, Larry had already done both. He’d paved the way, staking a flag into unforeseen territory.

It’s truly too bad the world will never know just how much he would have given for it. But then again, that’s really the story of unsung heroes, isn’t it? In the Buffyverse, it’s a well-known tune. But don’t feel badly for Larry. The world will probably best remember him by a different chant, anyway...

Go, Razorbacks, go!
Go, team, go!