BRAVE NEW WORLD. BtVS Intertext/Allusion.

In “The Wish” Cordelia sees Buffy as the source of all her problems after her painful breakup with Xander.  Unaware that the new girl in school Anya is in reality vengeance demon Anyanka, Cordelia expresses the wish that Buffy had never some to Sunnydale.

Immediately a far darker Sunnydale appears where vampires rule, but Cordelia is at first happy, as she realizes that her wish has been granted by the “good fairy”.

Later, when Cordelia confesses to Giles that she is responsible for there being no Slayer in Sunnydale, Giles summons Anyanka to ask what the now dead Cordelia wished for.

Anyanka gleefully responds:

“I had no idea her wish would be so exciting! Brave New World. I hope she likes it.”

Brave New World is the classic science fiction novel by Aldous Huxley in which the inhabitants of a new order associate lack of physical and  emotional pain (in this case drug induced) with happiness. Cordelia discovers like Bernard in the novel, however, that happiness is not just the absence of personal despair.

--Janice Chan