Buffy, the Vampire Slayer Post-Mortem

It's over. Thank god. But the only reason for my heartfelt shout of "finally" is that I loved Buffy. Oh, how I loved it! but when a show you can't live without stumbles then, well, I fell. And it hurt. The past two seasons hurt in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. At it's best, Buffy broke my heart. At it's worst, it broke my spirit.

I've wanted to write something about Buffy, something about heroes and metaphors and getting through the next day, but what exactly I mean by those has been jumbled up with the love and the disgust. Fortunately, there have been a few other people saying some smart, interesting things.

Will Shetterly nails down the metaphors, why they worked, and what happened when the show let them down.

Jonathan Last offers his ten best episodes.

And then there's Jaime J. Weinman, telling us ' Why Spike ruined "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" '.

" To make this clear, the monsters on the show were often portrayed as the twisted embodiment of high school coolness. ... Spike, when introduced in Season 2, was exactly the kind of smartass punk who makes high school a miserable place for geeks: Arrogant, cocky and contemptuous of anyone who wasn't equally cool, he was a superficial, self-confident Fonzie type who deserved to get smacked down by our awkward heroes.

With the transformation of Spike into a lovable antihero, 'Buffy' has stopped celebrating the uncool outcasts; instead, it celebrates the cool punk, the guy who would push the first-season Willow or Xander out of the way in the school halls. ... And Andrew [...] is constantly mocked for his geekiness, because a show that was once on the side of geeks now portrays them as buffoons or villains. "

The elevation of Spike is a repudiation of what Buffy stood for when it was young and capturing my heart. More than anything else, that is what hurt. Jon Katz was one of the first media critics to pick up on what made Buffy important to its fans. In 1998 he declared Buffy to be the best show on tv. But even before that, in 1997, he realized:

" [T]he personal lives of Buffy and her friends are bleak. They wish they were popular; they long for love. But they know too much about how the world works to be happy (Buffy's parents are divorced, for example), and they are cynical - allergic to the posturing, moralizing, and false piety that comes from adults and popular culture. ... Buffy's friends are the ungainly, the brainy, and the socially disconnected. "

And they set out to save the world anyway. Heroes. Just like me and you.

Posted by Martial